Ok, this next story covers pretty much everything it meant to be a true “Meathead”. This is the story of what is probably the craziest day that I have ever almost forgotten. I will do my best to piece it together for you, but the whole day was a blur, even at the time. If I had to go back in time to re-live one single day, I think this one would win hands down. I’m sure it won’t sound as awesome as it was to experience, but fuck you… it totally was…

Disclaimer: I’ll preface this by saying that this story involves the abuse of dead animals and local crazy people, tons of “boys will be boys” law breaking and drunken debauchery. I think I can speak for us all when I say that we’ve all grown up since this and learned from our mistakes… riiiight…

Back in the good old days we would go boating every Sunday. Hungover as fuck from the night before, all of the Meatheads would pile on to a group of 3 or 4 boats – all owned and operated by the Old School group. You did not board the boat without at least a flat of beer and that was never enough.

The Meatheads always rode aboard Gentry’s father’s boat, the “Cookie Cutter”. A 23 foot pleasure cruiser powered by a 5.7 litre LS1 Corvette motor with aftermarket aluminum heads and some internal work. The thing fuckin moves! His buddy made him a big sticker for the front that says “BOOSE BLONDES AND BIG BLOCKS” that he wears proudly; mostly just to prove that his buddy, who is 50+ years old and owns his own successful electrical company, still can’t spell the word “booze”.

Anyhow, boating trips were always a blast! You might get stranded on an uninhabited rock due to tides or out in the middle of the ocean from prop damage or fuel miscalculations… but as long as we had beer, nothing could bring us down. We were kings out there! This trip in particular would go down in the history books as the best boating trip of all time, by far. Everything after this one was just chasing the dragon.

The night before, we all got piss tanked out in DogPatch (Gentry’s dad’s property, where most of these stories start and/or end). From what I can remember, I think we managed to get to the bars and at some point (some of us did, anyways) and, on the way home, we tore down all of the neighbour’s mail boxes. So, basically, it was just a normal night in the Patch.

We came back to life the next morning and we were all getting ready for boating when Glen (Gentry’s father) came in and bitched us all out, “The boat isn’t leaving until you dummies clean up your god damn mess! Fuckin Meatheads…”

We all knew exactly what he meant. If we wanted to get drunk and go boating, we had to repair all of the neighbour’s mailboxes… again. So out we went. While we were propping one of the boxes back up, Gentry looks at me and says, “Oh yah, I almost forgot. I hit a cat on the way out here last night, eh? Right down there…” he points down the dirt road a bit. “Killed it.”

I found this to be a pretty random comment but, at the time, I never thought anything of it. I mean, he hit a cat… nothing I can do about that, right? I just nodded back to him.

Eventually we had fixed everything we destroyed and our next mission was to load up all the beer and grab some greasy breakfast.

I hopped into the truck with Gerald and we headed into town. Everyone else loaded in with Gentry and went to get some more beer. The plan was to meet up a little later at the boat club.

Gerald and I stopped at McDonald’s and went inside to coat our stomachs. We weren’t inside for more the 10 minutes, but when we got back to the truck I heard Gerald freak out, “WHAT THE FUUUUUCK?!?”

He was staring into the box of his truck with a look of disgust on his face. I walked over to see what the hell the problem was and I laughed hysterically at what I saw… There was a mangled dead cat just chillin in the back of his truck. To make matters worse, he had no tailgate on and nothing on back but a cat carcass and bag of golf clubs.

“Fuck it, man. Just leave it. We gotta get going…” I said.

“Fuck that! There is no way I’m driving around with that shit on back!”

Fair enough. I could see how that would be an issue. So Gerald hopped up into the truck and proceeded to kick the corpse off the back and into an empty parking space behind us. Both of us finding it gruesomely funny and giggling the whole time.

Other people in the parking lot, however, didn’t seem to get the joke… at all. They were understandably disgusted and some random decided to speak up, “Hey, c’mon guys. You can’t just leave that in the middle of the lot. That’s disgusting!”

