2000 - Thanksgiving in Caruthersville, Mo.

Thanksgiving, 1996
A tradition is born, revolving around Pilgrims, turkey dinners and five-liter boxes of Franzia wine. The first two I take care of with my family, the last with my best friend Jason, who invites me over to his house to split the equivalent of 6.7 bottles of cardboard-encased wine, to be dispensed from a space-age silver pouch and plastic spigot. We take down the box in two or three hours on his back porch while smoking cigars and listening to old Prince albums. We’re both incredibly intoxicated by 11:30, when a rerun of “Carson’s Comedy Classics” hits the Family Channel airwaves. This is the second time in my life I've been drunk, and when the mercury breaks on my BAC meter, I end up telling Jason I love him, man, I hope he knows that, a dozen or more times.

Thanksgiving, 1997
Back porch, cigars, Prince and more than a gallon of Franzia wine. This time the box is gone within an hour, and we’re practically passed out by midnight. I’m on my back on Jason’s bedroom floor when he loses his Russian roulette game with Uncle Vomit and sprays a light purple pool of wine and half-chewed pretzels across the bathroom linoleum. Jason’s mom, dad, visiting grandmother and brother emerge from various corners of the house to chide and chastise him as I watch from the bedroom doorway, leaning against said doorway for equilibrium’s sake. Jason’s brother’s fiancé needs to go home, and I’m parked behind her in the driveway. She asks me for my keys, but I’m reluctant to give them to her because I have no collision insurance on my car. When I mention this aloud, in less than eloquent terms, everyone seems to think it’s really funny.

Thanksgiving, 1998
Same routine, only Jason and I are joined by a third. His girlfriend of a year and a half, a sweet, intelligent high-school girl named Amy. They’ve just broken up so Jason can chase after a girl at his college, but there seem to be no overpowering emotional issues involved. We just have a great time, splitting the Franzia box, cigars and Prince and heading to 7-Eleven for junk-food supplies. Later, when we’re all downstairs, trying to sleep, Amy and I start holding hands in the dark. For some reason unbeknownst to me, I take things a lurching step further and pop her hand in my mouth - finger at a time - and suck away. For another reason unbeknownst, she seems to tolerate and possibly enjoy it until Jason breaks things up by asking what the hell is going on down there, it sounds like a family of four eating a chicken dinner.

Thanksgiving, 1999
Jason has flown in from Seattle - where he moved a couple months ago - to see his family and friends, and I’ve driven up from Columbia for the same purpose. Our paths intersect on his back porch, and Year Four exists in an uneasy state of truce. He is together with the only girl I've ever loved, after all. I call in my roommate Charles to help split the box, and Jason invites our old friend Keith. The Franzia dies a quick, painless death, and we all move on to cans of Bud Light. The truce is broken when Jason and I get too drunk and arrive at the conversational topic of Logan and how Jason whisked her away from me. As always, that I never actually, technically dated Logan makes it no less serious an argument to me. Charles and Keith go inside to watch “South Park” midway through the proceedings. I don’t get fully pissed off, though, until we’re taking a whiz on the neighbor’s fence, side-by-side, and Jason manages to impose an emotional breakthrough on me. I’m drunk and freezing cold, and I find myself drawn into a lingering hug - after we’ve shaken off and zipped up, of course - and telling his ass, “I still love you, you're still my friend,” over and over. It's mainly the alcohol talking. Five minutes later, I grab Charles from upstairs and head back to my family’s house, which is only three minutes away. Thankfully.

The only light falling down on me is the steady bluish-gray and white dream-state illumination of the moon and stars, and that comforts me. So does the near-total humidity, which seems to box us all in and warm up an otherwise chilly fall night. The headlights from Jack's Saturn point out into space, twin search beams bouncing off all those invisible dewdrops in the air and finding nothing at all. Both lights are parallel to a row of trees, which sit in darkness just beyond them. It's a spooky tableau, somewhere in the bootheel of Missouri, and we're using it as a backdrop for this year's ceremonial Franzia wine-box devouring.

"Year Five - what is it you give for the fifth anniversary?" I ask Jason, who's leaning against his big brother's car and sipping from his first Solo cup of Chillable Red. "Paper, right? Or is it the gift of luggage?"

