(Click on the Drunkard to Read Sully's Account of "XXXNapa")
(Click on the Drunkard to Read Sully's Account of "XXXNapa")
From: xxxjoel
To: Sully, Sondra
Foreword:
[No] thanks to a bad batch of mood stabilizers (and one 12-pack too many), this tale was posted last month to alt.binaries.pictures.squick, not ADB. I was beginning to wonder why I was getting so many e-mails about some kinda off-topic post or whatever. An Amitriptyline binge (combined with Jose Cuervo) has allowed me to resolve the mistake and correct the mix-up. Sorry about the mix-up.
St. Patty's Day is an interesting occasion for many pseudo-drunkards, not unlike New Year's Eve, when the entire world has an annual "amateur night" and everyone pretends as if s/he actually knows how to swill copious amounts of booze and perpetrate the existence of a wild drunkard, if only for an evening. Additionally, St. Patty's Day was a particularly special occasion for me because it marked the anniversary of when I ran for mayor in Norman, Oklahoma five years ago. But that's an entirely different drunken tale about which you can read later if you so desire. By the way, I placed fourth of the five candidates in that election. It's scary to think that I actually beat some other asshole in the election! Long live the great American protest vote and those who capture it!
I awoke a couple of hours before Sondra and began drinking Guinness in preparation for the roadtrip to Napa. There's nothing much to report of those two fateful hours except a minor fracas involving the hot- and cold-water knobs in the shower and how they'd been mysteriously switched the night previous as I slept. While I pounded the stainless steel knobs and screamed obscenities at full volume, Sondra got up and phoned Sully to inform him we were running a wee bit late and that we'd be there after I finished battling the opposition of the shower and was able to be resigned to remain peacefully sitting in the passenger seat of her car.
I finished waging my assault on the amenities and got dressed while Sondra showered.
We hit the road in the predawn hours a little after noon in search of the Mad Brewers' Compound. We left San Francisco and crossed the Golden [Bill] Gates Bridge (which, incidentally, is actually more the bright burnt amberish color not unlike two-hours-old blood coagulating on the pavement) and continued traveling northward towards Napa.
NAPA VALLEY, CA
We stopped at the entrance to the compound, where we passed the preliminary checkpoint with relative ease, considering I was still buzzing heavily and was screaming to the well-mannered (and well-armed) guard about how we had "guns, booze and Odwalla juice and know how to use em!" The guard grimaced, opened the electric razor-wired chain-link fence and motioned us through the gate.
Sondra sped up the access road and brought the car to a halt, or so I thought, and I jumped out. The ground must have shifted without my knowledge, because I vaguely recall my mid-torso connecting with the earth at a rate of speed more accelerated than that with which I'm typically comfortable. I picked myself up from the dirt, brushed myself off, looked up and was greeted by the Mad Brewer himself, Sully. He held a .357 in his right hand and a flask-sized bottle of Jim Beam green label in the other. A seemingly malevolent smile crossed his reddened face. I remember taking a full appreciation of Sully's style, so long as I was to receive something from his left hand and not the other. That was one of my two sole stipulations for the visit: One, I wanted to get drunk, and two, I didn't want to be shot at. Call me a whiner or whatever.
Sully holstered his firearm, extended the bottle and approached.
"You must be XXXJoel," Sully said.We shook hands and the bottle found its way into my left hand and, more importantly, the bottle's contents found their way into my mouth. I'd dropped my Booza-cola [tm me] somewhere en route between the passenger seat and the dirt; the cheap whisky was a welcome relief compared to the gritty taste of the earth I'd suddenly acquired. I took a hearty swig from the bottle and almost gagged."Yeah, I think so," I acknowledged and added, "Nice to meet you."
"You look like hammered shit," Sully said. "But I expected absolutely nothing less. You still drunk from yesterday?"I'm a dropout of Slutboy's School-o-Goth Fashion, and was semi-well-dressed for the occasion: black clothes with a black leather jacket, black heart and soul, et ceterola. Sondra, however, was ready for a sunny day at the beach and when a light drizzle ensued our arrival, she decided to head inside to change out of her short-shorts and chat with Kate for a while. Sully and I opted for a walking tour of the brewers' immediate compound, including (but not limited to) the garage-turned-brewhouse and the underground wine fermentation cellar and armory."Um, yeah, I think so," I said, smiling.
