Sometimes on the weekends, Jeff and I would spend the night at each others’ houses so we could hang out and do cool things.  When we were a little younger, we were into action figures -- G.I. Joe, He-Man, Transformers, M.A.S.K., Rambo, Chuck Norris, Centurions, Thundercats, Go-Bots, WWF wrestlers, and even those weird guys who looked like knights but their chest and head was flat with a hologram sticker stuck there that looked like monsters or animals and had a matching holographic shield.  Those were the days, but in 1989, we were getting too old for that shit.  So Jeff and I would hang out, and part of the time we’d play video games.  Not that either of us were all that great, but when it came to fighting games, we would make a great team.

One of the games we mastered was "Bad Dudes".  It wasn’t the greatest game in the world, but it was bad-ass.  The goal was for these two guys to walk down the street, and beat the hell out of ninjas.  If your life meter went down, you would grab a bottle of Coca-Cola, then go beat down some more ninjas.  At the end of each level was a stereotypical bad guy from a martial arts B-movie, who we also beat the hell out of.  Then our onscreen avatar would proudly proclaim in an eight-big electronic voice, "I’m Bad!"  We really were bad.

At the end of the game, we would rescue the president and watch him eat a hamburger.  Boy did he enjoy those hamburgers after being stuck in a helicopter for the 20 - 30 minutes it would take Jeff and I to beat up all the ninjas.

Why the President of the United States always got kidnapped by this band of ninjas is beyond me.  You would think that we would have nuked Japan again if there are so many ninjas out there waiting to attack our country, but that never materialized.  Fortunately, the United States Secret Service has issued policy changes based on techniques Jeff and I employed in defeating the ninja threat, and now our president has been safe from ninjas for nearly a decade.

At this age, we recognized the universal truth that ninjas were the greatest threat mankind faced.  Almost all of the games we played revolved around beating up ninjas in some fashion.  We grew up in a society swarming with violence, and we knew that one day we too would be confronting the great ninja menace with our huge biceps and martial art skills.  I dreamed of the day that I would be the proud owner of some nunchucks.  Little did I know that I would find some nunchucks sitting on a fence a few years later, which I permanently borrowed without telling the owner.  I still have those nunchucks, and they were never once used in an actual fight.  I did smash my fingers on them a few times though.

Let’s get back to the ninjas though.  Jeff and I were into beating up ninjas.  We saturated our lives with violence, and observed every effort mankind had made to rid ourselves of ninjas.  In addition to playing "Bad Dudes" or "Double Dragon 2" on the NES, we watched movies about beating up ninjas.  For example, we both liked the film, "Gymkata", where a gymnast goes to a nation that is named something like Pakistan but has white Europeans in it, and he beats up scores of ninjas.  I recall very little else from that movie, aside from the fact that he was a martial arts gymnast who had to participate in a game similar to that story they always make movies about where a rich guy is hunting poor and foreign people to kill them.  There was also a guy that had his tongue cut out, and a cute chick.  All in all, a great movie at the time that I’m sure to hate now.

On weekend nights, we would watch movies like Gymkata on a late night program called "USA up All Night" featuring Rhonda Shear.  She would make any movie interesting to watch, and often we preferred to see her over the actual movie.  Her long, smooth legs, ample breasts, sparkling smile, and bleached-blonde hair made her the ideal looking woman, and neither Jeff nor myself cared that she was an air-head.  She was perfect in every way.

Rhonda Shear was the type of girl you wanted to meet.  In a perfect world, you would pull up to her Southern California home in your Lamborghini Countach, whistle from the street without leaving your car, and she would come running out, breasts bouncing all over the place, and get into the car.  You’d then roll, knowing that you are the biggest bad-ass in America.  You, a martial arts master, with a big breasted beautiful babe, and your Lamborghini.  You see, in the 80’s and 90’s, all young boys wanted a Lamborghini.  Gay, straight, macho, sissy, whatever.  It didn’t matter.  If you had a Y chromosome, you wanted a Lamborghini.  It was the ultimate car.  In later years, I learned that they are actually pieces of shit that go fast and cost too much.  Had Jeff and I known the truth about Lamborghinis back then, it would have destroyed our lives.  This futuristic looking car’s photo is in the dictionary twice -- once next to cool, once next to fast.  Lamborghinis were awesome, and I have memorized the two that I saw in my life prior to turning 18 for the momentous events that they were.

