This Day in History - Years Ago

July 27th was always a special day to Petey. It was his girlfriend's birthday one year - presuming you could call Sheila Ham a his girlfriend. They were together for two weeks just for her birthday and then Petey left her.
"Guys," he said, as he so often did, "guys, I don't know what to do. I'm not kidding, Ham is more than just her last name. I can't handle it, guys."
That was two days after they first hooked up. See, we always knew Petey liked them a little on the big side of heavy-set but Sheila Ham, well, it was more than just her last name. She loved ham. Her birthday cake every year was a big honey roasted ham with ham-and-mayo spread smeared across the top of it.
After attending her birthday that year (and consequently breaking up with her a couple of weeks later), July 27th lost a bit of its hold on Petey. Usually on this day, around noon time, his body would remember how violently ill he got from eating that ham-and-mayo-on-ham that turned out to be not-quite-cooked-all-the-way. The day he got out of the hospital, Sheila showed up with a big ham cookie for him and some flowers (that smelled like, strangely enough, roast beef). He dumped her right then and there. He did, however, try to eat the cookie which put him into a fit of diarrhea.
That's just how Petey was. He never gave up, he just persisted - if there was something he wanted to do, he was going to do it (by God) and let no man, woman, nor child try to stop him under penalty of death or being puked on.
Anyway, one of the reasons Petey so enjoyed July 27th was because it was the day he would always 'smell' summer ending even if it still had a month left to go.
"Okay guys," he'd put on that silly headband with the feathers that he got from that Native Awareness Pow Wow and Meet up in South Dakota when he was a kid. "Guys, now you know," he'd always tell the same story, "you know I'm one twenty-fourth Coeur d'Alene Injun-American. My great grandad taught me this medicine when I was just six years old, guys, and it has not failed me yet."
And man, he would stick that nose of his out and he'd close his eyes with so much sincerity that you almost believed him. He'd bow his back all out like Iggy Pop and hold his arms out like some kind of tap-dancer. With those feathers sticking up off his head, he'd start prancing around in a mixture of something he must've seen at that Pow Wow and some kind of Riverdance bullshit, and I'll be damned if he didn't look like some kind of mutant rooster trying to find its mutant mate.
We'd all just stand back and watch, maybe pull out some booze or pass around a joint and we'd just watch him and he'd go for sometimes hours, around and around, never opening his eyes and always moving his head around like he was looking with his nose.
Usually after a couple of hours he'd just stop dead still and toss his head back, looking all the world like that rooster, and he'd open up his mouth and out would come that goddamned annoying noise that he picked up from Dumb and Dumber.
After about a minute of that, not a single bit of movement, he'd throw himself back onto the ground and start writhing around in some kind of sacred convulsion (that's what he always called it). We knew not to get too close to him when he was doing this, cos he'd always start kicking and spitting and once or twice he unzipped and whipped out his jimmy and started pissing all over the place.
Then we'd hear it and we'd know it was safe (and expected) for us to walk over there.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven," he'd count in quick mumbles and then when he reached a random number he'd stop and he'd look up. It was almost pathetic, him down there on the ground looking up at us with his eyes all wide and tears welling up in them and his arms all covered in goosebumps. "Alright guys," he'd say, "I got it. I got it, guys. It's fifteen more days of summer, it's an early fall this year guys."
Then he'd jump right up, he'd take off that headband go put his shirt back on and grab a beer and just act like the whole thing never happened.
Sometimes, when July 27th would roll around, you'd almost think that he thought it was the first time he'd ever done it. He'd act like he had to tell us every little detail again and again with such earnest concern for our understanding in his eyes that you just had to wonder if maybe, somehow, he really was possessed by Chief Igmumpa the Summer Sniffer like he claimed to be. In Memory of Petey
[Steven]
Time:1:36 PM

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