"Ha haa! That's wonderful!," Sully roared. "Come on let's go inside and get you guys some more drinks!"
The brewshack was most impressive-- Sully's setup seemed more than adequate enough to brew upwards of a hundred gallons of beer on any given weekend, which would amount to a wonderfully drunken following weekend once the previous week's product was finished aging and carbonating. The fermentation cellar/armory was also well-stocked and fully prepared for any kind of rural invasion of federal agents or perhaps an assault from a roving tribe of drunkards bent on some kinda rape/pillage/plunder and beer-stealing mission. But getting into the cellar itself was no simple feat. Sully went to great and exhaustive measures to ensure his stash was nothing less than impenetrable.
The entrance to the underground cellar reminded me of the time I was hand-carrying a large envelope containing three and a half million dollars' worth of gold-backed securities bonds across lower Manhattan and had to pass through several metal detectors and electronic identity verifies while trying to get that goddamned envelope to its destination. Had I known the package I was holding could have been instantly converted to U.S. legal tender, I would have jumped in a cab and headed straight from the nearest airport; next stop: Mexico, adios Los Estados Unidos. But at the time I wasn't curious enough to open the envelope and have a peek inside before handing the parcel to the corporate executive (aka piece of excrement) to whom it was addressed, so I blew that one, as far as I'm (not) concerned.
Sully asked me to stand back a couple of feet while he pressed his face against the apparatus that housed the retinal scanner to the vault's lock. The scanner would determine that he was the sole person authorized access the lock and, more importantly, the storage cellar's valuable contents.
I took a few steps back, Sully's (somewhat bloodshot) retinas were optically verified and the massive electronic door locks were withdrawn. Sully closed the housing to the scanner, replaced the padlock and began tugging on the huge steel door's handle.
"You need some help with that, Sully?" I asked.I gained yet another appreciation then and there for Sully and his passion for brewing. Not only was his wine caller more carefully guarded than most homes in Beverly Hills, he was the sole proprietor of the stash. After a minute of muscling with the door, Sully swung it open and we entered the underground cache."Back the fuck up, lightweight!" Sully commanded. "I've opened this door by myself a thousand times and today's gonna prove no exception."
The air inside the dark cellar was musty and thick. I stood beside the entrance as my eyes adjusted to the dim light and tried to determine what lay before me. My alcohol-constricted pupils finished their requisite dilation and allowed for a look around; I squinted to determine the room's contents. About fifty feet ahead of me was a series of fermentation casks and other assorted five-gallon tanks. To the immediate left, a row of about five shotguns stood guard, ready to punch a lethal hole in anything or anyone who dared get in the way. I nervously cracked a joke about the wine casks containing Amontillado; Sully looked back at me, then to the brick wall behind the shotguns and smiled.
Oh shit, I thought, did Sondra or I bother to tell anyone where we were going before leaving for Napa? I'd best be on my version of good behavior for the remainder-o-the visit.
"Goddamn!," I said. "Your setup here is great! Look at all this! You've got booze, guns, more booze and even more guns!" I picked up the first shotgun from the vertical rack and held it horizontally at my side.The deafening BOOM! and recoil almost knocked the weapon from my loose grip. Jesus christ! The gun was loaded, a shell chambered and there was no safety switch of which to speak. No sooner were the words off of Sully's lips then I'd discharged the gun and taken a two-foot chunk of cement out of the cinderblock wall to the left. A small cloud of spent gunpowder and an even larger cloud of cement dust drifted through the damp underground air."Be careful, goddamnit, Sully screamed. "Those guns are--"
I looked up at Sully with a panicked expression not unlike some drunken moron asking, "Did I do that?" Sully, who'd instinctively withdrawn the Magnum from his holster and trained the barrel towards the source of the commotion, re-holstered his handgun, walked back to me and pulled the 20-gauge from my hands.
