One of my best friends from back in the day was the renowned football player Reggie Garret. Reggie once played for the Pittsburgh Steelers and had two Super Bowl Games under his belt.

Naturally he had two Super Bowl rings. One with one diamond and one with two. Sometimes when we went out together barhopping and catting around he would wear both massive rings, one on each hand. Needless to say, he was a chick magnet. The women would just gravitate to him and surround him. I always felt lucky to get his overflow.

One night while at the Brass Rail we were chatting up a very pretty black chick. After a while it became pretty obvious she was more into me than she was into him. Since we were a salt-and-pepper team he just couldn’t understand how a black chick could be more into me than into him. Oh well! Anyway, he never got over it and whenever the subject came up later on he referred to it as the, “baby, baby, baby…” incident. Even years later. We always had a big laugh over it whenever it came up. Sometimes we would even answer the phone, “Baby, baby, baby,”

On another occasion we were out having  drinks at the Frontier Club across the street from the factory where we both worked. It was happy hour. We were drinking with our boss, Jim Smith. Now Jim liked to take his subordinates out to drink and have them pay for it and then put it on our expense accounts. That way we all got to drink for free.

Well this one night at the Frontier Club we were having drinks up at the bar and a friend of Reggie’s comes over and says, “Is that fat faced motherfucker your boss?”

Well Jim’s jaw dropped opened, his face got red, and his eyes popped.

Reggie started in to stuttering and I excused myself to the gents. When I got back Reggie’s friend was long gone, Reggie was hanging his head in shame, and Jim was getting up to leave.

We got a big laugh out of this one too later on but we never brought it up around Jim.

We made bottles for the beer industry. Budweiser was just down the road. Whenever we went out we were expected to drink Budweiser which I couldn’t stand. I preferred Heineken. We don’t make bottle for Heineken, Jim would say, but Budweiser. This Bud’s for you!

Well I ran across this passage from The Road to Wiagn Pier by George Orwell, which pretty much sums up how I feel about Budweiser beer: “Look at the filthy chemical by-product people pour down their throats under the name of beer.”

That was it. It was beer in name only.

Baby, baby, baby….

Oh, the black chick? We got married.