Do I even need to say that it has been a slow week? The Wife and I and our friend Glen went to the Castle last Sunday night; we were glad when Glen did not follow through on his threats to invent goth-breakdancing right there on the spot.

And through the rest of the week I worked on my 'zine - which was a fun, obsessive kind of project. I went to Kinko's this morning to print it up but I called the session short when I realized how much it was going to cost to print my ideal circulation of fifty copies. I may need to rethink the design a bit and put out an abbreviated version of the first edition.

Sonya and I, along with David ("Just David!") and, eventually, Shawn went to an honest-to-god triple feature at the drive-in last night - Friday the 13th, The Blair Witch Project and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'd never been to the drive-in before, and it was a hoot - we piled up in the back of my truck, drinking beer and eating snack food. During Rocky we got to throw all the shit - including toilet paper and rice. It was a deeply fulfilling night.

And we went to Elmwood Cemetery today with one of Sonya's coworkers and her husband. Elmwood is old - pre-civil war, anyway - and it was cool to ramble around and check out the statues and what-not. All the Memphis historical heavy hitters are buried there, too. It was a neat way to spend the afternoon.

Here's another piece I wrote for the zine - it's a good story, but I've never found a good place to tell it before. Still, it's time for the truth to come out. Hope you enjoy it.

Sandy's A Bitch

The drive from New Orleans to Conway, Arkansas is not fun. No matter which route you take you're on the road for nine hours of crap. Some of that drive will be spent in Mississippi, too, and thereıs no uglier state than Mississippi.

It was the spring of 1992. We were all college students and we were going back to school at the University of Central Arkansas after a weekend at Mardi Gras. There was me, my Wife, our friend Angie, our friend Jon and Sandy, Jon's girlfriend who had seemed nice enough before the trip but who had turned in to a raving superbitch once we were in the car. Jon was supposed to drive back when we met up at the hotel where our car was parked at midnight. Sandy, though, had been pouring drinks down his throat all day. They were both quite obviously tattered when we found them in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency. Sandy, though, pushed her bitchiness to brand new levels when she kept insisting that Jon (drunk as a wino, remember) should drive. Angie, my Wife and I shouted her down and I drove out of New Orleans. I took a couple of wrong turns but I stuck grimly at it, ignoring Sandyıs drunken insistence that I should turn this way or that way. Finally, I found my way back on to the highway.

"I'm just not going to say anything else if no one is going to listen to me," Sandy pouted from the back seat.

"Thank you, Jesus," I said just as loudly.

A few hours out I switched seats with Angie and let her drive. So Angie and the Wife were in the front seat, buckled in and driving. Me, Jon and Sandy were packed in the back seat - with Jon in the middle to keep the peace. It was two or so in the morning. Everyone except Angie, the driver, went to sleep.

When I awoke we were in an uncontrolled spin, tearing down the middle of a two-lane road. Everything was a spinning blur outside the car. Finally we got close enough to the shoulder and the car went over on the passenger side. It didnıt stop, though, but slid along at a good clip. I was sitting on the passenger side and had the unique experience of seeing grass and dirt pass inches away from my face at sixty miles an hour.

We eventually came to a stop in a ditch, the headlights pointing up drunkenly. We took a head count, found everyone to be pretty much okay and crawled out the driverıs window.

The car (an egg-shaped 1992 Mercury Tracer, hatchback, cherry red) had stopped in a ditch, as I said. Ten feet further along was a concrete culvert where the ditch went under a driveway. Had we hit that the engine would have tried its hardest to go out the hatchback, Iım sure, and it would have tried to take us with it.

We found ourselves in the yard of a white-trash clapboard shack. I knocked on their door and explained the situation. I heard the unmistakable click-click of a shotgun being pumped as a curtain was flicked out of the way. I suppose they wanted to verify that our headlights were, indeed, shining up into the sky.

The cops arrived soon enough. Rather, a cop - a friendly county sheriff who warmed to us considerably when we told him the driver hadn't been drinking down in New Orleans. We were still wearing beads we'd caught at the day's parades. The Wife and Sandy, though, almost got in to it when Sandy told the cop that she'd wanted Jon to drive but we wouldn't let that happen. The Wife thought Sandy was a stupid liar and said as much. The cop didn't have to intervene, exactly, but he did recommend that everyone cool off and find a hotel room. A wrecker came along directly and towed the car to a mechanics. I had the dubious pleasure of riding in the back of the county sheriffıs car - even if he was only dropping us off at the hotel.

The next morning the car was road-worthy (if a little more battered than before) and we made our way home. We let Jon drive while Sandy navigated. We got hopelessly lost. I doubt the Wife, Angie or myself said three words to Sandy. Eventually we made it back to Conway. Iıd missed a midterm. Angie and the Wife had missed work. Jon broke up with Sandy a few weeks later.

Curiously enough, Jon broke up with Sandy over another road trip. Some of us were going to a nearby lake where a friendıs relative owned a house. Jon was invited, Sandy was not. This wasn't an ultimatum or anything for Jon; if he felt like he couldn't go without her he didn't have to go at all and weıd still be friends.

In the car on the way to the lake, he told us about it.

"I just told her I was going to the lake this weekend," he said.

"And what did she say?" I asked.

"She said, 'what about me?'"

"And you said?"

"I said, "you get to stay here.'"

"What did she say to that?"

"She said I needed to figure out who I liked better, my friends or her."

"And?"

"And I'm here, aren't I?"

And as for you, Sandy, wherever you are: you are a royal cunt. If you were on fire I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on you.

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