"I think we'll be a lot better off without any gunplay down here," Sully said. "Okay?"Good behavior, goddamnit, good behavior, I repeated to myself."Um, okay," I said and added, "Sorry about that."
"No problem," Sully assured me. "The walls are well-fortified. Hey, at least you weren't pointing that fuckin' thing at me, right?"
"Right."
How fuckin' typical of me. I suppose things could have been worse and I envisioned the write-up: Joel visits Sully in Napa, accidentally shoots the Mad Brewer himself in the ass with one of his own guns, the remainder of the visit is spent in the emergency room while Joel swills cheap wine and cons the nurses into giving him handfuls of prescription pills while Sully's having the buckshot removed from aforementioned ass...
Two seconds later, Kate and Sondra began banging on the cellar door, shouting something about what the hell's going on down there, blah blah blah. Sully ejected the spent shell from the shotgun and with a swift thrust of the pump action, chambered another live round. He set the gun back onto the rack and went to the cellar door. He pushed the door open and Kate stepped into the cellar's entrance. Sondra followed closely behind.
"Is everything okay down here? What's going on?" she demanded.Sondra glared at me, turned around and led Kate from the cellar's entrance."Oh nothing, dear," Sully lied. "Joel and I were having a taste of batch 405 and one of the casks shifted, that's all."
"Um, yeah," I falsely agreed. "What Sully said."
"Well, where'd all this smoke come from?" Sondra asked.
"Camel Filters, of course, I offered. "Ya can't enjoy a good vat of wine without a decent cigarette, right?""That's not cigarette smoke," Sondra alleged. "It smells more like cement or something."
"Naw, it's one of those special edition Kamel Reds," I lied. "Sondra, you don't smoke and are therefore and by default immediately disqualified from establishing any relevant or predisposed observations of or related to any particular brand or blend of smoke produced from the smoking of the cigarette in question, that's all."
"You ever take law classes?," Sully asked.We entered the main house, poured a couple of large beers from Sully's second refrigerator-turned-beer tap and then headed outside for a closer walking tour of the immediate vicinity of the compound."Naw, but I've picked up bits and pieces, here and there, from my own attorneys," I said.
"Not too bad at all," he laughed. "Let's go drink."
"Sounds like a noble idea to me, counselor. No objection here."
We visited the westward food gardens where the Mad Brewers' could produce month's worth of food in the event of a Waco-style government siege and chatted about various drunken-this and drunken-that. We were accompanied by Sully's two well-trained attack dogs, whose names escape me at this writing, though I think their names were something along the lines of PipeBomb and CrackWar. They're each a mixed breed of half Irish Setter and Rottweiler, so I hypothesized they'd be the kind of dogs that'd tear someone to shreds and then go out drinking afterwards. [Nice doggies, nice doggies. Uncle Joel poses absolutely no threat, whatsoever!]
Since Sully and I both have varying degrees of training in criminal law (his is from the formal aspects of the classroom and practiced in the courtroom, whereas mine is exclusively from the in-court perspective of the defendant), we discussed the finer intricacies of the United States legal system, specifically the Fourth Amendment* and the Second Amendment-- the right to keep, bear, and discharge firearms. Additionally, if I were to specialize in law, I'd lean towards the First Amendment and how it directs that schoolchildren shouldn't be exposed to the "Cable in the Classroom" corporate marketing ploy. I'd not allow CNN and its money-grubbing affiliates to brainwash our nation's youth unless there existed the opportunity for an equal timeshare for similar but distinctively alternate programming, specifically the Playboy Channel in the classroom.
[* 4th Amendment-- search and seizure. You fucks should knows these!]
Sully and I fetched the wimmins and the four of us headed off to some of the local vineyards for a series of wine-tasting expeditions. Sully declined his jack-booted security detail's offer of an armed escort to each of the stops, as we were "armed to the teeth with our wits and our wives," as he put it. Hmm, well at least Sully was, on both accounts. I, however, made sure I had my (forged) Federal Marshal identification card in my wallet.
