The Best St. Patrick's Day Ever Part 2 (Or "Fuck Mumia - Free Us!)

Friday, May 26, 2006

The Best St. Patrick's Day Ever! Part 2. (Part One is 2 or 3 blogs back.)

I know a lot of you are obsessive compulsives (1,2,3,4. I think you left the oven on. Did you lock the door? How many dots are on the ceiling? 1,2,3,4.) I am not one of you. You completionists annoy me the way you have to get stuff done. Not me. I never finish anything and I love it. I get to say things like "I'm so busy. I've got like nine things going on at once." When in reality I have like nine things no longer going on at all. You may remember that I wrote a blog entry titled "The Greatest St. Patrick's Day Ever! Part 1." You would think there would be a "Greatest St. Patrick's Day Ever! Part 2," but there wasn't. There was supposed to be, but I ended up in the emergency room due to a car wreck that day.

You see, someone came up with the crazy idea to give women the right to have driver's licenses - and the right to vote, for that matter. As a result, I have a shredded spine and California has Barbara Boxer. Anyway, I'm feeling generous today, despite the fact that I just insulted the entire pretty gender, and I figure that at least one of you OCD'ers is losing sleep over the fact that there was never a "Greatest St. Patrick's Day Ever! Part 2." So I'm going to do this person a favor and pull a Sammy Hagar and "finish what I started." (That song is about blueballs-seriously) Anyway, here is the completion of a true story I humbly refer to as "THE GREATEST SAINT PATRICK'S DAY EVER! Part 2."

After my real-life fake Kung Fu fight I had in the street (from Part 1 if you read it), Dirty Dave, Firin' Byron, and myself decided to leave the bars of Savannah, Georgia at about 3 a.m. due to the fact that they were no longer selling that potion that makes girls want to take their clothes off, also known as alcohol. My friend Nathan, an alcoholic pilot (That's actually an oxymoron. All pilots are drunks. What? Go meet one and then get back to me. Told you so. Pilots are also womanizers. What? You don't believe me again? Go meet one again, and I guarantee you he'll put his hand down your pants less than five minutes after you first shake it. Told ya, again! You really should start trusting me. See what your mistrust got you? A pilot palm in your panties. All I'm asking for is a little blind faith, people! Is that so much to ask? You'd be an alcoholic man-whore too, if you had to operate these crazy robot-birds that soar through the sky with people in their bellies)

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, Nate. Nathan was supposed to come up from Jacksonville, Florida and get us all a hotel room to crash in that night. I figured a drunk pilot would at least be good at finding a place to crash. There is one thing about Nate-O. He's about as reliable as a crack whore's period. He didn't get us the room, and the last time we saw him was hours earlier in a bar where he was trying to seduce some girl by showing her how many shots of whiskey he could take. Poor girl, even if she was impressed to the point of nudity, it wouldn't do her any good, because Nathan always gets whiskey-wang. Always. We've all come down with a case of it from time to time, but his is a guarantee. What? He sold me out (even if it was 6 years ago). I'm allowed to reveal one secret in anger. And besides, it's not really a secret. Everyone knows about it...now.

So Byron, Dave and me had long since lost our new girlfriends (I know, I know. "Yeah right, Cory. More like they lost you!" Hey, Fucko. It's my story and I can lie if I want to. You don't know. Were you there? You don't know me! Whuh-evvuh! I do what I want!) and we needed to find a place to sleep and we didn't have the funds for a hotel. Our car was parked in the ghetto, and I made the call.

"No way in hell are we sleeping here. I'm drunk, but I’m safe. I'll get us to a hotel parking lot and we'll sleep in the Celica there."

So I started driving us towards where I thought the hotels might be in this town I'd never been to before. Dave fell asleep in the floor of the backseat. I don't know how he negotiated getting his back over the hump-divider thing, either. The boy could rest easy in hell if he had to. At this moment, Byron decided to be a character I will now declare to be "Asshole Funny Byron." Here's how the shit went down.

Asshole Funny Byron: Hey, Cory. (smiling and mildly snickering)

Cory the Grate: What.

AFB: You got a cop behind you. (still kind of laughing and shit)

CTG: Tell me you're joking.

AFB: I'm joking.

CTG: Man, you shouldn't joke about that shit. It's not funny.

AFB: Oh, good. (still fucking giggling) Because there really is a cop behind you.

CTG: You fucker. Why did you tell me you were kidding?

AFB: You said "Tell me you're joking." So I did.

CTG: I'm gonna pull into this place on the left and pray that he keeps going.

AFB: Hey Cory.

CTG: What?!

AFB: He didn’t keep going. And he's pulling you over. (giggles, snickers, and Gargamelish delights were on his face.)

