Rage Against The Machine

That kid with the guitar- and the attitude- is my son, Nick.  Dressed in his boarding school clothes.  He had just gotten home for Thanksgiving break. The year was 1995.

(Interior designers please note the wall covering in Nick’s room.  It was brown paper bags. Right on, Bruce Gregga.)

In those days Nick basically only cared about three things:

A. Snowboarding

B.  Music

C.  Girls

(The order depended on what season it was.)

In the summer of 1996, two out of three of his vital interests neatly combined when he went to a Rage Against The Machine concert.

This is that story…

One hot Chicago night, I checked in with Nick as he got ready to go to the Lollapalooza music festival.

He was psyched and wearing his favorite shirt- a striped, blue uniform top.  The kind grease monkeys and mechanics wear.  I think it said “Joe” or “Nicodemus” or “Henry” on the pocket in red script embroidery.

Something like this.

Fact-checking Sidebar:  For accuracy’s sake, I could text Nick right now and ask him what the shirt inscription was.  He’d tell me, but then he would know that I was writing this post and he would have to kill me. So to keep my boy out of jail, let’s just say it said “Lorenzo.”

He looked great.  But he was in a hurry.  As I hastily told him to have a good time, he murmured something about a “mosh pit” and then he was gone.

The key part of this story is in the photograph.  Nick’s bedroom at our co-op also doubled as my office.  If you look closely, you can just make out a part of my (non Bruce Gregga- approved) maroon and gray desk chair peeking out of the right hand corner.  So at midnight, I was hard at work in his/my room creating some brilliant literary masterpiece when Nick came back.

He looked awful.  Sweaty, grimy, bedraggled…

And bare-chested.

“What happened?!” I cried.  “Where’s your shirt?!”

“It got ripped off,” he snarled.

“Well, you should have known better than to take it off.  It was such a cool shirt.  It said ‘Lorenzo.’  Someone was bound to steal it,” I prissily reprimanded him.

“No, you don’t get it,” Nick slowly stated- for dummies.

“It… Got… Ripped… Off… Of… Me.”

Oh.

“But as long as you’re up, Dude, you’ve got to help me,” he continued. “I met this awesome girl at the concert tonight and she gave me her phone number.  I wrote it down, but now I can’t read what I wrote. Can you help me figure out the phone number?”

“That shouldn’t be too challenging for an old code-breaker like me,” I said confidently.  “Show me the number.”

And with that, Nick stuck out his sweaty forearm.

“She wrote it on here, Dude.  But I sweated off the last three digits.  How many combinations do you think that is?”

Calling All Mathematicians:  HELP!

“Gosh, Nick.  Do I look like Fibonacci or Charles Babbage to you?  I’ll never be able to do this,” I wailed.

“Come on, Dude.  You’ve got to try,” he pleaded.  “That chick was amazing.”

“Even if we do start figuring out the missing numbers, you can’t call her now.  It’s almost one in the morning!”

“No, she’s totally expecting my call.  Let’s go.”

So for the next hour, we tried to decipher the faint, smudged numerals and guess at the missing ones.  And I cringed every time Nick punched in a new combination.

It didn’t go on for long, thank goodness.

Nick reluctantly gave up the search- and I was off the hook and off to bed.

Now here’s a look at what my baby liked.

(Music-wise, that is.)

Rock on.

But keep your shirts on.