.

The Gatorade opened in my lunch box and soaked my tuna sandwich.  I had nothing else to eat and I was hungry.  I ate the sandwich.  I tried to think of it as a bold epicurean experiment, but it’s hard to enjoy your food when every bite makes you want to barf.  It was winter and I had been quietly enduring a hangover while digging a trench for a gas line.  I tried not to be a pussy about hard work, even glorified it at times, but some days you felt every shovelful.  I was gassed out and running on soul fumes.  The fact that my lunch sucked just beat it in harder.

The concrete guys were dining inside their trucks, running the heaters.  I ate my Gatorade on the side of a dirt hill.  I could see all of Santa Fe below me.  A stiff wind was blowing up the slope.  The sky opened up in a yawning chasm of melancholy, trying to suck me in.  I pulled myself out.  I wasn’t in the mood to feel sorry for myself.  Maybe later.

Lunchtime in the world of construction, takes on an almost sacred importance.   You want to stop working and you’re starving.  During lunch you get to stop working and eat.  That’s a significant improvement.  But a lot of times, if you were a bum laborer with a drinking problem, lunch wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.  I used to count off the minutes in my head waiting for noon, and when it came,  I’d look at my lunch and think  “I was waiting for this?”

If I had the money, I tried to make lunch good.  If you had some apples, chunks of cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bananas, and salami to go with your primary sandwich you could feel okay about lunch.  Wash it down with some soda, bottled water, coffee, or maybe a stray beer from last night, and you actually began to revive.  However, a dead car battery, a traffic ticket, a trip to the clinic, and you were back to a candy bar and a drink from the hose.  When it came down to budgeting any remaining funds between drinking or eating, the choice was clear.

My buddy Marko and I used to pool our money and buy ground beef, refried beans, onions and potatoes.  We’d cook it up in a pot and then slap the slop into tortillas and roll them up.  We’d make twenty of them so we could have two each, Monday through Friday.  That was lunch.  The first couple of days they were okay, but by Wednesday they had congealed into a grey clot wrapped in soggy dough.  We doused them with hoarded Taco Bell hot sauce, which made them swallowable.  After a while they became nothing more than a delivery platform for the hot sauce.  We called them “Plug-aritos,” because that’s all they were, plugs to stopper up the hunger hole.  Taste and texture were not a factor at that point.  Volume was king.  Clogability.

I finished drinking my tuna sandwich.  I was still hungry.  A Plug-arito would’ve been good.  I lit a cigarette and watched the clouds move for a while.  I found myself wishing the boss hadn’t pulled Marko off to another job.  Not just for help with the trench.  It was better to have someone to talk to.  It helped to have another miserable face looking back at you.  You could pretend you were both in Stalingrad and it was the end.

The night before, my friend Samantha had invited me to her office Christmas party.  She worked for a tour company and they were having dinner at Anthony’s On the Delta.  Fancy.  The owner joined us at dinner.  He was a great host.  He made sure nobody wanted for anything.  Salmon, crab, steak, and chicken dishes kept coming, and I kept cramming.  My bottles of beer kept coming too.  The people at the table were in a good mood, and I felt a tad merry as well.  Yeah, that was good.  It was very different.  Very different from now.

I watched a fat guy walk to the Porta-John.  He had a newspaper.  Ok, I thought, that’s off-limits, for sure.  The honey pumper that came around to empty the shitter was days late.  It was getting intense in there.  I was always pissing all over my shoes because I couldn’t bring myself to look down and see the horror.  Now big boy was going to make his contribution.  Fuck that.  I couldn’t risk losing the food I fought so hard to get down.  I couldn’t imagine bringing a paper in with me and just sitting there catching up on the headlines.

The sun ducked behind some clouds.  It got colder.  I decided to make a hand fire.  I gathered some cardboard and pine cones.  I pulled my gloves off and lit it.  It felt nice to toast up the finger bones.  I looked at my watch.  I had seven more minutes to enjoy this.  I went to my hotel room in Mexico.

There was a brunette opening a bottle of beer for me.  Her teeth easily snap the cap off.  She hands the beer to me and takes off her bikini top.  She throws it off the balcony and it sails like a gull, out beyond the sand and into the surf.  She begins to dance and grind to the music coming from the variety show on the TV.  “A la cama, a la cama, a la cama con Porcel!”  The farmacia cough syrup starts to ooze into the base of my skull and I glow with warmth and joyous goodwill toward mankind.  It’s balmy and breezy.  She’s wearing strappy high heels.  The sink and bathtub are filled with ice and beer.  She says she feels like being a bad girl.

Truck doors started to slam.  It was time to get back to work.  I stomped the fire out.  I put my gloves back on and walked back to the trench.  I was about to pick up my pick and shovel, but stopped.  I just stood there looking down at my tools.  I couldn’t pick them up.  I hit a wall.  I could not move.  Strange.  Then I felt a wave of despair rise up in me.  Oh shit.  Tsunami.  There wasn’t any fighting this one.   Everything suddenly looked sad.  Everything around me looked like it knew it was going to die, and was severely bummed out about it.  I hardly expected that having to eat a fish-flavored sports drink sandwich would bring on a trance of Universal Sorrow.  It seemed an excessive reaction, even for me.

I climbed down into the trench so the other workers wouldn’t see me if I started to cry.  That would be murder.  I laid down on my back.  I remember how good it felt being surrounded by dirt that didn’t give a fuck if I drank too much and screwed up my life.  I closed my eyes and just gave up.  I pretended I didn’t exist.

I heard a Ranchera come on over a distant boombox, and a power saw start up.

After a while, I felt better.  I got up and climbed out, and picked up my pick and shovel.  I could see a little red Honda Civic driving up the hill.  It was Marko.  The boss had wanted him to finish out the day helping me.  I was really happy to see his stupid face.  I called him a spoiled Liberace lap-dog.  He said I looked like someone who made love to the dead.

“I am the dead, but I have risen.”

I told him about the Tuna and Gatorade sandwich and he laughed.  He still had an extra piece of chicken and said I could have it.  He reached into his lunch box and handed it to me.  It was a cold drumstick wrapped in greasy wax paper.  It might as well have been Lobster Thermador.

“I have some hot coffee in my Thermos, dude.  Do you want some?” he asked.

“How is it still hot?”

“It’s in a Thermos, you stupid fuck.  That’s what they do.  They keep drinks hot.”

He poured me a small cup.  Sure as shit, there was steam coming off of it.  I’ll be damned.  I somehow thought that only happened on TV.

“I’m going to get one those things.  How much are they?”

“Twenty five bucks for a decent one.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t buy one now,” he said, “Christmas is coming.”  He jumped into the trench with his shovel.

As far as I was concerned it was already here.  I finished my chicken and coffee and climbed down with him.

These Plug-aritos are delish!

Count Thugula, Avenger of The Weak

I punched him square in the face.  It was a solid one.  To this day, I’m still a little proud of it.  It was a right jab and I was wearing leather sap gloves with lead pellets sewn in the fist for extra zing.  He got blinky, staggered a bit, and ran off, slipping along the icy road as he scampered.  I walked back into The Cowgirl and handed the wallet to the little guy who had it stolen.  The bouncer on duty, Ziggy, came up to me. “Dude, that punch-which I didn’t see-was a felony!”  he said, all worry-warty.  I guess the sap gloves bumped it up to a felony assault.  “Stealing a guy’s wallet is also against the law,” I said, “So it’s a wash.”

I went inside and drank the beer the little guy bought me.  He was grateful to get his wallet back, and I was glad for the free beer, and the opportunity to punch a dick in the face.

That was a good night.  I remember that night.  That punch in that guy’s face made it one to remember.  When I imagine all the dump trucks full of nights that I dumped into the landfill of forgetfulness, I think maybe I should’ve punched more faces, just to remember more of my life.

These days, I’m all for peace, love, and understanding.  I like cats and gardening.  Still, there was something about a well-placed punch in the face of somebody who really had it coming, that brought true joy.  I’d like to think I’m over that kind of joy, but I can’t be sure.  We all want satisfaction, and there is something deeply satisfying about serving as a hammer for justice.  It was especially so back then, when I didn’t have any other hobbies or recreational pursuits.

I’m not talking about getting into a fight.  Those were fairly commonplace.  Looking back on those, I know I could have defused many of them with some patience and discipline on my part.  I regret a lot of them.  No, I’m talking about delivering a righteous punch in the face, one that when you look back on it, after years of sobriety, spiritual recovery, and soul-searching personal inventory, you still think  “Yeah, I’d do that one again!”

I was constantly picked on as a little kid.  Either for the Little Lord Fauntleroy clothes my Mom insisted in dressing me in, or the fact that my English not speaking good in talkingness, I walked around with a bull’s-eye over my balls.  I didn’t need a “kick me” sign taped to my back, the directive seemed to be clear enough.  Anyway, something happened along the way.  I mutated, like in any comic book worth it’s paper, into a deranged vigilante.  The scared-of-his-own-shadow, son of Eastern European immigrants, turned into…Count Thugula.  I embraced my shadow, and became a deluded, self-appointed arbiter of justice, what our society labels a “superhero.”  A drunken dangerous one that caused more damage than fixed.

My earliest real-life superhero inspiration came in the unlikely form of a gentle, orphaned waif named Jim Keller.  He became my friend in eighth grade.  Keller endured a brutal childhood.  He suffered the kind of abuse that would have turned lesser men into sociopathic killers.  But he was then, as he remains today, the Buddhist ideal of loving compassion and patience.  Small children flock to him like squirrels to St. Francis.  Everyone’s happy, when the Keller is near.

That didn’t mean that if somebody’s bad karma required an instrument to deliver its repercussions, he wasn’t open to serve.

