Vic and the Fourth Class: Part Two, by Nils Parker

For Part I, click here.

Vic’s words sunk in well during the first weeks after our meeting in his office. I couldn’t coast and risk putting myself in a bad position. Or a worse position, depending on how you looked at it. I only had a year before the real world would be staring me in the face. The better I did, the more options I would have when I officially became an adult. At Vic’s urging, I dedicated myself to the fall semester with an energy and persistence I had only ever committed to work for which I was being paid.

Finals Week came faster than any previous semester’s. They say time flies when you’re having fun. It flies twice as fast when you’re worried about fucking up your future. Still, I enjoyed and excelled in all of my classes, none more than The History of Apocalyptic Film. It met for three hours every Tuesday night and it owned. We watched movies like “Bladerunner”, “Escape from New York”, “Soylent Green”. I think we even watched “Tank Girl”. It was a small class—maybe 20 people—and half the students lived with me in Cloyne. Discussions were lively and included a healthy dose of fucks, awesomes, mads, wickeds, rads. And, because Maarten was the “professor”, alcohol was present at every meeting.

For the last class, we bought a bunch of 40s and watched “Death Race 2000”; a film that falls clearly into the awesomely BAD category. It’s one of those movies—like Dolemite or Baseketball—you have to see for any number of reasons unrelated to quality. It stars a young Sylvester Stallone as “Machine-Gun Joe Viterbo” and David Carradine as “Frankenstein”. Joe Viterbo wears a 70s gangster-pimp suit. Frankenstein wears a black leather gimp suit. Not much of a stretch for Carradine. In the movie, the champion of a brutal cross-country car race of the future where pedestrians are run down for points, has a change of heart while being hounded by rivals and targeted by a conspiracy seeking to stop the race. I won’t spoil the ending, but Frankenstein survives and the President declares war on the French. Like I said: awesomely bad. Basking in the afterglow of the final class and swimming in the buzz from cheap malt liquor, eight of us from Cloyne decided to walk down to Henry’s for celebratory drinks.

Henry’s is attached to the Durant Hotel just up the street from Café Durant. Like any other hotel bar in the world, Henry’s serves over-priced cocktails and gets away with it because half the customers are hotel guests who add the bill to their room charge and forget about it. The only time it makes sense for the college population to hit up Henry’s is for the Two For Tuesdays special—2 for 1 cocktails every Tuesday, 10pm to close. Well, it was Tuesday, and when we walked in, it was 9:45pm.

By 11:30, we were 5 rounds in and four men down. The four of us stalwarts said our goodbyes to the four who’d thrown in their bar towels, and took a minute to decide what to do next. I looked around the table and laughed. Standing to my left flirting with a cute Asian girl was Andy—6’5” and Swedish. Across from me on the phone with a “customer” was Maarten—6’5” and Dutch. Standing to my right and railing against California’s anti-smoking laws was Maarten’s friend Fritz—also 6’5” and Dutch. At 6’4 ½” and German, I was the shrimp. Our standing bar table littered with empty rocks glasses and crumbs from bar snacks, we looked like a boat crew of Vikings who’d rowed ashore for a night of raping and pillaging.

“Let’s celebrate,” Andy suggested. “I’m gonna get some champagne.” Not very Viking-like. He disappeared through the throng of bargain-hunting college drunks who, by now, had filled the bar to capacity. Maarten finished his call and said something to Fritz in Dutch before turning to me.

“We’ve gotta go.” Fritz pulled his jacket off the back of a chair while Maarten unfurled several twenties from a serious wad of cash. I’d known Maarten long enough not to ask where he was going. Over the previous three years, he’d become one of the biggest dealers in North Berkeley thanks to a series of ridiculous circumstances that were generally out of his control (a story I will get to in a future entry). He and Fritz were leaving to make a deal. I pocketed Maarten’s twenties as Andy returned with a bottle of average champagne, six flutes, and a look on his face like he’d just won the lottery.

“Why six?” I asked.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Andy started. “The bartender is giving us a half-hour of free drinks!”

“What? Why?”

“I bought a $100 bottle of champagne? I don’t know.”

“Was the bartender a girl?” It was the obvious question to ask.

“No. Where did Maarten and Fritz go?”

“They had to leave.” I didn’t need to tell Andy why.

“Sucks for them. Go get some drinks. Tell the bartender you’re with me. He’s the bald, sweaty one.”

What. A. Mistake.

It was midnight and I was perfectly lucid; floating on the perfect buzz. I wasn’t just happy, I was joyful. I was in that zone of invincibility where average guys flirt with above-average girls and friends make grand plans that never come to fruition. When you are in this zone, you have two options: you can throw it in neutral and coast to last call, or you can shift into overdrive and hammer the accelerator.

Guess which one I chose.

I walked up to the bar cloaked in drunken armor, found the bald, sweaty bartender, and ordered twenty drinks: 10 Vodka-Red Bulls and 10 Crown & Cokes. Being perfectly drunk leads to perfectly drunk decisions apparently. Ten minutes later, I was striding confidently back to our table carrying one full drink tray stacked atop a second full drink tray. The crowd parted around me like I was leading a mountain stage of the Tour de France. I caught Andy’s eyes as I reached the table.

“No.” He shook his head vigorously.

“What?” I smiled.

“NO.”

“We can share them.”

“Okay.”

