lucky strike

There are four days every year when you never want to be driving anywhere at 4 a.m. for any reason at all, because your very presence on the road is considered probable cause.  These days are: New Year’s Day, Super Bowl Monday, the 5^th of July, and the fourth Friday in November.  Cops assume anyone out at this time of the morning is drunk, and they are right in most instances.

This is the situation I find myself in right now.  It’s 4.5 hours into the new year and I pulled out of the parking lot of Crazy Matt’s apartment complex maybe 15 minutes ago.  I haven’t had anything to drink in a few hours, but since I’m 19 if I blow anything above .00, I am going straight to jail and not collecting 200 dollars.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t in Ohio.  The two states most notorious for snagging drunk drivers, speeders, and other automotive offenders are Ohio and Utah.  I guess at the very least I can thank God I’m not in Utah.  Oh Jesus, even the undercover cops are out in full force tonight.  You can tell which cars in the lots are undercover cops because their cars don’t have any frost on them.  I spent fifteen minutes scraping that shit off my car, but I can still see where that drunk girl staggered by and wrote ‘I [heart] you’ with her fingernail.  Things like that never go away, unless you actually windex your windows and nobody’s paying me to do that.

Right now is just like two days ago, in the sense that I’ve exhausted my supply of cigarettes.  I’m only a smoker on those occasions when I intend to do lots of drinking, and that’s just what I planned to do tonight.

Since I don’t smoke too often, I’m picky about what cigarettes I’m going to crush my lungs with.  That honor falls to the Lucky Strike Lights.  All other cigarettes are crap in comparison.

And you may wonder how I came to have such an affinity for these particular cancer sticks, and I will tell you.  It started three years ago, when I wandered into Crapplebee’s with my friend Phil, looking for a better job.  We walked up to Steve, the manager, and he was sitting at a little table out front, balancing accounts.  He looked up at me and said:

“Are you the kid Phil has been telling me about who knows all the Sims cheats?”

“Yup.  They’re right here on this paper.”

“Wonderful.  You’re hired.”

The Sims, of course, was a popular computer game where you’d build a house for your little digitized people and govern their digital lives like some kind of geeky deity.  But that’s how it went, and that’s how I came to join the restaurant business and realize that you only get smoke breaks if you’re a smoker. 

It might have been a Friday, on my very first week of chicken-strip-slanging hell when I almost went crazy.  I had maybe fifteen tickets hanging, and at least ten more dangling from the machine and I was frazzled.  I just needed a break before I started cutting people and Brad, the other manager, saw me about to murder a waiter who asked me where his food was.  Brad told one of the other cooks to cover for me, and he led me outside and told me to sit down and pointed to a milk crate.  He didn’t say anything, but he offered me a cigarette.  In between magic puffs of nicotine, I felt relieved.  I’d tried smoking Camels, and Marlboros, and all your other fancy packs, but that was the first time I ever smoked a cigarette and accomplished something productive.

I walked back in and I was calm as Buddha.  I knocked out the tickets in twenty minutes and had time to eat a t-bone steak and a cheesecake while everyone else caught up to the rush. 

Shit.  I think a cop just went by me and I hope he doesn’t turn around.  Christ, I hope he didn’t look in my window and see this drunk girl’s head on my lap.  Then he would definitely turn around.  The steering wheel is lubricated with all the sweat coming from my palms and I am shaking.  I am so going to jail tonight.

So I had to get these cigarettes for my big night out tonight.  I tried the gas station on the corner by my house and they told me they didn’t carry them.  Then I went to my local Seven-Eleven and that punk told me they don’t even exist.  At that point I knew I was going to have to go to Gus Miller’s Newsstand, which sucks, ‘cause it’s an hour away from my house.

Gus Miller’s is the Mecca for all your tobacco-related needs.  It’s in Oakland, in the heart of Pitt campus, and they have all manner of cheap cigarettes and rolling papers and Philly blunts and anything a young college student might desire.

And that’s exactly where I went.  And of course there were millions of cars on the Parkway, and traffic was at a stand-still through the tunnels, and of course there was a Pitt basketball game and NO parking for a six-mile radius of the school.  But I obtained me some Lucky Strike Lights and drew in glorious nicotine-filled breaths on my way home.

“Julia, wake up!  Please sit up!”

There’s a car right behind me and it’s making me very nervous just because we’re the only two cars on the road.  I want this drunk girl to please sit up for just one minute, but there is no way I can rouse her without going ‘left of center’ and straight to jail and not collecting two hundred dollars.  No, its FIVE hundred dollars, at least, for bail.  Shit.