This skinny little fellow, who looked more like a monk than a thug, packed a punch that delivered the White Light of Realization to drunk frat guys, skinheads, and surf Nazi’s up and down the Gold Coast.  Trust me, none of them suspected that they were about to become so profoundly enlightened by The Buddhist Bomber.

One night up in Santa Barbara, in the college town of Isla Vista, Keller and some friends went to a reggae show.  He had decided to linger outside while the others went in.  His keen intuition told him to hang back for a bit.  Sure enough, right across from him, in the little town park, three skinheads had jumped a solitary traveller. They were beating on the guy pretty good, and having a having a grand time doing it.  “This will not do,” Keller thought to himself.

He hit the first skin while running in.  He jousted the punch into the guy’s gut.  Keller said the air came out of the dude so fast, it actually made an odd little whistle as it rushed through his teeth.  Tweetle-teeeeee!  Ok, that would be awesome.  Jealous of that.  So that guy dropped like a sack of horse shit.  Then as soon as the next guy looked up, Keller pasted his mouth.  He later told me that he was really able to torque his hips on that one and whip it in hard.  Zang-Pow!  That one was wearing braces (I love it, a skin-head with cosmetic dental work) so his lips shredded across the metal.  He grabbed his face and started screaming like a little girl.  That left one more upper-suburban neo-Nazi to go.

Having just watched both of his buddies destroyed in a matter of seconds by some guy that appeared out of nowhere, he decided to run for it.  The other two joined him.  Keller helped the victim up.  The guy couldn’t express his thanks enough.  Our hero wished him a peaceful rest of the evening, then went in to bathe in the good vibrations of the reggae show.  God, I love shit like that.  It was always sweet when Keller clocked someone.  You have to figure, if you manage to piss off an easy-going, peaceful person like Keller, enough to make him want to punch you; you so fucking have it coming.  It’s gonna have a little something extra on it too, because The Universe wants in on the action.

The recipients of my punches were generally in a more gray-zone of deserving it.  If I was really drunk, my aim might be off.  Maybe I took a statement out of context.  Sometimes it seemed inevitable, so I just got it over with.  I don’t do stuff like that anymore.  I’ve really worked on this.  Now I like cats and gardening.

A buddy from New York once told me that while throwing a good punch looks cool, being able to take one earns you even more style points, and an exponentially higher chance of getting laid because of it.   I had just written about this concept in my weekly column on Monday.  That next week-end, it would be put to the test.

I went to my job as a doorman at The Catamount.  Two guys I had thrown out (I can’t remember for what) were outside pissed at me.  One was tall, the other guy short.  Mutt and Jeff.  I was wary of this possible two-on-one situation, but tried to play it cool.  They’re yelling, I’m pretending to yawn–then zip–the short guy dives behind me and makes like an ottoman, and the tall guy pushes me over him.  It was a slick move.  Impressive, really.  They must have practiced it a lot back home at their trailer.

Anyway, I go down and hit my head on the street, and as I’m getting up, the tall one connects with my jaw.  He had wound it up and sent it all the way from Gallup.  He almost knocked my block off.  I saw buzzing blue and green neon parallelograms in a field of purple sparks.  When the buzzing stopped, I realized I was still standing.  I was totally fine.

It was amazing.  I was surprised, but so was the guy that hit me.  He looked concerned.  I would’ve been.  I did my best, but I guess my best wasn’t good enough… for you.  You rarely get a clean shot at the jaw.  It’s never like the movies.  He gave me his Pony-for-Your-Birthday best and I was okay.  Now what do you do?   What kind of brain-dead monster doesn’t go down after that?  I could feel my eye-teeth start to grow.

“I’m going to give this door money to somebody, and when I come back, I’m going to kill both of you,” I calmly informed them.

They started backing up.  I walked into the bar, which had been watching the whole thing through the windows, and gave the cover charge money to one of the cooks.  I felt humiliated.  These guys played me like a piano, and in front of a lot of people.  It didn’t get much worse than that.  It L.I.T. me up. (Lifetime Issue Trigger)  I didn’t know how I was going to deal with these two guys, especially since they already clowned me, but I knew there was a vast reservoir of rage I could tap into.  Marius just got his ass kicked, his demons were going to have to take over.  A calm came over me.  All I had to do was get out of the way, and let this infernal power handle it.  You see, it’s like a spiritual surrender, only opposite.

I went outside but they were gone.  I saw them round the corner up the block.  I wasn’t thrilled about going after them, but felt like I had no choice.  Here we go.  They were up the street, getting into a car.  There was a chick I hadn’t seen before with them.  She started screaming “Oh my God! He’s packing! He’s packing!”  I wasn’t, but I took the cue.  I reached behind me and grabbed the band of my boxer shorts.  They thought the only way I would go after them alone was with a gun.  They hadn’t factored the power of wearing funny clothes as a kid into the equation.

“I told you I would come back to kill you,” I said, walking slowly towards them.  Count Thugula was in full effect.  The chick even seemed to be fumbling with the keys like in the horror flicks.  “Hey man, we’re cool!” one of them yelled.  What a stupid thing to say.  Like if I did have a gun and was going to shoot them, I’d hesitate because one of them told me they “were cool.”  Whatever.  I’ve said stupider things when I was scared.  “Not cool enough to live,” I yelled back.

Finally, she got the door open, they piled in, and drove off as I approached.  It was hardly a satisfying resolution.  Yeah, I wound up scaring them off, but with some phony trick.  It did little to stop the burn.  I didn’t get my punch!  Fucking shit.  I knew this dose of shame would have me sitting up at night for years to come, and I was already a light sleeper.

I walked back to the bar.  I got the door money and sat down on my stool.  A few women who had seen me get hit came up to me.  They asked if I was alright, and I said I was.  I wasn’t feeling libidinous enough to try cashing in on their concern.   There might be some connection between a man’s ego and his penis, but I can’t be sure.  One thing for sure was that I lost my grandfather’s watch that night, probably when I bounced on the street.  I usually took it off, but I wanted to impress one of the waitresses that night.  That went well.  What a life.

I tortured myself that night sitting up on my mattress, pounding beer after beer.  What would people remember more, how the Two Stooges Dick Van Dyked me, or how I took the sledgehammer like Iron Man?  A typical alcoholic concern, anchored deep in reality.  I worried about everything, except what really mattered.  Poor idiot, nobody was going to remember any of that night, except if I ever brought it up.  And why the hell would I ever do that?

The Young Count as Beating Magnet

Burn Baby, Burn!

When that thing went off in my hand, brother, I saw a white light.  That was all I saw.  For a few seconds I freaked.  Is this what death is?  A blank white screen for all eternity?  Then I heard Tom screaming, saw smoke and blood, and felt better.  I wasn’t going to have to face a blank screen, yet.  There was more colorful chaos to witness.

I could only make out what was happening in intermittent glimpses.  My perception seemed to be strobing.   I was blinking back and forth between some vast eternal void and the aftermath of the explosion.  White light to smoke and gore, white light to smoke and gore, and so on.  There was a low-pitched hum in my head, like I had been hit over the skull with a tuning fork the size of a garden rake.  That was a peppy little fuse alright, a real go-getter.  It burned down to the stick, quick as a lick.  Ka-pow!

It was 1979.  Tom and I were teenage delinquents.  We were hanging out at my Dad’s house.  He was away on a business trip so we decided to drink all his scotch.  It was Sunday night and we were bored.  I remembered I had a box of what were essentially quarter sticks of dynamite that I had smuggled from Mexico as a little kid.  Let me tell you, you’ve never sweated a border crossing like an eleven-year-old sitting on a box of junior dynamite in the back of his parent’s car.  To me it was worth it.  These “firecrackers” were so much more dangerous than anything the other kids had, they would elevate my status as a mayhem-maker to royalty.  Even big kids would know I meant business.  They were to serve as a sure-fire cure for boredom for many years.

They certainly cured our boredom that night.  We were inside my Dad’s bedroom, and I was flicking the lighter in one hand, while drunkenly holding the Tijuana TNT in the other.  The lighter was out of gas, so it was totally cool to be doing this.  What wasn’t cool was that a spark from a dead lighter could still ignite a fuse.  My Dad’s roommate, a Vietnam vet, sleeping in the next room, didn’t think that was cool either.  The blast opened up my hand into a hamburger pita.  The lighter turned into shrapnel, and peppered my neck and face.  Blood and bits covered my Dad’s walls and water-bed.  Tom had been blasted instantly sober, the roommate pissed himself, and I wound up in the emergency room.

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored drunk.

It was never enough to just get drunk.  I liked to keep things exciting, and it seemed like destroying things, in whatever manner, a great way to do it.  Admittedly, there were at times… consequences, but if you live in fear of those, you have no business drinking yourself insane.  Shoot things, set them on fire, blow them up, throw them out the window, take an ax to them, run them over with your Mom’s LTD, but for God’s sake, make something pay for the fact that you can’t sit and enjoy a quiet moment.

When I was nine years old, my parents turned me into the Camarillo Fire Department for being a pyro.  They caught me recreating a viking sea burial with my G.I. Joe and a burning raft of popsicle sticks in the toilet.  Joe was on his way to Valhalla when they forced the bathroom door open.  A more enlightened set of parents would have recognized my love of history, appreciation of ritual and custom, and would’ve encouraged me to become a cultural anthropologist.  Instead, they ratted me out as a fire bug.

A fireman sat me down and told me gruesome stories of all the people he saw burned to death as a result of little boys playing with matches.  He took my name down and said that if there was any fire in a five-mile radius of my apartment complex he would come looking for me.  He then gave me a tour of the fire truck and turned me over to my parents.  That really sucked.  I was sufficiently penitent.  I decided to take up shoplifting as a hobby until the heat from this rap cooled.

