The Night of Whatever

My old college buddy James.
Definition:  Lush.

The call came at 9pm.
It was fairly early for a James evening, so I registered surprise when I
heard his voice.  By registering surprise
I, of course, mean that only you and I know that I was taken off guard.  Long ago, as a survival technique, I had
learned not to show surprise in a way that James could detect.

Behind him, creeping through his cell phone, a familiar
soundtrack played.  The screams of women,
the burbles of their dates, Brown-Eyed
Girl.  James was at a wedding.  I’ve worked weddings, both as manager and
caterer, for 15 years. I know them, I can taste them, I can feel them in my frail,
vodka-addled bones.  I didn’t say
anything.  I had to piss and as soon as I
knew it was James, I put everything he was about to say out of my mind and
became consumed by the age-old question:
Could I piss while I was talking to him?

“Nach?”

I didn’t reply.

“Fucking Nach, Nach?”
James screeched, then he cursed under his breath.  I heard ice clinking, his cellphone
scrunching between head and shoulder, a shaker blasting away.  Ice and vodka.  The pour.
A martini.  I hesitated.  James was making a martini for….someone else?
Mystery deepened so, instead of playing
my usual silent game, I brought myself back to earth.

“James, what are you doing?”

“You have got to
get here,” he hissed into the phone.

“I – ”

“Please, god, please, just write this down.”  He rambled off a set of directions that
barely clutched at my mind.  Fortunately,
I knew the final destination.  James hung
up, I blinked twice, then I grabbed my keys and ran.  Something was different about  the night.

The Acura gave me trouble.
That wasn’t very different.  I had
to hit the wheel a few times before it started, then I watched the temperature
gauge slam to the right side, back to the left, then normalize.  That was different.  It would have been funny if, you know, I had
been a passenger.

I power-geared out to where James was.  (Power-geared.  That’s something my grandfather says whenever
he uses the Acura.  “I power-geared to
Giant and got power-bars!”  This was
chief amongst my thoughts when I realized that I didn’t have a third gear
anymore.)

James was at an old mansion in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  Sitting peacefully on a 40 acre, wooded lot,
the house was frequently rented out to wedding parties and other similar
events.  Saturday night at 9pm, the house was full of lights and
rocking like the foundation had got its freak on.  A Spanish song that had been played a million
times at the Cadiz feria in May of 2001 poured out of windows and doors and,
seemingly, from the rocks and trees themselves.
I had spent many hours on the dirt floor of various sherry drunk huts at
the Cadiz feria, my Spanish friends dragging me from tent to tent, stuffing me
full of sherry and 7-Up and, when the Feria closed each night at about 500
o’clock AM, dragging me in a cloud of Spanish-language lunatics to scotch bars
in the bad part of Cadiz.

Flashback:  May,
2001.  I sat in the car for a few
minutes, living every moment of my feria hangover.  My stomach is still somewhere in a back alley
close to the sea.

I locked up and leapt out, hitting speed dial 10 and getting
James.

“Round back,” he said, hanging up.

I circled the house and saw three dozen wedding freaks
dancing on the lawn, feria-crazed, and James in a penguin power suit mixing
exotic drinks.  A magic man whipping lime
and vodka and whole grapefruits and badgers and weasels and various unmarked
bottles into tiny, blue glasses that appeared to have no stems.

Stepping up to the bar, I leaned close to whisper something
harsh and disapproving, but he saw me first.

“Nach!”

“James, what the – ”

“I’m tending bar for Ridgewells.”  He leaned close to my head and whispered, “You’re
a wedding crasher!  Like in that movie
neither of us will watch.”

“Tending bar?”

“Yep.  Thought you’d
appreciate a few free – ”  He poured a
viscous, green fluid into a martini glass made of crystal and air, then handed
it to me.  “Whatevers…”

I took a sip and the world dipped.  I took another sip and a black haired girl
from New York City
appeared at my elbow.

“Hi.”  I said.

“You shouldn’t drink these,” she warned me, her hand fluttering
up and down my arm.

“He’s Nacho Sasha,” James said.  “He’s mellowed in the new decade but, really,
he can drink these.”

“Funny name.” she whispered, her eyes glazed and zombie like
as James filled her glass what a Whatever.
She looked down and mumbled, “Funny…name.”

“What the fuck are you tending bar for?” I asked James.

“I need the extra cash,”

“James, you make 150 grand a year!”

“I have a mortgage man!
Have mercy for the little man!”
He refilled my glass.  It seems I
had finished my drink at some point.  I
noticed a bottle on the bar.

“Johnny Walker Green?”

