The world had been ending all week. I heard the growl and supersonic whine of jet airplanes whooshing off Grissom Air Force Base. The rain came down all week, too. Like it would never end—even if the world did. I stood at the porch railing with my eye on the pelting silver darkness, but I didn’t see Boone. All I saw was the glare of the streetlight reflected on the wet tarmac like a false moon.
I checked my watch, almost eight o’clock. We were going to be late for our Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the Methodist Church. “Boone you asshole.” My longtime cohort Boone and I quit drinking. After I lopsided into the alcoholic trifecta of getting a DWI, fired from my job, and a psychiatric ward commitment. This compared to the powers of NATO and BALLISTIC MISSILE CONTROLS seemed almost silly. Like the problems ants have carrying the body of a cricket.
I didn’t feel like going, anyway. What was the point? Everyone was dog-meat. As if to emphasize this a sonic boom hit like a thunderclap, shaking the air, beyond the rising head of “The Base’s” water tower. Like King David whipping his sling, finding the mark on Goliath’s forehead. A cold shutter went through me, perhaps the world, too.
I heard the apocalyptic drums of some Devil music pounding up the sidewalk getting closer to my yard. A yellow smudge came out of the rain dimpled darkness into the halo of the streetlight. Like some kind of lit up yellow demon. The Succubus had found me, again.
Boone, wearing a yellow raincoat like the “Gorton Fisherman” with his wet beard, clumped onto the porch, carrying a dripping case of Budweiser and a giant black boombox. Like he was moving in. I frowned at his wild waterproof music, but I said nothing about his violating case of beer. I swallowed hard. The familiar tremor of a rushing motor kicked on—It ran on alcoholic drinks of any kind. My pie hole dried up and yearned for libation. A case of beer for the end of the world. I liked that.
“Turn that down, Boone!” He knew my Mother’s work schedule, which was a twelve-hour shift of drudgery—6 PM to 6 AM—like a Dickens’ workhouse. She distrusted me but reluctantly provided shelter, on the one condition. NO DRINKING. Besides her, only the good people at AA (not all good) gave us a chance.
I even got a sponsor this time, his name was Ned. He sold cemetery plots. An immensely talented salesman who could literally sell dirt to a dead man. He had no sympathy for the “half-asser” or the sad sack. He said, “If you want to drink I’ll buy you your first six-pack—kick you in the ass and get you started,” and laughed. Then he got serious, “But if you want to work a program of recovery. I can help.” It looked like we were going to let Ned and the group down. If the world is still here, some will feel a rush of victory at our failure. You can take the drunk out of the bar, but you can’t take the people out of people.
“Jimbo, the Russians are invading Poland!” said Boone.
“They are?” It stunned me. Grissom Air Force Base was only five miles away. A sure target. A sharp smell kept coming, even in the rain, like burnt ozone.
“Putin is going to blow up the world, my man!” Boone sounded happy.
“Come to Jesus, time” I moaned, in a doomsday sayers voice with my eye on that case of Bud like the glistening Ark of the Covenant.
He handed me a beer, which went against everything we had been striving for—insanity has no equal. I pulled the tab. “Psssst.” The sound of my doom. I’ve heard it many times. We had been going to AA together, and the group had celebrated us for achieving three months of sobriety. The first time anyone had celebrated me for anything in years. I had been carrying my three-month brass token jingling with my change all week and proudly showed it to my aging father, who grunted.
I put the cold steel to my lips, with no thought to the consequences I had suffered and all the ones that would come again, and relapsed. The transgression felt giddy like taking a swig of laughing gas. Sometimes it’s the friend that comes up with two beers in his hand and you automatically reach. He is the one to avoid. Misery loves company.
“l thought you would be mad?” said Boone, flipping his hood down sitting in the lawn chair like he planned to stay awhile. Of course he did, bringing an entire case of beer. Yes, the anchor was down. He’d probably been drinking the whole time at AA. The frigging liar. This made me laugh. The way he looked sitting in that lawn chair. His leg kicked up on the other one in such a conversational way. Like he was some sort of woolly psychiatrist, studying me, enjoying the warmth of my failure.
“It is… What it is.” I said feigning sadness. Then smiling the smile of a fool and there were many that night, flying in war planes and generals congratulating each other. “I’m back bitch!”
“Let’s get drunk!”
I sat beside him. Our beers clanged together, and we watched the distant lit up Air Force Base in the black rain, like a radioactive furnace, and it would catch the whole world burning.
“Do you think the Prez will retaliate?”
