This afternoon, I ambled on an errand about a local retail plaza and, to my astonishment, I discovered there the most ideal sneakers I’d ever seen. Suede and several different shades of grey,[1]their white toe, slate laces and a black faux-snakeskin design on both port and starboard sides made them a glorious, textural monochrome rainbow. I approached them with consternation, the way I might creep toward a strange but proud and beautiful dog I felt compelled to pet. I held them, the shoes, and found them not just tangible, but weighty; I smelled their hide and gum rubber surfaces and decided that the moment, though oneiric, was not actually component of some banal dream. From sheer excitement and apprehension, I very nearly did an ill-advised adult rendition of the toddler special Pee-Pee Dance while I waited for the haggard, pink-haired attendant girl to see if they, the shoes, were stocked in my size. Haughtily, I studied instead some expensive Italian loafers, tried to look both masculine and sobersided for the distraction, tried to suppress the giddiness I derived from the thought of sexy new child slave-sewn footwear.
When the shopkeep returned with a single characteristically orange carton,[2] I whimpered slightly, but audibly. Since my first pair of Airwalks, purchased shortly after my fourteenth birthday, I’ve had an inexplicable (and perhaps feminine) relationship with shoes. It smacks, in certain ways, of the complicated affiliation between the Green Lantern and his ring, but perhaps it more closely recalls the not so complicated link between Popeye and spinach. Though surely placebo, those Airwalks were an avatar of Cool to which I’d prayed while squirreling lawn-mowing loot away in a shoebox; they were an artifact, an objet d’art, which, in my possession, I would use as panacea for my myriad Issues[3] and leveler for my doldrums. I bought those Airwalks the same year Tom Hanks played the titular idiot in Forrest Gump and they were to me what his character’s brown leather booties had been to him: magic shoes.
Indeed, shortly after the purchase of those Airwalks, I got my first steady girlfriend,[4] my first tongue-kiss, my first, well, never mind. What I mean to imply here is that those black and chocolate Airwalks might have actually been the genuine article, pukka: magic fucking shoes. And this afternoon, I remembered that feeling as, in a boutique, I threaded the eyelets of grey suede shoes which fit perfectly when I finally tried them on.[5]
I hadn’t thought of those mystical kicks, the Airwalks, for years before today. Motivated to mischievousness by the newfound confidence they instilled in me—a longhaired frosh in contact lenses, thick-waled corduroys, a braided leather belt and rock band tees—I made any number of extraordinarily questionable decisions that autumnand somehow reinvested myself in a dunce’s hope for social esteem. I was certain that they, those salubrious shoes, would help me to change my life: befriend and bed beautiful girls, ease my anxiousness, impress the boys with my chill and easy style. So when on an orange-leaved October Thursday an acquaintance named Justin asked me if I “partied,” I, of course, said yes.
Justin, he’d cocked an eyebrow at either my initial hesitance or the effusive keenness which followed in its wake. “You drink, then?” he asked. I promised that I did. Without making eye contact, I extemporized. “Sure. You know, I have a bottle or two of red wine while I read, uh, Shakespeare and stuff. But every so often, I’ve been known to toss back a beer or two with friends.” Justin was either satisfied by this ad-lib or so appalled by it that he had to flee the scene of its unfurling; regardless he queried no further, just called “seven o’clock” over his flannel-draped shoulder and jogged lazily down the lima bean- and buttermilk-colored corridor.[6] But that elaborate yarn of mine was inaccurate for no less than four reasons:
1) Even for academic credit, I’d never so much as skimmed a Shakespeare text. A Permabound mass market Merchant of Venice was shredded as it spent a semester in the rough and tumble bottom of my knapsack; Romeo and Juliet I just refused when class editions were distributed, claiming I had my own copy. In reality, I worked hard to avoid The Bard; I loathed the laborious dialect and the predictable, archetypal plots.[7] But in addition to affecting the mannerisms and habits of the sort of Type-B slacker I imagined might own such slick skate shoes, I’d decided that my new image (hence the corduroys) was going to be “prematurely classy hipster” instead of “socially inept Star Wars enthusiast.” (In addition to my sartorial makeover, I’d also bought a copy of Weezer’s Blue Album and a hackeysack and I considered myself well on my way.)
2) I had no friends and everyone knew this.
3) I’d never had a beer in my life. My fifty-plus, crippled mother really wasn’t the sort to hotbox a Pall Mall and mutter “it’s Miller Time” after a harried second shift at the perfumery. I think by fourteen I’d sipped the head from both a Red Dog and a local microbrew called Honey Brown and I recall that, to my half-sister’s amusement, I puckered and teared-up and cared for neither. (I had yet to have that one exhausting, really hot day that turns all disapproving palates Pro-Beer.)
4) Unhouseled, I was actually less familiar with vino. I think we kept some sort of ancient cooking sherry below the kitchen sink with all the caustic household cleansers, but I can’t imagine which Steak-Umm or Hamburger Helper entrée it might have been added to. Prior probably to my tenth birthday, I have a vague recollection of my mother once indulging in a bottle of Chablis, which I pronounced “shableece,” only disappeared over the span of seven days (repeatedly blocking my easy access to a refrigerated two liter of root beer).
My absolute alcoholic innocence notwithstanding, I pressed on. After classes that Friday, I preened and fretted, actually watching the drier as it spun, howling and squeaking, in our musty basement, baking the water from my freshly laundered corduroys, black ringer tee and plaid, pseudo-grunge[8] mocha/ivory flannel. I found the manliest musk in the brown-bottled menagerie of my mother’s essential oils (patchouli) and swabbed it on my carotid, slathered it onto cephalic veins. I tried my hair in a ponytail, but decided on allowing it to hang in clotted strands—freshly washed and conditioned, I achieved the Cobain look with half a bottle of some expensive eczema unguent as pomade.[9] After riffling a purloined Complete Shakespearian Works to memorize character names (if Justin had since decided in favor of doubt where my sophistication was concerned), I felt certain that my nervous terror would never abate and, as it was 6:45, I’d run out of time to wait for the unlikely miracle that might assuage my social anxiety.[10] It was time to change my life. I stormed from the house plagiarizing a less-classic author: David Ward, the chap responsible for Major League. “Fuck you, Jobu. I do it myself.”
I composed a note detailing a fancifully refined and wholesome gustatory agenda and left it for my working mother; I proceeded on foot up the long-defunct gravel trolley bed that ran through the woods and connected the renter’s tracts to the faraway hilltop homes of the suburban affluent. I found Justin waiting at the terminus of a tamarack-lined footpath that originated near the French rear doors of his palatial house. I’d been there on two or three occasions[11] and, approaching it, I cracked a comforted grin and let loose a moist sigh, remembering his mongrel dogs—with which I could busy myself if my nerves got the better of me, or I found myself outclassed by the urbanity of the likely wealthy co-ed crowd. And so I found myself resiling, reinvested in panic when Justin nudged my shoulder and pointed to a ruddy manor two doors down. “Party’s this way,” he said.
