TWO SIX PACKS OF COLT .45

Pretty much a true story at age 14, with a recently departed friend, at age 66. Written maybe 35 years ago.

TWO SIX PACKS OF COLT .45

 

     I lifted my third can of Colt .45 to my mouth, guzzled, a little bit dripping down my jaw. I was definitely high, on my way to becoming drunk. It doesn’t take much when you first start.
     My buddy was down on the floor, doing push-ups. He was getting drunk too, and starting to feel like a real strong man. I held my can of Colt over his back and gave it a turn. Splip, splish…it cascaded onto his back, cold beer.
     “Hey! What the hell! Jesus! Goddamnit! What are you doing?” He folded up on the floor like a wet straw wrapper, then got on his knees and stared at me, mad.
     I laughed my ass off.
     “Think it’s pretty funny, eh?”    
     “It was.” I was still laughing, my belly shaking. “It was. You shoulda seen yourself!”
     “Oh yeah? Well here!”
     He gave his beer can a jerk in my direction and a stream of beer shot out in my face and splashed down over my chest.
     “Well shit, man…” I moved to paste him with a gusher.
     “Hey! No! Wait! We’ll get beer all over! My parents’ll know we’ve been drinking.”
     “Yeah, yeah, you’re right.”
     It was the first time either of us had been drunk. We were to become steady drinking buddies for the rest of that summer, and quite a few summers afterward when we became old pros. But it was new then, and a novelty. It was a discovery of a new world. We were bored with the one we lived in everyday. To be transported to a different world was an exciting and vibrant thing.
     We both popped open new beers and moved into the living room. I started slapping my face.
     “Hey! I can’t feel nothing!  Not a thing! I’m all numb!” I sat there slapping myself on the cheeks, hard, more and more amused. We both began to laugh, the laughter building and building like a snowball until we were helpless with it. I felt like I was about to burst out of my skin.
     “Whoo! I can’t feel anything! I can’t feeeel anything!” I sang, I laughed, rocking in my chair.
     Then I got up and jumped into the air, letting myself fall freely. I made no effort to break or soften the fall.
     “Wheee! Up we go!” Crash. “Down we fall! I can’t even feel this!”
     My friend joined in and there we were, both of us, jumping damn near to the ceiling and smashing to the floor like sacks of potatoes, rolling around on the rug in hysterical laughter. Everything in the room was quivering and jingling, the floor was shaking.
     “Can’t feeeel anything! This is crazy!”
     We got tired of that after awhile and sat with our beers. Colt.45 Malt Liquor. This was the strong stuff.
     “You ever wonder what it’s all about?” I asked.
     “What what’s all about?”
     “All of it. Everything. I mean look around. Why do we do what we do? Why do we go to school? Why do our parents work? Nobody ever enjoys their lives! I’m not going to be that way. I’m going to enjoy myself. I’m going to really live! There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what it is. So many people just work all day and watch T.V. all night. They don’t even notice what’s all around them! Then they get old and retire and they’re too old to enjoy things anymore. There’s something wrong.”
     “You’re drunk that’s what’s wrong.”
     “No, that’s what’s right! I feel alive! Everything’s vibrating!” I lifted the beer to the sky and swallowed, spilling it over my face. “Let’s go out!”
     We went stumbling down Rahway Ave. clutching our remaining beers, past the rows of tract houses that all looked the same. In a few blocks you’d leave one subdivision and move into another one of a different design. Then for blocks there would be that sameness, then you’d move into another, and so on. The purple eye seemed to stare out from all the windows. Everything was the same, everything was dull and boring and dead.
     “Look at all this, man! Look! Nobody’s doing anything! How come nobody’s doing anything?” I did a little dance in a circle pointing it all out to my friend.
     “Because they’re not drunk.” He grinned a large, stupid grin, like the Cheshire cat.
     I laughed loud and long, not worried about the neighbors.
     “Let’s go see Rita.” he said.
     Rita was a school friend of ours. She was a little girl, but she was also a very big girl. We were all very attracted to her for this but also because she was fun to be around. She was lively and laughing and just on the verge of loving, we felt. We all imagined ourselves up against that buxom body. She played with us like a cat and its nutmeg.
     Rita answered the doorbell and saw two wobbling idiots on her stoop.
     “Are you drunk?”  She was so full of energy and vivacity that drunkenness was incomprehensible to her. We knew it was not our night even for the fun of Rita, much less the deeper pleasure of her. We were shooed away and left on our own.
     We stumbled further on down the road, dragging our beers along by their plastic leashes, until we ended up among the factories, the industrial park in the next town, across the railroad tracks. There was a little stream that went under the road there, then into pipes and under the factories and warehouses. We didn’t know where it went, or what happened to it after it disappeared here. My pal went down into the gulch to take a leak.
     I stood on the bridge looking down at him, his white shirt almost glowing in the reflected electric light of the plant parking lights. I pulled it out and let the stream arc out into the air. From the bridge it sailed beautifully, down onto his back, sssshh, ssschip!
     He didn’t really know what was happening.
     “Hey, what the…?” then; “You’re pissing on me! You’re pissing on me! I can’t believe it! You’re pissing on me!”
      I was.
     He buttoned up and the chase was on, across the well tended plant and warehouse lawns, me screaming and hooting, him cursing and panting. We darted through the factory grass, into the parking lots, around the piled up pallets, laughing and cursing.
     Finally he caught me and rubbed my face in the wet grass. Helpless with laughter I couldn’t fight him off. We both rolled on our backs in the grass, blowing like whales. We couldn’t help but be friends again.
     On the way home we danced in front of the spotlights that shone onto a big brick warehouse wall, creating crazy pantomimes, wild shadow shows, falling on the grass in an ecstasy of release.
     We scuffed and stumbled back down Rahway Ave., heading for home where we’d have to put it all back in our pockets. We’d have to hide our crazy joy, push our breakthrough back into our brains and act as though the world really wasn’t a kaleidoscope of wondrous things. I fell off the sidewalk and into the street and lay on my back on the asphalt, as happy as if I were in a mountain meadow, stared at the sky and laughed and laughed. I laughed at the whole craziness of it, the absurdity of it, the wonder of it and the fear of it.
      We were fourteen and drunk and knew almost nothing and caught in the middle but we were still glad to be alive. We had that much.