Vodka Mike and the Dashboard (part one)

An afternoon of sloshing madness with an old friend...

��������Vodka Mike was a friend of mine. Even though I despise vodka. He had a lot of friends and they all thought he was crazy, insane, mentally imbalanced or any given pop-armchair-buzzword they're using these days for folks who are a little off or not exactly buying into the marketing as well as they should. I say that, not necessarily in that I thought personally that he was a pillar of mental health, but with a slight demented appreciation for the profound effects that his off-ness produced. Mike was around his mid-thirties and had some supermodel sharpness about him. But unfortunately he had this debilitating addiction to the bread wine that burns, which created drunken animosity amongst most circles.

Not that I'm judging him- far from it. Social animosity and I are old friends..

I met him back in the days when I was armed with transport, a 88 Honda Civic I bought from my sister- ran like a dream- prolly still is, somewhere on the roads in Texas where I lost it. We met over pitchers of something domestic with a slight buzz on some Monday night ritual about five years back. The buzz usually evolved into a full-on roar doused in smoke and a jam-packed juke of Neil Diamond. He was something else, Vodka Mike- he had a deep rich sense of some kind of twisted understanding that fascinated me, complete with a slight twitch in his eye and an under bite that exposed itself in moments of nervousness.
But the main thing, the thing I truly dug about him was his understanding of mechanics. He was full-on Starfleet Academy genius with tools. Almost to the point of mutation. He could get an old, rusty, on-its-last-leg Dodge 150 pick-up running from A to C with the right placement of duct tape and wire hanger. It was an art to him.

Last I heard he was running a pit-crew for a racing team somewhere in Florida, but that was three years back, another rumor that's surfaced afterwards was that he got busted for running pirate rum and contraband into Mexico and made a deal for his freedom by agreeing to build the Mexican military the perfect fighting machine out of spare parts from Ford Pintos. One rumor read that he was being held prisoner in the romper room of some UFO cult in Utah and given vodka through a straw inserted in the keyhole if he could properly relay the signals from passing Venusian warp-ships.

Hell, I don't really know what he's up to these days, beyond the science fiction. I always just dug on his science. He introduced me to Al Burian and his underground book Burn Collector, a collection of Zine entries, he introduced Mike Patton of Faith No More fame's new band Tomahawk. He's the guy who shared my twisted, humorous appreciation for a t-shirt that read �f**k blind people.� Yeah, sure- he was married briefly to a girl who grew to become another decent friend of mine, and in that period there was the awful story concerning Vodka Mike's suicide attempt, a bathtub, a straight razor he threatened his wife with and the god-awful stories about what really happened that developed afterwards. I mean damn, that would be a horrible thing to do, yes- but I didn't know what story to believe when it was all said and done, all I knew is that the guy was my friend and he made every effort every chance he had to make that point clear.

He could bullshit and talk and drink it up with a grin on his face. And he kept my Honda fixed. He could fix all the little screwed-up things that most blue-collars such as myself would just be content to grow accustomed to, such as an air-conditioner slide dial that wasn't function properly. Which, I guess leads to the real story I'm trying to get to.

It was somewhere in the middle of August, about six months after first meeting Vodka Mike. I was finishing up some running around and taking care of business with the proper channels. It was hot in the Six Bridges as it usually is in those summer days. I was melting to the steering wheel and my cartoon boxers were climbing straight up my a*s. All because the Honda's air wasn't working on account of the aforementioned malfunctioning slide dial. I was somewhere near his apartment downtown on 9th and I figured, hey- a tiny malfunction with the slide-dial? Nothing Vodka Mike couldn't handle. I looked at my cell and saw that it was a half hour past noon and he usually didn't crack open a bottle before two or so I turned the corner and headed to his apartment.

