Date with Jen G

DATE: Saturday, July 30
PLACES: Bradford's Pub, Harrah's Mardi Gras High-Limit Bar
POISONS OF CHOICE: Bud Light draft, double tequila sunrises
CAST OF CHARACTERS: You and Jen G


NARRATIVE NOTE: The author has decided to experiment with second-person narrative, a technique he is shamelessly ripping off from vastly talented memoirist Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club and Cherry. Who he hopes will never hear about it and decide to sue and who, he rather suspects, probably stole the second-person thing from one of her own influences.

When you have a night cleared to hang out one-on-one with a friend you don't see on a completely regular basis, on occasions where you've actually made plans that involve nothing but drinking and conversation, you take people to Bradford's in Westport Plaza.

Westport is a St. Louis County business-office/bar-and-restaurant complex that peaked in the late '80s, from what you've been told. Its social drinking attractions are mainly of the middle-class preppie and professional fortysomething varieties. A few bars and clubs are worth visiting and about a dozen aren't.

You live within almost immediate walking distance of Westport - which you think would mean something to a guy without a car who likes to party on a too-regular basis - but you hardly ever go anymore. Your favorite bar closed down more than a year ago, and you've gotten pretty burned out on karaoke, the main source of Westport's barroom entertainment.

But you like Bradford's, an unassuming, almost flimsy-seeming hole in the wall that offers an inviting jukebox, horseshoe-shaped bar and a Desert Storm-era, fishing-themed pinball machine. And it has a patio.

Westport is set up half like an indoor mall and half like an outdoor one, and patio space is monopolized mainly by two of the larger restaurant/bars, Trainwreck and Patrick's. Both of which issue forth loud fucking band and DJ music and charge a cover on the weekends even if you're sitting outside.

Bradford's is relatively tucked away, but it has patio seating for about thirty at a prime peoplewatching locale in the Westport ouevre. Directly in front of the bar - facing outward from the building - and to the left are the entrance doors to the inner part of Westport.

In front of Bradford's and to the right, is a sidewalk leading to the massive fairly new nightclub Margarita Mama's. People in club clothes constantly scurry back and forth on that sidewalk, passing Bradford's and occasionally offering random snatches of loud, drunk dialogue. On a weekend night, you're guaranteed the passing of a bachelorette party every fifteen to twenty minutes.

Facing away from the bar on the patio, you can stare straight ahead at the tinted windows of the Funny Bone comedy club - it offers a fairly frazzling view of bartenders and barbacks running back and forth to make drinks and keep the bar stocked.

One floor above the Funny Bone, there's an Irish restaurant and bar called O'Toole's. When O'Toole's has karaoke and you're sitting on the Bradford's patio, through the last tinted window on the left, you have a perfectly clear view of the singers holding microphones and squinting through alcohol-glazed eyes at the lyrics on the monitor. The varying body language is fascinating, and there's ample opportunity for comic commentary on hair and clothing styles.

--

That's what your friend Jen G and you are doing right now - peoplewatching on the Bradford's patio and sipping Bud Light drafts. Your original glass has just been confiscated by the cocktail server, who informs you that, if you're outside enjoying the weather and the bad clothing, you're only allowed to drink from bar-issued white plastic Budweiser cups. Pouring the beer from the glass to the cup has already made it taste flat as hell.

As was the case with most of your current friends, you met Jen G through work. There were two other Jens working with you at the time, which necessitated the first-initial-of-last-name suffix. The "Jen" and the "G" in her identity among you and your other friends are inseparable. It sounds weird to just call her Jen - her essence almost seems naked without the G.

You made a date with Jen G - actually, she came up to you at Hilltop on Thursday night and asked you on the date. This is purely a social date, mind you, to briefly rekindle what was at one time a fruitful friendship of the work-and-party-together variety.

Jen G used to close at work with you three to four times a week, and she was the type that kept late hours, liked to drink and had an unhappy home life. Therefore she was out often and seemed to end up sitting next to you at the casino bar every Friday night, while her boyfriend of six years was off gambling with your friend Emma.

You would sit at the main Mardi Gras bar at Harrah's and bounce back and forth low-pitched comments about the people walking down what you two referred to as the "blue carpet." It was a main-vein traffic area for drinkers and gamblers of all ages and abilities.

You and Jen G would keep a running tally of elderly people with oxygen tanks and people in wheelchairs, and you'd bet on which side would win the attendance tally. Twice it was the oxygen tanks; four times, the wheelchair contingent won. One time you both saw an old lady being pushed in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank strapped to its back - you and Jen G didn't know quite how to score that one.

Jen G, when you were hanging out with there all the time, reminded you of yourself in that she had turned 21 and graduated college and just kind of spinning her wheels with a menial day job and too much aimless late-night social activity. In that she loved to sleep the afternoon away and was dreading the Real World. In that she graduated with a media-related degree - a bachelor's in graphic design - and feared she wasn't doing enough with her talent.

She didn't remind you of yourself in that she was saddled to her relationship with the aforementioned boyfriend of six years. A boyfriend who, by the way, also worked with you and hung out in your social circle. Who was on your Monday night men's league bowling team.

You had a thing for Jen G for awhile - practically every guy you knew agreed she was fucking hot in a kind of unassuming way, petite but sporting a meaty, perfectly shaped butt and possessing relatively high levels of humility and low levels of self-esteem.

With the obvious looks and intelligence and all-around sweet, genuine personality, plus the self-esteem problems you could identify with, it was easy to develop a crush.

Of course, you never would have done anything about it. Girls like Jen G need to be rescued, strongly supported and given time to grow into their confidence and identities, and you can't imagine yourself as a rescuer. You're too much in need of rescue your damn self.

And, though you've always been closer to Jen G than the six-year boyfriend, you'd never make a move on her. The boyfriend's your friend too, and besides - it's part of the United States Bowling Congress rules and regulations that you never make a move on a teamate's girl. Even if his average is only 152, and especially if your average is only 129.

Plus you were pretty sure Jen G thought little of you physically - the two of you shared too many jokes and pointed-peoplewatching observations at the expense of chunksters for you to consider a possibility Jen would care to jump your 270-pound frame.

So you were friends, you hung out in groups and occasionally solo, and it was a good time. You even designed a pair of 11" by 17" party posters together for events at your favorite bar, Old Hilltop.

