The doorbell rang exactly thirty minutes after it should have. Of course, it being Mike, it was thirty minutes earlier than I expected. With a rush, I grabbed my hat and keys off the mantle and whipped open the front door of my parents' house. Standing just on the other side of the screen door was Mike, sporting a fresh new look for his abnormally-thick-for-his-age facial hair.

"Dude," I said with a smirk, "nice chinmuff you have going on there."

He smiled pensively as I walked past him to his car. "Jesus... You go away snowboarding for Spring Break without me. That's bad enough. And then you come back and I find you decided to go full grunge..."

"What?" he said defensively. "You don't like it?"

"Well, I mean... It's fashionable, if that's what you're asking."

"That's not what I'm asking," he answered as he reached the driver's door of his Camaro. "If I wanted to know if you thought it was fashionable, I'd have asked 'Hey, is this fashionable?' But that's not what I'm asking." He opened the door and his head disappeared below the hood as he assumed the captain's chair.

"Dude, don't be so defensive," I said, opening the passenger side door and hopping into the co-pilot's chair. "You look fine. Just..."

He sighed and leaned against the steering wheel, assuming defeat before we even started. "What."

"What, what?" I said in reply as I opened the glovebox. "What, nothing. Nothing, okay? Just... Let's go. We're going to be late for the show."

He looked over at me with dead eyes; his new reddish goatee hanging horizontally off his chin.

I looked back at him and held up the CD I'd retrieved from the glovebox. "Matthew Sweet okay with you?"

He just kept staring.

I smirked, knowing he was just waiting for the setup to be over and for me to get to the point. "Since we're going to his concert and all... I figured we could listen to this..."

He didn't blink.

"And, you know... The concert's at Chastain, which is on the north side... HEY!" I said, feigning a new idea had just popped in my head. "You know, we could go up Piedmont and through Midtown if you want."

He sighed. "And why would we do that," he groaned.

"Well, that's, you know... Where people with gay goatees hang out..."

He looked at me as if I'd just soiled the rug after weeks of potty training. "That's it?" he asked with a sigh.

"Yup," I said with a smirk. "If I wasn't in this car, I'd take a bow."

He shook his head and started the car. With a roar, his 405 block engine sounded the call of two ridiculous teenagers headed into an evening full of rock and roll and hyjinks galore.

We arrived at Chastain forty five minutes and three repeats of the song "Girlfriend" later, excited as hell to see Matthew Sweet live. He was out on his "100% Fun tour," and while we liked that record just fine, the real draw was the chance to finally see him perform Girlfriend. Girlfriend was the finest rock song of the early 90's for our money. Sure, there were tons of acts that blew the faces off crowds with insane power-crunch chords and fancy guitar trickery... But for a straight-up bluesy guitar-solo-that-wasn't-just-wanking groove, Girlfriend couldn't be beat.

It just sucks that we had to see it at Chastain Amphitheater.

There is one huge problem with Chastain as a venue. It's large and holds a lot of folks, so they book these big national acts there who are not throwaways from a bygone era - these are the stars of the time. So you actually WANT to see them. But Chastain's big selling point to audiences is also it's biggest fault. You see, they serve dinner at the tables on the floor of the amphitheater, and allow picnic dinners in the rest of the seats -- turning what should be a pretty rockin' show staring Fountains of Wayne and Matthew Sweet into dinner theater for a bunch of drunk uptown yuppie pricks.

Foutains of Wayne came out first, and proceeded to play their big radio hit at the time, "Radiation Vibe," first. And of course, we just so happened to be sitting in front of a few of those aforementioned yuppie dicks, but a special breed of them who adore what's on the radio and feel the need to sing along to the jam they know. And that was annoying.

What was more annoying, however, was the fact that once the song was over, they proceeded to talk -- LOUDLY -- throughout the rest of the band's performance. I learned more about the two guy's cars (a silver convertible Mercedes and a powder blue convertible Lexus), the two girls' tastes in shoes, all four morons' worst party ever, how much their jobs sucked, how much revenge they were going to get when they finally made middle management...

