It was Will’s birthday. Not that it mattered much. Life doesn’t stop kicking your ass just because you lived another year.
Will was the restaurant manager—my boss’s right-hand guy. Tall, sharp jaw, good cheekbones. Looked like that golden boy quarterback from the Patriots, Bradley something. He had that same all-American charm women love right before they’re crying in a parking lot.
But he had a limp, like life clipped one of his wires early and he’d been dragging a dead leg behind him ever since. It didn’t stop him. Hell, if anything, it gave him character. He leaned into it, used it like a cane made of sympathy and pity and free drinks. Will could charm the panties off a waitress and still make her refill his soda before walking away.
I talked him into golfing with me that day. His birthday. No idea how I pulled that off. Maybe he hated himself just enough to say yes.
The course wasn’t anything special—some rundown fairway stitched together in south Bend, Oregon. Old greens, sunburned staff, enough empty carts to host a senior center death race. But it was good enough. It had grass, it had holes, and I brought the booze.
Three sheets to the wind? We were six deep before we even hit the first tee. I packed a cooler like it was a life raft on the Titanic—tequila, whiskey, something called a Dirty Mexican: tequila, ramen broth, and a sugar-dusted mystery liquor that tasted like cough syrup and domestic violence.
We didn’t come to play golf. We came to forget we were still alive.
The mulligans started early. We weren’t hitting balls—we were assaulting them. Drunken hacks. Foul language. Laughs that had no joy, only volume.
By hole ten we’d turned into the kind of assholes that make good people quit drinking. We knocked over a goose or a groundskeeper or maybe both—some poor bastard in khakis named Mr. McGuire. He screamed something about rules and lawsuits and “Jesus Christ!” as we sped off in our cart like jailbirds in a bumper car.
Somewhere around hole sixteen, one of us hit a rock. It might’ve been me. Might’ve been Will. Hell, the rock might’ve hit us. The cart launched—airborne. We were flying, laughing, probably pissing ourselves, heading for a concussion or enlightenment, whichever came first.
The cart hit the ground with a cartoon bounce and flipped sideways. I tumbled out like a sandbag, skidded along the edge of the fairway, came to a stop just shy of a water hazard. Will stayed in the cart, staring at me upside down like a drunk Jesus on a cross.
We laughed like lunatics.
Two grown men, too stupid to be scared, trying to right a busted golf cart with whisky breath and rubber legs. I pulled, he pushed. The thing groaned like it wanted to die. Skid marks across the green like war wounds. The roof cracked. We didn’t care.
We finished the course anyway. Smoked cigarettes like old bluesmen. Took swigs from the last of the whiskey. Poured Dirty Mexicans down our throats like holy water.
And that should’ve been the end.
But you know it never is.
That should’ve been the end. Any halfway normal drunk would’ve called it a day right there—cart crash, bruised pride, half a liver hanging on by a thread. But I was never halfway anything. I was the full disease.
I told Will, “One more stop, just real quick.” He didn’t argue. Of course not. He had that dazed look, the kind you see in men being led to either sex or slaughter. It’s all the same when the blood’s boiling and the buzz is on.
I took him to my little hideout. A dive stitched into a rotting old gas station, somewhere near the river, tucked under the bonepile of south Bend. A forgotten neighborhood with cracked sidewalks, sagging porches, and Gypsy blood in the dirt. The kind of place where people still believe in curses, smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, and name their dogs after saints and bastards.
The bar itself was a joke. Neon lights flickering like a seizure warning, old cornhole boards duct-taped at the seams, women with tattoos of broken clocks and dead gods, skin out, eyes sharp, piercings in their faces like leftover nails from a crucifixion. They were beautiful in that apocalyptic way, the way a burned-down church looks holy if you stare at it long enough.
I liked it there. They liked me too—mostly because I bought rounds like a wounded king buying silence. I was the fool with money, the man with too many stories and not enough sense to shut up. I showed up often enough to get waves and hellos, but not so often that anyone trusted me. It was a delicate balance—being liked without ever being welcome.
One night, I remember leaning on the bar, sweating tequila and failure, when a girl with gold in her eyes and a nose ring like a warning bell leaned in close. She smelled like smoke and trouble.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, all sweet venom. “You’re just a tourist.”
