So I ran into my buddy Jeff Bagwell. We were both in our 30s or something.
I caught up with him as he was walking to his ride. I asked him, "Jeff, are you a metalhead?"
Suddenly, in the way of dreams, he's lying on the floor, leaning back on his elbows next to a heavy workbench, looking up at me.
"When I have to be," he says.
We're walking again and I'm trying to tell him about that time when the boss let me leave work early so I could go to the Metallica concert off Justice and then I came back to work after the concert was over, but Jeff is going on about left-handed pitching and I can't get a word in edgewise.
Finally he calls ahead to the driver of a ramshackle Chevy van and someone on the inside (there's four or five guys in black t-shirts sitting on the carpeted floor, I'll see) slides the side door open.
"Frantic," from St Anger is playing rather loudly within. We both start headbanging.
Jeff hops in, I don't. The van starts moving ahead slowly, side door still open, and I'm walking alongside, still whipping my head back and forth.
Bagwell is still talking to me, now it's about Kevin Brown's anger management issues. I wish I was going with them. But I'm not, and I'm going to have to tell Jeff about that Metallica concert some other time. The van door slides shut and it pulls away in a cloud of exhaust.
I turn around, dejected. Think I'll get a hot pretzel....
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