If you enjoyed episode 1 , Adolf the goat then pull up a chair right there, grab a beer or wine, and sit the fuck down. We are about to take another trip down memory lane of my fucked up childhood.
So lets rewind this way back to when I was about 6 years old. I have always been just crazy competitive. Like Ricky Bobby says
No wait, that's not it
Oh, here is is
So my dad asks if i want to be a boy scout (cub scout technically for my age) , I'm like YEEEEEESSSSS!!!! The next day we look into what needs to be done and i get assigned to a Den. I still remember the little chant we made up...... 2,4,6,8. Who do we appreciate? den 3, den 3, den 3!! wooooo!!! Yeah it was dumb as hell but as a kid it was fucking awsome. So we were off and running, we did the food drives where you go up and collect food for homeless shelters, we did community service, picked up trash, went camping, earned merrit badges. I was eating it up.
The competition
Then came the day of our first competition. We had to bake a cake....... I was confused but I went with it. It was going to be a giant competition on who made the best cake. We get out to the car and my dad says " what do you think?" I was like" well seems kinda girly". He laughs and says well we are gonna be the best queer boy scouts we can be and bake us a fucking cake i guess. Off to the store we went. We got everything we needed and more. The competition was in 2 weeks. We made a practice cake or 2 to kinda get the feel for it and decorating it. By the time we got to the competition we had a bad ass cake for being made by a big burly biker and his kid who i am pretty sure the kids from Talledega Nights were modeled after
It's show time
We roll up there like we own the place and soon to discover that one of the other boys , whos dad was a local lawyer in our little podunk town in Arkansas, had a fucking store bought and decorated cake. The assholes still had the damn sticker on it.
A little side note is needed here for people not familiar with Arkansas. My parents were from Iowa and everyone in this particular area of Arkansas it seems is related and noone can let go of loosing the civil war.
The judges are the kids relatives and nobody even second guesses that these 2 weasels didn't make this perfect cake. Well needless to say we lost but we got to eat some delicious cake so i guess it wasn't all bad. At the end of the competition they let us know what our next competition is going to be. They call everyone together and ask if anyone can guess what it is. Boom, my dads hand goes up. I know he is pissed and has ZERO inner filter. Please don't pick him. Please don't pick him. Please don't pick him.
You there, what is your guess? My dad. "Are we baking cookies or sewing dresses to model?"
5 awkward minutes later
We find out we are making a pinewood derby car
Back in the car and my dad explains that sometimes even if you are better than someone you still get fucked out of it. I understood and we were both excited about building the car. Have I told you how competitive I am? It is borderline obsesive sometimes. So we head home and discuss ideas the hole way there, we lived 25 miles out in the Ozark Mountains so it was a drive.
The build
Now i am not saying Hollywood had a wire tap in our house but this scene looks damn familiar
wind resistance
We put 2 solid weeks of work into this thing. This thing we called the Reaper. We started out with the body. It was fashioned to look like the body line of a hearse, a wagon if you will. We made the nose slope up and we made a home made wind tunnel with a small fan and my dad would blow cigarette smoke through it. I know how white trashy that is and i fully embrace it. So we wittled on this thing and ended up with a hood sloped at about a 50 ish degree angle then it had a drop down area for dead air before it went up to the windshield area in which we drilled a ton of tiny holes from front to rear where the windshield would have been to allow air to pass through thus droping the surface area for wind resistance even more.
rolling resistance
We took the 4 janky nails supplied and threw them in the trash instead we opted for our own custom axles and drilled them 100% square. We used lasers on this damn thing to square it up. It was perfect. The axles were chucked into a drill and spun inside steel wool until they were polished perfectly. The wheels were also turned down a bit on both outer edges so that they had a very slight V shape so that only the center of the tire touched the track. To top it off we lubed between the axles and tires with liquid graphite. You could give this tire a spin, go to school, come home and it would be spinning still. We may have actually accidentally made a perpetual motion machine.
weight
The rules gave very strict rules on weight. Luckily my dad sold some drugs here and there so we had plenty of scales that would measure down to the gram with ease. so we gutted all the unneeded wood on the bottom side and made some metal tail lights out of 16 penny nails painted red with a gloss black paintjob. To make weight we driled holes and melted lead fishing weights into them. Each tire had its own scale under it and we adjusted the weights untill all 4 tires weighed exactly the same.
It's go time
We show up and they have it divided out into brakcets that the top 2 move on each race and there are 5 tracks side by side. I got the buterflies in my stomach. We get lined up and they drop the gates. I swear to god and everything holy that that car literally jumped out of the gate. That car ran down the hill like it was a dog with it's ass on fire, we put pinewood dearby bus lengths on those other cars. It was a massacre. The Reaper had come to town and it was here for your souls. Bracket after bracket came and went and we were eyeing up the competition and timing them. Our times were a solid 2 seconds better than anyones. We were on cloud 9. Final bracket comes up and we are in it with cake boy.... Vengence is mine mother fucker. The gate drops and my little black bitch DESTROYED everyone. I am the happiest kid in the world. Me and my dad and mom are hugging and jumping up and down like idiots when the judges (who were old as fuck and later found out they were the cake boys grandparents) call it for old cake boy. The room goes silent, everyone knows it is not right. One lady quickly says i have it on video (one of those huge 80's recorders) and the judges promptly decline. I am crushed. I look up at my dad with tears starting to well up in my eyes and that lit the fuse on my dad. Holy fuck.
My dad say " are you fucking blind? " someone says settle down . (you wanna know how many times that ever worked?) My dad who is a large biker guy whips around and tells him to shut his fucking mouth before it ends up wired shut. Turning his attention back to the original targets he says " either you are blind or you bunch of sister fucking , inbred, hillbillies really are as stupid as you look. No wonder you lost the fucking war! "
needles to say, that bit of sweet talking didn't get us our trophy but it did get us a police escort out of the building
And that is how my dad got me kicked out of the boyscouts.
Hope you enjoyed my pain. Until nextt time folks