Then, in rapid-fire succession, Jen G landed a Real Job (legitimate graphic design work offered by a former internship boss), moved in with our friend Alison, broke up with the six-year boyfriend and took up with a coworker. Who had been courting her and encouraging her and being pretty damn persistent about things.

--

Jen G - as she has been telling you on the Bradford's Pub patio - is finally happy with her life. She's forced herself to be functional in public at 8:30 in the morning and, to her own surprise, now has the stamina to last the entire day on five hours of sleep with no nap. Jen's new living situation is working out, and the new guy... well, she can't stop talking about him.

She tells you a lot of personal details, a lot, about her new relationship with the coworker and the emotional misery she endured toward the end of her time with my bowling teammate. There's just a host of emotionally bare remarks and moments.

The rules of journalism in a situation like this presuppose that the person you're talking to already knows you're in the business of disseminating biographical information and are likely to regurgitate any personal details. So unless the subject of the interview/conversation tells you a certain statement is off the record, you're allowed and in fact obligated to divulge the fully frank, honest facts of your talk. The people have the right to know, after all.

Jen G knows you gossip, and she knows you've started posting moments from your life on the Internet again for Whoever to read. She tells you all heaps of personal shit anyway, and only once does she tell you to keep a certain detail to yourself.

Actually, Jen issues a kind of a blanket gag order regarding one set of details, stuff she wants to keep under wraps for the sake of the six-year boyfriend. She's still trying to do the post-breakup Let's Be Friends thing, and he's still painfully in love with her, by his own admission.

And you will honor her request, pass up a lot of juicy shit in the retelling of this particular evening. You're not interested in burning bridges with the damaging and scandalous a forum like this, or in casual conversation with friends.

Suffice it to say, the girl's at a fucking happy place in her life, and you guys will talk about it at great length over the course of the evening. And you'll keep it to yourself. And maybe shamelessly congratulate yourself for doing something a good friend is supposed to do anyway.

--

As the night unfolds, you get ample opportunity to catch Jen G up on some of the more entertaining social drinking moments and idle workplace gossip and spout your usual half-buzzed, half-baked lofty theories about human nature and idealism about the simple pleasures of life. And you have plenty of comically goofy moments, too.

You guys bump into Jen G's cousin Nick inside the bar. Cousin Nick (EMMA I CHANGED IT) is there with a couple friends, leaning against the front left hexagonal curve of the bar and bullshitting over a beer. He has the kind of practically model-gorgeous face that makes you wonder why he's not exploiting his jackpot of good looks by picking up a sluttily dressed, early 20s hottie at one of the louder nearby drinking spots.

If God had given you that face, and Mom wouldn't have allowed you unrestricted access to the cookie jar, you'd be off fishing for one-night-only tail right now. Not talking to your friends about the Sammy Davis Jr. episode of "All in the Family" in a bar this low-key and outdated, like Nick is currently doing. Or maybe you would, just by virtue of the fact that you'd be guaranteed to be the best-looking dude in the bar. And because, pretty face or no, you'd always be a dork at heart.

When you get back out to the patio, Jen G tells you Cousin Nick does very fucking well with the ladies and in fact possesses the deserved confidence to hang back and let his favorite pick approach him in a bar. Which apparently happens quite a bit when you look like Cousin Nick.

JEN G: Yeah, did you see that perfect dimple on his chin?
ME: I did. I never got the whole chin-dimple thing. The chin dimple seems like some odd evolutionary eyesore that probably used to have a function several species back but is completely obsolete now.
JEN G: It always reminds me of John Travolta.
ME: And see, John Travolta is an evolutionary eyesore, so the whole thing fits.
JEN G (laughs)
ME: I mean, have you seen Travolta lately?
JEN G: Nick wasn't born with the chin dimple, anyway, was my point. He got it sledding with me and another cousin when we were all like 11.
ME: What, he was going headfirst on the sled?"
JEN G: Yeah, down this huge steep hill.
ME: I never had the balls to go headfirst.
JEN G: I bet Nick never did again either. He somehow got thrown and landed face down on a rock. Lost three teeth.
ME: God, did they reset them?
JEN G: Yeah, we saved the teeth, the chin dimple was born and the rest is the stuff of legend.

When you go back to the bar to retrieve the next round, you notice Cousin Nick sitting next to a fucking hot but down-to-earth-looking blonde around his own age. She's playing the touch-screen interactive game/trivia box, and he's leaning across to push the screen, helping her out. Mouth practically to her ear. They're both laughing.

Judging from the overall body language, you'd say Nick's already well on his way to taking her home. And you're proven right about 20 minutes later, when you see Cousin Nick emerge from the bar with the blonde and head off to the parking lot together.

You and Jen G exchange a few lines about how you wish you were part of the physically flawless elite. How you both know it's a superficial, relatively meaningless thing to long for but, god dammit, it would sure be cool to have.

--

When last call comes at Bradford's, there's no question what the next step will be. No preplanned social date with Jen G would be complete without a couple hours at the casino bar spent downing drinks, having conversation that ranges from profound to absurd, and watching the parade of humanity roll by, oxygen tanks and wheelchairs and all.

Even on a post-bar Saturday night you two are able to land a plum position in the inside corner of the Mardi Gras High Limit bar. Behind you people are betting $25 to $500 a hand on blackjack and poker. Around you, no real crowd or overpowering noise. Just a lot to look at and talk about.

Jen G has always indulged and even topped your darkest urges to gawk at and comment about the extreme of human personal appearance. For every mullet you spot on a woman, Jen can point out three people over the 450-pound mark. For all the decrepit senior citizens you notice who are out way past his or her bedtimes - like 24 years past their bedtimes - Jen sniffs out an amputee or a thoroughly unconvincing toupee.

On your way in, you both spotted a truly miserable sight - a woman who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties, slouched in a wheelchair, looking to be about three-and-a-half feet from top to bottom. She had a kind of shrunken head, prematurely withered, with mouth open and top and lower jaws eschew.

You just feel bad for this woman, but you're also tragically amused, and you feel a kind of inexplicable contempt you're loathe to acknowledge. Jen's half drunk, trying her hardest not to laugh out loud at the human nubbin, especially when you remark that at birth the woman in question "probably looked like a peeled grape."

--

It's a great date, all in all, and the perfect combination of social familiarity with each other and everything seeming fresh because you haven't hung out in so long.

