Can You Help Me? I'm Not Drunk!

‘You know,’ said Nick, who had gotten up to get a drink of water, ‘you can’t really say you have insomnia when you guzzle coffee all the time.’ He had on a pair of pin-striped pyjama bottoms- that’s how civilised he was. Joe and I just slept in our underwear, and Joe’s left little to the imagination.

‘I’m not awake because of coffee,’ I protested, swivelling in my chair in front of the computer. ‘I’m drinking coffee because I’m awake.’

‘Well then you’re awake because you’re on whatever it is, that site again,’ Nick retorted. ‘Honestly, if you slept any less, you’d be a vampire.’

‘As soon as blood comes caffeinated,’ I promised him. ‘Why are you up, anyway?’

‘Pizza,’ he mumbled, unnecessarily. Nick had a soft spot for pizza, and most of his soft spot was hanging out over his pants. ‘Not much left, actually. Did Joe get into this?’

I sipped my coffee knowingly. Of course, Nick didn’t suspect me, because normally I didn't eat- ever. I subsided almost entirely on coffee and other caffeinated beverages that I might as well have inhaled, I drank them down that quickly. When I did eat though, I didn't do it half-arsed, but even after a four-day stint of self-starvation I was nothing compared with Joe. When it came to quaffing pizzas, he could give the Ninja Turtles a run for their money.

‘Or was it you?’ Nick had wised up, and was scrutinising me.

I made two crab claws with my hands and clacked them above my head like Dr. Zoidberg. ‘And one time- pepperoni!’ I teased him, ‘What a day that was!’

‘Seriously?’ Nick asked incredulously, ‘You ate all this?’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, sipping my coffee again. I couldn’t put it down for more than five seconds. ‘Why are you up, really?’

‘There’s no ice-cream left, is there?’ He answered me with a question, digging through the icy wasteland that was our freezer. It badly needed cleaning- everything did. The only things in the kitchen that weren't filthy were a pair of dying cacti, and they hadn’t been there long enough to accumulate dust.

‘I could make you a lemon snow cone?’ I suggested.

‘Har-har,’ Nick replied dryly. ‘Seriously, you know what I'm thinking?’ He was always saying ‘seriously’.

‘A frog, a toad or your big, fat momma?’ I swung about gleefully in my chair. I couldn’t stop fidgeting.

‘I was thinking I might go for a drink,’ he continued. Nick was always going somewhere for a drink. Really, he was as bad as me. He just didn’t like to admit it.

‘I’m in,’ I said. ‘Your car or mine?’ It was a rhetorical question. Of course, we were taking Joe’s. ‘Is he asleep?’

He shrugged, rubbing his obnoxious hair. Nick was a red nut. ‘His door’s closed,’ he observed, which was as much as either of us was likely to discover. Nobody ever went inside Joe’s room- nobody wanted to, on account of he was perhaps the biggest slob of the lot of us. He also looked like the kind of guy who would have snored -hulking and built like a boulder- but he didn’t. He was so damn fit. Chances were though, he was asleep. Joe and rocks had a lot in common- in addition having roughly the same IQ and weighing as much as a large stone, he also slept like one.

We grabbed the spare car keys, which were hidden underneath the doormat -he wasn’t very clever, was Joe, unless he got to use his fists- then together Nick and I sneaked out of the apartment. Or at any rate, I sneaked, as Nick was about as sneaky as a three-legged giraffe. His hair was probably the most subtle part of him.

To begin with, we hit a bar in Civic. It wasn’t a very reputable bar, but neither of us had enough money to be concerned about thieves, and between us we probably violated every dress code in the city. An old lady passed us on the way in, stinking powerfully of nicotine and bourbon. She took one look at our T-shirts, both from a heavy metal concert we had seen with Joe, and Nick’s shaggy facial hair, and recoiled in disgust.

‘You need to find Jesus!’ She spat.

We sidled up to the bar, and downed a couple of the cheapest, nastiest drinks we could order. It was about this time that Nick noticed he was still wearing his pyjama bottoms, albeit with a coat over the top. ‘God dammit,’ he swore.

