During one of my many perusals of the Ars Lounge yesterday, I was reading a thread that an Arsian had started telling about his latest outing on the car race circuit. I'm not even sure why I read almost the entire thread. I guess I was thinking maybe he was racing NASCAR or something. At the very least I wanted to see pics of his race car.

That particular Arsian's handle was "christaylor."

"ChrisTaylor…ChrisTaylor" - my mind hounded me. "Why did it sound so familiar?" My brain started Googling through my internal database.

All of the sudden it hit me. Rolyat. I mean, Bubba. I mean, Chris Coffee. One of my best friends/roommates during college was a guy who went by Bubba. Although I think I was the only person who called him by his actual name - Chris. Although he went by Bubba or Chris, his middle name was 'Taylor' so he used Taylor once in a blue moon. Or Rolyat = Taylor reversed. He ended up dropping out of school at some point, and I lost touch with him shortly after that. Right before we moved here to Arkansas, I managed to track him down through his mother and talked to him briefly over the phone. I hadn't heard from him since then.

But here I was, staring at my computer screen with the name "ChrisTaylor" staring me back. Is it him? Could it be my long lost friend? Chances are that it wasn't, but you never know these days. He was a pretty computer savvy person when I knew him so it wasn't at all far fetched for him to show up on Ars.

[Ars]christaylor had a link to his racing website which was the first place I checked. Reading up on the history of the team, it appears he started racing with his father back in 1992. My hopes crashed. Damn. It couldn't be him as my friend ChrisTaylor was still in Austin during that time. And he certainly wasn't racing cars with his father to my knowledge.

Chris and I sure had many great memories from our freshman and sophomore years. We had many a late night where we just laid in bed talking into the wee hours of the morning. Inevitably at some point during those conversations, one of us would say, "we really need to go to sleep. If we don't go to sleep now, we'll never get up in the morning." And then that would be followed by another hour or two of chatting. And as we predicted, we'd either barely make it to our 8am class or we'd sleep through our 8am, our 9am, our 10am…I admit, we were like a couple of teenage girls during a slumber party.

While I introduced him to the world of computers and computer games on my $3000 (!!!) Macintosh SE/30, he expanded my music horizons with the not-so-subtle bands such as Motley Crue, Guns & Roses, Metallica, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin. This genre of music was completely foreign to me as I had come from the likes of Richard Marx, Lionel Richie, and Chicago. I would never be the same again. Not only did he introduce those bands to me, I was inducted by fire by attending a Motley Crue concert shortly after the school year started. And to this day, it was one of the best concerts I have ever attended.

You know what they say, "you may be able to take the boy out of the country, but you can never take the country outta the boy." Even if I was listening to Skid Row and Whitesnake nearly every hour of the day, I still kept my sense of propriety and responsibility. This couldn't have been more obvious in the Spring of 1990.

Chris was supposed to have gone to take a physics test one afternoon that spring. But as evening turned into night and I hadn't heard from him, I began to get worried. I don't know why I did - after all, Chris was a big boy and I wasn't his mother, right? The hours crept by and the dorm room grew more and more lonely. Soon it was 10pm, then 11pm. Now I was really getting worried. So worried that I called our floor's RA and told him that my friend was missing. So worried that we both went out at midnight combing the campus for him, albeit unsuccessfully. So worried that I didn't sleep a wink that night until he stumbled into the room at 3am.

"Where the *ell have you been???" I nearly screamed at him as he tried to enter the room quietly.

"Umm, at Clay's…." he stammered back, seemingly confused.

"You mean to tell me you were at a friend's house all this time???" I nearly screamed a second time.

"Uh yeah….I went over there after my test and we've been playing computer games all night" he admitted.

I then proceeded to give him an earful about how worried I had been, with a side of how he should have had the sense to call, topped off with a serving of what responsibility was all about. It just never occurred to him to check in with anyone as he'd never done that while growing up. However, it was to be the last time he didn't give an accounting of his plans. And I must say he must have been touched by how much I cared as he never once called me "Mom".

