I’ll be reposting my older stories/photos over the next month or so.

Then I thought well, I haven’t really known “Jason” because from day one, I’ve only known him as one another name, and that’s “Crute “

And that got me thinking “What’s in a Name?”

“Crute” may just be 5 letters to anyone else, just a last name to some, but to many here, and myself, those 5 letters characterizes so many things in our minds.

It’s like with Madonna or Prince, “Crute” is uniquely himself and so unlike anyone else that he only needs one name.

Same as “John” wouldn’t have the same power behind it as the name “Bell.” A “Nyamekye” is not even close to a “Lum.” And a Rose by any other name may still be a Rose, yet somehow, it’s less so as a “David”

And like those, Crute isn’t just a surname; it holds much more significance to me than that.

Crute once shot out a friend’s windshield with a BB gun from his second-floor loft and then paid for the damages with comic books he didn’t even own.

In the nearly 14 years that I have known him, Crute has owned dogs, cats, fish, lizards, iguanas, guinea pigs, an octopus, and coming home from work one day, Crute found that his ferret ate his parrot.

Once in GNC, Crute turned to me and in all seriousness, declared: “Stu, I am too big for regular pants” he said “Go into J.C. Penney and see if you can find me some drawstring pants.”

And I did.

But those were much simpler days when our group of friends were young and innocent, 24 or 25 years of age, running around without a care in the world.

And though his eccentric personality and crazy situations get all the ink, I wouldn’t be up here if Crute wasn’t also a good person and great friend, you always know you are getting the truth with him, and then some.

It could have been so easy to lose touch when he moved 45 minutes out of Plymouth-Canton, but he stayed in touch with many of us, and when I moved to the West Coast, when there were times that we didn’t speak for 2-3 months at a time, yet I never felt the bonds bend one bit.

If you don’t know him very well, Crute may look like a stereotypical tough guy, but to anyone that knows him, Crute is much more than that. He’s honest, and intelligent, humourous and philosophical.

He’s Crute.

So, whatever you know him by, Crute just isn’t a word, it has much more meaning behind it.

And if by simply taking the name “CRUTE” brings even a tenth of the meaning and memory to me and all of us that know him by this, I think we’ll all be lucky and more than happy to welcome another “CRUTE” into our lives.

So, this is my tribute to the old Crute and new one.

After about 30 minutes and a combined debt of about $150.00, we decide to cut our losses, punch that bitch of a roulette dealer in her guts, and grab some overpriced psuedo-greek food at the in-house “restaurant”.

So yeah, we are like eating and basically disappointed by the whole shebang masking as a greek eatery (What good is saganaki with no flames? The ‘opa!’ just isn’t quite as exciting sans fire.) The one bright spot so far was the busboy and I use the term “boy” and “busboy” lightly, but I guess “old-greek-crazy-man-that-hacks the-english-language-and-randomly-brings-bottles-of-ketchup” wouldn’t be an efficient moniker, so lets stick with “busboy”. A comedy of errors including the much-talked about ketchup bottle incident, the mangled english, and just the plain old creepy stalker looks brightened my mood after paying $8 for a fucking Greek salad. Little did I know, things were about to get a lot more brighter for me. And when I say brighter I mean a near-death experience.

Its just a given that at about 1 a.m. certain things are just a lot funnier than those same things would be at 6 p.m. Its a fact. So after hearing the middleaged busboy mangle the words “mountain dew”, i get a large piece of pita bread lodged in my throat and I start choking, making those ever beautiful sounds of nature when one doesn’t chew his food correctly. Of course this is all to the humor of my friends, which didn’t help my situation any. I too wanted to laugh at myself choking and the visual of me dying further jammed the greek bread into my throat.

To make matters worse the busboy turns around to see what the fracas is, smiles at me and says to me in his monotone heavy-accented voice “You choke? You drink water.”

Now put yourself in my situation. Currently I have three huge obstacles to hurdle before I can breathe clean air again. Number one obstacle being the pita jammed in my trachea, two I can’t stop laughing at my own situation and three, the broken english advice from the barely decipherable busboy. To top it all off he is totally unaware that his presence is causing my friends to laugh more, thus making me laugh more, that in turn bringing me that much closer to death.

At this point i am panicking. I muster up the last of what breath I have and whispered “Make him go away” to my friend Ed, who probably didn’t hear my dying words over his own chortling.

Everything turned out to be ok. I rationalized that if I didn’t do something soon, I would lose consciousness or uh… die. So I buckled down, gave the busboy the stinkeye and drank some water. Pure genius.