I smiled like I’d heard something holy.
“You’re right,” I told her. “Just visiting. Thanks for having me.”
Because she was right. I was always just visiting. In every place, in every bar, in every life. A tourist in my own goddamn story. Passing through with a drink in hand and a suitcase full of regrets.
I didn’t belong there.
But then again—I didn’t belong anywhere.
Will and I were there for one reason: to kill time and dignity in a cornhole game with a couple of younger punks who thought they were clever. You know the type—brimmed hats, sleeves rolled just right, the confidence of youth and no record of failure.
One of them opened his mouth and what came out wasn’t English—it was some garbled accent that sounded like a blender filled with teeth and shame. I couldn’t place it. Thought maybe he was drunk. Thought maybe I was. But nope—he was Scottish. Figures.
I made a crack. Told him the cooks in my kitchen—first-gen Mexicans who barely spoke a lick of English—still had a better grasp on the language than he did. Said it loud, said it for the room. Got a few laughs. That’s all I needed to keep going.
The guy wasn’t much to look at. Wiry. Built like a scarecrow left out too long. That kind of thin that comes from generations of bad weather and boiled meat. Full beard, of course—because skinny men grow facial hair like weeds to make up for what their fists can’t deliver.
But I was drunk and mean and riding high on the fumes of tequila and ego. I kept poking at him. Just enough to see if he had a bite.
And wouldn’t you know it, he squares up. All five feet of him. His chin in the air like it could win something. That was the funniest part. He was serious. He thought he was gonna say something that would knock me off my barstool.
But I wasn’t angry. Not yet. I was in that sweet spot—too drunk to care, too proud to shut up.
The room went quiet like a bomb ticked once.
I told him I was sorry, still half-laughing, eyes glassy. He said something back in that accent again, mumbled like marbles in peanut butter. I squinted.
“What the fuck did you just say?” I asked.
“I’m joking! I’m joking!” he said, like a boy trying to dodge a belt.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling just enough to scare him. “So am I.”
And just like that, it passed.
But you could feel it in the air—one wrong breath, and the whole goddamn bar would’ve exploded in fists and broken bottles.
I wasn’t there to fight.
Not yet.
Next thing I know, I wake up naked. Not the fun kind of naked. Not the wrapped-in-skin-and-sin kind. I mean naked naked. Flat on my back, downtown Bend, in the vacation home I was supposed to be treating like a sanctuary. Instead, I turned it into a crime scene.
I was soaking in a warm pool of my own piss. It had dried, then reheated under me. My body was steeped in it like a teabag of shame. My head pulsed with something between a hangover and brain cancer. My hands shook like a Parkinson’s parade. I sat up and sniffed myself—definitely piss. Mine, thank Christ. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been someone else’s. Could’ve been blood.
No women, no animals, no angry Scotsmen. That was something.
Clothes scattered like an exorcism had taken place—socks on the lampshade, shirt across the TV, pants halfway down the hallway like I tried to wrestle them off mid-collapse. The front door was wide open, just flapping in the breeze like the world was invited in to see the wreckage of the night before.
But the real kick to the balls? No truck in the driveway. No keys. No phone. No wallet. No idea.
So I pulled on whatever clothes weren’t soaked in regret and headed to Amalia’s—my restaurant, my second home, the place that tolerated me like an old dog with a bad hip and a history of biting customers.
I walked in like a man walking into his own funeral.
People gasped. Real gasps. Like they’d seen Elvis back from the dead with piss stains on his jeans.
“What the hell happened to you last night?” one of them asked, which meant at least someone had seen me.
That’s when the investigation began.
Turns out someone—no one could say who—dropped off my keys. Just handed them in like lost and found. A good Samaritan or maybe the ghost of my liver. I had the keys, sure, but not the truck. So I wandered the streets of Bend like a half-functioning lunatic, jabbing the alarm button like a junkie searching for God in a parking lot.
Then it hit me.
A flash. A dream. A fog parting for one brief second: the cornhole bar.
That greasy little spot with cheap beer and cheaper people. That’s where Will and I had last been. The image of that rundown bar popped in my skull like a Polaroid—just enough to get me moving.
