I spent yesterday working in Birmingham. After getting up at 4am, driving all day, making calls and then driving to Ft. Payne, AL all I wanted was to relax. I first had some clerical work to do, emails to send and a 22-minute heart to heart with the treadmill. After that I made my way to the Santa Fe Cattle Co for a double whiskey on the rocks and a steak. Seems harmless enough, right? (Buzzer sounding) Wrong! First and foremost; I like to sit at the bar. You get quicker service, there's always a TV on and you're that much closer to the booze. But not here. The bartender here sucks. He's unfriendly and makes a shitty drink. Plus his name's Lamar. How many white dudes do you know named Lamar? About as many black guys you know named Chad. So right off the bat, Lamar is not my personal favorite. But seeing as I'm in Ft. Payne I either eat here or the Captain D's down the street. These are my only options. Tonight Lamar is in rare form. The 'double' he poured me had as much alcohol as a Smirnoff Ice and it takes him 10 minutes to me bring peanuts . Then stumble in quite possibly the two drunkest men in the state. The one guy is about 30, the other 55. The begin to tell me that they are stuck in Ft. Payne for the night because their car broke down. They were traveling through the mountains when the thing crapped out on them. I apologize for their troubles and go back to my meal. But these two are dead set on telling me their life story. As the story progresses (and they continue to down LIT's) details of their "car breakdown" begin to emerge. Apparently the older gentleman had just been sprung from prison on a 5 year bid for meth manufacturing. The younger gentlemen picked him up from jail...on get this...his motorcycle. As they drove down Lookout Mountain said motorcycle ran out of gas. And seeing as they had no money (Assuming b/c they had no meth to sell) they decided to walk into Ft. Payne to crash for the night. Call me crazy, but I believe a tank of gas for a Harley is quite a bit cheaper then a hotel room and 17 Long Island Teas. But hey I got a D in Calculus at Tennessee. At this point these two are falling all over themselves and I'm cashed out of my bar tab. Time to take it to the hotel and watch ESPN. That's when the 55 year old, former meth kingpin turns to me and asks if I'd be interested in sleeping with one of his "girls" out on the patio (habitually chain smoking). Between the three women there were a total of 5 legs and 24 teeth, so I took a rain check. Lord knows what happened to those two last night, but my money is on the two of them pushing that bike down I-59S as we speak with splitting hangovers.
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