My friend Sam was, under almost any circumstances, subject to clumsy, embarrassing, and often violent outbursts and loud tirades of gobbledygook about the evil and stupidity of the world that included a generous helping of sports metaphors which he would repeat and rephrase as many as six or seven times in a row as he tried to tweak the wording."Trying to make myself clear," he would say. He was someone who was much better off placated and quiet than argued with and perturbed, as he was incredibly inclined to throw tantrums and make humiliating spectacles even when he was dead sober. Tonight he was anything but that.

It was a Wednesday night, and in this boring Kentucky burb, that meant bar night. On Main Street were two competing bars. Both were crappy dives with horrendously bad music filled to the gills with heinous redneck fraternity bastards, which is as good as Kentucky nightlife gets. The attraction was that on Wednesday, The Millennium offered Windex flavored Coors Light draught for a quarter a cup and right across the street Vertigo offered all the well drinks you could drink for only twelve dollars, which included entry; a volitile combination indeed, and even more so when you're accompanied by a self-destructive alcoholic maniac who lives to see how many people in a 24 hour period he can freak out, offend, and possibly brawl with.

I picked Sam up at about 9pm. He cheerfully bounded into my car and announced that he had just drunk eight shots of Jagermeister. I might have known the night was going to be disastrous if at the time it had seemed unusual. It didn't seem uncommon because it wasn't. Many times had I gone out with Sam full of poisonous amounts of liquor, and it rarely amounted to much more than him saying something intentionally offensive to the wrong people or conducting a sports metaphor imbued lecture about the unfathomable mysteries of women to an audience of one in the car on the ride home. Those I could handle. I was, however, innocent to the horror that would unfold on this evil night.

When we got to Main Street, we decided to hit Vertigo first. There's a saying, "Beer before Liquor, Never been sicker. Liquor before Beer, Never fear." Sure. Never fear. A+B=C. This simple equation becomes a lot more like theoretical physics when A = Liquor and B = 12(beer+liquor)(n x liquor squared x 7beer + unknown murky substance + neon pink cranberry juice + empty stomach). Then, arriving at the answer is much more complicated and the variables become too undefined. I've never been into entropy enough to use it as a fixed value in the equation. There are people who can wander through life narrowly avoiding death and never know there is anything unusual going on. I have always envied them; the people who can go out and do whatever the hell they want and never fear that they'll miss work, and if they do, who cares? Sam had no hope of calling in sick tomorrow. His boss knew what he was up to. The "stomach virus" story would never work because Sam's boss was Me, and I don't stand for that. What you might think of as his ace in the hole was more of a noose around his neck. I may have been his friend here, but at work there was no way I was going to pull his load while he slept one off. There would be Hell to pay, and worse, there would be ME to pay, and I'm worse than Hell, because I'm REAL.

Vertigo was a strange place. It might have even been interesting if the people and music inside weren't so worthless. The place looked like it had climbed out of some Fred Astaire movie from the Big Band era. All of the architecture and decor was old and original, yet clean and polished. The bar itself was gorgeous polished hardwood, and probably would have cost a fortune if it hadn't come with the place, nailed to the same floorboards that it sat on in 1938. Amidst this subtle beauty was a slobbering mess of depravity and filth. Sloppy, drunk girls were enjoying the five minute long fascination with Swing music that happened in the late 90's while a billowing horde of idiot frat boys, all wearing Tommy Hilfiger like a team uniform, were trying to score with women too drunk to operate their mace canisters. Right in the middle was Sam inhaling vodka and cranberry juice as fast as the bartender could pour, one cup after another. I wisely stuck to beer, avoiding the paint thinner that they used for house brand liquors in these low rent ratholes. After Sam finished six vodkas and cranberry, he finally slowed down enough to transcend his alcohol binging trance and notice the hellish music. "Oh, fuck this shit!" he said as his eyes wandered lazily up to the ceiling, as though he could see the Brian Setzer Orchestra hanging in the air above his head. He sneered and gave me the head-tilt-point towards the door. I hadn't finished my beer yet. He would have to wait while I drank it at a normal human pace. This didn't seem to bother him much as he hit the bar again and drank three more mineral spirits and cranberry. When I finished my beer, we left and headed over to the Millennium. Vertigo had given us wrist bands so we could reenter as many times as we wanted that night.... CURSE THEM!

