Originally written: January 12, 2005
I woke up on New Years Day on the hardwood floor in the living room of Club Z. Someone had put a pillow under my head. It was a nice replacement for the Christmasy gift-wrapped box I had adopted at some point in the night. I leaned up off my sore back and looked around. Everyone who had been laid out on the couches the night before was gone. Not too suprising. I’m usually the last to leave, unless I’ve done something really stupid the night before. In which case I’m out so fast it’s like I was never there.
Folks began to emerge from the bedrooms. I stood up and looked out on the back porch to see if those goofballs from the night before had come by early to fix the screen window they’d ripped. Surprise. They had not.
We sat around and nursed our hangovers and laughed about the night before. We decided the best way to start out 2005 would be with brunch and Bloody Marys.
So the remaining group of us hopped in a couple cars and headed over to a local bar/restaurant. The place was packed. Apparently we weren’t the only ones with headaches and nausea and diareaha. We grabbed a big table outside and sat down under the blazing sun. It was January, and it was probably 70 degrees out. How perfect. We sat around for a few hours drinking Bloody Marys. The waiter, a long-hair, was rushing from table to table, and kept screwing up our orders. I think I was the only one who got exactly what he ordered. Ironic, being I was also the only one who could have cared less what he got. Being I was the only who didn’t like food. I leaned up to the bartender and commented, “Man, it must suck to have to work today with a hangover, eh?” He laughed and said, “Well, we’ve been doing Jager shots in the back, so it’s not so bad…”
Damn, a drunken waiter. This was going to be a good year.
After we’d finished our meals and our drinks and were deciding if we wanted to leave, Z ordered another pitcher of Bloody Mary’s. Lauren, his wife, looked over at him and rolled her eyes and laughed. The waiter returned with the pitcher after a long wait – he was sweating and drunk. Heh.
We finished off the pitcher and said our goodbyes. Lauren and Katie and Z and I headed back to Club Z. Lauren and Katie went inside to grab some shut-eye. I stood around on the stairs that led from the street up to the complex wearing my hipster jeans, white belt, and a dirty wife-beater. I must have looked like one of those creepy street kids – the kind that would blow a stranger for crack or for free, stranger’s choice. Z came out with a couple of beers left over from the night before, along with the remains of a pack of smokes. We sat down on the steps, beers in koozies, cigarettes in hand, and watched the strangers who were out for a New Years jog.
Z and I sat on those stairs for quite some time, talking and finishing off our beers. Z went back in, returned with two more, and sat back down on the stairs where we talked and began to finish off our new beers. I kept thinking about the fact that I was still in last night’s clothes, I needed a shower, and how my house was probably on fire. But, man, the sun was out, and we still had a bunch of leftover brews in the fridge, and it was basically a perfect fucking day, so I wasn’t going anywhere.
Soon, a 61 year old homeless guy walked up to us and said, “Hey guys, if you give me a beer, God will bless you.” Z went in to get three more beers, and I asked the homeless guy, Jon, how he was so sure God would be willing to bless us for something so simple as a beer. He turned and looked out onto the streets, apparently in no mood to discuss the fine points of Theology. Z returned, handed Jon and me a beer, and invited our new friend to join us on the steps. Which he did.
And we stayed there, the three of us, for hours. Man, we were having a ball, too. Talking and laughing and cracking jokes at the strangers who’d walk by and awkwardly try not to look over at the strange trio on the stoop. We learned a lot about our friend, Jon. He was a nice guy. A sad guy, though. I mean, he didn’t seem that way at the time. He was really happy to have some pals to laugh with on New Years, but I’m sure the next day he was going to be sad. Hell, he didn’t have a home.
It began to get dark out. We stayed out there, talking. At this point, though, Jon, was hammered. And I found it to be quite an interesting exercise to sit out on a step and get drunk with a homeless guy. Then one of Jon’s fellow hobos stopped by. We didn’t like this guy right off the bat. He asked for a cigarette, but we were bone-dry, so he grabbed a butt off the steps and popped it in his scabby mouth. As he lit it, he said in a really creepy, lispy, Southern voice, “Ya’ll don’t laugh at me, ok?” He then stood there with us for a little while, talking about how he’d known Jon for the last 15 years. And how he wanted to take a pull off Jon’s drink so he’d be ready to go out and “panhandle.” Finally, he offered to pick up all our bottles and take them to the dumpster. When he had walked away with an armload, we turned over to Jon, who at this point had taken on kind of a father-figure role to us, and said, “I don’t know about that guy, Jon. He’s trouble, isn’t he?” Jon gave a drunken flip of his hand, and then put his head down.
So we decided it was probably time to head inside, since Lauren had been cooking a nice New Years dinner and it was about ready. We said our goodbyes to Jon, who just kinda nodded his head, and replied, “Uhhmm.. .James Brown…” As Z and I stepped inside, where it was warm and comfortable and clean, it started to hit me. I began to feel bad for our old friend. Here I was, just another drunken jerk who, like Jon, spends a whole lot of time alone. But, of course, when I sit outside drinking beers all day on the steps, I get to head inside afterwards to a nice warm home with my old friends from high school… while Jon would be staggering back to wherever he goes at night, all by himself. Katie made a good point about that guy later on in the night – that you’ve got to really hurt a hell of a lot of people throughout your life to end up with absolutely nothing and no one. That was a good observation, I thought, and for some reason, it made the whole thing even more sad. A guy like Jon doesn’t even have the luxury of playing the victim-role. Nope, he’s poor and alone because he made it happen. And for some reason it made me feel worse for the guy.