Then there’s Julia.  This skinny girl with dark hair and seductive brown eyes who is passed out in the passenger seat with her head between my legs.  She’s the source of all my problems, my fountain of misery.

I wouldn’t say she’s my girlfriend.  She was in my Creative Writing class this semester and never said a word to me until the second-to-last week of class, when I was standing on a frozen streetcorner waiting for the bus and talking to this ditzy sorority girl who was also in our class.  Julia offered us both a ride home.

The ditzy girl lived about five minutes away, but like I said, I commute from an hour outside of Pittsburgh.  I tried telling Julia this, but she seemed almost happy at the prospect of getting to spend some time alone with me.  She even offered to take me out for beers, but I told her:

“Um, I’m only 19.  We can go out for milkshakes, though, if you’re up for it.”

That night, I stumbled upon three strange revelations.  The first was that Julia was five years older than me, the second was that she had a boyfriend who was seven years older than her, and the third was when she said:

“I like you.  I’ve had like this huge crush on you ever since the first day of class.”

After that I went home, with a new phone number scribbled on a corner of placemat, to bask in intrigue.  I was still trying to decide how to handle this situation two days later, when Julia called me at 11:30 and asked me what I was doing.

“Mainly sleeping, in about a half an hour.”  I said.

“I want to see you. *hiccup*  I’m coming to visit.  I’ll call you when I’m *hiccup* closer to your house.”

I could actually smell the alcohol on her breath through the phone.  Despite my best efforts to convince her to NOT drive anymore, I got another phone call at midnight.  Julia had run out of gas, and it was up to me to rescue her.

So I summoned my friend Jesse and we searched the side of the interstate for her little black car.  I gave him my keys and approached Julia’s car with the gas can.  She ran up to me and kissed me and took me back to her car, and I commandeered the vehicle to my house, because she lived too damn far away for what time it was.

Jesse went home, and I found myself sitting on my futon next to this intoxicated girl who was rambling about the evils of Belgian beer and then she was feeling me up and saying very unprofessional things, like how she had to be at work in five hours.  And so we did what it was obvious we were going to do.  Twice.  After that we each drank a glass of cranberry juice and went to sleep.

My alarm went off promptly at 6:30 and I turned the light on.  Julia shielded her eyes and started taking shallow breaths.  Christ, I knew what was coming and I ran to her with the trash can, but it was too late.  She projectile-vomited liquid purple goop all over my favorite light blue comforter.  Between this and the whole boyfriend issue, I knew right then there would never be a relationship in our future.

Oh shit.  Oh Christ.  Oh fuck.  I’m on the interstate and two minutes ago I saw this police-SUV exit abruptly on the other side and now, in my rearview mirror, I can see headlights approaching me far faster than the legal speed limit, which I am following religiously.  I’m going to jail.  This is going to be on my record forever.  What will I tell my grandma?  My dad will kill me, I think, before that becomes an issue.

And I exhale in relief.  It’s only a Cavalier with some idiot behind the wheel who doesn’t know the rules for driving on nights like this.  Oh well, let him distract all the cops for the next ten miles.  It’s not my concern anymore.

Which brings me to tonight.  Julia met me at my house at 5 p.m. and we started for Ohio, for Uncle Matt’s apartment.  If I hadn’t promised her we would do something on New Year’s, I wouldn’t have brought her.  But it seemed I also made some kind of promise to Matt a few weeks ago that I would go to his party.  I was stuck, and despite my best efforts to convince her it wouldn’t be fun and it was far away and my relatives are weird, she still wanted to go.

Let me tell you about my uncle, who I call Crazy Matt.  He is a die-hard Misfits fan.  He is the same age as Julia, and he is pure fun.  His wife, Leigh Ann, is gorgeous and tolerant of his drunken hijinx, and they’ve been together since they were half-way through high school.  Matt has short, brownish hair and a different goatee every time I see him.  He is a fiend at electric guitar, and all his stories start with ‘So I had drunk about a fifth of rum…’

I consider his apartment my Sanctuary, sacred ground where I go when I want to relax and be completely goofy.  Where nothing bad can happen to me no matter how drunk I get or who shows up.  Until tonight, that is.

