Jason Nemec
EVERY DRUNK HAS A PASSPORT
Here they come, stumbling down the sidewalk two by two,
masses of hammered college kids puked out of the bars
on the Tennessee Street strip after last call. And it’s not the sight
of them that gets to me as I stand in my boxer shorts watching
their bumbling migration from the balcony of my apartment;
it’s the sound as I’m yearning to sleep off the iron-legged stress
of a hard-fought double at the restaurant, the fuck yous
yelled at the top of smoked-through lungs, the punches
itching to be thrown, revving up in the glamour boys’
well-exercised beer muscles, the shrill come-ons screaming
from deep in the exposed chests of scores of girls who received
their breasts as high school graduation presents, Whoo! and Yeah-uh!
cutting through the night air overtop the off-tempo
rhythm of high heels on asphalt. If I had to pick a mascot from
the entire mad cacophony to represent this species born unto me
at 2 A.M. and set to die off by 2:30 every Thursday through Saturday,
it would have to be this beanpole of a kid scarecrowed between
his two buddies, his spiky, standard-issue-fraternity-brother hair
pointing straight head, his feet fumbling out of order, but his mouth
still working just fine—he’s shouting I’m drunk! over and over
as though the entire planet not only cared, but also failed to hear him
those first twelve times. I wince, not just because of how obnoxious
I’m Drunk is acting, but because his un-tucked, pale blue oxford
is just like one of my favorite shirts from back when I was in college,
and I realize that I’ve been I’m Drunk, I’ve been the guy
who’s so plowed he needs to be carried out of the bar. My 21st
birthday saw me, in that shirt, beneath the high ceiling of Panini’s
in Coventry Village, or rather, a version of me who actually thought
that trying to ingest 21 drinks in one evening was,
if not the smartest idea, just something that had to be done.
So even though my heart back then had recently been wrung out
like a sponge by Lindsay, who I used to refer to as Lucy in poems,
I offered myself up to the ritual, I picked a bar, ordered up some songs
on the jukebox—probably some crazy mix of whatever bad rap song
was popular at the time and a little vintage Billy Joel—and then
put back shot after crystalline shot with names I can’t
remember, save for a Redheaded Slut brought by Jen,
who was a redhead but was not a slut, and a Buttery Nipple
from Heather, who really did have buttery—no, just kidding.
I think I was about two hours and thirteen drinks in when
the floor gave out, the lights behind the bar fell apart, and the spins
kicked in, at which point I was beyond lucky to still have
my good friend, my brother-man Goo there, all 105 lbs. of him,
to lean my suddenly Gumby-like 185 on, a weight
he absorbed and shouldered like a pack mule, pushing me
past the bouncer and down the xylophone steps to the street,
every sound ringing wrong: the amused eyes of strangers tinkling
against my head, car horns with their volume cranked,
Goo telling me just a little bit further to his car,
and me unable to hold on to myself, vomiting into
the storefront alcove of Passport to Peru, a specialty shop
where, years later, I would buy a tapestry and feel ashamed
inside for shattering my kaleidoscope of liquor drinks
across their threshold, trying to expel a bellyful of demons
brought on by a girl who said she left me to deal with her own
alcoholism, and I can’t go there anymore, not Passport to Peru,
but to Lindsay’s long departure, because the going results in
pages and pages of untranslatable manuscript in my head,
worse than this, longer than this—this, which is just to say
that the asylum silence there in my moment of greatest intoxication,
while I was hunched over in that worldly store’s doorway,
staring deep into the world of myself as my rough reflection
winced and stared back, has whispered across the years for me to look
hard at the caved-in shells of the screaming kids
outside my apartment,
and listen even harder to the longing that lines declarations like
I’m drunk! And while it hurts to watch I’m Drunk’s friends drag him
like a massive sack down the street, maybe the reason any of us
are driven to render our extremities so useless, to float
our insides on such a magnificent ocean of booze in the first place
is because on any given day, our fattening hearts weigh at least
1000 pounds, and our bodies get tired of having to carry them around
from minute to minute, and person to person, all by themselves.
—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
