Well, woke up this morning with a wine glass in my hand.
Whose wine? What wine? Where the hell did I dine?
Must have been a dream I don't believe where I've been.
Come on, let's do it again.
- "Do You Feel Like We Do," Peter Frampton
When I left the office on Friday at 5:00, I never knew who was going to be in my apartment at midnight, standing across the dresser from me, chopping lines in the "Computer Room." Whoever became connected to our happy hour circle - friends from high school, college buddies passing through town, wasted work comrades and their roommates... nameless acquaintances I could barely connect to anyone in the group - all came along for the ride. Sometimes, only half the party got wired, leading to odd groupings in the apartment. If we brought along people we weren't sure were comfortable with the concept of getting tuned up, one or two of us would entertain them in the living room while the others locked themselves in the bathroom. When one of the living room brigade spotted one of the bathroom crowd back in the living room, we'd switch places (except for the bathroom whores, who had to be reminded of the one-line-per-trip rule). Awkward run-ins were the rule. A co-worker of a friend of Frampton's would run into Lisa and Miles walking out of a locked bathroom together, laughing hysterically. Somebody's girlfriend would open the door to the Computer Room and lock eyes with me, gingerly placing a powder dusted copy of "Rust Never Sleeps" in the top drawer of a dresser.1 I'd smile, civil. Nothing. To. See. Here. Sometimes, people would come across Miles, hunched over the air conditioning unit in the Computer Room, white as a ghost, catching his breath, his brow drenched in sweat, suffering a Too Much moment. He'd turn and bleat a C- excuse in a shaky, desperate Jack-Lemmon-from-"Glengarry Glen Ross" tone. "I, think I, uh, had bad, uh... Indian food earlier... spicy... curry... It burrrrns... I'm fine..."
These evenings always started the same. Frampton, Miles and I would meet outside __________ at 5:10. Chuck, the bartender, was on retainer; we'd pay him $100 on a $50 check for $200 of Wild Turkey, Amstel and Jack Daniels. About four or five drinks in, Christian would appear. A friend of Frampton's, Christian was a thin German who'd emigrated to Philadelphia less than a decade before. A likely lifelong bachelor and incorrigible swordsman, Christian lived to get high and chase ass. Studying to be a veterinarian, he had a calendar and work schedule that allowed him stay out all night doing it. Connected to people carrying "Cocksucker Blues" quantities of lello, he could easily live two, maybe three lives at once. Which he did.
Christian would usually hang out with us during the early part of the evening, then cut loose around midnight to hit one of the bars in Olde City packed with late 20-somethings in low cut tops and tight micro-skirts. The summer wasn't a great hunting time. Most of the quality was at the beach. The bright side was less competition for the meat left behind, Philly's "Guido" population having moved to the Jersey Shore for the season. But then, that didn't really matter to Christian anyway. He was fearless. He'd start a conversation with any girl, as though he'd known her since fourth grade. That she was property of a hulking gel-head getting a Miller Light at the bar, or a college student who'd never be interested in any man carrying the stench of post-graduation "real world" didn't concern him. Christian would coax her onto the floor at Cuba Libre, and the guy knew how to dance. Not like some Drexel student who'd taken a salsa class, but actual, real Latin dancing - smooth, effortless, hard-wired into his joints... the kind that makes a dancing partner wonder why she's with the guy she's with. He also had a thick foreign accent. What'd be a social foul, or the desperate come-on of a decrepit divorcee coming from you or me, was charming coming from Christian.
"He's German, like really from Germany."
"Ohhh, Brianna... Has he been to Vienna? I've heard it's to die for."
Christian did well. Very well.
Christian either had blow or he didn't. If he did, he'd walk into _________'s wearing a huge grin. After a few more drinks, we'd catch a cab to _________, a restaurant around the corner from my place where we knew the owner. We'd meet Lisa and Frampton's girlfriend, Kerry there. Three drinks later, we'd be at Frampton's, picking up extra Camel Lights and beers. Then we'd head to my place, walking through the lobby, smiling to the Asian doorman booming "How are you?" from behind the security desk. The air in the lobby was refrigerator cool. The sweat built up under the heat of your suit suddenly felt like ice on your skin. We stepped briskly, determined, numb from the liquor. Popping into the elevator, we'd make smiling chitchat with whoever was standing next to us - the red-faced jowly bachelor who lived down the hall, stumbling in from happy hour at Brasserie Perrier, or the pleasant 40ish woman with her cute daughter in the Catholic school uniform. We were positively chipper. And why wouldn't we be? Christian had a fresh baggie in his pocket. We were ten minutes from feeling better than everybody else in the ____ apartments in the building.