He called me when we were about fifteen minutes from his house and said he had the liquor, but I needed to pick up my own mixers.  We stopped at a gas station where I got four slim cans of KMX.  KMX is one of those energy drinks, in the same family as Red Bull and SoBe Adrenaline Rush, etc.  The difference is that KMX doesn’t suck, like the other ones do.  It tastes like Slice and has the consistency of syrup.  In short, it was made to be mixed with large amounts of vodka.

We pulled into the parking lot a few minutes later and I can remember standing in the landing waiting to be buzzed in, carrying my guitar and a plastic bag full of cans.  Julia was toting a case of Rail-Bender Ales. 

I barely made it two steps into Matt’s apartment before he bear-hugged me and told me it was time to mix a drink.  He pulled a very large bottle of vodka from the freezer and his own very large bottle of rum.  He said he was sorry, but he was out of regular ice cubes and ice shot glasses would have to suffice.  I’d never seen this before, but you have a plastic tray of shot glasses, you fill it with water, and then snap a top part on and you get…ice shot glasses.  I was amazed, of course.

So I had vodka and KMX, and Matt had a rum and Slice.  Julia had a Rail-Bender Ale.  We sat on the couches, and the only other people there so far were Leigh-Ann and Kim, Matt’s little sister who is also my aunt.  Almost on cue, we all lit cigarettes and started smoking away.  The first inhalation of the fine bouquet of tobacco was the best, and by the time I was done with the first cigarette, I was buzzing.

After we each finished our first drink, Crazy Matt and I started playing guitar.  He played a new Irish-sounding song he wrote, and I played some new stuff of my own.  Julia was on her third beer by the time I was finished, and she wrapped her arms around me and hung from my shoulders as more people started showing up.

There was this kid who lived on the floor below and was Matt’s friend.  His real name was Oswald, but everyone just called him Ozzie.  He had black hair, bushy eyebrows, and a forehead that sticks out perhaps half an inch too far.  He was bursting out of this little t-shirt, just to prove to everyone that, yes, he really does have muscles.  He was walking around holding a beer and sporting one of those dumb smiles, like he’s the butt of a joke everyone else gets but him.

Ozzie brought his friend Aaron, and two other kids named Austin and Kyle showed up.  They stayed for maybe an hour and then trooped off to some other party, and then it was just the five of us again.

Matt and Leigh Ann fought over what music we should listen to, and Matt made Kim get him drinks, and change CD’s, and light his cigarettes.  You know, typical sibling hassling.  It was getting close to midnight at this point, and the other kids had come back, bringing with them a few new people I didn’t know.

Julia was whispering in my ear, spouting terrible curses that tickled and hummed in my eardrums.  I could smell beer on her breath, and she wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. 

“Listen, I like you.  These last three weeks I’ve gone on dates with three other boys.  But you know something, the whole time, I was thinking about you.  I like spending time with you.  I like lying in bed like you.  I even like having sex with you.”

And then she kissed me.  I tried to say something, but she put her finger to my lips and kept talking.

“You’re only 19.  This other girl who hurt you, I hate her.  You’re only 19 and you say you’ve given up on love.  You think you’re so wise.  I don’t want you to love me, that would be the worst thing you could ever do to me.  But I like you thiiiis much, and I want you to like me too.  I want it to just be you and me.”

Somewhere during that speech, the ball dropped, it was officially the New Year, and Dick Clark turned 107 years old.  Someone said something about bonging a beer and Julia jerked her head suddenly in that direction and ran off to bong beer.

Some kid I don’t know sat down and started talking to me about how he’s going to Kent State and started asking me questions about Japanese and what I was going to do when I graduated.  I heard cheering in the kitchen as Julia bonged two beers and shotgunned another one.  The crowd dissipated from there and filtered back into the living room.

I was still talking to that random kid when my uncle walked up to me solemnly and asked:

“Is there a problem?”

“With what?” I replied.

“With that.”

He pointed to the kitchen and I stepped in to find Julia sitting on the kitchen counter making out with Ozzie.  I walked away in disgust when Crazy Matt came up to me, with Josh at his side.  Josh was shirtless and fierce.  I remember going to this huge outdoor concert with him and we were maybe twenty feet from the stage.  I’m not really a big person, or even very tough, but arms and legs and drunk people were bouncing everywhere and Josh deflected them all from me.  He motioned towards the kitchen and asked me again.

“Is that a problem?”

Matt conferred with him and they both assured me that at a whim this kid could be taken outside and pummeled into squishy, bloody pieces.  But I said no, don’t worry about it.  After all, it wasn’t Ozzie’s fault Julia’s a drunken whore.