Such expensive cars, however, can only be afforded by badasses.  The kinds of guys that get rich by beating up ninjas for a living.  Jeff and I had never attended martial arts classes though, so we had to figure out some way to defeat ninjas without the years of training and sacrifice required.  That’s where guns came in.

In addition to video games and movies about martial arts, Jeff and I watched movies about men with guns killing off bad guys.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were some of the best actors we knew of.  They didn’t know martial arts, but with an infinite supply of guns and ammo, as well as an uncanny feats of accuracy no other human being can replicate, they beat some ass.  Jeff and I both grew up with dads that taught us how to use guns, but we did that respectfully and calmly.  No, one day we had hoped to be able to get fully automatic guns, such as Uzis, to kill the bad guys and save the day.  Perhaps sometimes we would even use a machine gun to open a can of beer or kill a mosquito that was being annoying.  A good guy with an Uzi can be nearly invincible.

Unfortunately, time was not always on our side as youths.  Sometimes we would have to wait hours and hours before watching ninjas, men with guns, or the Toxic Avenger or whatever Troma film would be playing that night.  Sometimes we’d have to take a break from playing "Bad Dudes" or "Contra".  To stay awake for long periods of time, Jeff and I had two things to help us -- Dr. Pepper and sweet tea.  We would drink both constantly to keep us going.  It would work well most of the time too.  We could stay awake until the wee hours of the morning on that stuff, and watch all of a late night movie.

In addition to that, we would have to stay full too.  We snacked on many different things, but a couple things stood out.  The first thing is pizza pockets.  You know what they are -- cheap tomato paste, small cubes of cheese and pepperoni, and some spices all stuffed inside of a little fried bag of something that may not be food.  When you would take your first bite of these things, they would burn your mouth because the ingredients inside the bag of pizza would be much hotter than the outside.

The other food we filled ourselves with was popcorn.  For some reason, we both would always get those huge tins of three different kinds of popcorn for Christmas.  The plain one didn’t go over too well, but the caramel and cheese ones were great.  We would always finish those flavors off and end up throwing away much of the rest.

The tins Jeff would get for Christmas were pretty much always decorated with some variation of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill colors and logo.  Jeff was a huge fan of UNC, and convinced me to be a fan as well.  It was pretty easy, this was the college that brought Michael Jordan onto the basketball scene, after all.  Being tall, it was also easy to convince me to play basketball for fun.  Jeff and I would play basketball with many other friends in our neighborhood.  Unfortunately for those other kids, they were idiots and liked other schools like Duke or NC State.  So Jeff and I would get as much Tarheels paraphernalia as we could, and I’m sure that somehow having their logo on the outside of the popcorn tin made the popcorn taste that much better.

So far, I’ve explained that Jeff and I were into video games, ninjas, movies, machine guns, bleached blondes, junk food, Lamborghins, and UNC basketball.  Something that was left out was the music.  Music wasn’t a major part of our lives at the time.  We liked whatever was popular, but most music was just a sound track to beating up ninjas, so it wasn’t that important.  As we got older though, we would watch MTV sometimes and critique the music videos.  Mostly we’d just put MTV on at night when we were tired of video games and were waiting for USA Up All Night with Rhonda Shear to start (as a side note, Gilbert Gottfried was also a host on that show sometimes, but he was horrible and it’s best to forget that.)

I was probably more into music than Jeff was.  I listened to cool bands like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica.  However, there were some popular bands, that while mediocre, released some songs we were ok with.  The problem with Def Leppard began when we first saw a video of them.  It must have been shortly after their drummer lost his arm, because they would go back and forth between different shots and they either disguised his armlessness well, or they had started making the video before he lost his arm.  In either case, the cruelty of children in addition to the novelty of seeing a one-armed drummer became something of interest to us.  We talked a lot of trash about how goofy it was for a drummer to have one arm, and what kind of sucky band would hire a guy with one arm to play the drums.

Looking back, I can now understand how it was an amazing accomplishment for Rick Allen of Def Leppard to continue playing drums after losing an arm.  He should have been an inspiration to us, two boys who had no martial arts skills to beat up ninjas and couldn’t hook up with hot women like Rhonda Shear (or the hot daughter of Jeff’s mother’s boyfriend.  She was a cute bleach blonde college student at UNCG with a name that escapes me at the moment, but was something typical for girls to be named in the 80’s.)  Neither of us could afford a Lamborghini, which I bet the drummer of Def Leppard could afford.  Neither of us owned an uzi or had a chance at playing basketball for UNC.  We did, however, have both arms, four between us, and this one-armed guy was on TV showing us up.  He was cool.