Even the ones fucking.
Every one of "those" nights was the same. I'd turn on the proper liftoff music. "Aaaaaaalllllll... that I neee-heed/Look at all the love we've found/I won't run and pull the one jack move/They love her for the Kingston Sound..."2 Frampton would hand me a cigarette. Miles would start fixing drinks. Lisa and Kerry would crack open champagne and Christian would start cutting lines. Sniff. Drink. Gibberish. Drink. Sniff. Drink. Gibberish. Change music. Show Miles newly discovered porn site. Sniff. Drink. More gibberish. Not much would change for a couple hours, until Lisa and Kerry got bored and wanted to go dancing. They'd take off, usually with Christian. Frampton, Miles and I would throw some mushrooms or a joint into the mix. Sniff. Smoke. Argue about 73' Dead versus '69 Dead. Smoke. Sniff. Drink. Drink. Sniff. Smoke. Get the door. Apologize to Doorman about loud music. Promise to turn it down. Put in "Waiting for Columbus," cue to "Spanish Moon." Smoke. Sniff. Turn it up. Louder. Three more hours would pass. It'd be 3:30, and we'd be nowhere near sleepy, but the baggie'd be done. Perfect with their timing, Lisa, Kerry and Jessica or whoever else was with them on any given night would roll back in around 3:30, after last call and a pit stop at some late night club. Kerry would collect Frampton. Miles would order a cab. End of the night.
But not this night. Frampton left around 3:45. 4:00 came and went. Still no sign of the girls. No answer on her cell. No answer at Frampton's. I struggled to remember where they'd gone, when they said they'd be back... when they'd left. Did they take a cab? Did Christian drive again? There was reason to be worried - remote, but real. Earlier that Summer, Christian, Kerry and Lisa had snuck into the nearby hotel's pool to swim. Lisa was uncontrollable drunk, Jessica was allergic to common sense and Christian had one agenda - fucking Jessica. If Lisa or Kerry suggested it, Christian would've broken into any hotel pool in the city for a chance to see Jessica skinny dip. They could have been arrested. That Christian was probably carrying a second, personal baggie, made that scenario all the more complicated.
The rotten possibilities poured into my head as I stared in the wall length bathroom mirror. Arrests? Bail? Kerry, Lisa, Jessica and Christian in holding cells downtown? Possession? Trespassing? Fuck that... Idiot paranoia - the drugs talking. I knew from the shark eyes staring back at me - saucer-sized pupils, wider than a "Speed Racer" character's. Some people tell you never to look in a mirror on hallucinogens. That's folly. Your reflection's the only oracle that'll prove you're all the fool you suspect you are, and those passing certainties of impending doom are just a shitty side effect of a neuron scrambler. Embrace the mirror. Never make a dope decision without it.
Miles' cab arrived at 4:00 and I was left sitting in the house alone, polishing the evening off with snifters of Grand Marnier. The blow wasn't heavily cut with uppers, but it was cut enough that I knew I'd be up for a few more hours. I could feel the tension welling in my joints as the mushroom buzz faded. I'd started at 1:00 with shake at the bottom of a quarter I had in the freezer. Once the amusement of the fungus ebbed, it was my body versus some vicious amphetamine derivative. No Xanax, no Ambien - nothing - riding bareback... my liver and kidneys against the Drug.
I heard someone fiddling with the lock around what I think was 5:30. Lisa was leaning on the other side of the door. She poured into the apartment, weaving through the entranceway, pushing off the walls for balance as she went.
"Where'd you go?"
"Cuba Libre... And someplace else... Fu-uck..." She was grabbing her back like she were having an arthritic spasm.
"What's the matter?"
"I fell on my head."
"What?"
"I fell out of a tree outside of Christian's house and landed on my back." I felt the back of her head. The blood wasn't dramatic, but a fairly large knot was building on it.
"How far?"
"I don't know... ten feet?"