“Absolfuckinglutely. Poland’s in NATO. This is the end of the world, Boone.” I said, wiping drips of beer off my mouth. Already getting sloppy. At that moment despite all of my proclamations about how wonderful sobriety was… Not waking up with a hangover, no jail, no nut ward, no fistfights, God loves me, I’m so grateful, etc. meant nothing. I thought, I’ll go out drinking… With a liver the size of a regulation basketball or with radioactive ashes for teeth. The world ending was the best excuse ever, and I had been looking for one… The whole time.
Boone turned down his boombox, and we chatted and drank four quick ones listening to the steady sizzle of the rain. The planes scrambled, and a sonic boom hit over the water tower again.
A hydrogen sun should rise any moment. I put on my Mom’s Foster Grant’s. Huge rosy things she bought years ago at the defunct Hooks Drug Store. She was at work at the electrical wire factory. Probably making wire cables for the electrical grid that would soon go dark. Dark forever.
I had been convalescing at her house since I got out of the psychiatric ward. Every day, she asked, “Are you going job hunting?”
“I guess AA doesn’t matter now, huh, Jim?” said Boone
“Fuck them!” We laughed.
I guzzled my fifth beer. A fuzzy space opened inside my head, quickly filling with the black regrets of alcoholic insanity that plagued me for years. I took another long drink, feeling the urge to go ape shit. “Is that your sixth one?” I think he was out pacing me, the greedy pig.
Boone’s mouth moved a little sloppy. The telltale sign of the drunk. He totally misread me and said, “Y-you always been a friend, Jimmy.”
He wanted to shake hands—starting that crap already… “Geez. Don’t get all mushy, Boone.” I slapped his hand—talk about a lush.
His face changed to hate. “In AA, Todd’s little sister—the mouth whore. You know her. She sucked you off a few times, right? Y’all grew up together. Right? She said you’re a loser. A real lowlife, and I should stay away from you.” A sharp almost contagious laugh came, and he studied me with a cigarette bouncing between his fingers with each fresh bout of laughter. He wasn’t sloppy or mushy at all, now. He was cruel.
I looked down at my beer. “Yeah. I guess.”
“Forget all of that, don’t get down. The world’s ending. This is a historic event, my man. Let’s enjoy it. And get drunk!” He teetered another empty atop the growing beer can pyramid. He grinned, showing glints of straight teeth, barely noticeable in his hairy lips.
I got quiet. Lowlife, huh? It hurt me to hear such an honest and awful appraisal of how someone really saw me—who saw me in my cups, and from such a low person as Todd’s sister, Keira. Even Keira, a little skank-ass mouth whore, looks down on me. How low was I? Now that I was drinking, maybe I should look her up?
I bashed the beer cans with my fist and knocked half of them into the yard. I guess human nature is destructive…
“You ass,” Boone said and laughed. He was having a good time, getting me drunk, ruining my sobriety.
I smiled under my Mom’s Foster Grant’s. Like Elton John just after he sang, “Rocket Man.” I looked up at the dark rain soaking sky with my tongue sticking out catching acid rain. I expected to see the Russian version of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) streaming in long white hot flashes rainbowing across the black sky. There was nothing. I thought the town would be a roar of traffic, honking, perhaps gunshots, people fornicating in the streets, but it was eerily quiet.
Boone cranked it to an alternative rock station, then switched to classic rock. A DJ sounding like “Wolfman Jack” said, “This one goes out for those big daddies and mama-sans of the night, “We’re on The Eve of Destruction.” The rock beat into our squishy drunk ears. I lit a cigarette backwards. Boone pissed over the porch rail. The evening distorted and distended like a black stomach adjusting to large quantities of beer.
The sky whined with jet airplanes, full of thermonuclear holocaust. I imagined my town’s obliteration melting over my skull cap rushing us into a red jellyfish sun. Our very own Bikini Atoll disappeared in a four mile wide crater.
A seven foot tall disabled man lumbered by in the rain. Like some off-course vagabond basketball player. Stringy hair plastered to his deformed bovine forehead. I yelled, “Your getting wet, you fucking retard!” The mentally challenged man looked at us. Like I slapped him across the face. Boone stared in a noncommittal way that angered me. My words with no support sounded awful and petulant. The rotten words drove into my soul leaving splinters.
The disabled man, all seven feet of him, wandered over to a pile of gravel that was waiting for the Telephone Company. A new telephone pole laid beside the gravel. Like the world needed another telephone pole jammed into the earth so people could run their mouths and interrupt each other, “It’s over. No, this is not happening! Yes, it is. God will save us! Bullshit.” Click.
He picked up the telephone pole that looked about twenty-feet long. A battering ram that might knock down a castle’s door. He lifted it to his wide shoulder; his posture looked like an S then he straightened to his full height. He swung using his shoulder as the fulcrum, slicing the sawed down tree through the pelting raindrops, spinning around and around out there.