You both say you'll do it again sometime. You keep making jokes about how Jen G has been the perfect gentleman tonight - she drove you, bought you both a pretzel with cheese, even lit your Black and Mild at the casino bar. You promise her that, if she plays her cards right, she may even get a close-mouthed kiss at the door.

You end up hugging her. The rules of the United States Bowling Congress and good taste, after all, prevent you from going any further. Jen is somebody else's girl, and she's a fun fucking friend to hang out with. Even if she has joined the nine-to-five world.

Poolside: Dead of night

DATE: Friday, July 29
PLACE: Emma's backyard
POISON OF CHOICE: 1.75 liter bottle of Popov Vodka
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Me, Emma, Rachel, Mallory, Josh, Alison, Amanda, Johnny


The Maryland Heights bars are closing right about now, and I'm sitting on a wrought iron patio chair around a matching table in Emma's backyard.

We're talking about a night that occurred a couple weeks back, in which a group of twelve to fifteen of our friends and friends of friends had spent several hours drinking at back-to-back bars then returned to Emma's backyard to swim in her pool and, well, get even more fucked up.

There was definitely a Sun Way Up In The Sky / Car Ride Home Kinda Hazy ending to that particular night and morning. I remember the clock reading somewhere in the 7:40's when I returned home and cooked myself an egg, cheese and garlic omelette.

Emma tells me she was still poolside for at least a half-hour after I'd passed out with that belly full of omelette. Her boyfriend, drunk and exploring the deep end, just wouldn't fucking come inside.

EMMA: As long as I've known him, I mean he can swim, but he's afraid to go spelunk in the deep end or open his eyes underwater. But this time he's drunk, he's going for it! Doing front flips and back flips, diving for flourescent pool rings, eyes wide open.
ME: His eyes were red as a motherfucker the next afternoon, I bet.
EMMA: Crimson. Fucking crimson. But here I am, I'm cleanin' up after everyone - dozens of empty beer bottles and half-deflated pool floaties spread all around - and Johnny's splashing in the water like an eight year old.
ME: And the sun's way up in the sky by now.
EMMA: It's like 8:30 in the goddamn morning. All through the neighborhood I can hear the sound of responsible people's garage doors coming up and everyone backing out of their driveways and into their workday. And here I am begging my boyfriend to come inside and go to bed.
ME: And he's blowing bubbles underwater with his eyes bugged open.
EMMA: He was getting on my nerves. Telling me shit like, "Babe, this is a breakthrough, I've been waiting my whole life to enjoy diving! I need you to let me have this!"
ME: (laughs)
EMMA: I mean gimme a fucking break.

--

I was absolutely going to stay home tonight and stay sober. Scout's honor.

But god damn Emma, she knows exactly how to socially seduce me, to push my fucking drinking buttons. We were sitting at work after finishing our closing duties and watching the remaining handful of restaurant employees file out the door.

I sat sideways on a booth bench at Table 21, my back to the wood-and-glass five-foot divider between the nonsmoking and smoking areas of the dining room. Emma sat aross from me, and we talked about miscellany. Fifteen or so minutes of idle prattle about workplace gossip and the recent local highway pileup that took the lives of five family members traveling in the same van.

The victims were on Interstate 44, right at the exit to the St. Louis Six Flags, a park full of innocence and wonder, cheap fun and throwaway amusement. Two young boys, their mom and an aunt and uncle were rear-ended by a dump truck in what the newspaper called "a fiery crash."

The article noted that authorities had refused to comment on whether the family was headed to Six Flags - why ruin every other parkgoer's day with that kind of trivial information?

The now-deceased young boys had a third brother, Alex, 11. He wasn't
with the five victims because he was away at that other childhood ritual of summer's dog days - summer camp.

So Emma posed the question, what would it be like to be Alex? You're in the middle of swimming and archery and making tacky leather corn purses out of stinky half-moon pieces of leather and colored plastic lanyards. And you get that kind of news.

"You're that 11-year-old kid, your dad shows up out of the blue," Emma says. "You're thinking, What the fuck? Camp's not over until Sunday.
"And Dad says, 'Get your stuff, it's time to go.'
"You ask, 'What's going on?'
"And all he'll say is, 'Get in the car and I'll tell you.' Then you find out your mom and two brothers all died together in a grisly fucking car accident."

In conjunction, Emma threw out another one: "How would it feel to be the grandparents? In one second, you lose three children and two grandchildren. How could you live your life after that?"

"God, I don't know," I told her. "I'd probably crawl into my head and never come back out."

--

I was presented with several social options for the evening - sit around with eight to ten friends at a house party tossed by my friends/coworkers/acquaintances Ashley and Jessica, spend a couple hours at Hilltop playing shuffleboard and/or singing karaoke, per usual. Or pick up some beer and hang out in the Keller backyard.

Now, the Keller backyard is a frequent afterparty destination in the summertime. Emma lives with her parents, a sister, an uncle, two cousins and - half to two-thirds of the time - her boyfriend of more than five years, Johnny.

The Keller house is a hub of activity, with two other sisters popping into town from time to time, extended relatives and neighbors frequently dropping by and, two or three nights a month, friends and strangers partying until sunup in the backyard.

The backyard patio features a hot tub, a hammock, three tables and probably a couple dozen chairs and deckchairs of all different designs and eras.

Just past that is a sizeable in-ground pool, three feet in the shallow end and eight feet in the deep end. Luckily for our drunk asses, there's a shallow ledge all around the inside of the pool.

Scattered around the pool - an amalgam of inflatable rafts, inner tubes, foam noodles, beach balls, snorkels, diving masks, plastic rings and glow sticks.

This - along with a cooler full of beer, a pocketful of one-hits, good music filling the beautiful, still weather of the dead of night in the middle of summer - is all a stuck-in-adolescence, indulgent human being could reasonably ask for.

That Emma's parents, sister, uncle and cousins (not to mention neighbors) also put up with these pre- and sometimes post-dawn drunken romps and leave all kinds of junk food stocked in the kitchen... well, that's icing on the cake.

So it was a tempting destination, as ever, but I had a nagging twinge of resolve. Go home, Andrew, you can work out, save your money, get some writing done, not be hung over in the morning. These are thoughts of self-preservation I manage to shut down several times weekly, but tonight Emma subtly did the work for me.

