To Ride in the Dark

              There was only a half hour left to buy hard alcohol by the time we pulled into the liquor store’s parking lot.  Karen’s early 80s Honda labored to a stop just outside the attention of the single fluorescent light standing alone like a weathered soldier at the store’s front.  That light’s comrades having fallen dark beside him allowed all the work to fall across his shoulders of chipped paint and exposed wires.  Here, where the tiny motor still sputtered protests before going silent, the spastic flickering of beer signs joined with that light’s dull yellow glow but both blurred against the night, leaving a silhouette of the car just beyond reach.  It began to rain.
         Jersey State law cut off hard alcohol at ten pm with beer being available to late night drinkers up until store close, which was usually two hours later.  After that you were out of luck.  There were no twenty four hour supermarkets to get baby formula and a 40 of Old E at three am.  You bought liquor at liquor stores, period.  You had until midnight on weekdays to get it.
         “A bottle of Absolut,” Karen reminded Keith while counting out the loose bills.  “And a Boones too.  I don’t care what kind but not that mango shit.”  Her face scrunched up in mock disgust against the far-off light, which shadowed her features.  From the backseat where I sat the gesture seemed exaggerated.  As though Keith would get the mango anyway if she didn’t demonstrate her distaste.  I looked back out to the storefront.  He’d probably get the mango now just to piss her off.
         “You say this place is cool?” Keith asked aloud, to no one in particular but it was Karen who’d brought us here.  It wasn’t a usual spot we went to score beer.  This wasn’t our town, we didn’t know the spots and, besides, if you frequent a place too often with a phony ID you risk getting burned.  There wasn’t much concern in his voice.  There rarely was.  It was just a waste of time if we went in there and got tossed out.  Who wants to play Moses all night searching for a place that takes the ID when we could be using that time drinking?
         “It’s cool.  I told you.  My sister’s boyfriend goes in here all the fucking time and never gets carded.  They don’t fucking care.”  Karen cursed a lot when she hung out with Keith and me.  It never flowed.  Every ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, ‘asshole’ or any profanity she used were like holes in the road.  Jarring you back into realizing she’d just done it again.  It came off childlike, which fit her.  Keith and I had been squatting a place in AC furnished with only a couch we dragged from the trash and a tattered recliner that happened to be left behind for the past couple weeks and we couldn’t stay much longer there before we’d have to move on.  We hardly ate.  Didn’t shower and had nothing but the clothes on our backs.  Our only cares were finding booze and watching out for each other.  Karen, on the other hand, was a community college girl who lived at home with both parents and siblings she still spoke to.  Hanging out with us was her way to ‘slum it’ and claim some part of a counter-culture she’d never truly come to understand.  Not in any true sense.  But she paid for the drinks and drove us about when she came around.  And it didn’t hurt that she was female either.
         “I dunno,” Keith added.  I watched his eyes narrow as he tried to look through the store window. He needed glasses and when he did that, the way his crooked nose turned downwards and the skin on his face pulled taut, I was always reminded of a vulture. “What do you think?”
         “Fuck it,” I said giving a shrug while still looking into the store.  I couldn’t see anyone in there.  We were the only car in the lot.  “They don’t take it we go somewhere else.  It’s getting late.  Not like they’re flooded with customers.  We’ll be in and out.”  Keith appreciated how I spoke.  The logic I tried to use in decisions since he considered himself more a thug than a thinker.  We balanced one another. 
         “Aw'ight then,” and with that he got out as I slid across the vinyl seat to follow behind.  Karen stayed in the car.
         The dangling bells on the door rattled a sharp, annoying noise as the two of us came in.  We split apart to gather what was needed separately.  There was a routine to this we had down.  Keith, considerably taller an older looking than myself (although at nineteen I was a year his elder) who also had the ID, would get the alcohol while I grabbed an armload of assorted crap with no intention of buying it.  It was all for the performance at the counter.  If the clerk was iffy on the ID Keith would be more than willing to walk away and I’d join in by asking if the clerk would mind putting all my stuff back while dumping it in front of them.  Sometimes, especially in smaller stores, they’d fear losing the sale and would take the ID.  But we never had the extra cash for the stuff I’d get so it’d get left behind, except for whatever I could stash in my coat real quick. 
          This time though I did have a few extra dollars.  With Karen putting up the cash for the booze I could afford to get something to eat.  I grabbed a handful of Slim Jims before heading up front.  The place was empty besides us. There wasn’t a feel that it had been around that long.  The bottles were lined up neatly in ordered rows.  Not in the chaotic mess drunks create fishing for the cheaper piss.  All The labels were out in front with no hint of dust having settled yet, not even on the shitty stuff that would never move.  The air smelled of wet cardboard and musty, damp clothes which we had likely brought in but I hardly noticed that anymore.  How we smelled or looked never came up.  You stopped thinking about that unless you had to.  Like being hungry.
Keith was just setting a case of Heineken and the smallest bottle of Absolut vodka down on the countertop (he’d forgotten the Boones) by the time I walked up shaking the rain out of my hat.  The clerk, a chubby guy probably about mid-late twenties, wearing a shirt too tight for his size and thick framed glasses, looked us both over before getting up from the stool he sort of leaned against more than sat on.  The space behind the counter was narrow, almost too narrow for the guy’s bulbous gut.  I was surprised that the rows of airplane bottles and chewing tobacco weren’t swept away each step he took.  Keith was already counting out the cash.
