Exploits of the Young & Shameless

"...but is it wrong to think oneself a god walking among mere mortals?"

Strange question to be asked while standing in a smoky bathroom queue in northern California, the inflection hanging heavy in the air right in front of my cheap beer buzz grin. I examined her discreetly; her features were aged but I knew she was probably no more than forty, mouth puckered 'round the edges from too many cigarettes, too much sordid head-giving. Eyes of frosted gray glass encircled by crow's feet and bags of swollen purple, caked with drugstore foundation. These eyes I looked into as I smiled sincerely and rolled her question around my intoxicated mind.

"Fuck no, " I finally blurted. "As long's you don' forget to keep it realistic!"

She laughed, burped. I laughed with her. This was great! She looked at me intently then and I noticed the glass had cleared some. Light shone through. I suddenly felt hammered and giddy. My friend Jules was hanging from my arm, talking to some guy taking a piss in the restroom opposite from ours. Some conversation about the sheer luck that our favorite bar has a doorless men's room and a shrill drunken screech that resembled the words "...must be my lucky night!!"

I was laughing way too hard as the ladies room door, which had been holding our drunk asses up, opened suddenly. Jules and I all but fell on top of some poor chick as we came crashing in while simultaneously screaming "Aw fuck!" and "Jaysis Christ!", peals of laugher filling the dark, mirrored bathroom. Jules righted herself as best she could and addressed the line formed outside of it: "Ladies and gentlemen!" She cried with an exaggerated smile. "Good night and good luck!" She punctuated the sentiment by slamming the bathroom door shut. She struggled a bit sliding the lock into place before she turned to me and said "Man, I am wasted!"

It was the last night of the year, almost the morning of a new one. I was feeling pretty optimistic as I squatted over the john, careful to hold my faux fur coat up and out of the way. We were dressed to the nines, so to speak. Each of us wore body-hugging mini dresses of black stretch cotton; Jules' was strapless where mine boasted a plunging V-neck halter top. She had opted to show off her incredibly long, tanned legs with strappy goddess-worthy heels that spiraled up to her knees. Being employed, and therefore inside most days, my tan was a pathetic one - my inspiration to spend countless dollars on Victoria's little secrets.

"Nice stockings, lady!" Jules exclaimed, eyeing my sheer lace-top thigh highs as she pulled a little blue vial of coke out of her furry coat pocket. The coat belonged to me but it looked fantastic on her. Black with a big, fuzzy collar and brassy buttons just beneath the cleavage so that if you positioned it right, your tits looked as though they were just floating there on sheaths of fake animal fur. And Jules could certainly pull it off. I'd always sort of envied this about her, she was so incredibly sensuous. I'd only worn the damn thing twice. The coat I wore, however, was my favorite. Just enough shape to accentuate all the right places. Long and magnificent, the "fur" used was all shades of browns and mochas and caramels. Deep, rich and elegant. The chocolate silk lining inside made for an excellent background to the curves being showcased by my little black dress and the length of my legs seemed doubled thanks to the expensive stockings and my sleek, calf hugging suede stiletto boots. We looked good, I must say. We knew it.

Jules busted out two small piles of blow onto a paper towel laid on the metal vanity surrounding the sink, then produced a small stainless steel straw from between her ample breasts. I giggled as she bent to snort her rail and came back up with her fingers pinching off her nostrils.

"Don' laugh," she said, smiling. "My nose's a pissed at me. I have to coax the shit in'r it just falls out, 'ts a damn pain."

Her words were skewed. I could only imagine what I sounded like. Someone outside yelled for us to hurry the fuck up, made some comment about us taking a shit together which immediately led to an enthusiastic "whoop!" from some other silly bastard. I thought about the woman in the hallway as I took the steel tooter from Jules and looked down at the little mound of white powder. "We're goddesses among mere barflies, Jules." I bent and snorted the shit up.

We'd drank like madwomen that night, driven insane by the powers of Dionysus himself. At the beginning of the evening, we had decided we would start at one end of the downtown strip and work our way up, hitting bar after bar until reaching our final destination - The Club - just before midnight. At our first stop, we'd each enjoyed a handful of picklebacks and a game of pool. At the second we met up with Jules' dealer, chainsmoked cigarettes and pounded three PBRs. By the third, we were lit up like Christmas trees and in desperate need of a toilet, which is how I'd found myself in line having a strange conversation indeed with a very profound bar bunny. After that, we danced our way back out into the night, drunk and high; singing loudly and cackling into the sky, swinging our cigarettes around and joining the chorus of laughter and screams of drunken stupor that seemed to come from all around us; party people crowding sidewalks and yelling "Happy New Year!" at passersby. Wonderful fun.

