Biloxxxi's Woodshed

“Blood on the rocks,
Blood on the streets,
Blood in the sky,
Blood on the sheets.
If you want blood,
you got it”
- AC/DC If You Want Blood (You Got It)

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of weird stuff happens to me. Some of it I bring on myself, and the rest of it just goes with the territory of being awesome I suppose. There’s a price to be paid for sheer-badassery and sometimes it’s paid with blood.

All of us Wharf Rats were gathered at Fontaine’s for our weekly meeting. The $2 Stetson beer was flowing like water and the shots of Goldschlager were on their way. Wiley and I shot ours back and a bit dribbled out onto my hand. I wandered to the restroom to wash my hands and that was fairly successful. It was when I tried to dry them that the evening went horribly awry.

Fontaine’s has a smallish men’s restroom. It’s basically a sink, a urinal, and a crapper. There’s a small metal divider between the sink and the urinal, you know, to keep splash-back to a minimum. This divider ends about 3 inches or so below my eye-level. After I washed my hands, I turned around to grab some paper towels to dry them and as I whirled back around to throw the towels away, I sneezed. It was a fairly hard sneeze and as I brought my head down to meet my hand to cover the sneeze, I slammed my forehead into the top corner of that metal divider. I’ve got a notoriously hard head, but even so, I saw stars for a second or two. I raised my head back up and started to walk out the door when I glanced in the mirror.

“Holeee Lord! I look like Harry Freakin’ Potter!” I exclaimed, as a stream of blood ran down the bridge of my nose. “I’ve been in the bathroom 30 F’n seconds and I’ve managed to split my head open!” I grabbed some more paper towels, wet them down and put them on my bleeding forehead and walked back to the bar to take my lumps.

Roman was the first to notice. “Good God! What the hell did you do?” He said. So I went through the whole story in all its faded glory. We took some action shots (which I’m still waiting for Jenn to upload), had a few good laughs, and went back to our drinking. After a few minutes Wiley spoke up, “You know, you might wanna come up with a little better story than ‘I hit my head in the bathroom at the bar.’” And thus the brain storming began…

We went through all the typical ideas, like barfights and the like. Barfights are so cliche and everyone knows I don’t get involved in that nonsense anyway. I’m a minor celebrity and as such, I have henchmen that take care of these things. After discarding a few ideas, it occurred to me that the new Harry Potter film was about to come out and I had just conveniently scarred myself in much the same manner. Since magic is more or less not real, I couldn’t easily say some snake-faced dark lord had scarred my forehead with his deathstick. I did need some street cred with the Potter heads so I decided that my wound just appeared, like the Stigmata. If I parlay this properly, perhaps I can convince some of those little bastards that I’m the second coming of Harry J. Potter. They’re mostly youngans and their parents are those gullible “I’m not religious, but I’m spritual” types with deep pockets who would totally spring for this sort of new age idea. After all, people buy into this crap.

All in all, a pretty interesting evening. Another good story to tell an as Roman so eloquently phrased it, “There’s good stories and then there’s shame.” Fortunately, I ran out of the latter years ago.

Have you ever had a moment that just completely defined your life, all your hopes and dreams and aspirations wrapped up into one tiny little box of awesome? I have, and you’re in my world now, so I intend to tell you all about it.

Up until a year or so ago, I had an absolutely badass Chevrolet El Camino. This thing was awesome! It would set off car alarms in parking decks when I started it up and the stereo in it would cleave your eardrums right in two. It cost $5 in gas just to start it up, which is partially the reason I had to sell it. My buddy Chris (Deuce) had a Pontiac Trans-Am when we were in College. He was a car guy like me and we spent many a night verbally souping up cars over a case of Budweiser and a Papa John’s pizza.

One particular night, a bunch of us were hanging out over at Chris and Wiley’s apartment, drinking beer, shooting the shit, making fun of kids that played guitar with capos, whatever it was we did in those days. Chris had to take his girlfriend home, and when he returned, we were all standing on the back deck of the apartment facing the parking lot. He thought it would be a good idea to do a burnout when he got back in the parking lot, and he was right. He dumped the clutch on the Trans-Am and laid rubber from one side of the parking lot to the other. Smoke was everywhere, and if anything gets the cops called, it’s that.