Despite being located in the heart of a simple backwater town with rural living only minutes away, the bouncers at the Millennium always acted like the Gestapo at the doors of snooty New York City nightclubs. "Baggy jeans! You can't come in!" "No hats!" "No logo shirts!" Big, fat, savage lummoxes with suit coats over tattered and faded Def Leppard t-shirts who spoke in military style blurts of short grunts would look at your ID with a Mag-Lite, then shine it in your face like a cop. While it's incredibly annoying to be blinded by some officious idiot when you're sober, it's really disorienting when your brain is soaked like a Baba Rum Cake in a bucket of cheap alcohol. Sam winced and made a groaning sound. "HEY! IS HE ALRIGHT?" snapped the ogre. I was still totally sober at this point and I played it off by joking with Sam, asking if I could see his License and Registration. Sam chuckled and the rhino decided that was a normal enough reaction, and saw that I was totally collected, so he let us in. The downstairs of the Millennium always had some horrendous live band that Chuck Barris would have Gonged in seconds. Nobody really paid any attention to the band, and instead clustered around the bar like bees on a hive in pursuit of what they really came for: a cheap buzz. Upstairs was slightly better, with a dance floor. We were friends with the DJ, Corey, so he would play decent house music after we got there, although he could only play it for a few minutes at a time or the clientele who only understood rap music would go into chemical shock and swallow their tongues.

We saw a few people we knew. I talked to my friend Jace for a bit and Sam took off into the crowd in the direction of the bar. I didn't go for the quarter draughts. I was perfectly content to pay six bucks to drink something that actually tasted like beer. Sam was about five dollars into quarter draught night when we bumped into a couple of girls we knew. One of them was a short, stubby thing with "jilted" written all over her. She reminded me of Marcie from "Peanuts," except overtly horny, which is a frightening combination. Sam was viciously drunk, and this made him fresh meat in the eyes of this thumb shaped menace. They ran off into the mob and she apparently started buying him shots. How many, it's hard to say. He came back a few minutes later with a cup of some murky, dark brown liquid. It was a foul looking muck with the lumpy consistency of swamp water and a color like molasses. It looked like someone had chewed up an entire Hershey bar and spat it into a cup. How close to the truth this was, I was afraid to guess. "What the fuck is it?" I asked.

"I don't know but it's really strong."

Sam was fading. I could see it gradually coming on over the last hour. The end of Fun was near. Soon dealing with Sam would turn into a stream of baby-sitting and psychological management. There would be people he would piss off and I would have to be nearby to diffuse tension or else the Tommy Hilfiger Crew would make him pay in teeth. I could see him looking around the room, but it was obvious that his eyes couldn't focus on anything. That made me nervous. He was out of his mind and scanning for something, and what he was looking for was usually trouble, or at the very least, degradation and horrible embarrassment. Sam said he was going to the rest room and headed in that direction, walking on his toes, leaning forward like a ski jumper. I got another beer and went back up to the DJ booth to shoot the shit with Corey.

Time passed and there was no sign of Sam. I checked the bars and restrooms on both levels, but Sam wasn't around. It had been about an hour since I saw him last and that could only be bad.

