For fellow Tent Man Mike Harvey, the $3 T-shirt would have been revised to read, "One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, MORE..."

 

Mike was a lanky, squinty-eyed, balding man with a fondness for tequila that was simultaneously awe-inspiring and terrifying.  One Saturday morning at 9am he nearly hit our truck when he threw the tequila bottle he had just finished off--while driving--out the truck window on Boston's Mass Ave.  Like that evil Mexican liquor he loved so much, Mike Harvey sent off "stay away, you fool!" vibes from miles away, but for some reason, you were drawn in...

 

He had a fantastic scar on his face--one of those scars that no one asks about, no one knows about, and Mikey certainly wasn't going to talk about.  Personally, I always figured it was where a demon had clawed into him to rip out his soul.  That or some drunk girl sobered up, told her boyfriend what Mikey tried to do to her, and he looked no further than his bag of nails and broken glass to fuck Mikey up.

 

Mikey had the scary focus of a serial killer, but without the "get it done" attitude that would have had him showing up for work each day with fresh scratch marks on his face.  Instead, he just smoked a shitload of pot like the rest of us and carried his eerie intensity around the tent sites, sucking down Marlboro reds like they were Chuckles.

 

His stories drew you in like a good car wreck or a refinery fire.  Whether it was a blow-by-blow account of eating his girlfriend's snatch while coked up or "that fucking bitchin' time at Lake Havisu" when he did a week's worth of LSD in one morning, you knew that the law, Mikey's liver and some ugly chick were going to come out on the losing end. 

 

Tenting ran in the family--his older brother had literally shown him the ropes.  But Mikey had bigger dreams than tenting, and he wasn't afraid to tell anyone who would listen.  As he put it one crisp summer morning at a job site in New Hampshire:  "I'm either going to go to Harvard Law School--because all the other ones are shit and everyone knows it--or else I'm going to open a dive shop in Jamaica."  Oddly enough, Yale Law School didn't jump in to protest that a man who had been kicked out of every college west of Utah had overlooked them.

 

That job in New Hampshire was a hell job--those people wanted tents, tables, chairs, a dance floor, heaters--then they wanted us to cover all the poles with evergreen leaves as a finishing touch.  Breathtaking mountain scenery is all well and good, but by the seventh hour of ass-tounging tales from Mikey, you just wanted to get back to the shop and hide in a big pile of canvas, hoping the bad man would leave you alone.

 

Naturally, at some point in the day, the conversation turned to pets.  Mikey, ever the innovator, quickly dismissed dogs, cats, ferrets, fish and snakes.  "Fuck that--those pets suck.  I want to get me one of those Vietnamese potbelly pigs."

 

Kyle Shore suddenly became our resident naturalist, noting,  "Oh, yeah, dude!  I've heard about those things--they're wicked smart and you can train 'em and shit." 

 

"I don't give a shit if they can do math.  I want one because I bet it's really satisfying to kick 'em in the ribs when you're angry."

 

The twinkle in his eye made it clear that he was pretty pleased with himself--and that he had mentally and/or actually tested a few animals before getting to the poor pig.

 

"Dude, you're a fucking sick-o..."  Kyle had a soft spot in his heart for Vietnamese pigs, apparently.

 

"I don't think I'm a sick-o.  I just think those pigs are exactly the right height and weight for a good swift kick..."  Mikey paused in a rare thoughtful moment.  "I will admit that I'm evil, though.  I figured out a long time ago that a fuck-up like me isn't getting into heaven, so why even try?  I'm going to be as evil as I can be, so when I die, Satan's going to be waiting for me at the door to hell to give me a big high five before we team up and come back to fight Jesus."

 

That was five years ago.  When I was back in Massachussetts last year for a friend's wedding, someone told me Mikey cleaned up, that he got his shit together, and maybe he went with some sort of Plan C before his assault on Fair Harvard and/or Jamaica. 

 

I'll believe it when I see it.  For now, I keep warning every potbelly pig I see, and I'm willing to bet that the Lord of Darkness is still leaving the light on for him.

 

 

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