I retired to the couch and started chain-smoking and talking to various people.  Julia came back into the room and was dancing with a few different guys and acting like everything was copasetic.  By now it was almost 3 a.m. and I had stopped drinking a long time ago.

Julia took some other kid’s baseball cap and put it on her head and then just started kissing him right in front of everyone.  After stumbling onto the couch and fondling yet another kid, she gravitated back towards me, but only for a minute.  Matt told some people to get everyone to leave because it was getting loud and he didn’t want any trouble from his neighbors.

A few kids left, including Ozzie and Julia.  Someone asked me if I wanted to go too, but I decided to stay with the seven or eight other people who were reminiscing about past experiences and close shaves.  She was only gone for fifteen minutes, but to me it was five cigarettes and an eternity later when she returned.

Sitting next to me, she started her rhythmic whispering in my ear again.

“I don’t want it to be like this.  I don’t want a bunch of different guys.  I just want you.  And I want you to like me.  Is that so hard, for you to like me?  Just say you do.  Lie to me.  Pretend you like me just a little bit.  Try it.”

Everyone had settled down for a conversation about racism and I pretended to be asleep and Julia really was asleep on my shoulder as they talked about how the Mexicans are stealing all our jobs and the black people take all our tax money through welfare and unemployment.  It was making me sick and I decided that at 4 I was leaving. 

The second it turned 4 o’ clock I rose to depart.  I gathered my stuff and pissed, and I came back to rouse Julia.  She was pretty much immobile, but after five minutes of cajoling and whispering I got her to rise up and get ready to leave.

I walked around the room shaking hands, and said good night to Leigh Ann and Kim.  I could hear some kid proclaim from the corner of the room that yes, he was a racist, and he didn’t care what anyone thought.  Crazy Matt was above such discussions, and had long since passed out in his room.  I asked Julia if she had everything and she mumbled that she did.  My aunt pleaded with me not to go, but finally conceded to let me leave on the condition that I call her cell phone if I needed someone to come bail me out of jail.

We stumbled out to my car and I started the engine so it would heat up the car while I scraped the frost off the windows.  I climbed back into the driver’s seat, fully realizing my predicament.  I looked at Julia, whose eyes were droopy with sleep. 

“You realize,” I said, “That this is pretty much what Hunter S. Thompson means by fear and loathing.  Any cop we see on the way home can stop us for any reason and take us to jail.”

I was buzzing on caffeine and nicotine and alcohol and I knew that this was my test, my hour of reckoning.  Julia celebrated by rolling a joint as we pulled out of the parking lot.

“Are you retarded?”  I asked her.

She smiled and proclaimed happily: “This has been the best New Year’s I’ve ever had.  Thanks for bringing me.”

And she’s not being sarcastic or anything.  God, some people are fucked up.

She took four or five hits off her joint and put it out in my ashtray to save for later.  It didn’t take long for her to tilt sideways and end up with her head in my lap.  At first I thought she was going to start doing naughty things to my man-bits, but then I heard snoring.

Which brings us to the present.  I’m on this dark and desolate Ohio road trying to obey the speed limit rules, but it’s hard when in the span of less than a mile it goes from 25 to 45, and then to 35.  It’s even harder when I can’t stop shaking and imagining that I’m swerving all over the road when I’m not.  I’d really like a cigarette now, but I ran out of those right before we left.  I’d even settle for a Camel.

I’m almost relieved when I get to the last highway and cross into Pennsylvania again.  Only twenty more minutes until I’m safe and home and everything is gravy.  A few cars blast by me, scaring the hell out of me because right now every car is a cop in my mind, but it’s okay.  I’m a champion and a warrior and I can do this.

The sign says ‘Hopewell 2 Miles.’  That is my exit and my salvation.  I feel that if I can make it to that exit everything will be peachy-freaking-keen.  But it’s not.

I’m less than a mile away when I see the cop speed out from behind a billboard and swoop behind me.  Blueberries and cherries are flashing all around us and, for starters, I need to get this drunk girl to sit up.  Still, she won’t budge. God dammit.

He taps the flashlight on my window and I roll it down.  He doesn’t say anything as I hand him my license and my registration.  All I can do is wait, and pray, and wait.  It seems like twenty minutes I’m sitting here.  This will go on my record.  I won’t get to go to Japan with a criminal record.  And I will lose my license.  I won’t be able to get to work and I will get fired, and I won’t be able to get to school and I will flunk out.  I might as well just bypass all that and get the K-Mart application tomorrow after somebody bails me out.

