Liquor
We were four hours into the graveyard shift, chroming lengths of polished cylindrical steel which would eventually be assembled into hydraulics for garbage trucks. It was important work to somebody, since the company was willing to pay us double our normal rates to work sixteen hours from Saturday night well into Sunday. It was beginning to seem as though we were always here, always existing to merely add a thousandth micron of chromium to an endless array of metal tubes.
My partner in chrome, Larry, turned to me and said “Man, all I can think about is what I got at the house.”
We were sitting down, relaxing for the forty-five minutes it took for the chrome to adhere adequately to the metal. Without anything in the way of supervision, we spent sixty-five percent of our work shift reclining on plastic chairs within sniffing distance of the bubbling tanks of chromic acid.
Larry was what you might call unfortunate looking. He didn’t have the rock star good looks I possessed. Rather, his face was too narrow, his hair too thin, his nose too crooked, his eyes too hooded, his adam’s apple too pronounced, and his teeth looked as though he’d been gargling chromic acid the entire time he’d been employed by Hydra Hydraulics.
But when he talked about his grocery excursion the day before, those unfortunate features lit up with an inner joy. “I got some Hennessey. I got some Canadian Mist. I got some Bacardi Gold. I got some of that fancy vodka. The Grey Goose kind.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing here?”
I don’t know why I said it. I certainly hated to turn my back on double time. This was my fourteenth consecutive day working in the chrome shop. I needed to get away. I needed to get out. I needed to get fucked up. I also needed to get paid.
Harley decided for us. I couldn’t tell you why Harley was seated beside us. Though he worked for the company as a welder, he wasn’t on the clock. He just showed up and started loitering, having a few laughs with the chrome shop boys, at the factory, on his day off… Obviously, he preferred our company than spending another lonely night at his house, lifting weights and listening to aggressive music while the latest, momentarily legal steroids coursed through his garden snake sized veins.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Harley said. “You got the liquor, I guess I can treat us all to some Huddle House to go.”
“I don’t know…”
“Hell, turn the tanks down. It ain’t like anyone’s coming up here 2 am on a Sunday morning to check on us. We’ll have some drinks, have some laughs, come back before anyone misses us. Anyone asks about production, just say that the tanks were giving you trouble.”
We’d done it plenty enough times in the past, probably the main reason we had to work so much overtime in the chrome shop, right up there with incompetent management and an inability to schedule the shop floor correctly.
“Let’s do it.”
Fortified with a bacon double cheeseburger and fries (and a salad for Harley) we swung by the gas station where I decided to splurge on some cigars. With Larry providing the liquor, Harley dropping sixty bucks on the meal, I felt the least I could do was provide my friends with six dollars’ worth of chocolate flavored gas station cigars. I felt like the poor lady in those church stories. The one who tithed a penny, only Jesus wasn’t there to pat me on the back and assure my place in heaven.
All I got was Harley belly-aching. “Didn’t they have them green apple flavor cigars? I like them green apples.”
“I tried,” I lied. “That Hindi fella told me he only sells those green apples to the homosexual community.”
“That’s a load of shit; he sells them to me all the time.”
We let it go at that. It was the totally masculine, chocolate cigars all around.
Larry lived in a rented trailer off in the Alabama woods of the Hopewell community. The place gave off Evil Dead by way of Raising Arizona vibes. The single wide trailer looked to have been a ’74 model and likely weathered a few tornadoes during its fifty-year lifespan. The interior was decorated with dirty clothes, empty beer cans, ashtrays like open air funeral urns, power tools, porno mags, and random small arm ammunition. A ceiling fan held down the coffee table. Several empty milk crates scattered about approximated seats for guests.
We didn’t care about any of that shit.
Larry withdrew the liquor bottles from the refrigerator and lined them along the kitchen counter. He was like a pimp lining up his best girls. And he was foolish enough to think that we’d only chose one for the night.