She pushed my fucking drinking buttons. I had turned down all the existing options - house party, Hilltop, evening around the pool - when she just kind of casually announced we'd stop at the neighborhood liquor store so she could get some vodka to drink around her pool. And just chill out, put on music, enjoy the weather... do everything I love to do.

I had my swimming trunks on not five minutes later.

Not ten minutes after that, I was mixing club soda with a sizeable liquid chunk of Popov vodka. Its yellow $12.99 price sticker still protruded from the cap of the 1.75 liter plastic jug in a blatantly tacky display of just how much ethanol you can buy in bulk for a cheap price.

--

"You are not getting a pet snake in your room! No way!" She's shaking her head as she throws in another pair of no ways: "No way! No way! What if it gets out?"

"It's not gonna get out, Emma."

"My room's right across the hall. I'd have a heart attack. No way!"

Emma has gone into pseudo-hysterical mode all of a sudden. Her 13-year-old cousin, Rachel, has joined us on the patio and just announced that Aunt Erica - matron of the house - has granted her permission to have a pet snake of up to ten-foot long in an aquarium. Emma is deathly afraid of snakes, spiders and, fuck, I've seen her run screaming from a lightning bug before. She's a nervous sort of girl.

And she's gotten drunk in light speed, it appears. Emma is usually a couple notches below me on the old Waste-O-Meter when we drink together - tonight is an infrequent exception.

Case in point - the conversation soon turns from, I can't live in a house with a snake in it, to, I can make your snake love me more than it loves you.

Rachel, the sober soon-to-be ninth grader, calmly tries to explain to Emma that snakes are cold-blooded beings incapable of loyalty and love and are mainly just meant to be looked at and admired. Emma doesn't buy it.

Emma, in fact, soon becomes possessed with the idea that Rachel's pet snake will become her (i.e. Emma's) cuddly, scale-covered companion. They argue about this for a couple minutes; I sit, sip my drink, listen and laugh as the remarks out of Emma's mouth get more and more implausible.

EMMA: My question is, if the snake loves me and wants to be with me, if the snake will curl up next to me and make me feel good, can the snake sleep with me?
RACHEL: No, it's impossible.
EMMA: Fuck you! I will bet you I can teach your snake to be loving.
RACHEL: You need to get your own snake.
EMMA: I could train a snake to do tricks. I could teach a snake to bark. Maybe not a "bow wow" or a "woof," but some kind of (unintelligible gurgling noise).

I've got a pocket composition book out on the table by this point, trying to write down all this outlandish shit word for word. I give up by the point at which Emma boasts, "I can teach a regular snake to rattle!"

I never thought my friend would turn out to have such a God complex about her snakecharming abilities.

--

The conversation shifts as the minutes go by. Young Rachel reveals her desire to study snakes and grow up to be a herpetologist. I tell them I'm surprised that I even remember the word herpetologist.

It's only really because of an oddball friend I had in late-elementary and middle school who was hellbent on becoming a studier of snakes and would drop the H-word into conversation as frequently as possible.

This friend used to spend entire recess periods in fifth and sixth grade pretending he was a dog, communicating only through growls, barks and yelps and scratching at fleas that weren't there. I think he bit me once.

Last I heard, my ex-canine buddy was off to attend his freshman year at Yale. I still wait on his parents every now and then at work. All three of us pretend we don't know each other from fifteen years ago.

Emma still insists she can train a snake. She offers as proof the following - her boyfriend, Johnny, has a lizard in an aquarium. When Johnny is away at work , his grandmother (who lives with Johnny in her house) will go into his room and blow cigarette smoke in the lizard's face.

I've seen Johnny buy cigarettes for his grandma, too. Her lung poison of choice is a brand of cheap, unfiltered Canadian smokes I've never heard of. A poor aquarium-encased lizard wouldn't stand a chance. Indeed, by Emma's account, the lizard is thoroughly addicted to granny's Canadian unfiltereds.

"I have seen the lizard exhale," Emma proclaims.

--

This is my fourth, or maybe my fifth drink. I've been pouring them heavy and kinda fast, but I'm still in control. I come out of the kitchen and into the family room at the back of the house. It's the only path from kitchen to patio, and even at two in the morning, still houses two wide-awake, sober members of the family.

An older sister of Emma's, Amanda, is playing online poker on a DSL-equipped personal computer. The Keller mom and daughters are all enormous fans of online gambling.

I'm not really friends with Amanda, but I've partied with her off and on and usually when I see her exchange small-talk pleasantries. Tonight we've already covered the old standby topic, What movies have you seen recently?

It's a step up from, Hot one out there today, ain't it? and, How 'bout those baseball Cardinals, huh? But it's still definitely small talk. Turns out Amanda and I both liked Wedding Crashers and thought War of the Worlds was a little overblown.

Six feet or so to Amanda's right, Emma's boyfriend Johnny is sitting on the floor, prying open a computer's hard drive. He's worked with me as a waiter for five years, but he kicks ass on repairing cars and computers, and he's finally getting paid to do the latter.

Johnny's been repairing computers for Emma's uncle on a freelance basis, but he's about to start his first Real Job. About which he is nervous, naturally, and for which needs to purchase an entire new wardrobe. Lots of dress shirts, ties and slacks. I hate slacks.

I ask Johnny what he's up to; he spews out a bunch of technical jargon I don't even pretend to follow, and I leave Johnny to his work. I'm on my way back outside when I notice a travel brochure kind of sitting askew on a desk shelf.

"Whose Schlitterbahn pamphlet is this?" I ask.

Amanda perks up. "Oh, that's mine, I just got that."

And suddenly we have something fun to talk about. I watched an hourlong Travel Channel special on the Schlitterbahn Waterparks. There are two in Texas, one in New Braunfels and the other in South Padre Island. The New Braunfels location is the largest water park in the world, and the newer Padre branch has revolutionized the aquatic amusement scene.

Traditionally, there are two things that suck about water parks. First, if it's even remotely busy, you end up waiting twenty minutes to an hour for a ride that lasts 45 seconds if you're lucky and eight seconds if you're not. You're there to play in the water, and you spend most of your time on dry land, feet sizzling on wooden slates and getting scraped up by concrete sidewalk paths.

Second, before you ride every waterslide, you have to climb an endless series of stairs to the top of the launch tower. That's four to eight stories for every slide you ride. You get your exercise in, yeah, but if you're like me, sometimes you want the line to be kinda long so you can get your fucking breath back before you ride.

