Many years ago on a Boulder sojourn, I took a photo of a building under construction and posted it as an entry on a blog no longer existent, with the title "106-60."
I mentioned that only one other person in the world would get the reference and he was dead.
This intrigued Bryce and he asked a couple of questions, but I did not tell the story.
Now, however, I will.
25 years ago this autumn, I was living in this town. I had not been able to get in touch with my friend Erik, one of my best friends from high school, who had been living there for three years. (I had previously visited three times and each time he was living in a different house, which is sort of a college-town thing to do, very much a Boulder thing to do, and absolutely without question an Erik thing to do.)
I had tried a couple of different numbers that mutual friends had for Erik, but neither of them worked.
I'll probably run into him eventually, I thought. Maybe on campus. More likely in a bar.
One Thursday morning after I had been in town for two or three weeks, my phone rang.
"JUSTIIIIN!" the familiar voice said. "Let's go get a beer."
"Right now?" I asked.
"Right now!" he said.
It was noon.
"Cool. See you in a few."
Erik suggested we meet at place I had never before been, a bar roughly halfway between my apartment and his.
It was called The Dark Horse.
I may have mentioned it before.
We drank there. Then went to another bar. And another. And another.
After we were drunk, Erik suggested we meet up with his roommate and another friend to play trivia at another bar. Which we did.
And, though we did not win, we did better than Erik ever had before. "We need to do this more frequently," Erik said.
So we did. We played bar trivia two nights the following week.
Then three nights the week after that.
And then four nights.
We were the perfect team. Erik was the smartest friend I had in high school and his expertise was science and math - two subjects about which I knew little. I knew history and the arts. We both knew pop culture. And we both knew sports, though he knew a ton about hockey (while I knew almost nothing) and I knew a ton about baseball (while he knew almost nothing).
We always put up a good showing, but after several weeks, we had not won.
And we didn't really expect to: We were 21 years old and our team, the Rushmore Beekeepers, was always just the two of us. The rules stated that, while you could only have one team per table, there was no limit to the number of players on a team, so often we would be pitted against groups of a dozen people, all in their 30s or 40s and gathered around a single table.
The odds were stacked against us, and we knew it.
But then, one night in October on this corner, in the bar of Old Chicago Pizza, we put on a performance that they still talk about in Boulder 25 years later*.
The trivia contests took place over three rounds. Teams' points were tallied after each round so everyone knew where they stood, and you could wager up to 20 points on a final question that contained four answers.
We won the first round and the free pitcher of beer that entitled us to. We won the second round, again a free pitcher. (Sunshine Wheat both times, in case you were wondering.)
We exchanged looks but said nothing. We knew what we each were thinking: Holy shit, we have a chance to win tonight.
There were a handful of rules, as there always are in such bar-trivia contests, and one of them was this: If anyone shouted out the answer to a question, the question was thrown out and an "impossible" question was asked.
(Remember, this was 1999; smart phones did not exist and random information was impossible to look up in an instant.)
In the third round, someone did just that. The MC replaced it with this question:
"What was the Colorado Rockies average attendance this season?"
Erik looked at me, the baseball expert.
I took a guess: 39, 937.
I wrote it down on a piece of paper and turned in my answer.
After a song played and all the teams' guesses were tallied the MC took the mic and said "Guys... someone was off by only 12. The answer is 39,949."
Erik looked at me with astonishment. "Was that YOU?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "You know what this means."
"We are winning tonight," he stated.
"We are winning tonight," I agreed.
After the third round, the scores were tallied.
We were up 86-60.
We were guaranteed victory.
We did not have to wager a single point. No one could catch us.
The MC asked the final question: "Put these four Police Academy movies in order: Their First Assignment, Back in Training, Citizens on Patrol, Assignment: Miami Beach."
"I have never seen any of those movies," Erik said. "Have you?"
"All of them," I said. "Many times."
My brother and I grew up watching them over and over again on HBO. There may not be anyone in America who has seen the Police Academy movies more than I have**.
I wrote down the answers and showed them to Erik. He shrugged.
"Remember," he said, "we don't have to risk a single point to win. How many points are you risking?"
"All 20."
The MC announced the final answers and scores.
We had gotten all four parts right. No other team had.
106-60.
We would win many, many times over the following months***, but we never came close to beating the second-place team by a margin of 46 points. (I think our second-most dominating win was by 12 points.)
But that night was special. It was magic. We drove back to Erik's place, parked, and walked to the Dark Horse. We drank until closing and then the bartenders locked the doors and we drank longer. Much longer. We stumbled back to Erik's as the first rays of light appeared in the East and we collapsed on the couch. Guinness the dog curled up between us.
"106-60, My God," was the last thing Erik said before passing out.
Within five years Erik would be dead and within 10 years Old Chicago would be closed and within 20 years the building would be razed and this one put up in its place.
I still pass by it every time I visit the town and think of that night.
106-60.
My God.
*This probably isn't true.
**Except, perhaps, people in prison and retards.
***We were absolutely hated by those groups of a dozen people in their 40s whom we beat regularly, and many of them thought we must have been cheating, but we never did. Not once. I'm not sure how that would have even been possible. My God, I didn't even have a cell phone then.
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