Before anything else can be said, Jack - Jason's oldest brother - passes a crumpled Coke can my way. "This," he says. The brother, not Jason.

I take hold of the can and rotate it slowly back and forth, like a lawn sprinkler. "Garbage. Garbage for the fifth anniversary. It figures. Why reward your partner for only staying with your ass five years?"

"If you don't want the can, then give back the can," Jack says, playing along. "Nothing worse than an ungrateful bitch who can't appreciate a proper anniversary gift."

"No no, I can appreciate it." And I take the lighter from Jack's outstretched hand and ignite the bowed-in center of the horizontal Coke can. I take a harsh but satisfying hit from the lip of the makeshift pipe and send the can Jason’s way. He's getting high with us for a change. "It's the thought that counts," I say, my voice sounding guttural and restrained from still trying to hold in the hit.

We get another round out of the Coke can before headlights appear on the horizon, the first non-Saturn headlights in more than a half-hour. We're convinced they belong to the cops - they have that law enforcement glow, to our stoned, half-drunk eyes anyway. So we each perform a cover-up task, executed so quickly and smoothly that it seems like we pre-planned it. I stash the wine box in some nearby bushes, and Jason sets our three Solo cups side-by-side-by-side, upright behind a tree. Jack hides the small, rectangular piece of foil containing the weed among some protruding roots from the same tree.

We try to look nonchalant, like we're just here, hanging out in the dark along an unpaved road in the woods. Three sober buddies killing a few hours on Thanksgiving night. And before we can even say much about the situation, the approaching car with the bright-ass headlights stops a half-mile up the road, makes an awkward, three-point 180 and speeds off.

"Must've thought we were the cops," I mumble, and as the taillights recede into the distance, we all move to retrieve our respective contraband.

The wine box and cups come back without a hitch, but it doesn't take Encyclopedia Brown to know what's up when Jack starts in with, "Shit!" "Fuck!" and the rest of the Tourette’s lineup. The weed has come up missing. The foil rectangle has been spared, yes, but the immediate area around it seems to yield nothing but dirt, overgrown grass and weeds. The wrong kind of grass, and the wrong kind of weeds.

Jack moves the Saturn to where its headlights - brights, even - are flooding the area around the tree, and we hunt together for four or five minutes, but our marijuana supply has mysteriously returned back to the earth from whence it came.

"Those fucking rednecks owe me some serious weed," Jack declares, and for a brief period, it's the most pissed off I've seen him since I threw up all over his apartment three years ago (on the night he moved in, no less). It was only a dimebag or so, but it was all we had for our weekend excursion.

Something about this beautiful, undying Thanksgiving tradition - something always goes wrong. But every year we honor the tradition anyway. It's a for better or worse concept, just like in a real marriage.

--

I was sure the wine-box tradition would die this year, once Jason told me he and Jack had to spend the holiday in Caruthersville, home of a set of grandparents on their mom's side. Representatives from the entire family would be gathering to celebrate, but for some reason Jason’s mom and dad wouldn't be going, and his girlfriend was a couple thousand miles removed. I got the invite, then, and he assured me I'd be welcome and we could treat the occasion more as a party than a get-together for someone else's family.

I still felt somewhat out of place when we walked into Frank and Carla's - the grandparents - house around 5:30, a full hour late for the family dinner. We were half-high, and my stomach was still near-capacity from eating Thanksgiving dinner with my family three hours prior, but a couple minutes in the microwave and we all had another enormous meal to eat. Carla's warmed-over turkey was actually better than my mom’s, although I'd never tell Mom that.

I'd met Frank and Carla many times and had at least a passing acquaintance with most of the handful of aunts, uncles and cousins present. From the (late) moment we arrived, Jason, Jack and I were collectively known as "the boys." And after serving a few hours of family time, we boys grabbed a few empty plastic cups and excused themselves from the proceedings.

Jack told Frank and Carla he was going to take us city kids on a makeshift tour of Caruthersville in all its small-town glory. That leg of the trip that took about seven or eight minutes - for the next half hour, Jack pulled off the town's main road and tore through the unlit, unmarked gravel and dirt paths. Until we finally pulled over, broke into the Franzia box and loaded the Coke can up with weed.