There was no way in hell I was gonna let Chris beat me in a burnout contest, so I hollered out to everyone, “Y’all ain’t seen shit!” and rushed down the steps. As I ran across the parking lot through the tire smoke, I remember thinking, “This is probably not a good idea.” But I disregarded that thought and hopped in my El Camino. I backed out of my parking spot and pulled around to the end of the lot. As I dropped the transmission into drive, I thought to myself, “Biloxi, with all this smoke in the air, beer on your breath, and you sitting right in the middle of it all, there’s no way you’re gonna be able to convince any authority figure that you didn’t cause this. You just bought yourself another reckless driving ticket, better make it count, Son.” With that, I jammed by left foot down on the brake and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The back end raised up like a tiger ready to pounce and I literally boiled the back tires off that thing. As the wheels started spinning I gently lifted off the brake so the car began to roll. As I reached the end of the parking lot, I pulled into the last spot and hopped out.

I want you to stop and imagine with me. Imagine that it’s fall and you’ve raked up all the leaves in your yard into one large pile. Now imagine all those leaves are on fire. You know how much smoke they put out, especially if they’re wet? Multiply that by 5, that how much smoke we’re talking about here. I could taste burning rubber. It tastes like bigotry and intolerance.

I couldn’t see everybody standing on the balcony, but I could hear them cheering. I could also hear somebody yelling “Cops!” My heart dropped in my chest, even though I knew this was coming. (Milledgeville is a small town, and the cops will show up to your kids birthday party.) I turned around in time to see that the drag marks led right into the parking spot I was in. I hopped back in the El Camino and floored it into an adjacent parking spot, backing in this time, so it’d be more difficult for The Law to tow it. I jumped out of the car and hauled ass back towards the stairs. As I burst through the smoke cloud, I could see that the majority of the building was standing outside watching and cheering. As I made it back to the top of the steps, I saw the cop cars rounding the corner and pulling into the complex. They might have seen my car, but they hadn’t seen me. I might be able to get out of this after all…

I ran into Chris and Wiley’s apartment and hid in the back. Everyone else followed. As I was getting ready to lock myself in the bathroom, this stoner guy that was over there asked me to hold his “bowl” for him. I was like, “WTF, man!?!? They’re looking for ME! I’m not holding any of your contraband!” About that time, I heard a knock at the door and a voice say, “Milledgeville Police, open up!” Chris went to the door and had a brief discussion with the officer that basically went something like this, “No Sir, Officer, we didn’t see anything. We were wondering what was going on out there. I’ve never seen that El Camino here before.” (This was obviously a lie and I’ve gotta give Chris some credit for having brass stones because there were drag marks leading to his car too.) The officer then said, “Well somebody here knows what’s going on and if you see that kid, tell him he can pick up his car at Beckham’s (an impound lot) tomorrow.” The cop then went to every other unit in that building and nobody ratted me out. Thank God for small favors.

We all got pretty tore up drunk that night and had some great laughs over the day’s happenings. I got a pretty good lecture from my girlfriend for getting my car towed. (Evidently she just didn’t see the humor in avoiding that ticket.) The next day after class I set about getting my car out of impound. I first went to the impound yard and they told me I’d have to go to the police department and get them to release it first. As I walked down to the police station, I figured I’d better get a fairly decent story together. I knew that since I was on private property they couldn’t really get me for anything tangible, but I did have a couple of beers the night before while in the midst of this nonsense, so I’d better bring my A-game just in case. I talked to the lady behind the glass at the police station and she had no record of the city towing anyone in the last 24 hours. I ended up having to talk to a Sergeant who was at the scene and thankfully he was cool and laughed it off. He told me that the police officer who lived at the apartment complex was the one who had it towed for “parking illegally” at the complex. He also said that officer was pretty pissed he couldn’t find me, so I should tread lightly. Awesome.

I thought up an even better alibi and headed over to the Apartment Office. Fortunately, I got the manager. I tried giving her my bullshit story and her response was, “we haven’t towed anyone for “illegally parking” in years. So I had to tell her the truth. She wasn’t mad at all, and said she’d call and get my car released, but she did make me stand there and use the office phone to call and apologize to the officer. Fortunately, he didn’t answer so I left him a message and even more fortunately, he never called me back! I wandered back down to Beckham’s, cut them a check for $50, and I had the Hell Camino back. Small price to pay for an awesomely badass story. In the immortal words of John Popper, “The mountains win again.”