Water parks haven't invested in moving sidewalks or elevator cars just yet, and I'm surprised the Americans with Disabilities Act people haven't demanded equal rights. I suggest they get on it. It would be awesome to just get on an elevator, step out and plunge down the slide. And, come on, this is America - do we want to deny our paraplegic citizens the right to shoot down a pitch-black, tube-enclosed slide known as the Black Python? I don't fucking think so.

Schlitterbahn South Padre has stepped up to the plate. The entire park is set up like a massive lazy river. You get in your tube, you get in the water, and you're done walking for the rest of the day. The entrances to the waterslides are actually in the lazy river. You channel your tube-assed self into a certain line, you mill around in the water and wait, and conveyor belts or kick-ass canal-linking devices slowly transport you to the top of the slide. It's cool, and the paraplegics can play too. That's a win-win.

These are topics Amanda and I chew over before I head back outside.

--

Our group has swollen to six. Me, Emma and her cousin Rachel have been joined by two female coworkers, Alison (the girl who drove me home from the casino last night) and Mallory.

Mallory and I have the kind of vibe a little sister and big brother would have if they were overly physically affectionate in public. She's all about the hugs and the lap-sitting and just general physical closeness, and I'm happy to oblige, more so as my blood alcohol rises.

Tonight she's with her new boyfriend, Josh. They dated briefly a few years back, ran into each other recently and have pretty much been together since.

Josh is a cool enough guy, if a little nondescript. Easy-going, amiable, and he always appears to have exactly four days of stubble on his face. Not three, not five. Four.

Mallory and Josh have been swimming for the past couple hours. They missed the entire snake-training conversation. Their loss.

We've been talking music the last few minutes. Mallory sports the distinction among my friends of being able to recognize, sing along with and remember the lyrics to nearly every song on every radio station.

This is an ability I can appreciate, and when riding drunk in her passenger seat, the two of us inevitably scream along with whatever's playing in the background.

The oldies are on right now. Social background music-wise, there's no safer bet on your radio dial. Country and rap are too polarizing, alternative radio is too morose for a social gathering, and adult-contemporary is too goddamn cheesy and ballad-heavy.

Top 40 honestly isn't bad in the context of outdoor poolside drinking, but the same couple dozen songs repeat every couple hours, and there are way too many breaks for pre-recorded idiot-DJ/listener chatter.

If you want feel-good music everyone knows all the way down in their souls - whether it's brilliant rock or something goddamned childish like "Do Wah Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Do" - you complement good weather, good drinks and good times with the oldies.

Just ask the Schlitterbahn people. Try to fucking go to the water park and not hear the Beach Boys two dozen times before you pull all your stuff back out of the rental locker and head to the car all sunburned.

Speaking of goddamned childish, one of the worst musical atrocities known to man has just popped up on the oldies station. Mallory and I exchange a quick glance and both start laughing. We've made fun of this one together before.

"Quick, Josh - name the song!" Mallory pokes down on her new boyfriend's right knee. She's doing some of her patented lap sitting at the moment.

"Name the artist, name the year, name the peak chart position, name the record label, name the B-side!" I chime in, bordering on drunk and obnoxious.

"I don't know any of that shit," Josh says, expelling laughter between each syllable.

"Andrew, name the song!"

"That would be, 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've Got Jesus In My Tummy,' by the Ohio Express, 1968, Bogus Pop Records, peaked at #3 in July."

"And what was the B-side?" Mallory asks.

A few seconds of silence, and I say, "Fuck, I can't remember!"

I get three laughs. "Yummy Yummy Yummy" gives way to the Beach Boys water park staple "Barbara Ann." I point out that it always sounds like they're singing "Bobber Ann," like Ann's some kind of slut that gives a lot of head. Bobs on knobs quite a bit. I only get two laughs on that one. Should have quit while I was slightly ahead.

--

It's 2:45 in the morning. The topic of the five-victim car accident has popped back up, and with it, the question of, What would you do if you lost five close family members at once?

Alison responds, "I'd kill myself. I'd be too fucked up."

"I'd be fucked, but I'd live on," Emma tells us. "I'd strive on somehow."

"A guy in my eighth grade class killed himself," says Rachel, the 13-year-old cousin. She talks about this as casually as if she were telling us what she had for dinner tonight.

The topic of suicide, as I'm about to quickly remember all too well, always sets off Emma. She sees suicide as the ultimate selfish act, in that you leave behind a family full of emotionally scarred people who have to pick up and carry on in your absence.

"Suicide is ignorant!" Emma exclaims, then starts talking in a self-mocking dumbass-teenager voice. " 'Oh, I didn't get the car I wanted!' 'My brother's retarded!' 'I got an F!' Fuck you, kid, deal with it!"

It's a serious topic, granted, but this shit makes me laugh.

Emma continues: "When I was in high school, I had a couple different friends call me up crying and tell me, 'I love you... I just took 30 pills.' These girls would swallow the pills then call everyone they could think of, just so someone would stop them. They'd get taken to the hospital, get their stomach pumped and get flowers sent to their room. The whole thing's about attention."

This monologue is the last uninterrupted stretch of conversation for ten to fifteen minutes, with everyone on the patio offering their two cents on the suicide argument in loud, overlapping vocal ejaculations.

My main point, which barely puts a dent in the discussion, is that Emma refuses to consider the irrational biological imbalances caused by clinical depression and several other major mental illnesses. Which are, all of them, life sentences.

--

The 13-year-old cousin has gone to bed at this point, thankfully. Around 3:30, the evening takes a turn for the strange. In the midst of random chit chat, I crack a joke to Emma that she doesn't like. Nothing too mean, just some playful shit that pops a pseudo-indignant reaction onto her face.

Emma rears back like she's going to throw her drink on me. I say yeah fuckin' right, you're not gonna throw your drink on me. She throws it right in my face and down my chest.

The vodka and whatever is cold as fuck and soaking into my shirt, and without even thinking I grab the two open, practically warm beers sitting in front of Alison - one in my left and one in my right hand - and douse Emma with both of them. My arms are flapping up and down and around like a demented lawn sprinkler.

The remnants of a Tupperware bowl full of tortilla chips sit on the table next to Emma. She tosses the bowl's contents at me - mostly crumbs. Half the crumbs hit the ground, half sog their way into the chest of my wet t-shirt, which I yank off.

