A Night On The Town              KING JIZZO

it is the morning of my discontent. i am hungover. hangovers are God's way of letting you know that you are not Superman. there is a name for my pain, and it is called wineover. anyone can have a hangover. takes a real man to suffer a wineover. ordinarily, i'm ok with wine. like a lion tamer i tease with the whip and then dance lightly out of harm's way. but this morning i am officially fucked. compared to a hangover, a wineover is akin to something biblical. God's terrible trumpet or a rain of locusts. whatever is locked inside the insidious little grape LEAPS OUT and renders you immobile, looking up at the ceiling, drooling like a dog. as i said, my relationship (and i call it relationship) with the grape began when i became a beer drinking casualty. i could drink prestigious amounts of beer -- beer was good. beer was my pal.

unfortunately, there was also a price to pay for all this anti-social drinking. i started getting into fights, but that was ok, 'cause i just figured it was an extension of the male beer bonding ritual. drink, laugh, fight, kiss and make up. i wasn't losing friends, i was gaining enemies, you see. people would come up to me and say "you were so funny last night doing all those dumb karate moves." trouble was, i was really trying to do those karate moves. drunken kung-fu was my specialty. i would drink and pretend i knew kung-fu. sometimes you'd bluff your way out of an altercation, and sometimes you didn't. i talked myself into believing i always had a 50-50 chance of walking away unscathed. and afterwards i'd always end up with the girl that specialized in sheltering the troubled musician. she'd console my bloodied and bruised face with encouraging lines like "better luck next time," or "you know, your nose looks more distinguished bent that way."

then i moved on to Jack Daniels. i felt like Timothy Leary breaking down new frontiers. the only thing i broke was my hand putting it through a wall. i learned J.D. can send you into a state of grace called the "blackout," where you could lose whole tracts of time and wake up in interesting places like the parking lot of Denny's, seat belted, kinda comic, kinda tragic, that was me. at first, your friends think you're funny when you break shit, but after awhile, you just become another drunken dick. so i had to make a choice. i wasn't going to stop drinking; people that don't drink are BORING. they sit around at meetings and chain smoke and bemoan the fact that they can't get fucked up anymore. that wasn't for me; i like to drink. drinking makes idiot tv watchable and shallow girls likable and it's just plain fun. so i started drinking wine instead. wine was different. it wasn't carbonated and it tasted kinda sour and you had to drink it out of these fluted-stem glasses like Doctor Zhivago or something. i started off drinking the three-dollar-a-gallon Chablis with the screw-on cap. the first glass went down like drain cleaner, but after that it wasn't too bad. in fact, i convinced myself that this was a far less belligerent buzz than malt liquor. but i found out you could still enter the sainted blackout zone with or without bubbles. so i drank and drank. my first night of wining went something like this: ploughed, i remember kicking out the crutch of our hostess who'd recently had a skiing accident, breaking her new wine goblets in the street to a captive audience, and running several stop lights getting home, screaming, "i'm going to kill us all." when you see those news stories on tv with he car and the bewildered guy in cuffs, that was me.

apparently, you can take the beer out of the blackout, but you can't take the black out out of the moron. the next morning was, to say the least, not pleasant. too nauseated to have sex, too dizzy to drive, i'm laying on the bed like the figure on the shroud of Turin and not even knowing this girl i'd come home with. but of course, her thinking it's funny that i'm so crazy. i guess i score women by appealing to their lower reptilian functions. and i can't vomit, it's just not in me. i can't clock out, i just have to deal with it. i finally managed to drive her home, fuck, i'd have carried her home on my back to get rid of her. and then i spent the rest of the day on the couch, under the covers, just laying there -- my head pounding like the guy in the Scanners movie. and my body all wiggly and clammy, like a melted piece of cheese. all day long, paralyzed like Christopher Reeve and nothing i could do about it. it took me a few more horror show episodes after that to realize that wine was an animal to be respected, not trifled with. i could dance a little with he devil, but not too close. lesson over.