--

It starts raining about fifteen minutes after Jack misplaces the contents of the dimebag. I didn't bring my one-hitter along because I had an odd, paranoid vision of it clanging to the dinner table in the middle of the prayer and popping open to spill a twenty-sack all over the fucking yams, which would cause my certain banishment from any future family events.

By this time we've pulled off the dirt road completely and are surrounded by woods. The Saturn's headlights are shining out at tree branches, brush and old headstones, most of which are tilted slightly to the left or right. The raindrops fall in euphonious surround-sound, but most of them get caught up in the foliage. Only a few drops trickle through, and we're already too blunted to mind.

"Look what I rounded up," Jack says, closing the driver's side door and presenting me with the Coke can, which has somehow been miraculously reloaded.

"No shit?" I look down at the ample bowl Jason's brother has loaded from thin air, and suddenly I'm ready to proclaim him my Rastafarian messiah. "I thought you spilled it all."

"I had an emergency micro-stash, and this is all of it." He sets fire to the can-bowl, and the glow from the lighter illuminates his face for a few quick seconds. He exhales. "I was saving it for a rainy night."

The micro-stash is going quick - only Jack and I partake - and so is the Franzia. I've been the wine-box custodian since we got here, and it feels noticeably lighter every time I pick it up. Part of that assessment is due no doubt to the increasingly deep buzz coursing through my head and extremities.

If we had any more weed, I'd probably end up paranoid about drinking in a cemetery. Or at least spend ten minutes wondering about how many of these corpses resting in peace got here because of cheap alcohol like the shit we're slamming down. As it is, I finish off the Coke can and ash it on the grave of someone named Frances - possibly male, possibly female, hopefully not both - who died in 1963.

"You guys think it's disrespectful to drop weed-ash on someone's grave?" I ask.

"It's not like you're pissing on it," Jason replies.

"And it's not the first time," says Jack. "We partied out here all through high school. Saw some freaky shit, too. This whole cemetery is haunted."

"All fifty square feet of it?" Jason quips.

"It'd be an easy place to haunt, though, you know?" I wave around at the crooked headstones. "You just have a float a little to the left, a little to the right, a little forward and backward, and you've got your whole haunting ground covered. Piece of cake."

"We would come out here and drop acid," Jack continues, like he's not even listening to our smart asses, "and it was fuckin' crazy. Whenever someone would bring an Ouija board along, this same spirit would get on the board and refuse to get off."

"Nothing worse than a Ouija board hog." I try to dismiss the notion that I just saw something dart across the cemetery, out the corner of my right eye.

"He's over here somewhere." Jack takes a few steps forward, crunching some sticks and leaves on his way. I follow and crane my neck as he gestures down to a grave marker. "That’s the bastard - Eric Jules Kaiser."

"Did you ever ask him how much it sucked to have the middle name Jules?" I pantomime jerking my hands - index fingers and thumbs making a triangle - back and forth across an invisible Ouija board and spell out loud, "'F-U-C-K… Y-O-U.'"

"Eric was a dick, too." Jack tosses a quick apologetic hand down at the marker and says, dismissingly, "Sorry dude, but you were." And, as we're walking back toward the car: "He used to make things fall all around these woods."

"You think that might not have been a ghost but maybe, oh, gravity, Jack?"

"Gravity never quite has that perfect a sense of timing. Fill me up." He sloshes his near-empty Solo cup around for emphasis, and I become Box Bitch once again. Probably three glasses of Chillable Red left.

Jason and Jack spend a few minutes trying to outdo each other with stories of freaky spiritual occurrences while my skeptical butt sips more wine and stares across the cemetery.

--

We emerge from the cemetery just after midnight, Jack drop kicks the empty Franzia box, and it sails in a perfect arc over thirty or forty yards of darkness. We cross the gravel road into a barren field, dirt plowed into uneven rows, and we chase each other around, stewed to the fucking gills. We play a grown-up, full-contact game of tag, and Jack tackles the shit out of his brother in the first three minutes. When I'm "it," I hurtle toward Jason at full tilt and end up falling on my ass, skidding four or five feet in the sandy dirt. Which doesn't hurt in the least and isn't near as muddy as one would expect.

And somehow, don't ask how, we end up standing side by side in the road, and we sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" at top volume. All six minutes of it, in hoarse, drunken harmony. I sing straight to the moon, which is nearly full, and when the song's over, we collapse laughing. Every soul in the cemetery is embarrassed for us, I fear.

