There Ain't No Sanity Clause

This is a poor man's obituary, but I gotta get it out.

Timothy Rhatigan was my best friend for about a year.

I had a lame joke that I always liked to tell that I wrote for Tim.

Tim woke up in the morning and saw a rat. Then, he looked in the mirror and saw a Rhatigan. (rat again. get it?)

I don't remember how or specifically when we met and I'm also not sure why we drifted apart. We just did.

Within a month of meeting each other, we had accidentally burned a house down together.

We got high a lot.

We listened to a lot of Circle Jerks and Buzzcocks and The Damned and The Ramones and we both loved Robyn Hitchcock. Tim taught me the words to Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down.

One of my favorite memories is playing frisbee by moonlight with Tim's mother's Rod Stewart LPs.

We'd often ride our bikes 5-10+ miles to get to the stores we knew would sell tobacco to minors or to meet a neighborhood freelance pharmacist or to buy tools or just to ride.

Or to see girls. We talked a lot about girls. We stole his dad's nasty pornography. We were generally confused about our sexuality. Jet Boy, Jet Girl was one of our favorite songs. I Just Want Some Skank was our anthem. We'd practice leaning cooly against a wall and casually picking up a girl with our favorite pickup line, "hey baby, wanna fuck?" We never got the girls. We alternately hated and envied the guys who did.

We got high a lot.

We were both terrible skateboarders, but that didn't stop us.

We loved black cherry soda with fresh lime. We drank cheap vodka.

Tim's mother once rented a car and took us on a trip to Great Adventure. On the way there, we thought it'd be awesome to have anarchy symbols scarred into our flesh. Eager to prove my punk abandon, I bared my upper left arm and Tim gouged my flesh with a pocket knife. Buckets of blood and me yowling like a baby, I couldn't finish, but I have a beautiful large scar to prove my half-assedness. And I like to think that my blood is still there on that rental car seat.

So many more stupid stories.

After we'd mostly parted ways, Tim gained infamy for stealing the baby jesus from the Shrine and converting it into a bong. I wasn't around when he stole it and never really approved of the sacrilige, but I still admired him for the brazenness of it.

I always loved him. I know that he knew that at one point, but we drifted apart. I miss him.