13th
MC Mike is one of my best friends from high school. He just graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics and is spending the summer at home before moving to New York City for a great job and an apartment in Chelsea. Until he moves though, he’s living with his parents with little responsibility and even less ambition. That makes his situation nearly indistinguishable from mine, except that in a few months he’s moving to New York City for a great job and an apartment in Chelsea.
Last night he and two friends decided to kick off summer’s freefall with their idea of a good time: hookah and drinks at a bar in the valley that separates our small town from the next. I joined them for my idea of a good time, which is hanging out with Mike and following him to the end of the earth, which I now imagine to look a lot like that bar.
You know that dream where you’re in a really unfamiliar place and all of the sudden people from high school and beyond start appearing out of nowhere? They’re weirdly unchanged because all your subconscious has to go on is the impression left from the last time you saw them. And for the same reason, all they’re talking about is obscure throwbacks from the time you knew each other.
That dream is a bar called “Bourbon Street,” and it’s fly paper for former collar-poppers with spoilers and tinted windows on their Chevy Cavaliers, as well as the over-powdered, oompa loompa-tanned females who eat that stuff up. And also a lot of people I know.
I was very happy to see MC Mike, but also pretty bent out of shape over a bomb that had been dropped on me earlier in the day. So I was working a level of charm most people need a few drinks to reach.
When we arrived, I was finishing the better half of a dozen donuts we had picked up on the way. I set the box on the patio bar, still licking my fingers, and ordered a Coke, no ice. The Barbie bartender told me to get it inside because she didn’t have any cold. I told her if I wanted it cold, I probably would have ordered ice. Then I took another huge bite of donut. A girl with teeth like a staple remover sitting next to me asked what the deal was with the donuts. I looked at her like she had ordered a gin and tonic at an AA meeting.
Me: What’s it to you? … Want one?
She didn’t want one.
Mike’s friends had found us a well-postitioned table. Thanks to the widescreen plasma TV behind us, we were not only backlighted like angels but also appeared to be the object of everyone’s attention. We weren’t. I ignored this and continued my donut disappearing trick as if they were shots and the spectacle of my stamina was a gift to the crowd surrounding us.
That’s when I started recognizing faces in that crowd. I quickly realized I knew roughly three out of three people, and some were more recognizable than others; the rest had been devoured by comically fatter versions of themselves. I stood and invented an elaborate dance to avoid making eye contact with people whose names I’d forgotten or whose adolescent insecurities had obviously grown into full-blown adult insecurities with tragic physical manifestations.
Then I saw my good friend Sneak, who was enjoying a visit with mutual friend Oshkosh similar to the one that brought Mike and me to this bar. Which, by the way, I avoided actually calling a shithole for fear of drawing attention to the slight tinge of sewage wafting over from the nearby water treatment facilty.
The patio was getting crowded at this point and I was literally cut off from Sneak by a wall of her guy friends who had been standing between me and her since some time in sixth grade. Whatever.
We left a little before one and I drove Mike and one of his friends back to his house. They had each had two beers or so, but I didn’t have my glasses, so the choice of driver had more to do with my keys already being in pocket than personal responsibility.
Apparently LeBron James showed up shortly after our departure and partied with everybody.