It's barely 12:30 when we realize the party's over out here. The rain drops are getting fatter and more abundant, and we're not quite plowed enough to ignore it. Jack mentions that there's one nightclub in the entire tri-county area and asks if we want to go there. Sure, we reply. Why not?

A minute later, we're back on the road, gravel issuing forth from the back tires of the Saturn. We bounce along the road as the windshield wipers whir rapidly and mechanically back and forth, slinging water to the left and right. Bob Marley's Exodus is still playing on the car stereo, and the soothing, utopian sounds of "Three Little Birds" are clashing almost poetically with Jack's manic driving. I buckle my seat belt.

We're just hitting civilization - which might not be the appropriate word, come to think of it - when we run into another bout of poor Thanksgiving luck. Well, a stop sign is what we run into, after the main road creeps up quick on Jack and he slams on the brakes. We fishtail and skid through the gravel, veer to the right and plow right over the sign, which offers no resistance. It smashes immediately to the ground, one ungodly metallic thud begetting another, and the Saturn slides out a few feet into the main road until we finally stop. Which is what the sign told us to do in the first place.

All three of us are about to catch our breath and force our hearts back down through our rib cages when we see the Highway Patrol car across the street. Jack sees it first, actually, and he informs us in a calmer tone of voice than I would have. I'm incredibly relieved to be in the back seat, and for the first time since we ran out of weed, glad I left my one-hitter in St. Louis.

The way his ass was driving on the gravel road, this seems like an ideal time to kick into one of those high-speed pursuits you're always seeing on Fox, but Jack's grown up a little since he was a Caruthersville teenager. He flashes his brights at the cop, who hasn't even had time to react yet, to make it look like he's flagging the officer down to report the incident. As any good citizen would.

Sure enough, those red and blue flashing lights are on us within the minute, and the patrolman wastes no time approaching the Saturn, either. But instead of, "Step out of the car," or any other standard you're-in-a-heap'a-trouble cop line, Rosco P. Coltrane opens with a whistle and a declaration of, "Boy, you sure took that stop sign clean off!" Like he's impressed and bewildered all at once.

And, like an invisible hypnotist snapped his fingers and brought Jack out of his city-boy trance, Jason's brother lapses right back into Missouri-hick inflection. "Tellyawhut, Officer, I couldn't hardly believe it myself!"

They bullshit for another thirty seconds while I'm trying to drink it all in from the backseat, then Rosco gets down to business: "Well're you boys gonna tell me the truth or you gonna tell me about a hundred thousand lies?"

"I know I was going a little fast there, boy no doubt about that, but with the weather the way it is tonight, I just misjudged that turn," Jack says, not even overdoing the drawl.

"I seen you guys comin' up the road there and it looked like you might be taking it a little fast…" Then Rosco slips back into his good ol' fashioned country wonderment. "You took that stop sign clean off! It doesn't look like it even put a scratch on your car."

"You mind if I get out and take a look at that, Officer? I was shore worried about that muhself."

Jack undoes his seat belt, and they head around to the front of the car, him and this hayseed cop. Rosco shines the flashlight around and turns up maybe a dent or two on the license plate. That's all.

The driver's-side door is still open, and we can hear the cop tell Jack, "Them Saturns're some good cars, boy I'll tellyawhut. I was gonna buy one for my daughter, and the salesman gave me a hammer and said, 'Go 'head, give 'er a hit,' and I told him I didn't want to do that, so he bashed the car hisself, and there wasn't a scratch on the thing."

Jason and I exchange a do you believe this fucking guy glance, as the patrolman switches back to cop mode and tells Jack he'd better come sit in the squad car and answer some questions for him. And they disappear behind us for awhile, while we undergo the same situational dichotomy as Rosco - we're amused, highly amused, but we realize there's still a pretty good chance of my friend/his brother getting in some serious trouble.

A second cop car shows up a few minutes later, and without trying to be too conspicuous, I switch positions and stare out the side mirror next to the passenger seat. Still can't make anything out. Now there's an industrial security truck sitting on the shoulder across the street, and an oversize rent-a-cop is ambling across the street to ask Rosco what's going on.