Christ, I am so fucked.  If you somehow let me out of this, God, I will build you a fucking synagogue.  I will sacrifice this dumb whore to you right on the side of the road and drink her blood if it will please you.  Please, strike down this state trooper with a flash of lightning and I won’t spit in the Holy Water ever again.

There’s no lightning, just the footsteps and cycling lights and he hands me my stuff.  He’s a black man, and there’s no hint of any kind of joviality in his voice.  He says to me in the calmest voice I’ve ever heard:

“You have a clean record.  You’re probably a good kid.  I won’t ask you if you’ve had anything to drink tonight, because I don’t want you to insult my intelligence by lying to me.  Get this taillight fixed, and you might want to consider getting rid of whatever’s in your ashtray.”

He doesn’t say anything else as he steps back to his car, and I roll my window up.  I’m blinking in disbelief, thinking that this is some kind of a trick and he’s going to rush back and drag me out of my car and beat the shit out of me.  But he doesn’t.  He just drives onto the median, waits for a car to come screeching by in the other direction, and speeds off towards his next victim.

We make it to my house without any further incident, but I’m still trembling from the drugs and the adrenaline.  I shake Julia and pretty much guide her to my room.  She sits on the futon and I toss her a pillow as I take two Tylenol PM’s and trounce upstairs to take a shower.  I mean, I can’t make her drive home.  She’ll never make it in her current state.

I’m getting pelted by thousands of scalding beads of dihydrogen monoxide, but I still feel dirty.  My throat is sore from smoking and my teeth are coated with yellow, even after I brushed twice.  But the water feels good.  It feels even better when I’m freezing and I hurry downstairs to throw on some boxers and a t-shirt, because I’m under the covers and the diphenhydramine hydrochloric acid has kicked in and I can sleep the blissful sleep of the dead.

That’s not quite how it goes.

Four hours later, my cell phone jolts me from deep sleep, ringing fierce Tetris music from my pants pocket on the floor.  Crazy Matt has awakened me to tell me that Julia left her keys and her wallet at his apartment and I have one hour to go and get them before they go to Leigh Ann’s mom’s house for the day.

Frightened by the prospect of waiting and being stuck with Julia for any longer than necessary, I flick the lights on and off until she wakes up.  I tell her we have to go to Ohio, yet again, because she’s a stupid bitch and left her car keys in Ohio.

We’re driving again, and the sunlight is golden.  It might even be sixty degrees, warm by anyone’s standards, and there’s a silence in my car.  Julia just sits there, awake, not saying a word.  We’re halfway there when she decides to ask me:

“Are you mad at me?”

There’s no smart answer to a stupid question, so all I can say to that is:  “I’m not really in a mood to discuss it.  We’ll talk about it on the way back.”

For the second time in a day, we arrive at Matt’s apartment complex.  I tell Julia to wait in the car and I grab my keys.  I stand again in the entry, waiting to be buzzed in.  I find Matt, Kim, and Leigh Ann eating breakfast, and Josh is passed out on the floor.  They’re watching television and Leigh Ann offers to make me some breakfast.

“Well, Julia’s waiting in the car, so...sure.  I would love some.  Take your time.”  I fetch her keys and turn my cell phone off to make sure my pleasant breakfast isn’t interrupted.  I know she won’t come up here, because she doesn’t remember what number their apartment is.  All she can do is wait in my car.

So I hang out and eat eggs and toast.  Kim smiles and says I should bring Julia back again because she’s fun, and Matt just shakes his head like you do when a little kid says something they don’t realize is terrible.

Thirty minutes later, I head back to my car and Julia is just sitting there.  She doesn’t say anything as I throw a wallet and her keys on her lap.  I turn up the radio loud and sing along, in anger and triumph until she turns it down and repeats her question.

“Are you mad at me?”

I think for a minute before I reply.  “Julia, how would you feel if I went to your house during your family reunion and fucked your mom in your kitchen?  Probably you would be mad.  What you did was kind of like that.  You embarrassed me in front of my family, and made it abundantly clear that I will NEVER be able to trust you enough to be in a relationship with you.”

She has no response to that, and I spend the rest of the trip thinking how proud I am of myself for not swearing or shouting or killing her.  Now that it’s daylight and I’m sober, I’m taking every sharp turn at seventy miles an hour, on two wheels.  We’re on my street, seconds away from my house when she asks if I’m hungry and want to go out for breakfast.

“Nope.”

I’m home, and I get out of my car and walk straight to my door, not even glancing back at Julia.