A Summer Tale:

Instinctive Calling

Summer vacation was our break away from the cool autumn and cold winter, a vacation from that drama sweat shop known as high school. The bliss of its sun shine and blazing heat could only be spent at its fullest on beach sand, or at least that is how Joe, Michael, and I saw it.

The sound of glass bottles sang with short lived crashes in the trunk of Michael’s car. The clings and clangs belonged to our beach necessities, which some called juice or liquor. This juice was the cause of broken relationships, the only reason husbands needed to beat their wives, the excuse used to forget your significant other, the leading cause of car “accidents”, the fuel for rape and abortion, and yet our celebration tool. Michael’s car pulled into the empty concrete drive way of his father’s beach house. No one was there as planned.

The sight of crest white carpet, reflective tile kitchen floors, real wood cabinets, two bathrooms, two bed rooms, and a fine living room finished with a big screen TV, shocked us. Every centimeter was clean and glowing. Every inch was decorated with shells or other ocean trinkets. Joe placed the gallon of Bacardi and the fifth of cheap Canadian whiskey on the kitchen counter. Behind him I was shoving the mixes into the frig, which consisted of orange juice, sunny D, and some Sera Mist.

“I’m going for the kill tonight, Son!” Joe shouted at Michael.

“We are all going for the kill. I guarantee that!” Michael said smiling gleefully, while pouring the three of us a glass of whiskey and Sierra Mist into three plastic cups. I could barely taste the liquor, which for me was a good thing. I didn’t much like the taste of liquor at the time, even though for me it was preferred over beer. My mouth sucked the mix drink down my throat with a quick series of gulping breathes, and after about an hour of continues repetition we were all drunk.

I went out to the back porch with a cigarette in one hand and a mix drink in the other. Joe followed close behind with the bottle of whiskey in his right hand and Michael’s souvenir shot glass in the other hand, which he had bought that day to carry memories. I freed my hand putting the cigarette in my mouth lighting it with the free hand.

“Let me get one,” Joe said pointing to my pocket where my pack of cigarettes lay. I pulled one out and handed it to him pushing my lighter’s flame in his face offering to light it. This is before Joe started smoking regularly. He sipped from his drink and smiled from the taste.

We sat on that porch for hours talking about our lives and theories, which were forgotten the morning after. We talked about our other friends, some kicked out of school, some school drop outs, some addicted to drugs, some dying, and some dead. Michael brought up Joe’s love for marijuana, which he looked down upon. I did not join into this conversation, because at the time I was just as married to the plant. I frequently wondered if Michael’s view on Joe’s love for pot carried on as his view on me.

Air pushed passed the thick strands of my black hair and stinging street lights turned into fireworks streaming my face. Somewhere in our alcohol sponged brains the bright idea to drive around the neighborhood in Michael’s father’s golf cart in the middle of the night sparked into action. Girls most likely drunker then we shouted to us from the balcony of a foreign beach house, as we zoomed by. We waved at every person as intoxicated as possible and found ourselves parked at the rim of the beach sand. The sand squished and crumbled between our toes reminding us that we left our shoes in the beach house. I personally loved walking drunk and even more then that walking on the beach drunk. It is perfect bliss, my state of nirvana. We walked and walked until my entire pack of cigarettes had been empty, which eventually led us back to the beach house.

After Michael went to sleep me and Joe took the last bit of the Bacardi and walked back to the beach. We found in the darkness sitting up right on the sand two striped beach chairs. We sat down and started taking back to back shots until it was all gone. Endless and no time passed by. We found ourselves in a child’s sand trap maybe half a foot deep. We both struggled to crawl out of the hole, but neither of us could conjure up the mental or physical control to get out. So we laid there so drunk we didn’t even know if we were throwing up, we could only hypothesize. Time passed and a few strangers came and picked us from the ground and walked us home. Thank God for good strangers named Homer, thank God for life, thank God for heaven, and thank God for nirvana.