The Brains Challenge

Unusual as our being out in the middle of the afternoon may have been, several aspects of our togetherness on that particular day were quite typical for Brahm, Kelly, Carol, and me. Perhaps most obvious to an outsider would be that all four of us entered the diner wearing head-to-toe black, but this was irrelevant, save for in its scene-setting value to a lazy writer (who does not now need to provide you, his reader, the ages and various descriptive particulars of his friend, girlfriend, girlfriend’s friend, nor himself, since you will have taken this shorthand, perhaps rightly so, to mean that these were the sort of kids sometimes seen in public spaces, like ink spots on a nice shirt, where “normal” citizens give them a wide berth while simultaneously pretending to ignore them, as if averting their eyes might keep them from catching whatever sickness causes the kids to mutilate their deathly pale skin with all those silver piercings). The diner was just a diner, as diners all looked, thirty years after their last renovation. Of course, there’s no extraordinary relevance in telling you these things; what I think was extraordinary was how a sort of third-rate local tradition was born at our faux-woodgrain Formica table mere minutes after our dark foursome was seated.

It happened something like this. Inveterate cheapskate that he was, my friend Brahm perused the diner menu not from left to right, like most people in the Western world, but from right to left — price then description. Whether or not he did this every time we went out to eat, I can’t be sure, but he always had his eyes open for a bargain. He was still scanning for agreeably low figures on the menu when the waitress came to take our orders. After Kelly and Carol had placed theirs, he said, “I mean, I’m hungry, just not three-dollars-and-forty-cents-for-three-pieces-of-fried-chicken hungry, you know?”

Carol, installed beside him in our booth, rolled her eyes — often the only part of her that moved. She laughed with Kelly, my girlfriend, however, because Brahm’s pathological unwillingness to part with money frequently took strenuous efforts that never stopped being comical. Our waitress was less amused, almost certainly wishing we’d wandered instead into a Denny’s, or at least into a different server’s section. She nevertheless stood by, armored with the thick skin formed from decades of table-waiting in shabby establishments, her ballpoint pen hovering steadily above the pad, while the long-haired tightwad made up his mind.

In an effort to prod Brahm along, Kelly floated a couple of suggestions. “What about an omelet?” she tried. “That’s only two eighty-five.”

Brahm pursed his lips. “I’m not really in an omelet mood, though.”

“Pancakes, maybe?”

“Hmm,” he mused. “Yeah, except they probably use a premade batter mix, so their markup is huge. Besides, I’ve got Aunt Jemima at home.”

Brahm and I knew the patterns of this diner’s brown-and-orange tile work and drop-ceiling stains by heart, yet until that moment, somehow, one item on its menu had escaped our notice. Spotting it was a revelation. Wide-eyed, I looked up at my friend and said, “What about brains and scrambled eggs?”

The waitress leaned in, causing an intensifying of the odors of stale cigarette smoke and onion rings in my airspace. “That’s not really on there, is it?” she asked, as though I was the sort to just make up menu selections, as though I’d further delay, for the sake of a jokey hypothetical, the placement of my order. I pointed her to “Eggs and Such” on the laminated sheet. She said, “Well, I’ll be damned!”

Brahm responded, “I’ve never eaten brains before.” Grinning, he was visibly intrigued. “But if I won’t pay three forty for the fried chicken, which I’m sure I’ll like, then I’m certainly not gonna gamble three thirty on brains, which I’m pretty sure I won’t.”

Carol elbowed him. “Oh, come on, be adventurous! Look, they come with toast and hash browns.”

Turning down a novel meal ran as counter to Brahm’s values as did expending personal funds. Kelly made his choice easier by producing a few folded bills from her purse and asking, “Okay, so how about if I’m buying?”

“Buying me brains and eggs?”

“Yeah, sure. Except you have to eat the whole thing,” Kelly said. “Otherwise you’ve got to cover it yourself.” This reminded me of the time, in a different, far nicer restaurant, Kelly offered five dollars to the young women at a neighboring table to stop giggling so obnoxiously — a confrontation that evolved into a near-brawl between myself and the women’s angry boyfriends in the parking lot. Fortunately, Kelly’s pet cruelties could also be funny.

“What about a drink?” Brahm asked. Haggling now, she had him on the ropes.

