Thursday, July 27, '06
It was April vacation of my junior year in high school, and I was taking three friends home from their party, where they'd been drinking heavily. I disapproved of driving at night, especially when I wasn't legal without a parent. Technically I was okay; on my seventeenth birthday, I had coerced my mother into sleeping in the back seat of the minivan, in case I had to make a post-midnight run, as my friends had summoned me to do.
I like my friends when they're drunk. They walk with a slight limp in imperfect unison, like jazz musicians pushing or playing behind the beat. They speak with a gentle, feminine lilt. Their eyes become watery and sincere, their cheeks pink; their rowdy laughter becomes a muffled giggle. This particular evening, they staggered into my car politely and quietly, without arousing the dormant Asian in the back seat. I drove in total silence, listening vaguely to the words of my friend, who was particularly gifted with storytelling. His words held my other friends totally captive.
"The greatest part of the movie," he drawled quietly, "was when the big dragon came home while the sister dragon and brother dragon were-"
"Ori, it's your stop," I interrupted, and the other two groaned.
"Aw man," he said, getting out, "I'll finish it next time, all right?"
"Yeah," said one of the others, "and make sure you go over that part with the sister dragon. I don't think I caught it so well the first time."
The rest of the ride went in relative silence.
Right before the last of my friends turned heel to drag his sorry drunk ass back to his house, he turned around and produced a bottle from inside... I don't want to know from inside what. He dropped it through the passenger seat window and it landed softly on the seat. "Have a beer, Phildo. Not for now, I mean. For later."
"Jesus Christ," I hissed at him, "My mother's in the car."
"Seeya," he said, and swaggered up the driveway to his house.
I was very eager to get the hell out of the car. I nearly exceeded the speed limit on my way home, and I even forgot to signal at a stop sign.
I sprinted up the stairs and into the kitchen, nearly breaking my neck on the waxed hardwood floor in the hallway. "Son of a gun," I muttered, and slammed the beer bottle on the kitchen table. I grabbed a cup from the cabinet and left the door swinging open and placed the glass next to the beer. Viciously, I tore the chair from its pushed-in position and planted myself upon it.
A full tinted container and a clear empty class faced me idly. I uncapped the beer and allowed its vapors to seep a bit into the air. My eyes swung from one to the other, a hypnotic sensation overcoming me. Slowly, I poured the beer into the cup. It was a nasty yellowish color with a fair fizzle to it. I had emptied half the bottle, and the beer had overflown a bit from the cup.
Again, the pendulum effect seized my eyes, but as my gaze turned back and forth, I could feel the oscillation coming to a point upon the glistening glass. Slowly, as Galahad had lifted the cup of Christ, I wrapped my fingers around it and brought it to my lips. My face contorted a little as it came close, but I bore it. My lips sealed, clenching around the rim of the glass, and a little bubble exploded upon the surface.
My sneeze was prodigious in volume, significance, and visual effect. The beer exploded from my hand and splashed all over the floor; the glass rolled precariously on the table but did not fall. I jumped a foot and a half into the air and let out a piercing shriek. I landed on the beer-soaked kitchen floor, sending tremors throughout the house, and froze, listening for any sort of punishment.
"Bitch," muttered my father in his sleep, from his bedroom.
It took me fifteen minutes to wipe up the mess I had made and another fifteen minutes to whip up a chocolate milkshake. Just earlier today - or rather, yesterday, since it was now one-thirty - I'd had a strawberry milkshake, and I hadn't had a chocolate milkshake since Kahuna burgers went out of business back in the nineties.
I was a little frantic, worked up, rifling through the kitchen drawers to produce the straw I wanted, but I found it beneath the considerable stash of little plastic ketchup packages from McDonald's. It was a thick, manly purple straw, twisted in the shape of Mickey Mouse's face. I'd wager that if it were stretched out, it would have been six feet long, and trying to ingest anything through it was a constant test of lung fortitude. I had gotten it at Disney World when I was six and last tried to use it when I was twelve. After I passed out, however, my parents had decided that perhaps it wasn't right for the time.
But now, in my prime, I sipped the milkshake with relative ease. I bent over, used all of the sucking muscles that I had and some that I didn't have. My vision grew a little hazy as my eyes traced the path of milkshake from Mickey's chin to right ear to left ear - or was it the other way around? It didn't seem all too clear.. Nothing seemed too clear when oxygen was short...