A rap comes on Jason's window. It's Rosco again, and he doesn't even humor us with condescending dialogue like the officers on the "Cops" show. He just asks for our licenses and disappears with them. Another fifteen minutes go by, and even Bob Marley's starting to sound a little impatient and unsure. But I have to chuckle when Rosco shows up at the front end of Jack's "well-made American automobile" to give the cop from the second squad car a guided tour of the damage or lack of.

"You think they’re making him blow the Breathalyzer?"
"Who the fuck knows. Jack had about half the wine we did."
"He's half the size we are."
"There goes the security guy."

I look over and the security truck is pulling away. One less pig at the roast. And another five minutes go by.

Then, just like that, the front door opens and Jack plops down into his front seat. He passes back our IDs and flashes us a canary-yellow citation. "It’s gonna be a sixty-five-dollar fine." He's surprisingly casual as he fastens his seatbelt.

"Rosco let you walk?" I ask, a smile finally crossing my face.

"Yeah, man. He asked if I'd been drinking tonight, and I told him, no, sir, well a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, but that was at like six o'clock. And he said, 'Well, boy, you don't look drunk to me. Your eyes are certainly responsive.' And we talked about domestic autos for awhile."

We all let out a hearty laugh as Jack eases off the shoulder and onto the main road at a fraction of his original speed.

"What about that fatass rent-a-cop?" Jason asks.

"Shit, that guy… He shows up, leans into the window of the cop car and asks about the stop sign. You know, what happened to it, why it was in the middle of the road all of a sudden and not anchored in the dirt. And the cop tells him he's got everything under control and this guy should go back to watching the textile plant. The security guy says, fair enough, and walks away, as he's crossing the road, the cop says under his breath, 'It's a good thing they don't let those boys carry guns.'"

We never make it to the nightclub, but you probably guessed that already. No, we head back to Frank and Carla's, Jason and I crash in a vacant bedroom - him on the bed, me on the floor, at my insistence - and we talk and laugh some more in hushed tones.

--

I look at my watch. Half past nine. My head doesn't hurt that bad, but I don't exactly feel like getting out of bed when Carla pokes her head in the door and announces, "Breakfast on the table, boys. Get it 'fore it gets cold."

Just as quickly, the door shuts and Jason’s snoring ceases. "What'd she say?" he asks, groggy as a post-op hospital patient.

"Breakfast," I mumble, and throw the blanket over my head.

Neither of us moves for another couple of minutes, as voices penetrate the bedroom door: "How late were they out last night?" "After midnight, I reckon." "What were they doing all that time?" "Come on, Grandma, why do you think they took those empty cups with them? They got drunk last night!"

Different relatives get different versions of the story, but officially, we went out driving and got shown around Caruthersville. We might have had a drink or two, but we certainly never got pulled over. Pass the biscuits and gravy, please.

The food is certainly the highlight of my Friday. The down-home breakfast is an absolutely mind-blowing affair, and it drowns out my hangover. Lunch is even better, but an entire day seems to pass before it arrives - as we repeat the television/Game Boy routine, we all take turns using the one bathroom, and I'm shocked to find any hot water to fill the enormous, iron-legged tub with when I go second to last.

Then it's back to Jack's Saturn for a trip to Kennett, Missouri, hometown of Sheryl Crow. We "boys" ride with Uncle Lou, who pops his trunk to reveal a pouch with four or five prerolled joints. "You fucking rule, Uncle Lou," Jack announces, and I'm inclined to agree.

The weed improves an otherwise idle drive, though I'm once again made to maintain around a bunch of rural relatives - Jason's extended family has rented out the Kennett community center, and they've provided enough food for a hundred people. Or fifteen stoned ones. There's an entire table filled with nothing but desserts, which makes the glutton in me spring a footlong hardon.

I introduce myself to a couple relatives as Leroy, Jason and Jack's second cousin, but mostly I keep quiet and enjoy the opportunities for people watching. Which are abundant. I'm not even high anymore by the time Jason, Jack and I sit around the community center piano and sing old Beatles and Elton John songs, but I can’t resist suggesting a certain six-minute Queen song. Which we sing again, in perfect harmony, while a half-dozen twice-removed elderly relatives smile and bob their heads to, none of them having a single clue as to how these "boys" spent their Thanksgiving.