“I thought you said it was at your place?” I begged, as if my desperate remonstrations could sway the revelers’ agenda.
“Party’s this way,” he rasped. The tone of his voice was a slouched and inclined one, the audio equivalent of his posture as he trudged up the muddy slope toward the neighbor’s, and it betrayed an already extant annoyance with me. And I annoyed him further with frantic querying when, a moment later, he spoke the technically sensible but still mystifying sentence, “Come on, the Cuban Missile’s waiting.”
Behind retracted, tinted panes of glass in the track of a sliding door were gathered six or eight teenage guys of the Mostly Harmless Goon variety—the sort who’d used to cheat off of my spelling tests or snigger at my visible ribs while they were exposed in the locker room, but had never really caused me actual distress. They, to a man, probably believed professional wrestling was real. And Justin, with crooked finger, urged me into the basement room to recreate with them.
With trepidation, I followed and adapted my plan: instead of playing the sophisticate, I’d become the stoic, seasoned rake. Lacking, certainly, in the requisite rehearsal time and research for this new role, I began to review all the dialogue from the cinematic bar scenes I could recall.[12] My smile was shaky as I nodded greetings to the then-seemingly gruff crowd of my peers which curiously watched me enter.
Perhaps because Episode IV’s Tatooine bar scene was the one with which I was best acquainted, it was prominently on my mind when I moved past my preoccupation with the gatherers and turned my attention to the room itself. I felt slightly more comfortable when I discovered that I was, for all intents and purposes, in that Mos Eisley Cantina. The basement walls were textured, taupe-colored, in what I now recognize as a guero-imagined pseudo-Latin style. Aside from an overstuffed sofa in the corner near the stairwell, the six available seats weren’t chairs so much as micro-benches, all upholstered in black Naugahyde or cheap vinyl, and oddly curved to concinnate with small, round tables; reminiscing, I now wonder if they might actually have been purchased from a barroom catalogue some time in 1983. Frosted glass sconces were affixed to the walls, but the room was still dim, almost dank, for its lack of overhead lighting. All that was missing was a macrocephalic jazz quartet and a bumbling Rodian or two.
I coughed once when I vented a sigh of increasing comfort/lessening panic[13] and looked to find the source of the acrid miasma in which I stood. I found it in the form of a smoker, behind Justin, who himself was clapping in my direction and barking, “Dude, dude?” Sheepishly, I jumped at this summons and approached Justin and the smoker behind the basement’s fully stocked wet bar.[14]And that was the moment things became more than a bit surreal.
The Cuban Missile was the bartender’s nom de guerre and he clenched between his uneven teeth a cigar the size of his ulna, which forced his lips into a sort of cruelly bemused smirk. Above his upper lip rested a pelt of soft black hairs which looked like infant’s eyebrows, but could only—with the obvious grooming effort which had gone into its symmetry and shape—be described as the larval stage of a John Waters moustache. His hair was a well-oiled Addams Family Gomez ’do and he spoke with his chin at a forty-degree angle. He was, at most, nine years old.
“Ey,” he said, “I dunno you.” He rolled his cigar from between one set of bicuspids to the opposing dentition and then asked, brusquely, “So?”
“So,” I said. Then I said it again and again and again in a strange staccato stutter which has, on five or six occasions of tremulant extraordinary nervousness, pervaded my speech.[15] I knocked my chest and excused myself. Recovered, I attempted to compose myself and said breathily, “So what?”
“So whouda fuckre you?” roared the child. He cracked both sets of knuckles atop the bar over which he towered—it didn’t occur to me then, but he must have been perched on a stool or a chair or (less likely) stilts. Against all probability, he pulled off this intimidation act with aplomb and I quailed some as I silently pointed to Justin, who proceeded to introduce us.
“So?” he asked again.
“So what?” I whispered, head down.
“What’re you gonna drink?”
Justin walked away from the conversation as I giggled in nervous relief and slid onto a barstool. I told the Cuban Missile that I didn’t yet know what to drink and he more or less immediately lost interest in my existence. I asked him where we were, repeated the question twice more, and he eventually replied, “The basement.” The laconic little bastard occupied himself with a vigorous groin scratching, cigar ashing, and occasional shouted outbursts directed at a soccer game on an overhead satellite television. It’s fair to say that by this point I had already envisioned the two of us playing chess atop the room’s little round tables, smoking freely and chortling; I’d imagined myself as an urbane and informed C-3PO to his diminutive but brash R2-D2;[16] I was already mentally prepared to reply to aggressive questioners, “Cuban Missile’s my best friend, dude, I’m always down here” during a four year senior high tenure spent partying in this cantina/basement. And since we were already destined to be boon companions in my head, I persisted in talking to him, this kid behind his parents bar.
“Is this your house?” I asked and repeated the phrase until he responded.
“Yep.”
“Do your parents know that all these teenagers are drinking here?” I asked and, soon as I uttered the words, I realized the downright idiocy of the sentence. I was going to attempt to flatter him with his brazen defiance of authority when he understandably bragged in reply that, no, they didn’t know that their pre-teen was doling out their expensive schnapps and draughts for a room full of underage aspiring thugs. But, of course, I instead sounded like the kind of sweater-vested narc that grew up identifying with the Gallant character in Highlights cartoons and would eventually call in the principal, at prom, to tell him the punch had been spiked and the children must be warned. I’ve found, sometimes, that thinking calculatingly before I speak can actually end more problematically.
The Cuban Missile, he heard that question the first time I asked it, and when he snapped his neck ‘round to face me and decide my implication, I caromed into an epic run-on sentence as diversion. It’s possible that, panicked again, I even flailed my hands as I rambled.
“‘Cos it’s cool, and stuff, that we’re here—we’re all here and I’m here too—and we’re all breaking rules, every one of us,[17] which is awesome because rules are usually stupid and it’s way better to break them and live by your own rules and stuff. I like to break rules,” I said. “That’s why I only drink the strong stuff, strongest stuff, the strongest alcoholic stuff. Drinks. What sort of strong stuff do you have back there?”
In the end, I think the kid just filled my glass because he wanted to shut me up.
“Vodka, rum, sambuca, what?” he sighed, rolling his eyes and rolling his stogie.
I knew that I’d heard those words before. The likeliest place I could imagine them, however, was on the colorful cardboard backing of Star Wars action figures—above the thin polyurethane bubble which enclosed some crudely rendered creature from Jabba’s Palace, as briefly seen[18] in Return of the Jedi. Was it Weequay, Barada, Klaatu and Sambuca above the Pit of Carkoon? I wondered. Aware that conspicuous delay would lend me the air of a novice, I waved his question off, the Missile, and pointed to a three-quarters-full bottle of amber liquid, away from the rest of the liquor collection and nestled between the steel tendrils of the cappuccino maker atop the fridge/dishwasher island. I suppose I chose it because it appeared to be in the catbird seat.