I liked to create chaos around me to equalize the pressure of the chaos inside me.  Whatever was happening didn’t seem like enough.  Maybe it was from watching westerns as an impressionable child, but no drunken party seemed complete until firearms were discharged into the ceiling.  I remember kissing a girl goodnight after a particularly noisy celebration, the sounds of nearing sirens wailing in the night air, the other partygoers scattering in panic around us.  It was a dramatically romantic way to end the evening.  “Be careful,” she said.  “Put money on my canteen,” I told her as I closed the door.  I thought about her while I hid under my mattress.

Thank God I had my buddy Marko to serve as the voice of reason in my life.  (My friends who know Marko got that last joke)  We were a bad combination.  Together we became a machine that produced, and then acted on, very bad ideas.  Besides having a dangerously extensive knowledge of chemistry, Marko liked guns.  Me too.  What’s not to like about guns?  Especially in the hands of crazy people.

For awhile we lived in his mobile home out in the sticks of Santa Fe.  We drank a lot, and often got bored.  You can imagine the results.  Since we took such a casual approach to firearm safety, we didn’t get too many repeat visitors to the old homestead, especially girls.  Poor us, all lonely, drunk, and armed to the teeth.

On New Year’s Eve, 2000, when our society was about to plunge into Mad Max apocalyptic anarchy because the date on people’s computers couldn’t go that high, Marko and I were excited.  Finally, a society more suited to our talents and abilities.  We saw an opportunity for fast-track advancement.  Once the system collapsed, all rule of law would dissolve in the individual’s desperation to survive.  We had been practicing for this moment all our lives.

For months we had been stockpiling guns and ammo, along with canned tuna and baked beans.  We had a medical kit with bandages and medication for pain. We also had five gallons of medical-grade grain alcohol to tide us over until we could liberate more.  Since we had no goods to barter, we decided to become raiders.  We would run around with guns, taking other people’s stuff, especially their beer.  That was our greatest concern with the breakdown of civilization as we knew it, not being able to get beer.  Since this was already our greatest concern, weren’t too worried about adjusting to a world gone savage.  In the meantime, our ids would have some room to stretch out.

When the ball dropped at midnight, Marko was already passed out on the couch.  I was sitting in a recliner.  I picked up my shotgun, and still sitting, pointed it out the open door and pulled the trigger.  I blew a hole through the screen door I thought was also open.  Marko didn’t even flinch.  “Happy New Year, fucker,” I said, cocking another round. “To a brave new world!”  I yelled, and shot through the previous hole.  This time he rolled over and said something that sounded like “Monkey time,” and was out again.

Y2K turned out to be a big disappointment.  The date on everyone’s computers just went to 2000.  Banks stayed open, police showed up for work, utility bills arrived right on time.  Our hopes for establishing our very own empire based on extortion and white-slavery were dashed.  With the money spent on ammo we could have put ourselves through massage school or learned to sell real estate, but that clearly wasn’t meant to be.  We ate the tuna and beans, drank the grain alcohol, and eventually used up all the supplies in our first aid kit.  The only apocalypse we’d get to participate in was the one of our own creation.  Monkey time?

We felt cheated.  The hippies got to have their Summer of Love.  They had Woodstock before Altamont.  Marko and I never got our Altamont.  We were never going to have our environment adapt to us.  It was the first time I lost all hope.  My earlier adventures in Central America had also taken a lot of steam out my engine by then, and I was getting pretty tired of the noise.  Maybe a little peace and quiet wouldn’t be so bad.

That summer I made my first stab at getting sober.  I went to a rehab, and stopped drinking for a couple of years.  Things quieted down for a bit.  The problem was that I never really fixed what was bothering me.  I never made peace with the quiet.  I figured it was enough to just stay dry, but I was getting restless, and I never did get rid of the guns.  I was flicking the dead lighter in one hand, with dynamite in the other, convinced a spark couldn’t start anything.

Tobacconist to The World

Nat Sherman’s is “The Tobacconist to The World.”  Their smokes are world-famous.  It’s a public relations disaster that their cigarettes are the prefered platform for PCP, and that getting “Shermed” is synonymous with walking through plate-glass while being tasered, but sales are sales.  I have to admit that if I were to decide to smoke a dangerous animal tranquilizer, one that will make me go stark raving mad, I’d probably want to do it with one of Nat Sherman’s Turkish Ovals, made with a smooth. rich, and satisfying tobacco blend.

Nat Sherman’s retail store in Manhattan features their fine tobacco products, as well as the high-priced corresponding paraphernalia that delights any addict.  The employment company sent my girlfriend and me to them for an interview with the explicit instructions that we were to pretend we didn’t know each other. We wouldn’t get hired as a couple so we had to play it cool, at least at first.  We were starving then and down to picking up cans and bottles for grocery money.  When we both got the jobs, I celebrated with three quarts of Schlitz Malt Liquor on an empty stomach. “We made it, baby!” I told her, “We’re going midtown!”

It wound up being one of the worst jobs I ever had, and that’s saying a lot for a job that didn’t get shit under my fingernails.  Working retail, serving the clientele of 5th Avenue, exposed me to more human sewage than digging up broken sewer pipe ever did.

It was intimidating to work at such a fancy place.  I had to wear a suit, which I had, but I didn’t have any dress shoes.  I went to Macy’s on Queens Blvd. and looked around.  I wound up getting a pair at Payless that looked okay.  When I came in to work that next day, it was as if I walked in wearing snow-shoes made out of birch bark and fur.  All eyes went to my man-made uppers.  “Are those leather?” my manager asked, before even introducing herself.  “They’re leather-like,” I explained.  She raised her plucked eyebrow.  So this is how it’s going to be.

There were two managers.  The Ice Queen, who I had just been humiliated by, and a guy named Don.  Don was gay.  He was a less than Rip Taylor but more than Andy Warhol kind of obvious about it.  He wore a lot of masculine jewelry and a lot of masculine make-up.  He could be snotty, sneering, and bitchy, but in the context of that environment, he was actually an okay guy.  It was the Ice Queen that made life hard for us.  She always needed to have someone to wipe her shoes off on, and my girlfriend and I were stooping at just the right height.  If we didn’t get it from the customers, we could always count on her to shank us with a snide one.  My shoes, my watch, my tie, my haircut, the cut of my coat, the cut of my jib, all failed the test of her refined scrutiny.  She let me know this in a very helpful and well-meaning way.  My girlfriend got it worse.

In this hyper-critical reality, there was a tonic, besides the shots I started having for lunch.  It was a guy named Richie.  He had been working there for a few months by then.  He was another dud sent by the same employment company, but unlike us, Richie just didn’t give a fuck.  A lot of people say that they don’t, or try to act like they don’t, but you know they still do.  Not Richie.  He really, really, didn’t give a fuck.  He proved it.  All the time.

He was the iconic New Yorker.  He was brash, crass, and streetwise.  He wore loud, ill-fitting sports coats with mismatched slacks and big, ugly ties.  He had real leather shoes, but they were suede running shoes that were polka-dotted with souvlaki grease.  He constantly had one our pricey cigars hanging from his mouth.  He would let one dangle for a while, then mash it into an ashtray, only to reach into the case and get another one to cram in his mouth.  He’d go through eight or nine 12 dollar cigars in a shift.  He was constantly on the company phone to his bookie.  I’m serious.  I know it might sound like I’m trying to create a  Runyonesque character, but he would really spend most of his shift betting on sports.

He was probably the worst employee Nat Sherman’s has ever had.  He’d be sitting on a stool, looking at either the sports page or racing form, while customers cleared their throats trying to get his attention.  He’d turn his shoulder away from them, pick up the phone and dial.  He’d turn back to the customer and hold up a finger and turn away again. “Hey it’s Richie, fuck the Jets, give me Miami and the points.”   He’d cover the receiver and tell the customer to look around some more, then back into the phone, “I lost my balls with Buffalo, I need to get it up again. Double me. Yeah…fuck it.”

The customer never complained.  That was the thing.  Richie seemed to get away with murder.  Not so with us.  My girlfriend and I, desperate to keep the okay-paying gig, bowed and scraped before the customers and management.  Yet, it was our servile attitude that seemed to draw more heat.  We were chastised over nit-picky things, and constantly made to feel like the dirt-eating serfs that we were.

We had a meeting one afternoon, during which management pointed out problems in our performance.  One of the crimes against customer service was some of the guys loosening their ties.  I instinctively reached for my knot, but Richie just sat there, his tie at a slovenly half-mast.  If they had even tried to tell Richie that he was an offender, he would’ve just said “Fuck that, I never loosen my tie. I wear it like this!”  It was pointless, and they knew it, and just didn’t bother.

At one point, the complain-o-rama turned to personal phone calls.  This was in the days before cells, so any call had to come through the office.  The operator would announce who the phone call was for and from, over the intercom.  Taking any call that didn’t involve a life-threating emergency was frowned upon.  Well, Richie’s buddies and bimbos were constantly blowing up the phone with personal calls.  “Phone call for Richard, Vic on line one.”  “Phone call for Richard, Cha-Cha line two.”

Eddie, Tina, Sal, Sunny, Bunny, Mikey B, Wiz, Razz, Lana, Shauna, Monique, Dino and Dommy all checked in with Richie at some point during the day.  He’d insist that they were big-spending customers inquiring about inventory, but he never bothered to disguise his end of the conversation.