"How the fu---"
"Car surfing." Lisa leaned back on the bed and struggled to take off her dress. "He parked the car under the tree, and a branch was there. I started climbing. I lost my grip-- shit... Can you help me?" I pulled the dress up. She fell out of it and collapsed face down onto the bed, fumbling to adjust the covers around her.
I knew the tree. I could see its thin trunk rising from the cracked sidewalk in front of Christian's row home. I could see Christian driving home in his Saab, weaving shitfaced through the narrow side streets, Lisa flailing out of the passenger side window, climbing onto the roof, surfing, waving to the spectators on the sidewalks, crawling home from last calls. Miss Vodka 2003. I could see her howling along with the blaring radio from his car, bleating "My Cat's Name is Maceo" into the stale summer air. I could see Christian parking the car, and Lisa grabbing the lowest branch of the tree and disappearing into it, a monkey in a blonde wig and short black cocktail dress.
"You could have a concussion."
"I could," she slurred back.
I'd heard somewhere that a person with a concussion should never sleep, because if they did, they'd die. I immediately defaulted to worst case scenarios. She looked alright; her eyes seemed alert; her voice was strong. She knew her name, where she was, what day it was. But how could I tell if her slurring was the product of a deep drunk or the first wave of concussion dementia? And what could I do? I couldn't go to the hospital. They'd ask for a history. They might even test her blood. That couldn't happen. The fallout would be insufferable. But then how couldn't I take her to a hospital? The "Point/Counterpoint" was maddening. She's fine - you're paranoid. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean she's fine. There was only one thing to do - stay up and watch her all night. It was 6:00 anyway.
Between moments of frenzied aimless channel surfing, I watched the better parts of "Unforgiven" and "The Quiet Man," stopping every few minutes to run into the bedroom to check on Lisa. The queerness of standing over her, looking to see if she was breathing, and cracking Yuenglings as the sun rose because I couldn't bear sobriety in a moment like that, but couldn't bring myself to drink whiskey at a breakfast hour, wasn't lost on me. I made several mental notes, all variations on the same theme - "No more blow." But those were just words - pledges... and coke pledges at that, the lowest sub-prime loan of self-help promises, lost in a hurricane of movie dialogue, lyrics and random guitar bridges from the evening randomly repeating in my head.
The end of a mushroom buzz leaves the brain scrambling, struggling to reconcile a million disparate notions that rode through it in the previous hours. Your mind is a 24 track recorder, mixing the evening together. Only the tracks don't fit. Stuffing shitty coke into the mix is jamming the machine into fast forward with the tape door slightly ajar. All's frenetic, images and sounds blurring into a non-sequitur narrative, voices zooming past like a Chipmunks record. William Munny's speech to Little Bill is mixed with Sean Thornton and Will Danaher's fight scene and overlaid with hundreds of snippets of commentary from your fellow travelers of the night, coated in endless song fragments that seemed profound in the moment. "'I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned... Cause I'm hung up, on dreams I'll never see... The Marquis of Queensbury Rules will be observed on all occasions... Please don't dominate the rap, Jack, if you've got nothin' new to say... We're the psycho-semantic police - you can't even see us3... Did Christian have another bag?... Deserve's got nothin' to do with it... They say I shot a man named Grey, and took his wife to Italy..." I rode the morning out, mumbling to myself, the cirrhotic ramblings of "The Quiet Man's" elfin drunkard, Michaleen Oge Flynn, pinballing around my head along with the flick's infectious theme... "Dum dum dum dum dum dum, duh-duh-duh-duh, dum dum dum dum dum dum... Never. Again. ...Dum dum dum dum dum dum, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh... Never. Ever. Again. ...Marquis of Queensbury Rules!... Never, ever again. ...There was a wild colonial boy/Jack Duggan was his name/He was born and bred in Ireland... Stop. Just. Stop. ...Dum dum dum dum dum dum, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh... Somebody, kill me."
I collapsed into sleep somewhere after 10:00.
Lisa woke me around 1:30. "Hey, hey... when did I get in?"
"Fuck, uh... 5:30 or so. How's your, uh, head?" I was still half drunk and slurry, holding my hand over my face to block the light from my eyes.
"Fine. But my back is killing me. I don't think it was the ground that really fucked it up, but some branches I hit on the way down. I have all these cuts and scratches."
