Free Beer Emergency

Sonja and I were just about out the door on the way to yet another night of roller derby. You might think watching a pack of well built young women in revealing outfits circling a cement track and bashing the fuck out of one another would get as old as watching the Chicago Black Hawks kick the Canucks' sorry Swedish butts - wrong motherfucker! Just as as we were about to lock up the phone rang. I ran inside to get it. When you have parents as old as ours you have to answer the phone every time it rings. You just never know when they are going to have health problems.

"Hello," I said when I picked up the phone.

"Hello to you too Beer. It's your mother."

"Hi mom. Can you make it quick. Sonja and I are on our way out the door to the roller derby."

"Fuck the roller derby. Reggie just brought home 100 cases of beer that fell off the back of the delivery truck. Everybody's coming over."

"Free beer?"

"Free beer. And not that cheap shit you drink."

"We'll be right over."

Nothing gets between me and free beer. Not even half naked roller girls.

The party was well under way by the time we reached mom and Reggie's place.

Reggie was in particularly fine form. "We were beginning to think maybe you were starting to like roller girls more than you like beer," he told me.

"I do like roller girls more than I like beer but I don't like roller girls more than I like free beer!" I advised him.

We raised cold bottles and Reggie shouted, "To the Canucks!" as we our bottles met in a toast to the only thing anybody gives a shit about in this town who does not love roller derby. Our bottles met a little too violently as we toasted however causing both bottles to shatter in a brown fizzy mess that was soon discoloured with Reggie's blood.

"You fucking cut me!"Reggie whooped.

"You made me toast the Canucks!" I whooped back.

My mom came rushing over. "What have you done to my Reggie?" she asked me before she took a real long slug that emptied her bottle. "You're going to have to take him to the hospital. I'm too drunk."

Mom was right. She was drunker than me. Hunky cut the end off a beer case and stuck Reggie's arm in it so he would not bleed all over my car on the way to emergency. Canadian first aid at its finest.

When we reached the emergency ward at the hospital we realized it was going to be a long wait until we saw a doctor. Two dozen other people with bleeding limbs stuck into empty beer cases were ahead of us waiting.

"I should have cut your hand right off," I told Reggie, "then the doctor would have to see you right away."

"I could fake a heart attack," suggested Reggie. Faking a heart attack is the best way to get to the front of an emergency ward line up.

"Go for it," I agreed.

Reggie was being looked at by a team of doctors within minutes. He explained to the the doctors that his heart would probably be fine, "If that motherfucker out in the hallway hadn't tried to cut off my hand with a broken beer bottle."

One of the doctors went out into the hall to look for me but I was long gone. I had only been able to fit four beer into my jacket to take to the hospital and they were empty even though I had to guzzle them down in the can after a rock 'n' roll nurse admonished me for drinking on her ward. I told my mom I would take Reggie to the hospital, not wait around all night for him to get an unneeded heart by-pass and miss out on the first plank of the Anarchist Platform - Free Beer!