All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
- H.L. Mencken

It took a few phone calls, but eventually Martin and I tracked down the rest of the group and met up with them at another bar across town.
“This sucks.” Erin was running a wet napkin over Victoria near the front door of the place.
“Did you get egged, too?”
“Egged?” She looked confused, understandably so. I turned to ask Martin to explain, but he’d already spotted Samantha across the bar and broken loose in her direction.
“Henry bumped into Victoria in his ‘getaway’ and left a streak of sour cream all over the back of my dress.” Erin wiped at the stain furiously. “I have to wear this tomorrow.”
“She’s wearing your dress?”
“Victoria forgot her evening clothes in her car at the train station.”
Of course she did.
“We’re the same size.” Victoria slugged back a glass of wine. “So it fits.”
Funny how those concepts tend to mesh.
“What happened to you?” My Flock of Seagulls hairstyle and soaking wet shirt caught Victoria’s eye.
“I wasn’t fucking around. I got egged.”
“Like, with ‘egg’ eggs?” Her boyfriend appeared on the scene.
“Faberge.”
“Ha ha. Nice. Like those are those real expensive ones sheiks buy, right?” Victoria’s boyfriend appeared at my left. “I saw one once… at this museum. I think it was in Europe. It had, like, all these rubies–or, no… emeralds. Which ones are orange?”
“Hold that question.” I spotted Bennett across the bar.
“You chickenshit.”
“What?” He stared at the jukebox, knowing I was there, but refusing to acknowledge my presence. “I waited for you outside. You cut right. I was on the left.”
“They’re never going to let you back in that bar.”
“This should upset me?”
“I thought it was your favorite place.”
“I just said that. Somebody told me it had good nachos.”
“Nachos?”
“What?” The music slammed out of the machine, a deafening wall of noise – a half dozen bone-crunching, low register riffs buttressed with crashing cymbals.
“Nachos!?”
“You know what’s fucked?! What’s really, really fucked?” As he shouted, the opening notes faded for a moment and an immediately recognizable bass-line kicked in the rest of the song. “You can get anything here, anytime you want it, right?!”
“Right!”
“Can’t find decent guacamole! Anywhere!”

“How about–” He tapped his ear as the bass-line ended and the crunching wall of guitars started in again. “I said, ‘How about going to a store!?’”
“Make myself food?” I instantly noted my error – that I’d completely forgotten my audience.
“What’s with the Rage?” As we hollered at each other I spotted a bevy of girls near the bar starting to dance, shaking their hips back and forth as the singer shouted over the feedback laden bass: “Some of those who work forces, are the same who burn crosses!/Some of those who work forces, are the same who burn crosses!” In the corner of the bar I saw Victoria and Erin grinding to the music on either side of Victoria’s boyfriend, laughing and blowing cigarette smoke toward the ceiling.
“And now you do what they told ya!/And now you do what they told ya!” The bar bounced up and down with the chorus, even the slovenly ex-frat guys – the sort who’d never dance to anything – bobbing their heads along.
“I didn’t think you liked metal.” As long as I’d known the man, Bennett had only dug classic rock. Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Dylan… He didn’t even go in for the new retro stuff like the Black Crowes, or the better jam bands like Widespread or Government Mule. The guy couldn’t even stand Pink Floyd. And now he was grooving to Rage Against the Machine?
“They’re so angry. It’s hysterical!”
“I like the metal. But more like… Metallica.”
“Chicks love this shit.” He waved his hand across the bar. A blonde girl in a “PRADA” t-shirt was flinging her hair back and forth, mocking an eighties head-banger groupie from the front row concert footage in any Motley Crue or Poison video. A pair of brunettes were laughing on either side of her, one curling her upper lip Billy Idol style and trying to sing along, the other swinging back and forth like a belly dancer as she sucked back a cosmopolitan. “You can’t dance to fucking Metallica.”