"You're lucky. I thought you needed to go to the hospital. What the fuck happened last night?"
"We left Cuba Libre, danced, then went to some club on Walnut Street. We got to Christian's block, then all I recall is, I was on the roof of his car."
"Why?"
"I used to car surf in high school, and I'd had a million screwdrivers, so, you know... Then I fell out the tree and I was out of it. They took me inside and--" Lisa trailed off, furrowing her brow. "Fuck, this is really weird... Oh, God..."
"What?"
"I almost forgot about this... When I got back inside, Jessica put ice on my head and Kerry got me some water. And I was standing there, and... this is really weird."
Ninety nine percent of things prefaced with "this is really weird" aren't weird at all, particularly when you're in the opening throes of a champagne, blow, beer, liqueur and cigarette hangover. Anything less than a winning lottery ticket or news the office was decimated in a gas explosion is a letdown. I walked to the bathroom and leaned over the toilet, forcing a pointless morning erection at the bowl. Lisa followed me to the hallway outside the door.
You can't hear for shit over the first piss of the day, and on a Saturday, what's usually being said is better ignored anyway ("Did you spill this soda can full of butts on the carpet?" "Why is there sticky liquid in the CD changer tray?"). Not this time. The meat of her recollection sliced through the white noise of the stream hitting the water. "...Off my dress... see my implants... nude... in her panties..." I squeezed off the last of my piss and darted for the hallway.
"Oh, goddamnit... you peed all over the floor." Lisa was shaking her head.
"Whatever. I'll get it."
"Why can't men wipe?"
"Yeh, uh... Say what you just said again."
"I said, Kerry and Jessica they were checking my head and then Jessica asked to see my implants."4 The fog vanished from my head. The fear of the Big Pain was gone, thousands of miles away, buried in a nuclear waste vault in a mountain outside Reno. "...And the next thing you know I'm standing there in just a g-string."
"Where?"
"Christian's living room."
"And?"
"Well, Jessica checked them out and then she--"
"Wait, wait... Jessica played with your tits?"
"She felt them, like everybody else."5
"OK. OK... What were you wearing?"
"A G-string."
"No bra?"
"She wanted to see them."
"Sorry. Go on."
"She was squeezing them at first, you know, normally... checking out the consistency. Then she started running her hands all over them, then all over me."
"Where?"
"I don't know - all over."
"Ass? Cooter? Where?"
"All over. It happened fast, and I was dazed."
"Sorry."
"Then she started kissing me."
"Did you kiss her back?"
"We sat down on the couch and started making out, like... high school style."
"The kissing... Just on the lips?"
"Let me finish. I started feeling her up. I put my hand in her panties, and started kissing her."
"What was she wearing?"
"The stuff she wore out."
"Did she get naked?"
"No."
"But you were naked?"
"No. As I said, I had a 'G-er' on."
"What happened next?"
"Nothing. It just kind ended after a while."
"Nothing else? Was Kerry in on it?"
"I think she was in the other room."
"Did she watch?"
"Ask her yourself."
"Where was Christian?"
"Upstairs."
"Upstairs" my ass... The front of Christian's row home had a stairway on the right, standing about eight steps high on which you could see the entire first floor living room. I played the whole episode, in detail, in my head. Christian ran upstairs as soon as they got in the door, to hoover a last bump before the end of the night - something to keep him up through a half hour game of NBA Live in the living room. On the way back down the stairs - carpeted stairs he'd never be heard descending barefoot - he turned and saw Lisa and Jessica kissing. Christian's good people. He'd never screw around with a friend's girl. But watching... watching's not screwing around. If he didn't watch, shame on him.6
It took a palmful of multivitamins (including a B-12 horse-pill that nearly made me gag), three bottled waters, a catcher's mitt sized omelet and a 20 minute shower to get me out the door. The walk up the slight grade to Frampton's street might as well have been a push through the final 100 yards of the North Face path to the peak of Denali. The acid in my stomach was washing into my throat. My knees wobbled; my hands trembled; my face was still bloated from the booze. The sides of my tongue were raw from being dried to the inside of my teeth when I'd passed out with my mouth open.7 I was hot one moment, cold the next, with a river of ethanol sweat running down the center of my chest. Three blocks from Frampton's, I felt like I needed another shower... and an oxygen tank. How many cigarettes had it been? Counting smokes is like counting drinks. Past six, it's wild speculation, and there's no reason to go any further. Counting anything... re-running anything... doing the shortest playback of any scenes from the previous night's coke binge is only for the hardest sadomasochist. Spin it in every conceivable direction, in the Thesaurus of Life Events, it's categorized under "Made Gaping Asshole of Self." The more you remember, the worse you feel. And the more you think about the smorgasbord of things you jammed into your head along with the "Face Draino," the more you wonder why you're not in the emergency room. Guilt and fear you've done yourself permanent physical damage have no place in a blow-scarred skull. Those are Tuesday morning concerns, for a far less fragile psyche. Luckily, I had something much better to discuss with Frampton.
