Of Folly And Of Vice

I guess it really was hard to explain where we were coming from.

Ryan stammered as the police officer asked again, “Where y’all from?” West Virginia State Troopers were not kind to out-of-towners.

He looked at Dreyfuss. “Where are we from?”

Dreyfuss did not hesitate and said, “Alabama.”

This was partially true. We had been in Alabama the previous morning. We had also been in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina the day before and spent the night in Virginia. We were a fair way through West Virginia. We were headed toward Ohio. Ryan’s Explorer which we were traveling in had California plates; he was from San Diego. Dreyfuss was from outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Lou was from a corn and soybean farm outside of Springfield, IL. I was from the Chicago suburbs, but technically, I was from New Jersey.

A seemingly simple question with a complicated answer.

“Y’all got any alcohol or firearms in this vehicle?” The officer asked. If only we had.

We had been driving for two days, with occasional stops: bathroom, food, the Unclaimed Baggage Center in rural Alabama, a night in a Days Inn somewhere in Virginia. We were tired. We had our crabby pants on. I am confident we may have smelled. We had showered the night before, but for some reason, I had neglected to bring a brush. The radio had just gone out (I would later claim it was because Ryan kept listening to the Eagles), and we had been looking for an exit so we could try to fix it.

That’s when we got pulled over.

Lou was sleeping next to me, and he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. I don’t think I was either. I shook him.
“Get up! Get up!” I shouted through gritted teeth.

He cursed me under his breath.

“We are getting pulled over!”

He sat up, quickly, and belted himself in.

* * *

I had called my parents on Thursday, a day before we left, and acted like nothing was going on. I knew they wouldn’t call again until Sunday or Monday night. I packed my bag for the weekend. My first road trip. We were going to drive to the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama, spend the night, and head back the next day. I took my $60 of birthday cash I had already received and packed my back pack. It was the weekend before my 19th birthday.

We left Friday afternoon, stopping in St. Louis to drop off a friend who wanted a ride home for the weekend. We drove through the southern portion of Illinois, Indiana then south through Kentucky and into Tennessee. We plotted our route the old-fashioned way, with a map found in the car, illuminated by dome lights as we headed deeper into the South.

In Tennessee at about 3 am we saw a 24 Hour Fireworks Superstore clear the horizon. It was obvious this was going to be our first stop. There was a girl working there, probably about the same age as us.
“Can we shoot these off in the parking lot?” Dreyf asked. The girl said she didn’t care. I bought a t-shirt.
We were riding high. Fireworks, road trips, middle of the night? My God, this is the greatest experience ever.

We continued to drive, ending up in Alabama much too early for the Unclaimed Baggage Center to open. So we drove to Georgia, because it was close.

At a gas station in Georgia, Lou and Dreyf smoked. Dreyf was the only one of us who had a cell phone and Lou called his friend, Jon. The scenery was gorgeous. We were in a valley of hilly forests and the sun was coming up. He was telling Jon how beautiful everything was, here, in Georgia. Possibly, also, in life.

We were getting ready to head back to Alabama and Lou wouldn’t get in the car.

“Hey, we’re leaving,” I said. “Get in the car.”

“I can’t sit down, “Lou replied, eyes wide.

“Please just get in the car.”

“I can’t sit down.”

“Lou – get in the car!”

Silence. As he climbed into the backseat he said, “I am going to live here.”

We were headed back to Alabama, were we ate at a Shoney’s. During breakfast Dreyfuss was talking to us about Southern gentility. While I was asking a question about grits, Ryan and Lou flipped a hunk of chicken nuggets into my drink.

The Unclaimed Baggage Center was a bust. They claimed that it would be all the things that were gleaned from lost luggage. It ended up being a lot of things that looked like it fell off a truck. We decided to abandon our original plan of spending the night in Alabama and driving home.

New goal: Drive to as many states as possible before Sunday night.

And so we did. We were intercepted by local police only once in West Virginia.

Our other hiccup occurred shortly after “claiming Ohio”. To “claim” a state to add into the total, we had to stop there and use the bathroom. We went just barely over the border. We were heading back on the bridge toward Kentucky again and Dreyf opened the passenger side door.