“Those who died, are justified!/ For wearing the badge, they’re the chosen whites!” To the right of us, a pair of lushes in tight jeans were swing-dancing with their boyfriends – pulling away from the men every now and again and giving “devils horns” salutes to each other.
For an instant I was back in college, or perhaps stuck in some time warp where college had never ended. Which was entirely possible, given the crowd in the place. A highly unconscious scene… and not in the medical sense. Not much was considered here – just how to get plastered and fucked. A dormitory keg party for the mid-twenties to mid-thirties set, for the long term adolescents who’d never seen a reason to change. Just shifted to higher end vices, what the boom of the Nineties made common. From the frat party in the basement to weekend benders in Vegas, from cans of Milwaukee’s Best to glasses of Macallan, rocks.
And standing there watching the scene, I remembered this particular party they had every year back at school. A frat house down the block full of kids from Greenwich would hire a reggae band to play in the spring. Everybody’d get whacked on mushrooms and check out the show – sucking down beers, smoking joints and throwing Frisbees around the academic quadrangle next door. I didn’t pay too much attention to the tunes, pretty much sick of reggae after having been force-fed the stuff by every burner I’d known since high school. (“Duuude… Marley was like… a genius.”)¹ But every now and then, one of the lyrics would strike me – some odd little line about oppression, being a second class citizen on a Caribbean island full of dinner jacket colonists. And in the mindset I held in those moments, that psychedelic focus where you see through the ornamentation, straight into the architecture of things, I’d look up at the band for a second, watch them watching a pack of soft, oblivious brats doing the country club shuffle to “One Love” and think, They have to be laughing at this shit. The irony’s too ridiculous.
But that flashback wasn’t long. Hard to play steel drums in your head with “And now you do what they told ya!/ Now you’re under control!” blaring over and over in your ears.
“So was it good?!”
“Was what good?” Bennett leaned toward me.
“The guac.”
“Ask Henry. He ran off with it.”
The song just kept erupting, and the girls went right on dancing. Bennett waved down the bartender for another round of whiskeys as a pair of thirty-something players across the bar toasted each other through a haze of cigar smoke… Single malts and two hundred dollar haircuts.
“Fuck you!/I won’t do what you tell me!”
Right.
. . .
If I were back in the office, describing the evening to “Norm,” this is where he might get confused. Prod me with questions in Vince Vaughn’s Swingers’ affectation. “So’d you use the egg thing to lay any sympathy rap on chicks? Babes eat up that wounded bird shit.”
Yeah, dude. Fuckin’ rocked it. Tapped one ass in the bathroom, one in the alley behind the bar and got a hand job on the cab ride to the next bar… Oh, wait. Are we in ‘Fight Club,’ or is this reality?
I could never translate the picture. Never explain how it worked, how the overt electric surface was absent a current beneath. And that this wasn’t an ethos distilled, some mindset of a breed drawn in lurid, native ritual. That nothing was being affirmed, no posture assumed at all. We weren’t “players,” “club trash” or “bros.” Not “artsy,” “preppy” or “hipsters.” And none of what we did was conscious. Just the general forms of amusement, what we’d done since we we’d known enough to do it. A pleasant, casual nowhere. Crack the seal on the bottle and off to the races you go.
But we all need a coat of arms, right? Or at least to wear one for others. Which was where “Norm” might have had some trouble. See, if I drew that night without comment, with no binding motive beneath – no goal or congealing mindset, or tether drawing everyone together, how could he decide what I was? And that was the point, right? Categorize, then fraternize. Maybe not down to species, but at least to the genus level.
What’s my aim? What am I chasing? All of it… None of it. Depends what day you ask. How many I had the night before. Whether I’d gotten laid recently.
