finishing off my weekend jaunt to the golden triangle has taken me three days, which wasn’t helped by a drunken spree thru remaining jaxxon bars last nite. i was going to bed early . . . had a couple beers, ate a surprisingly good morningstar “chik’n” pot pie (i love woefully misspelled products), when the fone rangs . . . it’s n-x, all upset because (warning!! SHOCK ahead!!) her boyfriend cheated on her. again.
sigh. so i get out of bed, and dutifully go and get trashed on gimlets . . . very well made gimlets, i must say—strong without being gross. that’s not my favorite—which is half rose’s lime juice and half gin, just like in the long goodbye—but they were good and got me drunk way too fast.
i made up a song to cheer n-x up called “stacy is a whore’s name,” about the cheatee, with borrowed liberally from the recent fountains of wayne single (which is currently on the outskirts of trl—vote for it here). it was basically me just singing that phrase over and over and laughing.
i was a lot more drunk saturday night after the gang headed over to dave’s in starkville, after a great dinner at anthony’s market in west point. starkville supergroup hogleg was a’playin’—ex-law of nature chapman welch on guitar, young agent jones superhero jason jones on vox and git-box (wow! check out their new hipster site, with posters by yours truly & big gray), and various members of the rum drunks scattered about the place, with scooter of cash county survivors holding down the backbeat.
we got there right in time. or something. chapman was a’hollering for “six more double shots of jaeger, please, and don’t forget to tip your waitresses and your bartenders,” and a screeching keyboard solo started up. what the hell—? i mean, like atonal noise rokk . . . the band picked it up, and started to rotate around this one little melody, buried between bursts of feedback and trash. two seconds before it hit, i got it—”jump” by van halen. they played it note-for-note after the john cage version they started, and people were screaming in the audience like they were van halen. i mean, screaming.
then they segued “jump” into “panama,” and i thought a riot was going to break out. it was compounded by seguing that into “baba o’riley.” you know, there’s a lot to be said for just straight-up bar band covers. i’m never going to see van halen (ahem! again—last time in 1992) or the who, but i sure as hell like some of their songs. it rocked.
rocked me to sleep. after that trio of awesomeness they started doing hand-jive shit or some other hippy junk i don’t get, all the girls dancing like they had a washboard & were trying to keep up with the latest zydeco hit. blah. the last high point was watching cisco try to pick up on this totally hot girl. it was working about as much as lobbing ding-dongs at yetis makes them mad. um, i mean, it wasn’t working. i don’t know what i’m talking about.
so i leaned over to bill and let out the catch-phrase he’d made so popular: “good thing dork isn’t an STD.” ah, poor cisco. waitaminnit, never mind that.
flashforward twenty minutes and i’m pulling the faithful jetta around. bored, restless, drunk, wanting to go . . . aw, fuck it. what the . . . the goddamn gear shift is stuck in neutral. i don’t mean stuck like, hey! there’s something sticky here! i mean stuck, like, jammed. fucked-up jammed. in neutral. it won’t move. we’re . . . well, we’re screwed.
nothing will move it. we turn off the engine and get it to park, where . . . yes, it’s stuck. i mean jammed. goddammit.
and then we endure thirty minutes of every idiot in the world asking us simple questions while we try to call volkswagen.
the only funny parts were chapman strolling nonchalantly out of the dark horse and getting in the back seat. it’s obvious the car is totally screwed—ben’s poking around by the pedals looking for some sort of . . . something, we’re just sitting in the middle of the parking lot, the car’s off.
“hey! let’s go,” he says. we tell him the car’s screwed up.
“then why are you sitting here?” he asks. what? oh . . . oh, he’s drunk. he’s really drunk. he proceeded to get out of the car, lie on the hood, and hump the car. “come to life, you bastard!!”
this is right after i got hit by a football. not hard, just a bounce. i’m pretty drunk, and exhausted, and frustrated, and these frat guys are playing football in the parking lot . . . why, i do not know. somebody misses a catch, and the ball bounces up and taps me lightly on the ass.
i hear a chuckle. i pick up the ball—one of those little vinyl jobs—and squeeze my eyes shut tightly and think god please let this go one thousand yards and hurl a perfect motherfucking spiral over the bar and deep into the woods beyond it. it was—and i’ll say it—the greatest pass of all time.
i never heard a peep from the frat guys.
tracy was stilling waiting on hold with vw. “fuck this,” i say, “let’s call bill. he can google the problem and then we’ll be home free.”
so i call. “where the hell are you guys? i thought you were right behind us . . . ”
never mind that. can you tell me how to fix this?
“what the fuck you think this is, hackers 2? i don’t know what the fuck is a matter with it.”
come on, computer king! figure it out!
so within the minute he’s telling me “turn the key a quarter of a turn forward, pump the brakes three times, hold on four, and then you can shift. balance the shifter lightly between neutral and drive so you can crank it—and when it cranks, pop it into drive.”
sonofagun. where the hell did that easter egg come from? but you know what? it totally works. it’s awesome. and we’re all extra-sobered up from that.
exhausted, we stagger into ford manor. susan has tivo’d better off dead and has a huge bowl of popcorn waiting. “does anyone want a beer?”
the next day me and wes head back to jackson, and between the two of us, k.c., and steve, we unload the whole house. it looked pretty good, too, even if we got the (white) couch a little greasy. drunk on budweiser, i gorged at the waffle house and passed straight out at eleven o’clock sunday night.
it was a good weekend.
“i made up a song to cheer n-x up called “stacy is a whore’s name,” about the cheatee, with borrowed liberally from the recent fountains of wayne single. it was basically me just singing that phrase over and over and laughing.”
When I was halfway into this sentence I was already about to comment and suggest that you base the song on FOW’s “Stacy’s Mom” but you beat me to it.
that song is the BIZZOMB!! gclark sent it to me, and i was immediately hooked. it’s absolutely ridiculous—i mean, the guys are easily in their 30s, singing “got it going on”—but it’s pure like sunshine. a great summer rekkid.
In fact, it IS my summer rekkid this year. And gclark turned me onto it as well. I generally don’t like 99% of the music he makes me listen to, but that FOW is, indeed, tha bizzomb.
The sis-in-law just got a new car—a Mini—with a phat system in it, and FOW is the first thing we’re going to throw in the CD player as we tool on down (rather, up) Pacific Highway for the car’s first spin.