I hoofed it over, and there she was.
My truck.
Sitting there smug as hell, like it had been judging me all night from its parking spot. I put my hand on the hood like it was a friend I’d let down. And just like that, one piece of the blackout jigsaw snapped into place.
The fog didn’t lift all the way. But it blinked.
And sometimes, that’s all you get.
Standing there next to my truck, brain still drowning in fog, I started piecing it together. Cornhole. Yeah. I had been there. Played a few rounds. Talked too much. Drank too much. Made a scene. That was me, always the main attraction at a circus nobody paid to see.
Then I found my phone. It was sticky with God knows what and had that dead battery feel, like even the tech had given up on me. I charged it in the truck, lit a smoke, and waited for the shame to download.
First thing I did when it came back to life was call Will.
He didn’t answer.
I called again.
Nothing.
It felt wrong. Off. The silence was too loud.
So I did the unthinkable—I called his wife.
Big mistake.
She picked up, already mid-scream. No hello, no greeting. Just: “How dare you!”
Apparently, I’d ruined everything.
“You fucked up his birthday! You ruined everything! What the hell did you do?”
I didn’t even get a word in. She hung up. Slammed the phone down so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
No answers.
Only silence and blame.
I sat there with that dial tone in my head and a pounding between my eyes. I was trying to replay the night like a broken VHS, but all I got were jumbled scenes—blurred faces, slurred laughs, flashing lights. And then a voice. That Scottish guy. The one I’d nearly gone toe-to-toe with over a game of goddamn beanbags.
I remembered now—after the almost-fight, after the barking and the squaring up, he changed his tune.
“Hey,” he’d said, “you wanna go play some Frisbee golf?”
Frisbee golf.
Of course.
I’d been golfing all goddamn day, drinking like prohibition was coming back, and now these two tweakers wanted to take me out into the desert and toss plastic at a chain-link basket.
And I said yes.
Of course I did.
Because when your soul’s already lost and your liver’s screaming for mercy, why not follow strangers into the sagebrush?
I started remembering the sand. The wind. That stupid disc slicing the air like a dull blade. We were chasing it like dogs, laughing, staggering from Point A to Point B like a trio of escaped inmates who forgot they weren’t free.
And it wasn’t confrontational anymore. Something had shifted. Maybe the booze caught up to us all. Maybe I stopped being the asshole. Maybe they just figured I was harmless.
But that fog in my skull? It loosened. The scenes came back in flashes—me running through brush, screaming about birds, doing impressions of a coyote while clutching a tall can of gas station beer.
It was stupid.
It was beautiful.
It was probably the only part of the night that didn’t end in disaster.
At least… I think.
Somewhere in the blur, I remember turning to those two foreign bastards—my temporary frisbee disciples—and saying, “Let’s get a beer.”
Because that’s what I do. I drink with enemies. I feed strays. I hand out the last pieces of myself like broken teeth at a bar fight.
I took them to a brewery. Not a real one, mind you. This place was the dying dream of some nerd who should’ve stayed in his mother’s basement.
You could feel it the moment you stepped inside—like a vacuum of personality, a void that stank of spent ambition and amateur yeast. No customers. Just laminated menus, empty chairs, and the smell of peanut butter sandwiches. The kind of place where the owner’s mom still flips grilled cheese behind the counter like it’s a middle school lunch line.
The guy himself? Soft. Face like a sheet of paper. No soul behind the eyes. Just spreadsheets and regrets. The kind of man that makes you want to punch something just to see color again.
But it was the only place open. And we were thirsty.
We ordered our beers. The Scots lit cigarettes—of course they did, it’s what they do. Smoke and mumble and scowl at everything like they were born in the ash of a funeral pyre.
We took our pints outside. Started smoking. I don’t know what we talked about. Probably nothing. Just booze and death and how far we could piss if the wind was right.
Then we heard it.
Voices. Female ones. Laughing, screaming, throwing themselves into the night from an upstairs apartment window like sirens calling out for disaster.
And like any drunk worth his salt, I said, “Let’s go.”
We left the brewery like thieves in the daylight, beers in hand, stupid grins across our faces. Walked over to the complex like we belonged there.