now, to the present. the reason i am suffering this particular wineover is because i went to a nightclub last night called Billboard Live. it used to be a club called Gazzari's back during the Cretaceus period. but don't worry, the jolly, farty, lecherous, old ghost of Bill Gazzari still lives on from the tacky Elvis decor to the scantily clad hostesses. now ordinarily i would not go to a place like this, it's too wanna-be classy. i'm more comfortable leaning up against the mailbox with a paper bag than hanging out in some surreal Miami Vice-suited neon nightmare. but in the spirit of adventure i went. first thing i see going in was a rock band that looked as if they were grown in some Doobie Brothers machine. they played songs that were calculated not to offend ANYONE. no dirty words, no extraneous use of the word "booty," all draped in sappy three part harmony. now the old me would have selected a table close to the stage and commenced the evening with a rousing, "GET OFF THE STAGE, PUSSIES." then followed it up with "YOU SUCK," "DIE FUCKER, DIE," and so on. i threaten them, they threaten me, i get thrown out and everybody's happy. but that was the OLD me. the new me kept my bottle-throwing arm in check and i was unceremoniously ushered downstairs to the VIP lounge. now the first thing i noticed was that on almost every couch was a girl i call a "bitch lioness." all slinky, dressed in revealing, fuck-me outfits, smoking 18-inch cigarettes. they looked like fucking lionesses. i kid you not. man-eating carnivorous goddesses, just waiting, stalking their next victim. whoever walked into the room was sized up immediately, classified as to financial status, and then patiently ignored. weird. i was looking for Siegfried and Roy to come jumping out with a whip and a chair. i sat down near one of the bitch-goddesses and felt her infrared vision scanning me, categorizing, indexing me. am i --

a) rich, tattooed "gangsta" rock star.

b) real "gangsta" who got in here by mistake.

c) wanna-be, poseur "gangsta," broke who feels like a fish out of water.

the answer, of course, is (c). if i was a computer disk, her look would have wiped me clean. the tension of the moment was broken by the arrival of her evening meal, a purveyor of fine tapestries, no doubt, he whipped out a Bunsen Burner to light her cigarette and i was forgotten. i decided at that moment to get myself a drink from the bar.

"a glass of wine, please."

"that'll be seven dollars."

SEVEN BUCKS. thank god i wasn't wearing a pacemaker 'cause my heart literally stopped. Jesus Christ, the balls of this woman! she might as well have asked for the shirt off my back. thank God i'd pounded a couple before i entered this hellhole. all right you imp of Satan, i'll play your devilish game THIS ONCE. i gave her seven dollars even and the look on her face when she realized there was NO tip was amazing. i could tell she almost wanted to tip my glass over, sorry lady, with the prices here, i'm gonna need all my wits about me.

i sat back down and watched my friend engaged in conversation with another brunette lioness. careful, my friend, they may look docile but remember -- these women are meat-eaters. what might they be talking about, i wondered. the latest mars mission? pretties inhibitors? the newest additions to NATO? what goes through the mind of a predator when they are stalking their prey? these women are beautiful, don't get me wrong, and i'm sure a romp in the hay would be glorious, but at what price? perhaps, your immortal soul. i'm honest enough to know i don't measure up to what would be their standards. these women can only be a hassle. like driving a rare, foreign convertible whose parts can only be flown in from the Netherlands. status, that's all it is, status. status driving in, status sitting down, status followed up with an expensive evening of driving and dancing, so you can scale the golden mountain to her cunt. and all you get to say at the end of an empty wallet is, i got to fuck her. she fucked me. me, a fine purveyor of unusual oriental drapes and tapestries, me with a gaggle of gold chains that would put Mr. T. to shame, me with a shoebox full of coke. i can't compete with that. i'm not cut out to shovel baubles and beads into the gaping jaws of the eager lioness. so i guess i don't get to fuck her. i don't even get to talk to her. i can't even look at her without tipping my waitress. fuck it, i'd rather go to Al's bar and shoot pool. or better yet, i'd rather rent a movie and just drink alone. i am the poster boy for cheap dates and cheap skates everywhere. i will pinch where no penny has been pinched before. my self respect and my estate are still intact and i don't feel like i'm missing out by not dancing with the glamourous crowd. in my own way, i'm kinda glamourous, in my own way.

                             KINGJIZZO