Drunk

I was drunk, drunk as a lord, drunk as two Finns and a box of wine, drunk as a Russian mystic, drunk as a Trotskyite, drunk as a fugitive Eskimo in the Humboldt County jail, drunk as a greenchain puller on payday in the bowling alley 15 minutes after the whistle, drunk, wobbling drunk, crazy shitty loose pants puke on my shoes lighting another cigarette with one burning in my other hand making hots with that crazy dingbat credit card with fake titties and a red Mercedes convertible drunk; wine drunk, whiskey drunk, desperately sitting around listening to miserable two-step rhyming poetry drunk, beatnik drunk, anarchist drunk, revolutionary counterevolutionary message of the day drunk, powerful powerful change the way you look at things drunk, so drunk I would have happily fucked anything that sat still but even then not that dizzy jabbering skeletons-in-the-closet pug dog woman of a thousand backgrounds drunk. Drunk but not that drunk.

I was drunk. Drunk enough to get a job writing up little blurbs about how things are and wondering how they would make it through editing, what priceless headline, what caption, what graphic, what page after all it would end up on, whether it would be read, whether it would matter. I got drunk with the reporters down at whiskey Dicks as ever I ended up sentimental about someone I should have forgotten about long ago, ended up weeping to the longline fishermen and the college girls in town quickly for bud-trimming season oozing of sex and irresponsible behavior at the table by the window where you can see the 11 1/2 inch abalone shell and the mounted jackalope head I was so fuckin drunk I was explaining about my drunkenness to the college girls and the fishermen and the hardhead longtime backwoods militant lesbian-crank warrior-well digger coalition, explaining to them how it had to be that way because of this woman, this milky-breasted poet woman living up alone in her stumptop shack, her little renovated chickencoop of literary allusions, her drunken Faulknerian madness driving her to make bad decisions among them having me over one night to read Dylan Thomas from a little Collected Poems, the one with the red cover.

Drunk, I was love drunk and drunk from a flask of Bushmills that I had providently acquired somewhere between realizing I was a doomed proletarian stick-maker with no future but a certain artistic pretension and the bad habit of falling for girls in sweaters who turned shades of pink listening to me read poems about the similarities between vaginas and shucked oysters, drunk with the conquering drunkenness of the one who starts out at first base and steals second as she goes to tap her 100% organic ash in the salsa jar lid, even she's starting to swoon a little, drunk as one who finds himself standing on third when she reaches across to remember that line about the thousand still geese on the black pond and spills herself, breast and all, across my naked lap, drunk as her cracked ass winking at me through its furry eye and with her voice in the imperative tense: do this, plunge into that, enter, penetrate, fuck, diddle, come, breathe, get situated, stretch out that cramp so drunk it doesn't matter if she looked like Ed Sullivan. I was that drunk.

I was drunk. Good and proper drunk. Antidisestablishmentarianism drunk. Drunk as a duck. Drunk as a truckload of dynamite. Drunk as an ammo train. Drunk as the United States Marines. Drunk as a colonel hunkered down in the Green Zone watching the fireworks over the internet as they pound insurgent positions with all the godforsaken drunken firepower of the combined forces of McDonnell Douglas and the Raytheon Corporation, flying through the Mesopotamian darkness with night-vision goggles and a pair of 50s carving out a trench of death you can roll down with something approaching the confident demeanor of the drunken secretary of the war department drunk, fetching along some stenographer-types in nylons and clunky shoes bent over the file cabinet looking up statistics for us, Miss Tumblebottom, if you please, how many signatures does it take to declassify this latest body count, and who might you call to discover how the war is going?

So drunk I was embedded in the war machine and fell asleep dreaming of the day when they gave a war but nobody came even as the rotting bodies glided in on C130s fat and slow over the delta, right about evening, appearing drunk in the conflagration of the industrial sundown, which hovers over the wires and passes unnoticed over the lines of traffic, each car with its own solitary light. Drunk. They're all drunk on the 40 hour week and the two hour commute, living out in Tracy and going along with it all because what the fuck else is there to do, everyone so drunk and the drunken soldiers and airmen and sailors living it up in cheap rooms getting whores and tattoos and writing home to Mom about the army slumgullion one swallows sitting on a sandy chair under a canvas roof wearing boots, drunk as a possum, eating and chewing on and washing it down with something that can leave you feeling a little drunk.

Drunk on sex war poetry and alcohol. Drunk on expensive beverages. I speak now of the good stuff. Scotch and water. Straight shots, body shots, jello shots, iambic pentameter shots, straight shots out of the jigger with ice and lemon, salt shots, pussy shots, shots of my noodle getting itself revived after two hours blubbering and snoring sideways in the Hyatt Regency atrium leather loveseat, back up the elevator smoothly solidly gliding up fifteen stories out over the glittering financial district swiveling over it all at my seat in the bar drinking something poured out of two brown bottles and a clear, with a cherry on a stick and a dab of whipped cream, I was so drunk I would have drunk from a mud puddle and eaten from a crusted plate whatever I could dig out of the ashes that tasted remotely of potato, so drunk I'd take chances, so deleriously obliterated I'd vote Republican for vague moral reasons and swear to be a good member of the Chamber of Commerce, so drunk I'd wade in and bust heads on the scantiest pretext, drunk enough to mount a panty raid upon the barricades of class structure and artificial sociological categorization, drunk enough to piss cocktails and fart without remorse, drunk enough to be in love. Drunk enough to give a shit, drunk enough to get by.