Kill Everything You Love

At work the other day a fella who is twice my age told me how that when someone thinks they aren't a writer they should just start writing how they talk. It seemed to me he had some thing going on with what he was saying, and the thing he had going on reminded me of this story I once wrote when I was in a mood to tell a story, but not a mood to write a story. It is a true story, and it follows, but one of the things that isn't mentioned is that at one point I told an Asian U of W coed that I was in her town doing some session work with Soundgarden. I was pretty drunk at the time, so when she said, "I thought they played their own instruments," I told her that they did, but, you know, "who do you think comes up with the solos?" She had me pegged from second one, but I thought that if I followed her for long enough things would just work out. They didn't. so I wound up on the following, conversationally conveyed adventure:

Six or so years ago, it was Seattle's last season in the Kingdome, a friend told me he got tickets to a preseason Seahawks game and he wanted me to go with him. I never really liked watching football, but I also never pass on an opportunity to go to Seattle, so I accepted his invitation.

We took off in the early afternoon and made a fairly uneventful drive to Seattle. We encountered a little traffic in Tacoma and Seattle, but otherwise we made pretty good time. We got off the freeway and made haste to the nearest liquor store we could find, which happened to be pretty close to the Kingdome. Neither of us were of age yet, but I had a pretty good average of not getting carded so I walked in and picked up a bottle of vodka no problem.

I got back in the car and we each took a couple pulls off the bottle before we realized that we didn't have much time before the game started. We still needed to find a place to stay, and we figured that once all of this was done there wouldn't be much time to drink, so we would need to smuggle some booze into the game.

I had the brilliant idea that we could get some of those lemon juice things that look like lemons, dump out all of the lemon juice, then fill them up with vodka, stuff them down our pants and voila! booze at the game. So we stopped by a grocery type store and picked up two lemons each, made off for the Seattle Inn, which would not take my debit card, as it was rejected, but had no qualms about taking my personal check.

We went up to the room and filled up our little incognito flasks. They didn't really hold all that much booze, so we decided we had better finish off the bottle before we left.

We polished off the bottle in record time, both knowing that we had approximately an hour of functionality left before the booze kicked in full tilt. So we called a cab and had it take us to the game, and made it to our seats just after kick off, and just before we lost all common sense.

We wound up sitting right behind the two guys from American Movie, or at least two people who could have been them. I clocked out of reality for the majority of the first half. When I came to, I realized that I had been involved in a twenty minute conversation with these two guys, and that it was halftime.

Our two new friends informed us that it was customary to go to the convenience store across the street at half time so as to enjoy some reasonably priced bottles of malt liquor. Never one to pass up some charcoal filtered goodness, I embarked with the others on the journey across the street.

While we were hanging out next to the dumpster behind the Plaid Pantry, drinking forties, our new friends invited us to a sick party that they were having after the game. We were all like, "Yeah! That's sounds fuckin' rad."

We finished our forties and went back to the game. As soon as we got back to our seats I told my friend that I was gonna go get a beer. He told me that he was going to get one too. So we took off, but we were maybe too drunk at this point to realize that we went in opposite directions.

After getting my beer I stopped to chat up some young ladies I met outside, and in the process finished my beer before I made it back to the seats. I repeated this about four times before I realized that the game was about over and my friend was nowhere to be found.

I went back to the seats and found my friend there waiting for me. I apologized for being gone the whole second half. He told me not to worry about it since he was gone the whole time too. He had been carded trying to buy a beer and started getting a little loud about how much the whole thing was bullshit. A cop overheard and hassled him for a while about it, but he told the cop that he was from Oregon, and you only have to be nineteen to drink in Oregon. Of course, this was total bullshit, but the cop let him go anyways.

We wandered outside of the stadium and saw a younger man playing guitar and singing songs. We hung around listening to him for a few minutes, I threw a ten spot into his case and asked him to play a song. He told me he didn't know that song, so I told him to give me his guitar and I would show him how it went. At this point he had had his fill of us and he started screaming at the top of his lungs, "You gotta get away from me..."

I was all like, "OK," and started to walk away, but my friend was deeply offended. He started lunging after the young troubadour, and I started holding him back and pulling him away. It was a scenario that was very familiar to the both of us, as my friend liked to fight, and I apparently liked to stop him from fighting.

I got him away from the scene, calmed him down, and suggested that we head back over to the Plaid Pantry for some refreshments. He agreed, and we picked up a couple 22s of green bottle beer.

This time we didn't feel like hanging out by the dumpster, so we just wandered around the streets carrying our beers in plain sight. There were a couple cops directing traffic, so we decided it would be fun to harass them in between sips of beer. They were shockingly patient with our drunk asses, and when one of them said we couldn't drink beer on the street, we told him that it was legal in Oregon.

The next part of the story must be omitted because it would cause terminal embarrassment for my friend, but it involved several street denizens, a crack dealer, a pimp, and a bus full of witnesses. Nobody was hurt, although with the cast of characters, it is obvious that people were exploited.

In any case, we quickly split that scene and decided that drinks on the town were in order. We managed to get into some sort of dance club type place where we met a girl named Molly who drank cosmopolitans. Dancing, making out, and a long as trek up a million flights of stairs to the bathroom followed.

Out of the blue, I told a girl that my friend was a top motocross rider, "the next Jeremy McGrath," I think were my exact words. Unflinchingly, my friend latched on to this story as if it was his life, and not surprisingly, the girl became putty in his hands.

At this point, both my luck and my cash had run out for the night, so I told my friend I was going to go find an ATM, and headed back for the Seattle Inn. Of course, I had only the vaguest of notions where the Seattle Inn was, and absolutely no idea how to get from where I was to there.

I knew that it was, in a relative sense, between where I was and the Space Needle. So, I started walking towards the space needle, and approximately an hour later, I wound up at the foot of it. So, I turned around and walked about a mile back the way I had come, which seemed too far, so I headed back towards the Space Needle. On my fourth or so trip I happened across a couple of fifteen year old kids on skateboards and asked them where the Seattle Inn was. "Right there," they said as they pointed across that street. I thanked them and they told me not to drink and drive.

After all of that fucking around I fully expected that my friend would be back at the room asleep when I finally made it up. I got there and he wasn't, but the bed was, so I went to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later to the sound of my friend entering the room. He looked to be in bad shape, but I knew that I looked no better, so we went to the car and started off for home.

On the way home he filled me in on the details of what happened after we parted ways. It seems things didn't work out with the motocross girl, so he started off for the hotel. He was just as lost as I had been, so when a guy offered him a ride he was happy to accept.

Instead of taking him to the hotel though, the guy wound up taking my friend to his apartment. My friend said he was just sitting there on the guy's couch, occasionally saying how he wanted to go back to the hotel when the guy asked him, "Hey, you wanna go get some pussy."

My friend was all like, "Yeah." So they hopped back in the guy's car and wound up at a porn shop. The guy put a bunch of money into one of the booths and told my friend to enjoy. My friend said he went in and after about thirty seconds the stranger walked in to join him. My friend told the guy to leave, which he did, only to come back in after thirty seconds.

After the third time this happened, my friend decided the best course of action was to get the fuck away from this guy, so he walked over to three other guys hanging out at the porn shop and asked them for some help. Amazingly, these three guys turned out to not be perverts and took him back to the hotel.