Cristmas Eve part 2

Hey, sorry. This took longer to write than I thought it would, plus it was not nearly as fun as I thought it would be. But trust me... you'll be glad you have this story as reference when I tell the story of Dom and Thatguy on the fourth of July two years later. No one was hurt in the making of that one. Except for the richly deserved goat heads in Thatguys naked bum.


So after re-reading the first part of this story, I realized that I left out one last major player in the festivities of the evening. So ubiquitous to the ex, the crowd we hung out with, and every single blessed day and night of my existence at that time; I completely forgot to mention the pot. It was always there, in the before, the during and the after of everything.

Can I just say right now that I hate marijuana? I hate the smell of it, I hate what it does, I hate smoking it, and I reeeeeee-hee-hee-heeeely hate eating it (way bad hash brownie experiment), and I for sure can NEVER mix it with booze; I get the spins. I can say with certainty that I was not smoking that night, because all my memories of it include a relatively stable videography, if slightly suspect in the exact order of how it all went down...

On closer inspection I also suspect that only the guys were smoking. Dom's wife, G had a baby to go home to at the end of the evening and Dave's girlfriend, who's name I cannot remember, was a fairly prissy club-girl and also had a kid to face at the end of the evening. But all the guys were doing bong hits and drinking, and since they had the run of the house, they had set up the kit, amps, and mics in the front room. In Dave's room there was a little more room to maneuver, and that's where Dom was seeding his pot for the next round of bong hits. He was using a magazine, slightly tilted and curled to let the seeds, which are heavier than the leaves and stems, funnel down into an ashtray, and then he was starting in on removing the stems. There was some sort of distraction and he got up and left the magazine sitting on the bed with a palm-full of stemmy pot sitting on top. I don't even recall who knocked the magazine off, but Dom just lost his business altogether. He started in shrieking swear words and flailing his arms; a potentially humorous situation with a not so humorous big guy with a long record of violence. Dwight just cut his losses and staggered out right then, his coke bottle thick glasses flashing in the light as he headed out the front door. He was perhaps the one who tipped over the magazine in the first place. One way or the other, he was the smartest one of the bunch when it came to one drunk pissed-off Mexican. It also means that he missed Dom kicking in the heads of his bass drum, and some fairly standard, if slurred obscenities.

Dave's girlfriend lost her patience with this crap as soon as Dom started in kicking over all the amps. She was also either the bravest or the dumbest of us all.... because she started to get into Doms face; she was screaming something about getting his sh!t together, and setting down before she called the cops. It was a scene from off the stages of any fine Jerry Springer show, and it did not help. All the guys hated Dave's girlfriend. She was very pretty and very uptown, and they figured if Dave wanted to sleep with her, then fine, so long as she keeps her perfectly orthodontia-ed mouth shut. As in, shut it NOW!

The screaming was going on in the short hallway that led to Dave's room, but I guess he figured he'd had enough, because he let out a strange honking sound and then he charged her like a bull, head down and broad shoulders coming at her. She easily side-stepped his charge by backing up into the open doorway into the bathroom, and holy crap! This sounds a little funny the way I am telling it, and in truth I haven't even gotten to the part that was lifted straight from a Keystone Kops gag... but at the time there was nothing funny about it at all. This guy had lost his mind. He was big, drunk, and had already given himself permission to do something to prove how pissed-off a pissed-off Mexican could be.

Dave quickly hustled his girlfriend out the door, and that seemed to ease Dom back a little. At first it seemed like the show was over, and G had talked him down, and back into the kitchen for a beer. But it wasn't long before he howled that same odd, honking bray and charged Dave, Thatguy and myself. Again, he couldn't quite grasp the maneuver of a target simply stepping out of the way, or else I wasn't the target, because as I stepped to the side he plowed right into Dave and Thatguy, shoving them back until the back of Thatguy's thighs hit the edge of a large, lidless metal trashcan... and then alley-oops! He was dumped right in, arms and legs sticking straight up in the air, Dave shoved in side ways on top . Thankfully this move took more grace than a profoundly drunk man possesses, and Dom ricocheted hard off the wall the trash was standing next to, and landed hard, face first in the kitchen floor. I think he may have knocked himself breathless; one way or another he lay there long enough for us to scramble Dave and Thatguy out of the trash, grab our jackets and bolt for the door. It was as we were running that we saw what initially looked like a golden frisbee go sailing past us, missing Dave's calf by about a foot. It wasn't until it hit the wall and embedded itself six inches into the solid adobe exterior wall that I realized that Dom had just chucked an 18" Zildjian crash cymbal at us as a parting gift. There was still the high hat left in the kit; we ran faster.

Once outside, it dawned on Dave that he was standing, freezing and terrified in his own front yard while a destruct-o boy was loose in his brother's house. He had just determined there was no help for it, he'd have to go over to our house and call the cops when we all heard a crash and the tinkling of broken glass and watched a shadow stagger out of the front of the house, across the rocks and down the street. The rest of the night was spent cleaning up Dave's house, and then driving up and down every street until we found a cold, and pathetically penitent Dominic zigzagging down a side street holding a badly cut and bleeding hand. There was a lot of back thumping Abrazos, slurred "I love you maaaan's" and a renewing of high testasterone buddy-buddy crap that I didn't understand at the time. Still don't. Thatguy was thrilled with the evening, and seemed to think that it was some sort of right of passage, going so far as to say something along the lines of "you know you are friends when you can beat on each other a little and still be bro's."

Dom got twelve stitches in his hand, Dave's brother pooped a brick when he saw the lousy patch job Dave did on the wall, and we all paid much closer attention to what flavor of booze Dom was drink after that. Merry Christmas, and I believe this tale lands squarely in the "this is stupid, don't do this" category. Fa la-freaking -LA-la-la-la-la.

The End