"You realize I'm just going to dive into your pool and wash the mess off in there," I tell her. "I don't even like to food fight. It's not my thing."

While I'm delivering this little solliloquy, I see Mallory pass Emma something under the table. A quiet second later, she's jerking an open jar of salsa at me. She yanks the jar back toward her body while a tennis ball-sized glob of the salsa splatters into my swimsuit-covered crotch.

"Salsa? Fucking salsa?!"

I hop out of my chair while fisting up a goop of the chunky crotch slop. And I shove it down Emma's cleavage on my way to the pool. Dive into the deep end headfirst while hearing her shriek, "It's cold! Oh God the salsa's cold!"

My crotch salsa dissipates underwater as I surface and watch Emma dip a semi-dainty, disbelieving finger into the top of her swim suit. I swim around the pool a little bit, and she calls over, "Andrew, no more! We've got to clean this shit up! We work in the morning!"

Mallory, Josh the boyfriend and Alison start to gather their shit. Once I'm sure I'm entirely chip- and salsa-free, I climb the shallow-end ladder out of the pool.

We're kind of laughing about the whole thing - Emma says she never would have tossed the drink at me if I hadn't insisted so strongly that she didn't have the balls to douse me. I say I never would have shook the beers all over her if she hadn't thrown her cold-ass vodka drink at me. And so on.

Emma gets up to take the empty beer bottles and salsa jar to a nearby Rubbermaid trash barrel. I hear the bottles clank to the bottom of the plastic drum, and before I know it I hear the liquid farting sound of a condiment bottle just over my head. Something cold kind of ooze-squirts over my wet scalp, and a pair of hands starts kneading the shit into my noggin.

"What the fuck?!"

Mallory, Josh and Alison are busting a gut around the table.

"What is that?"

Emma, giggling too, lowers her palms and fanned-out fingers into my view. Bright yellow. "Mustard!" she shrieks, almost like a little kid.

"You put French's Yellow in my hair?" I laugh too, but I'm still only half-amused. I reach up gingerly, to feel my hair. It's spiked into porcupine points - mustard, apparently, offers more natural hold than your average hair-care product.

Once again, I'm headed to the pool. Head-first. I'll get Emma back somehow.

--

A couple minutes later, the next round's ammo drops into my lap, almost literally. I'm kneeling in the pool with my elbows over the concrete, and Alison bends down to deliver two more squirt bottles from the Keller refrigerator door.

Hershey's syrup and barbecue sauce. I can do some damage with this shit.

Casually this time, I get out of the pool. Emma's in that same chair, back to me, while Mallory and Josh keep her distracted in idle talk. I catch Mallory's eye briefly; she moves her gaze back down to Emma just as I start drizzling chocolate syrup up Emma's thighs, like I'm garnishing a dessert plate at work.

Meanwhile, I squeeze the bulk of the barbecue sauce in a straight vertical line into her cleavage. I can still see a chopped piece of onion on the top of her left boob from the salsa. I keep squeezing until the pressure runs low on the plastic bottle.

"Andrew!" she screams. "You Heinz 57'd my titties!"

Seconds later, Emma pulls open the back of my swim trunks and lets loose an oily stream of ranch dressing. It squidges straight down my butt crack in a goopy, refrigerated progression.

I'm back in the pool in no time. A couple swervy laps later, Mallory and Josh and Alison say their goodbyes, and Emma comes over to the pool, practically whispering conspiratorially.

"I'm done with you," she says, "but let's grab these squeeze bottles and soil the fuck out of those girls. They're the ones who egged us on."

Sounds good to me. I don't really want to vandalize their clothes or hair so much as maybe hunt them down and scare them. So it's around the side of the house for us, Emma leading the way and cocking her head back with thumb and middle finger in an O shape and index finger to lips in the universal signal for Shhhh.

They see us coming, quiet or not. Mallory takes off around the other side of the house, while Alison is nowhere to be found. Josh just kind of shrugs his shoulders, car keys in hand, while I half-heartedly try to track down Mallory.

Then I see a dude about my age, medium-build, somewhat preppy, walking down the sidewalk. It's dark, and I'm kinda near-sighted, but that's Alison walking with him. I pivot on my heels and head toward the pair. Emma sees me. "Andrew, that's not her! That's not Alison!"

I hesitate for a second. The guy is a total stranger, but no, that's definitely Alison. She keeps close to him, on the inside of the sidewalk, before she finally breaks character and huddles behind her male companion.

"You shouldn't squirt her with that ranch dressing," the guy says, without much conviction. "Don't do that."

"This is a new tank top," Alison chimes in. "You can't ruin a twenty-dollar tank top."

I stand down for a second as the dude keeps walking and Alison eventually hangs behind. She remarks that it would have been worth it to get doused in Hidden Valley Ranch just to get the guy's phone number. Loud enough for him to hear, though he doesn't appear to react to the remark.

I uncap the bottle of dressing just to hear Alison shriek, and I throw a psych-out fake-move at her. And, completely unintentionally, I squirt a line of ranch up her shirt - from bottom to top. Alison's jaw drops.

This is the end of the food fight.

--

The cleanup process takes awhile and involves a broom, a makeshift dustpan and a hose. Also, the last two beers in the fridge, which are the remainders of a six-pack Emma's boyfriend Johnny brought over earlier.

Emma's reaching for her family's cordless house phone as she tells me to get the beers. The exact words: "You go in and grab two Amber Bocks, I'll get the ranch off the phone."

I reach into the fridge and chuckle at the thought of Emma's family being utterly pissed off tomorrow when they discover there's nothing in the house to put on their sandwiches and salads.

When I come back to the patio, Emma says to me, "You know what? Ranch dressing glows in the dark."

After using the net-on-a-pole pool cleaner to strain out the soggy floating tortilla chips, Emma and I spend an hour or so in the pool. I'm thoroughly drunk by now, and I keep rubbing my butt cheeks in attempts to get the ranch off. Oil-based cream dressings are more impervious to chlorinated water than I thought.

When I get up tomorrow, I'll discover my alarm clock's time had been reset overnight and my mustard-saturated hair is still standing perfectly on end. No shower - I'll barely have time to put on shoes and a non-salsa-stained shirt for work.

