Bad Friday

It started out like most Friday nights, on the drug store corner, deciding where they were going, did anyone have pot, and who was driving. After much deliberation, they were on their way to Orchard Swim Club, a large outdoor pool nightspot with live music, and a crowd of phony IDs looking for the opposite sex, but never with any success. After about an hour of walking the perimeter Rich and Colton decided this wasn’t happening for them, and that a real drink was in order. They left in Rich’s car, a VW which Colton hated and drove a half-mile up to York Road for a shot and a beer.

The Timonium Inn was a middle-age meat market. Rich and Colton were both twenty-one and had a much better chance of attracting a horny thirty-five-year-old divorcee than they did a ditzy teen at Orchards. Sure enough, second round, Rich introduces Colton to Mary, explaining how they’re going to a party in South Baltimore at the soccer club on Fort Ave. and Mary is coming with them. It’s about a forty-minute drive and Colton, now in the back seat of the Beetle, remembers vividly why he hates these cars. Mary was about 30, brunette, cute, petite, short skirt, bar maid with a rare Friday night off.

The Fort Ave club was a row house with a pool table in the living room and a bar in the dining room, that had been rented by a diverse group of longshoremen, Snakey, Joey G, Steamboat, everyone had a nickname. Rich’s connection were Hank K. and Dave. Dave and Colton knew one another from high school and were good friends.

On the way Mary turned her back to the windshield, Colton asked her if she was married.

“I’m waiting on divorce papers, got married young, had two pregnancies but no kids and no orgasms. He’s an asshole.”

Not wanting her to expand, he changed the conversation to politics and religion. They were developing a nice easy rapport when very nonchalantly she asked Colton if he wanted to drop some blotter acid. This is something that never occurred to him as a possibility for the evening but since it was a Friday night and she was becoming quite intriguing, what better way to get to know one another.

 “Sure, why not?”

Rich had trouble parking in the residential Fort Avenue neighborhood, and they walked two blocks to the club during which time the acid was starting to make Colton feel detached and the row house sidewalk seemed to be melting underfoot. The trees like plastic Hollywood were cramped by raised cement and seemed to be winning their battle of confinement. The trickle in the gutter seemed to be hurrying somewhere to the point where entering the party seemed anticlimactic.

The Fifth Dimension were announcing the Age of Aquarius as they went through the door and by the time Colton got to the keg of beer Bill Davis Jr. was asking Where’s the sunshine and he was thinking that was an incredibly pertinent question. At that point, Dave comes through the crowd, welcomes him. Rich and Mary seemed to have disappeared. Dave started introducing the cast of characters around the club and their nicknames. Colton’s favorite was Nig John, a big white guy with spiked blonde hair, who when he heard his name made eye contact, no one knew how or why people started calling him Nig John, his real name was Ralph. He was AWOL with a warrant out.

The party was hardly a party. Nick News announces to the group around the keg that his cabin at Charlestown was not being used the weekend and that anyone up for some hunting on Saturday was welcome to tag along in his Caddie. Steamboat, Dave and Nig John immediately jump at the idea, and Dave starts in on Colton to come with them. He wasn’t wild about the idea, but also didn’t have a ride home if Rich didn’t resurface. It occurs to him that an hour nap in the back seat of a Cadillac might be just what he needed to get back to feeling like all his body parts were connected and that he wasn’t walking around in a sequel to Good Fellas.

Nick News’s big white 1963 Cadillac De-Ville was parked right in front of the club; first stop was for beer. Colton leaned into the corner of the back seat and closed his eyes. When he woke up, he was alone and had no idea what time it was, the car dash was dark, but the diner sign seemed like a neon billboard. He got out of the car and assumed the crew were in the diner and asked himself, did he want to go in and eat, did he even want to continue on this trek to West Virginia.

Colton knew he was somewhere between the club and the cabin and that if he went east, he should be good. He also knew that everyone else in the car had been giving Nick a bad time about how he was too drunk to drive. He did not have the sense or the consideration to tell the guys he was leaving, but he started walking. He came to a convenience store that was closed, no phone booth, but there seemed to be someone moving around behind the shades pulled down under the Marlboro Man poster. Colton knocked on the front window and from what sounded like across the room he heard in a very raspy male voice.

“Go away, we’re closed.”

“I need help. I’m lost. At least tell me where I am, and which way is east.”

“Go to the corner and make a left, follow the service road to the highway, ‘bout three quarters of a mile.”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Go away or I’ll call the police!”