I opened the cupboard, figuring I’d grab us some drinking glasses. The cupboard housed three coffee mugs and the desiccated corpse of a mouse. I took the cup advertising the local hospital’s emergency response services. Harley blew the dust out of a cup proclaiming him the WORLD’S NUMBER ONE DAD. Larry possessed his own stein. It bore the legend I EAT MORE PUSSY THAN CERVICAL CANCER. Based on what I knew about Larry, this led me to believe for the next three months that this certain cancer had been cured.
Larry lovingly displayed the Hennessey bottle as though it were a special prize for correctly guessing the percentage of fatty tissue barnacled to my liver.
“This is one fine sipping cognac,” he said.
He set the bottle down and I picked it up. Larry continued prattling about the other spirits, but I paid him no heed. I cracked the seal, spun the cap and filled the coffee cup to the brim. I drank it down in three quick gulps. Larry was right. The cognac went down smooth. I barely convulsed at all.
“Smooth, ain’t it?” Harley said.
“Yes, very smooth. It pairs perfectly with chocolate cigars.”
Harley spun the cap. He didn’t bother with the mug. He turned it up and bubbled it twice.
Larry’s eyes popped wide. “Hey, buddy, let me see some of that.”
Harley relinquished the bottle. “Damn,” he gasped. “That is one fine sipping cognac.”
Larry studied the dent we’d immediately put in his cognac. While he poured a double shot into his stein, I cracked the seal on the Canadian Mist.
Larry said, “I like to drink Canadian Mist with a Mountain Dew chaser. I call it the Can Dew.”
I poured equal measures of Canadian Mist in my mug and Harley’s mug.
“I don’t give a shit,” Harley sneered. “I thought we were here to get liquored up, not fuck around with sodie pop.”
Harley flexed his considerable bicep as he spoke. Honestly, he flexed his muscles whenever he did anything. Standing in line at the grocery store, welding baseplates on a cylinder barrel, masturbating to clown porn, he’d flex his biceps, triceps, flexing whatever other bullshit constant exercise imbued him with.
I didn’t ponder his flaws too much. My focus centered on choking down as much whiskey as I could as quickly as possible so we could get into that fancy vodka. Harley was chugging the Canadian Mist so Larry wouldn’t have the opportunity to sully it with that hillbilly piss, Mountain Dew.
As the liquor disappeared down our gullets, I’d taken to chain-smoking the chocolate cigars. At the point I began extinguishing the cigar butts into my mug of Grey Goose vodka and quaffing the ashy dregs, I realized I was probably fucked up.
And then there was the music. Loud music. Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” LP pounded from the speakers. The perfect music to play at 3am on a Sunday morning, now, as it was forty years ago. Some people will tell you Led Zepplin is the yardstick of irresponsible masculinity, but for me I do my best drinking accompanied by Steve Harris’s galloping bass line and Bruce Dickenson’s operatic voice.
When we finished singing along to “Run to the Hills,” Larry approached Harley and touched his muscular chest in a way that looked very odd to me.
“You know what?” He said. “You got a good voice. You should be a lead singer.” He motioned toward me. “Polish Hammer can play bass since it don’t require no talent. I can play drums. We find a guitar player. Maybe, Smilin Mike at work. We can form a band.”
It never failed. Regardless of who I drank with, the idea of forming a rock band was invariably broached. I’m the imaginary bass player in no less than twenty pretend bands at the moment. Even stone drunk, Harley’s caterwauling resembled the cries a ninety-year-old woman might make while being sodomized by a croquet mallet. I’m still uncertain why Larry believed his knack for keeping tempo with a song by tapping his fingers on the steering wheel of his Hyundai would translate well to a drum set. I reckoned I could probably play bass passably well, though.
Near about this time, I realized if I held any hope of surviving until dawn, I needed to jettison as much of Larry’s fine alcohol out of my stomach as quickly as possible. Despite my own blurry vision, I could see Larry’s and Harley’s eyes were swimming around in their sockets as well. They’d reached the same plateau of inebriation I had attained, and decided there was ground left to ascend.