I'll spend eleven hours waiting tables, all the while annoyed and perfectly grossed out by the oily residue of ranch dressing in the depths of my ass crack. And I'll finally take one of the most rewarding showers of my life at eleven p.m. before heading back out for another night of social drinking.

A dead aunt at the Appomatox courthouse

DATE: Thursday, July 28
PLACES: Hilltop, Harrah's
POISON OF CHOICE: Vodka and club soda
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Cathy, Emma, Billie, Nina, GTO, Hailey, Gavin, Alison


"My fuckin' aunt died today," are the first words I hear out of Billie's mouth when I reach the Old Hilltop.

Billie is my favorite bartender, for several reasons. She hooks up my drinks, and that's never a bad thing, but she's also just a down-to-earth, hilarious character. Vulgar and tough yet heartfelt and fragile. I've spent a lot of hours listening to her personal drama, from fights with her (currently incarcerated) boyfriend to the little daily stuggles of raising three kids in half of a cramped duplex. And plenty, plenty of gossip items involving her extended family. Sisters, cousins, her mom and - all of a sudden - a dead aunt.

Hilltop's Monday and Tuesday evening bartender, Cathy, is grabbing drinks for everyone. She's up here on her night off to hang out and drink, but she's stepped in deftly to fill Billie's shoes while Billie takes a break. It's a valid excuse, a death in the family. And, as she'll point out five times in the next three minutes, we're talking about "a close, tight-knit fuckin' family, where everybody's real close to everybody else." She looks close to tears.

"He's got a tab with me," Billie says as Cathy sets a fully charged 16-ounce plastic-cup vodka and club soda in front of me. I'm one bar stool to the right of Billie - I have two pushed-together tables of friends sitting next to the shuffleboard table. I just came up here to get a quick drink when Billie sprung this on me.

So now I'm sitting down to talk with her for a minute, I think more because it's expected of me than because I want to. I've always been fairly shitty at consoling people. But Billie actually spends more time talking with the amiable crackhead-stoner sitting to her immediate left, and I return to a spot in the middle of the two pushed-together tables of friends.

Emma is to my left, eating a reheated bratwurst from Hilltop's buffet, which consists of one foldout-legs rectangular table with a couple watermelon-sized Tupperware bowls with potato chip and Fritos crumbs, and a small aluminum tin with four brats in it. If you're lucky, you happen upon a Crockpot with a ring of dried-out sloppy joe meat around the inside.

You see, there's a bottlecaps league* on Thursday nights, which equals a special event of sorts at Hilltop and thereby necessitates a food table. But, by the time we get off work and to the bar, the food is hours-old. This did not deter Emma - a minute in the back room microwave and the brat has been revived, oozing grease drops from its pores.

* = I'd never heart of the bar sport of bottlecaps until
I'd been coming to Hilltop for a couple years. It's a
rudimentary form of baseball, played in asphalt lots,
where batters wielding broomsticks attempt to hit
beer bottlecaps whizzed in their direction
by the other team's pitcher.
And, after Thursday night games, the bar's side lot
is littered with hundreds of Bud Light and Busch
caps for the next few days.

--

To my right is a table with three of my female friends from work. To my left, past Emma, is another pair of friends, a married couple. Greg and Hailey Oakes. Greg's dad owns the restaurant I work at, and their personalities are similar. They also speak similarly - Greg's voice sounds just like the impression I do of his dad. I'd developed the voice long before Greg moved back to St. Louis with Hailey en tow.

This was last fall Greg and Hailey moved back, and they almost immediately became an integral part of my social life. Since then they've been converted from the service industry world to the 9-to-5 world, so now I pretty much only see them on the weekends. They've designated this Thursday a special occasion, though, because Greg's college friend Gavin is in town.

I wasn't going to go out tonight, either... And, yes, before you snort at that statement I'll admit "I wasn't going to go out, but look, here I am drinking at the fucking bar again" is a total cliche social-alcoholic catch phrase that only gets more laughable the more you repeat it.

But this time I actually meant it... And, yes, before you snort at that statement, I'll admit "but this time I actually meant it" is also a total cliche social-alcoholic catch phrase that only gets more laughable the more you repeat it.

Greg seemed insistent about me committing to come along and do my part, however trivial, to ensure his guest from out of state had a memorable party experience. Which, I don't have a whole lot of job skills I can list on a resume, but "able to provide a memorable party experience" would go toward the top. In boldface 24-point type.

The memorable experience, for the first hour at least, involves a few shuffleboard games. Emma and Gavin vs. me and Greg. I'm on the jukebox end with Gavin, and we trade some pretty funny banter. Mainly we riff on the idea that the red vs. the blue shuffleboard pucks are an analogy for the Civil War. Blue is the union, red is the confederacy, and only one will emerge victorious. The other will sign papers of surrender at the Appomatox courthouse. This is Gavin's line about the Appomatox courthouse, and I bust up laughing - I haven't heard the word "Appomatox" in the long-ass time. Pre-high school, maybe. The word will get tossed around for the rest of the fucking night.

--

I stuff the jukebox with six bucks, hitting more of the usual favorites. Stones, Petty, CCR, "Under Pressure," very early Santana, Al Green singing "I'm Still in Love With You." By the time the latter plays, I notice Billie is back behind the bar, singing along with all the lyrics. Even the dead last lines of the second verse, which is where I always get fucking stumped.

Three or four minutes later, we hear the bar phone ring. Hilltop is that kind of intimate bar ("intimate" meaning "fucking small") where you can always hear the phone, no matter where you are in the room. And it always kind of makes everyone involuntarily stare over at the bartender to see if the call is for the bar itself or one of the patrons in the bar.

This time, it's for Billie the bartender. I turn back to the shuffleboard game and make a shot or two. Then the music cuts out for a second and Billie gets on the CB-radio mic mounted to the wooden beam that forms the left corner of the bar.

"Everybody, that was my mom on the phone," Bobbi tells the 25 or so customers in the bar, at least half of whom get constant updates on her personal drama just like I do. "She said my aunt is still alive. My fuckin' uncle was trying to play a trick on our family, and I'm gonna kick his ass!"

The bar erupts in applause, I think half because the aunt is alive and half because of Billie's tongue-not-in-cheek threat of physical violence.