I could never say that openly, not in any comforting sense – nothing that would reinforce him. How do you describe an absence? It was kind of like that old saying, “Everything in Moderation”… if that were a compulsory government edict or an inviolable law of nature. The way I figured it then, life was never going to be a cakewalk. But it also wasn’t going to be hard. I mean, I guessed I might hit it lucky, or things might really go wrong, but neither was likely to happen. I’d likely float in the middle, the higher end of that, I assumed. And that’s about where my kind, if there was one, probably truly belonged. Not brilliant, but smarter than a lot. Not rich, but well above poor. Ambitious enough in a pinch, but otherwise lazy as the rest. Talented in one way or another, but hardly a world class anything. The kind of people who wound up gliding through jobs like I had – leveraging licenses, brokering things… collecting checks and coming to grips with the slot the market was assigning us.
It’s not a bad life. When I’m really honest with myself, I’ll admit, the position has a decent list of pluses. And things could have been a whole lot worse. But it’s hardly an inspiring place, the sort that breeds tribal fervor… makes you want to identify with the rest of its population, label and embrace your brethren. To go in for something like that, you’ve got to be damn enthused, and in the world I knew at that time, the edges seemed to be fading – the peaks of the highs and lows blunted by the weight of routine. Just an aging carnival crowd, still rolling along on the rides. Someday I’m going to have to get a plan… But not right now.
The “Norms” I saw at the office? I have to say, I envied them. They’d selected and stuck with an ethos – even a silly one like that alpha-male player posture so many decidedly non-player sorts attempt to assume. No explaining the weekend to that tribe, or any other for that matter. It’d only serve to confuse, possibly alienate. When they come into your office on Monday and ask you the inevitable question, there’s only one answer that works – a phrase you might know well:
“Nothing exciting… A little of this, little of that.”
An oddly truthful brush-off.
. . .
“You got egged?” Karen found me at the bar.
“No, this is a look.”
“Sorry, It’s just–” She choked on her smoke, trying to stifle a laugh. “You know what’s good for that? To get that out of your clothes?”
“Why do you think my hair’s so sticky? Martin poured a bottle of the real stuff – with sugar – on my head.”
“There’s sugar in club soda?”
“Club soda?” Son of a b– I realized the mistake in an instant, and immediately set about punishing the fool who’d given me such terrible advice. “Bartender! Can I also have a glass of tonic water with that Wild Turkey?” I scanned the bar, looking for Martin, to pour it on his head. But when I looked around he was gone. Taken off somewhere with Samantha, probably to her apartment. Perfect. Two clowns running down the sidewalk, barely a yard apart… Fate gifts me a face full of eggs. But Martin? He gets nothing – not even a bit of shrapnel. And to top it off, the prick gets lucky? Where’s the equity in this?
“Did you use tonic water in your hair?” Karen had listened to my order.
“I thought it was diet.” Actually, I hadn’t even considered the difference. Tonic, seltzer, club soda… I was loaded, and whacked on adrenaline. Who had the time to think? And it’s all the same shit, right? Clear, kind of sharp tasting, filled with bubbles?
She was laughing out loud now, elbowing Bennett. “This ass poured tonic water in his hair!”
“If you’re going to wash with this, please do it in the rest room.” The bartender handed me the drinks.
“Can I tip you in pennies?”
“If you want the rest of your drinks mixed with water from the bar towel.”
“You moron. You’re hair’s going to be like taffy.”
“Fuck you, Karen.” I grabbed my drink and headed toward the jukebox, to see if it held a copy of Eat a Peach, so I could play song number four (the track they never listed, but anyone who owned the record knew was there). Force the bar to listen to half hour version of “Mountain Jam.” Calm the surroundings a bit, get some clarity.
Another bar and two or so hours later we were standing in Bennett’s apartment, digging into take-out six packs of beer and a box of nitrous cartridges I’d brought up from Philly.
“In a minute,” Victoria’s voice came from other side as I knocked on the bathroom door.
“Anyone seen Martin?” Victoria’s boyfriend was attempting to spark a joint, but was actually igniting his goatee. “I promised I’d hit this with him.”
“He went home with Samantha. They’re probably at her place.”