Being the upstanding citizens that we are, we agreed with the stranger. Something needed to be done, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to pick it up. Gerald, the crafty bugger, quickly came up with a perfect solution! He grabbed two clubs out of his golf bag and used them to pick the poor kitty up by the neck. Holding the deceased feline at arm’s length he walked it all the way across the parking lot and put it into a garbage can out by the road – smiling his huge toothy smile the whole way.

I was now dying laughing. Anyone who has been to the McDonald’s in Yarmouth knows that it’s right on the corner of Main Street and Starrs Road, which is a very busy intersection. The traffic light turned green and then back to red without a single car moving, while everyone just stared slack jawed at Gerald and this poor animal. He even made sure to leave the tail sticking out of the lid for some extra style points. Sad, I know… but we didn’t kill it, it was already mushed!

So how did we end up with a dead cat in the first place? Well, it turned out that Gentry had stopped to see if it was alive when he hit it the night before. It wasn’t, so, fuck knows why, he threw it into the back of his truck, thinking that it may come in handy. When he saw Gerald’s truck at McDonald’s he thought it would be funny to put it inside on the driver’s seat. At the last minute he decided that might be a bit much, and just threw it in the back instead. Awesome!

All in all, it was a great start to the day! There’s more to this part involving the police and McDick’s management, but I’ll come back to it later on…

We all met back up at the boat club and made sure to let Gentry know how we felt about his “joke”. No hard feelings, of course, but now we owed him one.

Anyways, we now had full stomachs and loads of beer, so it was finally time to hit the open water! The boating went fairly normal for the first little bit. We stopped into some random islands, the Cook boys dove for some lunch, and we all had an amazing cook out and just relaxed in the sun. It was nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal Meathead Sunday afternoon.

Everyone was throwing back the beer like it was water. It was just one of those days when they were disappearing faster than you could fill the cooler. It was great!

Glen eventually decided to take us all for a rip, so we left all the other boats and took the Cookie Cutter, full of almost every single OG Meathead, out onto the high seas! The tunes were cranked and all you could hear was AC/DC rocking out over top of a full throttle LS1. Bow to the sky and beers in hand we were unstoppable! Well, until we ran out of beer, that is. Fuck.

We stopped and made a few emergency calls. Glen’s friend Billy was now on the wharf watching the weigh ins for the local Shark Scramble (which is a fairly big deal shark fishing competition down here). Billy told us that he had a flat that we could have, but we needed to come in and pick it up. Going into the harbour in our current state could not possibly end well, though. I don’t think any of us were legal drinking age except the father, but where there’s booze there’s a way!

Hammer down and into the harbour we went! On the way in we passed a half a dozen large fishing boats on their way in with sharks. We made sure to give a 9 person full moon to every last one of them, even Mark’s father (with Mark on board with us). We quickly made it into the harbour and cut the engine.

We were floating about a hundred yards from the wharf, right in the ship lanes, in front of a few hundred people (all watching the weigh ins) with our music cranked! We were mooning the crowd, shouting at them, hyping them up, and generally just enjoying the attention.

That’s when someone got the bright idea to go for a swim. Next thing you know, everyone’s showing off dives and flips into the dirty harbour water. Apparently, this is a big no-no when there are boats coming in, but fuck em! Roland climbed up on top of the roof bars to do a back flip. He waved his arms and hyped up the big crowd, only to slip and fall (about 6 feet) flat onto his back on the deck. It’s a damn good thing we’re invincible…

Apparently, this whole time, they were on the P.A. system loudly warning us to get the fuck out of the harbour, but we weren’t done yet – we still needed to get our beer! Gentry was the smallest and fastest one of the group, so we pulled in and dumped him onto the floating wharf. Barefoot in nothing but a wet pair of shorts, he made a dash up and around to where Billy was watching the show. He grabbed the flat of brews and turned to sprint back. We all just sat and watched from the boat as two fat security guards locked onto him and raced through the crowd across the wharf, down the steps, and across the floating dock. Everyone on the Cookie Cutter, and even most of the crowd, was cheering Gentry on! He got within 10 feet of us and launched the beer. We caught it and he came flying in right behind. Glen had the throttle pinned before he even hit the deck and we were GONE! Asses hanging out the whole way, cheering at the top of our lungs! The new flat was gone before we even made it out the harbour, but it was worth every fucking second!