“No drink.”

“Sides?”

“You’re already getting hash browns and toast.”

“Yeah, but what if brains turn out to be, like, completely unpalatable?”

Kelly reached over me for the condiments. The bottles and shakers in the wire caddy rattled to a stop directly in front of him. She fingered each container in turn: “Salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup, A-1, syrup — that ought to be enough to get you through.”

The order was placed. If the anticipation of seeing this mystery meal came close to killing us, the smell of it traveling across the diner came even closer. A light stink, like warm pond water, wafted over our table before the waitress was halfway from the kitchen. Then the plate of brains and scrambled eggs was set down, and Brahm said, flatly, “I was hoping somebody had ordered fish sticks or something.”

The waitress set our table’s other, better-smelling plates before us; though, it was the brains and eggs that held our collective attention. Chunky and gelatinous, with an oily sheen, they steamed like the remnants of a disintegrator-blasted alien in a cheap sci-fi film. The waitress, departing, said, “Enjoy.” She laughed. No food-service employee should ever laugh that way on the job — it does not instill comfort.

Poking and prodding the pale yellow-gray mess before him, Brahm sniffed, then hefted a forkful to his mouth. He made a spasmodic shrugging motion and put the back of his hand against his lips. He chewed with his eyes squeezed shut. “Oh man,” he finally managed to moan. “This is awful.”

We each sampled a tiny bite; we each gagged and spat into a paper napkin. It was agreed that Brahm faced a challenge.

Spectators turn out by the thousands to watch people eat competitively — hot dogs, watermelon, pie, anything — and in the coming years I would see the debut of TV shows like Fear Factor, on which contestants ingest bugs, blood, and bull penises for a chance at a cash prize. But we four teenagers were mostly oblivious to food’s potential as vicarious entertainment until Brahm gave us an epic dinner show. Gagging, gasping, blinking back tears, taking frequent breaks to drown the squishy mass of befouled eggs with sluices of steak sauce, picking out fragments of skull, then tucking back in with soldierly resolve, he put on such a performance that a bystander would have been forgiven for thinking there was far more at stake than three dollars and some change.

The fork clattered noisily as he dropped it on his plate, a kind of victory gesture, and belched. His face immediately twisted. “Ugh, it tastes even worse coming up.”

“I can’t believe you finished it,” said Carol, long since having forked up the last of her French fries and retouched her blood-red lipstick.

“It was like eating mushrooms and cartilage… marinated in fish sauce.”

Belying her usual poise, Carol’s hands flailed, as though to shoo away the sensory memory of her sample. “God,” she said, “that’s so gross.”

Brahm belched again. “Hey, you asked.”

“Braiiiiiins!” I groaned, zombielike, but no one else laughed at how it sounded just like Brahm’s burp. Perhaps mockery was in bad taste, considering how my friend was suffering.

With the matter of indigestion relief foremost on Brahm’s mind, and with a change of venue on everyone else’s, we paid our bill to the smirking waitress at the register and left.

The interesting thing about rituals is always their origins. All the best ones develop naturally, gradually, as the events that inspire them marinate in people’s minds, like so much cartilage and mushrooms in fish sauce, over a period of days, weeks, or months, until someone gets the bright idea to stage a re-enactment and recapture the spirit of the earlier events. In the case of the brains and scrambled eggs, the catalyst was a night visit to some friends’ house, regaling them with a vivid retelling of Brahm’s heroic overcoming, when naive young Robert took a long drag from his cigarette, scratched his four-day stubble, tipped back his fedora, and said, “I think I could do it; I think I could eat the brains.”

Within the half hour, Robert, his two housemates, and Brahm packed themselves into my car and we sped off, diner-bound. To cheers and claps, Robert retched his way through the plateful of gray matter — beef or pork, no one knew — and unfertilized chicken ova. A good time was had by all. Except, of course, by Robert. But even he attained a state of joy the next week, when he witnessed one of his housemates attempt and fail to complete the Brains Challenge (as it had come to be called), as well as the week after that, when Tara, Brahm’s ex-girlfriend, chewed her way through the disgusting dish like a veritable garbage disposal before chugging a full glass of ice water, cubes and all, offering as her only comment on the experience an understated “Ick.”

