This is one of my favorite lifetime stories, which I presented at Mike O’Connell’s Drunken Tales of Glory and Shame.
Now, I’ve enjoyed this night several times, and the theme of the stories tends to be the indiscretions of youth, so I’d like to open with a story from a month ago.
I asked a boy to meet me out, and when I got there, he was sitting with a couple I knew and also another girl, so I punished him by drinking several drinks very quickly, and when the DJ asked me if I smoked pot, I said of course I do, I’m a cool person! And I don’t smoke pot, because I’m bad at it. I took one hit and immediately became horizontal. I crawled to my car and threw up in a parking lot. He texted me and said “you disappeared” and I said “you had a date already” and he replied “not a date, just a friend” so I thought “tell that to her face”, and then I took a four hour car nap like a classy lady.
It’s just that in the first year of life, you get a million times smarter, and then the next year you learn to walk and talk, which you’ll need every day forever, and from the 20th to 30th year, you get a little smarter, but now I get only a hair smarter every year. You can’t expect to get that much smarter every single year. This year I learned about not parking on Wilshire after 4pm and that’s it.
But this is also a story from my youth.
One time I was at a rave in an industrial park in Dallas, TX, and I was on acid and vodka, and we had been dancing all night to the Good Vibe Tribe, two DJ’s from England with floppy hair,, and it was getting early in the morning, and two gays were on the dance floor, whipping an incoherent fashion model with her own wig, you know, it was THAT time of the night, and these two guys tell my friend the drugs dealer that they want to buy some Ketamine.
My friend Special Keith, and we called him special Keith because he was the only Special K or Ketamine dealer in Dallas, and we thought we were very clever, he says, come with me, and I guess I’m supposed to be the muscle or something, but it turns out I’m bad at it. I’m all gacked up,we get round a corner, and these guys pull a gun and say give us all your drugs, and Keith, who is on ketamine, that he’s named after,, says, “you can’t shoot me, I’m special Keith!” and grabs for the gun and the gun goes off and the guys run off and there we are, standing on the street corner, and he says, did you get shot?
And I say no, did you get shot? And he says yes, I’m shot, and I laid him down on the ground and called for help, and the DJ’s appear and put an airline pillow under his head, and I go to call an ambulance from a payphone. Kids, this is the 1990’s, and everyone didn’t have a cell phone. Keith had one because he was a drugs dealer, but I didn’t have one, because I was a fashion design student, and I walk up to the closest pay phone and call and explain that my friend has been shot, and there’s no street address but if the ambulance can meet me at the closest intersection I can guide them to where he is. The operator says, snidely, you’re calling me from a Hooters. I said, does that mean he hasn’t been shot, because that would be great! That would be my preference! Are you magic?
Ambulance comes, and Keith gets in, and my friend Mel, and some girl that was with the Good Vibe Tribe and I’m staring daggers at this whore, and the nurse is telling Keith, we need to know what you’re on, we won’t tell the police but we have to know so we can treat you, and he goes through this shopping list- a little K, a little coke, some cocktails, some more K, some acid, some hash, some more coke- and the nurse does have to admit that it was pretty clever of Keith to take massive painkillers before being shot, because he’s really in no pain at all, and it probably helped him from going into shock.
We get to the hospital and he’s admitted and I get to enjoy the county public hospital and do a police report and see a man with elephantitis of the legs, no ankles at all, just knees to feet the same circumference, shuffling down a hallway, all on acid, at 9AM Sunday morning. And it’s great. And that’s how I know I can’t have a bad trip. I’m un-bad-trippable. The girl from the Good Vibe Tribe says, where did they take him? And I said, into ER, whore, and she says, I have to get that pillow back. There’s 300 hits of acid sewn into it.
A couple hours later, a nurse sees us in the hallway and says, you can go see your friend now, and I was all, how does she know who our friend is, and Mel says, you’re dressed like Raggedy Ann on a bad trip and you have yarn in your hair, and I say fine, and we go see Keith, who has had ALL his piercings removed for X-rays and is almost unrecognizable.
As it turns out, if the bullet had gone a little higher, it would have bust a kidney, and a little lower, it would have shattered his hip, and so for a long time we said he was a boy saved by platform shoes. Shortly after that, he stopped dealing drugs and started being a realtor, which is less dangerous. Also, when we were at the hospital, his mother said “you’re the last of my kids I ever thought would get shot!” and he said “Mommm, that’s what you said when I was sold into white slavery!
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