"You know I can't do that. You know that"

(quote: DrunkO, video: a talk on Albertu Camus's notion of The Absurd)

Last night I pedaled to the other side of town for a party. It was in a shared backyard, the year's first bonfire and keg event with all the contemporary trappings. And I had good conversations and drank, and reconciled, and many of the transient drinking friends I've come to have in Boise showed up. Late, late in the night I'm sitting back inside. Chatting with this person or that, done drinking really but still in no condition to do anything but talk. And then Drunko shows up. He's this neighbor kid that no one really knows, but of course all are invited and while he's gregarious at first, something seems not quite right. And then he disappears and reappears with a half-gallon of JD, the bottle frosted and cold. And I sit in the chair, and surrounded by people who don't seem to notice, I watch DrunkO chug his whisky. Three gulps, four gulps, five, six. . .All told perhaps 7 or 8 shots of whisky without a breath.

And in moments he's gone from overfriendly to arguing with the host. About god knows what. And then he's in the backyard and those of us in the house sort of look at each other. And then someone comes in and says: "hey man, homeboy is out there swinging on people." We file into the backyard and DrunkO is on the ground, screaming at some dude there standing by the fire. And I coax DrunkO to go out into the front-yard. There is already a cut on his face where his face struck a rock, or a piece of wood, or the keg as he fell. And the small group in the yard laughs at him. He screams at them not to laugh, tells them he will destroy them, that he's so goddamn sick of this shit. And I tell him he has to go, that we can't have this here. That he's drunk and no one knows what he's talking about. And he looks at me, not seeing me as part of that collective enemy yet, and he says "you know I can't do that". Like I know his biography, the contents of his soul, the shit he has endured and cannot bear to go through again.

I haven't touched him with any violence, just a friendly intimidation, a voice like I'm taking care of him, but he must submit. And in the front-yard he seems as though he'll simply wander into his house and sleep it off. And the party starts to reform itself. I was too intoxicated to recall every detail, who all was in the front yard, how long it took him too freak out. But within seconds he was kicking the line of cars in front of the houses, pounding on the hoods with both fists like a gorilla desperate to escape. And I hustle back out and put my hands on him to make him stop. And he swings at me. And I grab him, pin his left arm to his head in a deathgrip, drive him into the ground under my weight. For a few moments, the people definitely collecting around us now, I talk to him. Tell him he has to chill out and go home, that he's making a huge mistake. And he says he will go home, crying now, calling out those bastards in the backyard for their bastardery. And when I let him go and we both stand, he starts to punch me again. And we repeat, my voice growing impatient. And we repeat again. Until we've finally wrestled our way onto his concrete porch and as he stands up he starts to punch the nearest person. I grab his arms, he falls to his knees. And that's when they started to punch him. Some kid I never met before, punching like a fighter, lands who knows how many blows to his face. The first couple at least while I'm holding DrunkO's arms. And I let go, and I try to push away this usurper. I get a punch square in the hand that is now swollen and stiff. And I try to pick DrunkO up and get him into his house. And he tells me "I can't . . he beat the shit out of me" and then I see the blood on the concrete. So much goddamn blood. And then someone else runs up and starts punching him, and I push him off. But there's maybe three kids I don't know working him over now, and I can't stop them. DrunkO lays on the concrete, rolling in his own blood, crying, invalid, wrecked.

I'm shaking. Because I wanted so badly for this kid to be the only one among us all responsible for violence. I felt like the work I did to restrain him was in the interests of safety and defusing the circumstances. And then they had to beat the shit out of him, and me holding the poor dreck's arms for the first hard hits. I stood in the yard looking at him, everyone mostly silent now. Yells to call the police, people telling DrunkO that the cops are on the way. My new friend Tyler saying to me: "hey man, let's go to the gas station and buy cigarettes".

We walk to the Stinker, adrenaline and booze in my blood making me light-headed, painless, emotional but not sentimental, rather charged with being in the present. And we buy cigarettes and come out of the Stinker and two cop cars have arrived at the house. We can see them from the parking lot. And so we walk the neighborhood streets, 3am at the earliest now. Having a smoke, watching the fire trucks show up, more cop cars. And we walk until everything dissolves and tell our various police stories. A seemingly endless list of legal altercations between the two of us, feeling respirated like some sort of moonlit outlaws,going to the late-night pizzeria to swap cop stories with the kid making pizzas there. We all seem to have them. Sneaking a joint three blocks from the house watching the last cop retreat. And then we go back, having been away for an hour, close to two. Everyone is still up. The kid that pummeled DrunkO is in the kitchen, and it slowly dawns on me that only Tyler, DrunkO, myself, and this little piece of shit that couldn't help himself know the story. No one seems to know how he got his face bashed in, and the retard with the boner for hurting people doesn't respond to his friend when he asks "how did he get all bloody?". The police took DrunkO to the hospital, and I imagine that this morning was the worst morning of his entire life. We sat around drinking the man's whisky, all room-temperature now, until 5am. Wondering just what in the hell all of that meant. I've never seen anyone lose their mind from alcohol like that, and I've been drinking as a hobby for well-nigh a decade now. I think we all have some inner conflict, some rift between who we want to be, who we are, how the world sees us. And we mostly trudge along with this burden precariously atop our shoulders, silent in gritted teeth thinking we're the only ones that suffer. No solace for freak-outs amongst your peer-group. No airing of existential grievance or tolerance for sensitivity. No aegis for expressing the absurd, because no one wants to hear it. And I think DrunkO is just a sad, sad man. He drank like that to impress us, to show himself as some kind of rockstar Viking in the bacchanal. And we didn't even blink. I imagine how much that must have burned in him, wanting us to see him. Us only laughing. Some of us resolved to take our shots at him because he's an easy target. Some of us no better than him, worse even because at least DrunkO demonstrated some humanity . . .as fragmented and polluted and chaotic as it is. We laughed at him. We drank his whisky. I washed his blood off my hands in the morning, out of my pants this afternoon.