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 are 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. T3 was a big deal in the early 2000s. That was the whole reason any of us lived there. We were not 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. Personality matched the stock price on the way down. His apartment smells like bong water and laundry he never does. 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 is not trying to look like anything else.
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 is the full decision tree.
The bottle looks serious. Green. Fancy label. 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 bad decisions. First glass: interesting. Second glass: warm. 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 is not.
It is Friday. Or Saturday by the clock. Same thing when you have been drinking green liquor since whenever Enron started pouring.
Somebody says food.
Somebody else says Whataburger.
Whataburger is across the street from Walden. Two lanes. Maybe a hundred yards if you are sober and can walk in a straight line. We decide we are too drunk to drive. This is the smartest thing any of us will do all night.
The street is not a real street. Not for Houston. It is a little two-lane connector that only exists so people can get to our complex or the church down the road. Busy nightlife all around us. This road? Side street. Side quest. Cars every couple of minutes if you are lucky.
“We walk,” Hippie says, like he invented logistics.
We walk.
Crossing that nothing street takes about thirty minutes. I am not exaggerating for the story. When you are that drunk, a Camry doing thirty-five looks like a fighter jet. We stand on the curb. We wait. We start. We abort. We laugh. We almost die on a road that sober people forget is there. A lady in a minivan gives us a look like we are escaped livestock. Bemis waves at her. She does not wave back.
We make it. Barely. We high-five like we climbed Everest.
This Whataburger is not the nice Whataburger in the suburbs. This one sits right next to the beltway in Houston. Same chain. Different planet. Packed, loud, and we are the only white guys in the building.
It is 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 grease and victory. Everyone has somewhere to be and nobody is in a hurry about it.
We order. We sit.
Four bags come out pretty quick. Burgers. Fries. The usual. Abe is 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 has waited too long for a cheeseburger and wants the world to know the wait is over.
Bemis sees it.
I see Bemis see it.
There is a half-second where you 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 is a guy with food. To Bemis, hours deep in green fairy juice, it is something else.
Bemis stands up.
He shoots his own fist into the air, same angle, same energy, and he says it in a voice that does not 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 is still up. His face goes the color of mayonnaise. The blood leaves his head so fast I am surprised he stays upright. He looks like a man who just realized he is holding a live grenade and the pin is already gone.
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 likes to tell it like this: the fries in the deep fryer quit sizzling.
He is not wrong. It felt that still.
A little Jewish princess peels off from somewhere near the drink machine and storms over. She is small, loud, and fully prepared to end Bemis’s life with words.
“That is racist,” she says. “You cannot say that. What is 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 does not help.
She keeps going. Racist. Disgusting. How dare he. The whole speech. Bemis nods like she is explaining the Wi-Fi password and he already knows it.
Then the biggest black dude I have 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 is huge. If he wanted to throw all five of us through the window, he could have done it before our fries got cold. Instead he laughs like Bemis just told the funniest joke in the history of Texas.
That is 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. The Jewish princess looks around, realizes she has lost the room, and retreats with the dignity of someone who tried.
We eat like nothing happened. That is the thing about Bemis. He will say the most racist-sounding shit you can imagine, and somehow he walks out clean. We finish our burgers.
We walk back across the street. It only takes twenty minutes this time. Progress.
Absinthe is a hell of a drug. Whataburger is a hell of a stage. And Bemis is a hell of a man to be next to when the bag goes up.