For reasons that I’ve stated before I seldom venture into that territory known as the night life. That wasn’t always the case though. Back in my heyday I could shut down the bar with the best of them and the term last call meant that the so called non regulars had to leave. For those of us that called the bar home lets just say we had special dispensation to stay as long as we liked.
We’d dim the lights, shut the curtains and lower the jukebox so that no pedestrians wandering the street at some ungodly hour would have any clue that a few of us remained at the bar nursing our beers and shots and whatever else was on hand at the time. We also didn’t want any outsiders to be tempted to try enter our enclave and join our little party. Strangers weren’t welcome at this time or place.
For any of you out there who have a had a few too many you’ll know what I’m talking about. As you sit there nursing your drink your eyes will start to involuntary close and your head will begin to start to drop down. After a few feeble attempts to snap out of it you’ll give in to temptation and rest your head in your arms and quietly fall asleep at the bar.
That’s what happened to the six of us who remained. One by one by we began to drift off into a drunken slumber. Perhaps it was a matter of pride but I vowed to myself to be the last one standing and sure enough I managed to do just that. I decided it was time to heed nature's call before I too fell victim to my inevitable sleep. I lowered my pants, plopped down on the toilet and proceeded to go about my business and promptly drifted off into The Land of Nod.
I don’t know how long I sat there but I awoke to the sounds of commotion outside the rest room. Figuring I spent the entire night there and the bar was getting ready to open and do business, I finished cleaning myself off, zipped up my pants and went off to greet the new day.
What I saw was a fuckin’ nightmare.
Each of my five fellow drinkers still sat there on their assigned stools with their arms crossed and heads still on the bar. A pool of blood about a half an inch thick surrounded them and was slowly dripping to the floor. Their throats had been slit with the shards of an empty discarded bottle of Budweiser. For good measure, broken bottles of beer had been impaled in the back of their necks. Each one of them had a beer mug neatly placed in front of them filled to the brim with blood.
There were cops all over the place and they quickly handcuffed me and threw me up against the wall. One by one they kept screaming at me “Why the fuck did you do it, why the fuck did you do it?” Since I had no clue as to what they were talking about I tried to protest my innocence. They weren’t buying it and it wasn’t long before I was tossed in the back of a patrol car and headed off to jail.
I won’t go off into all of the gory details surrounding lawyers, trials and subsequent appeals. I tried to reason with them that while I was certainly guilty of many things, this wasn’t one of them. Suffice to say my fate was sealed when my fingerprints were found on the shards of glass and the empty fractured Budweiser bottles that had been imbedded in my friends necks. My argument that I drank only Bud fell on deaf ears.
So now I write this while sitting behind the walls of prison awaiting my fate. I’m spending what little time I have left on death row awaiting the spike that will eventually call me home to my maker. May God have mercy on my soul.
To the motherfucker or motherfuckers who did commit this crime and are still wandering the streets, may God have mercy on yours too.
It’s also worth noting that these events transpired in late October of 1996 and the bar was hosting its annual Halloween party.
Timing is everything.