“We bailed from L’Amour at two…yeah…I left all those fuckers at Rockaway…I went in Gina’s car…Oh yeah, I banged it, banged it bug-eyed, baby!  Hey, tell Moony I still want that thing…yeah, fuck it…”

So while Don is bringing up the personal phone calls thing at the meeting, the intercom goes off.  “Phone call for Richard, Manny line two.”  By this point it was common knowledge that Manny was Richie’s bookie.  Oh boy, this is going to be good.  Richie just gets up and says, “Hang on, Donny, I gotta get this,” and leaves the room.  Don and the Ice Princess just looked at each other.  He came back in later, and nothing was ever said about it.  I’m not making this shit up.  Richie had balls.  They grew ‘em big in Brooklyn.

One day, after watching me take an inordinate amount of abuse from some heiress who didn’t like the lighters I was showing her, he pulled me aside.

“Hey man, you need to get off your knees,” he said.

“But I made the sale.”

“Save the groveling for the parole board, these people are not better than you.”

I was embarrassed.  He was right.  I was selling out.  I was getting used to drinking Molsen and eating a hamburger cutlet every night.  I was letting the good life get to me.  In order to keep it, I just had to kiss some ass for eight hours a day, five days a week.  Boy,when you think about it that way, it adds up.  And who said these people are any better than me?  They just have more money, lots more.

I mean I understand that your family made a fortune manufacturing adult diapers, and that because of other people’s incontinence, you will never want for anything.  Great stroke of luck for you.  Your family is providing a valuable product to the buying public, and I’m sure a lot of well-needed jobs.  It’s a win-win.  I just don’t see where in the rule book it says you get to be a total ass-hole to other people.

I was starting to see things a little more clearly.  I loosened my tie.  I reached into the cigar case, took out a cigar, broke it in half, and threw it into the trash.  Then I got another one out and lit it.

Strangely, that week I made some freak high-priced sales.  Some tourist from Portugal came in and asked to see a cigar humidor.  He pointed to one.  I set it down on the counter.  He asked how much it was.  I told him it was $4,000 dollars.  “That’s a lot of money for a pretty box,” I said.  He said he’d take it.  Shit like that started to happen.  I became the top salesman that month.  Upper management took notice of me.

Two weeks after that, I was given a promotion.  I was to sell cases of cigars downstairs, to high-rollers and celebrities.  That day, they gave me a tour of the huge walk-in humidor down there.  There were cases of cigars with some impressive names taped on them.  Orally fixated captains of industry and finance, as well as tar-tongued stars of stage and screen, all had their favorite cigars stockpiled.  I was given a desk with a phone.  I just had to call these people and try to hustle them some more of their favorites.

It would still mean kissing ass, but now even more rich and more famous ass, and I would make more money doing it.  I looked at the desk and the phone.  I said I was going to lunch.  I went upstairs, paid Richie back the ten bucks I owed him.  I told him thanks, and walked out.  I never went back.  Fuck it.

Just call me Angel of the Morning

I laid in bed watching faces form in the popcorn ceiling.  There was one that looked like Warren G. Harding, and another that looked like Moe.  I rolled over on my side and felt something.  It was a piece of fish.  I didn’t know how it got there, but it smelled okay.  It was half a piece of smoked salmon, the kind with all the pepper on one side.  It was still in the package so I decided to eat it.  I reached under my bed and found a bottle of beer.

I was sitting up in bed, enjoying my breakfast of salmon surprise and warm beer, when I looked over and saw myself in the closet mirror.  I had four days of beard, bloodshot eyes, a gut that hung out over my boxers, and a very content look on my bloated face.  “It doesn’t get any better than this,” I said to myself.  It didn’t get any better, but it got much worse.  Waking up to a mysterious piece of fish was getting off easy.

Mornings can be rough for the alcoholic.  “Carpe diem” is rarely the rallying cry, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to hit the ground running.  If it isn’t the baffling environment he finds himself in, or the strange company, it’s the sinking feeling that something really bad has happened.  Something needs to be fixed right away, but what?  What just happened?  What do I have to fix?  And why am I wearing this?

I had long ago given up trying to put together the events of any previous evening’s adventure.  By studying the credit card receipts, matchbooks, napkins with numbers written in either lipstick or blood (hard to tell), bruises, shell casings, parking tickets, drug paraphernalia, condom wrappers, and damage to the car bumper you could come up with a pretty good picture and timeline, but why?  You had a good time, and that’s all you need to know.  If God wanted you to remember exactly what happened He wouldn’t have made you blackout.

I once went out on an entire date in a blackout.  To this day I don’t know who the girl was.  I don’t know her name or how I met her.  I don’t remember asking her out, or even talking to her.  I do remember us going to see my friend, Chris Linson, fight at the Sweeny Center that Saturday night.  He won by a TKO.  I also remember wearing my black suit, and getting cut off at The Catamount.  Pretty much nothing else.  The guy who got knocked out remembers more from that night than I do.  I can only speculate how the date ended.

I came to that Monday at my girlfriend’s place.  I don’t need to speculate how that went.  It seems that while I was out on the town forgetting things all over the place, I forgot I had a girlfriend, too.  She didn’t let me forget about that.  We broke up shortly afterwards.

One morning the phone rang.  It was Louise, a girl I met in Santa Fe, who was now living in Los Angeles.  Louise was a delightful creature.  She was a little eccentric and a tad thirsty.  She spoke with an affect that made her sound like a socialite from a cornball 1930′s movie.  It got worse the drunker she got. “Daaahhhling, you simply must top off my little-wittle drinky-winkeeeeee!”   She was also a human wrecking ball.   She liked to dance around the room, showing me the ballet moves she learned as a little girl.  A shoe would go through the window, a chair would break, my collection of German beer steins would come crashing down from the shelves.  I got a kick out her antics, and we had a lot of laughs.  We were drinking buddies who should have stayed just that, but didn’t.  The fact that we were the opposite sex seemed too convenient a fact to pass up, so we complicated matters.  I was to complicate them even further.

“Oh darling, I am soooooo excited!” she said, “I’ve told my mother, and my sister, and they just can’t belieeeeeeve it!”

“What about?  What are you talking about, Louise?”

“The wedding, my dearest, the wedding!”

I started jiggling the bottles next to my bed looking for a survivor.  I didn’t like where this conversation was going.  “Whose wedding, Louise?”

“Our wedding, silly boy. Don’t you dare tell me you don’t remember asking me to marry you last night.”

I didn’t, and I didn’t dare tell her.  Wait, there was a distant, misty, almost dream-like recollection of some sort of vague phone conversation on the subject.  Oh God.  It was the red wine.  Red wine always made me magnanimous, almost sacrificial.  Get me drunk on red wine and I’ll step in front of a speeding car for you, whether it was coming towards you or not.  I got sappy on the grape.  The headache it gave me the next day was always accompanied by some big check my red-stained mouth wrote.  I don’t know how many times I was ready to join the French Foreign Legion to escape the consequences of my “purely symbolic” gestures.

Now it was looking like I was going to be learning French sooner than I thought.

“Let me call you right back, Louise.”  I hung up and called Dave.  It was time for him to save my ass.  We took turns.

“Dude!  Major wine drunkage.  I just asked Louise to marry me last night.  I only sort of remember doing it, but she does, and she’s holding me to it.  She already told her mother and sister!”  I pictured them picking out the color of the Jordan Almonds that go into the little paper cups.

“Where did you get the wine?”

“Pablo came by with some he stole some from an art opening,” I said, “Fucking hell, if he wasn’t such a klepto I wouldn’t be in this bullshit!”

“Which opening?”

“I don’t know, Copeland-Rutherford.”

“It was the one for Delmas Howe?”

“Yeah, okay, probably.”

“He does the gay cowboy art.”

“Yeah, and really dude, who the fuck cares?!  Listen man, I’m in a jam here!  I need you to focus on me for just a half a cigarette of your time.  Can you do that for me, brother?”

“Alright, relax. Did you ask her ‘will you marry me?’ or ‘would you marry me?’ “

“I’m not sure.  I think ‘would you?’  Why would that matter?”

“Hold on.”

I heard him put down the phone, and walk down the hall to his bathroom.  I listened to him take an exceptionally long piss, flush, then walk back up the hall past the phone, towards the kitchen.  I could hear him drop some ice cubes in a glass.  The footsteps, now with clinking ice, started coming back towards the phone, but they passed by again.  He was heading to the living room.  Exile on Main Street, of course.  Finally, over the strains of “Rocks Off,” I heard the ice clink back towards the phone.

“Saying ‘would you marry me?’ puts the question in the realm of the hypothetical.  In other words, if I asked you to marry me, would you?”

“Then that’s what I said.”

I thanked him and hung up.  Good old Dave.  I called Louise and tried to explain our little semantics mix-up, but she hung up on me.  I never heard from her again.

I had lost another good friend.  Good old Louise.  Rather than really look at what happened, I decided to just make it all go away.  I wouldn’t have to join the Foreign Legion to escape.  Kelly’s Liquors had a sale on Heineken that week.  Murdering a few cases of Heineken would erase all the bad, for a while at least.  It would be easier than shooting bandits on The Ivory Coast, but the way I was drinking, not necessarily safer.

“

The Great Writer

The jack hammer broke through the floor and almost pulled me into the basement with it.  I had been wrestling with its 90 lbs. of kinetic rage for years by then, but never learned to love it.  I named this particular pneumatic beast “Sciatica Rex.”  I yanked it back up, and pulled the trigger.  My brain rattled against the inside of my skull like a lychee nut in a paint can mixer.  I could feel my Mexican dental work shaking loose.  The two cigarette butts I had stuck in my ears hardly dampened the din.  It was 1:30am.  I was in an Italian restaurant at the San Busco shopping center.  My coke-headed boss had decided that this was the best time for me to be working on this.  That way the noise wouldn’t bother anyone, but me.