“Oh, buh-bye,” he said as, from the back of the car, Lou and I could see the map burst into shreds behind us.

“What did you just do!?” Ryan was upset.

“We know the way home now,” Dreyf said.

I changed my mind about the way in which you can access information about the website on Facebook. I started a page. Please ” fan” it, or whatever it is that you do to such a thing.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Of-Folly-And-Of-Vice/62337180764#/pages/Of-Folly-And-Of-Vice/62337180764

Look to this place as this blog’s online chit-chat home and way to connect you more frequently…

Death to Twitter!

I was naked. Naked, kneeling on the bathroom floor and upset. Upset that I was throwing up. Upset that I was naked and dripping, the shower still pounding the tub beside me.

It was awful and yellow and the taste stayed in my mouth, even as nausea subsided. I knew I could feel better – I had to feel better than this.

I was cold and still dripping when my body finally stopped. The shower was still on. My hair, which had found my quick exit from the shower disruptive, had begun to get wavy in revolt. The ends of it were dripping cold dots onto my pale, heaving chest. I was completely undignified, unladylike, unapologetic.

I hadn’t thrown up sober like that in years. And this is what it felt like. I was in fact not superhuman, as I had begun to believe during the course of events the night previous. My false belief started somewhere inbetween when Nellie was curling and spraying my hair while everyone fluttered around dressed up, and that last swig of apricot brandy I took down, before becoming a concern to everyone. I had assumed, wrongly, having woken in my bed, clothed and unhurt, that my consumption had not been without consequence. But in fact, it had.

I eventually got back into the shower and felt better, but not before I felt worse. Brushing my teeth was repulsive. When I had finished, I put on my robe, threw out the disgusting toothbrush and went downstairs to join everyone else’s day, already in progress.

Unbelievably, I was in a service sorority in college. I’m in the Facebook group now and I am the oldest person in the group by a few years. A few of the younger girls have “friended” me, probably hoping that I still live down there and can buy them alcohol. This is ok with me, I wish I could help them out.

Status updates from these girls are always interesting, and remind me of the AIM away messages we used to leave.

Classin’ it.

At Dobby-Do’s.

Playing at Stank.

And, of course, away messages describing the sort of longing or despair that only college students can muster. College students, living off their parent’s dole, who more often then not are willfully unemployed and have not yet paid a winter gas bill.  

I came across one of these status messages the other day from one of the girls:

WE ARE IN COLLEGE NOW, NOT HIGH SCHOOL. GROW UP AND ACT LIKE IT.

Sometimes I’m so happy we didn’t have Facebook when I was in college I could cry. A single tear forms in the corner of my eye and I wipe it away. We missed the bullet by about 6 months or so. I didn’t get onto Facebook or MySpace until the very last semester of college. Oh sure, we had AIM and we had Friendster at the very tail end of our school careers, but we never had to deal with the mind suck that is Facebook. Or the bitchy status messages, which I’m fairly certain would have directly led to the end of our friendships. And it would probably be a detriment to our grades as well, which didn’t need any help sinking.

WE ARE IN COLLEGE NOW, NOT HIGH SCHOOL. GROW UP AND ACT LIKE IT.

Oh, how many times did we echo this sentiment? Perhaps not quite so out loud, but I remember several incidents that this would have certainly been someone’s status message. As hard to admit as it is, it would probably have been mine.

I’m sitting across the table from a kind British man in a crowded fake Irish pub style bar and I hear myself say, “A lot of it, well, it’s just not terribly attractive to talk about. Lots of vomiting, doing stupid things.”

He already knows about the Steak ‘n Shake mat, and that is pretty much the best story I have about stealing things. I tell him about the short period of time I was stealing discarded bricks from places and how they got heavy moving from place to place all the time. Great for doorstops, though, really great.

“I think I just felt that alcohol was a way to cope, a way for me to get out of my shell. After that, I used the internet,” I tell him.

“But you don’t need any of that anymore.”

“No, not anymore.” I look down at my beer. No. I didn’t need it anymore.