I was reminded of the time that Sam and I had gone to New York City and he vanished; some dumb animal from Tinytown, Kentucky, lost in a wilderness of cement and murderers and broken pay phones, and no doubt drastically impaired by heinous quantities of cheap booze. He had hit half of the bars in the Village before stumbling back, hitting even more bars en route. He fell into the hotel room at about 6AM, telling me that he got off the train too far uptown and instead of crossing to the downtown platform through the station, he jumped down into the track bed and walked across. His clothes were filthy from climbing up out of the track onto the platform on the other side. I cursed him for his stupidity and he explained that he had waited until no trains were coming. "What about the third rail?!" I snapped. He stared blankly at me. "The ELECTRIFIED RAIL!"

"The what?" he slurred. He looked confused even beyond the influence of his poisoned mind and liver. He could have been fried like a fish stick and he was completely oblivious to his peril. As saturated as he was with liquor, he would have been flambéed like a crêpe suzette.

There could only be one answer. In his drunken fumbling, he must have noticed the wrist band from Vertigo and remembered the vast quantities of readily accessible, and in this state, palatable liquor, and wandered blindly back through a flow of blurry glowing lines that were probably cars. As I left, I asked the Cro-Mag at the door if he had seen my friend, who I was almost sure he would remember. He looked dully at me and said nothing, his lips sagging open stupidly like a carp's mouth.

I found Sam in Vertigo telling some girl what might have been anecdotes if they would have had any consonants in them. She was visibly annoyed and was trying to get away, but Sam would follow her and spout his loud vowel howl at her, occasionally breaking into laughter at the funny vowels. She was too polite to tell him to fuck off, so she attempted to dart into a booth table with her friends. I was still attempting to push my way through the crowd to get to him before some Frat monkey gave him the beating that he so richly deserved. He apparently thought she was trying to get more comfortable, so he sat down next to her on the red pleather booth seat and pushed her over with his hip enough to squeeze in. Finally I arrived and latched my hand on his upper arm in the desperate manner that a lifeguard would grab a drowning child bouncing in the waves before getting into the head-up lifesaving swimming position. I had saved him alright. The metaphor was painfully accurate, and it showed in the relieved laughs of the girls at the table. "Sorry about that. He's pretty drunk."

He didn't even realize I was there until I started pulling. He protested, but his shoulder and legs were limp and without any reflexes like a dead body. He was hard to pull up to a standing position. He barely made it to his feet, and even then, it seemed that he could just as easily fall in a heap on the floor as stand up. If he had been allowed to sit there, there was no doubt that he would have awakened the next afternoon right where he sat. I still had not seen Sam open his eyes. When he finally realized who was yanking on his arm, he smiled and went, "WHAAAAAAAAA!!!" Which I imagined meant, "Why hello there! It's nice to see you, old friend! Here, let me introduce you to this charming young lady with whom I have been conversing in your absence." Or it may have simply meant, "WHAAAAAAA!!!"

There was no way that I was going to let this go on any longer. The option of fun was gone, leaving only misery or escape - or both. Sam wasn't moving on his own, so I had to pull him. To my surprise, he seemed to be completely cooperating, so after a couple of paces I let go of his arm. As soon as my fingers loosened, I felt a rush of wind as he wheeled around in a 180 to bolt back to the girls and bring the nightmare that they were relieved was over back like a horrifying flashback. Sam apparently believed that this girl was completely in love with him, and that I was ruining his chance at assured sex. He argued this point later, though I was surprised that he even remembered her. Just as he was about to sit back down, I snagged the back of his collar, which I held balled in my fist. He seemed completely surprised by this, as though it hadn't happened just 7 seconds earlier. The girls laughed, and I just gave them the "Sorry" look again as I pulled him away. This time I wasn't going to let go. As we walked towards the door, Sam's eyes must have opened enough to see the bar, and he tore away from me in an attempt to resume gulping down vodka crans. As he spun around this time, his feet crossed each other and he still had forward momentum from the original direction we were headed. He fell backwards. As he fell, his shoulder hit a Frat boy in the backs of the knees, tripping him and making him fall backward, sitting on Sam's chest. By some miracle, the guy's beer was all still in the bottle, which was still in his hand, more than half-full. He didn't seem particularly joyous over this supernatural occurence, and was compressing to punch Sam or me or anyone within his radius, before he was even all the way back on his feet. Sam just laid flat on his back on the floor for a moment, his eyes now wide and alert, but still somehow far away, like he was marvelling at the bizarre creatures and plants on the other side of reality.

