Josh alternated swims with hammock readings of SHOGUN (He gave it to me when he was finished reading it and I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN. Highly recommended!)
...and then put his hammock back up and all the rest of his stuff back in place. Then we cooked up a plausable cover-story: Grant called Fatty on his cell and told him that he had been working in Fatty's apartment earlier in the day when Fatty's building's super showed up with a maintenance crew and told Grant that they needed access to Fatty's deck. They had been working on the building that makes up the back wall of Fatty's deck and needed to put up some plastic to waterproof the plaster work that they'd done. Grant explained to Fatty that the super had apologized for the inconvenience and told him that the men would be back early next week to take the plastic down.
Now here's the kicker: Fatty was having a birthday BBQ party on his deck over the weekend. So our plan was, to wait until the party was in full effect out on the deck and then have one of the party guests ask Fatty, "Hey, what's up with that plastic tarp?" After Fatty had finished explaining the fictitious story we'd fed him, we were going to rip the plastic down and surprise him with a huge mural of HIMSELF playing guitar in front of a Puerto Rican flag that we'd managed to PAINT ON HIS BACK WALL right under his nose in front of all of his party guests!!! Hahahaha. Would've been amazing, right?
Sadly, it didn't work out that way. Later that night, there was a huge storm and it torrentially rained for like 3 hours. Grant and I were hanging out and we had our fingers crossed that the tape would hold. But then at 11pm, my phone rang...I saw that it was Fatty and my heart skipped a beat. Did he know? Was he mad? I answered the phone.
"Dude, so I'm about to go to bed and I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and on my way to the bathroom I look out onto the deck and I see a giant picture of my head peeking back at me from behind a giant black tarp. Uhhhh, you and Grant wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?" Hahahaha. The gig was up. We agreed to meet up for a drink.
(He gave it to me when he was finished reading it and I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN. Highly recommended!)