That is when we got the call… Glen cut the engine and picked up his cell phone. It was quick conversation and Glen never said anything except, “Ok, thanks.”

He turned to his drunken crew and dropped a bombshell on us… “Well, they sent the Coast Guard and RCMP after us boys! Hang on to something…”

He pinned the throttle again and we were off. No time to sit and think about it; we just needed to get back around to the river and the boat club as soon as possible.

Luckily, we had a bit of a head start. Glen’s neighbour at the time, was head of the Coast Guard… and he’s the one who called to warn us. He also said he had stalled them long enough for us to get around the harbour and out of range, but that we needed to get on dry land ASAP and lay low. I’m pretty sure Glen later sent him over a fruit basket for his trouble. What a good guy!

Anyhow, we know when we’re beat (actually we were out of beer again) so we headed back to the boat club. The hens, Alisha and Carisa (the warden?), came and picked us up and it was time for more greasy food and beer.

Now, normally we would go from here straight out to Billy’s house to chill in his heated pool, but I had to bail on everyone. I had to get home. Unfortunately, I had promised my parents that I would paint the top half of their house that weekend. There was scaffolding up because they were getting the roof re-done at the time, but they were both too scared of heights to do it themselves.

I got home, explained that I was sotally tober enough to be up there and then got to work. Did I mention how much I love rooftops when I’m drunk?

So, I was up there dancin around, tunes blasting, winding down from another great weekend… and that’s when I heard him – it was a voice that everyone (all of the assholes, anyways) in Yarmouth knows all too well… the voice of Peanut. Peanut is a local lunatic who rides a bike around all day, has ears like satellite dishes and is the most racist fuck you will ever meet. Every other word out of his mouth is the N-bomb.

He and my good buddy, a fellow Meathead named Murph, have an extensive history together. Hell, I could probably write a novel just about the things that have gone on between those two! Murph is the funniest person alive, in my opinion, and he really knows how to light up Peanut.

So, I was up on the roof and a couple blocks away I could hear Peanut in a full blast screaming fest with another familiar voice. Murph was in a truck, loaded with all my drunk buddies, driving right alongside Peanut’s bike at about 5mph just giving it to him!

This went on for a couple blocks until they were directly in front of my house. They now had my full attention. It was here that Peanut finally decided that he’d had enough and veered quickly to the right, unfortunately for him, without looking first. His front wheel dropped right down into the deep ditch and he did a perfect front flip right over the handle bars and onto his back. The driver floored it and the truck took off. I could still hear Murph’s unmistakable giggling for about 3 blocks. Fucking assholes, I know… but we were young and dumb – and don’t worry, Peanut lived to scream another day…

Anyhow, to wrap this story up, the next night Gerald, Cheek and I went through the McD’s drive through for Gerald’s nightly BigMac. Gerald ordered, drove to the first window, paid, drove up to the second window and they just handed him back his money and said, “Sorry, we’re not allowed to serve you, you’re banned.”

We were like, what the fuck??… whatever! So, we went down the street to Wendy’s and got some burger combos there before going back to get to the bottom of all this. We went inside, the 3 of us still eating our Wendy’s burgers, and demanded to speak to the McManager! We finally got an audience with her royal hindness and demanded some answers!

She was clearly nervous, seeing the size of Cheek and Gerald, but sternly said, “You’re all banned for playing street hockey in the parking lot with a dead cat.”

Word for word, no lie – hand on heart.

It turns out that there was an off duty police officer pulled over in the drive through waiting for food with his 4 year old daughter. They had sat and watched the entire dead cat ordeal and the kid was pretty traumatized, I guess. The cop took down Gerald’s license plate number and I believe that he actually had to write a big letter of apology in order to get off without a ticket. But, since he’s a Meathead, of course we got away with it all once everything was said and done.

However, this was not the first (and would definitely not be the last) time that we got banned from McDonalds… but it was by far the best reason!