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| There are no chickens in this story |
I’d
met this guy Jonathon while working semester opens at the college bookstore. He
was really introverted but we got along. He invited me to a party in The City,
although who he knew there I never figured out. The two of us rode out on the
Trailways bus and took a subway to wherever the apartment was. I’m necessarily a
little hazy on the details.
Most
of the night for me was in bursts and flashes. I remember drinking tequila and
then fashioning some concoction from other alcohols. I remember making out with
a woman in a room away from the party but other than long reddish hair I don’t
remember anything about her. This is a big part of the reason Jonathon later stopped
being friends with me because I found out she was someone he liked and had
hoped to get to know at this party. I wasn’t much of one for niceties like that
in those years.
When
the party broke up at 1 or 2 we took the subway back to Penn Station but there
were no busses leaving until 7. So we joined the ranks of the homeless who
squatted in the one room inside the station the cops kept open for them. Once
an hour they rousted us to another end of the room, saying “No one sleeps!” But
I did as I was riotously drunk and between bouts of laughing at the cops (not a
practice I’d suggest) and trudging from spot to spot, I huddled on the floor
and slept the fitful half-doze known to both the inebriated and those trying to
have conversations with them. Jonathon spent the whole time standing and trying
both to stay near me, like I was protection, and being as far from other people
as he could.
Eventually
the sun came up and at 630 we could buy tickets, with which we could stay the
half hour to 7 while the others were bounced into the street. The bus ride was
two hours but to me it seemed both like hours longer and just a few moments. We
reached town, I walked with Jonathon as far as the corner of Main and North
Chestnut where we parted, him to his room and me to my apartment.
Now
this is where it becomes uncomfortable.
I’m
one of those lucky few born with some immunity to the bad effects of drugs and
alcohol. I’ve never had a bad trip from LSD, never gotten paranoid while
smoking weed or hash, never experienced anything but stupendous and
unremembered epiphanies on shrooms or peyote. Never had a hangover no matter
how much I drank. Except that time.
My
headache began on the bus but I put it down to the sun in my eyes and lack of
solid sleep. As I walked, I could feel each step travel from my foot through my
body to the tiny hammer banging my brain. I had never felt so happy getting to
my apartment, so much so I opened the door and did a faceplant on the floor. I
didn’t feel like I could make it to bed, I just laid there and slept.
Or
I tried to. It seemed that day everyone in the world I knew chose to visit me,
either in groups or singly. Again, only fleeting memories but I do remember a
stream of drool from my mouth to a small pool next to me when the first person,
whoever it was, knocked at the door. Stupid me, it never occurred to me not to
say, “Come in,” although that wouldn’t have accomplished much as I had a habit
of not locking my door and encouraging people to walk in.
I
alternately curled into the fetal position or spread full out like DaVinci’s Vitruvian
Man. I may have even resembled that drawing a little as my hair was curly and
long and sweat-plastered to the floor. I vaguely recall Jonathon coming by with
another friend of ours, I don’t remember who, and looking smugly down on my
pain. I probably cried once or twice. No one, fortunately, stayed long, or I
don’t think they did, because I kept drifting back off to sleep after a few
sentences describing my head variously as a deflated basketball, a cracked egg,
a fishbowl full of fecal water, a balloon blown up by a congested drunken bum.
There may have been more.
