Day 2: Noon-I wake up on the couch and look out over the city of beer cans littering the coffee table in front of me. Glass Yuengling high-rises stand over ghettos of Busch Light, PBR and Beast tenements, all of which are overshadowed by two giant silver 24 oz. cans of Steel Reserve gleaming like twin towers of excess. It’s spring break and several friends from Georgetown, along with my brother, Mike, his girlfriend and I are hiding from responsibility in South Carolina. I walk out onto the back porch and find my brother in his reflective cop sunglasses taking a hit from a hash pipe he built from aluminum foil, tape, a water bottle and a cannibalized pen. He hands me the piece and I light up, sucking my breakfast through the pen and enjoying the pale midday sunlight as it streams across the deck. I exhale slowly and wave to some of the scowling golfers teeing off on the adjacent golf course. Golf, what a pointless way to waste your life, I think to myself, before resuming the task of getting high.
Day 3-Due to a scheduling error there was no day 3.
Day 4: 1:15 a.m.-We enter the Marriott cafeteria through the half-open glass doors and head towards the counter, crouched down stealthily, dripping water from our bathing suits as we go. We’re moving towards the prize on the breakfast counter: two giant, promotional Kellogg’s cereal boxes standing about 4 1/2 feet tall. To us, drunk as we are and with our heads still reeling from the hot tub where we’d been marinating and dehydrating for the last two hours, they’re absolutely irresistible; their sheer lack of intrinsic value or purpose enough to make them worth their weight in gold.
Horton reaches the counter first, hoists the first box up, pivots and tosses it to me before grabbing the second one. I vainly try to cover the box with my towel as I run out of the cafeteria and down the lobby hallway to the back exit, my bare feet slapping loudly against the smooth marble floor with each step. Kristen, Haley and Jim are milling about near the door leading onto the pool deck in their towels, but they take off out the door when they see us coming with the loot.
“Grab our stuff! We’ll meet you down on the beach,” I yell as Horton and I, with our comically oversized boxes, run down the wooden stairs to the beach. Minutes later they’re back with the clothes that we left by the hotel’s hot tub and we dress quickly in the dark and head back down the beach to where we’re staying, drunkenly congratulating each other the entire way on what surely must be the heist of the century.
Day 5: 9:00 p.m.-After a dinner of take-out pizza, we’ve slipped back into our respective gender roles, with the womenfolk sitting on the couch reading US Weekly and making catty comments about celebrities and the menfolk disinterestedly watching basketball on TV, sipping beer and playing Russian Roulette. Georgetown misses another free throw and Seton Hall takes it back for an easy two as Horton fumbles with the cylinder before snapping it into place, holding it to his temple and firing. He pulls a blank chamber and casually hands the gun over to me.
I take the handgun back from him and, without taking my eyes off of the screen, open my mouth, push the cold steel tip of the revolver against the roof of my mouth and pull the trigger. As the announcer informs me that Georgetown is closing the gap and speculation swirls on the couch about whether or not Lindsay Lohan has had plastic surgery, the barrel gives a dry click and I pass the gun across the coffee table to Jim. Jim places the gun in his mouth and fires, losing instantly as his head explodes against the wall in a blast of blood and gristle and his body rocks back into the recliner he was sitting in, his dropped beer can pooling Busch on the carpet at his feet.
The loud report of the revolver echoing through the tiny room rouses Haley from her reverie of celebrity dresses and fluctuating waistlines. She glances disinterestedly at Jim twitching in his chair, then over to us.
“Hey you guys wanna play Kings or something? I’m ready to start drinking” she says.
“Sure,” I reply, standing up and stretching. “You wanna play Jim?”
“Just give me a minute” he gurgles as his head lolls back and forth, haphazardly picking his brains off of the wallpaper and patting them back into the side of his shattered skull.
Day 6: 2:30 a.m.-“Ready yet?” yells my brother from the driver seat of our parents’ navy blue Dodge minivan, which is parked on the beach directly in front of the ocean. Aside from the hotel lights down the beach in the distance the only source of illumination is the two shafts of yellow light emanating from the van’s headlights, which disappear in the roiling ocean lapping at the van’s tires.
“Almost,” I yell back as I finish squirting lighter fluid over the weed in the funnel that we drilled into the top the van. After tossing a lit match onto the pile of weed and lighter fluid I scramble back down through my open window into the passenger seat. “Ok, let’s do it,” I say, rolling up my window and putting on my goggles.
Mike shifts into drive and slowly eases the car into the ocean, careful to keep the conflagration on the roof of the car out of the water. Water gushes through our two open windows and into the minivan, drenching us instantly to the waist, then mid-chest, until we are completely submerged in the cold, black water as the van rolls down the embankment of the shore and further into the salty ocean. When the water has reached the roof of the van’s interior we roll up our windows, trapping the water in with us, before reversing the van and slowly fighting our way out of the sea. The waterlogged engine groans and the tires fight for purchase on the shifting sand beneath us, but we eventually manage to pull ourselves out of the ocean and back onto the beach, the van’s suspension permanently compressed from the weight of the water in the interior. As water pours out of the Dodge’s undercarriage a vacuum is created inside the van, sucking air through the aluminum foil filter set in the funnel on the roof and filling the interior space with smoke, essentially creating the largest gravity bong ever.
We inhale furiously, trapping the smoke in our lungs and exhaling rapidly, only to breath in more smoke with the next inhalation. The last of the water drains out and the smoke diffuses throughout the van, but not before we’ve each smoked enough to kill a small dog. We glance at each other in the dark interior before collapsing forward in spastic, uncontrollable laughter, rendered all the more potent because there’s absolutely no reason why we should be laughing. I try to collect myself long enough to say something, but succeed only in making myself laugh harder, slumping forward against the hard plastic dashboard in the process, only partially in control of my limbs.
When I finally collect myself I glance at my brother and see him smiling in the dark of the Dodge’s interior before nodding his head out towards the sea and raising an eyebrow. The thought passes between us unspoken, and we both face forward again, grinning savagely. He pushes the car into drive and starts inching towards the ocean again, forcing the van through the oncoming waves and down the embankment of the beach into the murky water. Windows up this time, we drive into the water, the Dodge pitching and rolling over the uneven sand on the ocean floor. Water is seeping in through every crack, slowly filling the interior of the van and I know that this time we’re not turning around. This time we’re just going to keep driving.