I let him lie there for a moment while I tried to placate the angry Frat boy. The fact that he was lying there helpless drove the point home that it was an honest, albeit stupid, mistake and that no harm was intended. I offered the guy a drink, but he was already cooling off. Nobody was hurt, except maybe Sam, who didn't have a single working nerve ending left in his whole body at this point anyway.

I dragged Sam to his feet and headed towards the door. At this point, the bartender and door guy were well aware of what was going on, and I guessed that if Sam tried to bolt off again, I would have much more help than I wanted getting him outside. As angry as I was, there are very few things lower than a guy who will sit back and allow his friend to be brutalized by cops or security goons. I couldn't let him get away this time. The guard held the door open and we were out into the night.

About ten feet from the front door of Vertigo was a cop. He was in the crow's nest position between Millennium and Vertigo, scanning for drunks and troublemakers. HOW CONVENIENT! No doubt he'd pull his quota tonight. I was filled with dread that the people from inside would see the cop and come running out to flag him down and have Sam dragged off to some dank pit filled with venomous crawling things. The cop was facing away from Vertigo, leaning on the front of his car with his arms crossed. His head was pointed straight at the doors of Millennium like an owl that sees a mouse rustling in the grass. This was good. He was preoccupied. For a second, I thought we'd get by him cleanly, but it was foolish of me to make this assumption for even a nanosecond. Just as the notion of easy flight popped into my head, it was instantly shattered by the staggering slob. Sam stumbled away from me and smacked hard against the rear of the cop car. If the cop was completely deaf to the odd assortment of unintelligible wailings and gibberish coming out of Sam's drooling scream-hole, he would have been alerted by his car getting jarred as though someone had whacked it head-on riding a mountain bike going full speed. Panic! Instinct! Car Keys! My hand dove into my pocket and leapt back out clutching my key ring. As the cop's owl neck did a Linda Blair 180, his eyes met first with a sober guy dangling his car keys. He then noticed the guy pushing himself up off the pavement next to his rear tire. The message was clear. This was not his mess to clean up. This was being handled. Someone else will have to suffer the insufferable tonight, and he may yet get to see a decent fight at the doors of the Millennium. There was always a good one, and the cops were conveniently never close enough to stop it until a couple of solid punches made contact. He looked me in the eye and nodded. Well, I think he looked me in the eye. It was hard to tell, because despite being 1AM with a pitch black, moonless sky, he was wearing those Oakley Blade sunglasses that only cops, security guards and other Nazis wear. Lexington is not a town where you question these things. You simply nod back at the cop and go about your business, remembering always that Kentucky is the Ass-End of Hell and that any attempt at understanding it will lead down a winding road to confusion, frustration and madness.

As we walked into the parking garage, we saw Jace and his girlfriend. They were about halfway up the ramp, and when Jace saw us, he jokingly went into a kung-fu pose and let out a Bruce Lee yell that reverberated on the concrete surfaces. This had an instant instinctive effect on Sam. He lunged forward like a puppy after a thrown ball. He only made it about two steps before gravity took over. He fell hard, flat on his chest and skinned his hands and knees. The echo of the Bruce Lee scream had faded, but it had been replaced by the equally powerful reverberant "UGH" from Sam getting the wind knocked out of him. Since he was far too numb and mindless to feel pain, he leapt up and continued running after Jace. He went into a flying side kick, without the "flying" part, and tripped forward, landing on his hip and skinning his elbow. Jace was laughing almost as hard as Sam, but realized he should stop encouraging him, for safety's sake. Jace unlocked his car and popped the lock so his girlfriend could get in. Sam scrambled into Jace's car. If I could have predicted the future, I'm not sure how forceful I would have been in getting him out. Jace and I pulled him out by his wrists through screaming and protesting. Jace took off and Sam hobbled over to my car. At this point Sam was completely incoherent and showed no motor control whatsoever. His limbs were flailing and he couldn't sit up in his seat. I tried to fasten his seatbelt and he grabbed it away from me. After watching him stab at the air a few times, attempting to buckle it himself, I snatched the buckle away from him and fastened it before he could muster the coordination to stop me. This caused some sort of humiliation response and he covered his eyes and wailed like Chewbacca. I rolled his window down all the way, hoping that the air blowing in his eyes would keep him at least partly awake, and preparing for the possibility of the dreaded... EMPTYING.

