I had come home to North Dakota for my youngest brother Dave’s wedding. The evening after I arrived, all of my brothers except my oldest brother, Tom, decided to go out drinking. Why didn’t my oldest brother go out with us? Well, that’s the million-dollar question. I have several 60-cent answers. I don’t know if any of them are correct. I’d like to think they are. At least one of them anyway. I’ll throw them out there for your consideration. First, he didn’t join us because he was henpecked by his wife who the rest of us referred to as the wicked witch of the North, East, South, and West. We believed that his wife would not let him come out to drink with us. That was possibility number one. Second, he was afraid he might have to spring for a round or two of drinks. Hey I get it. He was a cheap bastard. So am I. So, what? Live a little. Lighten up. How many times are you going to get together with the boys? My other brothers thought I wasn’t going to show up because I’m a cheap bastard. You know. The old joke about the wallet. It hasn’t been taken out of my pocket in so long that it has cobwebs on it. There is actually mold and moss growing on it. You know. I’ve heard those kinds of comments before. But I managed to show up. Well, he didn’t because maybe his wallet had so damn many cobwebs on it that it couldn’t be pried out of his pocket with a hammer and chisel. Third, he was too good for us. He couldn’t be bothered with the rest of us poor slobs. After all, there were a couple of soldiers, a couple of misfits, and a poor part-timer. Finally, he was afraid we would drink him under the table. I can understand that. I know a lot of people that are afraid of being drunk under the table by true alcoholics. Now I’m not saying that we were alcoholics. But my brothers and I could put away our share of beer. What I’m really trying to say is that we were more like connoisseurs of alcohol. Yeah. That’s it. Connoisseurs. That sounds right. Alcoholics seems to be a bit of a stretch. Anyway, for whatever reason, my oldest brother decided not to show. I think we managed to make it to every bar in town. Of course, that’s not saying very much because there were really only three bars in town. But we did make it to all three of those bars. And we drank quite a few brewskis in each one of those got-damn bars. All three bars were located on Main Street within about 2 1/2 blocks of each other. In other words, they were all within walking distance of each other. Two of them were diagonally across the street from each other thus less than half a block away from each other. We went to those two last. Our designated drivers parked near those two bars. We went to the bar that was the furthest from the other two first. We did that for obvious reasons. Oh. You want to know why we did that? Well, duh! When you’re first starting out, you’re sober. That means you can walk straight. It also means you can walk relatively fast. After you’ve been drinking for a while, all bets are off. You’re lucky if you can keep your ass upright and your feet underneath you. Not only that, but you also have to be able to propel yourself from point A to point B. That means you have to be able to move your feet without stumbling, tripping, or falling. And just forget about the whole walking in a straight-line shit. Cuz that ain’t going to happen. Oh, hell no. You just want to minimize your exposure outside in the wilderness where the donut patrol might possibly get a glimpse of you. I know. That’s relatively low risk in my hometown. Cuz my hometown only had one cop on duty, and he was probably out at the Chieftain Café having donuts and coffee. In fact, there was a very high probability of that. My hometown was not what you would call a high crime area. Unless of course you consider all of the old ladies who sat on their back porches at night waiting for the local kids to raid their gardens so that they could call the police to report thieves. Those poor kids weren’t thieves. They were just hungry. They were just helping themselves to a few carrots and possibly a couple of crab apples. Where was the crime in that? Hey. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I don’t know any of those kids that may or may not have allegedly done any of those sorts of activities. All I’m saying is that if they had, where was the crime? It was just kids being kids. But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, trying to get from point A to point B without falling flat on your face and making an ass of yourself. That’s more difficult than it seems by the time you’re headed to bar number three. When we got the last call for alcohol and shut the third bar down, we headed to my brother Jed’s house. We were going to continue the beer bash there. Our designated drivers had gone out to the off-sale store to buy a couple of cases of beer while we were in the bars drinking. I rarely drank more than one or two beers a week anymore. As a result, I was extremely inebriated. As soon as we got into my brother Jed’s house, Dave decided he had to show me how great a wrestler he was. He cornered me in between the kitchen counters and the refrigerator where I couldn’t move and pinned me. I was never a wrestler, so he had me at a distinct disadvantage. But as soon as he let me up, I moved as fast as I could outside. And man was I pissed. Dave was hot on my heels as I went out the door. The young lad would soon learn that he had made a critical mistake by chasing me. When I got out in the open, and he lunged at me, I caught him with a roundhouse kick. He had forgotten that I had learned martial arts while I was in Korea. When he got up and moved in, I hit him with a dropkick and a couple of quick punches. I told him to stop before I hurt him, really badly. I said, “You started this. You jumped me in the kitchen where I was helpless for no reason and pinned me to the floor. But that’s okay. I’ll finish it out here where I can fight. Cuz you’ll never lay a hand on me. I don’t give a shit how good you are at wrestling.” Then he said, “I’m sorry, man. I just don’t remember anything about you. All I remember about you is seeing you put a stocking cap on your head every night and running out the door. That’s all I remember.” “That’s the only thing you remember about me because I worked two jobs the whole time I was in high school. I worked those jobs back to back. You never saw me because I had just enough time to come home from my first job, take a shower, put a stocking cap on my head to keep my hair from freezing, and then run off to my second job. I had to work two jobs because I had to buy everything to support myself. The old man took care of two people in his house besides himself, you, and Tom. Nobody else. Ask any of the other brothers. You know, I wasn’t even going to come to your goddamn wedding. But I let mom talk me into it.” “Well, I’m glad you came.” After that, we broke up the beer bash and crashed for the night. I couldn’t help but think that I had really screwed up by flying all the way up to North Dakota just to get tangled up in a beer bash wrestling match that ended up as another exercise in futility.
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