Some Other Times, Alexander...

War is hell.

As you may recall, my main guy Private Alexander Jasper left for Afghanistan in February. Over these past nine months, he’s been playing a lot of video games, taking pictures of dirt and sunsets, reenacting Lady Gaga music videos, and being a fucking all-star American hero in his spare time.

Alexander will be coming back to the States on two weeks’ leave in the next few days, which will put him in the position to decide which place is worse: Afghanistan, or Salem, Oregon. In honor of his return, I’ve decided to once again chronicle some of the crazy shit he got up to back in the day.

Some Other Times, Alexander…

…used his father’s camera to revolutionize the film world.

During my junior year, I was hanging out at Alexander’s house when we found his dad’s old video camera under a pile of dirty laundry in his bedroom. “Huh!” Alexander said. “I haven’t seen this in over a year! Let’s hook it up to the TV and see what I was last using it for.”

So we did just that, digging up a bunch of red/yellow/white cables to hook the ancient camera up to Alexander’s equally ancient TV. I remember being pretty excited to see what was on the camera; Alexander was always remarkably creative, and so I figured that whatever footage he’d shot was bound to be something bold and groundbreaking.

We hit “Play,” and the screen came to life, showing a bobbing, handheld recording of one of the family’s houseplants. From behind the camera came Alexander’s voice:

“Oh, hey there, Mr. Plant!”

And then, in a gravelly, high pitched voice, Alexander shouted the response:

“AW HI ‘DERE ALEXANDA HOW’DYA DOOOOOOOOOOO?”

“Oh, I’m just fine, Mr. Plant! Hey, what’s your favorite kind of soda?”

“AHHH YEEEEAH, YOU KNOW I LIKE-A DA MOUNTAIN DEEEEEEEEEEWWWWW!”

Maybe this isn’t as funny on the page, but there was essentially no background noise in this video, which suggests that Alexander was just sitting alone in his house, pointing a camera at a potted plant and having a conversation with it.

The camera then abruptly cut to one of Alexander’s experiments with stop motion, in which he had pointed the camera at a pair of fingernail clippers on the carpet and, by turning the camera on and off and moving the clippers around, tried to make it look like they were marching across the floor. Other amateur filmmakers would have used action figures or toy cars or something, but Alexander’s reasoning had clearly been something like, “Well, I’ve got the camera here, and I’ve got the fingernail clippers here, so why not just make some lemonade?”

…had a multiple year-long feud with his neighbors.

In middle school, I was walking up Alexander’s long-ass driveway with him when he pointed to his neighbors’ house and said, “Those guys are assholes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I was out here yelling at the moon the other night, and they came out and told me to shut up.”

Keep in mind that Alexander lived way the hell out in rural Marion County, and his neighbors’ house was a football field or two away from where the Jaspers’ property ended. This, clearly, must have been some yelling if it was loud enough to wake the neighbors.

“Why were you yelling at the moon?”

“What, you don’t yell at the moon?”

He never quite let go of this grudge, and several times over the next few years he mentioned his continual anger at these assholes next door who tried to discourage him from yelling at a celestial body. Finally, my senior year, he said:

“Oh, yeah, I talked to the folks next door. They’re actually pretty cool.”

“So you’re okay with the whole yelling at the moon incident now?”

“…Yeah, I guess.”

…was the most regular motherfucker on Earth.

If we may descend into potty humor for a second, Alexander shat more often than anyone I’ve ever met. This was especially interesting considering his affinity for large pieces of red meat, which, in my experience, pass about as easily as rubber cement.

This one time, senior year, I was trying to sweet-talk this girl in our British Literature class when Alexander comes up to me, his eyes bulging, and says in a hoarse whisper, “Truman…! I have to poop so bad!”

When we would play Dungeons and Dragons on Sunday afternoons, Alexander would often take two or more three-minute breaks to drop a superfast deuce. Eventually, when he’d come out of the bathroom after his power dump, everybody would clap for him and he’d bow.