It was 11:32pm. We were nearing the end of the strip, five bars conquered and totally blitzed, while the streets began to spill over with intoxicated zombies much like ourselves - all of us stumbling and weaving about. Jules and I had stopped to lean up against the window of a lingerie boutique and take it all in, heaving with amusement and attempting to smoke our cigarettes through fits of giggles, when some foul pig of a college student came by and saw us there trying to collect ourselves.

"You ladies wanna see somethin' impressive?" He whipped out his dick and began walking toward Jules saying "Hey baby, how about holding this for a minute?"

Disgusted, Jules flicked her smoke at him and and whacked him upside the head with her purse. The impact made a sickening crack when his head collided with whatever the fuck she had in her little bag, and he quickly dropped to the pavement. We looked at each other with sheer terror on our faces. The kid just lay there, unconscious. I thought I felt my buzz disappear.

"Jules. Oh fuck. Fuck! Is he...well's he fucking breathing or bleeding or...Jules. Jules what the fu-..." I stammered as she sloppily bent to put her fingers on his neck.

"He's fine. He's breathing, got a pulse, all that shit." Then she collapsed into a pile of hilarity on the filthy sidewalk. "His cock's still out!" At this she began laughing even harder, almost maniacally. "His cock's juss....hangin' out!" More guffawing.

I felt my buzz come rushing back. He wasn't dead. I looked around; somehow no one had seemed to witness the assault. We weren't going to jail. Everything was wonderful again. I helped Jules up from the sidewalk as she continued to hoot and holler about the dude's dick being exposed. "Don' know why he'd wanna show off that little thing anyway," I remarked as we made our way to the last scheduled stop on our New Year's bar crawl. " Was 'bout as impressive as a cocktail wienie."

Jules looked at me for a second, quite serious. Then we both burst into another fit of laughter. "Wienie!" She screamed. "Wienie, wienie, wienie!" Some people across the street began to echo her in cheery sing-song fashion and Jules and I rejoiced, proud to be spreading the word.

11:49pm: I held Jules around the waist with one arm as we weaved our way through celebrators on the sidewalk. We drunkenly sang "..two thousand zero zero party over OOPS outta time!" as we floundered on. When we finally arrived at The Club, I walked Jules to the adjoining flowerbed wall so she could sit and collect herself. I plopped down beside her to light a smoke.

"Can I have one'a those, dahling?"

"Sure thing."

I held out my almost empty pack and her fingers faltered as she fished one out. "Damn, I'm drunk...ah!" I watched, amused, as she finally managed to extract a cigarette and light it with her sparkly blue lighter. "Jaysis, I thought I'd never git it." She had adopted a strange sort of accent over the course of the evening. The whiskey shots had brought out all kinds of rare things in her. Usually I was the plastered one.

I laughed and said with my best John Wayne "Well now you gon' buy a liddle lady a drink? My wallet's gettin' slim there, darlin'."

"Can we have martinis, Elle? I do love me a martini, I do."

"Gin or vodka?" I asked.

"Mmm...vodka. S'more respectable like. With three olives, too! Tastes like the ocean." She became quiet and took a few drags of her smoke. "Weird night tonight."

"D'ya think Cock Boy is awake yet?"

She responded with an evil-sounding cackle then cleared her throat and said quietly, "Perhaps yes. Perhaps...no." She giggled softly to herself.

"Whaddya got in there anyway my friend, a fuckin' brick or something?"

She fumbled for a second then unzipped the small leather bag and proceeded to dump the contents on the wall where we sat: lipstick and a small can of aerosol hairspray.

"That's it?!" I asked, incredulous.

She quoted the hairspray ad before she began laughing again. "Small can, powerful stuff." I laughed along with her. "Comes in handy sometimes."

"I gotta get me some, I s'pose. So you gonna buy me a drink or what?"

"Sure!" She thought for a second. "E, can we have martinis and cosmos?"

"We can have it all, lady friend. We're goddesses among mere barflies."