Another memorable moment with Chris was when I went and spent the weekend with him and his folks in the town of Walnut Springs, Texas (population 613). Where coming to Austin (population: 500,000+) was a culture shock for him, it was on the other foot when I went to visit him. Having grown up in suburbia Washington D.C., I had never stayed in a town of less than a few tens of thousands of people. I tell you, spending the weekend at a livestock auction was enough for me. Fortunately there was a Toys 'R Us nearby where we managed to kill several hours. We probably wouldn't have been there that long except it was Chris' first time in a TRU, if you can believe that. He was like a little kid in a toy store. Oh wait, he was in a toy store.

I also had one of my firsts that weekend. That weekend can also be known as "The Weekend Where Cliff Gets to Ride in the Back of a Pickup For the First Time." One of the evenings I was there, one of their cows had escaped from the pasture where it was supposed to be in, and so Chris, his younger brother, his dad, and I all went out and attempted to herd it back to its pen. Ok, I take it back. Chris, his brother and his dad did the herding. I was sitting in the bed of the pickup hanging on for dear life. You could say that I was just along for the ride. As soon as we'd get the cow close to the gate, he'd turn and run back to the corner he was not supposed to be in.

"Hang on!" Chris' dad would shout from the driver's seat of the truck. He'd throw it into reverse, slam on the gas, and we'd go bouncing along crazily with only the taillights to illuminate the ground. I'm amazed that I didn't get thrown out of the truck and suffer life-threatening injuries. The Near-Death experience would actually come later. So there I was, sitting in the back of a pickup on the back forty in the pitch black night trying to herd a cow. Un-freaking-believable. If only you could have seen me then.

And now that the statute of limitations has expired, I suppose I can finally relate the Near-Death Experience that I just mentioned. A town of 613 people usually doesn't have much in the Department of Entertainment. In fact, there wasn't even a traffic light in their town. Which means for entertainment, you would have to drive 12 miles to the next town over which had a bowling alley. Chris had bragged to me in the past about how he was able to do that drive in his souped-up Honda Civic Hatchback in 8 minutes flat (you do the math). So he set out to prove himself right. We made it in just short of 9 minutes (you do the math again).

However, it wasn't until we were coming back home later that night after we had bowled that we almost became a newspaper headline and highway statistic. Chris was driving at not-so-near-breakneck speeds but still seemed awfully fast considering there were no lights but his own headlights illuminating the narrow two-lane road. All of the sudden, we come very quickly upon this large black & white striped horse-sized animal lying in the middle of the road, dead. With bubba-like reflexes, Chris swerved at the last second and avoided the dead animal as my heart stopped beating for a few seconds. I'm thankful for two reasons. One, I'm surprised we didn't collide at all with the animal. Two, I'm even more amazed that Chris didn't lose control of the car and end up in the roadside ditch. In either case, it probably would have been The End ™.

At first, I thought it was a zebra that we had seen, but whatthehell is a zebra doing in the middle of podunk Texas? My second thought was that somehow my life flashing before my eyes in black & white somehow clouded my vision and made me mistaken a horse for a zebra. Later I found out that there was indeed a wildlife preserve in that area so it wasn't such a rare thing to find a zebra out there. Needless to say, after that near miss, Chris drove at quite a slower pace until we arrived back at his house.

Those are just a couple of the most memorable moments I spent with him. I'll also never forget how we survived a year in an apartment with no cars (going to the grocery store was a Herculean task), how we barely didn't get a band started, and Ms. 17 ("She's only seventeen….seventeen…").

I still sometimes wonder whatever happened to my dear friend Chris. I keep hoping he'll appear in my email inbox one day or I'll track him down via Google. Until then, I'll keep my eyes peeled on Ars and the FBI's 100-most wanted fugitive list.