The mission was before me. Speed. I had to get to Sam's apartment as fast as I possibly could, or my clean beige upholstery was in dire peril. I put the car in drive and Sam knocked it out of gear with his flailing knee. This was to be a one handed drive the whole trip, I thought. I locked the doors, put the car back in gear and pressed Sam against the passenger door with my right hand. He groaned and struggled, but I yelled at him to shut up and be still. He closed his eyes and rolled against the door with his forehead leaning on the window frame as I held him in place. I tore out of the parking garage as though I was being chased and fired down Tates Creek Road at 80 in the 45 zone. This, of course, was pretty stupid because Lexington has about one cop per two civilians, and there's no real crime so they're all bored. This will generally ensure that being pulled over for anything from a busted headlight to low tire pressure will result in the extended remix version of the "touch your nose and say the alphabet backwards" drunk test even if you're completely sober and a full car search after the cop calls for backup, so you have four cops asking you questions about where you've been, where you're going, who you hung out with, etc. while taking turns digging through your pockets and shining their Mag-Lites in your eyes. Tates Creek Road is Shark Alley for cops. Add to that the fact that most Lexington cops are rednecks who think they're starring in Colors as Sean Penn with no pesky Robert Duvall around to keep them in line, and you get an impression of the risk I was taking by speeding here.

Sam was becoming more listless and subdued. His flailing had stopped. I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. In either case I stopped pressing him against the door, and he seemed to stay there on his own. I couldn't tell if he was conscious or not. He was quiet for a few blocks and I made good speed towards home. All of a sudden, Sam let out a shriek of terror and unfastened his seatbelt and kicked the car into neutral with his foot. He kicked and clawed and flailed like a wild animal in a cage; a cage from which he meant to escape. My engine revved up in neutral as Sam started getting up out of his seat. I swerved out of control onto the shoulder for 100 yards as I tried to push Sam back into his seat and keep him still long enough to pop back into gear. He was climbing out the window in an attempt to bail. His body was halfway out, up to his hips, and almost ready to fall against the speeding jagged pavement when I grabbed him by the seat of his pants, still in neutral at 75 miles an hour as I straightened the car back onto the road. Events like these are things that I never want to ever have to explain to police officers, newspapers or next of kin and would almost certainly raise my insurance rates.

I pulled him back into the car and the back of his head whacked the top of the door. He fell into his seat and slumped over, looking unconscious. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I screamed. I was pumping adrenaline and fury and terror. My breath hissed through my clenched teeth. Sam just groaned. As I pressed the brakes, Sam slumped over further until his head was resting against the dashboard. I coasted to the traffic light, where I came to a stop and put the car back in gear. Red lights in Lexington are long - like five minutes sometimes. Usually this would have me in a rage, but under the circumstances I appreciated having the time to sit there for a moment in the silence and peace and moist night air, collecting myself.