“That’s imposssss–” Erin fell sideways on the couch, a victim of her first balloon.
“Hey, you mind if I put in a show?” I could hear the Phish Guy pestering Bennett.
“Yes.”
“‘Yes’ I can or ‘No,’ you mind?”
“What does it sound like?”
“Why don’t you get Victoria out of the bathroom?” Karen put him to work. “She’s been in there since we got here.”
“So you want to hear a show?”
“No. I don’t.” Bennett was rifling through the liquor on the shelf in the kitchen. “I want you to get your girlfriend out of the bathroom.”
“Shotgun on the bathroom.” I saved my space in the order.
“He’s got a two seat bowl?”
“You know what I mean, Karen.”
“You’ve got a sort of a Robert Smith thing going on now. You want some blush?”
“Does your boyfriend beat you?”
“Maybe…”
“Not enough.”
“Martin can’t be at Samantha’s.” Erin emerged from the nitrous stupor. “She’s down from Boston, visiting.”
“She better not be puking in there.” Bennett hollered at Victoria and the Phish Guy through the bathroom door.
“She’s ‘upper decking’ you.”²
“No doubt… Sad thing is it’s probably by accident.”
“I’m going to have to buy another dress.” Erin shook her head and stared at the clock. Whatever’d been going on in the bathroom for the last fifteen minutes, it didn’t bode well for the health of that piece of clothing.
“Who the fuck drank all my Bushmills?” Bennett flung his hands in the air, swatting a half filled beer and empty liter of tonic onto the couch below the bar.
“Give you one guess.” I flipped through an old Financial Times on the table. “Starts with an ‘H.’”
“This is getting ridiculous.” Karen knocked on the door to the bathroom, even jiggled the knob. Locked, and there was no response from inside.
Fuck this. I picked up the empty liter bottle on the couch and ducked out the front door. There was a laundry room halfway down the hall, ten or twenty yards before the elevators, where I figured I’d have some privacy. Hell, maybe they’d even have a wash basin, in the likely case my bladder was holding more than thirty-three ounces. Worked for Henry. Why not?

“Whoa!” “Hey! Hey!” I was clicking on the lights with my elbow and “arranging things” with my hands when the voices shocked me backward. Martin and Samantha were rolling around on the linoleum flooring, half dressed, furiously grasping for coverage. “What the fuck are you doing!”
Just trying to stuff my dick in this plastic bottle.
“Get out of here!”
“Guess they didn’t go to Boston.” I jumped back into the hallway and started fixing my pants, laying the bottle on the floor and checking my fly to make sure every bit of the equipment was back inside before I pulled up the zipper.
As I picked up my head from the task, I realized a woman was standing before me. She was short, older, Asian – dressed in a simple brown raincoat, a suitcase in one of her hands. Probably coming home from the airport, from some long flight from another coast. And here I was, adjusting my pants, picking up an empty bottle from the floor, staring at her, wondering whether I’d just indecently exposed myself. Wondering what she might say. Wondering whether to walk past her and pretend I was on my way to the elevator, rather than trail behind her, making her frightened, liable to scream if I got too close… possibly blast me with one of those key-chain mace canisters. I could sense she was a bit uneasy, that she couldn’t make sense of the moment – gauge whether I was a harmless, idiot drunk or some degenerate sexual predator.
If every picture tells a story, what was mine? From the feet up things were promising. Driving mocs, khakis, clean pressed shirt. But then we get up near the chest and shoulders, to the patchwork of crusted stains everywhere, and then the hair – a half spiked, half-wind blown mass of mangled locks splayed across the side of my head, filled with little white bits of shell. One side didn’t fit with the other, at odds with each other, really. And my actions didn’t make sense at all. Just standing there wearing that sideways, retarded smile, trying to make it seem like a casual thing. I was just finishing this tonic in the laundry room and happened to notice my penis had somehow escaped my zipper, so… Where was the narrative in this situation? The easy explanation she could take away from the apparent clues? A person so seemingly put together on one level can’t be a flailing idiot or deviant underneath.
