Crazy Uncle Mike

People say I look like a vampire. I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not. ~ Nathaniel Buzolic

The Whitest Man in America

People often remark on how white I am, and no, not because of the way I dance.  I happened to be light skinned, ok, light skinned may be a slight exaggeration.  Think so white that I don’t tan, burn quickly and without a minimum SPF 50 I’m as likely as a vampire to burst into flames in direct sunlight.  The fact that I’ve nearly reached the age of 60 without my first skin cancer is either a miracle, or the result of better living through chemistry, a general theme in most of my life in one form or another.

When I was in law school in California there was an annual “boat race”, the fact is, it wasn’t much of a race and the “boats” were basically really nice inflatable rafts.  Maybe the most hysterical thing about the race was that every year, one professor put a team together, took the race way too seriously and furiously paddled the river to win the race.  No one else was racing, the rest of us were floating down the river, having water fights and drinking.

We had a particularly fun boat one year.  A friend had brought his German girlfriend along and she wasn’t drinking.  So I decided that since she was the only sober person on the boat, I should be able to yell for help in her native language.  So she really sweetly taught me the phrase, help me I’m drowning, in German.  Of course, my German pronunciation was just a little bit off and what I was actually yelling was, help me I’m drinking.  I would yell, she would laugh, it all seemed like fun, at the end of the day she explained to me what I was saying.

This was also the same year I saw the most amazing drinking acrobatics in the history of river rafting.  My friend’s girlfriend was up on the pontoon on the back of the raft with a full glass of beer.  The river was only a few feet deep at this point and we hit some rapids.  Now stop envisioning Grand Canyon river rapids or class four whitewater.  These were drops of a foot or two and the river sped up a bit.  In this particular section we caught a deeper than normal drop and as we bounced, the back pontoon popped up rather forcefully, flinging her 120 pound frame up into the air and fully into a somersault.  She completely flipped a 360 and landed on her feet in the river, while still holding her completely full beer.  A feat that should have landed her into some beer drinking, rafting hall of fame.  A full 360 flip off a raft without the loss of a single drop of beer, beyond amazing.

My friend Don was also on the boat this year and he’s also really white, so a discussion ensued as to which of us was the whitest man in America.  After significant discussion and planning, we waited to settle the question until we were in the deeper part of the river.  So once we hit the slow section the challenge was set.  Don and I simultaneously dove down to the bottom of the river, a good ten feet down.  The people on the boat then sat in judgement over the both of us.  When we surfaced and climbed back on they rendered their verdict.  At the bottom of the river, they explained they could absolutely see my entire body, Don looked deflated.  Then they explained to Don, that while they could see all of me, they could count his individual fingers, he was absolutely the whitest man in America.

Crazy thing is that twenty-five years later I was hiking the Appalachian Trail.  I met a guy on the trail, who oddly I immediately felt strangely comfortable with, his trail name was Jedi.  As we talked on the trail and in camp some things started to come up.  First, it turned out we grew up twenty miles apart, but on opposite sides of the Hudson River.  We graduated high school around the same time, so it was not out of the question that we’d crossed each other’s path at some point.  Then one night he mentioned that his fraternal twin brother went to law school in California.  I asked where, it was the same school I attended, when I said, it was the same year, what was his name and when he said it I screamed out loud, “your brother is the whitest man in America!”  Jedi burst out laughing, he was in fact Don’s brother and absolutely knew the story.  At times it’s a very small world.