The West Dallas Tigers Go to Houston

A couple weeks ago I took my Little League team to Houston for a tournament against frighteningly superior competition. We performed better than expected but the box scores would look pretty embarassing to any outsider. On the bright side (depending on how you look at things), I got to share a hotel room with four hilarious kids all weekend.

My roommates: Reggie Rusk (4'5"), Claudie Perry (sporting a mohawk to which he kept applying baby oil), Cesar Sosa (I'm pretty sure he only came to get a free trip to Houston because this was the only time he's been with our team in the last month) and Jose Cortez (some kid from another team that only got to come because no one thought Cesar would show up).

Our room contained two double beds and a roll away bed for me. When discussing sleeping arrangements, the kids insisted that it was too "gay" for them to share a bed. However, the gayness seemed to only apply if they were sleeping vertically. One of them suggested they sleep head-to-toe, but Reggie was afraid he would accidentily wind up with someone's toes in his mouth during the night. After making fun of him for a while over that comment, they decided to sleep horiztontally on the bed - a move that apparently removed all possible gayness. The weird thing is that because sleeping horizontally afforded them a lot more room on the bed, three of them decided to share one bed together. I tried to make them aware of the fact that their new arrangement was probably the gayest arrangement of them all, but they immediately disregarded my input. Claudie came out the winner by getting a bed to himself the whole weekend.

A room favorite was telling "yo momma" jokes. One night after lights out, they stayed up "scoring" each other, as they liked to call it, for a good 45 minutes. However, these weren't memorized insults - they were freestyling. They were scoring each other with the best insults they could think of off the top of their heads. What followed was an endless string of poorly constructed and unfunny jokes. An example from the mouth of Jose Cortez - "your mama smells so bad...she smells like poop." Their jokes would generally illicit an eye roll from me, but a series of giggles from everyone else. About 20 minutes in, a couple of kids started to take offense to the jokes, so they proceeded to start each score with "someone's mama is so..."

The kids also loved the hotel pool. After a trip to the Astros/Cubs game, everyone begged to do some night swimming before bedtime. Claudie insisted, "i'm going to do like 16 cannon-balls and that's it!" He wore regular shorts, a collared shirt and socks in the pool. Watching 12 year olds play in the pool is vastly different than being at the pool with my peers. I think the longest anyone stayed in the pool before getting out to run and then jump back into the pool was 50 seconds. Reggie brought his own personal life vest. He wore it for a little while until he "remembered how to swim".

A couple of other humerous items...

One morning, while they were still in bed, Jose said to Cesar, "hey Cesar, I woke up last night and saw your mole and it scared me." Cesar has a medium sized mole on his upper lip. Jose didn't mean this to be rude. He was just merely letting Cesar know about it. Cesar didn't seem to take too much offense.

Black kids apparently love Axe body spray. They douse themselves with it before anything: a game, bed, lunch, the pool. Our room constantly smelled like someone spilled a bottle of cologne. Only one kid brought their Axe, so I constantly heard the phrase, "yo Michael, let me borrow yo Axe, bro!" followed by 10-12 seconds of aerosol spray.

Good times.