“It’s between black and blue.”

“Black and blue,” the New
York girl said wistfully.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“I’m from New York
City.”

“No, who are you?”

“I’m from – ”

“Forget it,” James said.
“So Johnny Walker Green was illegal in the US.”

“What?”

“Seriously.  Now it’s
legal.  It’s right below Blue label and –
”

“What!  The
substandard label was illegal?  You could
buy the best but you couldn’t buy the second best?”

James cleared his throat, “I don’t know.  This is what some spic told me.”

“Well, I’ve never had the Green.”

James poured two glasses, looked at wobbling New York, shrugged, then
poured her a glass.  We three held them
up, inspected, then James clinked our glasses.
“For science!”  We knocked back
the Green.  James said: Woof.  I said:
Grrr.  New York said: Bark.

I stepped aside with New
York when customers came up, violently demanding
Whatevers.  James mixed them up and, from
behind, I noticed that he was pouring what appeared to be windshield washer
fluid into the glasses.  I went to stop
him, but New York
grabbed my arm.

“Are you…” She had trouble, slurring the words, dribbling
spit.  She blinked, shook her head,
sucked in a breath, cleared her mind.
“Are you here with…?”

“No, I’m crashing the fucking wedding.”

“Like in the movie?”

“I’m boycotting the movie because I belong to a religious
cult.”

“Do you want to see my tits?”

“Yes.”

We ran up a grand staircase, giggling like school kids, and
slammed our way into a bathroom.  She
worked very hard to close and lock the door, as her hands seemed to have
floated away.  She was better with my
belt buckle.  I had no problem with the
zipper down her back.  Her tits were
fantastic, and as I moved to grasp them in my hands she passed out in my
arms.  After a brief rape or abandon
moment, I decided on the latter and removed her clothes, leaned her back on the
toilet, then took off, leaving the door open.
I returned to James’ side.

“What?  A five minute
fuck?”

“You killed her.”

He grinned.  “The
power of the Whatever!”

An elderly woman hit the table, asking for a Diet Coke.

“Good evening,” I said, “your bartender’s shitfaced!”

She gasped and scurried off.

James grabbed my arm and shook me powerfully, “That’s why I
invited you, babe!  You hurt the sick,
young and elderly.  You’re like a
hyena.  Hyena Sasha!”  For a moment, I was worried he’d vault the
bar and attack someone.  He restrained
himself.  Whatevers.  Definition:
Unknown.  Science:  Hypothesis, experimentation, debate.

We drank Whatevers and discussed ways we could cause
problems.  It was pretty clear that James
wasn’t going to make it ten feet from the bar and, in fact, I had been called
to drive him home.  That moment was fast
upon me as James slumped to his knees, scattering glasses, and poured a fistful
of pearl onions into his palm.  “I love
these fucking little things,” he growled, filling his mouth.

Gibsons.  Cary Grant
drank those in North by Northwest.  I had a sudden, lurching desire to order one
so I could be cool and fuck little boys like Cary, but James was sucking the last of the
pearl onions off of the filthy bar.

I pulled him away and we stumbled away from the house and into
the night just as the girl from New
York City screamed and a ripple of silence moved
through the wedding.

James spun, pulled out a handgun, screamed and fired into
the air.  The silence became chaos and my
scream matched the pitch, intensity and desperation of New York.
I flailed against James and we both lost our balance, falling over a low
retaining wall and dropping about ten feet into a shallow creek.  For me, chaos lapsed into panic as I took
stock of every bone in my body.  James
was up on his feet, though, spreading mud across his face.

“Shut up, Eight Ball, Victor Charles will get you.  Those goddamned slope bastards breathe with
the night, they are in the trees, I can feel their rice breath slipping down
the back of my neck.”  He stood up, aimed
the gun, released a volley of shots, then bolted into darkness.

Times like this, I think James has too much time on his
hands.

I chose the opposite direction, crawling through woods and
getting to the Acura just as a convoy of police cars arrived.  I sank down into the backseat and pulled a
blanket over me.  Roll on dawn, roll on.

From moon and stars to sun and summer heat.  The car felt like it had been bricked up, but
I kept the blanket over me until a light tapping whisked across the
exterior.  Cautiously peeking out from under
my nest, I saw the top of James’ head and one bloodshot eye peering in my
window.  Sucking in stale air, I clambered
into the driver’s seat, popped the locks and tried to look everywhere at once
as he climbed in, moaning and hungover.

I glared at him, numb and a little out of my mind.

“Dude,” his voice scratched, dark and painful, “Thanks for
coming when I called.  God knows what I
would have done otherwise.”