George came by the house this morning wanting to borrow twenty more dollars for beer. I lied and told him I didn’t have it. Monday is my grocery buying day and I needed all the money I had. I did have a bottle of wine in my kitchen cabinet and told him he could have it, but I didn’t have a corkscrew to open it.
“I can open it,” George said. “Do you have a screw and a pair of pliers?”
I walked into the garage and got a long wood screw, a screw driver, and a pair of pliers. George screwed that screw deep into the cork and used the pair of pliers to pry the cork out leveraging with the head of the screw and the rim of the bottle.
“I would have never thought of doing that,” I replied as I laughed. “That’s why I have never drunk that wine as I couldn’t open it.”
I gave George a plastic cup and he proceeded to drink the whole bottle in a matter of minutes. The irony of drinking a 1999 vintage merlot from a plastic cup didn’t escape me.
“I am fixing to head down to Ferret’s campsite,” I told him. “You want to come?”
“I’ll give you a ride down there,” George replied.
I was kind of uneasy about riding with George after he had drank that bottle of wine, but said what the hell and got in the car. George cranked it up and we were on our way. George parked at the bank by the railroad tracks and we walked the rest of the way to the river and Ferret’s humble abode.
Ferret was drinking beer and cooking breakfast when we arrived. I noticed he had somehow acquired a propane powered camp stove and was boiling some water.
“What’s for breakfast?” I asked as we walked up.
Ferret pulled a package of Ramen noodles out of his backpack and showed it to me. George then asked Ferret for a beer. Ferret obliged by pulling a Miller High Life out of a case pack in his tent.
“I don’t see how you two can drink warm beer so early in the morning,” I replied forgetting my homeless days.
Ferret and George both laughed. I used to would drink from dawn to dusk to be honest when I was homeless.
We all sat and talked for the longest time as much beer was consumed. The conversation got on the topic of whether black women make better lovers than white women. George vehemently argued with me that black women do indeed make better lovers.
“You’ve been with a black woman once, haven’t you?” Sherman asked remembering a previous similar conversation we had on this subject.
“Yeah, and she wasn’t anything special,” I replied. “Actually, she was rather lame, but I was pretty drunk at the time.”
George scoffed and Ferret laughed.
“You just ain’t been with the right black woman,” George said. “I can hook you up.”
“Yeah, and I will have to pay twenty dollars for it as well,” I replied. “No thanks. I’m not about to pay for pussy.”
Ferret and George grew drunker and drunker until I got tired of their drunken rambling and nonsense. I bid them both farewell and walked on home. I still can’t get over how George opened that bottle of wine. Where there is a will there is a way I guess; a little alcoholic ingenuity.
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