Originally posted: August 05, 2005
Well, I’d been meaning to post this little tale for about two months now and had never gotten around to it. It’s a good memory of a good day, but it’s fading fast, so I figured I’d better get it down on text before it becomes nothing more than a passing flash or two.
In June, some pals and I headed down to St. John in the Virgin Islands for our buddy Freaky’s wedding. I hadn’t been to St. John since the summer before my junior year in college, when Aye Aye and I spent a few months down there grilling burgers and bartending. As much as we enjoyed slinging drinks, I personally learned a little something about myself – that I’m much happier on the public side of the bar. Aye Aye and I did, however, learn some great bar tricks – juggling flaming balls of paper towels soaked in Golden Grain; or taking a mouthful of Golden Grain, holding a lighter in front of your face, and blowing a massive fireball into the air. Tricks that impressed the clientele, for sure, but tricks I may have been better off forgetting. Fortunately there, uh, was no permanent scarring…
So, anyway, onto my story…
On our second morning in St. John, our group met up and grabbed a table in front of Woody’s Seafood Saloon – Aye Aye’s and my former place of employment. The pretty waitress came to the table and we ordered a round of Bloody Mary’s. It was hot as hell, and I was sweating my ass off, but I was in a good mood. A good mood, despite the pounding headache and nausea wracking my body. The feeling was mutual around the table. I was paying the price from the long and late night before, and laughing about how I had nothing but the shakes to show for it….
Last night: My buddy The Cop and I are playing pool at 2am with a couple girls in some dive a couple doors down from Woody’s and I suck at pool on a good day and tonight I’m barely even paying attention and probably not even accomplishing contact between stick and cue ball and then we all decide to head back to our house to raise hell cause there’s a pool and a hot tub there and it would be fun to act like the guys from Entourage even though we probably hadn’t even seen that show yet and so we hop in the back of a cab that’s parked outside but it’s not really a cab but really just a pick-up truck with a canopy above a row of cushioned benches in the back and so we sit back there for a good five minutes before realizing there’s no driver anywhere in sight and as we get up to find another cab a couple of dudes from the bar walk up and yell at The Cop and I for hanging with these girls even though they don’t even know them and the girls get annoyed and then our pal Pops calls because he and his lady are lost on a dark road and can’t find their way back to the house even though they’re less than a block away from the house and so The Cop gets tired of all the hassle and decides that we’re all just gonna call it a night and he and I end up sitting around girl-less in the hot tub drinking beer as I piss and moan about how the night is ruined even though it’s now probably 4 or 5 am and it hasn’t been night for a couple hours now and then I fall asleep in the hot tub and The Cop yells at me to wake up and I do so with a mouthful of water…
Anyway….
Ok, so we were sitting around Woody’s drinking Bloody Mary’s and eating burgers. A couple hours passed as we found ourselves going nuts on the tourist tip and dipping into the Daquiris and Rum Punches and Pina Coladas and so forth. I was telling the group about this kick-ass bar on the other side of the island – Skinny Legs – where you could order a beer at the bar and step right out onto the beach behind it. Aye Aye and I had stopped by there the last time on the island on the day of my 21st birthday. I convinced Doug, Betsy, and The Cop that we should head out there that afternoon. We decided we’d first make a stop by Doug and Betsy’s hotel for a quick splash in the pool to refresh our brains, and then we’d make the voyage to the other side of the island.
Doug and Betsy’s place had air conditioning, which was a welcome change. The house where the rest of us were staying didn’t have air conditioning. Or walls. It was a big open-air pad, and was awesome, but damnit if you didn’t spend the entire time “in” there wiping sweat off your face and scratching the mosquito bites on your ankles. Betsy and The Cop and I headed down to the pool. There was an older man out there, maybe 65 or 70, chilling on one of the pool chairs. We asked him if he’d mind if the three of us did a synchronized cannon ball into the pool. He didn’t, so we did. “Yeah!” we cheered! “Let’s do another!” We crawled out of the pool, stood on the side, yelled “1…2…3!!!” and did a three-way Cannon Ball. Again. And then again.
“Sir, would you like to join us for a cannon ball?” we asked the friendly old man.
“Why not?” he replied, as he pushed himself up off his chair.
“Yeah!!!”
And so the four of us – me, The Cop, Betsy, and the 65-70 year old stranger – did a 4-way cannon ball into the pool.
As we emerged from the water, we yelled, “Yeah!!! We’re the CB4!!! The Cannon Ball 4!!!”
Doug came down and he took a picture of the four of us – a little keepsake for the CB4.
We then called a cab – another one of those pickups with the cushioned benches covered by a canopy in the back – and headed out to Skinny Legs. It was a wild ride. These cabbies out there haul some serious ass around the skinny, curvy roads that snake up and down the island hills. The cabbie would yank the steering wheel to the right, and everyone’s ass would slide down the bench and crush the guy on the end into the railing, and then the cabbie would yank the wheel the other way, and everyone’s ass would slide down the other side of the bench, crushing the guy on the other end. It was a helluva ride, and somewhat sobering, actually.
About twenty minutes later we arrived at Skinny Legs, and I couldn’t wait for my pals to get a glimpse of the kick-ass ocean view from the bar. We walked in and observed the open-air eating area in the back and the weed-covered fields with the broken-down truck behind it.
Doug let out one of his trademark high-pitched laughs. “Yeah, nice beach, Bones!!!”