         “You got ID?”  Asked the clerk in a voice pitched too high for his age.  I saw his eyes shift behind the glasses to look me over again.  They stopped on one of my jacket’s patches before shifting back to Keith where they settled on the unfinished neck tattoo poking out from under his coat’s collar.  Without question Keith pulled out a wallet and handed the man his ID.  Which was a pretty damn convincing likeness.  He’d come across it before we met.  A friend of his was going upstate for a few years and just gave Keith his license.  Their resemblance was close.  Tallish.  Shaven heads.  Blue eyes.  Freckles.  Most times the match was enough to get us right through.  Even when it was rejected most people cited some strange reason for turning it down.  As though they wanted to believe it was real but something just seemed off.  This clerk took the license between his sausage fingers and brought it in close for examination.
         “This isn’t you, dude,” was his response without looking up from the photo.  Immediately Keith went into the prepared speech with a huff of feigned bother.
         “Whatever.  That’s fine.  I’ve never had any problems in here before but I’ll be happy to spend my cash down the street, man.”  There was no irritation in Keith’s voice.  We’d been turned away before.  Wasn’t uncommon.  With only a couple Slim Jims in my hand there wasn’t a lot I could add so I just dropped them on the shelf beside me then started to move for the door when I heard the clerk continue.
         “Oh – no no,” he added with more than a little bit of a laugh in that cartoon voice.  Each sound dripped of mockery.  “I don’t think so.  No no.  This little one wins a spot on the Wall of Shame.”  ‘Shame’ was drawn out in one long ‘aaaaaaammmmmmmmmeeee’.  Like some father teasing a spoiled child.  I turned back to face the two of them.  This guy actually held the license out some as if showing it to Keith for the last time.  On the wall behind him hung a corkboard where several assorted IDs were thumb tacked up.  A black sharpie sign above it titled this display, ‘The Wall of Shame’.  And it appeared that Keith had just donated the latest. 
         The blow thundered out deep and hollow.  Like striking solid against wet meat with a bat.  It just happened.  You didn’t see it.  Couldn’t have.  The clerk, head snapped back, glasses flying loose, his body stumbling after itself until stopped abruptly by the wall behind, sent a cascade of cigarettes raining down to the floor.  Keith brought his hands back down after drilling the man’s face then picked up the ID dropped when the clerk’s instincts decided covering the pain meant more than holding a bit of plastic.  We walked out together leaving the beer and the guy behind.  He didn’t follow.  There was no yells after us.  “Let’s go,” Keith said after getting back in the car while I settled into my spot.  He put the ID in his wallet.
         “They didn’t take it?” Karen asked while pulling away. 
         “Nah, “ was my answer as I checked to see if the guy would chase out after us.  The sting on his face might burn a little too deep on the pride.  You never could tell how someone would take being beaten.  It often brought out the stupid in too many.  But he hadn’t rushed out by the time turned out from the lot.  “Fucker tried to snatch the ID.  Got himself beat for the trouble.”
         “Take my fucking license,” Keith spit from the front seat.  You could feel the anger still hot in his words.  It came like that for him.  It was always present just a little under the surface.  He lived angry, as I think we all did then, but his ability to control how it made him act wasn’t there.  Most times you didn’t know there was a problem until someone was on the floor being booted by him.  It was expected.  The impact was gone.  There was no longer any natural revulsion to violence.  Not to us.  “Wall of Ssssshhhhhhhhaaaaammmmmeeeeeee….,” he mocked in a nerd-voice.  “Take my shit?  Scandalous!  Who the fuck is he?”  I chuckled alongside Keith and then suggested we try a nearby bar that might have carry-out.  Karen didn’t respond.  Not for another fifteen minutes or so.  By then her worry had built up enough that she couldn’t help but speak.
         “What if he calls the fucking cops?  They might have yous guys on tape!  I could get in some fucking shit!  I’m not even supposed to be around yous!  Fuck!”  The words still hung in the air when Keith snapped them away.
         “Pipe down.  Fucker tried to be cute and it didn’t work out for him.  He’s not going to call the cops cause someone cracked him for acting like a cunt.  You better toughen up little girl if you want to play with the big boys.  Listen, no one ever calls the cops...”  He went on for a bit like that.  One thing he hated more than anything was those who cried ‘cop’ every time something went down.  It rang of being an outsider.  Naïve.  Cause he was right.  The cops were almost never called.  And when they were it was after the fact where someone was a little bruised a little bloody and mumbling a whiskey-sour story that didn’t lift an eyebrow on the boys in blue.  Keith always said that you can get away with far more than anyone believes.  In that he was correct.  The violence just was.  Like an unseen companion.  The third wheel.  It went in hand with the drinking, those around us, the places we went.  No one thought about it much because it was always there.  You didn’t enter a situation without it sitting off to a side.  Always there and never really out if mind.  You lived with that.  Understood it.  That’s just how it was.
         In the backseat, I sat half listening to Keith scold Karen and her, not wanting to look weak, trying to argue back.  She didn’t know that he wouldn’t stop.  That the fight motivated him to keep getting up each day.  Fighting to stay drunk.  Fighting to find money somehow to get what we wanted.  Fighting with those it was decided we just didn’t like at that moment.  In school I’d been told by countless teachers to, “Live today like it’s your last day on Earth.”  And that we did.  Keith and I didn’t think about tomorrow outside of getting the drop on a hangover.  There wasn’t a lot of time spent wondering if beating some guy would cause problems down the line.  Or if trashed a place then we’d not be able to use it later on.  For us, right then was all that mattered.  And what we wanted at that moment was to stay as we were.  Drunk.  Alive.  In the company of who we wanted to and stay entertained.  Somehow I don’t think that was the intention when they coined that inspirational phrase.  But I sat there, staring out the window as random street lights threw a lazy prism of distorted colors against the steady wash of rain before my face.  At once they pulled thin, bended, twisted then flashed away right before the next one would step forward to do a short-lived, erratic dance.  With me watching as the shadow of a world passed behind it all just out of reach in the darkness.