Dying for a Drink

Dan moved into his apartment about six months ago and was elated to tell me that he had finally made his bed, unpacked all his clothes and put them into his closet where they belong. Letting him glow in his accomplishments, I kept my opinions regarding the cleanliness and order of the rest of his place to myself. Let’s just say that his “front yard” resembles a small-scale model of a recycling center, only without any large containers for storage, and if alcoholic beverages were all that were sold in aluminum and glass.

A bottle of beer gets cracked open with the butt-end of his lighter, he slips on a pair of sporty sunglasses, fixes his cap sideways and flops onto an old couch that sits torn, stained and weathered under a spot of shade in his boozy little yard. As I position my video camera on a slashed-up bar stool across from him he asks, “Is it on?” As soon as I nod he bursts out: “Suspect age: 26! Daniel Joseph Renal! Born: April 17th! Lived: In Menlo Park until the age of thirteen and then…Redwood City corrupted my life.”

A little over seven years ago, in the beaming hot rays of July’s afternoon sun, Dan and Joey waited outside a local grocery store, where Colin was preparing to heist a bottle of rum. Upon his return, in went Joey. Then Dan. And by the time all were back outside, they had pilfered four bottles of hard drink to accompany the case of cold beer that waited with the boys outside. Well, it’s not as if they would have sold it to them.

High-fives all around and they headed toward Henry Ford Middle School, only a few blocks away, for some serious alcohol consumption.

This was a sort of a kiss-and-make-up party, arranged loosely, so that Dan and Colin could squash the bad blood that begun to boil a week earlier. It all started after Dan had been orally copulated by Colin’s drunken girlfriend, who was immediately inclined to confess her actions to Colin. The couple decided to put their relationship on hold.

For some odd reason, nobody got any teeth knocked out that day. The three of them drank, and drank, until the case of beer and most of the liquor was gone. The always charming “Bros before Hos” manifesto held its weight as those inebriated souls carried-out impromptu displays of social misconduct and vandalism in their own little version of peace and harmony.

They were all trashed by sunset. Muddled Beatles tunes and slurred howls echoed in the late dusk. As the night went on, and the air got colder, the drink became less refreshing, and the yawns more frequent. Soon there were two of them, and later, when Colin decided to bail, Dan was left by himself to kill the last bottle of whiskey alone.

At about 10:30 p.m., Dan stumbled off into the dark to try and find his way home. He dropped to the concrete ground of the school yard a handful of times before reaching the 10-foot chain-link fence he would climb to begin his shortcut. After successfully scaling the fence, tip-toeing across the 18-foot horizontal sewage pipe that paralleled a semi-toxic civic waterway, and then a second fence, he had saved himself a good ten-minute walk. The home stretch was only a few more blocks.

Dan noticed that he was having a lot of trouble standing and walking straight. He fell on the sidewalk, he fell in bushes, he fell on private lawns and he fell frequently, as his consequent bruises and abrasions would later illustrate.

Suddenly, about a block away from his house, Dan thought he saw Colin out of the corner of his eye. Suspecting that he might be up to a prank, Dan ran after Colin. He ran until there was no sign of him, and until finally, a very bewildered Dan found himself right in front of his friend Mike’s house. Eagerly in search of a place to rest, he hopped over Mike’s fence only to land on a pile of steel truck rims. He was chased away by Mike’s angry father, who came out with a baseball bat. Dan would lose all recollection of the events that followed.

At about 2:00 a.m., a 911 emergency call was placed from a pay phone at Roosevelt Plaza, in Redwood City, California. A young man had been found face-down in wet mud beside a group of bushes that landscaped the same plaza. Reportedly, he appeared to be dead.

When paramedics arrived, Dan was not breathing and without a pulse. He was whisked into an ambulance and given an adrenaline shot. He immediately sprang up from his gurney. His father, who arrived at the scene shortly after the ambulance, repeatedly shouted his name, to which Dan responded: “Who are you? Shut up. Bald Man!”

At the hospital Dan had defecated in his pants, urinated on the doctor and kept up a constant, delirious monologue before having his stomach pumped. Shortly thereafter, he was sent home and put to bed on the couch.

When he awoke, his girlfriend was there to fill him in on all of the gory details. He told her that his memory was completely void of the ambulance, the hospital or anything that might have happened after fleeing Mike’s house, and that he actually felt very well rested.