Uh, apparently my memory of the beach might have been a tad off…
We sat down at a table and ordered a round of beers from the pretty 40-year old waitress with the reddish blonde hair and the friendly smile. When she left, I turned to my friends and announced, “I love her.” Sure, had I not started out my day with a brunch full of bloodys and frozens and beers, I probably would have said, “I find our server to be rather attractive.” Ah, but hell, we were on vacation and we were drinking, so why not go for broke? Two artsy-fartsy girls on vacation were sitting at a table next to us. I struck up a conversation with them, and immediately annoyed them. I began my typical array of questions: “So, which one of us guys do you think is the best looking?” “Not you”. And, “If one of us had to be slowly run over by a tank, which one would you choose?” “You”. And so on and so forth… I then pointed to The Cop and asked the girls, “If you had to guess this guy’s profession, would you say Accountant… or Cop… or… uh… uh…”
Doug let out another loud laugh. “Well, obviously it’s not the third one, you idiot!”
The girls guessed “Cop,” and The Cop declared, “Hugs not Drugs, girls. Hugs not Drugs.”
Betsy got up at one point, and as she passed our waitress, in an attempt to help out her slightly pathetic friend, she mentioned that I had the hots for her. The waitress came back to our table to drop off our next round of beers, chatted for a moment, and then asked, “So… which one of you thinks I’m hot?”
Nervously, but not really, I replied, “Uh, that would be me. I must admit that I have a crush on you.”
“Oh, really?” she asked.
“Yep. And I think the two of us should run through fields together, hand-in-hand.”
She smiled. I decided to ruin it.
“But, uh, I’d have to wear shoes so my feet wouldn’t get hurt…”
She smiled again, a genuine smile, and said, “That’s a good one. I like that.” Or something like that. I looked at my friends as she walked away and mouthed, “That worked???” Wow. Anyway, I think I got a little over-confident with that line and tried it back in Atlanta a little while later. It didn’t work.
Eventually the sun went down as we continued to drink bottled domestics and laugh, and then the owner of the place stopped by the table to see how everything was going. We thanked him for the good time, and then he asked, “So, which one of you is the cop?” We all laughed and pointed to The Cop, and I said, “Hey, The Cop, you’ve been preaching the good word about Hugs Not Drugs, so whaddya say, give the guy a hug?” So The Cop stood up and hugged the owner of the bar. Because, well, he believes in hugs and not drugs. And then I stood up and hugged the owner of the bar. Because, well, he owned a bar.
Finally we decided to get out of there. It was dark. We hailed a cab for another wild ride across the island. As we sped past the trees, I leaned out over the railing of the cab as far as I could without being an asshole, the wind blasting my face, and remembered the old high school days where we’d speed down some desolate road in our buddy’s mom’s minivan, seeing how far we could hang out of the cargo door without falling out. We exited the cab in front of Woodys. We headed in for more drinks and spotted the group of girls that were also on the island for the wedding. Yeah, girls! I was stoked. I started up a couple of different conversations that went nowhere fast and revealed absolutely nothing other than that a full day of drinking had rendered me quite useless. I didn’t care. I was drunk and happy. Yeah, girls! Tonight’s going to be a party! I stepped inside to order a beer and hit then head, and when I came out, they were all gone. Figures…
A little while later at another bar The Cop and I realized that the non-stop all-day beer bender had taken it’s toll, and neither of us really had any business being out in public any longer. Plus, I needed to be at dress rehearsal at 6:45 that next morning. Shit! So, doing something I so rarely do on days like this, I agreed with The Cop that it was time to call it a night, and we cabbed it home.
We payed the cabbie and walked “inside” the house with no walls. “Damn, dude, that was a fun-ass day, no?” The Cop looked at his watch, and then looked over at me with a look of shock on his face. “What time is it?” I asked. He paused. “Uh, 9:30pm.”
What?
9:30? You can’t go home at 9:30! You just can’t. We couldn’t believe it. How could it only be 9:30? Doesn’t it ever get late on this damn island? Well, there was no way in hell we could give up that easily. “Alright, dude! Let’s hurry and sober up and get back out there! ” And like a couple of morons on a mission, we both jumped in the pool and started splashing the water all over our faces to sober up. Wet and stupid and shaking my head back and forth to rattle out the cobwebs, I eventually felt stable enough for round two. We walked down the hill to the Weston to catch a cab. A couple of Weston employees drove up in a golf cart with boxes of bathroom products in the back. I asked the dudes if I could grab a couple bottles of shampoo. They obliged. I grabbed two, and acted like it was the best gift a dude could ever get. I clicked the two bottles together in some pointless symoblic gesture – click click – and we continued on our way. For the rest of the walk, throughout the cab ride, and as we prowled the streets towards the bars, I would continually give the two bottles a symbolic “click click” together. Finally, after about 20 or 30 repeats of my click routine, The Cop swatted the bottles from my hand and kicked them under a fence as soon as they hit the ground.
We joined up with all our friends who were sitting mellow at some quiet outdoor bar. And then… nothing happened. The night ended up pretty uneventfully. We all headed back to our pads, and I proceeded to fall asleep in the hot tub for the second night in a row.
Oh, and as we were all standing around in one of the rooms that night… ok, fine, I think it might have been the next night, actually, but it doesn’t matter… someone spotted a roach running across the floor. He stomped on it and squashed the fucker. The four of us in the room looked down at the dead monster and cringed. And then someone, I think me, yelled, “Let’s touch it!” And so the four of us crouched down over it and counted, “One… Two… Three!” and we all touched the dead roach. Normally, I’m terrified of roaches. Like, embarrasingly terrified. But not that night. Uh, liquor courage, I guess…
Impressively, I was able to wake up and make it to the dress reahearsal on time, and I felt like a million bucks. Or, at least, not like complete shit. The rest of the weekend continued to be great, and we were stoked to be on an island with our old pal of the last decade as he married his lady. And I got to leave with some killer memories and a long-winded story of a full day of kicks and laughs on St. John…