And then the delightful taste of chocolate milkshake exploded upon my tongue like a rotten apple dropping to the ground from a four-story building. Heaven caressed the insides of my mouth, and I embraced it swallowed, breathed through my nose while closing my esophagus. I closed my eyes, allowed the ecstasy to swirl around my jaws and slide, liquidy and taseful, down my throat. Ah, the forbidden pleasures...
The phone rang, and I shot enough chocolate milk out of my nose to feed an Afghani child for a week. I expelled all of the liquid inside the straw and caused volcanic bubbles to erupt from my glass as I struggled to detach the straw from my mouth. My mouth broke free, and my legs carried me instantly to the phone just in time for me to cut off the second ring.
"HELLO?"
"Phildo," said my mother's voice, "I'm in the car. I think I'm stuck. Can you-"
I hung up, slid down the waxed floor, and headed over to the car. My mom was indeed stuck underneath the back seat. I stuck my arm in from between the two seats in the middle of the minivan, but she couldn't reach my hand with her own.
"Damn it, Phildo," she said, "I don't mind sleeping in the car, but-"
"This might hurt a little, Mother," I said, and set off the car alarm. Eight times, the horn erupted throughout the neighborhood. The car lights flashed, disintegrating the darkness down the street, and my mother flopped violently onto the backseat like a fish.
"I swear, Phildo, do that one more time-"
"Let's go inside," I said, and took her by her trembling hand. I led her into the house, up the stairs gently, slowly and surely across the waxed hallway, and toward the bedroom, but she pushed a little, and we entered the kitchen instead.
Instantly, she became independent. She let go of me, shoved me to the floor, and, in a massive, two-handed motion, downed the entirety of the remaining beer and milkshake. It took around thirty seconds for her throat muscles to stop contracting, but she lowered her jaw and belched impressively.
"G'night."
She shouldered past me and skated into her bedroom.
Totally defeated, I tried to salvage my midnight snack. I tugged a little on the handle of the refrigerator door and withdrew from it a pouch of two S'mores Pop-Tarts. I unwrapped the squeaky plastic and chewed them slowly. I turned off the kitchen light; it wasn't necessary for this final attack of food. The flavor was definitely overly sweet, synthesized, perfect. The pinnacle of of Western culture.
I woke up at eleven the next morning. I hadn't felt this good since birth, and I nearly skipped out of the kitchen. I slipped on the waxy floor, landed hard on my posterior, and slid all the way to my computer. My forehead crashed into the desk, dazing me, and I could barely open my eyes to make out the flatscreen LCD monitor crashing down on my nose.
I don't think I actually lost consciousness, but my next memory was waking up at a hospital. It was only noon according to the clock next to the window.
"Who de hell brod me here?" I choked out. My nose was in some sort of metallic-cloth contraption that prevented me from breathing or speaking correctly.
"I did."
I looked over and saw the face that haunted me throughout the school year. I could never tell whether it was male or female; its voice was similar androgynous. Its body shape spoke nothing of its sex, and its clothes were all unisex T-shirts and khakis. All that I really knew about it was that it stalked me relentlessly and rather sadistically. It had waved and winked at me and called out my name whenever I came to school and left it each day for the past six months. It also regularly "bumped into me" when I went grocery shopping and passed by my house every now and then to ask for sugar.
"I just happened to be in the area," it was saying, "to ask you for some sugar. My mother does run out so often, don't you think?" It giggled. "But then I just happened to peek in a little from the window and noticed that you were on the floor! Thank goodness you're okay now!"
You bitch, I thought.
"Iz a good thig you were there," I said.
It smiled broadly at me and skipped to the door, shoulder-length hair waving, and paused right before it exited - "I'll be dropping by to check up on you!" - and bounced out the door.
I shook my head in disgust. Before the door closed, however, a male nurse walked in. He was large, black, bald, and intelligent-looking, and shoved a needle in the crook of my elbow.
"Excuse me, zir?" I said.
"I'm a nurse," he said extremely loudly. I curled up fetally and said nothing more.
"Your respiratory tract in your nose is broken," he informed me. "It seems that you shot out something chocolaty at lethal velocities. You're lucky to be alive."
"Ogay," I said.
Home.