Yes. Yes he can. And that describes about half, maybe two thirds of this nation. Everybody’s embracing tribes. Professionals, laborers, conservatives… liberals, protectionists, free traders… fundamentalists, evangelicals, atheists… the list goes on forever. For most of us, however, the difference between what we are and what we telecast – what we profess to “believe” in – is immense. And though we’d like to project control, most of that’s past our grasp. We call ourselves environmentalists while working for law firms that represent coal and logging companies. We vote straight line liberal Democrat while paying an accountant to shelter us from the taxes that come with it. We go to church on Sunday, but when our daughters get knocked up, we’re all suddenly pro-choice. It’s all about incentives and compulsions. Think you know what you’d do in Bonds’ or A Rod’s position? How you’d have acted if you were Henry Blodgett? One of those bankers pimping that mortgage backed garbage you knew was a ticking time bomb? You think you’d have stuck to the values attached to your image with someone dangling a huge pile of “fuck you” money in your face? The biggest force behind most of our “personal branding” is what we can get. And what we can’t. Do you think for an instant that if they could score a half decent, smart chick, the “Norms” of this world wouldn’t abandon that “uber-male on the prowl” bullshit posture? Your options, or lack thereof, control your world, and you do what they tell ya.
Everyone’s two different people. We all have elastic codes, adjustable moral compasses and our dirty, instinctual vices. The surface is just a veneer, masking a conflicted core. At any given moment, composed as we might appear, we’re all just a half fifth of whiskey, a few nitrous balloons and a congenitally weak bladder from finding ourselves stumbling around the hallway of a Manhattan high rise, trying to piss in a bottle.
But I couldn’t say that to the woman. In that limited instant, the surface was all that mattered. I nodded politely and walked in the direction of the elevator, away from where she was headed. Away from Bennett’s place, so she wouldn’t connect an apartment number to what she’d seen, and what she might see if she walked into the laundry room.
“Get out of there already!” Bennett was pounding on the bathroom door when I finally got back into his place.
“Where were you?” Karen handed me a balloon and I settled into the couch.
“Meeting the neighbors.”
“Come on! Get out!” I stared up at the ceiling fan, listening to Bennett shaking the doorknob and shouting, his words turning to echos as the gas scrambled my brain. “I’llllll…. brrrrreak… the…. fuckkkkkker… down!”
At the very last second, just as I was sure he was about to rip the thing off its hinges, the door popped open and Victoria’s boyfriend came out. “Sorry about that.”
“Did you vomit in there?” Bennett was nearly unglued. “You’re cleaning it up.”
“No vomit, man. It’s all cool.” Victoria appeared to his right, pulling both hands back behind her head and fixing her hair in a bow.
“Are you kidding me?” I heard Erin yell in the background as I lurched forward to beat Karen to the bathroom.
“Victoria, have you looked in the mirror?” Karen’s jaw dropped flat.
“What? What’s the issue?” Victoria sat down on a chair near the television, and started putting on some lip gloss.
“Are you serious?” Bennett’s eyes were wide as saucers. “You’re really asking that?”
“You suck, Victoria.” Erin jumped up from the couch. “You just… suck.”
“What’s your problem?”
“Oh, shit. Vickie– Vic–Uh…” Phish Guy finally realized what was going on. “Can you, uh– Let’s go back in the bathroom.”
“The hell you will.” Karen darted behind him.
“What are you looking at?” Victoria ran her hands over her face, looked in her lap, felt her sides and then, in her last act of self examination, touched her shoulders and realized why we’d all been laughing. Well, everyone except Erin. “Oh… fuck.” On the edge of her right shoulder, now smeared, was a monstrous, glistening load of ejaculate. It had to be a half a foot, and from the way the thing was laying, you could almost envision the deposit – a last minute pull-out from her mouth, only a second too late to fire it on something other than her person.