--

I rotate myself out of the shuffleboard game and take a seat in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped bar. Just to wait for a drink, at first, but I end up drawn into a conversation with Nina. She's the third bartender at Hilltop, and she too is here on her night off to hang out and drink. Nina is part of the seemingly massive clan bartender Billie and her dead aunt belong to. Her husband - a currently hyper-intoxicated graying man who has lost and/or broken his glasses three times since I got here - is Billie's brother. One of their other siblings, Ree-Ree (her given name is "Reba," as if this family wasn't country enough), owns the bar.

Nina is a terrific bartender - she always keeps up, she makes strong-ass, good-tasting drinks, and when she's light on bar traffic she'll come to your table and ask if you're ready for another drink, while carrying off armloads of empty bottles and rocks glasses. But when Nina's off-duty, she can usually be counted upon to be loaded in a staggering way. Blacking out, unintelligable but unable to shut up, more physically affectionate than you can comfortably handle. And so on.

But tonight she's damn near sober, and I'm pretty drunk already - it's a great conversational combination. We spend 20 minutes or so talking about a DWI she got last fall, on the night of her wedding anniversary. A cop car had followed her on the highway from St. Charles to O'Fallon, where Nina and her husband live. This is about 15 miles of being drunk and seeing the police in the rearview mirror, right on your ass but not throwing on the flashing red and blue lights. With your equally fucked up husband in the passenger seat offering constant paranoid driving advice. I imagine it would suck.

NINA: They booked me, took my fingerprints, all that, and they kept me there for 12 hours.
ME: St. Charles always keeps people for 12 hours. They want everyone to get a quick taste of what prison is like, to scare the shit out of them. They put my friend Charles in the orange suit and everything.
NINA: I didn't get the orange suit. They let me keep my clothes on.
ME: Did they put you in a cell?
NINA: Hell no, they cuffed me to a bench and kept bringing in new people to process. I had to piss for like an hour and a half before they let me up from the bench and walked me to the bathroom.

We also talk about the dead aunt who is actually still alive. It turns out she's 62 and practically on her deathbed, and the prankster uncle is known to be quite a prick.

--

Greg comes up to me before too long. "You comin' to the boat with ua?"

I still haven't decided. I'm in an end-of-month mad scramble to gather my rent, and the boat is going to cost a lot more than sitting in this chair at Hilltop. Besides, Emma's not going to go, and she's my guaranteed ride home at an earlier time. I've already worked all fucking day today, from 10:30 in the morning to like 10:45 at night, with a half-hour off in the middle.

I was offered bribes before I left the shuffleboard table. Greg first reminded me that I made $215 today, a hell of a lot more than I was expecting. I reminded him that the rent money was still a long way from being gathered in full, and he offered to buy all my drinks. Which, with my tolerance, is quite a gamble even at the casino. And especially for Greg, who is usually the type to attempt to have drinks purchased for him.

"Are you guys leaving right now?" I ask him. He says they are. I say hell no, I'm staying in my seat. We're also waiting for another friend, from the table with the trio of female work friends, to get back from driving the other two female work friends home. Greg leaves and Emma comes over to see what I'm going to do. I say probably leave with her and go home.

--

Twenty minutes later, I'm in Greg's wife Hailey's red Honda Civic with them and Gavin, the friend from out of town who is telling us about a drinking episode at South Padre Island, Texas. Essentially, he was with a group of guy friends and was trying to find a girl to hook up with.

"And I found a hot-ass girl sitting by herself at the bar," he tells us. "Just smoking hot, blonde and totally into me. About ten minutes or so into the conversation, things are looking completely promising. And she excuses herself to use the bathroom. A couple of my buddies come over to me, tell me, 'Dude, that chick's a hooker.' I tell 'em to fuck off, you know, I figure they're just giving me shit. They spot the chick coming back from the bathroom and head back from the bar, and I can hear them laughing, the assholes. And I'm talking to this blonde for the next five minutes and, sure enough, she starts wanting to talk in code and negotiate prices."

We're all laughing. "One of the few seeming sure things in my life, and she turned out to be a goddamn hooker." Hailey asks him what did he do next. "I got my ass off the stool and thanked her for her time. I don't have that kind of money."

--

We're at the boat for a couple hours, about a third of which I spend watching Greg and Gavin try their luck at a roulette table. I'm always fascinated watching the roulette dealers, who must calculate the payouts in their heads and pass the corresponding amounts of chips to their proper recipients with split-second precision. It's also fascinating to watch the amount of losing chips that get swept off the table in relation to the much smaller stacks of winning chips.

One man with several massive stacks of cobalt blue dollar chips is placing 60 to 80 bets per round, never appearing to get too far ahead or behind. The casino Muzak is on the "Party Favorites" channel. "Step it Up" by the Stereo MC's is followed directly by Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife." I'm starting to get bored.

I end up playing slots with Hailey, losing a quick five bucks in five pulls on a dollar slot and then breaking even on the quarters while Hailey loses ten bucks. We're not high-end gamblers, to be sure. Greg and Gavin join back up with us within minutes, each having lost their buy-in money.

The four of us head to the main bar. We play quarter-denomination video poker, and I make more small talk with Gavin. I spit out a preamble I've given lots of people lots of times, which goes something like, "Everyone has a celebrity or two that everyone says they look like, and I want to guess yours." I'm usually right at this game, and this time is no exception. Gavin fucking reminds me of Owen Wilson, without question. He doesn't have the fucked-up nose or sucked-in cheeks, and he has a baby mohawk, but he's otherwise a dead ringer. Gavin says yeah, a lot of people tell him that.

--

Last call comes and goes at the bar, and the female friend from work finally does show up. Her name is Alison, and I've known her since she was 17. She used to have a foolproof fake ID and come out with us all the time, but a serious car accident involving alcohol and Vicodin changed that.

The car Alison was in was nailed by a drunk 19-year-old, and she and her two friends were on Vicodin and had a couple beers in them. Some physical therapy, a six-figure settlement, and the purchase of a house and new Chevy Trailblazer later, Alison is back hanging out with all of us at bars and the casino. Now that she's 21.

I end up riding home in the Trailblazer, and Alison and I have a quality conversation about - among other things - a guy she used to be with. I won't remember a lot of the details later, but good chit-chat, definitely.

I get home, grab my Discman and take a walk around the apartment complex. Come back, smoke a little weed and listen to more headphone music until I pass out around 4 a.m. or so. And sleep for about ten hours.