‘Satanists!’ Cried the old woman from down the street.

‘I wondered how long it would take you to notice that.’ I nodded approvingly at his pants, complete with colourful pizza stains, ‘I like those wiggly doodads coming out of your hips.’

‘Thanks,’ Nick quoted through gritted teeth, ‘They’re called ‘pants’.’ When it came to quoting anything, he was a real trooper.

At about that time, something whacked me very hard between the shoulders, but I was too tipsy to fully register it. I’m a real Cadbury, if you’ve ever heard that expression. Cadbury is the name of a chocolate company, and their motto is 'a glass and a half'. They mean it as in a glass and a half of milk in every block, but in my case it meant a glass and a half of beer until I was smashed.

The something leaning on my back had a voice, and after indeterminate seconds of gurgling, it found it. ‘Hola, amigos!’ It was Kris. He wasn’t really Spanish. In fact, ‘hola’ and ‘amigos’ were probably the only Spanish words he knew, but judging by the smell of tequila on his breath, he’d certainly been having a cultural experience. Kris was the kind of guy who went out every night with the aim of winding up in the gutter, just so that he could tell you about it the next day.

Nevertheless, my blood was warm with liquid love, and I was happy to see him. ‘Hey, Kris,’ I gushed, rolling him off my shoulder. ‘What’s doin’?’

‘Drinkin’,’ he slurred, nodding vaguely at Nick. ‘Youse guys wanna do shots?’

‘Pfft,’ I replied. ‘Waste of money, in this place.’ I always drank cheap beer that would have rusted the insides of anybody normal, but I was used to it. Where I grew up, you practically had beer on your cereal.

‘S' better ‘n gamblin’,’ Kris replied. ‘You put that money downa drain, ‘n you never get that back. Drinkin' s'fun. Drinkin' I can afford.'

‘But Kris,’ I nearly choked on my own laughter, it seemed so damn hilarious, ‘you do both those things!’ It was true, though. He was always bragging about how much money he’d lost at the track. To Kris, losing six-hundred bucks was the next best thing to finding it.

‘Hey, Nick,’ I said. ‘Hey. Hey, Nick!’

‘Whut?’ he had about half his paycheck in the miniature glass in his hand. Or rather, he had half my paycheck. He still owed me four-hundred bucks.

‘Why does a robot need to drink?’ I was clutching at my ribs to hold the remainder of my breath in, I found it so damn funny. ‘Why does... Hey! Nick, I asked you a question. Why does a robot need to drink?’

‘I dunneeda drink,’ Nick slurred with perfect showmanship, ‘I can quit any time I want!’

‘Youse guys,’ Kris began. He was always saying ‘youse’ instead of ‘you’. ‘Youse guys know what would be great about now? Let’s go to Maccas!’

Ordinarily, this would have been an awful idea. ‘Fuck yes!’ I exclaimed. Nick would have said something, but he was too busy wrestling with his shots. He was almost as much of a lightweight as I was.

Together, we managed to stumble back to the car, although to be fair, that was mostly Kris’ fault. Kris couldn't have walked in a straight line sober, but Nick and I weren’t too sloshed, and so mostly when we stumbled it was just under his weight. Nick was carrying the bulk of it- I would have been puffed holding up a bag of feathers. Like a ball of quarreling rats, we tumbled altogether into Joe’s car, and I started driving towards the CBD, drifting dangerously in my lane.

'Pretty smooth skills,' I remarked coolly, nearly colliding with the curb. Nick agreed.

‘Wait, no!’ Kris interjected, suddenly becoming aware of his surroundings. ‘I dun wanna go to this Maccas. We gots to go to the one in Woden.’

‘Woden?’ I repeated, ‘Shit, Kris. That's ages away.’

‘I’m getting my stuff here,’ Nick insisted. ‘I’m hungry now.’ We pulled over, and between us Nick and I ordered an ambitious quantity of cheeseburgers and soft serve ice-cream. Then, with a lap full of hot paper bags, I turned the car around and headed in the direction of Kris’ whim. I get it into my head sometimes, when I’m tipsy, that really bad ideas are really terrific ones, like jumping off the roof of a house into a swimming pool, or eating an entire birthday cake. How I’m still alive today is anybody’s guess.