There’s a point we all shoot for as we twist the cap on the bottle, a destination we aspire toward, where we see the pattern emerge from the chaotic fabric of our existence. The answers to questions never quite articulated are answered in the most simplistic, awesome terms. Maybe, one’s place in the universe is revealed, or at least hinted at. We find that there are reasons. Perhaps, these reasons make the challenges worthwhile. This point is a nice place to reach. I overshot that point of self-delusion, racing past at a drunken 130 miles per hour.
I hit the bathroom at a dead sprint and voided my guts mostly into the toilet. It was an impressive stream of projectile vomit that managed to change color and consistency with every heave. Finally, after a prolonged ejaculation of everything in my stomach, I was relegated to chucking up globs of what looked like bloody guppies, that could have been either the remains of my Huddle House combo #3 or bits of my stomach lining.
Weak and shaky and knee bound as they say in the church, I flushed the toilet twelve times in rapid succession and watched the nasty concoction overflow the bowl and cascade onto the linoleum, soaking into my navy-blue work pants. I watched this happen, dully, knowing I should probably do something. Stand up. Anything. Shoving an entire roll of toilet paper into the bowl, I was beginning to realize, was probably counterproductive.
What galvanized me into action was seeing a sparkly red dart like a bartender’s toothbrush placed on the edge of the sink. The lone dart, innocuously lying there, offended me deeply in a way I’d be hard pressed to explain. I grabbed the dart and stumbled into the kitchen.
“What the fuck is this dart doing in the bathroom?” I shouted, accusingly.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in the bathroom, but the vibe outside the bathroom had changed considerably. One of the kitchen chairs had been smashed into kindling and strewn across the floor. A participation trophy, the only award Larry had ever received when he was a twelve-year-old little leaguer, lay twisted and ripped asunder.
Harley stood, shirtless, in the middle of the front room. He was flexing down again, a riot of janky motion and bulging muscles. Larry gingerly ran his fingers across Harley’s pectoral muscles.
“I don’t want to get this big,” Larry sniffed.
“You can’t get this big,” Harley said. “You’re an ectomorph. I’m an endo mesomorph. You ain’t got my genetics.”
“What the fuck’s going on here?” I asked.
Larry snatched the dart from my outstretched hand and threw it into the wall where it stuck into the fake wood paneling. I immediately forgot about it.
The whole place smelled of vomit and alcohol, sweat and socks. The dirty dishes piled high in the sink were caked in puke. And by the bounty of leafy greens protruding from said puke, I pegged Harley for the culprit. A slightly digest squidge of tomato stuck to Harley’s chin provided the final clue I needed.
“I think I have alcohol poisoning,” Harley said.
“Of course, you have alcohol poisoning, you greedy bastard,” I said. “You drank all Larry’s liquor! How’s he going to make it through the week?”
It was obvious the thought had occurred to Larry as well. Tears leaked from his watery eyes, down his acne scarred cheeks.
Harley didn’t have an answer for either one of us. He lurched into the bathroom for his next bout of vomiting and was flummoxed by the filthy water scumming up the floor. It didn’t halt his next burst of vomit erupting out of him. By the time he cleared his stomach, he crawled back into the kitchen on his hands and knees.
He collapsed before he made it to the kitchen counter. No amount of protein shakes or triple stacks promising freakish vascularity could carry him any further. Another glut of puke coughed out of his mouth. Maybe it was my pride, but I was unable to restrain myself from stomping a foot in Harley’s puke, splattering his stomach acids back into his face.
I kept yelling, “how ya feeling, Harley? I’m on top of the world. Wooooo! I’m on top of the world!”
I was on top of the world alone. Larry had passed out on his stained and filthy sofa, the broken little league trophy cradled in his skinny arms. Harley’s eyes had rolled back into his head and he might have been flirting with brain death. And I realized I’d have to find a way to make it back to work before the sun broke the horizon.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