The Brains Challenge became an institution. Rules were established. Someone thought to print and frame certificates that read, This Is to Certify That _______________ Successfully Completed the Brains Challenge at Nichol’s Lunch, on _______________,1999, in the Esteemed Presence of the Previously Challenged Witnesses _______________ and _______________. Take Pity. Many of those challenged, myself included, failed to clean their plates, but none ever demanded a rematch. Pride is only worth so much.

An occasion arose, more than a year after Brahm was fooled into thinking he was getting a free lunch, on which it occurred to me that someone enjoyed the diner’s brains and scrambled eggs, or else why would they be on the menu? I happened to make this observation aloud in the presence of Mike, a mutual friend of Brahm’s and mine, while the three of us were whiling away another evening at the coffeehouse. To this, Mike responded, “Oh, brains and eggs aren’t bad. I’ve eaten them lots of times.”

We doubted. (Who wouldn’t, honestly, after eating that phlegmy mush?) However, we did wonder: might the diner’s brains and eggs be representative of all brains and eggs, instead of being the aberrance we believed them to be? We challenged Mike then and there. His acceptance of the Brains Challenge, to be taken on the following night, would prove to us that the brains in question were empirically worse than just about any other foodstuff, thereby validating our bravery and endurance.

The next evening, Mike and his girlfriend joined Brahm and I in a booth, squeaking across the vinyl bench cushion too casually, in my opinion, for the momentous adversity about to be met. The orders arrived. Mike’s girlfriend scarcely watched as he took up a fork and ate of the infamous entrée, chewing without effort, swallowing without histrionics, biting a corner off one triangle of toasted wheat bread, sipping his water, and obliterating our tough-guy pride with three little words: “Not too bad.”

Yea Verily, the Cheese Didst Fly

The closing of our favorite coffeehouse precipitated a panic among its clientele. Where do we hang out now? we asked, desperate because we were young, therefore prone to lassitude, and conscious of the legitimacy imparted upon time-wasting by turning it into a group activity. The choice of which coffeehouse to frequent is not lightly nor easily made. As with a favorite restaurant, club, or bar, it speaks volumes about a person and is as individualized as taste in clothes. Unlike clothing, however, you can’t just strip yourself of your coffeehouse whenever the occasion suits — like a marriage, you’re stuck with it until one of you dies. (Or so my friends and I believed.) It is, in other words, crucial for one to select wisely.

So the onetime patrons of “our” coffeehouse became a diaspora. Some migrated to the sleek new establishment down the street — the one with the halogen lamps and brushed steel accents. Others dispersed downtown, to that spot resembling a sitcom set, with its overstuffed chairs and over-eclectic decor. Still others resorted to the stuffy standby with the downstairs theater and that Simpsons pinball machine in the corner that was beneath everyone to play. Starbucks was not part of anyone’s equation.

My friends Brahm and Paul found a lovably shabby place called Webstirs, a couple of blocks from where our former hangout now sat unoccupied. The personable owner was middle-aged, with a couple of inches’ beard and John Lennon glasses. He explained to us that he’d bought the erstwhile church for the building’s space, even after half the capital vanished with his runaway business partner. “We’d planned on it being an Internet café?” he said in his habitual way, with the interrogatoroy rising inflection that always made me think he was posing a riddle. “Web-stirs — get it?”

He served good enough java, but instead of a cybercafé he had ended up with a big space dotted with vacant sofas and a low stage serving no purpose. As if to prove to ourselves we hadn’t picked the wrong coffeehouse (thereby admitting to a host of unspeakable character flaws), Brahm, Paul, and I were determined to help fill those sofa seats with patrons and make Webstirs a wild success. Maybe then its owner could actually invest in a few computers and stop having to explain his business’s name to people. The three of us dipped into our own pockets to pay for promotional flyers, donated novelty mugs to the assortment decorating the coffeehouse’s walls, and, in a singular moment of brilliance, thought up a weekly event to make use of that stage.

“Poetry open-mics are horrible,” said Brahm from the sofa across from mine, his long legs splayed out like he owned the place. At a minimum, Webstirs was like our foster child.

“Right,” I said. “So we strip away the pretension, ramp up the irony. Why not? Everybody loves irony.”