While using a toilet stall at our high school, I looked at the wall and noticed a great deal of remarkably literate graffiti that included references to Faulkner and Neil Gaiman as well as a token “Who Watches The Watchmen?” Seeing this, I knew that Alexander had been there, probably for some time, and that he’d clearly put more thought into his bathroom graffiti than his schoolwork.

…laughed in the face of human reproduction.

During our Wellness II class, our moronic wrestling coach of a teacher showed us a BBC documentary about pregnancy that included footage of a woman giving birth. He warned us as we got closer to the Moment of Truth that squeamish people should look away from the screen, and so I did (because the last thing I want to see right after lunch is a screaming, bloody baby crawling out of a complete stranger’s vagina).

I turned my head to the left, which meant that instead of seeing the screen, I saw Alexander’s face as he watched the screen. And as the baby was born on TV with a great symphony of moist noises, while everyone else in class groaned at the sight of it, Alexander’s entire face lit up like he was seeing the funniest thing in the world, and he just cackled for the rest of the video.

…further thwarted my Wellness II teacher’s lesson plans.

Wellness II was a class taught by idiots to idiots, in an attempt to give kids a basic education of how not to get fat and/or pregnant. Seeing as our teacher was far better at coaching wrestling than teaching, most of the curriculum was videos. For the nutritional section of the course, we watched Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me, and had to write down five facts we learned from the movie (you know – for the learning).

Those of you who have seen Super Size Me may remember that the opening credits start with the song “Fat Bottomed Girls,” by Queen.

After the movie, Mr. Cox went to the front of the class and asked us to read back some of the facts we’d written down. Alexander raised his hand.

“Okay, Alexander, what’s one of the facts you wrote down?” Mr. Cox asked.

“I have: ‘Fat bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go ‘round.’” Alexander said, with a completely straight face. I looked at his paper, and yes, he had written it down.

However, what made this experience the best was Mr. Cox’s reaction. Shaking his head as though Alexander had actually mistaken late 1970s classic rock as legitimate medical advice, he said:

“No, Alexander – that’s just a song.”

It only could have been more condescending if he’d added the words, “You silly goose!” or smacked Alexander across the snout with a rolled up newspaper.

…was forced to change his culinary ambitions.

A lot of my great memories of Alexander come from Wellness II, which was less of an educational experience and more of an excuse for Alexander and I to goof off at the expense of Mr. Cox’s patience.

The final project for our nutrition unit was to create a menu for a health food restaurant, listing the caloric content of each item, based on our wealth of newfound knowledge of how to eat properly.

Mr. Cox was addressing the class, laying out what items couldn’t be on the menu:

“No fried food, and absolutely no alcohol!”

To which Alexander said, “Damn! So much for my Beer Battered Beer Beer.”

…inadvertently freakdanced on the band director.

Those of you who have been to high school know that all high school assemblies everywhere tend to suck. That’s just how it works.

My sophomore year, those of us cool enough to be in band had taken to hanging out in the band room during assemblies. The band director looked the other way about it, and it was only band kids anyway, so the school never really noticed.

During one assembly my sophomore year, a bunch of my friends and I snuck Alexander into the band room during an assembly. He wasn’t in band, but we figured he’d blend in easily enough with the other 20 or so people in the room.

We were all standing around talking and Alexander had his back to the band director’s office door. And then we said or did something that made Alexander start singing The Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or maybe we didn’t say or do something – maybe a car honked outside or Alexander started thinking about the space-time continuum. Honestly, it doesn’t take a lot to get him started on The Time Warp.

As he was singing, the band director came out of his office and walked up behind Alexander, somewhat perplexed at what was going on in his band room. Still unaware that there was anyone behind him, Alexander got to the part of the song about doing the pelvic thrusts, and stuck his ass out behind him and waggled it around as he sang. This more or less resulted in him grinding his ass against the unamused band director’s crotch.

Realizing what he’d done, Alexander turned around and nonchalantly said, “Oh, sorry.”

To which the band director responded, “WHO ARE YOU!?”

Nobody really knows.

Truman Capps hopes to generate enough material during Alexander’s leave in Salem to make another one of these updates.