Names changed to protect the guilty. Except me and I. That’s still me.
The Enron Asshole (“Enron”) texts the group chat like he’s inviting us to a funeral.
“My Place. Now. Absinthe.”
None of us have ever had absinthe before. We’ve all seen the green fairy movie shit and the bad tattoos. We’re a bunch of computer geeks.
We all live in Houston at Walden Internet Village. Same weirdly colored complex, same shitty parking lot, same amazing T3 internet connection.
A T3 is forty-five megabits. In 2002 the rest of the country was on dial-up at fifty-six kilobits, which put us at roughly eight hundred times the internet of a normal human being. That is the entire reason any of us lived there. We would have lived in a building that was actively on fire. I have nine gigabit at my house now. Two hundred times that. In 2002, I would have called current me a liar.
We weren’t living there for the aesthetics. The buildings were painted in bright primary colors, with bright primary color trim on top of that. The owner, Bernie, was an eccentric weirdo who painted every apartment complex he owned like a kindergarten set.
Five of us: me, Bemis, Abe, Hippie, and Enron.
Enron worked at the actual Enron until the whole thing folded. His personality matched the stock price . . . on the way down. His apartment smells like bong water and dirty laundry. Perfect.
Hippie has blonde hair that goes halfway down his back. Not “kind of long.” Halfway down his back. He looks like the definition of a long-haired hippie and he’s not trying to look like anything else.
Abe has dark hair and a beard. Tall. Tall enough to go duck hunting with a butterfly net. The only thing he’s missing is a top hat. That’s why he’s Abe.
We call him Bemis after the toilet seat. Open a bathroom in America and you’ll see the name. He’s not a toilet seat. He’s just Bemis.
We show up at Enron’s place like four idiots answering a summons. Nobody asks what absinthe is. Nobody asks why. The text said “now.” We went. That’s the full decision tree.
The bottle looks serious. Green liquid. Fancy label. Ornate script.
Absinthe was illegal in the United States. Had been since 1912. Ninety years of federal ban built on the idea that wormwood makes you hallucinate, which it does not. What it does is show up in a bottle that runs up to seventy-five percent alcohol, which will make you see things all by itself. It would not be legal again until 2007.
Nobody asked where he got it.
Enron pours like a guy who watched one YouTube video and now thinks he’s European.
“You put sugar on a spoon,” he says. “You light it. You drip water. Alchemy.”
We do the whole ritual. It tastes like black licorice and paint thinner had a kid. First glass: this is disgusting. Second glass: nobody’s talking about the sugar anymore. Third glass: the room tilts three degrees to the left and stays there.
We get properly fucked up. Not “tipsy.” Not “buzzed.” The kind of drunk where standing up is a project and talking seems like a great idea. Especially when it’s not.
It’s Friday. Or Saturday by the clock. Same thing when you’ve been drinking green liquor since whenever Enron started pouring.
Somebody says food.
Somebody else says Whataburger.
Whataburger is across the street from Walden, then through a parking lot. Two lanes first. Then a stretch of cars. Maybe a hundred yards of asphalt if you’re sober and can walk in a straight line.
The street isn’t a real street. Not for Houston. It’s a little two-lane connector that only exists so people can get to our complex or the church next door. Busy nightlife all around us. This road? Side street. Side quest. Cars every couple of minutes, if that often.
“We walk,” Hippie says, like he invented logistics.
We decide we’re too drunk to drive. This is the smartest thing any of us will do all night.
We walk.
Crossing that nothing street takes about thirty minutes. I’m not exaggerating for the story. When you’re that drunk, a Camry doing thirty-five looks like a fighter jet.
We line up on the curb like idiots at a crosswalk that doesn’t have a crosswalk. Headlights. We wait. The road goes quiet. Abe says go. We take three steps into the lane. Then a Camry comes over the little rise doing what is probably the speed limit and what feels like Mach 1. Enron makes a noise that is not a word. We reverse so hard Hippie’s hair does a separate evacuation.
The Camry blows past close enough that I can see the driver’s face. He looks bored.
We’re on the curb again, laughing like people who almost paid rent to God.
“I had that,” Bemis says.
“You had shit,” I say.
A lady in a minivan rolls up to the stop that isn’t really a stop. She gives us a look like we’re escaped livestock. Bemis waves. Full arm. Friendly. Then he yells something cheerful that is half greeting and half war crime. I don’t remember the exact words. I remember the volume. I remember her window going up so fast it might have been powered by fear. We laugh it off. Of course we do. It’s Bemis. We file it under random things that happened that night.