I slid the Honda into his gravel driveway and headed toward his door. He was living in one of the oldest apartment complexes on 9th street, existing of a patchwork of buildings that had been around since the seventies and all interconnected by rebuilds that started up in the mid-nineties. The place had the kinda character I dug. I gave his door the special knock he showed me to use the first few times I came over, which consisted of rapping gently on the bottom tin section of the screen door and not the window, because the window rattled and threatened to fall out and if it did it would mean at least thirty or forty minutes of early morning bitching and moaning from his little old landlady. And he'd never leave the screen door unlocked so visitors could just open it and knock on the wood door because he was convinced the Masonic Lodge down the way housed assassins out to get him.
So I rapped on the tin and waited.
I stood for a minute or two and bent down, rapped again.
A few more minutes I heard stomping, and then I heard someone grabbing the doorknob and the wood door began shaking violently like it was hung up on something. I stepped back as the door finally splintered and fell off it's hinges and there was Mike.
His hair was a mess of grease and the shadow on his face was long past five, his eyes were liquid saucers and the trademark under bite was in full force. He held the door in one hand and in the other snuggled in the sleeve of his thick bathrobe was a bottle of Eristoff three-quarters gone.
And he was drinking it neat.
S**t, I thought, he was already on the bender. It would have been est to fake a stomach cramp right then and turn around and bolt but before I could he lit up and said �Hey, man- where the hell you been? Come on in.�
�How yeh been, Mike?�
He leaned the busted door against the opposite wall in the hallway and opened the screen door. When he did, he dropped his Eristoff and it shattered on the porch and he lost it, swung his arms about. I stepped back so far that my left foot hung off the porch.
�Christ on the Moon! S**t! Goddam! I hope you didn't want any of that!.�
�Nah.�
�Well, f**k I did,� he said with a nervous chuckle. �Come on in, I still got a few can Budweisers- maybe some whiskey. There's an open bottle of Shiner but it's probably stale as s**t. Don't step on the glass, man. I don't have any peroxide or nothing. F**k, I gotta explain that door to the b***h as it is, I don't need paramedics too. It's only 3:30, man.�
Actually it was ten after one, but hey.
I followed him into the kitchen where he opened his fridge. In it was indeed a collection of Budweisers, a half a fifth of Kesslers, the opened bottle of Shiner, a package of brats with a growth on it, chewed up porch chop bones sitting in an oil stained plate and finally Mrs. Butterworth.
Mrs. Butterworth had an expression on her face that said she didn't want to be there. That bad things happened when the light went out. Or maybe the bottle was so old that the plastic was warped into a horrified expression. At any rate, that fridge was no place for a lady.
Mike dug out two cans and tossed one at me. I wasn't expecting it so it bounced off my shoulder and fell to floor.
�What the f**k man, Jesus?� Mike scoffed. �That one's yours.�
It was now twenty after one. I really didn't want to drink at all, especially at that time of the day, but Mike was persistent when it came to drinking. Not that it took a whole hell of a lot of persuading me in those days, but I usually didn't tie it on until after four. I also thought if I didn't drink with him then he might not be too inclined to fix my air conditioner.
He shoved his can into my chest, �Here, drink this one.� he said then turned and snatched the Kesslers and proceeded to the living room.
I popped the top and took a swallow. It was only pilsner but at that hour it still didn't hit me too smooth. I dug out a smoke and lit it. Mike flopped down on his couch. On his TV was the DVD menu screen for Godfather III.
�It's the worse of the bunch and they're all s**t. Just a buncha grandstanding glorifying s**t.�
I arched an eyebrow at that bold statement.
�They're s**t, man,� he tells me frenetically. �I lived in Chicago for a few years. Knew the streets. Rode the El trains. The mob isn't that romantic-like or tragically noble.�
He took a pull on the whiskey and gritted his teeth, as I sat speculated silently upon his potential mob connections with a nervous bile building.
�It ain't all violins and tommy guns and complexities.�
His voice grew louder as he continued. He was full-on drunk.
Then I simply asked him why he was watching it. He threw his hands up.
�I don't have a clue. I have no idea. Why did I date a girl who saved her toenails in hopes of science perfecting the cloning process? Why did I let her keep a jar of her nails in my freezer...right next to my Eggo waffles? Why any of it? I'll tell you why, because bullshit collects- it collects right under your nose most of the time. Just...congeals to the surface of anything good. You finished that beer? Wanta pull on this?�
He passed the Kesslers to me. I really didn't know what to say. He was good at putting me in that state. I stared at the harsh amber liquid see-sawing back and forth at the bottom and thought what the hell, it ain't enough to get drunk on, but just enough to visit Mike's world for a minute. And I was a sucker for social exploration.
I took a long pull on it. Unfortunately it washed over a week old canker sore on my back gum and burned. I spewed it all over the coffee table.
It saturated Mike's coffee table with a million drops. Mist collected on his Bukowski paperbacks and socket wrenches. His eyes went wide and the under bite shot out.
�Jesus, man! Who taught you how to drink? Are you Pentecostal?!�
I wiped my mouth, gritted my teeth and knew this afternoon was gonna get deep.


CONT.

Reviews

[J. Swaney]

That f*****g rocked.

Mrs. Butterworth had an expression on her face that said she didn't want to be there. That bad things happened when the light went out. Or maybe the bottle was so old that the plastic was warped into a horrified expression. At any rate, that fridge was no place for a lady.

This paragraph alone is one hell of a story waiting to happen.

I wonder if you are my clone? I could swear I've been in that apartment. Sure it was in Colorado Springs, and his name was Kary, and he was waiting for some bullshit workmans-comp suit to come through, and he almost banged my 'then' wife one afternoon, when we all got to drinking and then played strip poker and decided to swap, the only reason he didn't was because I finished with his old lady in about a minute and half and then had second thoughts about the whole thing. I guess I'm rambling but your work inspires me to do so.

JS

[email protected]

[Chris Willits]

Very honest I liked it. I knew and know a lot of people who were like Vodka Mike. Keep em coming.

[Rob Luciano]

Waiting to see the continuation...