It was only sufferable because it gave Mike and I stuff to make fun of... When I wasn't making fun of his goatee.

"Look, I'm just saying, it's going to tickle my nuts when you go down on me," I said matter-of-factly.

"Whatever," he said, taking a sip of his five dollar Coke. "At least I don't gag and puke up Fuddrucker's all over you, like Kasey did. Be thankful for that."

"I'm not sure which is worse, to be honest," I said as I sipped from my own overly expensive soda. "Maybe I should ask party chick and her buddy behind us?"

He laughed. "Maybe you should. Also, maybe you should wrestle the two guys and shut them up."

"Hmm..." I said, looking behind me to size them up. "Yeah, I guess I could take them... And they don't have goatees, so you know... No tickleage when I teabag them."

We both started cracking up. I overhead a voice behind me say "I dunno, they just looked back here and started laughing..." Another voice said "Dunno what their problem is..." And a third voice, from behind me and beside me and all around me, said "And now, ladies and gentlemen, Matthew Sweet!"

Immediately the place erupted. We clapped and yelled and forgot about the morons behind us as we focused in on the band making their way to the stage. Matthew picked up his guitar and immediately laid into the opening riff of Girlfriend.

The place went wild. I went wild. Mike went wild. Even God went wild -- he began to shower down upon us a torrent. Which was strange since there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I felt the cold dampness flush over me, soaking my hat and my shirt and seeping down to my pants. And I realized that rain -- even the most horrendous torrents -- don't come in floods, and they certainly don't taste like Miller High Life. And they don't end with globs of cheese dip.

"Mother FUCKER!" I heard a prickheaded fuckstick say behind me.

"Dude, SORRY!" I heard another male voice say."

"Oh, honey!" A female said. "Don't worry, we'll get you another one!"

I turned around and looked at the group of yuppie bastards. "What the FUCK!?!" I said to the guy behind me.

"Uh... Sorry," he said almost in passing as he scrambled to gather up his picnic basket and mop up the small amount of beer that spilled on it. That's it. That's all I got from that group of dipshits.

It completely ruined the show for me. I went to the bathroom to clean off the beer and cheese dip, and actually did a modest job of it. But I missed the first few songs of a concert I'd wanted to see for years -- including the one song that made me cough up the 30 bucks in the first place. Needless to say, I was a bit pissed off.

We left the show just before the encore -- half to beat the crowd, and half because we'd missed all the songs we really wanted to hear. As we're exiting, a couple of people standing in front of buckets of ice offered us a few freebies.

"Try some Fresca!" one of them said.

"And some Doritos!" the other chimed in.

"Well oh boy!" I said. "I do love me some Fresca and Doritos... Mind if we get a few?"

The two looked at one another. "Don't see why not," the drinkmaster said.

Mike and I made a dive for the goods. I think we ended up with six Frescas and eight bags of Cool Ranch Doritos before we were cut off. With a satisfied smile on our faces, we made our way back to our car.

And that's when karma looped around on us.

Sitting in a handicapped spot near the parking lot entrance was a silver Mercedes convertible. Right next to it, in the next handicapped spot, was a powder blue convertible Lexus. Both had their tops down, and because we'd left early, there wasn't anyone around. Like, at ALL.

"No. Way." I said with my mouth agape.

"Holy SHIT," Mike replied. "You think... I mean, what if..."

We looked at each other. We looked down to our hands which were full of nutrition-free foodstuffs. We looked back up at each other. We smiled. Without skipping a beat, he began tearing open bags of Doritos as I popped open Frescas. We dumped the contents into each of the two cars, laughing manically and screaming out revenge-fueled obscenities all the while.

As soon as the last bag of Doritos and the last can of Fresca were empty, we booked it to the back end of the parking lot and high-tailed it out of there. We high-fived at least fifteen times on the way to Felini's Pizza to scarf some replacement grub. We felt empowered and alive and all the things that come from being eighteen and a hair's breath from graduated from high school and out on your own, causing justified mischief.