“I always figured you swallowed.”
“Go to hell.” She looked for something to throw at Bennett.
“Can I get in there?” Victoria twisted the bathroom door handle back and forth. “I need to get in there, just for a second.”
“Just a tiny minute!” Karen answered in a high-pitched, schoolmarm voice. “Powdering my nose a bit.”
“Don’t get that… shit on my doorknob.” Bennett started to grab Victoria’s arm, then wisely backed away.
“Like you haven’t jerked off in the toilet a thousand times before.”
“Nobody jacks off in the toilet.” A terrible misconception, one I felt I had to address. “That’s totally myth.”
“Really?” Erin thought I was joking.
“Who’s got aim like that?”
“I was speaking generally.” Victoria was still begging at the door.
“Maybe in the sink.”
“Near the toothbrushes?” Erin spit out a hit from the joint, which she was now furiously sucking down, no doubt to forget what she’d seen – that her dress had been thoroughly Lewinskyed.
“I didn’t say I had no aim.”³
“Ever do it in the car, driving? I used to go on these long trips up to Ithaca and–”
“Enough!” Victoria put her hand over her boyfriend’s mouth.
“What the fuck?” He wrestled her away. “I don’t want that on me!” It’s a strange phenomenon, one that makes minimal, if any, sense, but I understood the man’s objection. Though it comes out of your own body, no man can touch his own semen. It’s not that it’s gooey or slimy, or that it smells like a mild form of Clorox. It’s the fact that it’s not for keeping – something to be dropped off elsewhere, left in another’s charge. Instinct tells you it’s toxic. Leave it. Get away from it. That shit’s dangerous. Put it in the wrong place and you can wind up paying $1,000 a month to someone you barely know. For eighteen years, by court order.
“It’s your… ‘stuff.’” She wrenched him backward, shoving her hand toward his face.
“That doesn’t mean I want it smeared on me!”
“Hey, hey… Watch it. You’re going to–” Before Bennett could finish the words, Phish Guy toppled backwards over a pile of luggage, pulling Victoria with him. They fell sideways across the arm of a director’s chair, which immediately buckled under the stress, half-folding, half-cracking into a pile of stilts and cloth underneath them as they crashed onto the coffee table, turning it sideways, flipping ashtrays, open beers and Styrofoam containers filled with half eaten sandwiches, chips, french fries and opened mustard and mayonnaise packets into the air, landing on the carpet, the luggage and all over Phish Guy and Victoria, now lying on the floor.
“You idiots.” Bennett could only stand there, staring at the damage. “You fucking idiots.”
“What the hell do I wear tomorrow?” Erin hung her head in her hands. “His folks were taking us to a serious restaurant.”
“Just tell them what happened.” Phish Guy offered his usual sage advice.
“What? ‘I loaned my dress to a friend and then another friend went nuts on over-the-counter speed and smeared a burrito up the side of it dining and dashing from a restaurant? Then her boyfriend came all over it and threw her into a table full of condiments and onion rings, so sorry… I’m just going to have to wear jeans?””
“Who had onion rings?”
Sssssssssssssssssssssssss. I filled a balloon and handed it to Erin. “Best not to think here. You’ll just give yourself a headache.”
As it usually tends to work, an hour or so later, after the box of nitrous cartridges, another joint and the last of the take out beer, people started passing out. I was startled awake in the desperate early morning – six, maybe seven o’clock – to the sound of the doorbell ringing. Who the fuck is this?
Henry was standing outside.
“Where were you?”
“Can’t talk. Need to go back to bed.”
“Back?” He never answered, just stumbled into Bennett’s room and heaved himself into a pile of laundry on the floor, wadding a stack of filthy t-shirts and jeans into pillow under his head.
“Who was that?” A body creaked up from the floor, behind the coffee table.