I didn’t care.  He was gone and I had a six-pack of beer to keep me company.  I knew that I would be up late drinking anyway, but now I had an excuse to sleep in a little longer.  Besides, I was in a good mood.  That night I was convinced that my writing would finally save me from the stupid, brutal life I was living.

I based this knowledge on the flimsiest of evidence.  A few hours earlier I had read some of my work at The Center for Contemporary Arts.  It was an open reading hosted by local poet, Joan Logghe.  My little bit seemed to go over well.  I got some laughs, and the applause was a notch or two above polite.   That was it.  That was the skinny little brad nail I had hung the entire weight of my world on.

There was only one way to propel myself through the malarial swamps of depression I was wading through, and that was to fart myself forward with clouds of self-delusion.  My hope seemed to come in crumb form.  When I did find a crumb, I tied on a big linen bib, lit a dinner candle, and sharpened the cutlery, before gnawing on it like the desperately hungry rat that I was.  So now I gnawed.

I thought about a woman who read some of her work that night.  Her poems were melodramatic and strange.  She did one about smashing sea shells with rocks while naming every broken relationship she’d had.  She seemed a little unbalanced, and volatile.  Not immediately attractive, she compensated for her fading beauty with accessories and heavy eye make-up.  That was fine.  We all do the best we can.  Outfit-wise, she was doing the gypsy thing,  and it worked for her.  Her hair was a little much.  She wore it frizzed up into a weird shape, sort of like an Ace of Spades.  She looked like Bride of Frankenstein meets Gloria Swanson meets Troll doll.

After the reading, she came up to me in the parking lot.  Her craziness seemed to electrify her with enthusiasm.  She told me she thought I was “a genius.”   This woman was clearly insane, but somehow she was beginning to look more attractive.  I pictured myself reading her my work while she sat topless on a milk crate, opening a bottle of wine.  I figured I could make it work.  I thanked her and told her I would see her around.

The jack hammer dropped through the hole again, but his time I was ready for it.  I pulled it back up in a swinging loop, and had it on the lip again in one move.  Very professional.  I seemed to do better when I felt better.  A smattering of applause and a compliment from a madwoman were enough to keep me going.

I had been writing off and on since I was a kid.  It was good to know my imagination was good for something other than torturing me with vivid fears.  However, I did notice that writing about stuff that really happened was more interesting than the stuff I could make up.  In my case, reporting the facts trumped creative fiction.  I just needed to make sure interesting stuff kept happening around me.  That was the part that was getting me into a lot of trouble.

The evening’s line-up was a mixed bag.  There was some good work, and some of the other kind, too.  Poetry is like milk, you either like it or you don’t, but when it goes south, it really stinks.

There was a guy that read just before me.  He wore a big cable-knit sweater and meticulously tousled hair.  I wanted to throw him a bar of Irish Spring to carve into while he flashed his dazzling smile to the lassies.  He read poems about love, or some version of it.  The women seemed to eat it up, but I saw through his vile little harvesting operation.

“My tongue dances slow lazy eights on your heaving porcelain pelvis,” he intoned.

I turned to my friend, Samantha, “And my finger crawls slowly towards the back of my heaving tongue.”  She reached into her purse and handed me another beer.

“Tender tear drop licked, aching wound, gently salted sadness, shuddering against the sheets…”

I nudged Samantha.  “I knew he was an abductor.  It’s the “sensitive” ones that you have to get restraining orders on.”

“Our writhing ecstasy twists in a torrid torrential torment, a brief eternal spasm, black velvet of oblivion descends…”

I knew plenty about the black velvet of oblivion, (and for my money it couldn’t come quick enough) but I would have never thought about putting “brief” and “eternal” together.  That was a limitation I put on myself.  As insane as I was, I still felt compelled to make sense when I communicated.  It seemed like in order to be a good poet I had to put that compulsion aside.  I needed to loosen the fuck up.  I was still a square.

The hole in the floor was big enough.  I lowered the work light, the beers, and the hammer, then climbed down into the basement.  I was surrounded by spider webs.  I had to blow a hole out of the side of the wall down there.  That meant holding the jack hammer sideways.  I swung the hammer up and started blasting.  As the dust blew into my eyes, nose and throat, I pictured myself on a Communist poster glorifying the working stiff.  I was building a brighter tomorrow.

That night I had decided to read a piece I wrote about Wayne, a guy I had met in the labor van taking us to work.  He fascinated me.  Wayne was a  blob of southern lard, but as eloquent as John C. Calhoun.  He was a living paradox.  He would sit there in his grimy wife-beater, sunburned belly peeking through the holes, and give symposiums in the van on subjects like convenience store chocolate milks.  He did this in a deep, sonorous, Southern defence attorney voice.

“This here Surefine brand of chocolate milk is an excellent chocolate milk,” he announced one morning, “It has an exceptional creaminess, and I appreciate that.”  He held the plastic bottle up for examination.  “The quality of creaminess is the characteristic by which I judge the various chocolate milks.  Now Hershey’s chocolate milk is, in my opinion, the creamiest brand, whereas I find Nestle’s Quik to be watery and sub par.  Chocolate milk should always be smooth and creamy. “

I watched him take a deep slug.  He was really making me want some creamy chocolate milk.

“I look forward to the month of October in my native Florida,” he continued, ” Because October there is Hershey’s Chocolate Milk Month.  For the entire month, all the convenience stores in Florida sell quarts of Hershey’s brand of chocolate milk for a mere 99 cents!”

“Knowing Florida,” I said, “I bet that price holiday was state-legislated.”

“I’m not certain if that’s the case, but I do have to confess to consuming a lot of chocolate milk during the month of October in Florida.”

“I fucking bet.”

Another morning on our way to work, he offered me some gum.  “Would you care for a piece of Hubba-Bubba?” he asked.  I declined the Hubba-Bubba from Bubba.  “Suit yourself,” he said, popped a piece into his mouth and started chewing.  “Now this Hubba-Bubba brand bubble gum has a distinctly fruity flavor,” he said smacking his lips, “And I appreciate that.”  He then leaned towards me, and in an almost conspiratorial manner said, “You know, I have found that it really helps to have a fruity flavor in your mouth when you’re operating a jack hammer.”  He paused, and then delivered, with the dramatic poignancy reserved for the final words of a stage play, “It really does…it really does.”

He wistfully looks out the van window.  Lights fade.  Curtain falls.  I felt like I should stand up and applaud, but I just looked at him.  Who could make this shit up?

Anyway, just because I found Wayne so interesting, didn’t mean an audience would.  I was relieved to find they did.  They got Wayne.  It made me feel good for Wayne.  It made me feel good for me.  I had lots of stupid stuff like that to write about.  Maybe that was my purpose.  Maybe that was my way out.

I poked through the wall.  Victory!  I set down the hammer.  All I had to do now was widen around it, and that would be easy.  I opened my last beer and toasted myself.  “To breaking through!”  I crouched down and could see street lights through the hole.

Looking back now, I can see I didn’t break through to anything, except maybe another holding cell.  There were more gigs, even some paying ones.  There was also a weekly column in The Reporter for a few years.  Things seemed to go along okay and then they didn’t.  Between all the drinking and having to constantly bullfight my problems, I couldn’t sustain the writing.  The research alone was killing me.  If it was hard to write while drinking, it was even harder to write sober.  I can’t tell you how many hours I evaporated staring at a blank screen.  I couldn’t write for almost eight years.

So let me tell you, this feels good, this clacking away, tossing empty cans of Hansen’s Diet Tangerine Lime soda over my shoulder while ripping out the words.  It feels like a real breakthrough, and not because it’s going to save me from my brutal, stupid life.  I’ve dialed down the brutal and stupid, so now I don’t need to be saved from it.  That’s a relief, especially to everyone who’s had to row my lifeboat for me in the past.  No, it feels good because I can finally deliver a message, my message to the world.  What is that message?  That it really helps to have a fruity flavor in your mouth when you’re operating a jack hammer.  It really does.

Don't be scared, ladies. We're fun.

The phone rang.  It was the kind connected to a wall.  The wall had a clock connected to it.  The clock said it was 7am.  I got up and connected myself to the phone, and subsequently to 7am.  It was Dave.

“What kind of disease makes your shit fluorescent green?” he asked.

It was always something.  “Do you know any amateur surgeons?”  “How much prison time do you get for…?”  “Where’s a place that delivers drywall and windows at this hour?”  “Do you remember where I left Karen last night?”  “Can a penis get pink eye?”  He always had a cup of crisis brewing in the morning.  I have to admit that it helped my early AM outlook.  A quick survey of my bomb-blasted landscape would reveal a few more houses standing than Dave’s, and I would feel a little better.

He would get up at six in the morning to start hitting the gin.  I should say gin-flavored grain alcohol.  That’s what generic store brand gin actually is.  Read the label sometime.  The ingredients list “Neutral grain spirits, gin flavoring.”  It isn’t gin, but a gin-flavored treat.  Either way, it’s a brutal way to start your morning.

I went to the fridge to get a beer.  “I don’t know, dude, fluorescent?”

“Yeah, bright fluorescent green.”

I turned the television on, and laid down on my mattress.  There was a half a can of bean dip with cigarette butts in it on the floor by my head.  It smelled bad, so I used a shoe to push it further away.

“Well, whatever it is, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be around too much longer,” I tried to console, “So don’t worry about it ruining your future.”

“Yeah, there’s not too much left of it to ruin,” he said, then belched.

At the rate we were going, we weren’t going to have to endure anything for too much longer.  We took a strange comfort in this.  We took comfort in strange things, like each other.

