The Black Angel’s Death Song: Drunken Memories Made
We spoke of everything and of nothing. Communication was never the goal, but the means to an end that none of us could then fathom. Half of them still can not. They had no problems. None of us ever did back then. All we had to contemplate on a daily basis was were we would find our next fix. Always looking for that great and ever illusive high that would flee out consciousness by morning. That feeling of a frontal lobe vacation. We had no future. I should have seen the end coming from six months off, and to tell the truth I did…but I didn’t see it for what it truly was. The end.
There was anger…there was love. There were drunken memories made…there were fist fights, there were even sweaty make out sessions in the back of an old delta 88′. Forty ounce intoxications experienced.We all had our fare share of hard liquor. The vapors that turned boys into men…or was it men to boys? I wish I could remember it more clearly. But clear headedness was something we seldom had in those days. I think of this…and I become sad.
Yes, those days are far behind me, only now on some idle Tuesday they linger up out of the time fog. Barely recognizable shapes in the rear view mirror of my mind. More than anything, parties are remembered. Beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, I stumble from room to room, viewing what had become of all of them. One was passed out on a sofa with permanent marker scrawled across his face…the saying, “I love Men.”, seems familiar.
I keep shambling on in my drunken state, the next one was still muttering something as he lay sprawled out on the kitchen floor…seemingly reaching toward the fridge, as if he wanted yet another beer. He would never make it. I stumble into the bathroom to find my attorney passes out in the bathtub, cigarette still burning in his fingers. I gently remove the butt and throw it still smoking into the toilet where it hisses at me in a high pitched death squeal. I begin to urinate, not paying attention to the open door behind me.
After I finish I turn to notice her staring at me…I haven’t zipped up yet…my cock hangs between us like a child that you were never supposed to speak of. She looks at me, holding my beer and my cigarette, and she makes as if to say something…but just before she could, my attorney, very inebriated and half asleep says, ” These SWINE have stolen from my grandmother! They have taken her purse and givin’ her the shackles of a dying man!” All we can do is look at each other…
Its the oddest moment I can ever recall in reality.
And just as quickly it was over…she walked off, I zipped up. We never spoke of it. She was my other friends current girlfriend, so I dare not mention it for fear of incurring his wrath. No. I simply drank the rest of my brew, stubbed out my cigarette and checked on the man in the kitchen one last time to see how far he’d gotten. He was now passed out on his stomach…looking every bit dead to the world. She was sleeping in the back bedroom with her man again…I dare not enter to see what became of her…or him. After all, it was not my place to do so.
Even after recalling this…I can not remember the names of them all…or exactly how it began…or even where we were that night. All I can remember with any kind of real certainty, is that I was drinking Bud Light. My attorney and I had requested Heineken. It was another night of drunken compromise. I stumbled into the living room to find the man with writing on his face had thrown up in his sleep all over the couch.
I couldn’t help but laugh. It was 4:30 am on July the 5th 2001…I slept outside on the lawn…the grass was soft. I slept until about 9 in the morning.
No one knew I was outside…no one would have cared. They were all dead to the world.
God how I miss those days…
