1 - Epic Beginnings I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the bro’d. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see hot LA actress chicks and try In N’ Out burgers, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect bro for the road because he knows how to fucking party. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few Facebook status updates written by Dean from the Arizona State Beta Phi Omega house. I was totally stoked about Dean’s status updates because they were funny as shit, asking Chad to rate some pictures of girls he hooked up with the night before. At one point, Carlo Marx and I texted about the status updates and wondered if we would ever meet the epic Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the crazy fucking jagoff he is today, when he was a young Communications major shrouded in Axe Body Spray. Then news came that Dean was out of ASU and was transferring to OSU; also there was talk that he was bringing some slam piece named Marylou.

2 - Flipcup and Phoenix One night I was playing flipcup at the Delta house and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean just got in and was staying at the Holiday Inn Express near East Campus. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in Columbus, with his hotass stacked trixie Marylou; they got out of his Land Rover and cut around the corner looking for some grub and went right into Buffalo Wild Wings, and since then B-Dubs has always been a bitchin symbol of Columbus for Dean. They threw down cash on fucking tasty wings and brew-dogs. All this time Dean was telling Marylou shit like this: “Now, babe, we’re at OSU, and even though I haven’t laid down the plan for you, we gotta forget about whatever stupid shit happened between us in Phoenix and fuckin’ cowboy up and start thinking about how we’re gonna pregame tonight…” and so on in the way that he had in those early days.

3 - A Natty Light-Slugging Hero of the Southwest I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to work part time at Foot Locker to cover tuition and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking at his Samsung Galaxy, nodding like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every work, throwing in a thousand “Hell yeas” and “right ons.” I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to go to the gym and do laundry and so on. My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest. In fact he’d just been in the hospital for alcohol poisoning before hooking up with Marylou and coming to OSU. Marylou was a nine-out-of-ten with a Mystic Tan and a crazy rack; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her iPhone in her hands and her oversized Dolce and Gabana sunglasses on, waiting like a less-hot Megan Fox in that first Transformers movie. But, outside of being pretty hot, she was a total bitch and capable of being a defcon-one psycho hose-beast. That night we all slammed Bud Light Limes and pulled stop signs out of the curb till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around hung over as shit and watching Sportscenter, Dean got up like a total pimp, paced around, and decided the thing to do was have Marylou get some grub. “In other words we need some breakfast burritos, babe.” She had some kind of bitch-out about it and I peaced out.

4 - Wonderwall During the following week Dean confided in Chad King that he totally had to learn how to play the acoustic guitar; Chad said I played some awesome Oasis songs at a party a while ago and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a personal training job at Bally’s, had a fight with Marylou in a Hooters– can’t believe that fucking dude took here there– and she was so bitched off and psycho that she narced to the cops some bullshit crazy charge, and Dean had to get the fuck out of the Holiday Inn Express. So he had no place to crash. He came right out to my apartment, where I was living with Derek, and one night while I was Bowflexing there was a knock on the door and there was Dean, grinning, smelling of Axe in the dark of the hall, and saying, “What up, you remember me– Dean Moriarty? I’ve come to ask you show me how to play “Wonderwall.”

5 - Wild Wings and Truth “Where’s Marylou at?” I asked, and Dean said she’d apparently whored a few dollars together and gone back to Phoenix– “the whore!” So we went out to slam a few brews cause we couldn’t talk in front of my roommate Derek, who was totally putting the moves on this hottie from Akron U. He took one look at Dean and got afraid he was gonna pull the robbery on his lady. In Buffalo Wild Wings I told Dean, “Shit, bro, I know you didn’t just come to me to learn how to play the acoustic axe, and anyway what do I know about it except just playing chords in first position and making sensitive faces to the hotties watching you play.” And he said, “Right on, bro, I feel you and I thought of that shit, but you know it’s all like you know and shit…” and whatever in that way, things I didn’t fucking get and neither did he (WTF). In those days, homeboy didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young player with his dick all caught up on the idea of becoming a legendary pimp, and he liked to talk like a pimp and using pimp words, but in a fucked up way, that he had heard from “real pimps”– although, on the DL, he wasn’t so naive as that in other shit, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become totally in it with all the pimp terms and frontin’. But for real, we got each other on other levels of bro-ness, and I agreed he could crash at my pad till he found a job and furthermore we agreed to road trip it out West sometime. That was the winter of 2005.