Small fuse. Small room. Small boom.
Three more almosts. One is a truck. One is a bicycle with a headlamp that might as well be a locomotive. One is nothing, just us spooking ourselves and diving back to the grass. Eventually the road empties for real. We cross like wounded animals. We make it. Barely. We high-five like we climbed Everest.
Then the parking lot. Everest has a false summit. More asphalt, more cars, more reasons to fall down. We weave toward the lights.
This Whataburger isn’t the nice Whataburger in the suburbs. This one sits right next to the beltway in Houston. Same chain. Different planet. Packed, loud, and we’re the only white guys in the building.
It’s drunk thirty. In Texas, bars kick everyone out at 2:00 a.m. By 2:30, every drunk in a ten-mile radius is hunting grease like a wolf. The all-night places fill up with the same people who twenty minutes ago were yelling over a jukebox, except now they want a burger and a reason not to go home. The line is long. The air smells like beef and victory. Everyone has somewhere to be and nobody’s in a hurry about it.
We order. We sit.
Four bags come out pretty quick. Burgers. Fries. The usual. Abe’s still waiting. Abe always gets the short end somehow. He sits there staring at the counter like he can will his number into existence.
Fifteen minutes later, they call him.
Abe stands up. He walks to the counter. He grabs his bag. And then, for reasons known only to God and the green fairy, he raises that bag over his head like he just won the Super Bowl. Full arm extension. Triumphant. A man who’s waited too long for a cheeseburger and wants the world to know the wait’s over.
Bemis sees it.
I see Bemis see it.
There’s a half-second of dread where I can almost hear the gears in Bemis’s head click into place. The bag up. The arm straight. The pose. To a sober person, it’s just a guy with food. To Bemis, hours deep in green fairy juice, it’s something else. Same fuse as the minivan. Bigger room. Bigger boom.
Bemis stands up.
He shoots his own fist into the air, same angle, same energy, and he says it in a voice that doesn’t stay at our table. A voice for the whole restaurant. A voice for the parking lot. A voice for history.
“White power, my brother!”
Abe freezes. His bag’s still up. His face goes the color of mayonnaise. The blood leaves his head so fast I’m surprised he stays upright. He looks like a man who just realized he’s holding a live grenade and the pin’s already gone.
Hippie goes still next to me. All that hair, halfway down his back, right as those two words land. He looks like he just remembered what he looks like. His hand goes to the blonde like he can put it back in the bottle. He does not speak. He does not need to. The hair is doing the joke for him.
I don’t know what Enron was doing. I don’t know what anybody else at our table was doing. I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at the door.
The restaurant goes silent.
Not “quieter.” Silent. Conversations die mid-sentence. A baby somewhere was crying and decides this is the time to stop. The couple arguing in the back booth suddenly agree with each other. The guy at the drive-through freezes mid-order with his mouth still open. Enron describes it like this: “Dude, the fries in the deep fryer quit sizzling.”
He’s not wrong. Exactly that still.
A little Jewish princess peels off from somewhere near the drink machine and storms over. She’s small, loud, and fully prepared to end Bemis’s life with words.
“That’s racist,” she says. “You can’t say that. What’s wrong with you?”
Bemis looks at her the way you look at a fly that landed on your burger. Mild interest. Zero panic.
“Relax,” he says. “It’s a joke.”
That doesn’t help.
She keeps going. Racist. Disgusting. How dare he. The whole speech. She’s not really talking to Bemis anymore. She’s talking to the room. Bemis nods like she’s explaining the Wi-Fi password and he’s the one who set it.
I was still running the numbers on the distance to the door and whether I could sell the idea that I came in alone.
Then the biggest dude I’ve ever seen in person starts laughing.
Not a chuckle. Not a polite “okay that was weird” laugh. An Isaac Hayes laugh. Deep. From the basement of his chest. The kind of laugh that rearranges the air in the room. He’s huge. If he wanted to throw all five of us through the window, he could’ve done it before our fries got cold. Instead he laughs like Bemis just told the funniest joke in the history of Texas.
That’s the starter pistol.
The whole place cracks open. People laugh. Someone claps. The tension leaves the building so fast you can almost hear it hit the door. Abe finally lowers the bag. Color starts to crawl back into his face. Hippie’s hand comes off his hair. The Jewish princess looks around, realizes she’s lost the room, and retreats with the dignity of someone who tried.
We eat like nothing happened. Bemis walks out clean. He always does. Next time the bag goes up, I’m standing farther away.
We walk back through the parking lot and across the street. It only takes twenty minutes this time. Progress.