Raining on his Parade

I once shattered my old college record by downing nine Jamesons on a Saturday night surrounded by mostly strangers, watching my evening spiral out of control and somewhat out of my recollection. Apparently that year’s “amusing antic” was air bagpipes, except everyone thought I was giving head to an imaginary friend and pinching a large, invisible scrotum. Yeah, then at eight the next morning, which due to the time change was actually seven, I rolled out of bed and threw on a green hat and dragged my feet five blocks to the tavern where the shuttle to the parade was waiting outside. I went only because the hot chick said she’d be there. Still drunk, I followed a bunch of people onto the bus where beers were passed around freely. Some yahoo trying to enter the bus through one of the side windows ended up almost getting half of his body stuck, his ass and legs comically dangling from out the other end, his face looking at us all stupid like he’d been wedged in medieval stocks all morning, and the bus flooded with exaggerated guffaws so I finally spoke up and said, “What a jackass!” to everyone’s agreement and his face reddened. Yeah, then the bus took off for the South Side and we all merrily shouted out of our windows at sober passersby who saw a busload of loud assholes singing along to the feel-good melodies of Joe Cocker and Jackie Wilson. The hot chick sat next to me and we talked. Elsewhere on that bus, wrestling occurred and beer went airborne—no one really gave a fuck. Yeah but then about my fifth beer into it the singing finally ceased and people began anxiously tapping their feet and bugging the driver about how much longer it would be and if he could hurry it up. We just about chewed our own arms off the desire to pee was so intense, so the driver mercifully let us out at some nondescript parking lot about a mile from the actual parade. I was too frantic to be amused by the franticness around me. The way everyone ran around that parking lot searching for a spot to pee on was the way kids race to the nearest chair after the music has been suddenly shut off during a spirited game of musical chairs. No one wanted to be caught in no man’s land. I found myself wallowing inside a trash dumpster, right next to a few other desperate public urinators. Our collective piss scraping loudly against rusty metal, we all looked at each other and grinned out of the camaraderie that men usually feel when playing “swords” with one another. We of course quoted Egon Spengler, warning everyone that crossing streams could mean the end of the world, and that’s when I noticed the hot chick about a hundred feet away in the distance, near another trash dumpster. What I saw was her looking around sheepishly, doing what seemed to be a painful amount of thinking, then kind of shrugging to herself like “oh what the hell, here goes nothing,” followed by yanking her jeans down violently and squatting to pee on the side of her dumpster. This was all in broad plain view to me. I could see everything. We hadn’t even had a decent conversation yet, but there it was, boom, “Hello Legs.” She had no idea that she was facing my direction. I watched her growing puddle crawl out from under her dumpster, snaking across the parking lot for about fifty feet until it rested at a car’s tire. I smiled. Her blondeness and posture and self-assuredness had intimidated me all morning, and here was this wonderful humanizing moment akin to witnessing a runway model slip or a company CEO fart. Yeah, but then I had to quickly duck into my dumpster when paranoia suggested that she might have seen me watching her pee from a distance. And then the parade itself was all a blur to me. Lots of marching bagpipers and waving firefighters and elementary school children, lots of screaming and stumbling and dry heaving. I could barely even remember the names of the people I was with. There’s something about the cornea-piercing midday sun that amplifies drunkenness in such a way that later in the day when the nameless people in our group were somehow split up, a crushing wave of panic hit me like it hadn’t since I was a five year old in a shopping mall who had foolishly stopped to a tie a shoelace. What were their names? Where was the hot girl? How the hell was I going to find our bus back to the North Side? On a quest to find something that would make sense to me, I wove through heavy crowds of parade watchers, looking everywhere around me but at nothing, and as I pushed through sweaty arms and elbows, there was the loud wailing of an infant and I quickly glanced down to see, to my heart-stopping horror, that a considerable amount of my cup of Icehouse Light had been spilled on a nine-month old baby boy in a stroller.

I spilled my beer on a baby.

The baby cried and then the father looked at me, then looked at his baby. He frowned, then dabbed the baby’s face with a napkin. He said, “No!” And I laughed. It was good.