It was old, the bottle, and its crisp, yellowed label—virtually blank save a large, serif font “151” and the smaller elaborative word “overproof”—was stained, bubbled and wrinkled by the tears which had run down its outside like suppurating candle wax, times past, after excited pours. The Cuban Missile unscrewed its cap and found it topped by a wire mesh screen.[19] This obstacle hardly stalled him. He meticulously arranged a marigold patterned Dixie cup on a ceramic coaster, squared with the grain of the bar before me, and spilled three, three-point-five, warm fluid ounces into its bottom, rattling it. We both stared at it for a long while, watched its Triaminic-colored surface stop rippling and settle, still. He re-centered it in the middle of the ivory tile coaster.
“Well,” he said curiously. And for the first time, he looked less like a rogue thuglet and more like a nine-year-old kid.
“Well,” I said in concurrence and commiseration, and I recited one barroom colloquialism, the appropriateness of which I was certain: “Bottoms up.” And I tried to take the viscous liquid in a single gulp.
Imported overproof rum tastes like the runoff of melted fat from a corpse doused in gasoline and lit afire. I am certain of this, despite the fact that I have never tasted the melted adipose tissue of the immolated. Its time on the tongue, the rum, is excruciating; it moves like the syrupy seconds of a car crash. Imported overproof rum smells like Tabasco shaken with isopropanol and draws water from the eyes. I learned later in the dipsomaniacal picaresque that is my life that this taste is called “cheap, strong booze.”[20] If the opening of the throat is out of the question, if one is possessed of a palsied uvula or hair-triggered gag reflex then, Reader, you will have a problem. If you cannot simply “toss back” the contents of your shot glasses,[21] then I would suggest almost any other alcoholic experience.[22]
I coughed most of the amber solvent back into my mouth; I sprayed trace amounts of it through pursed lips and into the empty Dixie cup I pressed flush with my face, like a feedbag or oxygen mask. I had to taste the shit twice. My eyes ran with both tears and stinging booze—in the effort to muffle my emasculating gags, I’d closed my openings and forced the stuff back up into the tributaries of my esophagus: my sinuses and tear ducts, my ear canals, my nose. My nose.
Now is as good a time as any to discuss my nose.
Earlier in childhood, I’d been the victim of extraordinarily frequent nosebleeds, virtually quotidian hemorrhages which ironically had little to do with the virtually quotidian incidence of vigorous schoolyard beatings. Twice, my mother consulted a physician for this condition and the initial consultation resulted in little more than a penlight shone up my nostril by a rushed whitecoat and an eventual diagnosis of nasal membrane rupture—I’d either broken the thin, moist skin of my anterior septum the last time I caught a baseball with my face or I’d picked away solidified snot gobs too hard. The follow-up consultation, which took place years later, produced both a different diagnosis and prognosis: posterior nosebleeds (uncommon and inconvenient, if not downright deleterious) would persist and worsen through adolescence—the recommended course of action was a series of more or less exploratory/preventative cauterizations.[23] I was fine with this idea, completely copasetic, until I paged through Merriam-Webster and discovered the denotation for “to cauterize.” To stop the Euphrates-like flow from my mucous membranes, a gaggle of stethoscope wearers wanted to jam red-hot metal rods up my nose until enough scar tissue accrued that all plasmic outflow was dammed. Yikes.
I was resistant to this agenda, to say the least, and I figured that my sporadic exsanguinations, if properly ignored, would cease on their own. Regardless of the fact that, even at fourteen years, if I so much as craned my neck the probability of a nosebleed was still one-in-three, I found so suffering a superior choice to cattle-prodding my innards.[24]
And, so membranally weakened, I sat across the basement bar from the Cuban Missile and worked to swallow the one-and-three-quarters ounces of warm, caustic booze I’d chambered. When I had at last, forty some seconds later, completed that first untoward imbibing, I sat motionless, brow beaded with sweat and avoidant of the eyes of my pre-teen barkeep.
“More gringo?” he asked.
The boy, he called me gringo with an unflinching deadpan countenance and, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to impress the almost-mustachioed little imp.[25] In suit, I absolutely said, “Sure,” and I even attempted to resurrect my Prematurely Classy Hipster character by adding, “Delectable and potent, good sir. Yes, another, indeed.”
Insert here in the retelling, then, the gargling of another excruciating three ounces of overproof. Know that, after the first upleasant gulp, most of those ounces rose to a rechambering in my mouth, effervesced in my nose and the sinal crevasses of my bone, and only then, sniffled back into the throat, was the liquor swallowed back down into my belly: left to diffuse from there and soon slink directly across the blood/brain barrier.
And insert here these purposely vague descriptors of the next ten minutes:
1) The Cuban Missile said, at some temporally proximate point, “Nice, dude. Righteous.”[26] Such masculine approbation caused me to ask for a follow-up dose of inebriant, in the hope of further impressing the tyke.
2) Shot/wax paper snifter number three is mostly blocked by my vigilant gag reflex. And instead of a John Wayne-style, calm and manly rechambering, the increasingly heavily poured serving of four ounces—all of it—was jettisoned through my mouth and nose, and into my feedbag/cup before I forced them down again.[27]
3) I may or may not have had a fourth shot—my anamnestic Super-8 became somewhat unreliable around this point in the evening. If I did, I poured it myself and I did so knowing well that I had yet to eat that entire day.[28] I had, quite like the imbecile, assumed that the parties of upper-middle class teens would be littered with canapés and other hors d’oeuvres[29] and I would thus end the night well fed.
4) I was strangling the bottle’s neck[30] when I heard the Missile’s jaw-clenched holler announcing, “We gonna blow this shit up! Right?” And after I pushed off of the bar to spin one-eighty on the overstuffed leather seat of my stool, I saw the boy offering up to his entourage—in the same manner as that ape-priest presents newborn Simba to the jungle in Disney’s The Lion King—an Adidas shoebox, full over the brim with cartoon dynamite-like fireworks.
What happened next happened quickly—in maybe less than five minutes. Such are many of the defining moments of human lives. So.
The teenage throng filed outdoors and headed, en masse, toward the mouth of that tamarack-lined path. I, alone in the sótano, became extraordinarily self-conscious and leapt to my magically shod feet; acutely aware of the risks involved with home explosives,[31] I looked first to those Airwalks for the courage to finally become One of the Boys. Immediately, I discovered that looking anywhere but directly ahead was a costly mistake. My vision was a carousel, my epidermis contained my musculature like a skin-colored sleeping bag full of nightcrawlers. I stumbled backward and knocked an empty red plastic pint to the floor; when I traipsed forward, it took me some time to correctly locate and navigate the four-foot expanse of the open door.
I was for the very first time drunk.