Paul broke in, always ready with a qualification. “Actually, a lot of people don’t get irony. But people would like Bad Poetry Night because it pokes fun at all the self-conscious crap you get at real poetry nights.” He took a violent slurp of coffee that fogged the lenses of his thick-framed glasses. “Oh, and here’s one: we’ll let the audience throw cheese at people onstage! That’ll break down some boundaries.”

Brahm and I were accustomed to this sort of ambiguous remark from him. Paul loved keeping people in suspense. We waited impassively for an explanation as his eyeballs slowly defogged.

“Wadded-up balls of paper — yellow paper, only we call it cheese,” he said at last. “Then it’s interactive, not passive. Everybody gets some paper cheese when they walk in the door, and we encourage ‘em to pelt the worst poet.”

“Dude,” said Brahm, impassioned by the premise. “At the end we could give the worst poet a prize.”

“First place wins a jar of Vienna sausages,” I said.

“Or a can of potted meat food product substitute stuff,” said Brahm. We were on a roll.

“Some Always Save mackerel,” Paul threw in.

“Man, you guys are great?” said the owner as he brought us all congratulatory free refills of the house blend.

For its inaugural evening, the turnout for Bad Poetry Night was surprising. People we’d never seen at Webstirs before appeared in the seats we’d rearranged opposite the stage. The flyers we had left in bookstores and tacked to the bulletin boards of rival coffeehouses had worked to draw a near-full house. Paul tottered around with a wicker basket, encouraging everyone to take from it their allotment of "cheese." As the only really sociable one of us, emcee duties fell to him by default. His big, dimply smile attested to how well he took to them.

“Hey, everybody, welcome to Webstirs and our first-ever Bad Poetry Night,” he announced into the microphone. It sounded odd to hear his nasal voice amplified in a space I was accustomed to being quiet. “Our host” — he motioned to the owner at the counter — “and I will be doing the judging tonight, so I’m gonna recuse myself from performing, but let me get a show of hands and we’ll put someone entertaining on this stage.”

Paul called up a young brunette in a summer dress. After a hearty round of applause, she bravely recited a bad piece of free verse about a stray dog in a grocery store parking lot. A couple of balls of cheese arced up at the stage, probably hurled by the woman’s friends. It was bad, sure, just not bad in a good way. No one laughed out loud.

Next was a girl with pink-and-blonde hair and a labret. She set the badness bar high, doing what looked like a half-improvised riff on the feminist free verse that sometimes got trotted out at other poetry free-for-alls: frequent invocation of her “sacred vagina,” coupled with a burlesque of flailing arms and sneers. I thought she was hilarious, and assailed her with more than half my cheese, but a lot of the audience were too uncomfortable with the talk of lady-parts to react.

Paul called me to the stage next. Maybe it was because the first couple of performances had warmed them up, but I’d no sooner introduced myself — “My name is Byron, and the poem I’m reading tonight is about the best thing to write the worst poetry about: my ex-girlfriend” — than my vision filled with flying yellow balls. A couple of people groaned. The girl with the piercing threw all her cheese at me at once, then bent to pick pieces off the floor and throw those, too. From way in the back, Brahm heckled me, shouting, “You suck!"

“If you’re through,” I said, mock-smug, “I’d like to proceed. These twenty-four rhymed couplets are entitled ‘Tears and Vomit.’”

More cheese, even more emphatic groans. It was great.

After my reading, just five more people went up to perform. One was a skinny kid in a backwards baseball cap. He was probably a couple of years younger than me, maybe seventeen. He took the stage meekly, shrinking from view into the bagginess of his black jeans, then mumbled into the mic, “’Sup, everybody. I’ma spit a little rhyme for y’all.”

What followed was a five-minute rap full of pride and bluster and conviction that all but erased from memory the shy presence that had introduced it. Even unhip as I am, I could tell his rap was epic. He made growing up in white, middle-class suburbs sound like an actual struggle — grappling with identity, paying no mind to haters, arguing with Moms. Brahm’s early scoff was put down quickly by Paul, who hissed, “So what if he doesn’t get our idea of bad? At least he’s got the balls to go up there and do his thing.”

When the kid was done, he got a standing ovation while he slunk offstage, a wallflower once more. I was reminded of my first time performing for an audience — how liberating that had been, how shockingly rewarding to be so appreciated. The white Midwestern homeboy with the wallet chain had something in common with me. How weird, I thought.