We didn’t.
Knocked on a door. Some kid answered. We walked in—two strangers and one hungover beast. Biggest guys there by a longshot. We looked around, spotted the beer, the half-eaten pizza, the cheap liquor sitting like bait on the counter.
We helped ourselves. Because of course we did.
Chugged their beers. Took a couple of shots from their plastic bottle of diesel-grade whiskey. Took polite nibbles of their pizza and left the crusts behind like cigarette butts.
Didn’t thank them. Didn’t linger. We were too old, too drunk, too restless.
We walked back to the brewery with our glasses empty and our guilt locked deep in the basement.
That’s when the nerd snapped.
He was red-faced, shaking, the kind of angry that only men without testosterone can get—all bark, no bite.
“You can’t just walk off with alcohol! I could lose my liquor license!”
And I lost it.
“Go fuck yourself,” I told him. “You, your mom, your grilled cheese dream.”
I didn’t shout. I sneered. There’s a difference. One is loud. The other stays with you like a nail in the gut.
He just stood there, vibrating with righteous suburban fury. Probably had a Yelp complaint drafted by the time I finished the sentence.
But I didn’t care. I was already burning from the inside out.
I was a fire that never asked to be lit.
By the time I hit Double D’s, the lights in my brain had officially gone out. I’d been drinking all day—no exaggeration, no literary flourish—all day. Blackout territory. The place where memory becomes myth and shame fills in the gaps.
I remember the bar. I remember the name—Double D’s—and the whiskey. Double Pendleton, neat. No ice. Just two fists of gasoline straight to the throat. That’s the last clear thing. After that, I was just a body in motion. A windup toy with no off switch.
I don’t remember who was there. Don’t remember what I said or what I wore or if I wore anything at all. I was drunk the way a man gets when he’s got demons clawing at the inside of his ribcage—drunk like survival.
Somewhere in that blur, my wallet vanished.
It had $1,500 in it. Hard cash. And my driver’s license. A small piece of plastic that pretended I was a real adult with responsibilities and a right to be behind the wheel.
Now here’s the riddle: I still had my keys. I had my phone. They were sitting in my truck like loyal dogs waiting for me to remember their names. But the wallet? Gone. Like dignity at a bachelor party.
So I went back to Amalia’s—my restaurant, my version of church—and started asking questions.
Nobody had answers. Just eyebrows raised and heads shaking.
“James, man… you were on the prowl last night,” someone said.
“You were everywhere,” another added.
Everywhere and nowhere. That’s how it felt.
Then the call came.
The owner of Double D’s. Said he recognized me from a photo. My wallet had been found in the bathroom. Everything was intact except for the $1,500.
Of course.
The money always leaves first.
But how did my wallet get there while my keys were in my truck and my phone was nestled like a drunk baby on the passenger seat? I must’ve gone back. Or someone took pity and returned the pieces I left behind. Or maybe I wandered in barefoot and half-naked, muttering about Jesus and whiskey and the fall of Western civilization.
All I know is—I ended up walking home alone.
Stripped down.
Naked.
Laid my drunk, broken body on a perfectly clean bed… and soaked it. Again.
My urine, my signature. The only honest thing I leave behind in this world.
And while I was drowning in my own filth, poor Will was getting his own chapter of hell.
See, after golf, his wife had thrown a surprise birthday party. They were all there. The kids, the gifts, the favorite food, the cake with his name on it in frosting.
But Will didn’t show.
Not right away.
She found him hours later, passed out behind some dive, his pants sold to the night, eyes rolled back, dead weight in the passenger seat. They had to carry him in like a corpse.
He never made it to the party.
His kids cried. His wife screamed. And that was that.
I tell you this not to justify what happened to Will. Not to explain why he’s divorced now, or why I haven’t seen him since. I tell you because that night—that night—wasn’t special.
It was just Thursday.
That was life back then. Burn it all down and piss on the ashes. People tried to help. Interventions. Sit-downs. Teary eyes. Even the restaurant staff staged one. Told me I couldn’t drink at my own bar. Said I was too wild for my age, for my size, for their comfort.
And they were right.
But fuck it—
It’s one hell of a story.
