Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian SweanyЧитать онлайн книгу.
than getting drunk, something I try to do as much as possible.
I hold the shot of Jim Beam to the light. Its amber glow is the color of hope—my hope it will somehow magically disappear without having to touch my lips. A goofy-looking guy sits next to me. He’s skinny, skinnier than me at least, and maybe a half inch taller, with a round face and a head sprouting random cowlicks rather than curls.
“Drink it, you fucking pussy,” he says.
“Hatch,” I reply, “shut the fuck up.”
Elias Hatcher has been my best friend since I met him at freshman orientation. Hatch is your typical child of divorce. His mother is a recovering hippie who now raises free-range ostriches somewhere in Oklahoma, his father a Vietnam vet turned semipro sport fisherman who’s spent the better part of the eighties chain smoking clove cigarettes and crawling out from the bottom of a liquor bottle. Hatch’s every move, at least in public when he has an audience, is a premeditated, loud, and more often than not obnoxious attempt to draw attention to himself. He is overly protective and sentimental toward his closest friends to the point of making you feel uncomfortable. Stick Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” in the tape deck, and Hatch is hugging you while bawling his eyes out—guaranteed. If you’re unwilling to commit any impulsive act—shotgun six beers in a row, jump off high bridges into shallow water, or drop everything and take a road trip because you’ve snagged some warm Natty Light with your fake ID and need an excuse to drink it—Hatch invokes the word “pals” and you have no say in the matter.
Like tonight.
“We’ve almost downed this entire half gallon.” I hold up the nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam save for an inch of bourbon—the remains of a sobriety lost hours earlier. “How about we take a break?”
“Pals, Fitzy.” Hatch grabs the half gallon from me. He finishes it, drinking it straight from the bottle. “Bring it!”
“Come on, Hatch.”
“Pals!”
“But I can’t feel my legs.”
“Pals!”
“Ah, fuck it.” I open my mouth and raise the shot glass to my lips. I throw the warm brown liquid down the back of my throat, doing whatever I can to prevent the harsh, woody bite of cheap whiskey from gagging me. I slam the empty shot glass down.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Hatch offers me a large cup of Mountain Dew. “Chaser?”
I nod, grabbing the cup. I drink the lemony soda until it runs out the sides of my mouth and down my face.
Last weekend Hatch and I got kicked out of the big hockey matchup versus Prep. Half-cocked on a bottle of Jägermeister we split before the game, we started taking liberties with the last names of the Prep players. By the middle of the third period, Mrs. Pocock tired of the demonstrative harassment of her son and had us removed.
Founded as Whiskeyville by a couple drunken Scotch-Irish trappers in the eighteenth century, Empire Ridge was renamed in the nineteen-twenties in honor of the large quarry just outside of town that supplied every inch of limestone to the Empire State Building’s exterior. Empire Ridge Preparatory Academy and Empire Ridge Public High School, or simply “Prep” and “The Ridge,” are separated by a mere three and a half miles.
If the stereotypes are to be believed—and given that I have neither the time nor inclination to get to know most people beyond their subjectively imposed stereotypes—Prep is a bastion of entitled fucksticks. The school’s coffers are lined by old money trust funds and new money CEOs who buy their “Prepsters” Beamers on their sixteenth birthdays. Meanwhile we “Ridgies” aspire to little more than attending the next pig roast, slugging pure grain alcohol, and shouting as racecars make left turns for three hours. Excepting the fact I have my own personal automobile pipeline courtesy of Dad, most of us Ridgies drive fifteen-year-old cars inherited from an older sibling—Camaros, Firebirds, Dodge Royal Monacos, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks.
After the hockey game, we were eating our way to sobriety at the McDonald’s down the street when two Prep girls, one a petite brown-haired girl named Carrie, the other a taller brunette named Mary, introduced themselves. They were new in town, their fathers both engineers who’d transferred in from the East Coast. After a half hour of dedicated flirting on both sides, Mary invited us to her house that following Saturday on Gotham Lake, punctuating her invitation with four very unfortunate words: “Bring whoever you want.”
Hatch has procured a new half-gallon of Beam. He pours himself another shot. “Some party,” he says.
I wipe the traces of Mountain Dew from my mouth. “Yeah.”
By my rough calculations, “Bring whoever you want” has translated into two hundred and fifty people since the party started. Hatch and I sit at a table on the second floor balcony overlooking the carnage. Every potted plant is dumped out on the floor, creating a carpet of peace lilies, rubber trees, philodendrons, and potting soil. There are zero exposed surfaces. Wine cooler bottles line the fireplace, cigarette butts floating in every third or fourth bottle. A case or so of shot-gunned beer cans are piled high in the kitchen sink, and multiple decks of playing cards are crawling amongst the refuse.
I’ve been drinking off and on since we got here this morning, some eight hours ago. I’m wearing nothing but a towel. Someone bet me twenty bucks to walk out to the middle of Gotham Lake, which is half-frozen at best. Formed by two limestone quarries adjacent to Empire Quarry that were later connected and flooded, Gotham Lake is shaped like a horseshoe. The bet was to walk out to the middle of the widest part of the lake, which is in the middle of the right curve of the horseshoe. I won the bet, but I lost my clothes, plunging chest-deep into the horseshoe just as I was nearly back to shore.
Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974–1978 starts up on the back deck of the house, replacing Fore! by Huey Lewis and the News, which inexcusably made the playlist. “Swingtown” is a few chords old before someone skips to “Jungle Love.” The techno introduction echoes across Gotham Lake. Hatch and I simultaneously mimic the whistle with our fingers in our mouths, transitioning to dueling air guitars, and then dueling air drums. Aside from us both flubbing the second line and saying “you thought you’d been lonely before” instead of “you thought you had known me before,” we sound pretty good.
Hatch ducks into the bathroom, reemerging with two beers in one hand and a set of car keys in the other. “Shotgun?” He pretends as if I even have the option of saying no.
This time around I don’t even bother going through the motions. “Give it here.”
Hatch hands me the beer. We each take turns cutting a quarter-sized hole in the bottom half of our cans with his dirty car key.
Hatch drives a serious piece-of-shit Volkswagen Beetle that burns through a couple fan belts every month. His idea of a car stereo is me holding a boom box in my lap and making sure his fourth copy of Van Halen’s OU812 doesn’t get eaten by his ravenous tape player. Hatch and I have developed a growing affection for Sammy Hagar, much to the distaste of our diehard David Lee Roth friends. Although Van Halen’s self-titled ’78 debut has to be considered one of rock’s all-time great albums, lately I look to Roth less for his debatable musicianship and more for the gratuitous D-cups and G-strings in his music videos.
Hatch asks if I’m ready. Grunting in reply, I put my mouth on the opening of the can, careful not to cut my lips on the jagged aluminum edges. I pop the tab on the other side of the can and suck the beer through the opening. One full beer down in maybe five seconds. I let out a relieved belch. Hatch leaves a good three or four swallows in his can as he crushes it and throws it on the floor.
We work our way through three more beers. I point to the foam dripping out of his third can. “Fucking cheater.” I punctuate the accusation with a loud, wet belch.
As is the natural order of a party in southern Indiana, Johnny Cougar’s Uh-huh finds its way to the front of the playlist. The opening guitar riff of “Pink Houses” commands a wave of dutiful shouts and catcalls in