“Samantha?” I didn’t know how they got in, but somehow, some way, in the middle of the night, somebody must have let her and Martin into the apartment. I could see him lying nearby, against the wall to the bar, wedged between shoes and luggage.
“That was… Henry.” As our eyes met, the moment came back, that awkward run-in a few hours before. Her and Martin on the linoleum, me with my dick hanging out, trying to shoehorn it into a bottle. The mind meld was instantaneous.
So you’re going to hear what my tits are like on the way home, and how I fuck. You’re going to laugh about catching us on the floor.
We went to the same school, remember? I already know what your tits look like. Sucked on them, I think. Who in this room hasn’t fucked around with all the members of the opposite sex here? If it helps you go back to sleep, they’re nice. A little sloppy, but it’s all good.
We got up for real around noon, when Erin packed her stuff and left. “Just get it cleaned and mail it to me.” Victoria was offering to go out and pick her up a new dress, but Erin didn’t have time for shopping. “I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend and his family at the hotel in an hour.”
Martin and Samantha sat on opposite sides of the couch, wondering whether to act like old casual friends or observe the standard rule on those sort of hook-ups and behave, at least for the moment, like there was some sort of deeper connection. I could read the neuroses in their eyes, the two of them wondering whether it would it more impolite to pretend nothing happened or to pretend it was more than it was.
We staggered out around 1:00, stopped at a deli across the street and, after waiting for Henry to vomit in the men’s room, finally reached the parking garage. Nobody’d said a word. Just stumbled, moaned and grimaced. We had two hours plus in a car, sick and only getting sicker.
“You’re taking a train from Philly. I can’t do the ride to Delaware.” Henry didn’t put up a fight. I don’t think he had the strength. Demon ephedrine. As bad as I felt in that moment, with the cold sweats and shakes and nerves, his pain was thousand times worse. Like an ice pick between the eyes, with a sidecar of arrhythmia and angina. There is nothing worse on this planet than the “day after” those awful pills. A truckload of pure powdered evil, pressed into a tiny white discs.
“Where’d you stay last night?” Karen had no mercy on him.
“I don’t know. Ohhh. I was running and then I was at this bar– These chicks from Jersey were there… Somebody bought me drinks and… Does anyone have gum?” He could barely stay on point. It was like listening to someone recite The Hobbit from memory on mushrooms. “I think I left a credit card somewhere, or a jacket, maybe. Did I have a jacket? I wanted to get pizza– Then I got lost in the building and– I think I slept in the laundry room…”
“Really? I hear it’s nice.”
“She was good.” Martin snickered and started packing a bowl. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Wait ’til we’re in the straightaways to hit that, where we’re blending into traffic.” I took the big left rolling out of the Lincoln Tunnel and flipped the cruise control to seventy. Fast enough to make decent time, slow enough to stay off the radar. Nobody had anywhere to be, and this wasn’t a day for tickets. I was already shaky and squirrely, seeing shadows on the road that probably weren’t there. I’d break down in tears if a cop pulled us over, and there was no good coming from a search. Better to play it safe – steady, straight and vanilla… Just another pack of generic whitebread kids packed into an SUV, heading home from some wholesome fun in the city.
_______________________________
¹ He is, the same way Johnny Walker Blue is a phenomenal scotch. But if you have it all the time, it might as well be Budweiser. I’m not going to demand anyone turn Marley off, or turn down a glass of that whiskey when it’s offered, but frankly, I might rather listen to Peter Tosh instead, and have a glass of Red. People who go for the super smooth, high end shit all the time wind up fat, with the Gout (in their heads as well as their joints).
² Removing the top of the back of the toilet and defecating in the clean water depository, causing the fixture to flood contaminated water into the bowl with each successive flush, basically destroying the toilet.
³ Untrue. I’ve twenty years plus of practice and I still don’t know where it’s going to land – whether it’ll be a lazy foul tip, blazing line drive up the middle or a looping moonshot, deep into the stands.

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