Without actually looking at them, I blinked a telepathic thanks to my shoes (and corduroys and flannel) for the doughtiness that allowed me to shamble, pissed, down a muddy hill and into a crepuscular woodland, insinuate myself into a crowd of, if not strictly enemies, then certainly not well-wishers and, with these unfriendly peers, ignite and explode a shoebox full of low-grade demolitions and plastiques. I shouted a boisterous “Wait up!” and made it six or seven skull-jouncing strides before slipping (in a full-on limb-flailing, heel-on-a-banana-peel, vaudevillian manner), collapsing and skidding on the seat of my slacks, sliding subsequently into a hedgerow. I stood slowly and tried to descend gingerly the rest of the declivity which, when unfamiliar with extreme drunkenness,[32] is much like trying to run an NFL wide-receiver’s route while wearing a scuba mask full of extra-virgin olive oil.
I was for the very first time drunk, and I reacquainted myself with the group by more or less rolling to their feet.
“Hey,” I said. Muddy and addlepated, I giggled in a madcap manner, like Jack Napier, as I tried uncoordinatedly to stand and, noting that I had to a man their rapt attention, I said again, profoundly, “Hey. Whassup?” On my feet, I continued to giggle in a manner both freewheeling and semblant of a mumble (if such a thing is possible) and I tried to collect myself by looking up to the halcyon empyrean, breathing deep. I stared up at the rising moon; the neon navy glow of twilight made my eyes water and I shook my head as I sneezed twice spasmodically.
“Damned booze in my nose,” I announced to an obvious and uncomfortable silence. Waiting for the forgiving response of laughter, I felt the postnasal warmth and smoothness, tasted iron; I noticed that I’d sprayed the closest concentric half-circle of five people—their cheeks and eyes and the insides of open mouths, their bleach white Grateful Dead tees and already stained wife beaters—with a healthy dose of my own O-positive. I sneezed again. The blood spray was profuse, like a burst water balloon dropped from a great height. And I giggled.
“Whoops,” I said. And before I could rationalize it, I was nervous again. Becoming keenly aware that I had just bled on and in other people, antagonistic virtual strangers, I realized that this manner of introduction and commiseration, historically, had probably never won anyone a friend—save the occasional extreme fetishist. I began a slurry explicatory rant: “There’s this vein, or maybe two of them, and they’re in my nose and they always break, or they’re too close to the surface or something, and I was s’posed to have them cauterized except—you know what that is?—they want to take a hot—”
Justin’s friend Justin[33] punched me in the throat and I collapsed to my ass, simultaneously burping. I crawled my way to a thick-trunked tree, and clawed my way up and to my feet, and then objected with as much gusto as I could muster. “Hey,” I whined. “Man. Dude.” An atonal round was my reply, all voices entering into the chorus with their own variation of the phrase: GO HOME.
I stepped closer and wrung my hands. Limp-wristed, I pushed my unctuous and wavy Cobainish locks from my forehead with the filthy reverse of my hand. Certain that this was my social eleventh hour, I marched in place, clenching and unclenching my fists, making small kicked dog noises as I attempted, both panicked and drunk, to compose some sort of elaborate apology/explanation which would endear me to the group. I stood before that quorum, sodden and soiled, pricy faux-grunge flannel half-tucked into my torn, thick-waled cords. Bone thin and mad eyed. Though evidently unperturbed by it, my nose bled profusely and freely onto my mud encrusted labiodental region—only with years of accrued wisdom and the benefit of long-term hindsight do I now realize that I must have looked like a rabid lycanthrope, a guerilla terrorist, a cudgeled Reconstruction-era minstrel, a real life version of Alan Moore’s Joker.[34] To them, I was grotesque, abominable, incomprehensible. I was Horror. The poor teenaged dimwits were probably both frightened of me and repelled by me: they had no experiential frame of reference for what I, the nebbish longhair from the senior high corridors, had become.
The nouveaux riche of the upper-middle-class, their idea of drunk and disorderly had likely been derived from Belushi’s Animal House. Mine was a product of faulty neurochemistry and desperation—it was genuine and grisly and, of course, too intimate to be anything but terrifying. It was soul pornography.[35]
And, in suit, I was received with only rancor and refusal when I suggested, “No, guys, I’m cool now.” Another session of GO HOME variations ensued and I resorted to begging. “Come on, I’ll just stay for one more drink. Please?” Simpering. “Please?” Like negotiating five more minutes of playtime with an impatient parent. Pathetic.
My bloodied peers milled around, all faced away from me; they busied themselves with investigating the shoebox of bombs and face-blotting with a mysteriously acquired roll of paper towels. I was completely nonplussed when, at my side after a seemingly infinitesimal span of time, the Cuban Missile stood with both hands around a Dixie quad-shot of 151. “Drink this,” he said, “and then get the fuck out of here, dude.”[36]
I emptied the whole serving under my tongue and into my puffed cheeks; I gargled and aspirated and choked and, finally, swallowed. I felt heat effervescing through my face, above and beneath my eyes and in the bridge of my nose. “Cool, man. Thanks. Can I have one of those cigars, too?” I asked, then without pause for reply, I inquired, “How long did it take you to grow that moustache?” And, again, without pause for reply, I sneezed in his face.
I didn’t struggle or say goodbye when, from each side, a Justin mutely lifted me by the armpit. I immediately understood my social failure as destiny. As a pair, they kept in step and toted me down that tamarack path, dropping me on the knee-shattering gravel of that derelict trolley bed which connected their basement bar and fireworks world to my clapboard townhouse and antenna-TV one. “Go home, man,” said Justin the First. He was almost kind, even if he wouldn’t look me in the face; he was likely deflated by the feeling of defeat that must have accompanied the incipient awareness of his diminished status within the group: Idiot Known to Have Invited the Bleeding Guy.
I watched them disappear completely from sight before I pressed palms to the grit and pushed to standing. I coughed and brushed the stones from the seat of my slacks.[37] There were no fireflies. The fingernail moon was still low, behind trees. I walked home apace in the pitch, blind and dizzy, using the vaguely tidal sound of my gum soles on gravel as sole assurance that I was still on the right path.
Home before midnight, I slunk muddily past my mother.[38] By way of greeting, I offered her just a single, mumbled polysyllabic word, the denotation of which was the condensation of the sentences I have injured myself and my pride, but all is well; I shall bathe and retire; How do you do? I do not now recall if she offered any reply at all. If she did, I ignored it and, nauseated, simply climbed the shag-wrapped stairs on all fours and settled finally onto the toilet, pants and drawers around my ankles. I allowed myself to make water—a feat of which I assumed my then-handicapped self of gracefully performing while standing.