“Okay, everybody, the judges have conferred,” said Paul, mounting the stage one last time. “We’d like to thank you all for coming tonight, and the poets for sharing their, um, talent. We’ve decided to present the award for worst poem of the evening to Byron, who gave us that godawful rhyming verse about lost love. Byron, jeez, that was awful. Come up here and get your official Bad Poetry Night first-place ham loaf!”

The ham loaf had been an ideal prize choice. Its weight was almost enough to make you feel proud, holding it up and waving while twenty-odd strangers struck you appreciatively with balls of colored paper.

I wish I could say that our efforts with Bad Poetry Night were enough to save Webstirs from going out of business, like a fundraiser organized to save the beloved summer camp in some bawdy 1980s teen comedy. It would satisfy me to claim that the event reaped sufficient dividends for Webstirs to become the Internet café it was intended to be. Unfortunately, it didn’t last the year. Our friendly hippie host closed shop overnight, without so much as returning the mugs we’d contributed. As divorcés, we swallowed our pride and moved on. Paul joined the downtown sitcom cast for awhile, slumped in one of many pastel armchairs for a season before coming to his senses. Brahm and I fell back in with prior acquaintances at a casual place near the university. Good coffee there; I liked the Sumatran. And the red-haired barista. If you’re wondering about my ham loaf, it was re-awarded to a more deserving stranger at one of the final Bad Poetry Nights. I was unsentimental about it, and thus never learned if it was eventually eaten.

The Kids Give Gutter Ball a Whole New Meaning

One temperate evening in late spring of my seventeenth year, I sat smoking with my friends Brahm and Tara on Paul's quaint concrete front porch. The house was small, a remnant of an era when that part of the city was still suburbs. Even Paul, oldest among us, couldn't have known a time when traffic noise and sirens did not reach his rented home. Around the city's haze, darkness was creeping into crevasses, and we were idly contemplating a plan of action, in the way of many Midwestern American youth, when I noticed a wheelbarrow on the neighbor's curb — a wheelbarrow full of bowling balls.

The narrow street's residents had set their trash out for morning pickup, but Paul's neighbors obviously expected a bit more than the usual performance out of their sanitation engineers. Nine bowling balls! Of all the things to throw away. And what a way to get them to the street: in a perfectly serviceable garden implement. As with much curbside trash, the juxtaposition was humorous while also being baffling.

Nine bowling balls... in a wheelbarrow.

Brahm asked the sanest question. "What garbage man's going to expend the time and effort to lift a bunch of heavy balls into his truck?"

"It's not a bunch," I said. "Bananas come in bunches; bowling balls, plural — that's called a passel."

Unsmiling, Tara took a drag from her Camel, flipped her hair and deadpanned, "Oh, yes. Funny."

My humor is of a singular brand, but Brahm was right. No two men, however hale and fit, were going to take away the balls, by either picking them up one at a time or by heave-hoing the entire wheelbarrow. Our pal Paul's neighbors were asking too much.

"Someone could still use these," said Tara upon inspecting the mound. The balls were of all different colors and weights, some in solid colors, some with eccentric swirly patterns. Two were flecked metallic, like Hot Wheels toy cars. Only one appeared damaged, with a big sidelong split in its pearly shell. "I guess they just didn't feel like playing anymore."

"I wouldn't mind a game," I said, looking up and down the street. "Too bad they didn't throw away a set of pins — we could play right here."

Sometimes when you're with friends and someone has a fantastic idea, the way the idea surfaces seems, when reflected upon later, to have been born of the combined consciousness — groupthink. This was the case at that moment, standing under a buzzing yellow streetlight with two of my best friends, when we decided to go street bowling.

A surprisingly large percentage of homeowners are funny about others making off with their trash. Having dumpster-dived and scavenged a good deal in my limited years, I had learned how some people's paranoia could turn innocent salvage operations into scary dressings-down ("Get outta there, you parasites!") or worse. So we asked for, and received, Paul's okay to load the spherical contents of his neighbors' wheelbarrow into the trunk of my busted-up Pontiac and head for the hills.

