One Saturday or Sunday morning in the middle of August, my buddy Peter called me up.
“Ohhhhhhh good morning sweet prince, me and Lobito just got dropped off over here at Hair of the Dog. Come through. Let’s get drunk and then go lay on the dock.”
“You’re at Hair of the Dog right now?”
“Yes. Come.”
“Word, yeah, I’ll be there in twenty.”
Hair of the Dog was our favorite brewery, with inexplicably strong beers and delicious classic American sandwiches. I can’t express how powerful the beers were. My friends and I drank a lot and three to four beers at Hair of the Dog would have us close to blacking out. There was just something about them.
We had a few beers and some sandwiches like reubens and turkey melts and stuff like that. And then we noticed that their most expensive beer, listed as the most sought after beer in the whole world, The Dave—an award-winning English Barley Wine produced in 1994, barrel aged, and bottled in 1996—we noticed that it was half off and now only seven hundred dollars for a regular twelve ounce bottle.
Peter looked up from his menu with saucer eyes. “Boys,” he said.
“We have to.”
Reed and I were resolutely against it.
But Peter is a fucking conman and we were drunk and he talked us into it. Something like we owed it to ourselves for graduating, and we didn’t know how many bottles were left. It might be our last chance. Anyway we bought the stupid bottle.
In part, I hold George, the bartender, responsible for even allowing us to buy it. He got us drunk and then encouraged us to make a terrible decision. I can’t really blame him though, because George was just a degenerate—he was always trying to get us to come do blow with him down at the poolhall, and giving us free beers and food and talking about hating his job and smoking weed with us in the parking lot around the corner. He was a regular degenerate just like we were and if I’d been in his position I would have done no different. For the sheer comedy of the situation. He must have loved it, these drunk broke idiots are about to spend seven hundred bucks on a single beer.
We did.
“George, bring us a Dave please,” Peter said. He said it low and solemn, like some absurd patriarch in a regal manor.
“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”
“He isn’t,” I said. I still didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars I needed for rent and food on one little beer.
“Don’t listen to him George, we want a Dave. It’s time.”
George looked at me, then back at Peter. Then he gave me this wicked grin.
“Alright, one sec.”
He came back a few minutes later with this dusty little bottle. It didn’t look like anything special, but it was older than I was.
“Last chance,” he said. And then didn’t wait at all and just opened the bottle.
Poof! Seven hundred bucks.
Poof! Twenty-two years.
He poured us tiny little cups and we told him to pour an extra tiny one for himself. And we drank the ancient syrupy thing.
And then we acted like it was the best beer we’d had in our entire lives.
The honest truth was it tasted like a twenty-two-year-old Guiness.
Or I don’t really know what it tasted like. If you went through your grandpa’s garage and found an old mason jar of a half drunk old stout or porter from who knows when and decided to drink it, it might have tasted like the Dave. I don’t know.
But we drank the beer, and discussed the flavors like we were scholars and brewers ourselves and not drunk twenty two year olds.
And then we left in this holy sudsy afterglow and hauled ass to go meet Emma and her friends over at the public docks in Sellwood.
I drove.
There was a lot of traffic on Milwaukie. It was pretty stop and go. It started to go and I sped up quick and changed the song on my phone. Then traffic slowed back to a stop. And I was looking at Makonnen songs on my phone until I looked up and saw the bumper of a little navy Saab hatchback a few feet ahead.
I slammed on the breaks.
And into the Saab. Hard.
I looked at my friends. They looked horrified. We were wasted.
The people in the Saab got out. They were a middle-aged couple. They looked justifiably very pissed.
We didn’t know what to do.
I looked at Reed. “We might have to dip.”
“Fuck dude, yeah, I dunno. Might be the call.”
“License plate.” Peter slurred it from the back seat.
We looked at his limp, blank face, into the dark raccoon circles under his eyes that made him look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
He said it again. “License plate.”
He was the most drunk out of the three of us. He’d had as much beer as I had, and I wondered how Peter had gotten so drunk.
“License plate.” He pointed a wavering finger straight at the windshield.
We looked through it and saw on the bumper of the Saab a distinct letter and number imprint of my license plate.
I got out of the car.
“Are you fucked up?” the lady shouted at me.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
And acted businesslike and took pictures when they took pictures and was extremely apologetic and respectful and traded insurance information. I still have pictures of the damage with Peter in the background looking cartoonishly incriminating with his confused, wild-haired Jack Nicholson look. At one point he declared that it was impossible that we had caused the damage to the Saab, which he called a piece of shit. The husband of the couple almost hit him, I could see it in his eyes.
I’d slammed into the Saab so hard that it rolled into the car in front of it, which was a brand new Toyota Highlander which now had a slightly dented rear bumper. The lady who’d just bought it was also super pissed.
She called the cops.
I started to get back in the car but Reed calmed me down.
She put her phone down and said the cops had just asked if everybody was okay and if the vehicles were driveable and if so to trade insurance and carry on. This made her more pissed. I’m sure they all wanted to see me in handcuffs.
I was so grateful I could have cried.
But I was also devastated because my car was fucked up. The front bumper now hung at a sorry angle and the driver side door made a terrible creak when it opened and closed.
We drove the few minutes through Sellwood to the docks in silence.
And met Emma and her friends down at the docks and drank more beers and smoked some pot to cool off. The weed made me feel a little better, but still I remained quiet and pouty. It was pissing Emma off. She thought I was being a bitch. I was an idiot for getting into the situation in the first place and now I was acting like a big baby. Mostly, she was mad that we’d spent seven hundred dollars on a single beer. She thought we were fucking morons and douchebags. But it was fair of her to think so. Spending seven hundred dollars on a beer is something only a moron or a douchebag would do.
I just hoped I was only a moron.
Everybody split up and Emma and I went to a bar down the street for some burgers and more drinks. The whole time we were there she was kinda making fun of me and I was kinda sad and grumpy. I drove us in silence back to Peter’s place where I was living at the time. And took her straight up to the bedroom Peter and I were sharing and fucked her viciously on my mattress on the floor. I picked her up and fucked her in the air with her legs wrapped around me and her torso dangling and only her head on the mattress just sort of swinging around. Oh, oh, oh, oh, thud, thud, thud, thud. I lifted her all the way up and set her on her feet and pushed her up against Peter’s bed so that she bent over, and held her by her hair and fucked her standing up. It felt like the house was shaking. We came together with all the tenderness and fury of a bumblebee landing on a flower.
Afterwards she laughed at me and said I looked ridiculous when I fucked.
“Why’d you pick me up like that? You had the stupidest look on your face,” she laughed more and squinted her eyes at me disparagingly.
“I dunno, I just did it. You weren’t into it?”
She was still naked on the other side of the bed looking at me over her phone.
“I dunno. No, it was kinda weird.”
“Alright, sorry. I guess I just wanted to try something new.”
“Yeah, it was new,” she smirked.
I didn’t know how to stop being pathetic after I got insecure about her and she loved to prey on it.
My friends were right.
She was a reptile.
She was a killer.
She told me all kinds of terrible things like how I was too much of a baby, and how I was a loser, and how she wanted a real man and shit like that. And she told me that she had a bald fetish. Which really really got to me. I never let it go.
I couldn’t stop seeing it. I’d look at anything, a toilet, a plate a food, a frisbee, and see her fucking bald guys. I’d watch her staring out a window and wonder if she was thinking of bald guys. Everything started to look bald. Kids, tennis balls, women at the grocery store. Everyone and everything except me. I never wanted to be bald.