It’s not going to change the way I vote, though. So don’t worry.
I looked out the window to check on him, and he was passed out cold on the steps. Oh man, that hurt my heart. For real. I walked outside and sat down next to him, gently shaking his shoulder trying to wake him up. He’d lift his head, look up at me with hollow, glassy eyes that were open but weren’t really seeing anything, reply “Errph…James Brown,” and put his head back down. Man… So I sat down there with him for a little while – an old drunk and a young idiot in a wife beater who was beginning to appreciate things. I gave him a final pat on the back and headed back inside.
I walked in with a strange look on my face. Katie, jokingly, announced, “Bones just met his Ghost of New Years Future!” We laughed. “I think Bones might have just learned a lesson,” she said.
Hmmm. Maybe I did.
Because, well, I now know that you can carry loose cigarettes without breaking them by wearing them in your sock.
It seems 2005 will be the Year of Lessons. Heh.
The four of us sat down to a nice dinner of black-eyed peas (a Southern New Years tradition), and casserole, and uh, other stuff. We lifted our glasses of champagne so I could give a toast. I started it out, “In the clutch of…” Damn. Couldn’t remember the rest. I tried again. “In the clutch of…” Damn.
What I WANTED to say was, “In the clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.” Come to think of it, that particular quote is terribly irrelevent to a nice New Years dinner. But I couldn’t remember it anyway, and said, “To a great year!” Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new president of the fucking ToastMasters.
We ate our food and drank our champagne, and I thought about how neat it was that I was spending New Years Day with three friends I’d known since high school. I then laughed as I observed how the two nice girls sat on one side of the table, while the two drunken idiots sat at the other, one of whom was wearing a “Governator” t-shirt because he thought it’d be rude to wear a wife-beater to the table.
As we were finishing up our meals, our pal Aye Aye called from Florida. We had talked to him earlier while we were sitting out on the steps with Jon, and he was checking in to hear the news of any horrific aftermath. Katie answered the phone and said, “Uh, yeah, we’re just sitting here in the hospital waiting room. Some bum hit Bones over the head with a bottle.” She continued telling her tall tale about how shit went awry outside as Lauren and Z and I looked on in amazement at the fanastic whopper she was pulling out of the ether. She hung up the phone, laughed, and told us that he’d said, “I knew that was going to turn out bad….”
Yeah! We’d just Punk’d our friend! 2005 rules! I then began feel a little bad about it, thinking Aye Aye might be truly worried, and he might call my brothers to see if they’d heard anything, who would of course, also be truly worried, and things could nasty. So I grabbed my cell and left a message on Aye Aye’s voice mail…
“Aye Aye! Dude, it’s Bones! I’m in the hospital parking lot, man! I escaped! I fucking escaped the hospital! Dude, I need you to come down from Florida and get me!”
When he listened to the message later, he knew he’d been had. And now I’m sure he’ll pay us back for the lie ten-fold.
We all headed out to the back porch to call some more friends and lie some more. We were pretty stoked on Punk’n. Trucker hats, ya’ll! But we couldn’t keep from laughing, especially since we’d convinced Katie to tell a story that BOTH Z and I got hit in the head with a bottle. Not terribly believable, sure, but damnit if it ain’t a hilarious visual.
Then a crack addict walked up to the screen window. The same one whom we’d given a slice of pizza to the night before. He stood outside, mumbling thank you’s for the pizza and the generosity. We nodded our heads and said, “You’re welcome” and watched him as he continued to talk, non-stop, without ever looking at us. Finally, we just turned back around and returned to our previous conversation as the crack addict stood out there talking gibberish for another 5 or 10 minutes.
Later that night Leo and Jenn stopped by. They stood around laughing at Z who was blasting punk rock on the back porch and commenting over and over about how Leo looked like “the guy from Fear Factor.” I decided it would be a good idea to grab a couple hours of shut-eye. I didn’t realize it was past eleven at this point. I laid down and closed my eyes and the world stopped for a little while.
They later woke me up a couple hours later to politely ask if I wouldn’t mind sleeping somewhere other than their master bed. A fair request, I’d say. I launched up, rejuvenated, ready to take on the night. “You all ready to hit the town?” I asked. “What time is it, anyway?” They replied, “1:15am.”
NOOOOO!!!!
The night was over. Jenn and Leo had gone home, and everyone else was getting ready for bed.
NOOOOO!!!!
I was terrified at the thought that the weekend was now officially over. The following day I’d be eating a stupid boring dinner in front of the tv and going to bed early to wake up for a week of work. I wanted to cry. I never wanted to leave this between-year purgatory, this safe and comfortable womb of debauchery where everyone eats and drinks and acts fucking merry and celebrates life in drunken revelry. But, sadly, it seems the lights would be going out and the music would be stopping whether I liked it or not, for it was last call for the New Years weekend.
I woke up that next morning with a vision from Saving Private Ryan in my head. The scene where the German soldier has Adam Goldberg pinned down and is whispering “Shhhhh,” as he drives a blade into his heart. Suddenly my mind was filled with thoughts of wars, and I was drenched in a terrible depression. Man…
I pulled myself up and walked outside to the back porch of Club Z. I sat down on a chair, lit a smoke, and stared at the streets outside. Strangers were jogging, already hours deep into their day. I watched them run by. I was wearing my wife beater. I smelled bad. It was Day 2 of 2005. I had just spent three days having a fucking blast with my friends, a million laughs, and I apparently I was only bumming hard because I wanted more. I was having a Joy Hangover. And that was a good thing. Hell yeah it was.
It was going to be a great year.