Nick was in the front passenger seat, fiddling with the dials of Joe’s precious stereo until the music was turned up as loud as it would go. Joe would've had a fit if he'd been there. He was obsessive about his stereo, was Joe. When Nick turned the dials, the face of the digital clock also lit up, much to Kris’ dismay.

‘It’s almost twelve!' He yowled. ‘They’ll be closed soon!’

And so, like a pilot on a mission, I did what circumstance demanded- I sped up. The needle on the speedometer hovered nervously as it hiked up the numbers, clocking about one-seventy kilometres an hour. Really, we were lucky that the road was so deserted. Like an insidious black ribbon, it wound up the side of a mountain, cutting into the raw bedrock and spilling down the other side into Woden valley. Hurtling along at almost twice the speed limit, we got slightly airborne cresting the peak.

‘You win again, gravity!’ Nick exclaimed, delighting at his own comedy, which was just as well for him, because nobody else did. I was concentrating too hard, and Kris was practically passed out in the back seat.

‘Nick,’ I said. My ice cream was melting rapidly, threatening to drip onto my jeans. ‘Nick, I need you to do something for me.’

‘Whut?'

‘Take this,’ I said urgently, passing him the wheel. 'I can’t do this and change gears at the same time, or I’ll get ice cream on me.’

‘S’okay.’ Nick was a bit like my offsider- he always did what he was told. Rattling over the loose gravel on the road, we rocketed down the slope, curving into the valley like a dangerous moonbeam.

‘Wahoooo!’ He hollered, his hands sticky with the effort of holding the wheel. With a jerk like a roller coaster at the end of its track, we thudded into the drive-through of the next McDonalds.

‘We made it!’ Kris sighed with relief, and promptly passed out.

Nick leaned into the speaker. ‘Can you help us?’ He inquired. ‘We’re not drunk!’

‘Sure buddy,’ the attendant grumbled. Wresting the steering wheel back off Nick, who was practically hanging off it, I took off before we could be chased away.

‘I think we’d better get Kris home,’ I said, and so we did, Nick navigating while I cleaved the blurry haze that hung mysteriously in the air.

‘Damn foggy,’ I muttered, oblivious. We climbed up the mountainside again, dragging uphill now that we were going more slowly, and in the wrong gear, and careening down the gentler incline back into town. Whispering conspiratorially and forgetting that the music was still blasting at full volume, we roared into the carport.

‘Whew,’ Nick declared, ‘That was a close one.’ I nodded my agreement as I fumbled with the doorknob. By the time the door finally caved in, I had forgotten what I was doing, and it caught me by surprise. Swooning, I collapsed forward onto my face. I almost yelled, but by then I already had a mouthful of carpet. I half expected to find Joe looming there, but the kitchen was eerily empty and all the lights in the apartment were out.

‘Seriously, that was close,’ Nick whispered, as loudly as he could. But before I could reply, I had bumped into the back of the couch, fallen over it, and blacked out with Joe’s keys still in my pocket.

When I woke up, I was shivering with cold. With a cottony hangover clouding my brain, it took me a while to realise why. My pants were gone. I spotted them halfway across the kitchen floor, lying in a heap with the pockets turned inside out. That wasn’t all, though. There was also something icy smeared all over my chest. It was sticky and sweet and smelled slightly of vanilla.

I hacked up a cough as I sat up, awake. In my blurry field of vision, Nick was bent over the counter, skulling orange juice from the carton Regret was etched into his face like a tattoo. ‘Why am I sticky and naked?’ I asked him. ‘Or almost naked, anyway? Did I miss something fun?’

I had my eyes fixed on Nick, dribbling juice all over his chin, when the answer boomed from behind me. ‘No,’ the voice growled menacingly in my ear. He was always growling, was Joe, and now his colossal arm was wrapped like a python around my neck. 'You didn't miss anything fun,' he said, 'this time. But I promise you, we’ll have some fun the next time you get fucking ice cream all over my car!’