We figured the best pins available would be empty bottles, and that the best place to turn into our personal alley would be an out-of-the-way stretch of road where some broken glass wouldn't make a whole lot of difference to anyone. Step one was easy and could also technically be considered neighborhood beautification. Anywhere with liquor stores, pawn shops, and mobile phone depots will do for finding a slew of discarded bottles. By picking them up, we'd be doing a public service. Conveniently enough, a sketchy midtown strip wasn't far away.

We drove slowly, in the far-right lane, eyes peeled for cast-off forty-ouncers glinting in the grassy median. Each time we stopped at the curb to retrieve some, my friends leapt out, laughing at the silliness of what we were doing then dropping another stinky armful into the trunk to acquaint itself with the balls. Reports from the back seat each time were that more bottles had been crushed; we hadn't even thought about keeping the balls from rolling around freely.

"Your trunk is full of glass dust," Tara told me with a smirk.

For fun, and to emphasize how little I cared about the state of my battered wreck's little-used stowage compartment, I gave the steering wheel a slight tug. Behind us was heard a muffled thunk, ka-thunk! We all giggled like schoolchildren.

We ended up on Cliff Drive, a twisty-turny route in woodsy northeast Kansas City that, in spite of being officially historical, was pretty shabby. Pull-offs had, in some distant era, offered motorists fine cliffside views of a wealthy part of the city, but were now litter-strewn, overgrown, and under-trafficked — in other words, perfect.

I pulled in at one of these ill-lit roadside crescents, crushed glass from parties of yore crackling beneath my tires. A six-inch retaining wall on the cliffside wouldn't have prevented incautious drivers from rolling right off, free-falling through trees and a dense overgrowth of vines, into a carpeting of litter — empty bottles, plastic cups, cigarette packs, and who-knows-what-all — thirty feet below. The lack of guardrails or wire evidenced the location's bygone relevance. It had been all but abandoned by the city. I cut the engine and popped the trunk, announcing, "Welcome to Cliff Drive Lanes, people!"

Brahm and I agreed to let the lady bowl first. We crouched to set up a triangle of ten bottles away from the road, near the retaining wall, while Tara picked a blue ball from the trunk. She put the road between us and rubbed her hands vigorously, preparing for action. (Some distance from the pins was necessary to approximate actual bowling; we were determined to preserve a little authenticity.) As soon as we were clear of the estimated glass shrapnel radius, she let fly. The ball rumbled past me and Brahm like a blur — the girl had a good arm — smashed through seven of our makeshift pins, bounced with a hollow pok! off some hitherto unseen ripple in the asphalt, and disappeared into the blackness without a sound.

"Damn," Tara said. "Did it go over?"

Brahm shot to the edge, his long hair flying, and peered down over the low wall. Whatever he expected to see wasn't there. "Oh yeah," he chortled. "It's gone."

"Should that be a penalty?" I wondered aloud.

"Hey, way to make up rules as you go along," said Tara, genuinely upset. "I should get a pass if we're playing that way."

"No rules, just play," Brahm said. He stooped into my trunk and chose a ball. Tara and I crowded him as we retrieved replacements for the obliterated "pins." When he took a long-legged running start, I knew my mischievous friend intended to send his ball the way Tara's had gone. This was understandable. There's something kind of funny about launching a sixteen-pound composite-plastic piece of sports equipment off a cliff. When only three pins shattered, Brahm didn't mind. He was too preoccupied by the pok! that sent his brown orb into oblivion. "That was great," he said. Of course Tara and I agreed.

Not all our balls went over. Our fun wouldn't have lasted very long if they had. Street bowling quickly became a sport of some finesse as we worked to find the sweet spot — that ideal inertia for breaking as many pins as possible without sending the balls down to a wooded grave. Recovering the ones just bowled became an even bigger challenge than bowling itself, because the road's incline often sent them caroming to the right. We laughed to watch whoever was on fetching duty scuttle downhill after a runaway. The posture required was a through-the-legs-backwards catch that stripped the fetcher, hilariously, of any possible dignity. All this was worth the road grime and pulverized glass that clung to our palms.

When the last ball, already cracked almost in two before I bowled it, rolled erratically away from me, completely missing the final remaining pins, and, with a grrrr, pok! vanished, the three of us brushed our hands on our clothes.

"Hey, I sparkle," exclaimed Tara, grinning and holding her tiny palms up to the light. We all looked. They glimmered like fairy dust.