At some point during my stream, I felt the spinal strain of my dangling head—which was somehow hanging limp from my bent neck like the bloom of a wilting sunflower—and I snapped back, chest puffed, to proper posture. Strangely, I’d stopped peeing without meaning to and I started up again. Increasingly boggled by the vagaries of drunkenness, I squinted at the room gone yellow bright, the skull-collapsing sound of something which recalled garbage compaction, the excruciating intracranial sensation that my brain was a tiny girl kitten being orally, anally and vaginally raped by icicles. My consciousness felt luxated. I had heard comedians and sitcom actors offer snide jibes about The Hangover, but I had no idea that it would be so confounding, that it would register physically as the End of Days. I’d also been under the impression that I would get to enjoy at least a complete evening of intoxication before The Hangover, which as I understood it, was only supposed to come The Morning After, not with The First Whizz.
My body ached, even slight movements felt like working a catcher’s mitt on its first, unbroken day. I attempted a moan, but found my throat shot and unaccommodating. I was stunned by the silence, paying attention to my vocalic blight, which made it exponentially startling when my mother—suddenly there, straightening the control-top of the panty hose she wore beneath a floor-length crinoline skirt—fairly shrieked, “Do some drinking last night, hon?”
My contact lenses floated over and through the relatively small space circumscribing my pupils (the place where they might correctly function, but refused to remain), and I attempted to focus on her face with a varying degree of success in either eye from second to second. She smirked and sucked at her lips. Anger, amusement, embarrassment, condescension: all were present in her stare, on her creased brow, but the foregrounded, winning emotion (if truly there was one) was indiscernible.
“No,” I rasped. And I struggled to spin a lie which might sufficiently explicate my infirmity when my cerebral gears ground to an unlubricated halt, throwing sparks like giant exclamations and asterisks. So stymied, it took me another few moments to adumbrate the events of the past few minutes and locate the anomalous metaphorical monkeywrench in my mental works.
“Last night?” I croaked.
“It’s nine in the morning, sweetheart. Friday.”
The brightness in the room was the sun streaming in through dusty Venetian blinds. The compaction-like ruckus outdoors was, in fact, early morning trash compaction. My apocalyptic headache was absolutely The Hangover and my previous understanding of such was corroborated by the fact that it was confirmedly The Morning After. My first blackout ended with a breathtaking display of Occam’s Razor in action—suitable epilogue, I suppose, for the detoxification of a logician.
“I won’t ask what happened because it’s always the same story when you’re drunk,” said my mother. “And I assume what’s in your lap is punishment enough.”
I returned to the drooping bloom position in which I’d awoken and saw the object of my mother’s allusion: my thighs were splattered with medicinally colored, oatmeal-textured vomit[39]—cold and congealed, it stuck to me in leprous patches when later I stood to shower it off. Sitting, I wore a great puddle of it the way Adam in Renaissance frescoes wears a fig leaf.
I was speechless. Red-handed,[40] pink-lapped. My mother knew me well enough to know that this was beyond rare and she, cleverer than most, correctly deduced that my dumbness was symptomatic of both shame and sickness. And so, instead of admonishment, as she descended the stairs, she gave me some of the best, most utile advice I’ve ever received.[41]
“Clean yourself up and drink some water. Take a vitamin and have some toast—nothing more, nothing too salty or you’ll bloat and dehydrate all over again. No coffee. Brush your teeth. Have two aspirin and take a nap. Stay in bed and watch TV. Take your contacts out. No reading—your headache will come back. Maybe have the dog sit with you if you feel guilty. Depending on how badly you treated yourself, your hangover should be gone before one or two. Good luck. When you’re better, you should probably use the rest of the day to do something productive with yourself.” They were sage, motherly words which still guide my remedial treatments to this day.
There was, however, apparently no remedy for my vestments. I would guess that after I had stripped and stepped into the shower, my mother had thrown the biohazardous laundry load directly into the trash—trash that was, at that moment, possibly being compacted outside. I didn’t process this until much, much later. Possibly only the following Monday morning, when I tried to don the ‘Walks for school. I recall the passing of a preposterous thought. “What am I going to do?” I wondered. “I never even got to say goodbye.”
Years later, Hank Scorpio—friendly supervillain voiced by Albert Brooks—would ask Homer (in one of my all-time favorite Simpsons moments), “Ever see a man say goodbye to a shoe?” In response, Homer giggles coquettishly and says, “Yes, once.” Unfortunately, the man he saw was most certainly not me.
[1] Grey is, all affectations aside, my favorite color. I have other grey shoes, grey sweaters, grey bed linens; there are five solid grey canvases upon my bedroom walls. In a way, this grey-lust is so appropriate that I wish it weren’t the case. Though I’m reluctant to cite him, Adam Duritz of Counting Crows once sang, “Well, grey is my favorite color—I felt so symbolic yesterday.” This isn’t that, though it seems like it should be and, in fact, it is often assumed the case (Reader, you try telling someone that grey is your favorite color). White can be jarring and dirties easily; black gets boring quickly; grey is Goldilocks’ spectral porridge—just right. Sincerely, without guile or agenda, I actually find the hue (some shades more than others, but I’ve never met a grey I didn’t like) halcyon, luxurious and altogether aesthetically pleasing. [BACK]
[2] If she shuffles out from that back room with two, you know it ain’t good news: there’s a dearth of your size and she greedily hopes that your desperation will be enough to make a terribly cramped or loose shoe seem to fit. And sometimes, yes, mine has been. [BACK]
[3] N.B.: the capital “I” on that one. [BACK]
[4] Who dumped me just after a showing of Forrest Gump. She’d caught me bawling—not crying, but bawling—during the scene at Jenny’s gravesite, when Gump, Sr. tells the headstone that he’s been instructed to leave his son’s letter unread, then announces that he has. “So, I’ll just leave it here for you,” he explains to dramatic cathartic effect. It remains my contention that, should you not cry intensely at that scene, you’re a potentially dangerous emotional cripple who lacks empathy altogether—a potential mass murderer or serial goon. But this girl, my first steady girlfriend disagreed. Quoth that harridan: “There’s a fine line between ‘sensitive’ and ‘pussy’ and you just crossed it. We’re through here.” She walked out on me right there in the theater. Harsh toke, dude. [BACK]
[5] Naturally, I purchased these enchanted sneaks, tucked them under my arm and fairly skipped to the car. It was everything I could do not to wear them out of the store. But, as is my luck, the dream died aborning when I arrived home. Preparing to waterproof their tender skins, I held them high and examined them in the pure, natural light of my living room to find that I’d been had. That store’s lighting was somehow out of whack, its RGB scale slightly skewed: all their white parts were actually pale pink. The box’s label confirmed my suspicions: LOW-TOP, GREY/PINK. I’m not so postmodern a man that I’d feel ironically hip in pink shoes and so I boxed them back up, double-checked the boutique’s return policy, drew a bath, and mourned quietly with Johnnie Walker’s Green Label and a good book. [BACK]
[6] I’d initially assumed that only institutions tiled during the ubiquitously avocado/pumpkin/chocolate decade between 1965 and ’75 were floored in such a demoralizing color scheme and, at least, I can say that buildings then-floored do appear to be universally so. But I have since discovered that an institution’s possession of this lima bean/buttermilk Xoloft-necessitating linoleum is a square/rectangle thing: all ’65-’75-built structures have it (unless they’ve been reworked), but not all structures with this color scheme were built during the era.