Within minutes we were the drunken black hole at the center of the bar’s social galaxy. Constellations of new friends orbited our table, taking drinks and leaving girls for Andy. With he and I double-fisting, twenty drinks went quickly. I immediately returned to the bar to re-up, but our half hour had passed. I pulled Maarten’s twenties out of my pocket and bought another bottle of champagne hoping it would earn us a second free ride on the carousel of death. The bartender was having none of it this time. I tried to argue with him but the crowd drowned out my yelling and he just turned his back to deal with customers on the other side of the bar. It made me black-out angry.

An hour and a half later, I came to.

It was 2 a.m. Andy had his hands on my shoulders and he was staring me in the face. He was standing between two bouncers and me.

“Just do it, Nils.” Andy was frustrated. Why was he frustrated?

“Lift up your shirt, bud, “ commanded the shorter, sturdier of the two bouncers.

“Is he talking to me?”

“Yeah, dude,” Andy knew what it was like to blackout and come to. “Just give them back and let’s get outta here.” Give what back, I thought.

“I’m not going to lift up my shirt for you!”

“LIFT UP YOUR FUCKING SHIRT!!” The taller bouncer had clearly had enough.

I quickly relented. I’d been working at a bar for a year by then and I knew that when it came to physical violence and basic rights in a patron v. bouncer confrontation, the police always side with the bouncer. I lifted up my shirt. Both bouncers stared at my belt line. I looked down….confused. Tucked into my waistband from hip to hip were 12 upside down champagne flutes. They looked like a bandolier. I was shocked by…well…by myself.

The reality of the previous 90 minutes began to set in. I sheepishly removed the flutes from my pants and placed them on the bar. The bouncers waited impatiently for me to finish unloading while the last of the straggling customers gawked at the scene. It’s not every day you see someone stuff a dozen glasses down their pants.

All I could think was, Vic would be so proud. Only four months earlier, he’d convinced me to commit myself like an adult. What better way to pay respect to his influence and reward my effort than getting blind drunk and committing petty larceny. Pangs of regret and shame started to percolate inside me and manifest themselves as anxiety and nervous stomach. The bouncers escorted us out the door and told us not to come back. Ever.

Now it was Andy’s turn to get pissed. He wasn’t mad at me. It wasn’t my fault. Well, it was my fault, but it’s not like they needed to blacklist us. Getting drunk and doing stupid shit is part of the college experience. It’s very nearly a rite of passage. The bouncers did not agree. They were running a respectable establishment. There’s was a HOTEL bar. Ooooooh. Andy’s protest didn’t last long. The bouncers wouldn’t let it. They went back inside and slammed the door behind them.

We started up Durant Avenue on our way home to Cloyne. Andy was still fuming and I had already abandoned my self-shaming pity party for the opportunity to stoke the flames of his fury with drunken proclamations of injustice. That’s when he kicked one of the two-wheeled garbage cans sitting at the curb. The force of the kick propelled the can into the street. It caught the slope of the hill, tipped over backward, and slid thirty feet down the hill, leaving a trail of garbage behind it.

It was the coolest thing we’d ever seen. And since it was garbage night for the entire street, we could see it over and over and over again all the way up the hill. Andy immediately ran across the street and began launching those garbage cans into the middle of Durant Ave. while I punted the ones from the side of the street on which Henry’s sat. We kicked over dozens of cans. One of Andy’s cans clipped the rear bumper of a passing car, went hurtling into the air, and landed on the hood of an Isuzu Rodeo. If you happen to be in the market for a small, late-model SUV, let me just tell you: the Isuzu Rodeo does not fare well in low-velocity, front-end impact tests with large plastic garbage cans.

We reached the top of the hill breathless, filthy, and exuberant; the shame of the personae non grata label buried under a landslide of garbage. As we turned up Piedmont Avenue, a car came to a screeching halt behind us. Red and blue lights filled the air along with a piercing siren. The car was close enough that I could feel the heat from the million candlepower spotlight when they opened it up on the back of my head. A deep, authoritative voice came booming from the car.

“DO. NOT. MOVE.”

Andy and I froze. Two uniformed Berkeley city police officers emerged from their squad car, each with one hand on their gun and the other on their service weapon.

“Where are you two headed?” the older officer asked.

“We’re going home,” Andy said. “We live on Northside.”

“Did you guys do that?” the older officer motioned back down Durant Avenue at our trail of carnage.

“Nope,” Andy responded. The younger officer belched out a laugh.

“We followed you all the way up the hill,” the younger officer told Andy.

“And you didn’t stop us?!” I blurted out.

“Listen kid, you wanna stay out of jail, you’re gonna clean everything up,” the older officer interjected.

“Okay,” Andy said immediately. Our two-block Pele impersonation had clearly helped exorcise his drunk. Not mine.

“Are you kidding me?!” I shouted. “Have you seen that mess? It would take all night!”

The younger officer laughed again and the older officer torqued my left arm behind my back, bent me over the trunk of the cruiser, and cuffed me. It was my first time in handcuffs. When they clicked closed tightly around my wrists, it was the most desperately suffocating moment I’d ever experienced. Like my entire future was being choked off and the slightest resistance only tightened the grip. The older officer crammed me into the backseat; my knees pressing into the hard plastic partition and the cuffs cutting into my wrists.

“Officer Ruiz,” the older officer said to his younger partner, “get the other kid’s info and let’s get outta here.” The cruiser door slammed shut, hitting my shoulder and adding insult to indignity.

The next thing I remember, I was face down on a cement floor with Red Bull-scented vomit caked to my shirt and the side of my face. I had no idea what happened, but I knew exactly where I was. And it wasn’t good.