So I had turned into this Prep School Parking Lot, and the cop followed me in and pulled me over, mainly due to the fact that at 3 AM, I had PULLED INTO A PREP SCHOOL PARKING LOT. I'd already been pulled over like a million billion times before, and I thought it was time to try out some new material to get myself out of this jam. I had heard from a friend, who I later discovered to be a certified dumbass, that if you get out of the car and get the keys out of the ignition before the cop gets to your car, then they can't do shit to you. So I tried it.

The cop did not like this one bit. He started yelling a bunch of shit at me that I really don't remember. Then he asked me how much I had been drinking. I confidently proclaimed "Six." Yep, I told him I had six beers. I know you're saying to yourself, "Withers! Why in the fuck would you tell a cop you've had six beers?" I'll tell you why. I've watched COPS, a million gazillion times, and the drunks all do the same thing when they're pulled over. They at first say, "No, officer. I haven't had a drink tonight." Then they upgrade the lie to "Well, I've had 1 or 2." It's never one. And it's never 2. It's always the ever-vague "1 or 2." Then the drunk caves in and says, "I'm fucking wasted. Take me in."

I knew that's what the dude was expecting from me. I never give people what they want, it's in the Withers Family Handbook (The sad thing is that you are actually considering the possibility that my family might have a family handbook. Surprisingly, we don't. But boy, if we did, it would be a doozy.) So I decided I would fuck up this cop's predictable world with one three letter word: "six." I could see in his little cop eyes that he wasn't prepared for this. He naturally went in for the upgrade "So how many have you really had tonight?" My tone didn't change: "Six." I could see his simplistic copper brain now questioning every thing he'd ever believed. "About six, huh?"- I had to interrupt him here; "No. Not about six. Six." The true answer we later calculated to be eleven, but the truth was not needed at this time. It wasn't time to "go to eleven!" (Yes! My first forced Spinal Tap reference! Stonehenge!)

This was a case where the truth would not have set me free, so instead, I set the truth free. (Damn, that should be modified into a gnarly-ass t-shirt.) "Son, you think maybe had more than six beers?" I calmly dug my heels in harder. "No, sir. Just six." He stood there as his primitive brain comprehended my stance, and he questioned the issue one more time. "So you're saying you've only had just six." "Yes, sir. Just six."

Look what I did! I got the cop using the phrase "JUST six." I was starting to see that I had opened a path to owning this guy. Oh, don't get me wrong, I was scared as hell, but I now knew that I had the ability to win.

I had taken Bacon to unchartered territory - a journey to the center of his mind, if you will. And he didn't like what he saw, so he tried to hedge the conversation in a different direction. He wanted to get into the "whys" of it all. "Why were you driving around Savannah, Joiwjuhh at three in the morning drunk?" At this moment, the little scam artist that lives in my brain came to me with the assessment that I asked him for. "Hey, Bossman! I've analyzed your surroundings and I found us just one way to win. Listen to me, NO, STOP! Look, what's the point of having a scam-artist in your head if your not going to use him? I have other offers you know. Now listen to me. We're in the blackest town in the state of Georgia. And he's a cop. It's a safe bet to assume that he's not exactly a card carrying member of the NAACP. We have to play the race card. I don't care if it's right or wrong, it's the only way to avoid jail. You wouldn't last five minutes in jail without getting butt-rammed. Hell, you can barely survive in a gay bar - you have to do this. And I don't want to hear any arguments. Assuming that this guy isn't "down with the brothas", I think you can get yourself out of this. Just play the race card, and play it well. Now get talking, talky boy."

So I proceeded: "All right, officer, here's why I was driving. My friend Nate was supposed to get us a hotel room and he bailed on us. You know how those Florida Yankees are. (I was hoping that there was some Georgia/Florida rivalry that this redneck cop was a part of. If he was a native Floridian, I was fucked. I was trying to soften him up for the race card move.) So we were left stranded, with my car parked in the middle of...the GHETTO!”

My mouth may have said "ghetto" but the look I gave him said "BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD"). I could see that he was hearing me out, I found his soft spot - a hatred of black people.

I continued: "I'm responsible for this. I made the call. When I saw the brick wall beside my car was spray painted with "FREE MUMIA," I knew that we had to find a different place to sleep, even if it meant me driving illegally."

Oh man, this was his red-meat material. He was eating this shit up. So I continued on, almost to the point of overdoing it. But I was on a roll. I couldn't stop.

"I didn't just drive us out of this neighborhood for our sake, but also for your sake. Yes, it sounds crazy, but I thought of you guys, when deciding whether or not to leave. I thought to myself "Oh, that would suck to be the cop that has to clean our guts up off the street tomorrow if we sleep here tonight."