Every morning Dave and I would talk while watching TV.  He’d be at his apartment, and I’d be at mine.  Sometimes we’d be watching the same channel, other times different ones, but our commentary was always, brilliant, poignant and insightful.  We were pundits.  Pundits of Reality.  Pundits who drank and watched TV, while everyone else was earning a living.  It was easy to feel better about ourselves while watching daytime television.  Compared to the cretins showcased on Jerry Springer, Cops, and Judge Judy, we were towers of intelligence and wisdom.  Twin towers.

I was a semi-employed alcoholic bouncer/laborer, who sometimes wrote things.  Dave was a drunk, ex-heroin addict (and then current fugitive from Texas justice) who could play the drums.  What cruel irony that even with these stellar resumes, the world hadn’t bowed before our majesty.  Actually, the world had bowed for Dave once, but when Dave bowed back, he fell on the floor and couldn’t get up.  He lived the rock and roll myth for a brief time, then plummeted faster than an oil-soaked Texas Mallard.  He splashed into a pond of gin-flavoring and had to tread water, instead of being able to rely on his natural buoyancy.

I didn’t need success to ruin me, failure was doing just fine.  I’m not sure which is worse, being a has-been or a never-was.  I’d like to try being a has-been sometime.  I know the other gig blows balls.

I adjusted my pillow and found a pink plastic barrette.  I reached up and dropped it in the lost and found jar.

“Hey dude,” I said, “I’ve really been getting The Fear a lot more.  I’m wondering if the drinking has anything to do with that.”

“Probably.”

“See, I was afraid you’d say that!  My fears are real!”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Everything,” I said, “I’m afraid of the spatula on the counter, the mailman, traffic signs, weather, phone calls, getting a disease that makes me shit fluorescent green.  The only time I’m not afraid is when I’m watching a war documentary.”

“About Stalingrad.”

“It seems to help more if it is.  Anyway, do you think there’s something wrong with me?”  I asked, more earnestly then I’d like to admit.  I could hear Dave swallow some gin-scented crazy water.

“Nah, there’s nothing wrong with you.  Everybody is like that,” he reassured, “I mean everybody is fucked up.  You’re brand is just more…unique.”

I thought about it and felt slightly better.  We’d do that for each other, throw out straws for the other to grasp at.

“Let’s watch Mexican TV,” I suggested.  Dave and I liked to watch telenovelas with the sound off.  We added our own dialogue and took the characters to places only the hopelessly depraved would dare to tread.  It kept our minds sharp.

We turned to the station, but it was a game show.  Mexican game shows are a phenomenon as mysterious and baffling as the stones of Ollantaytambo, Peru.

“What the hell is this all about?” Dave laughed, “Renaissance Fair escapee runs amok?”

We watched a midget, wearing an Elizabethan gown, run around with a broom.  He was swatting at couples trying to dodge him. They each had a leg tied to each other with what looked like an Ace bandage.  It was some sort of sack race/Pinata hybrid the producers had improvised, but they forgot to include a point to it all.  He wasn’t swinging at them hard, there didn’t seem to be any penalty for being hit, and there was no finish line.  Afterwards, no winner was declared or prizes awarded.

What was the purpose of all this labored chaos?  It wasn’t funny, at least not the way they intended it to be.  These zany antics were worth a dry cough and glance at the wristwatch.  Even the clowns they had standing around to add merriment to the scene, looked like guys that were rounded up while loitering at a bus station.

“Maybe it’s a pride thing,” I offered, “the pride of knowing you got hit less often by a midget than other people.”

“Yeah, pride is a big thing in that culture,” Dave said, “And so is having some of the hottest women on Earth. Check out that carne ass-ada!”

While the midget in damsel-drag chased the conjoined couples around in a circle, and the shot-out clowns performed their vagrancy, something else was going on. Long-legged Latinas, dressed like mid-priced hookers, jumped around the sidelines, cheering, blowing whistles and party horns.  We understood this.  This was actually okay entertainment.

“Do you think all the bullshit with the midget and the broom is just an excuse to have some boobs bounce around?” I asked.

“I think all Mexican TV is just an excuse to have some boobs bounce around,” Dave said, “And that’s sad, because you don’t really need to have an excuse.”

“You never need an excuse to have a good time,” I pronounced, and got up for another beer.  We didn’t need an excuse.  That was our problem.

We had gone out together the night before and had gotten ugly drunk.  At one point our group was waved off by the bouncers upon on our approach.  We were thrown out of the bar ten yards before getting there.  That takes skill.  So does getting 86′d out of a bar you still have to work at.  I have to give Dave the assist for that one.

We all wound up at Dez’s house.  I remember a zoftig Brunhilde sitting on my lap, pushing her amber necklace into my face while I drank.  My legs were going to sleep under her weight, but I didn’t care.  Let them sleep.  I figured they could use the rest.  I finally had to ask her to get off so I could take a leak, but by then my legs had gone into a coma.  I could not get up.  I was about to piss my pants and had to beg for help.  Dez and another guy carried me to the bathroom, my legs dragging uselessly behind me.  When Dave saw this he howled with delight and shouted, “Medic! Medic! I need a chopper!  Gustaitis has been hit by a blonde bombshell!  He’s paralyzed from the neck up!”  Everyone had a good laugh.  My troubles always seemed to be good for that.

After drinking up all of Dez’s beers, we scavenged around for anything else.  Dave found some green creme de menthe liqueur in a cabinet.  I took a hit, and Dave finished it.  Wait… that was it!

“I think I have the diagnosis for your alarming symptoms this morning,” I announced, ” The glowing green stool sample you produced, my friend, was caused by acute alcoholism, a condition exacerbated last night by your ingestion of half a bottle of green creme de menthe.”

We got a good laugh over this.  The big har-dee-har-har was on us though, because a few years later, Dave’s guts gave out, and he died.  It wasn’t a shock, but it was.

I have some survivor’s guilt, and a lot of regret.  You see, when I got sober, I left Dave by the side of the road.  We were bound to drift apart, but I shut the door on him.  At the time it was easy to rationalize.  I needed to focus on getting better, but I could’ve done that without avoiding him completely.  Instead, I stopped answering the phone.  I let him drown, while I went off to seek a better life.

They say you can’t help an alcoholic if he’s not ready, but somebody should be around if that time ever comes.  Who better than an old drinking buddy?  Besides, you never leave a man behind, and I did.  I am deeply ashamed of this.

I hope you can forgive me, dude.  I am really sorry.  I hope I’ll get a chance to make it up you in the next life, when I’m a midget and you’re a long-legged Latina.  In the meantime, I want to tell people how funny, talented, and smart you were.  What a good heart you had.  How hard you tried to be a good dad to your little boy, and how often you were.  How you were a life raft on my stormy seas.  How in spite of all the bullshit, what a great friend you were.  And how I miss you, and would give anything for a call from you… at 7am.

Photo by David Tatge

Dave, 1967-2008

When I worked the door at bars, I knew I was in for it that night.  People are under such pressure to have the best night of their lives, they wind up making it their worst.  The sudden influx of novice drinkers also insures a fresh supply of punching bags for the already surly and sodden veterans.  Imagine boy scouts setting up camp on a penitentiary recreation yard.  Nothing good can come of it.

Working a big crowd is a stress fest.  Having more women around is as bad as too few.  When drunk men see their chances of scoring slip away, they get irritable.  Sometimes a jump-up-on-the-pool-table-while-ripping-off-your-shirt-and-trying-to-kick-anybody-that-comes-near-you-in-the-teeth kind of irritable.  Whenever I’ve witnessed these animated displays of irritability, my first impulse was never to go over and deal with the person.  I would’ve prefered to have found a defendable corner, perhaps barricaded by a tipped-over table, from which I could egg the maniac on, with impunity.  Unfortunately, they don’t pay you ten bucks an hour to do that.

It was my second New Year’s Eve at The Catamount Bar and Grille in Santa Fe, NM.  That year, T-Bone was working with me, which was good.  He was a lovable lug from Boston.  He played hockey, knew Aikido, was level-headed, and didn’t have a whole lot to prove.  We were friends so I knew he’d have my back.  He had never worked a New Year’s Eve before so I warned him.

“They’re going to build a corral out of plywood outside to help control the crowd,” I explained, “but we’re still going to have our hands full trying to keep them from pushing past us, not to mention having to deal with anything that erupts inside.  I’m going to wear my big boy underwear that night. I suggest you do, too.”

He nodded, and then I nodded back.

The next night we had a couple of beers and went to work.  It was already crowded by eight o’clock.  T-Bone reached into his pocket, pulled out two things of pepper spray, and handed one to me.  I commended him on his foresight.  I never minded an edge.  I had used them all: pepper spray, Maglites, high-voltage zappers, brass knuckles, spring-billy batons, whip-chains, lead-shot sap gloves, rubber truncheons, pool cues, salt shakers, door jams, and even other people’s heads.  Like in any video game, there are strengths and disadvantages to each weapon.  I would soon learn a major disadvantage to the weapon T-Bone had procured for us.

Management had hired a couple of guys to help out.  We all knew each other.  We had worked together at some places, as well as thrown each other out from others.  Ours was a small world.  They would be upstairs at the second bar.  T-Bone and I would be outside by the door.  I would take cover charge and he would check IDs.

That night started memorably enough when a drunk girl threw up on me.  She was trying to push past without paying, so I put up my hands to stop her.  She looked down and puked on them.  Bravo!

“Uh, I don’t think I can let you in,” I told her, “You seem to have had too much to drink.”

“But I feel better now,” she tried to explain.  She was a warrior alright.  I wiped my hands off on her sleeves and sent her off.

I was even more impressed a half an hour later when she returned, and tried to get in again.

“You think you can still come in after barfing gazpacho on the bouncer’s hands?” I asked.  She nodded.  “You’re an amazing woman,” I told her, ” And I could see falling in love with someone like you, but tonight you need to go throw up somewhere else.”