Builders of Empire, Guzzlers of Tea

House Rules
First, the requisite soundtrack b which to send a load of, say, bauxite into Duluth, Montana, was the compilation album Pure Disco, or any of its sequels (i.e., Pure Disco 2, Pure Disco 3, et cetera). Other music could be selected, but only by universal consensus and only after the disco hits had played through in their entirety.

Second, when upgrading to a Super Freight, the swiftest and highest load-bearing train available, one had to offer up his or her humility, in addition to the large financial cost, by singing the Super Freight song. The song could be sung in any style; however, the lyrics were mandatory:

I'm a Super Freight, Super Freight
I'm Super Freight-ing
Yow!

The basic melody established in the Rick James hit "Super Freak" was to be adhered to.

Third, first-timers and other non-regulars had to play as brown (the machine screw) or green (the petrified SweeTart). No old hand would be asked to give up his official token after earning it through so many Saturday nights playing with that filthy old piece of candy. It just wasn't done.

Official Rules
The game in question was Empire Builder, a unique strategy board game, which involved building railway lines and transporting various commodities across turn-of-the-last-century North America. Crayons were used to draw track onto the board, each player in a different color, which could be rubbed away with a little elbow grease at game's end. Cards were drawn to determine what possible loads a train might pick up and drop off. Accidents such as bridge collapses and blizzards kept things interesting. The first player to amass half a million dollars and link rail to at least five major cities won.

Gameplay
Paul picked it up — well, I've no idea where he found the game, actually. Knowing Paul, it could have come from a garage sale as likely as it could a dumpster. There was a closetful of interesting games at Paul's house no one had ever heard of: Junta, Assassin!, and the truly anarchic RPG Call of Cthulu were some I remember. Many were the evenings whiled away with him and his roommate, our mutual friend Brahm, figuring out the rules of each. Beginning in the summer of 1998, to head over to Paul and Brahm's little white rented house, often with another friend or two in tow, was a weekend institution. Those poor newbies! They had only heard legends of the game and usually came to play without a clue they were in for an epic five to seven hours of gaming.

The board snapped together like a six-piece jigsaw puzzle of the contiguous US. Assemled, it covered most of the sparkly Formica surface of Paul's retro teal dining table. While someone attended to the board, someone else would ready the music. One of the house's residents would be in the kitchen putting on a kettle for tea, which was the de facto Official Drink of Train Game. ("Train Game" being what Brahm, in his infinite capacity for ludicrous nicknames, had dubbed it. It was so stupid, it stuck.) Your beverage choices were: English Breakfast, Earl Gray, oolong, or orange pekoe. They came out of a case of individually packaged teabags, like the kind you'd find at a cheap hotel's continental breakfast bar. You could have milk and sugar, but to ask for a glass of water, a cup of coffee, or anything else might've gotten you thrown out. Surprisingly, no one ever did.

Far greater selection was to be had in your drinking vessel selection. Paul had a prodigious collection of coffee mugs, having migrated to and fro across the nation for his transitory job in the local news industry. Like consolation prizes won for a career bereft of stability, there were mugs from tiny TV outfits, charity events, radio stations, hospitals, novelty shops, truck stops, and practically any promotional message for which one could conceive of using a mug. Paul cherished them and, accordingly, always got first pick.

Once everthing was set up, the rules (official and un-) explained to any virgins present, off we went, thundering our loads of coal and cattle into the wee hours of the morning, hopped up on Bigelow and prodded by relentless disco beats. For my part, I may have even been known to get caught up in the moment, and singing along to an ABBA tune here and there.

As the year progressed and the weather turned cold, the games and music migrated into the kitchen. Paul's house had a comically ineffective gravity furnace that cost the GDP of a Third World country to run, so he relied instead on space heaters in the bedrooms and, when company was over, the oven to warm the kitchen. He draped blankets over doorways to corral the heat, and propped open the oven door, creating a cozy space that bore the added benefit of being very close to the water for a fresh cup. Bathroom breaks became a bit of an ordeal, forced as you were by the tea to make the icy trek through the dining room and across the frigid hall over and over, until the game finally ended. But the unforgettable camaraderie of those ritual games of railroad rivalry was worth a few chilly trips to the loo.