2 September 2002 | Vol. 2, No. 3

When You Got Somebody

by CLINT MEADOWS

Twenty minutes until my brother's wedding and I'm drunk and my mouth is hot and thick with vomit.

I'm in the last of three stalls, kneeling on a bathroom floor carpeted with shreds of warm wet toilet paper and puddles of thick strawberry milk that probably aren't puddles of thick strawberry milk. And the toilet water is staring at me.

My bowtie and vest and white dress shirt are all pink. My knees are wet and smeared with pink and the baby blue sleeves of my jacket are pink. I'm missing one of my gold cufflinks and my right foot is pink and squishes anytime I put weight on it.

I can hear my mom asking me if I'm okay from doorway, asking me if I want someone to take me home, asking me if there's anyone else in there with me to help. I tell her she has a beautiful voice, sounds a little bit like Janis Joplin, and then I tell her that Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970 only sixteen days after Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit.

I tell her heroin is two letters short of hero, then I ask her if Jimi's death puke was pink like mine is now.

It's a nice bathroom that I'm puking in right now. White tiled floors, black marble stalls and walls, chrome sinks and toilets, brass lighting fixtures that look like little starfish, black ceiling fans that would sound like Lego helicopters if Lego helicopters could make noise, paper towel dispensers and hand dryers, and a Monet hanging over each urinal and toilet.

Above my toilet is a chrome-framed replication of The Magpie, and I have the sudden urge to scream until my throat crawls out of my mouth, toting my Adam's apple as a bludgeon to smash that pretty little building behind those little pretty winter trees into nothing more than a pile of toothpicks, or rocks, or Play Dough, or whatever the hell those syphilis-ridden bastards used to build things back then. Then I ask my mom if she'd be ashamed to piss in front of La Promenade, you know, if she could piss standing up and everything, but I don't hear her a