There were the usual hassles: no ID, don’t want to pay cover, friend already paid cover, swear they were in before, just want to look for someone, need to use the rest room, forgot my girlfriend, etc., but no major shit storms.  Still, my nerves were getting frayed.  I was getting irritable, especially as I watched my own chances to score slip away.  Ladies don’t respond well to your advances, if they can smell another woman’s vomit on you.

About 11:30 pm I heard yelling.  I ducked inside and saw some guy raging at the bartender.  He was red-faced and rough.  Tough and chewy trucker trash.  Shop class hero burns out.  His messed up hair and bushy unkempt eye brows made him look like Oscar the Grouch, but more desiccated and raw.  This grouch had spent years drinking whiskey and smoking Marlboro Reds in the hot desert sun.  Now it appeared that his evening wasn’t unfolding to his complete satisfaction.  We all want New Year’s Eve to be special.  I would make sure his was.

The bartender motioned to him, made the throat-slitting sign, then pointed to the door.  Oscar was cut off.  I went over to him and politely inquired as to the reason for his distress.  He went on about not being served, how the place was full of uptight bitches, and there were no more seat liners for the men’s toilet.  I acted like I couldn’t hear him.  I apologized and leaned in.  The deaf doorman bit has two purposes.  You can use it to get in closer range for the sucker punch, or as an excuse for needing to talk outside.  He didn’t seem to warrant a cheap shot yet, so I asked him to follow me out to where I could hear.  Get them outside first, then deal.

He didn’t fall for it.  I asked him again, but he just snarled.  I noted major tartar build-up on the teeth he had left.  His swaying was making me seasick, so I reached out to steady him.  He smacked my hand off his shoulder, and then suggested I do something to my mother.  That was it.  I grabbed him around the neck and dragged him towards the exit.  I made sure to bang his head against The Pillar of Shame on our way out.  “That’s from my Mom,”  I told him.

T-Bone and I each grabbed an arm. We carried him out into the street and tossed him.  He caught some good air before landing in a crumpled pile of worthlessness.  He got up slowly, straightened his cheap, foam cap, and disappeared.  “I hope he’s not going to get a gun,” I said, but T-Bone was already back to checking ID’s.  I went over to my post and started taking money again.

Tick…tick…tick…Boing!

A scarlet blur shot up from behind the plywood fence.  Holy Shit!  It scared the piss out of me.  Oscar was back.  He looked like a demon as he tried to scramble over the barricade.  T-Bone and I kept pushing him back, but God bless that mad muppet, he kept coming.  Because he was on the other side of the plywood fence, we couldn’t get a good hold of him.  Ah, the pepper spray.  What an ideal time to give this bastard a little Binaca blast.  While T-Bone grappled with him, I pulled out my can.  I took aim, and from very close range, shot our assailant in the face.  I gassed out every drop of that canister into his stupid eyes and mouth.  He got the full experience.  Napalm aromatherapy.

Man, if I thought his face was red before.  One night I had slipped a bunch of niacin to my friends, telling them it was a new designer drug.  A cruel hoax, perhaps, but it made them all look like boiled pigs, and that was worth some solid laughs.  Anyway, that’s what this guy looked like now, a parboiled little piggy, except with streaming mucus, saliva, and tears.  He stumbled around holding his face, then bolted off into the night, trailing body fluids. “Happy New Year!” I yelled after him, and that was that, I thought.  I went back to taking cover charge.

A few moments later I noticed some people inside the bar coughing.

The windows were cracked an inch for ventilation.  The pepper spray cloud had drifted into the bar.  A guy tried to explain something about thermal currents to me, but I didn’t care at that point.  I just looked on in horror as more and more people started hacking and crying.  It was like watching the outbreak of an epidemic.  I quickly opened the doors, but that made the gas blow deeper into the bar.  Now the band started coughing, the waitresses, and even the cooks.  People were groping  for the exits.  I directed some of the victims to our bar upstairs, but a lot of people were just leaving.  Happy New Year! Come back soon!

It was a disaster.  Who was responsible for this?  Nevermind that, it was up to me to save New Year’s Eve.  It was fifteen minutes before midnight.  I had to refill the place fast, before the owners, Anthony and Tom, came downstairs.  I dropped the cover and told T-Bone to bag checking IDs.   We drove them in like cattle.  I even helped hand out party hats and horns.  Champagne was opened and passed around.  Finally, at one minute to midnight, the band retook the stage.  Thanks to the residual effects of the chemical agent, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place when they struck up Auld Lang Syne.  It was a moving scene to witness, and I was glad to have played a part in making it happen.

Here’s what really happens on New Year’s Eve: The illusion of time is perpetuated.  That’s it.  It’s done by making one arbitrarily chosen point on a looping continuum more significant than the others.  This moment is special, and now it’s gone.  Nobody blows horns at 7:32 am on New Year’s Day (for valid reasons), but should any moment be less worthy?  Why not really blow-up the party bell and make every tick of the second hand as joy-injected as the one that strikes midnight?  If that’s what you propose, dear friend, I’m down.  I may not drink that way anymore, but I’m more than willing to get joyously excited over what is essentially nothing.  As long as I get time in for a nap, I’m fine.  Besides, I don’t have anything better to do on New Year’s Eve, or ever.  Happy Eternity, fellow creatures.  Celebrate safely.

Whoop-dee-fuckin'-doo!

I guess if I had been more aware, I would’ve picked up that she was with someone, but I was on a mission to blot out anything even remotely resembling awareness.  I also wanted to find a special friend to celebrate the warmth and joy of the season.  The prospect I had chosen was a busty, bespectacled, little brainiac in a button down sweater.  The combination cat glasses, cardigan, and cleavage is a personal kryptonite for me.  But, when a guy stepped in and told me she was with him, I backed off and apologized.  Even at my worst, I tried to honor The Code.

That should have ended it right there, but he had to give me this shitty smirk.  It said, “Yeah, a proletarian sack of lug-nuts like you wouldn’t even have a chance with a woman like this anyway. You probably haven’t finished a book since Charlotte’s Web, and we Johnnies pride ourselves on the high intellectual caliber of our literacy.”  I might have been projecting, but it sure looked like that kind of smirk.

In Lithuanian, we have a phrase, “Ot snukis, kuris plytos praso!”  It translates roughly to “Now there’s a snout just begging for a brick!”  His was begging for a whole backyard barbecue’s worth.  I looked him over.  He was about my height, a few pounds leaner, more handsome, secure, smug, and self-satisfied.  He was cologned, well-groomed, and nicely coordinated in a wool pullover and pleated slacks.  I suddenly felt ashamed of my work pants and sweatshirt ensemble.

“I’ve never even read Charlotte’s Web,” I told him, “but there’s a lot of other books that I have read, and not just about Stalingrad either.”

“What are you talking about, Duuuude?”

I realized I didn’t know what I was talking about.  I was talking to his previous smirk.  “Nevermind,” I said, “Enjoy having sex with your girlfriend.”

I think he thought I said, “I’d enjoy having sex with your girlfriend,” because he got right up in my face.

“Why don’t you get your drunk ass out of here?” he yelled, poking at my chest, “Before you embarrass yourself anymore!”  I don’t like anybody telling me when I should stop embarrassing myself, but I really don’t like to be poked.  A poke is so demeaning.  Hitting a man in the face is more respectful than poking at him.  He was saying that I was not even worthy of the expenditure a beating would require, that a few forceful thrusts of his finger would be enough to cow me into submission.  Between the smirking and the poking, I could feel my insides tearing up the social contract.

I grabbed his finger and twisted.  He dropped his egg nog.  Over the years, I learned that in a crowded situation like that, you can’t excite the herd too much.  The more people that realize a fight is breaking out, the more will eventually swarm you.  At this point, the guy was going to his knees, but he might’ve been just getting down to the funky beat.  So as I twisted his finger, I acted like I was dancing with him, to sort of camouflage it.  I waved my free hand in the air like I just didn’t care.   Here we all are, just shaking it loose to Oasis.

Anyone who was actually watching wouldn’t have been fooled by my pantomime.  The girl saw what was happening, lunged at me, and began clawing my face.  Now, I had a problem.  Although I had the guy under some control, (it’s not like I could walk him across the floor like a pedigree, but he wasn’t going anywhere) the chick wrapped around my back, shredding my face with her garden rakes, was seriously hampering my dance moves.  I couldn’t seem to shake her off.  We crashed backwards into a Christmas tree.  Now, nobody thought we were dancing.  However, nobody was entering into the fray, just yet.

There’s a pause before other people join in a fight.  It’s only natural to take a moment to size things up and see if you want to add to the merriment.  How long that pause is depends on the crowd.  It doesn’t take long for an Irish bar crowd to rush in.  Country Western folks don’t tend to over think things either.  But these were St. John’s students, and they were going to wax philosophically about cost versus reward, one’s duty to society versus self-preservation, savage warlord glory versus possible ass-kicking and jail time.  They had some heavy things to sort out before joining in.

I had a small window to act.  The she-bitch on my back was the main problem.  I couldn’t get her off of me without hurting her, and the way I saw it, we had something once, before he showed up.  I was getting desperate.  I was alone at this party, with no back-up from buddy boys, and I knew the crowd would eventually come to defend one of their own, especially a boyfriend/girlfriend combo.  There wouldn’t be time to take to the podium and explain the passive-aggressive nature of the poke, or how certain social cues can be misread by the overly sensitive, so I decided to give her my Banshee War Cry.