6 - P90X, Lifehouse, and Friendship One night when Dean drank Sparks at my house– he already hit the gym earlier– he leaned over my shoulders as I did P90X and said, “Come on bro, those honies won’t wait, make it fast.” I said, “Chill the fuck out, I’ll be right with you as soon as I finish these lunges,” and they were some of the hardest lunges in the whole P90X system. Then I geared up and off we flew to downtown Columbus to meet some chicks. As we rode in my Land Rover in the weird phosphorescent void of South Campus we leaned on each other (no homo) fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get fucking buzzed like Dean. He was simply a straight-up player, and though he could be kind of a douche, he was only a douche because he wanted so much to party and to lay chicks who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was being sort of a douche to me and I knew it (crashing at my pad and learning the acoustic axe, etc.), and dude knew I knew it, but I didn’t give a shit and we partied fine– no bitching and moaning; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new bros. I began to learn shit from him as much as probably learned shit from me. As far as my guitar playing was concerned he said, “Shit yeah, everything you play is great.” He watched as I played Lifehouse songs, yelling “Fuck yeah! That’s the best fucking song!” and “No fucking joke!” and slammed a Natty Light. “Bro, there’s so many good fucking Lifehouse songs. How to even begin to learn all of them …”

7 - Edward Fortyhands, American Genius “Shit yeah, bro, hit this beer bong.” And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his alcohol tolerance and his love of partying, which he described so torrentially that buzzkills at Dave and Busters looked around to see the “overexcited douche.” At ASU he’d spent a third of his time at the bar, a third in the sack, and a third at the Beta Phi Omega house. They’d seen him rushing eagerly down the streets, no shirt, with a forty duct-taped to each hand, or climbing trees to get into the windows of Alpha Phi hotties’ rooms, where he spent hours just fucking going at it. We went to a party at Alpha Tau Omega– I forget what the situation was, two East coast hotties– there were no hotties there; they were supposed to meet him by the flipcup table and didn’t show up. We went to his buddy P-Rock’s room in the frat where he had a few things to do– shotgun a Natty Light and spray on some more Axe and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean partied with Carlo Marx.

8 - The Only Bros For Me Are The Awesome Ones A raw fucking thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two total players that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two hardcore eyes glanced into two hardcore eyes- the Natty-slugging player with the lacrosse shorts, and the MGD-chugging player with the popped collar that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies fucking tangled (no homo), I was a prude compared, I couldn’t shotgun PBRs as fast as them. The whole insane clusterfuck of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my bros and all I had left of my family in a big keg-stand over the American Night. Carlo told him of Big Pauly, D-Rock, Jenni; C-Rock in Texas slamming whiskey, J-Rock in Toronto, M-Rock wandering in Times Square, fucking drunk out of his skull. And Dean told Carlo of bombass players at ASU like Tommy Snark, the ripped-as-hell bouncer and online poker genius. He told him of Ralphie Johnson, Big Dong Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his frat buddies, his innumerable girls and hookups and Hustler mags, his heroes, enemies, and fantasy football draft picks. Carlo and Dean rushed down the street together, bonging brews in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and a buzzkill. But then they strutted down the streets like total pimps, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after bros who interest me, because the only bros for me are the awesome ones, the ones who are mad to chug, mad to party, mad to bone, mad to get hammered, desirous of all the chicks at Buffalo Wild Wings, the ones who never turn down a Bud Light Lime, but chug, chug, chug like fucking awesome players exploding like spiders across an Ed Hardy shirt and in the middle you see the silver skull pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

9 - Natty-Pounding, Grenade-Dodging Proportions Wanting dearly to learn how to be a total pimp like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was all up in his face with a great amorous soul (no homo) as only a pimp-to-be can have. “Bro, Carlo, listen to fucking this– I’m being fucking real here…” I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to raw-as-hell, Natty-pounding, grenade-dodging proportions. Then came spring, the great time of spring break, and every one of my bros in the posse was getting ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on the fifth disc of P90X and when I finished tricking out my triceps, after a trip to Miami Beach with Derek, I got ready to beast it West for the very first time.