I mention this for two reasons: 1) I was flabbergasted and further divested of hope in the human race by my discovery that this color scheme is still contemporarily used for hospitals/asylums/schools, etc. and 2) I refuse to believe that any well-intentioned human beings are greenlighting such undertakings, as I’ve been unable to find a single human being who isn’t instantly depressed and tired by such an interior decorative palette. So, in a roundabout way, hallways of this color force me to believe one of three things: 1) all institutional interior decorators are sadists; 2) contemporary institutional interior design is done by machines possessing at least rudimentary AI; 3) aliens are designing our post-postmodern buildings from light years away and, because of the signal’s lag time, it’s still 1971 to them. There are, of course, a scant selection of more rational explanations for this truly appalling phenomenon, but I figured a digression of this magnitude should end on a joke. [BACK]
[7] And I still do. I may be the only 4.0 GPA English Lit. major/enthusiast who is possessed of a vitriolic loathing for virtually the entire Shakespearian oeuvre. It’s too lengthy a list to enumerate here, but suffice it to say that (save a half-dozen moments from Merchant of Venice and the whole of the delightfully parodic and self-lambasting As You Like It) I wish the bulk of it expunged from the collegiate canon and forgotten by history. I find it unremarkable at best and despicable at its worst.
Most of The Bard’s catalogue is bigoted, crude, trite and linguistically dictated by an odd and relentless obsession with iambic pentameter (if I wrote a dozen novellas all in trochaic octometer, it’d be impressive, sure, but quickly boring and exhaustively repetitive—which is to say I wouldn’t deserve the accolades of centuries for doing so). Taming of the Shrew wouldn’t still be taught if, instead of its inherent and overt sexism, it was a “slightly racist” play called Taming of the Nigger, about the shaping of a good house servant—regardless of the fact that “that’s just how things were” (the commonest professorial excuse used to dismiss its hideous plot). No one earnestly teaches Birth of a Nation anymore, despite the fact that it won prestigious awards for excellence in its day—and they’re right not to.
Let me not elide the truth that if any contemporary author were so uncomplicatedly formulaic, he or she would be ousted from the literary community. Shakespeare isn’t excused from answering complaints levied against his dismal simplicity on some Orson-Welles’-Citizen-Kane-it-was-revolutionary-then-‘cos-he-was-The-First argument—see Quixote, Tristram Shandy, The Canterbury Tales for examples of reasonably complex classical-era literature. Give me Arabian Nights or Homer any day—that last, he is excused from innovation.
I do, however, appreciate Shakespeare’s 1608 coining of the word “lonely.” For that, I say kudos! [BACK]
[8] But in reality Structure-bought (now known as Express Men). It was, in actuality, sewn as vestment for middle-class post-yuppies, not swag for the unkempt rocker chic. [BACK]
[9] Years of sporting pretentious hairdos taught me that the great majority of texturally intriguing, mercilessly restraining hair products aren’t marketed as such. Elmer’s Glue works wonders when baked-in with a hair dryer for the creation of stalagmite-like spikes and, for the record, so do egg whites. Conditioners give you that lush, but rumpled look only when applied by the ¼bottle and never washed out; glue-stik dampens humidity frizz on the fly. I once combed candlewax into a platinum blonde, very dead, saggital keel-parted style I had going to shape it in ways its posthumousness would not allow. Mousse, gel, Aqua Net, wax: these are for wimps. I suppose, however, it is worth mentioning that I lost a lot of my oft-abused hair before the tolling of the clock on my twenty-sixth birthday. [BACK]
[10] I have since discovered Xanax and the fact that doctors practically live to over-prescribe the stuff to people who have the good fortune to be insured. A thousandth of a gram (literally) of alprazolam, on several disparate teenage occasions, might have completely changed the course of my entire life. [BACK]
[11] His father made such absurd bank that, even in 1994, he had a high-speed (relatively speaking) connection to the internet. Those two or three occasions were spent looking for interviews with and pictures of rock stars which, perhaps somewhat shockingly, were in bountiful supply online even then. [BACK]
[12] Casablanca, Roadhouse, Star Wars, Major League, Field of Dreams: if Reader remembers the brief seconds in any of these films which counted to my juvenile mind as “bar scenes of repute,” then he or she also instantly realizes how fucking doomed this idea was from the get-go. [BACK]
[13] The fact that I was calmed by the room’s resemblance to Mos Eisley’s cantina pretty much exemplifies my complete social ineptitude. [BACK]
[14] To get a scale of the ridiculous suburban opulence of this wet bar, I present to you its more prominent features. 1) There were no less than four draught beers either on tap or potentially on tap. 2) The bar was two feet in depth and at least five long, glossily varnished hardwood. 3) The cappuccino machine (I think) which sat behind the bar, atop the refrigerators/dishwasher unit, and amidst the less-expensive bottles, looked like a pewter bust of Medusa and must have cost five-grand alone. 4) There was a locked, illuminated humidor on the bartender’s right and a locked, lit scotch cabinet on his left. To call it a wet bar is to understate its absolutely ridiculous magnificence—it was arguably better equipped than the bar of at least two of the restaurants where I would later work. I can’t imagine how the owners could ever justify going out. [BACK]
[15] It would have sounded like this: “Soso sososo….uh…..so.” Each of those five or six times I’ve similarly stuttered, I have always realized I’ve erred immediately after it happened and I’m usually as perplexed as my listener. Once, I repetitively stumbled while I tried to ask a girl on a date. “Afterafter afterafter,” I said. It didn’t help me recover my suaveness that, when I recovered from the speech impediment, I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t recall why I’d been using the word. “After what?” she sensibly asked. “I, uh, I don’t recall,” I explained and then boldly attempted to salvage the situation by saying, “But who cares? You wanna go get some coffee?” “Not really,” she said; obladi, oblada.
And then shortly after that incident, a pre-med acquaintance suggested that this sometimes stutter might actually be a symptom of occasional seizures. Obladi, oblada. [BACK]
[16] I had yet to realize that 3PO was an Oliver Hardy-brand prototypical straight man—the clear inferior to his squat counterpart’s Alpha. In my mind, I’d already signed on to be the slovenly, dim, battered Stimpy to this nine-year-old’s Ren. This is depressingly indicative of the many, many issues I’d have with male relationships later on in life. [BACK]
[17] I remember trying my damndest to inculpate myself during this rant. To assure the Missile that I’d be busted too, were I to tattle. Of course, I think the subtler nuances of most of my forethought teenage character-acting/performance art were lost on my audiences whom, in retrospect, were usually far less perceptive and threatening than I gave them contemporaneous credit for. It was, then, my timidity, not some inherent aura of Loserhood, which lost me the great majority of my physical/social battles. How sad.