This is a form of psychological warfare.  Like the rebel yell, or the Japanese Banzai, the war cry is used to demoralize one’s opponent into paralysis.  If done properly, it also makes you look like a total psycho- one that nobody wants to deal with.  But you have to sell it, and in order to do that, you have to sell a piece of your soul’s self-respect.  I turned around, looked right into her face and unleashed the most demonic, possessed-by-a-wraith, crazy-eyed shriek I could summon.  It’s funny when I think about how earlier in the evening, I was hoping  we’d be kissing each other’s naked bodies, and now I was screaming in her face like some tortured mythical monster, and not in a good way.  What a steep trajectory our relationship took.  How fickle the flight of love’s arrow.

She quickly disengaged.  I got up and bolted for the door.  Only when I was clearly in retreat did the crowd finally decide to jump in.  Now, everybody wanted a piece of me.  Saving face at that point was futile, so I ran like a villain in a silent film, out through the yard and down the street.  I was being chased by an angry mob of young intellectuals.  How absolutely, fucking embarrassing.  I really legged it and managed to get away.  I barfed a bit, waited in the bushes until it was safe, got in my car and drove home.  I stayed up a few hours that night feeling weird about things, then passed out.

The Christmas parties I attend now are pretty tepid.  They start early and end early.  Sober people only say things once, so their get-togethers don’t last as long.  The highlight is usually coffee and cake.  That may not be some people’s idea of a party, but that’s what I prefer these days.  My idea of a good holiday party was a brutal experience, an endurance contest that destroyed the victor and vanquished equally.  Peace and goodwill towards men, got trampled under foot in the stampede for kicks and oblivion, and somebody usually got hurt.  Now, I’d rather have cake and coffee, and not get poked or smirked at. Cat glasses still kill me.

Christmas on The Western Front

Hello Dad! Hello Mom! Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch Cherry Bomb! Santa Fe, '92

I left The Green Onion, looked around, and couldn’t find my car.  This was hardly new, but this time it really wasn’t where I left it.  Someone stole my car.   She was a ’73 Olds Omega, a beater, with bald tires, bashed-in bumpers, a cracked windshield, coat hanger antenna, cigarette-burned interior, and a body rotting with leprous rust.  Underneath all the shame was a Rocket 350 V-8 that could propel me into or out of trouble quickly.  Her rear-end was light, so she fishtailed in the snow.  I’d drive around all winter with a boxing heavy bag and all my weights in the back to give her traction.  She was a Gulden’s yellowish-brown, so I named her “The Mustard Bitch.”  Except for over-heating all the time, and bleeding a quart of oil every three days, she was a great car.  Now, she was someone else’s great car.  I went back into the bar.

My buddy, Doug, was bartending.  I handed him some needle-nose pliers, and then told him what happened.  He handed me the phone to call the cops, then started pouring me a beer.

“Can you believe someone stole The Mustard Bitch?” I  asked him.  He couldn’t.  ” I’m pissed that someone took her, but flattered that anyone would want her.”  Doug nodded and set the beer down, “No charge.”

I didn’t get it.  Why her?  It’s still grand theft auto, whether it’s a Lexus or a Leper.  It helped that you didn’t need a key to turn the ignition, but how did they know that?  I finished my beer, and Doug poured another one.  He was a good friend.  It would be a while before the cops showed up.

I guess it comes with the lifestyle, but I’ve always had crappy cars.  If they weren’t too bad when I bought them, they seemed to age faster than a president.  I gave them nicknames.  There was The Silver Fish, Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, White Lightning, The Beast, Cherry Bomb, Ol’ Smokey, Creeping Death, Compostula, and a bunch of others that died before I could name them.

My favorite was Cherry Bomb.  She was a red ’61 Ford Falcon, that Marko and I bought for $100.  She was edgy.  She was seatbelt-free.  She also didn’t have a rear window, or a muffler, or wipers, or a backseat (you sat on milk crates).   Somehow, she still managed to turn heads.  Unfortunately, most of those heads belonged to cops.  I had painted on some registration tags, and paid a guy at Kinko’s to forge us some bogus proof of insurance, so that was no problem.

The trouble was the steering.  It was so out of alignment the car would swerve while you held the wheel dead center.  You had to, not so much steer, as counter-swerve.  This made you appear to be driving at a higher blood alcohol level than you really were.  The roar coming out of the muffler-free exhaust made sure to call attention to it, too.   We’d be zigzagging along the street, setting off car alarms as we passed, leaning out to wipe away the rain or snow with our hands, or gripping the dash, yelling “Oh fuck! Oh shit! Oh shit-shit-shit! Oh fuck! Oh Shit! Oh fuck this shit-shit-fuck!”  It was an all-hands-on-deck ride.  We only drove her to the liquor store, and to get to work and back.  It was a lousy date car.

It was closing time and the cops still hadn’t showed up.  I called to let them know I was leaving the scene of the crime, and that they could take my information back at my house.  I thanked Doug for all the free beers, and promised to help him haul his massive album collection the next time he moved.  A waitress named Sarah Jane drove me home.  I waited for a while, then went to bed.  My sister woke me up that night.  “The police are here.  What did you do now?”   I said I was the victim, this time.

I sat at the dining room table and gave the cop my report.  He seemed earnest, but with cop-earnest you never know.

“I know they didn’t get too far,” I told him.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“You can’t pull the lights on without needle-nose pliers,” I explained, “and I don’t keep any in the car,”

“Where do you keep them?”

“At home. Otherwise I lose them.”

“How do you turn the lights on when you’re not at home?”

“I borrow a pair from Doug.”

“Who’s Doug?”

“The bartender. He’s my friend.”

He started to write something down, then looked up.  “You seem to have been drinking tonight. You didn’t drive home did you?.”

I stared at him.  “No, my car was stolen.”  I got up to get a beer.  “Are you going to be the one heading up this investigation?”

It looked like I was going to have to get another car.  That was okay.  I was used to things coming and going by then.  Cars, jobs, money, places to live, and soul mates all came and went. You couldn’t get too attached.  It would kill you faster than the drinking.

Creeping Death was Volkswagen Sirocco that could take you out pretty fast.  The car had brakes when I bought it, but they disappeared shortly afterwards. At that time, brakes were a luxury I just couldn’t afford.  I relied on my parking brake and psychic intuition.  “Magic 8 Ball, will that light remain green much longer?”  I kept it in first gear, and if necessary, gently tapped parked cars to slow down.  True fact.  That was Creeping Death.

Shitty Shitty Bang Bang was a clattering Chevy Chevette (diesel!) that leaked radiator fluid, regardless of how much Stop-Leak I added.  I quit wasting money on that shit and anti-freeze.  I just added water every other time I drove it.  One morning, I was in a rush to drive this girl home before her parents woke up.  I forgot to add water and overheated on the way home from Pecos.  I walked back and forth a mile or two looking for water.  No luck.  I did have to pee though.  I couldn’t find a container to transfer my fluid, so I whizzed directly into the radiator.  The funny thing was, I felt clever, or at least as clever as you can feel while pissing into a car engine by the side of the road.  It didn’t work.  I abandoned Shitty Shitty by the side of the road, and hitchhiked home.  It was a pain in the ass looking for diesel anyway.

Ol’ Smokey was a Ford Bronco that torched oil.  It spewed dense, cumulus smoke, in power plant-sized clouds.  This became a problem when I moved to Los Angeles.  It seems L.A. motorists are more uptight about air quality.  They would drive up beside me and angrily point at the smoke, as if I didn’t see it.  I would act surprised, and thank them.  “Oh my gosh, time for a valve job!  Do they cost more than a case of beer?”

I was stopped at a light on Lincoln Blvd. in Santa Monica one night, when a cop pulled up behind me.  Here we go, I thought.  I watched in my rearview as the squad car disappeared in the cloud of smoke.  The light changed, and I left him there.  That was a great moment.  My luck held until one day in Hawthorne I finally got pulled over and issued a fix-it ticket.  I drove Ol’ Smokey around for 29 more days, then called the junk yard.

The Mustard Bitch could be one.  She was hot-headed and thirsty, like most women around me then, fast but unreliable.  One October night, she left T-Bone and me stranded at a rest stop at the top of La Bajada.  The car was at the bottom of the hill, along with our extra clothes and mobile party supplies.  It was freezing, with a nice wind driving the cold into all our cracks and crevasses.  We had to take turns warming up inside the men’s restroom. One guy would go in while the other guy waited for the tow truck.  T-Bone was wearing a buckskin cowboy jacket, and I had a black leather biker one.  We looked like half the Village People.  We had no idea what we were in for that night.  Men circled, whispered, and disappeared around us.

“Dude! What the fuck is going on here?” I asked him, “How long does it take these guys to stretch their legs?”  Some of them had been hanging around for almost an hour.

“Everyone is friendly enough,” T-bone noted, “But something weird is going on around here.”   When we figured out what was really going on, we stopped taking turns warming up inside the restroom.  We both stood shivering outside, trying hard to not look like guys who wanted to blow strangers.

The cop finished his report.  I got up and walked him out.  He said that they would do their best.  I knew what that meant.  I always did my best, too.  I told him to watch out for drunks and closed the door.

The next morning, Marko and I went looking for the car ourselves.  We drove around with a baseball bat and some beers.  We saw a lot of cars up on blocks, but no Omega.  We gave up when we ran out of beer.

We were driving home when a smear of mustard caught my eye.  My baby.  She was sitting in a small parking lot.  That funereal “waterfall grille” never looked so beautiful.  I was right, they didn’t get too far.  Not keeping pliers in the car turned out to be genius.  I got in, turned the ignition, and she started.  Good girl.  They stole my leather jacket, a pair of sap gloves, and my David Lindley, “El Rayo” cassette, but I could let that stuff go.  I was resigned to lose everything someday, but I was grateful it wasn’t all at once.  One loss at a time.  I had Marko follow me home.  I was low on gas, and almost out of oil.

h

Have you seen me?