Winger

because I felt like he was sticking up for me.

Chas and Kevin had already opened their beers and were drinking before the first deal, and Joey took the beer he’d offered me and popped it open for himself. Then Chas reached across our little poker circle and grabbed a can of beer away from Joey’s arrangement, pulled the tab forward so I could hear and smell that beer trying to find a way out of the can, and placed it on the floor beside my knee.

“It’s time for you to lose your beer virginity, Winger,” he said. Then he raised his can to the center and said, “Cheers.”

And we all tapped cans. Six eyes watched me, and I closed mine as tight as I could and took my first-ever swallow of beer.

As Chas began dealing the cards out, all these things kind of occurred to me at once:

1. The taste. Who ever drinks this piss when they’re thirsty? Are you kidding me? Seriously . . . you’ve got to be kidding.

2. Little bit of vomit in the back of my throat. It gets into my nasal passages. It burns like hell, and now everything also smells exactly like barf. Nice. Real nice.

3. I am really scared. I am convinced something horrible is going to happen to me now. I picture my mom and dad and Annie (she is so smoking hot in black) at my funeral.

4. Mom and Dad? I feel so terrible that I let them down and became a dead virgin alcoholic at fourteen.

5. For some reason, Chas, Joey, and Kevin are all looking at me and laughing as quietly as they can manage.

6. Woo-hoo! Chas dealt me pocket Jacks.

An hour later, I had finished an entire beer. I needed to pee so bad, there were tears pooling in my eyes. I forgot what my home phone number was—I don’t know why it mattered, I don’t even know why I silently asked myself the question Hey, Ryan Dean West . . . what’s your home phone number?, but I was emotionally devastated, crushed, that I forgot my home phone number—and I was the first player to lose all his chips, too.

By two in the morning, the game was finished. Joey won everyone’s money, which gave him the right to determine the consequence.

Oh, yeah . . . the consequence.

Chapter Eight

THANK GOD IT HAD NOTHING to do with getting naked.

Thank God, again, it had something to do with peeing.

I needed to pee so bad, I sat rocking back and forth in a near-catatonic state, with my hand jammed down between my legs.

Then Joey told me, “Here’s all you gotta do, Ryan Dean. This is an easy one. All you gotta do is go downstairs and take a pee in the downstairs girls’ bathroom.”

“But Mrs. Thinger is down there.”

(I couldn’t remember her name.)

“Singer,” Chas corrected.

I rocked. I thought he was telling me I had to sing, too. Oh, well. I kind of felt like singing.

Yeah, 142 pounds gets pretty stupid when you add twenty-four ounces of beer to it.

“Hey,” I said, continuing my journey into stupidity, “Do any of you guys know my home phone number? I think it’s got a twenty-four in it, too.”

At that moment, I think everything in my universe had a twenty-four in it.

“Come on, retard, before you piss in your pants,” Kevin said, pulling me up by my armpits. It felt like I was standing on ice skates, and I nearly fell down, but Chas was right there behind me, holding me steady.

“Hey, thanks,” I said. “You guys are really awesome.”

I would have shaken hands with them, but I didn’t dare let go of my dick.

They turned out the flashlight and pushed me toward the door.

“You remember what you gotta do?” Chas said.

“Yeah,” I said, confidently. “What?”

“Go pee in the girls’ bathroom downstairs,” Joey reminded.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “And sing, too.”

I don’t know exactly where I got the singing part from, but Chas, Joey, and Kevin weren’t about to stand in the way of my willingness to compound my idiocy.

“Come on,” Chas whispered, pushing me out the door. “And you better do it, ’cause we’re going to be following.”

“You guys are the best,” I said, and they all three whispered “Shhh!” as we made our way down the lightless hall to the stairwell.

And every step I took made me feel like a water balloon filled to the bursting point. I was convinced I would explode in a shower of pee and guts right there on the stairs. It hurt so much to move, but each foot forward brought me closer to relief.

I was sweating like a heroin smuggler at a border crossing when we cracked the door open onto the girl-less girls’ floor. I ice-skated in my socks down the dustless linoleum hallway. It felt nice under my feet, so nice I almost began laughing, but I wasn’t stupid enough to do that, yet. Chas, Joey, and Kevin made their way around the outside of the building. They instructed me to pull open the window once I’d gotten into the bathroom so they could help me get away if I needed to.

And I thought, no wonder I couldn’t remember my home phone number (but it still choked me up, nevertheless), because I drew a mental Ryan Dean West Brain-Capacity-Allocation Pie Chart, and it came out like this:

So there you go. It’s a miracle I didn’t forget to breathe.

I am such a loser.

I found the bathroom. When I got inside and shut the door, I reached over to flick on the lights, but the switch was on the opposite side of the door from the boys’ bathroom, and this gave me time to realize how stupid turning on the lights would actually have been.

But, drunk or not, at least I was smart enough to latch the door behind me.

And then I thought, Wow, this is a really nice bathroom, so clean and spotless, with nice clean curtains hanging across the row of shower stalls. It was so nice, I almost wanted to lie down on the cool, clean floor and take a nap. But I had to pee too bad. So I turned toward the wall opposite the showers and hurriedly unzipped.

The urinals were gone!

Oh, yeah.

So, standing there as I was, pulled halfway out of my pants, made me want to pee even worse. I literally almost began to cry. Then I heard a scraping at the window and ran over and unfastened the catches.

Chas lifted up the window and stuck his head inside.

My pants fell down around my ankles.

I pushed open a stall.

The goddamned toilet seat was down!

Too bad. I couldn’t slow down for such genteel considerations as raising a toilet seat (something for which I hadn’t been yelled at since I was about seven).