The same way I was spinning when they picked me up outside my ex-girlfriend’s apartment building, staggering drunk after I smashed her flower pots of geraniums on the sidewalk. Clothes scattered in the dark yard. Wearing nothing but a leather vest, my phallus hanging loose, speaking louder than any words could, and they committed me to the psychiatric ward for seventy-two hours.
His strength was unimaginable. What had I done? We stood with our fingers clinching the wooden porch railing like we were on a swaying ship. Then he flung the telephone pole like how the weightlifter throws the barbells with 300 pound steel weights into the air. It hit the sidewalk making a thronging, blurry vibration that hurt my teeth. He turned and raised his arms over his head. He yelled, “I not weetard. I not weetard.”
Then with a sad dignity, a dignity that I drank away years ago, he walked away, almost glowing like royalty. Some things never change in this barbarous world, even on the last night of it. I found a moment to disparage a disabled man. In my heart, I knew I was a bad person. The night continued…
Drunks do what drunks do. We shook hands every two minutes, Saying “Bro!” and “It’s Over!” Then fell into a convoluted debate about the resurrection of Jesus—arguing about the exact time. Then how many nukes it would take to crack the world like a walnut.
Boone staggered down to the bar and got another case, burning through his rent money. Nothing to rent anymore, except a fallout shelter and some bone marrow. Meanwhile…
The B-52s, the big boys, roared off Grissom Air Force Base. I watched them as the rain stopped and the black sky opened up to a squadron of red lights. I wondered if they would go dark over Putin-land? The land of Chekhov’s “A Dead Body.” What did God think of this? Was Jesus pacing in the Garden of Gethsemane? His disciples—the watchman—sleeping. It seemed the whole town was sleeping like it was just another quiet Sunday and work would start on Monday. It must have been all the false alarms.
DEFCON 4 all week on the News. The fire siren blowing again and again, scrambling jet aircraft rattling windows flying low on sortie after sortie. People went from terrified to making jokes.
Starting on case Number Two is when the handshakes stopped, and for no rational reason, distrust swelled between us. Old grudges loomed under the paranoid state of numb-headed drunkenness. I did the alcoholic math. We had plenty, but Boone’s red-rimmed eyes kept going to the Budweiser box by the porch rail. Like he was going to steal it. He could barely speak but still guzzled.
His bearded face became two, and he looked like the beast of Armageddon. “Good God, man… You’re ugly.” I laughed!
His wet lips turned down, getting white, squeezing out a ball of saliva into his beard. Something cross worked under his drunken brow. He looked older than twenty-nine. He looked fifty-nine.
Boone slammed the beer on the glass table. Surprising me—I thought he was incapable of such dexterity. Then he put on “Alice and Chains.” Loud!
I might have to bust him in the mouth again. Like the last time, behind Dougbo’s bar, by the dumpster.
“Turn that down you stupid bastard!”
His mouth hung open, drooling. No one was home.
I repeated.
He flipped his cigarette. Red sparks flew down my shirt with the cigarette nested into my chest hair, burning.
“Oh, shit!” I swatted like hornets were after me and ripped my shirt open, buttons flying. Then I flung the lawn chair, and it went end over end in the yard. “You fucking cocksucker!” Standing over him, Boone put up his raincoat’s latex hood hoping to shield the blow. Crazy feral eyes stared from the hood. I could almost see the drunken insanity rising from his medulla oblongata.
A giant invisible arm grabbed me around the neck, stopping my swinging fist, jerking me backwards. I’m not sure how that happened? Not that the world had much time to figure out such anomalies.
Boone grabbed everything and windmilled off into the night, surprising me again with his fluid movement. Beers hit the sidewalk, and the boombox crashed. I yelled a string of profanity. He turned and lifted the screaming boombox over his head like a gorilla. It warbled, but kept its satanic beat pounding and growled, “Die World!” I heard “Die World” disappearing down the street.
I woke up to the world still ending, but it stopped raining. My head ached in the brilliant sunlight. Brighter than a nuclear bomb or seeming so. I put on my Mom’s Foster Grant’s.
Today it was over. Mom’s Dodge Intrepid wasn’t parked on the street. She must have finally deserted me. The siren never stopped. My Bible sat on the smeary glass table by a Colt .45 pistol. I couldn’t remember how they got there. I drank orange Gatorade for my hellish hangover. A sonic boom or an actual explosion cracked through the siren. Cars were flying by like honking blurs. A gunshot startled me.
THE BOOK was open now, and the trumpets were blowing. I vowed to find the disabled man and make amends—die with a good deed on my breath or at least under foot.
Image: A crate of budweiser from google images.
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