The light turned green and I started off. The moment of quiet slowed my pace a bit and I took off at a much more sane speed. The terror from a moment before seemed to have passed and Sam slumped there in silence, seemingly passed out. I could hear the wind in the trees outside and could feel it on my face. Then I became aware of another sound, like a trickling brook or a tinkling fountain. It sounded too close to be from outside, but there was a definite sound of fluid moving. I looked over at Sam and could see pink liquid flowing out of his face like a waterfall. There was no wretching. There was no gagging. There was no heaving or straining. It was just flowing out of him like water pouring out of a bucket. The terror wasn't over. I grabbed Sam by the back of the collar to push his head out the window. When I grabbed him, it must have awakened him because he coughed and the vomit splattered all over the inside of the windshield in tiny pink droplets as though it was shot from a high pressure spray nozzle. His stomach must have been completely empty other than the vodka crans because there was nothing solid in it. It was like a violent spray of poorly set red Jello. He gagged and sputtered out the window for a block before I could find a safe place to park. I turned a corner, pulled over to the curb and unlocked the door. Sam jumped out and began violently gagging and throwing up for about ten minutes on his hands and knees in the grass. I looked over and the entire inside of my door and a good portion of my passenger seat and floorboard was coated in what looked like the red slime that covered Carol Anne and her mother on Poltergiest when they emerged out of the glowing tunnel.

"Are you done?" I challenged. I was standing outside the passenger side of my car refusing to let him back in until there was nothing left. He kept trying to get by me and into the car and I kept pushing him back by his left shoulder, the only dry spot I could see on the front of his shirt. The whole front of his shirt was completely coated and sopping wet with drooling stalactites of slime. The outside of the door looked as bad as the inside and the wind had sprayed it all over the side of the car all the way to the back. It looked like he must have had about 45 gallons of liquor in him. He'd puke enough to make a huge puddle and try to get back in the car, then I'd tell him to wait a minute, and he'd puke another lake, releasing the wages of his sin all over the pristine lawn of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Finally, when it looked like nothing was left, and the grass was sufficiently watered, I let him back in and resumed the insane speed, winding through the suburbs like a rally course.

We arrived at his apartment complex and I didn't bother to find a parking space. I stopped the car right in the middle of the lot and put it in park. I jumped out and ran over to the other side to get Sam out before he caused any further damage. When I opened the door, he fell out on the pavement like a bag of gravel. I tried to help him up and he started crying. "This is really embarrassing, man!"

"Fuck you! You did it! Now let me help you get up so I can go home." He laid there flat on his back with his feet still up in my car. "C'mon man."

"Let me just lay here for a minute. Or you can just go and leave me here. I'll get inside ok. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine." There was no way I was going to leave him lying in the middle of the parking lot, flat on his back, covered in vomit under the hateful black eyes of Heaven. The ants and local cats would clean his bones by morning. As he laid there, he started to look comfortable, like he was going to sleep. I grabbed the dry left shoulder and started pulling him up. He woke up suddenly and struggled to his feet. He then leaned on the car door with both hands in the wet, pink vomit and nearly slipped off. As he halfway caught his balance, he jumped up and ran around to the other side of the car, smearing a trail of pink around the whole car, like a racing stripe, where he leaned all the way around to the driver's seat. I had left the door open and the car running, hoping this would be a quick drop. "C'mon man! Let me take you home! I feel like an asshole. Get in, I'll drive you." Sam, despite being 25, has never had a driver's license in his life, and even if he was a skilled Indy driver, there was no way I was going to let him drive anywhere now. I reached in and grabbed the keys. "C'mon man! I feel really bad about this whole thing." He leaned his head against the steering wheel.

"Me too! That's why I want you out of my car. Give me your apartment key and I'll get you in." After a bit of coaxing, and then finally a bit of pulling, I was able to get him out of the car, although it caused him to fall flat on his chest on the cement again. It was like struggling against a 200 pound rag doll whose only reflexes served to resist you. He laid there for a few seconds and I asked him again for his keys. This made him jump up and run up his apartment stairs, tripping and skinning his knee again. Then he got up and ran to his apartment door. Finally! Progress. Sort of...

