Saturday night

We’d spent the first part of the evening sitting around Josh’s room in the basement, drinking and talking about sex, just like everyone does on Saturday night before you get around to going out. Massie came home from work around 1:30 and joined us. Buddy Holly turned into Bob Dylan, and Josh silenced us all while “Don’t Think Twice” played, and then broke the silence by hurling his empty whiskey glass against the wall, shattering it all over the room. No one spoke for a second, and then Josh laughed and Massie said, “Can we FINALLY go out now?” Ryan shook his head, I shook the shards of glass out of Josh’s shoes on the floor, and at 3 am we walked a few blocks in the rain over to Capone’s. The magic of Capone’s is that you get a free pizza with every beer you order. The other magic of Capone’s, especially for Josh and Massie, is that you can keep going back no matter how many times you get thrown out. After talking his way into and out of a fistfight with some idiot on the roof, stopping to kiss me on the way up the stairs and then falling halfway down them, taking me with him, Josh moved on to tequila shots with Massie at the bar, both of them talking about how they weren’t going to talk about love gone sour, and I went outside and hailed a cab with my skinned hands. Two blocks into the fare, the cabbie stopped the car and offered to let me drive home. I asked him if he was kidding and he said he wasn’t, so we both rode in the front seat and sang along to “Pure Energy” by Information Society on his radio. I tipped him one hundred percent, limped upstairs, and fell asleep to thunder in the distance around 5.