I don't specifically recall anything out of ordinary happening, with the exception of my pissing in one of the wineries' fountains, kicking the hell out of giant cask of wine in an attempt to break it and unleash about 300 hundred gallons of aging wine, and then later threatening to shoot a waitress who said I was getting, "sloppy and that I shouldn't gulp champagne like it was beer." Still, the people in general at the wineries seemed nice enough, despite their occasional stares at our group, specifically me, when I began loudly commenting that one of the female wine servers had, "the nicest set of chubby pups I've seen in ten minutes," and would she "like to sit on my lap and feed me more of the sauSe?" Some people have absolutely no fuckin' sense of humor.
Four hours, several stops to various wineries, nine piss breaks, zero assaults/arrests, countless tasteless comments and a few sets of stolen wines glasses later, our group found itself drunk and standing in the rain trying to determine where to go next. We were prepared to flip a coin to determine who'd be the designated driver, but instead decided to head back to the Mad Brewers' compound to resume some relatively safer drinking in a less hostile environment. The four of us piled into Sondra's car and the driver (whomever it was...it wasn't me, was it?) gunned the engine, spun the tires and raced back towards the compound.
The daytime soon turned to dusk and we decided to start dinner. One thing I learned while visiting the Mad Brewers' compound is that eating while drinking amounts to a lot more time to drink, as the food one ingests serves to absorb some of the alcohol in a person's system and greatly reduces the opportunity for blackouts, violence and the likelihood of arrests.
A thick drizzle drifted downward from the nighttime sky, but Sully had little trouble lighting the grill (thank you, unleaded gasoline!) and slapping some wonderful and tasty meat onto the heated, parallel metallic bars while Kate and Sondra prepared the secondary courses and supplementary foods inside.
At the dinner table (yes, I've actually heard of such a thing), we continued our discussion of the various aspects related to being drunken bastards and exchanged a few sordid tales of drunken behavior. Halfway though the meal, we decided that we'd really need to swill a lot of alcohol and look through my little black book of DBs to harass over the phone. Time zones? We don't heed to no fuckin' time zones! Besides, it was the eve of St. Patrick's Day and if those bastards weren't awake and preparing for the holiday, we rationalized, we'd best wake them and command em to do.
We finished eating and retired to Sully's office to begin dialing. Kate had to be at work early the following morning and had to retire early, as she was the sole person with an actual and legitimate job to pursue. We bid her a good evening and alleged we'd try to keep the drunken noise to a minimum. I grabbed Sully's phone, withdrew the address book from my jacket and began turning the pages. To the best of my recollection for the remainder of the night, we snared a few DBs at various times of the night, including but not limited to: BigBrad, right before he was about to pass out at three in the morning; Tory VonderHaar, who I drunkenly pissed off when I said I was Dr. Grogan calling from a local hospital and said we had recently admitted Pete for excessive alcohol consumption or something like that; and a few others who I can't recall right now.
My memory for the rest of the evening is hazy as best, so I'll assume that after we each started nodding off in the parlor while listening to Dread Zeppelin (complete with my man TortElvis on vox), we decided to call it a night before everyone wound up passing out on the couches and floor. The gin I'd been gulping (at least I think it was gin) was efficiently attacking my head and a recall flopping down on the bed and having Sondra curse at me while removing my boots and then jeans, heh heh.
Sondra and I awoke the next morning, actually afternoon, and checked our bodies for any new scrapes, scabs, nipple rings or anything of the like. Nope. Everything seemed intact and non-punctured. Sully was already awake and was anticipating delivery of some office equipment while returning work-related phone calls, playing on his computer and drinking green beer. It was finally St. Patrick's Day, and we'd survived the night previous to enjoy some green beer for breakfast.
If there's ever another draft here in the U.S. and those weirdos in the military actually want a freak like me in their military, I know where I'm heading: straight to the Mad Brewers' Compound. If nothing else, I'll be safe as hell down there in Sully's underground fermentation room. Keep those gauges loaded, Sully!
Cheers,
JOEL
Call the 24-hour burp line! 405.842.0794