I knew that it was now a matter of when, not if, I was going to own this dude. I had pulled a number on this guy. Then I realized that I had also pulled a number on myself. I had convinced myself that what I was saying was a lie; when in fact, most of it was true. Nathan did sell us out on a hotel room. It did say "FREE MUMIA" on the wall beside my car. We would have been shot in our sleep in that particular neighborhood. But I didn't care if a cop had to clean me up off the street. That one was a lie. I can't stand cops. They've done many shitty things to me over the years. Most of them have small-dick complexes. They are out to steal our liberties. And they're all the time trying to keep me from having fun. Fuck cops.

Then the cop looked at me and said the corniest most cliché thing Byron or I have ever heard a person say. "This ain't North Carolina, boy! This is Georgia! You know what we do with our drunk drivers?"

At this point I knew I was being forced to fake having a true wonderment about what the answer was. It was my duty to fake being genuinely curious about the answer. So I faked being in suspense with the obligatory "What? What do you do to your drunk drivers in Georgia?"

His answer of course: "WE PUT 'EM IN JAIL!"

No Duh.

Ironically, the moment he said the word "jail" was the exact moment that the "Oh So Chipper Middle Aged Gay Man That Lives In My Head" joyfully sang in a broadway-ish manner to me "It looks to me like a certain special someone isn't going to jail after all. Splen-DID!" He's a pretty cool guy for the most part, but he can get annoying. He's a lot like Paul Lindh (If you're under 35, you're saying "Paul Who." Bewitched? No? Hollywood Squares Re-runs? No? Oh, who gives a shit. He was gay and famous and wore bad leisure suits.)

I knew that in lieu of going to jail, I was going to be givine some sort of alternative impromptu punishment.

"You boys are sleeping here tonight. Right here in this parking lot." I tried to be helpful by offering to straighten my car up more properly into the space. His response: "If you move that car one inch before tomorrow, I will haul your butt to jail so fast!"

Ok, dude. You got it.

"I'm gonna send somebody to wake you up in the morning, and when they do, you boys need to get out of Georgia immediately."

Yes, we were being unoffically banned from an entire United State. (I've never seen "United State" in the singular either.)

"You're the luckiest son of a bitch I ever knew. That's fucked up. You should be in jail."

What the fuck? Who the fuck? Who said that? Oh, it was Dirty Dave! He wasn't asleep after all. He was just too tired to get up and deal with the cop. And yes, my good buddy was pissed off that I didn't go to jail.

"Every time I get pulled over for drinking and driving, they send me to the slammer. But not you, man. That's so fucked up."

Yes, my dear pal wanted, WANTED, me to be hauled to jail, leaving him stranded two states away from his home, all in the name of fairness. He was so pissed off, but it was only because he was a thrice-convicted drunk driver who spent 30 days in the Brunswick County Jail, where he lived among wife-beaters and dead-beat dads who gave him the jailhouse name of "Professor" because he was the only college graduate in the joint. Oh, by the way, he said they had a rule called "flush your kids" which meant that it was OK to wack off in the one shower the 12 of them shared; but under one condition: you better get the jiz down the drain. Thus, “Flush your kids.”

Anyway, the cop left and I slept in the front of the car, Dave slept in the back, and Byron slept on a towel on the asphalt. (His body. His choice.) It was a hot Georgia night, so we rolled the windows down for the night, and I remember that as we chatted ourselves to sleep, we all agreed that the cop wouldn't really "send some dumbass to wake us up in the morning."

So some dumbass woke us up the next morning. (pause for the laughter) He did it by honking his horn repeatedly. Then he said "Get up, and get the hell out of here!" I really didn't like "Some Dumbass." Nevertheless, we got the hell out of there.

We decided to make one more stop before we left the state that we had so greatly offended in less than 6 hours time. We went to McDonalds for breakfast. Dave was in the bathroom, and me and Byron were getting our food. With Dave still in there, me and Byron decided to go to the wizzer, as well.

Byron walked in and I followed about two feet behind him. When we got in the bathroom, Dave was standing there at the sink washing up, and he looked at Byron and said "Aye new watt yer theen ken. Budeye dedden dew it." (If you don't yet speak the language of Buffalo native Dirty Dave that translates to "I know what you're thinking. But I didn't do it.")

"Didn't do what?," we both thought. Then we both saw a pile of turds placed neatly in the center of the urinal. The sad thing is that, had he not immediately denied it, Byron and I would have both naturally assumed that Dave was the guy that took a shit in a urinal. He was no doubt capable of it. That's just the way Ol' Dirty Dave rolls. You haven't truly lived until you have befriended an intelligent college graduate who is still fully willing to shit in pee pee device in front of complete strangers at a McDonalds. That dude is awesome. Oh, sure he didn't do it...this time! But the doesn't mean he hasn't done it before, or that he won't do it again. And that my friends, is what I like to refer to as...THE GREATEST ST. PATRICK'S DAY EVER! (PART 2)