Ye Olde World According to Buchs

I was doing a little lunchtime reading over at The Mecca, and followed a link to an onMilwaukee.com piece about Milwaukee Legends. Lo and behold, #1 on the list is my former neighbor, Frank Pecoraro – better known to most as simply “Pepperoni! Cannoli!“. Known to me, however, as the jackass who robbed me of a perfectly good TV stand.

I’m not even sure what year it was, but I used to live on the corner of Brady St. & Marshall St. I was there for almost 3 years, and for the last 2, I lived in a first-floor apartment, with access to the back “patio”. Seperating our apartment from the neighbor’s yard was a chain link fence. Beyond that fence was the home of one Mr. Pepperoni-Cannoli.

I had soured on cable TV, and decided to hook myself up with DirectTV – I think I was desperate for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. And when I say that I decied to hook myself up, I literally mean “hook myself up”. I purchased the equipment at the local Radio Shack, and bypassed the installation option.

It was the middle of winter, and there was probably 2 feet of snow on the ground. I was able to run a cable out the living room window, leading to the back of the apartment building. That’s where I planned on putting up The Dish.

The only thing missing was a ladder. This wasn’t exactly an “approved” addition, so I didn’t ask the building manager for help. Instead, I took a simple faux-wood TV stand out into the snow, which I hopped up onto. About an hour later, I finished up.

The TV stand ended up pretty well soaked by the snow. Anxious to get into some satellite action, I left the stand at the back steps to the building to dry out.

When I returned the following day, the TV stand was gone. The only evidence at the scene were a set of footprints in the snow leading from Pepperoni-Cannoli’s back door, across his yard, and up to the fence – next to the last known location of the TV stand.

To this day, anytime I see him while out driving around, I’ll slow down and flip him off.