Helmeted

Curly was the one motherfucker who could always poison himself with booze more than I could. He is the only person I ever witnessed pouring Scotch on his corn flakes. That takes guts.

Curly started drinking at a young age and was an alcoholic before he got out of junior high. Back before I had even begun to shave, Curly's mom poked her head in his bedroom door when we were unloading several cases of beer for safe keeping through the ground floor window.

One time Curly and I both passed out as we took a shortcut through Linden Field. We woke about noon the next day to find children running and yelling. They paid us no mind. Luckily we had not passed out in the middle of the baseball diamond. It would have taken a very creative umpire to come up with a ground rule for hitting a ball into a passed out drunk's lifeless body.

Curly was my only friend who let me drive his car pissed before I got my own license. "Let Beer drive. If he gets pulled over he doesn't have a license to suspend." I kept it between the ditches for a short distance before everyone realized I was going to kill us all unless I relinquished the steering wheel to a drunk with a license.

Eventually, because Curly kept falling down and hurting his head, we began making him wear a motorcycle helmet when we went out drinking. The motherfucker was going to kill himself. The helmet was not a flimsy lid either. We made him wear a full face ricer helmet. This got him a few weird looks from those who did not know him. People would ask, "How come your buddy is wearing that dumb helmet?" They were told, in hushed tones, that Curly had a rare disease, like the one that afflicted a famous pool player, that required massive amounts of alcohol to keep it from killing him. If it was a pretty gal who did the asking the story would be embellished with a bit about an unwanted side effect of the booze being that Curly had a constant hard on that would not go down under any circumstance. Curly got the odd mercy fuck as a result of that story being particularly well told.

Now Curly is in AA. His group loves it when he tells them about his helmeted days.