Straight Line on a Crooked Highway

 I’ve never been good at toeing the line. I’ve always been too sloppy, clumsy or inebriated. I can’t draw a straight line, much less cut anything straight. It’s hard to walk straight on a crooked highway.

 I was hanging out with a bartender and her family. They were recent transplants from up north and had very different customs than my upbringing.

 Grandma was into the whole Catholic, Virgin Mary weirdness… There were statues depicting the ladies of Fatima, Lourdes and Guadalupe, draped with beads in every corner of the house; it seemed quite Exorcist-like to me.

 Being Southern Baptist, I was taught that all that stuff was blasphemous, so I didn’t regard it as “sacred” as I should have. Grandma was having wine and seemed to be loosened up enough. The rest of the family didn’t mind their p’s and q’s, so I figured they didn’t take their religion so seriously.  

 Totally unlike my own Bible-thumping Mother and siblings who NEVER indulged in any form of alcohol and didn’t use coarse language i.e. shit, piss, fart, hell or damn much less the “F” word.

 I thought Grandma would enjoy a little harmless joke about the priest and the nun with the “$10 bucks, same as downtown” punchline.  Boy was I wrong. There went my chances with the bartender’s pretty-faced younger sister with the pear-shaped ass…

 I had told what I thought were far more offensive jokes that evening, but I guess the wine turned psycho in Grandma Fatima and the drama exploded. The entire family erupted into some kind of fight that had to have been festering just beneath the surface for longer than I’d been around.

 The bartender’s husband and her father came to blows over the son-in-law’s inappropriate behavior towards the doll-faced little sister- Mom, little sis and Grandma were screaming simultaneously—who knew about what.

 I made my exit with my bartender friend on my heels. When we got to my truck, I stuck the key in the door and turned around to apologize for stirring up the hornet’s nest when she jumped up on me, threw her arms around my neck, wrapped her legs around my midsection and laid a stunningly passionate kiss on me.

 The heat of the moment must have lasted longer than I perceived because the next thing I knew, Grandma was peeling her granddaughter from around my person and gave me a look like I was Lucifer incarnate.

 The neighbors had called the police—again. It seems the all-out family brawl was a regular thing for them. The bartender’s husband and dad both went to jail. They didn’t appreciate the police involving themselves in the fight and fought with the law on principals, the in-laws exclaimed.

 Not quite sure what they meant by that but after everyone, including myself, gave a statement to the officials, the drama was over. Grandma went to her room.

 Mom and little sister commenced to cleaning up the evening’s mess…

 The bartender had wanted to hook me up with her sister, at least that was the original plan. Her sister was cute but lacked personality to put it nicely.

 The bartender saw something in me that she liked but her sister didn’t see it. That’s okay because, other than her being married, the bartender and I had natural attraction/chemistry.

 Whether acted upon or not, animal attraction can awaken the hope of something better than what we have—or somewhere better than where we are. I think my bartender friend just wanted some excitement, something different than her day-to-day.

 It’s hard to toe the line in a hurricane and sometimes it really isn’t my fault.

 A few years earlier, a good friend and fellow partier made the mistake of marrying a girl nicknamed “Tits.” She was the closest thing to an actual succubus I had run afoul of at that naive age.

 My friend wasn’t the beach lover that I was, and she was a sun sponge, so he didn’t mind her taking me to the beach with her.

 She and I had been acquaintances previous to their nuptials, and I let her read through my box of poems and stories I had been writing since I was a child.

 Before things got weird, she spent months trying to convince me to hand over the box. She promised to type it all up and organize it for me. I repeatedly refused until she finally said, “If you were really my friend, you’d let me do this for you.” I gave in. What a sucker!

It was all fun and games until she started showing up at my hangouts. I would tell her to go back home to her husband. The guys I would be hanging out with would run her off when she would come around looking for me. It was obvious to everyone that she was up to no good.

  I was at the ABC Lounge drinking fifty-cent bourbon on ice, sink or swim night, because I’ve always drank for the buzz.

 They had a jukebox with 45s (records) in it. When it played a song I didn’t like, I would hip check it and it would play the next song. It was a weeknight, so all my buddies had gone home- some people have day jobs you know.

 I had recently been dumped and was doing a fine job of drowning my sorrows.   

 After $20 worth of fifty-cent, rotgut, ABC branded bourbon, the next thing I knew, I thought I heard an angel calling out. Then an abrupt voice asked a question that cut through the blurry-eyed fog of inebriation; it took all the lead out of my pencil- “What about Joe?”

  My heart sank as I realized who was doing the talking. A rage shot through me— I was mad at myself, mad at her for putting me on the spot. She KNEW the ramifications.

 The twist to it was she wasn’t really interested in me as a romantic hookup but more as a way to cause great pain and anguish to Joe- who loved her.

 Had it been an honest mistake she wouldn’t have rushed right home to torture him, withholding who her co-conspirator was for hours- making him guess who it was. Was it a stranger or someone he knew?

 When she finally told him it was me, he grabbed a gun and was mad enough to kill. Luckily for me he had reconsidered everything by the time he found me—He recalled the time I talked him through what could’ve been a bad acid trip and the hundred times he’d heard me admonish her for being in my business and following me around.

 All of our mutual acquaintances were dismayed, and I had a few hairy confrontations over it. They divorced and I went on the road. I’ve never seen the big box of everything I had written from first grade to the age of 25 again, she “lost” it or more likely threw it away. That was my punishment for dancing with the Devil.

 Another cruel twist for human beings: everything fun, especially sex and food, is another fine line that moves as we age. It’s extremely difficult for some of us to toe the line. Moderation is the key to life, and I’m wired to run wide fucking open.