Shaming St. Patrick
This is what happened last year. This year I am going to try to avoid it.
St. Patrick’s Day was nothing but the calendar’s attempt to slow me down by speeding me up. I slept in until noon. I had a late lunch and an early dinner. By seven, I was as innocent as a babe. Then I happened upon a bottle of Windsor Canadian, some cola, ice and a few tokes of nature’s own goodness. Two hours passed and I was ready to really start drinking. The Windsor bottle was empty. The parking lot of the Cantina was packed but I drove on by. I slipped into Zorbaz. The crowd had been decimated. Tate was kind enough to save me the last green beer and I bellied up across from Larry.
“Hey Lare, where is everyone?”
“They all got drunk early and left.”
“****, that sucks.”
“Not really, it was the old crowd anyway.”
I was wearing a Guinness hat, reminiscent of the Cat in the Hat’s in shape but really it just looked like a huge pint of stout on my head. I dialogued the few chicks left in the bar and proceeded to nurse the liter of green beer while chain smoking cigarettes. I was surrounded by regulars and Zorbaz employees off-duty. In the back was a group of guys playing one of those vidiot games where the object is to blow away animated deer with a bright orange, plastic rifle. I’m a quasi-pacifist. In this group, my nemesis. He is obviously a hunter.
We all have those people that rub us the wrong way or for some reason go out of their way to be a pain in the ***. What is worse about my nemesis is he will proclaim he just cares about the Bob and if his questions seem to be an invasion of my privacy that is my problem not his. The guy has a keen interest in my finances and is associated with a group of young men who cannot grasp the fact that I haven’t held a job since March of 2001.
“I’m an artist! If you want to wake up five days a week to go slave for someone just to continue the status-quo that is the nightmare of our supposed freedom and the even worse silliness of our make believe economy, go ahead! I mean, really, just go get a 30 year mortgage while interest rates dictate affordability! I don’t want to hear about it. I’m done talking to you!”
He stared at me like he didn’t believe I was thirty seconds away from giving him a steady diet of uppercuts.
“What? You want the hat, punk? Here ya go! Just for you, the dunce cap of the evening!”
I pulled the Guinness hat over his eyes. The entire bar was staring at a wild-eyed, adrenaline pumped, four-leaf clover ready to blow. I offered a handshake. The nemesis refused, stood up and left the bar.
“Bob, just because you’re a lot smarter than that guy doesn’t give you the right to be that big of a dick.”
“Says who?”
She had me there, a valid point. I forget her name but her voluptuous nature was just what Dr. Windsor had ordered.
“Calm down. Now, are you going to follow us back to our house?”
“Anything you say, toots.”
Last call had come and gone. Time was the midway point between two and three in the morning. It had snowed the entire evening and frozen. The roads were slick. I fired up a cigarette, the Buick and tore off after the girls.
There comes a time in the lifecycle of every drunken driver. Not the guilt of the act or the physical mistakes caused by inebriation. The point at which decision making abilities cease to function. I was at the crossroads of the county road leading to my home and the highway. There was a lineup on both sides of the highway of five cars. The sobriety of each driver was in question. It was too early for the bar employee rush hour home. These were the hard core drunks. The girls turned left, southbound on the highway.
All I had to do was go straight, leave those two broads alone, get off the road and go sleep this drunk off. I turned left in hot pursuit of the fairer sex. The alignment was off a bit to the left in the Buick and the front tire pulled as I plowed through slush. Below the slush were patches of black ice. A slight fishtail of the Buick sent my cigarette flying out the open driver’s side window.
“****.”
I rolled up the window and turned up some classical music on NPR. The Buick was made with “Concert Sound.” I don’t know what it is but it does make classical music sound better. I was in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” when I felt the first fish tail bordering on loss of control. My foot came off the accelerator and my hands off the wheel. The drop in speed seemed to help but the misalignment bit into the next pile of slush.
I have a history of doing 360’s on highways at decent speed in the winter time. I’m a magnet for automobile mishaps. I’ve watched friends mutilate deer while digging for a CD. I saw the deer in the road. I could have warned the driver. I just sat there waiting for it to happen. I’ve convinced myself this is constructive apathy. We all know I just don’t give a ****.
The first 360, “Oh ****.”
Second, “God damn it!”
Third, “**** it.”
I sat back, closed my eyes and enjoyed the G forces. Tchaikovsky was perfect for my mood. I was just waiting to hit a mailbox and have it go right through my head. Bleeding to death at the bottom of a ditch almost seemed appropriate. The fourth 360 happened as I was facing north while spinning southbound. I had crossed the median and as the back tire hit the snow bank the Buick snapped to attention facing south. I slid thirty feet to the bottom of the steepest part of the ditch. I had just missed a driveway that would have sent the car flying and was forty yards short of open water. The driver door flew open. I killed the ignition. There was no way the vehicle was going anywhere.
I hopped out of the car like a brutha being chased on the television show Cops. I sprinted up a sixty degree incline singing, “Bad boys, bad boys, whacha gonna do? Whacha gonna do when they come for you?” A far cry from “Pathetique” in style but apropos nonetheless. The temperature was in the twenties. I was wearing shorts. It was still snowing. Stunned, in a controlled panic with adrenaline pumping longer than I needed, I crossed the highway on foot.
“Why didn’t I just go straight home?”
This time I did exactly that. I had conveniently crashed at a path by the lake leading the two miles to my home. Had it been summer, this would have been a nice walk. Instead, the blowing snow had drifted and the path was laborious. At least I wasn’t walking down the highway like some drunk. I could have used a light pole - for support, not illumination. I hoofed it fifty yards.
“**** this.”
I turned, looked back at the highway and lit my last cigarette. In the middle of the woods, even close to the highway, the animals snatch scents and hear bumps. My cigarette and a few curses had spooked some large fowl nearby. I heard the sound of their beating wings echo off the lake surface. Every third step I kicked a drift out of the way. I searched the ground for level area. Step, step, poof. Step, step, poof. I could have used more cigarettes. They were in Christina’s car. My last view of the girls was just before the first 360. Their tail lights disappeared around a corner.
The final half-mile of the trek was a slow incline. Torture and somewhat painful for the typical barstooler, but it had the feeling of walking out of Dante’s hell. For at the end of the incline was the Craftmatic adjustable bed. I needed to lay down. The adrenaline from escaping death, the disappointment of my inherent ability to elude twists of fate and the chagrin of the morning, tow truck duties kept sleep at bay. I couldn’t write. I didn’t want to grasp the consequences of my actions. It is not in my nature to question myself. I just turned on Dr. Fiorella Torenzi and listened to her sing about dancing and quantum mechanics...repeat…repeat…repeat. I was the object of my own spite and it was hopeless. All I could do was chastise myself with an evil chuckle heard in the background.