We sat at Felini's for the better part of two hours, discussing which girls we'd love to bang but never could (all of them), which girls would bang us but we'd never let (none), what college life was going to be like, how things were going between me and the student teacher who befriended me and I tried to kiss and wouldn't even look at me anymore... You know, life at eighteen.

We tossed our paper plates and headed back to the car. When we rounded the building and got to the parking lot, we spotted the car, left exactly where Mike had parked it when we arrived - except there was an add-on that we didn't quite expect. Mike had done a fair bit of work to his bitchin' Camaro, but adding the walking half of a person to the driver's side front window wasn't one of them. It was very clear that we had an opportunistic burglar in our sights.

I looked over at Mike with my mouth gaping open. He returned the same look, only his mouth was wearing a dumb goatee. Immediately we realized two things: first, we did exactly what the dumb pricks at Chastain had done and left our vehicle vulnerable to a villain, and second, this villain was going to have to be dealt with.

We weren't really the ass-kicking type, so neither of us had the intention of kicking the guy senseless. But we did know we had to scare him enough to release whatever goods he'd procured from the car and make haste in exiting. So, silently, I pointed to the guy's right leg, then pointed to Mike. He got the idea and crept around to the right side of the vehicle. I slid in to the left. And on a silent count of three, we both reached down, grabbed a leg each, yanked the guy from the car and deposited him on the asphalt below.

"What the FUCK do you think you're... Oh GOD!" I said as the guy raised his head. He was covered in puke.

Karma looped on us yet again.

"Oh SHIT!" Mike exclaimed, rushing to the window of his car to find a pile of puke laying in the driver's seat.

"Sorry," the guy slurred. He was very obviously drunk and very obviously used to being drunk. He was also very obviously without a job or a home or a fresh change of clothes.

"Man... What the HELL!" I yelled. "Why were you in that car, man?"

"Needed a place to puke, y'know?" he replied.

"You weren't stealing anything?" I asked.

He shot me a look through his nearly crossed eyes. "Man, FUCK that. I'm a CHRISTIAN!"

I sighed and rolled my eyes. Turning to Mike, I asked "Is anything missing?"

"Not that I can... OH, GROSS!" he exclaimed.

"What?"

"It's all in the cup holders too!"

I laughed. "What, did you stick your hand in there?"

"Well yeah," he replied as he turned to show me his hand. "That's where all the spare change is."

"And you didn't just LOOK?"

"It's DARK!" he yelled. "I wasn't expecting there to be PUKE in there!"

I shook my head. "Fuck... I guess we gotta clean this up, huh?"

"Ya'll gonna beat my ass?" the bum said from the asphalt.

I looked at Mike. He sighed and shook his head. "No, man," I said. "You deserve it though."

"F'what!" he said as he attempted to stand up. "Got sick is all... Can't beat a man up for being sick."

"You could have puked in the parking lot, you know," I stated.

He thought for a minute. "Yeah, but that's gross," he finally replied. "People might step in it."

"And puking in the car isn't gross?!?" Mike interjected.

The bum shrugged. "No garbage can around," he said.

I guess it make some sense.

We sent the bum on his way, and then headed back to Felini's for a stack of napkins and a pitcher of water. "So," I said, "This was a pretty fucked up night, huh?"

"Yeah," Mike answered. "You think God was getting us back for the Fresca thing?"

"No," I said. "God put those cars there for us to get back for the beer and cheese thing. This was just... I dunno what it was, actually."

"Gross," he stated. "But still... Not as gross as Kasey puking hamburger on your junk, huh?"

I laughed. "Yeah, I guess... But that's still not as bad as your goatee is going to be when it tickles my ball-- OH, FUCK YOU!" I yelled as he flung his puke-covered hand at me, spraying my beer-soaked, cheese-stained shirt with the final ingredient needed to make a man decide to go bare-chested in the middle of the parking lot.