Sam fell to his knees as he reached his apartment door. He leaned his forehead against the door and began rooting around in his pockets to find his keys. After about five minutes, he found them. He held himself up by holding the doorknob with one hand with his head pressed against the door so his eye was about two inches from the key hole so he could aim, while trying to insert the key with the other hand. It was like watching someone with nubby fingers trying to thread a needle magnified under a microscope a thousand times. His key would miss the entire doorknob over and over by four to six inches. I suggested several times that he give me the key and that he would be in in a second. This made him wince his eyes and go, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!" The struggle was making him visibly frustrated and having me over his shoulder trying to talk some sense into him wasn't helping matters. Finally he started stabbing deep splintering gouges in the door with the keys and dropped them on the ground. I snatched them up and calmly opened the door. This triggered Sam's humiliation reflex again and he went into a fit of banging his forehead against the cement and rolling around cursing. When he finally got up, I gave him a wide berth and he ran full speed past me through the apartment door and dove squarely on his shoulder. I looked in and he was still laying there, so I took the key out of the lock and tossed it into the apartment. As I was reaching around to the backside of the door to turn the lock, Sam got up and said, "Hey man, sorry about all this. C'mere." He had his arms stretched out like he was going to hug me with puke all over him.

"Uhhh.. That's ok. I'll pass this time. Go get yourself cleaned up." Sam waved and then started running towards the back of the apartment. The last thing I saw as I was closing the door was Sam running hard into the corner of the couch and flipping over it onto his back on the floor. The door closed. He was gone. Now I was free to curse and scream.

I drove home in a rage, screaming obscenities the whole way. When I pulled up to my house at 3AM, I didn't even go inside. I went straight for the garden hose. No doubt the neighbors thought some madman was outside from the torrent of screaming profanity and slamming of buckets and car doors. As I was scrubbing the filth off my car, I was plotting my revenge and imagining the next day at work. I was Sam's ride to work, and his boss. I would show up at 9AM and drag him kicking and screaming out of his cozy hangover refuge. We would arrive at work at about 9:30 and regardless of how terrible his hangover was, I would be behind him with the whip until 10PM. His hangover should be of Biblical proportions, and I was going to use it against him every second of the day. I would make him work like an animal nonstop for 12 hours, holding back vomit and lugging heavy tables while his head is pounding and spinning. This pink will never come out of this upholstery. Fuck it. Tomorrow he'll pay for it.

The next day was bright and sunny. The sun was glaring and there wasn't a single cloud in the sky; perfect weather to turn people with hangovers into vampires running for cover. My victory was at hand. I knocked on the apartment door hard, hoping to disturb whatever peace was inside. It felt weird looking at it, with its fresh-gouged divots from only a few hours ago. The violence and madness still felt too near, like the whole horrible night could burst out of the door at me. I heard movement behind the door. I imagined that it would be Sam's roommate coming to tell me that Sam didn't feel well. I had a whole spiel scripted in my head for that event. His roommate was a pretty dimwitted guy who would definitely let me in if I played my cards right. He'd even have a laugh watching me boot Sam out of bed. The door rattled and I readied the speech in my head. It turned out I didn't need it. Sam was there in uniform ready to go and looking like nothing unusual had happened. He looked rested and alert and even cheerful. I was a seething ball of hate. "You remember last night at all?" I asked.

"Bits and pieces," replied Sam. "I remember waking up at about 5 with puke all over me and I knew that something wasn't right."

"You puked in my car and nearly killed yourself," I told him. "You tried to jump out my car window."

"Hey, sorry about that, man. I kinda thought I had gotten sick in your car. I'll help you clean it up."

"Too late for that. I was up until 5 cleaning it out. How do you feel?"

"Oh, I'm ok." He smiled cheerfully.

The ride to work was silent and bitter amidst a suffocating cloud of ammonia based cleaner fumes.