Actually, I chalk most of my grown-up cerebral adroitness up to the fact that I had no childhood social experience at all—no real friends, just bullies who would hang out and swap Topps and Donruss rookies before smacking me around—and, naturally, I spent more than a decade under the assumption that every one of my peers wasn’t so much a real person like me (riddled with defect and ill-equippedness), but more like someone my age as portrayed in a film (I knew they were actors in fake stories, yes, but I never accounted for the fact that the fake characters they played had lines perforce scripted for them and no one could truly be expected to be as quick-witted as they seemed). When my teachers said I was “gifted,” I wondered how much more so my rambunctious peers must be: I guessed that I must have been somehow deficient because life, for me, seemed so hard and they—the aggressive dunderpates in the Robins, not Bluebirds, reading group—were having such a good time of it. I spent more than a decade of my life deluded into thinking that every bully and passerby was secretly a mental Moriarty and I schemed constantly in hope of finally besting them—everything my brain can do now, then, is a result of twelve years of constant training to defeat some imaginary archnemesis. Imagine that.
To conclude this lengthy aside, it was sometime in tenth grade, I think, when the thought first dawned on me: I think most everyone might actually be an idiot beyond help. It was five more years before I accepted it intellectually as truth but, thanks to that aforementioned righteous inferiority complex, I have yet to accept it emotionally. Despite my luxurious vocabulary, wealth of trivial knowledge and proclivity to dismissiveness, I remain, at heart, about eight years old and certain of my inferiority and an impending belt-whipping. [BACK]
[18] Briefly seen, indeed: the original run of Kenner Star Wars action figures got pretty desperate toward its end. See if you can find Amanaman, one of Jabba’s motley henchmen, without the aid of the internet or frame-by-frame DVD play—like someone from 1990. Go on, I’ll wait. It took me the (very probably not an exaggeration) two-hundred viewings during the years between seven and nine. Locating Barada, whose action figure was rather nicer than the others in the series, took more than twenty showings, and he’s smack in the center of the screen. This sort of thing was my childhood. And it doesn’t fix anything to say that I was equally Type-A about baseball. [BACK]
[19] Known in the trade as a “flame arrestor,” it became clear to me only much later in life that my liquid opponent this evening was an imported bottle of 151-proof rum from the pre-Bacardi 151 era. Highly inflammable, such overproof rums are most commonly used for the spectacular barroom visuals that take place when they have been floated atop a shot and ignited or aspirated and lit for a fireball. The next time Reader is at a party bar (neither a classy bar nor a dive bar will have all the requisite ingredients or the desire to prepare it for you), I suggest he or she orders a “Flaming B-52” to truly understand the utility of 151-proof rum—despite its isopropyl and napalm taste, it makes things all sparkly for a minute, and this is wild entertainment of the highest echelon to drunks. Or, if such an outing seems like too much trouble, one might simply ignite, extinguish and sip kerosene to get the idea. [BACK]
[20] See also: rotgut, cop’s bottle, Ol’ Granddad. [BACK]
[21] And indeed, sadly, many people are so afflicted. I myself am incapable of whatever action is required to “open the throat”—to quote Bill Watterson’s Calvin, “I’m not even sure what muscle to flex.” Thus, I am incapable of funneling beer or other liquors (which incapacity has likely saved my life), and any shot I do, I must chamber: I’m forced to hold it first in my mouth and then swallow it after, like a bite of hamburger or a sip of cola. This means that anything I drink sits upon my palate; it means I must taste my shots and I’ve discovered that some of the many liquors which on first blush taste rather like liquid sandpaper or turpentine can, with acclimation, become noticeably delicious. Thus, I don’t fuck with mixers and don’t really get people who do. You want to get high without tasting the alcohol? Buy a bag of kief—probably cheaper.
The shot called Chocolate Cake, for instance (comprised of Frangelico, sugar and chilled well vodka), is merely possessed of some ersatz reflection of its namesake’s bouquet. And while this is sufficient similarity for those who can “toss back” the contents of their glasses, those who must taste this demonic mixture will want immediately to chase their shooter with a full pint of beef gravy or ketchup or GHB, or any other potent nepenthe—Chocolate Cake shots taste less like any cake in which I’ve ever indulged and more like the palatal equivalent of how snorting ice chips through a rolled twenty might feel. [BACK]
[22] Imported overproof rum, neat, is a superior beverage when compared to Everclear, room temperature Rumpleminze, absinthe (w/ wormwood extract, but without laudanum) and anything in Jim Beam’s Aftershock line. [BACK]
[23] This apparently makes sense to those with more than my extremely rudimentary knowledge of medicine. [BACK]
[24] Besides, however “goth” it may sound, I didn’t mind the taste of the blood, and it was, artistically speaking, potentially utile. I’d become adept at stanching the leaks, anyway. Once, I went face-down instead of head-back during a heavy flow—so confident that I could stop bleeding at will that I drained myself awhile for sport—and I collected an half-full Jug-O-Juice container of plasma, which I hid successfully in the fridge’s ghastlier recesses for almost an entire evening. When my mother found it, she called me a “sick weirdo” and, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I can entirely dispute the epithet. [BACK]
[25] The year I authored this essay—2005—I realized that the kid would have only just graduated high school. The year I finally edited the piece—2008—it occurred to me that the kid was just finally able to legally drink. A part of me wonders what became of the little mongrel once he achieved majority, but a larger part of me feels safe in the assumption that he became a world class imbecile, so ensconced in the affectation, pretension and machismo he likely began displaying as a result of ritualistic emotional abuse, that he will be essentially useless in any but the most banal and disappointing human interactions. He will pop his collar, cheat on his UV bed-bronzed girlfriends, affix a spoiler to his oft-washed economy sport sedan and only vent his emotions while watching pro and semipro sports on TV. Honestly: he was nine years old, tending his parents’ bar for kids twice his age, and he earnestly called me “gringo”—could another destiny lay waiting? [BACK]
[26] I know. Seriously. [BACK]
[27] What? If you ever swallow your snot whilst sniffling during a cold, then you’ve done much worse than this. [BACK]
[28] My mother was in the habit of withholding lunch money since, during my fifth-grade year, I’d saved the daily buck for three months and then used the scrip to buy $65 worth of sportscards. I bolted a bowl of Pebbles (Fruity or Cocoa) before school every day and came directly home afterward to raid the pantry: skipping lunch was a cakewalk. My brilliant scheme failed because, winter, I had to be driven to the sportscard shop and the driver was, of course, my mother. She saw my three-bag heist, I spun an exculpatory lie; she went inside to consult the shopkeep and returned scowling and furious to snatch my takings from me. I got the fifty or so packs back over the next year for my birthday, Easter, Chanukah, Christmas and Valentine’s. I always suspected but never confirmed that my mother was both impressed with my scheme and appalled by the idiocy with which I’d executed it’s final act.
