Harry: How far have we gone?
Lloyd: According to this map, about an inch and a half.
- Dumb and Dumber (1994)
"Can I ask why?" Jeffrey stopped in his tracks the minute we met eyes. The fish was in my hand, in the air, dangling above my lips. Thankfully I couldn't answer. My mouth was already full, stuffed like a chipmunk's with acorns.
You can always ask why, but that doesn't mean I have an answer. We stood there for a moment, not saying a word, each of us taking in the scene. There was Jeffrey, a partner from my group, standing, staring, open cell phone in his hand. And there was me, behind the deli, next to a dumpster, peeling slabs of lox from a wax-paper package and shoveling them in my mouth. It wasn't an ugly moment. He hadn't caught me getting high with the bicycle couriers who openly smoked dope behind the buildings or stepping out of a massage parlor. This was just strange. It's not everyday a person turns the corner on his way back from a client luncheon and runs into one of his employees in a suit, cufflinks and tie, gorging himself in a filthy alleyway like some vulture gnawing carrion. To all the common passers by, I might as well have been eating rancid meat from the trash, an overdressed wino, white collar crack-head or escapee from a local psyche ward... One of those wretches who stumbled around the blocks bleating about conspiracies and begging for change. But Jeffrey knew better. He knew I was sane - too sane, really, and this was something else... something odd, seditious and bizarre.
He was right. Sort of...
I hadn't walked out for lox. I'd walked out to leave. It was a Monday and I'd snapped. You know those Mondays. Everyone knows them. Those mornings where a ten minute flurry of phone calls, faxes and emails turns a perfectly calm week to a shit rain of idiot paperwork... Those moments where you can actually feel your face turning purple as some Napoleon threatens you over the phone... I'd gone in hoping for Nothing - a boring, dead week, the best thing you can hope for in a law firm. By eleven I'd been peppered with five calls, four letters and a half a dozen emails. All annoyances - the usual pile of grating, niggling demands. "When can you get me this?" "When can you get me that?" "When can I expect this other thing?" From the incoherent threat letters of grammatically retarded plaintiffs' lawyers to the tyranny of emails from management about the ten days of time sheets I still owed, every communication held that same selfish refrain... "Gimme, gimme, gimme... I want to take something from you to make my situation better. I'm going to sap your energy, drag your mind to a task the benefits me, my wallet, my bottom line. I want things, and I'm going to burn you and everything else around me like fuel to get them. I have car payments to make, tuitions, golf course minimums... My wife just ordered granite for all the bathrooms."
I'd walked out the door to catch a cab, go home, put on a pair of shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops, jump in my car and drive. No destination in mind; just step on the gas and run. Bolt from the box, from that crushing claustrophobia... Take off on the highway, through the cornfields and mountains and the desert. Never stop moving. Float around the country like a salty drifter in one of those old beer commercials - the grizzled sort stalking into dusty bars with "Big Log" or "Midnight Rider" playing in the background. Get space, air, breathe. Live like a fucking American, like goddamned human.
I stepped out the front door and looked up the street for a cab. The firm was on a slow corner, so I decided to walk a few blocks, closer to City Hall. Then I saw the sign in window of the deli. "Nova Lox, $22.00 pound." Hmmm. Few foods on Earth beat quality kosher lox. Salt and raw, smoked salmon... Poor man's sushi. I could easily eat a half pound alone - no bagels or onions or tomatoes, and none of that disgusting cream cheese heathens smear on the stuff. It was almost lunch, and there was no resisting hunger... or my chronic ADD. The decision came like instinct. A moment later I found myself in the deli, in line, waiting to order. Fuck it. My "escape" could wait a moment. I'd grab a quarter pound, appetizer size - something to eat on the run...
And really, let's face it - Where was I going? I wasn't going to get in the car and drive off for the Left Coast. I'd do what I did every time I lost my mind at the office - get a cab home and sit in the living room, taking my pulse, catching my breath and reasoning with myself. You have to go back. Everyone hates it. That's why they call it work. The problem isn't the job - it's you. The rest of the world suffers through this shit and you're going to have to as well.
Serenity now... Serenity now...
I'd tell myself the same thing every time, something I knew all too well, from so many doomed "escapes" - all those frenzied midnight runs and frantic, pointless road trips that had gone horribly, hideously wrong. All the times I'd thought the answer was in distance, speed and movement - a simple matter of placement, stumbling on a magic "elsewhere." And all the times I'd learned... Running just to run is running in circles. Or running in place, maybe, depending on how look at it. Either way, you wind up at the same finish line.
* * *
The first "escape" fiasco I remember was in college, sophomore year. A bunch of us were sitting in a room in the fraternity house, bored and restless, facing another dead Thursday night. Same beer, dope and people - another keg party in the basement, repeating the tired drunken ritual we followed every night. Looking back now, that seems like Nirvana, a moment most of us would give a finger to have again. But then, there, as crazy as it sounds, the scene could get routine, like you were living in an endless loop of reruns. There was the same music - that constant hum of "Jessica" or "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" pouring out of the basement stereo.1 The same beer - $30 kegs of Milwaukee's Best, frequently warm or skunked. And all the same women - the ones you'd already tried and failed to hook up with, hooked up with and didn't want to hook up with again or knew would never, ever, under any circumstances hook up with you. We needed something different, a totally new scene. That or a distraction, something to occupy the mind - a quest, challenge or competition of some kind.