"How you feelin'?" Frampton was laughing in the doorway.
I collapsed into his couch. The coffee table was littered with take-out bags, ashtrays, spent cigarette packs and videogames.
"Is anyone else here?"
"No," he flipped through the channel guide on the large screen television.
"Did you hear about last night?"
"Yep." Deadpan.
"The make out session, and the playing with the tits and all?"
"Yep."
"How did that happen?"
"People were fucked up."
"Lisa can't do that shit anymore. She goes nuts."
"I don't think they did any at the bar. That was all booze."
"Bullshit." I stared at Frampton, realizing I hadn't asked Lisa what poison had bent her mind to the concept of car surfing.
"You're just pissed you missed it." He coughed smoke into a cloud in front of the jumbo flat screen, obscuring a Southern beauty queen with lacquered hair, prattling on above a set of colored "Terror Alert" bars. "...Capture of... known Al Queda operative... provinces... Another homicide bombing..."
"It wouldn't have happened if I was there." I pulled my gaze from a rope of pearls around the debutante's neck.
Frampton smiled. "Or it might have been way, way better."
I went to the dining room and collected my briefcase and sunglasses. "Where are you going?" He asked.
"To the office."
"Kid yourself."
"No, really, I think there's some motion I was supposed to respond to last week. I gotta write some shit."
"Yeh, uh - good luck with that."
I stood in the doorway for moment, staring into the street. "Christian doesn't have a digital camera? You don't think he--"
"Dream on."
I put on my sunglasses, closed the door and started down the street.
The sun was hot. By the time I reached the lot where I parked my truck, I was sick in the truest medical sense - dizzy, dazed and weak, sneezing bloody mucus buckshot through my nose. I meant to drive to the office, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. The mechanics of the act - turning the wheel, manipulating peddles, navigating the mean streams of traffic between here and there - seemed impossible. I'd request an extension from the judge; I wasn't penning any legal gibberish that day.8 The image of Jessica twirling her fingers around Lisa's nipples was burned in my brain, blotting out everything - every argument, every fact in the case... every reason I had - every reason anyone had - for sitting behind a computer, punching out a tedious arrangement of syllables and citations. I turned and headed home, my mind running sideways as I replayed Jessica and Lisa liplocking endlessly in my head. I'd blown it big time. All I could hear the whole walk back was Michaleen Flynn, the Irish Elf, on my shoulder, barking into my ear in a Bushmills-slurred brogue, over and over... "Or it could've been way-hay, way-hay bet-ter." I vowed then never to do blow again. And I didn't.
...For about six months.
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1 The back of the jewel case appears cracked, until you turn it sideways in the light and recognize the white grooves splitting the black space between Neil's image and the song titles on the left are actually razor tracks. Thank God for Ipods.
2 Is there a bigger loss to modern music than Bradley Nowell?
3 Raleigh Theodore Sakers. (www.rollietheodoresakers.bravehost.com).
4 Lisa had gotten a small set of implants earlier in the year. Nice ones.
5 By everybody, she meant every female friend. Though once a woman gets implants, her breasts are no longer private property, show and tell is near exclusively reserved for other females.
6 I've seen Christian a hundred times since, and never asked him about it. It's a permanent "Door Number Three." I couldn't bear learning there was a new car behind it, and I took the washer/dryer combo instead.
7 Think Ralphie's experiment with the frozen metal pole in "A Christmas Story," only the pole is your molars.
8 Procurement of extensions being a sub-sub-specialty of law in which I can confidently call myself a Viking.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 6:00 PM