In my defense, my mother only gave me $1.35 for lunch for a year or so after the price had gone up to $1.75. So even before my loot hoarding idea, I’d only been getting a slushy half-pint of OJ and a cup of soup daily—I was starved and cranky one afternoon and said, “I might as well just fucking skip the snack and save the cash for wax packs”: the thought came as a joke, fully formed. In her defense, she continued to withhold lunch money only because she always offered to buy me cold cuts and snacks to tote along with me. I tried for a school year and then, afterward, always refused—to this day, I think there’s something hideous and putrid about the taste of bagged lunch. Maybe I just don’t correctly assemble sandwiches. But I digress. [BACK]
[29] If it isn’t already bloody obvious, it should be here noted that virtually everything I presumed I knew about everybody, at fourteen, was gleaned through the medium of vacuum-tube TV: VHS cassettes, basic cable’s aetataureate reruns and then-contemporary broadcast sitcoms. It might also be useful for Reader to know that a generous portion of my adulthood has been spent coping with the lung-collapsing let down I suffered when I dematriculated from senior high, entered the real world and found that existence is nothing like anything anyone has ever presented on film or TV. [BACK]
[30] Which is much of the reason I remain unsure of whether I had just poured myself a shot or was instead about to pour myself a shot. [BACK]
[31] Three years prior to the events here depicted, I shared a classroom with a boy named Dave. Dave’s little brother had in his possession a heaping sack of M-80s and invited, through Dave, a number of older boys to their lakeside summer cabin for a grand ol’ weekend demolitions spree. I told all parties involved that I was saddened, but couldn’t make it. I learned the Monday after the ordeal that the little brother in question had, with his first firework, blown off both of his hands. Terrified and slightly validated by the tale (I was pleased that being chickenshit had, for once, come in handy), I resolved upon hearing it that I would never be so dimwitted as to tinker with bombs for recreation. Like most of my self-imposed dictums, however, I broke this rule with gusto. [BACK]
[32] There have been several occasions during my dipsomaniacally-defined young-adulthood where I have been quite desirous of my own personal breathalyzer. I’m not sure of the science behind how such a machine works (I know the basics—the test is predicated on the fact that alcohol in the bloodstream is excreted not only through urine and sweat, but also through respiration and, thus, breath can be an accurate gauge of BAC—but I don’t know whether the little black handheld device the cops have always works or instead requires some sort of expensive, single-use litmus-type paper or filter or whatnot), but if I had one and the tests were both quick and inexpensive, I’d take at least one every time I drank.
After a dozen years of regular intoxication, the phrase “Man, I was wasted last night” sort of loses flavor and impact—no matter how many colorful modifiers come before the word “wasted”: viz. “motherfucking, shit-ass, fall-down sixteen sheets to the wind wasted.” Additionally, it’d be fun to know that, yes, Thursday last actually was the drunkest I’ve ever been, and so on. And let’s not forget the fact that, in any drunk’s career, he eventually has a morning or two where he wakes suffering from a biblical-scale hangover despite only having had two beers and an ounce of whiskey the previous evening: yet another mystery I feel that, with the appropriate legwork, might be solved. [BACK]
[33] Whose family had a twelve-by-fifteen Nazi regalia room which featured prominent ceramic busts of Goebbels, Eichmann and Der Fuhrer himself, full-sized flags, and two ebon and gilt antique leather wingback chairs (surrounding a coffee table topped by a Third Reich lamp and an early edition of Mein Kampf). It was unquestionably the finest room in their generally wrecked and unkempt home. Two years after this party, I went to fetch a ball Justin 1 had thrown me, but that I had fumbled. And through ground-level basement window wells, I saw Justin 2 dip his erection into a glass jar of Heinz’s beef gravy and feed it to his German shepherd. No joke. A year after that, the dog was put down after biting through a neighbor boy’s testicle. That incident, I cannot help but feel, was informed by the gravy-related one. [BACK]
[34] The Killing Joke was a staple of the literary diet of my coevals and its villain was an icon with which virtually every boy, teenaged in the early nineties, would be familiar. Alan Moore’s take on the origin of Jack Napier’s criminally insane alter-ego in this volume was both plausible (except the toxic bleaching/reddening/greening of the Joker’s parts) and dark. At the time of this essay’s writing (2005) I had no idea that my villainous visage of that day would come to be cinematically resurrected: by the time of the editorial process, 2008, Heath Ledger’s final performance as the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight was available for mass-consumption. The film’s script and performances were admittedly heavily influenced by Moore’s 1988 graphic novel.
That day, on the muddy hillside, I behaved and looked like Ledger’s Joker—complete with an unsettling lip-smacking/licking which, in my case, was free-flowing blood-, not cocaine-, derived. For Reader’s convenience, he or she may use Ledger’s appearance and mien in that film as illustrative of mine, from the paragraph containing FN33 through the paragraph ending just before FN38. Of course one must allow for minimal palette swapping: I wore earth tones instead of paisley and purple and a mudmask instead of whiteface. But I probably appeared about as threatening. [BACK]
[35] And to the time of the editorial process, this is a fairly accurate description of what my bouts of blackout drunkenness actually are. I’ve been known to get a bit too…real (though I despise the MTV-infected connotations of the word). A fistful of any –codone caplets, for the record, only intensifies the effect. [BACK]
[36] I recall specifically that he lost his affected Chicano colloquialisms once spattered with my blood. [BACK]
[37] An hilariously futile gesture, considering I still looked otherwise a lot like Vertigo Comics’ Swamp Thing. [BACK]
[38] After years on the bar scene, I now realize that even from the generous distance at which I passed, my mother could probably smell the alcohol excreted by my lungs and skin. [BACK]
[39] The texture makes me think I took some food upstairs with me—remember I hadn’t eaten. But, for the life of me, I don’t remember doing so. Perhaps the more solid bits in my exudate were the remnant of my dignity. [BACK]
[40] Quite literally true as I was still a gory mess. In retrospect, it’s lucky my nosebleed stopped at all—alcohol is an anticoagulant and I slept with my face down, blood still running. [BACK]
[41] With all due respect, most of my mother’s advice sucked. There’s no more eloquent way to phrase it. I loved and still love the woman, but years to reflect caused me to realize that some of her behavior was, well, rather fucked up. Some of her advice was just plain insipid, some of it was (nugatory deposits installed and reinforced from an early age) pervasively destructive and downright scarring. She was an unmedicated, terminally timid depressive with no social circle outside of her three children, on whom she depended unhealthily for all emotional needs. She was, at her worst, an unintentionally toxic influence; often purposively debasing, using guilt and self-flagellation to the same effect as a Saturday afternoon matinee’s shirtless warrior wields a katana. Which is to say she was a human being, doing the best she could and, like everyone, usually failing miserably. [BACK]
