drunks should not have pointy objects

I'm at 1020 on Saturday night with a not-so-motley gaggle of Zetes, dates, and friends, deriving from various places: there was evidently an expedition north from apartments far downtown to the old stomping grounds at the 72d Street Dallas Barbeque, including Jide, Aaron, Tim & Grace, and Tyrone and his ex; Chucky & Rosy appeared from a barbeque of some sort in New Jersey (interesting cosmic convergence, that), and I wandered over from the house. The group had originally been stationed at Nacho's Kitchen (the latest incarnation of the restaurant formerly known as Nacho Mama's) in solidarity with Baird, who is tending bar there to a nearly empty establishment; our group constituted roughly two-thirds of his trade while I'm there.

But we're all hardcore 1020ers, and eventually a sense of longing for our true home overcomes bonhomie. Naturally the darts come out, since most of us are fairly good at it, and a mostly empty 1020 bodes well for dart-playing: no oblivious drunkards staggering around in front of shots, nearly getting their eye put out, as your mother would have warned you. It is amazing that I only now discover that Tyrone and I have exactly the same dart case, though his is evidently the original; I have unwittingly rendered him the sincerest form of flattery. As intoxication progresses apace, we manage to mix them up several times, though we have rather distinct darts (mine are tapered to the front, twenty-four ounces, with a black and silver stripe motif), so the precious cargo itself is not mistaken.

Eventually, as I'm staggering home, Tyrone's ex-girlfriend calls me back when I'm already half a block away. Dubious, I'm not turning back, until she screams more pleadingly that it's urgent. I trudge back in the brutally humid night, only to discover that her “urgent” message is that she needs a cigarette. Stupefied into muteness by the sheer temerity of the ho, I am beginning to turn and walk away when her grabby hand snakes out, snags my pack from my pocket, extracts several stoges, and tosses them back to me without so much as a thanks. I should point out that at this stage, I don't even know who she is, and as I struggle for some kind of appropriate response, she replies, “I'm Laura. You should really know that.” It all comes back to me: she's the One-Legged Hippo that people were always talking about! I suppose I must have met her at some point, since she seems to know me, but I never put this girl and the legend of the Hippo together. (The link is not to the legend of this Hippo, but rather to the Hutto Hippo. They seem to share a great deal in common, since the Hutto variety is described as both “belligerent” and “ferocious”, which is just about right.) She has a prosthetic leg, which many people over the years have perhaps only partly jokingly suggested they'd like to rip off, and with which beat her senseless. This is not a derogatory remark about the disabled. It's a derogatory remark about her.

My hand is closing convulsively over my darts in my pocket, and I'm seized with a sudden mad impulse to stab her with one, or perhaps all three. Fortunately, being a sane man even when so deeply in my cups and provoked by so uppity a source—and wanting to avoid being aprehended for felony assault, which would preclude a career in law—the moment passes and I walk off. But think of what harm a man with less self-control in an equal state of pique and inebriety might have done. The lesson: drunks should not have pointy objects.