I never had a 'real' job. I worked at a lot of restaurants and stuff like that but never anything with steady paychecks and health insurance. So when I got the job as webmaster of City Pages I was pretty excited. That was January 1, 2000. The pay wasn't great but I loved the job. And still do. So after about a year I got kicked out of my apartment. Not for any reason other than I was paying $400 a month for a three bedroom place in uptown. My friend Chris Teigen got the place - a basement apartment - years earlier and the landlord never raised his rent. Anyway, after he moved out I lived there alone. Eventually I guess they just had enough and asked me to leave. I didn't bitch but I wanted to make sure that I'd never get kicked out of an apartment again. See, over all the years that I worked in restaurants I squirreled away a hundred or sometimes two hundred bucks a month and bought mutual funds. So ten years later I was sitting on around 40k. So I decided to buy a house.

No more than a week later I got an email in my hardflip account that said something like 'Hey Joe, I think I found you a house'. Half kiddingly I wrote back saying 'My name's not Joe, but I'll buy a house from you'. I got a reply explaining that she had made a mistake and was actually trying to reach Joe from Fobia. Her name was Heidi. I gave her Joe's email address and she told me she'd keep me in mind for future houses. I guess she searched for Joe's name and hardflip came up or something. But anyway about a month later Muldoon and I started hitting City Billiards pretty regularly and one day this waitress comes up to me and says 'are you Brian Perry?'. I said yes and she told me that she was the girl who emailed me about buying a house. I asked how she knew who I was and she pointed to my sweatshirt (hardflip). Then she quickly moved on.

Next thing you know we're out looking at houses together. I had a good chunk for a down payment but didn't make enough to get anything nice. So we started in north Minneapolis. I wanted a duplex so I didn't have to pay the whole mortgage alone and we looked at some of the most fucked up places I'd ever seen. Seriously. Like kicked in doors with little kids begging me not to buy their house. But some of these huge old houses were for sale for like 80 grand. Eventually we found one I liked in Camden and I bought it. I trusted her completely. I don't think she had it in her to lie. And a few times when we were looking at houses alone I found myself looking at her - a woman I barely knew - but I'd find myself thinking that I'd like to have sex with her in someone else's empty house. I'd try not to let her catch me looking at her but at the time I didn't much care if she did. The only thing that didn't fit was the fact that she was selling real estate. It's a pretty smarmy business and not for everyone. So when she quit not long after I bought my house I was extremely happy.

We stayed in contact for a few years but each of us had other romantic issues and personal junk to deal with. We're both older - and we've been through the usual crap of being in your early 20's and thinking you have to start a family and all that. So one night I went to the Timberwolves with my friend Nick and we got pretty loaded. We had this idea that our excuse for being so drunk was that we were on 'shore leave' - even though we wouldn't join the military to save our lives. So it turned into this fun game where you can do whatever you want and blame it on 'shore leave'. So we went to City Billiards and were being total dicks. Yelling at people, slapping asses, all that. And at one point I had my hand on this waitresses leg and I saw Heidi looking at us from across the room. She wasn't working - she was there with some other people. Our waitress left and within five minutes came back over to use with her head down saying 'I was told to stay away from you'. I asked her who said that and she simply said 'Heidi'.

So of course I went over there and blah blah blah - tried to get her to come home with me. It's a little foggy here because I know I went home alone but then my phone rang and it was her. She came over and we made out for a while. She left her cell phone at my place (on purpose probably) which I found the next morning. My buddy Nick was in my place and we were piecing together what happened to us the night before. Heidi had called earlier saying that she needed her phone so she was coming over. As I was telling this to Nick with the phone in my hand two things happened. The front door started to open and Nick dropped possibly the most offensive shit bomb in the history time in my apartment. One of those 'shore leave' farts that smelled so bad the paint in the room started to peel off. And before Heidi got to my apartment door Nick ran out the back leaving me trying to explain to this girl that the smell wasn't from me. It was horrible. She wasn't phased by the smell but still grabbed her phone and quickly left. No kiss, no call me later. No nothing.

So I was still hanging out in City Billiards and eventually got her to actually date me. I had already smashed my face up so I knew she wasn't overly interested in 'looks'. Lucky for me she's a hockey fan. We've been dating for a while now and I'm very excited about hooking up. For her birthday I took her to a waterfall behind my parents house that I spent most of my childhood at and asked her to marry me. And again, lucky for me she said yes.

I was at a point in my life when I had pretty much given up when I found her and it never would've happened without all those little details. So thanks Joe for starting our connection, thanks Muldoon for bringing me to Billiards, thanks Teigen for getting me a place I'd eventually get kicked out of, and thanks Nick for ripping ass so horribly yet not scaring away the woman I'd eventually marry. And mostly thanks to skateboarding which is the source of all the happiness I've found in life.

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I stand corrected

Heidi just saw this posting and sent me the following email...

You and Nick were not being dicks, or yelling or slapping asses at the pool hall. You didn't see me looking at you when you were touching Rachel's knee (you probably didn't even know I was there), I came over to your table, not the other way around, and I didn't leave my phone there on purpose...Faith called while we were making out so I looked at who it was. You said 'answer it while I go down on you', and I had to drop the phone on the floor to stop you from taking off my pants.