"I know this chick named Amy. She goes to ________________." My friend Chris yanked a cigarette out of his mouth, sat up from the couch and pressed the mute button on the television. "I sort of hooked up with her over Thanksgiving break at home. We should road trip there."
"_____________ University?"
"No, the _______________ meat packing plant. I hear it's a got a great tour. What other _________________ would I mean but the college?"
"That's like two hours away."
"No it's not." Chris reminded me I hadn't majored in Geography. "It's an hour, maybe an hour and quarter."
"She have any friends?" My buddy Martin lifted his eyes from a magazine.
"She's cute and she lives with a bunch of friends. They're probably cute." Chris picked up the cordless phone. "I'll give her a call."
Twenty minutes later eight of us were in the hallway, prepping for the trip. We had Chris driving half of us in his rickety old Volvo and another brother, Randal, taking the other half in his rusted, mid-80s Honda Accord.
"We need liquor for this." Martin got straight to the important business. Most of us had been casually drinking beers. Stopping dead for any period of time would crater whatever thin buzzes we had. As any drinker can tell you - there's no restarting a drunk. Break the steady flow of fuel - give the brain and liver a moment to regroup, build up a tolerance - and your buzz is shot for the night.
"Jagermeister." Chris snapped.
"Not in my car." Randal laughed. "We'll have Beam."
"I don't give a fuck what you drink, but I'm not drinking that shit."
"Jaegy? Your pussy hurt?" And so the battle was joined... There were two types in the fraternity - people who drank bourbon and the people who didn't. Chris' liver had the proof of a bar towel, but he never drank bourbon, and that was a sore spot with some. The house worshiped bourbon, viewed it like a sacrament. Jagermeister was a novelty item, the sort of thing you kept around for visitors, sorority girls or someone's silly younger brother visiting from Villanova... A sugary, seventy proof buzz for people who couldn't handle real whiskey. Randal was a purist. He wasn't drinking fortified cough syrup on a road trip.
"Fuck you. I don't have to justify my choice of sauce. I can go round for round with you anytime."
"Okay." Randal laughed. "Let's make a bet..."
Fifteen minutes later we were parked outside the liquor store, waiting for an older fraternity brother to bring out bottles of Jagermeister and Beam. "So here's how it works." Chris spread a map across the hood of his car and showed Randal the route to _____________. "First car there - with the bottle finished - wins a handle of whatever they want."2
"Wins a sack!" Stuart, a member of the house's "Baking Contingent" screamed from the back of Chris's car.
"Don't start that shit." I had to cut off that debate before it gained any traction. Every fraternity has a "Baking Contingent," that group of members who smokes twice as much dope as everybody else and reduces every transaction, conversation or house meeting to a discussion of how they might procure cheap or free weed.3 It was bad enough I found myself in the Jagermeister car. The last thing I needed was to suffer through an argument over first prize.
"You have a shot glass, right?" Chris handed me the bottle and jumped in the driver's seat.
"You sure this is cold? I'm not drinking this shit warm."
"Freezing to the core." He backed out of the parking space and put the car in gear. "We called ahead and had them put the bottles in the champagne chiller."
"The champagne chiller?"
"You know. That whirlpool thing filled with cold water that-- What the fuck are you doing?"
"I'm pouring a shot."
"We're on fucking Main Street." Chris shoved my hand down and pointed across the road. "The police station is right over there."
"I thought we were in a hurry."
"You notice the windows in this car? You can't hold the fucking bottle in the air like that, like you're working in a lab or mixing shit in chemistry class. Pour that shit down low."
"Fine, but you don't have to knock the bottle out of my hand. This stuff's black. It stains."
"Hey. Hey." Stuart leaned in between the front seats, holding a lit bowl in Chris's face. "You guys want to hit this?"
"Shit, man." Chris waved off the smoke. "Wait till we're out of the center of fucking town."
"I think that's the post office right there, Chris." Martin coughed from the back seat. "The police station's on the other side of the street."
"Thank you. Thanks for that clarification."
"We should have made it so the winner gets a sack." Stu whined to Martin. "Think about it. A sack's worth fifty bucks. What's a handle cost? Twenty bucks? How's that worth the effort?"
"It's not about the prize." Chris adjusted the rear view mirror. "It's the principle of the thing."
"Look. I have to be honest." We hadn't even made the bridge out of town when I realized we had serious problems. "I have issues here. I don't think I can do this."
"Too late now..." Chris laughed and crushed a cigarette butt in the ashtray. "You're in."
"There's no way I can pour shots like this. The potholes alone are killing me."
"You sure you don't want to hit this?" Stu's bowl re-appeared in my face, this time from the from the window side of my seat, as though that little added distance - the two and half foot difference between him handing it to me from that angle and passing it up the middle - would somehow hide the transfer from Chris's gaze.
"With what?" I had the bottle in one hand and a half full shot glass in the other. "My foot?"
"The car doesn't have cup-holders?'
"For liquor bottles? Square liquor bottles?"
"So you don't want to hit it?"
To be continued...
----------
1 Low Spark and Brothers and Sisters being the last remaining tapes that hadn't been stolen or destroyed.
2 "Handle" - 1.75 liter bottle, named for the glass handle usually affixed to its side.
3 Officials in the house routinely won the Contingent's vote on governance issues by earmarking initiatives with promises of free sacks for them.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 7:26 PM