The road back to the highway was about two cars wide. There seemed to be warehouses and manufacturing a couple of hundred yards away. There was an open field on the left and what looked like public housing on the right. While the service road didn’t seem to be servicing anything, there was one car parked on what was beginning to feel like his road. Colton was trying to make out the highway when a half dozen wild dogs came up out of the field on his left. At first, he wasn’t too worried, thinking they wouldn’t want any more to do with him than he did with them. There was a clear leader in front of the pack, and as he got to the street and first saw Colton everything stopped. The leader, about 50-60 pounds, short brown hair on a shepherd type body and boxer type head with a pit bull look, was standing motionless. The pack also stopped and tuned in. He stared at Colton with a low growl and seemed to be sizing him up. As nonchalance turned to fear, the pack started toward him like the hyenas on PBS. He ran toward the only car on the road and climbed on the roof of what turned out to be a 1954 Desoto. The pack surrounded the car and never barked but growled in what seemed an angry communication back and forth. Fortunately, the DeSoto was like a tank, and he didn’t feel he was doing it any harm. As his fear grew, their snarling temper increased, as they jumped up at the sides of the car, and the leader almost scrambled onto the hood.

Colton was now sitting and studying the personalities of his attackers and thinking how they knew he had taken some very effective acid and they also knew how alone he was on top of this car, when as though sent from above, a large rabbit went running through the gutter on the other side of the road toward the field. The leader of the pack looked at him with a quick, You are so lucky look and took off after the rabbit. The pack followed.

Colton got down off the roof and vomited, stood up, recovered somewhat, and then threw up again. As he started back on the trek, he noticed a phone booth at the far end of the apartment parking lot and not knowing who he would call, he headed to what seemed a beacon of civilization. He was digging through his finance when a car came into the entrance on the other side of the lot. He tried to flag them, excited since this was the first evidence of humans since the Go-away convenience store which had been about a half hour ago, but now seemed like about a week. They drove past him like he wasn’t there, but then another came in behind, saw him waving and stopped. A middle-aged guy with red hair and big ears rolled down the window.

“You live here, don’t remember seeing you before?”

“I live in Baltimore and don’t have any idea where I am or how I’m going to get home.”

“Get in, you’re in Frederick, I’ll run you up in town and you can get a bus or something.”

“Thanks.”

Colton got in the front seat of the Ford Fairlane and his new friend introduced himself as Benny. He turned up the radio, seemed to like Motown, and lit a cigarette.

“You look like shit”, he says, “like you been chased by a pack of wild dogs or something.”

“Thanks again”, you couldn’t make this up, was the only thing that came to mind.

Benny drove to the Greyhound bus depot. Colton got out and thanked him for a third time and started toward the office door when a police car pulled up.

“Can I help you?” very politely and Colton thought how when this movie was finally made, Tom Hanks would be the proper casting for this officer.

“I’m going to get a ticket for the next bus going into Baltimore,” Colton’s tongue felt twice it’s normal size, like it was curling around these words, and he realized he was probably dehydrated, and his jaws hurt from fear.

“It’s 4:30 in the morning and the depot doesn’t open til 7AM, I don’t think there’s a bus until ten. What part of Baltimore are you from?”

“I live out NE, Belair Road area.”

“Well, I can’t get you out there, but I’ll take you into downtown.”

“You’ll give me a ride?”

“Yeah, get in, it’s a slow night. I’m Officer Murdock but you can call me Bob.”

Colton didn’t know if they were going back to the highway and into Baltimore or to whatever the local lockup in Frederick looked like, but at this point he didn’t care. He assumed his eyes looked like saucers and while this Barney Fife maybe didn’t know how stoned he was, the dogs in Frederick did. It was a quiet drive and Colton sat with his eyes closed, feigning sleep. Bob pulled up to the Block in downtown Baltimore and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Do you know where we are, if you get out here?”

“Yes, this is perfect, the 15 bus stops here, goes up to Gay Street and out to Belair Road.”

Colton starts to get out of the car – Bob leans in toward him like they’re old friends telling secrets, and he needs to be sure he has his attention.

“So, was it blotter, microdot, a tab? There is supposed to be some really good blotter going around”, he says, like he’s asking for a friend.

“You get on that bus now and travel safe” and he drove off.

Next morning Colton’s phone rings, he throws up in the trash can next to the bed before he answers.

“Hey, its Rich, so you got lost, you obviously got home all right?  Mary talked about nothin but you until I got her to her door. Was your evening as uneventful as mine?”