In case you can't remember where we were, Kenny the fugitive and I have just decided to go for a joyride in his truck. We are both hammered out of our minds. My friends are nowhere to be found, so it is just the two of us. Woo to the oot.
At no point did I ever stop to think, "Hey, this might not be such a good idea." Instead, I sprinted with drunken abandon out into the road in front of the house we were all at and waited for Kenny to fire up his Toyota. As he launched in reverse out of the driveway at full speed, the tires squealed and Kenny may as well have been Luke Duke pulling up in the General Lee (if the General Lee was a Toyota with a Rock 101 sticker). I started to run towards the passenger door as Kenny rolled down the window. "Hop in!" he said with eyes from hell. He flicked his head towards the back of the truck and without a second thought, I Bo Duked myself over the rail of the bed and grabbed on to the roll bars. Kenny peeled out and somehow, I stopped myself from tumbling over the back gate and onto the road in a heap of shattered, drunken bones.
Kenny screamed down a relatively abandoned street somewhere in the gut of Ft. Lauderdale. Deciding that holding onto the roll bars was "for pussies," I was now surfing in the back of the Toyota. I was posed like a surfer, trying to maintain my balance as the car tore around town. If my life were a TV show, I was about ten seconds away from a white screen with black letters that read:
Shane Nickerson
1971-1994
Miraculously, my life did not end that night. Yet.
Kenny spun onto a main strip of Ft. Lauderdale where the muffled thumping of a dozen night clubs and modified car stereos filled the neon-lit air. Suddenly, Kenny began banging on the window frantically. I could see that he was yelling something, but I couldn't make out what it was. He was pointing at the seat.
"I can't hear you!" I yelled as loud as I could.
He fumbled with the sliding glass window between us and finally managed to slide it open.
"GET THE FUCK DOWN. FUCKING COPS."
I hit the deck. Kenny sounded desperate. No one wants to get pulled over for driving around drunk with a jackass surfing in the back, but something told me that Kenny had special reasons for not wanting to deal with the police. Rational Shane, who was waking up from the club to the head that Idiot Drunk Shane had given him earlier in the evening spoke up for the first time in hours. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked in my head. ID Shane clubbed him back down. "I'm on Spring Break," he told him with a thunk.
"Ok man, we're cool!" Kenny shouted through the glass. As I peeked my head up, I saw the giant sign for Baja. We were apparently going to a night club. Kenny the fugitive and I were going dancing?
WOOHOO! SPRING BREAK!
He pulled into the parking lot and parked the car. I hopped out of the back. We began walking towards the club.
"I hate this fucking place man," Kenny told me as he packed another round of Copenhagen into his bottom lip, "it's all fucking frat boys and tourists."
"Yeah, but there's gotta be some ladies right?" I asked him as he handed me the Copenhagen. I figured if I went along with it, he wouldn't notice that I was both a frat boy and a tourist. I had even begun imitating his style of speaking apparently, as I could not remember ever referring to women as "ladies." I hesitantly pinched a quarter-sized gob of stinky, wintergreen tobacco between my fingers and imitated Kenny by pushing it into the space between my lower lip and gums. I held back a retch as the taste of the horrible snuff filled my mouth. "Sweet, thanks bro," I said with a brave face as I handed him back the small cannister of shredded tobacco.
"Yeah, I mean there's some bitches here though so it ain't bad. I just fucking hope one of those pretty boys mouths off to me tonight. I'm in the fucking MOOD to wreck somebody's face."
I laughed nervously. Suddenly, I wanted to be drunk enough to think that Kenny was funny again. Sobering Up Shane and Drunk Kenny had zero in common. Only Drunk Shane could find the companionship with the fugitive tolerable.
It was ten or twenty bucks to get in. We waited in line for a few minutes, but it was one of those lines they keep outside of a club to make it seem even hotter to the people driving by. Soon, we were paying the doorman...or rather, *I* was paying the doorman. Kenny had no cash.
Inside, miraculously, was the Spring Break I had always imagined. It was the Candy Store multiplied by hundreds. Someone walked by with free hot dogs and there was alcohol for sale in almost every square foot of the bar. Women praced about in spandex and denim and micro skirts and tank tops. Color me Badd filled the air. Kenny peeled off and told me, "Hey, I'll catch up with you later man." I watched him wedge into the crowd and disappear. I knew I'd never see him again that night, and although I vaguely worried about how I'd get home, I could not believe my luck. I was suddenly free of a fugitive wingman in the mythical place I had been seeking since we left Keene, NH. My Spring Break was going to happen in Baja. I took the opportunity to get rid of the plug of nasty Copenhagen still wedged in my mouth. I almost vomited when the dip broke apart in my hands and fell on my tongue. I spit it out on the floor and raced for the bar.
There were ice-luges and women offering shots out of their navels. There were shooters girls and wet tee-shirts and even no tee-shirts in some corners. It was a giant frat party. It was everything I imagined. At one point, I even ran into one of my actual fraternity brothers.
"Hey Shane!" he shouted at me out of nowhere. I turned to see a familiar face and because it was so out of place in this strange club, it took me a second to make the connection.
"Tippy!" I shouted back at him. It was Tippy the Turtle (so named because he bore a slight resemblance to that turtle in the drawing contests sometimes posted on the back of matchbooks).
"What are you doing here?" I shouted through a drunken curtain of blur. I'm sure he told me, but I can't remember why he was there. I think it had something to do with his parents living there or his sister visiting someplace, but it was hard to make out all of the words. I think that's mostly because I was on the verge of blacking out. We said our goodbyes and I headed back to the ice luge to press my lips on the exact spot where a hundred other people that evening had done the same, and watched the tequila slide down the ice into my mouth...