I had just reached the crest of the hill on Kiwanis Avenue when my baby-shit brown 1980 Chevy Citation finally gave up the ghost. It left this world quite disgracefully, sputtering violently and belching thick clouds of poisonous black smoke. I was ashamed to witness the machine’s pitiful death rattle. I had hoped it would end exploding in a fireball at the bottom of a cliff with me behind the wheel. I had hoped it would show a little class. The car wasn’t just my transportation. It was my livelihood. There are not a lot of successful pizza delivery personnel in this town who do their job on foot. One prerequisite for my job was a dependable vehicle. Now all I had left was my winning personality. I leaned over to the glove compartment, pulled out the title, took a pen out of my pocket and wrote, “Abandoned. Help yourself,” and stuck the paper underneath the windshield wiper. I threw the keys on the floor, put on a pair of cheap sunglasses to cut down the glare of the hot sun and started the long walk home. About three blocks into my trek I decided to take a shortcut through a neighborhood of large homes owned mainly by plastic surgeons, car dealers and divorce attorneys. I looked out of place in a t-shirt, baggy shorts and a pair of canvas sneakers, sweating like a butcher in the 100 degree heat. When I was younger, the progeny of car salesman and shysters used to give good parties. While the parents went skiing at Aspen, their misguided children would open the doors to the rabble, and we came in droves to drain their liquor cabinets and smoke their dope. Now I couldn’t buy an invitation to one of those homes, not even if I had a firstborn to trade. I walked past Joe Cole’s parents house. His dad was a coroner of some kind. At one of his parties Billy Stevens passed out after guzzling 20 shots of Southern Comfort. While he was under, some prankster shoved a empty pony bottle up his ass. After two weeks without a bowel movement, Billy went to the doctor. It only took a routine exam do determine there was an unnatural obstruction and it took a battery of lubrication, prying and laxatives to dislodge the bottle. Rumor had it that the pressure was so great behind the bottle it shot across the room, over the doctor’s shoulder and shattered against the wall. Following the launch of the projectile, Billy proceeded to throw his hat in the ring for most copious bowel movement in Western history. The nurse in attendance, apparently new to the job, lost her lunch right on the spot. She tried to escape the stench but slipped in Billy’s mess and fell on some broken glass. After a few stitches and a tetanus shot, she quit nursing for good. The following weekend, Billy found out who pulled the prank and tried to return the favor, except he used a 40 oz. Colt .45 bottle. While trying to insert the object, his victim woke up and beat him so badly that to this day one of his eyes is a little crossed. I guess the guy didn’t even remember violating Billy with the bottle, and didn’t believe it when people insisted he was the culprit. Last I heard Billy was working in his own mobile maid service. He makes 15 dollars an hour cleaning other people’s homes. As I approached the next block a police cruiser passed me slowly. The cop in the passenger’s seat took a long look at me, but didn’t stop. Suddenly the car accelerated and disappeared behind around the curve. My feet ached. My canvas sneakers weren’t made for walking. They weren't made for much of anything except to connive twenty bucks out of my pocket for 55 cents of rubber and cheap cloth. Paste my picture up high on the wall at the Sucker Hall of Fame. As I rounded the corner, I saw the two cops were talking to a man in a ragged coat holding two plastic garbage bags. Behind the man was a tall iron gate with two angels mounted high on either side. The gate was ajar and inside it behind a short hedge were a pair of green dumpsters. The guy must have been diving for aluminum cans. The residents, fearing for their lives, called the authorities. Apparently the guardian angels on the gate were not enough security for the owners of the house. As I got closer the cops pinned the man against the car, pulled his arms behind his back and handcuffed him. They recited his rights and stuck him in the back of the cruiser. As I walked by the car I heard the man screaming, “But what about my dog! You pricks, who’s gonna take care of my dog!” As they pulled away a skinny yellow dog trotted out of the bushes and followed the car for about half a block. Then it veered to the right, turned around and walked toward me, tongue nearly dangling to the ground. The animal walked by my side for a few yards then smelled my ass. Apparently he got a whiff of something he didn’t like and started trotting in the other direction. Everyone’s a critic. Toward the end of the neighborhood, I passed Melanie Donaldson’s house, or at least where she spent her summers home from college. We saw each other for a couple months. While we were dating we spent almost all our time together doing whatever we wanted, and paid for the lark with her father’s credit card. It all came to a screeching halt when she said I drank too much. “I don’t think you drink enough,” I retorted. With wit like that, I thought, I should go on the road, maybe even get a sitcom. “You,” she insisted, “are a hopeless alcoholic. Maybe you should get some treatment. Lot’s of people have done it.” “Sure,” I said. “And they replace the booze with something else to fill the bottomless holes in their souls. Some plug up the emptiness with religion, some with exercise, and others with money, sex or self-righteous rage. Or they just become boring. Anyway they become people I don’t want anything to do with.” I walked to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a huge glass of what I knew was my last free liquor from that particular source. In the following week she met up with a cokehead from Sacramento, California. Melanie has been in treatment twice since we stopped seeing each other. I have yet to make that trip. I entered a working class neighborhood and immediately noticed the change. First of all there was noise, children playing in the yards, some screaming women and yelling men. Secondly there was the smell of charcoal burning, people cooking their meals outdoors. I turned the corner and started on the long straight drag to my room. I was soaked with sweat and I had worn holes in my shoes. And I still had 25 blocks to go. It was nearly dark when I reached my door. I was relieved to be home, and actually more relieved to be once again unemployed. Holding down a job is for losers, I thought. Jerks, assholes, flunkies... people too weak to buck the system, sissies who played the game because they had no imagination or intelligence. I was dead tired, but I felt much more alive than I did before the Citation broke down. I turned the knob on the door. It was locked. I checked my pockets for the key and remembered I threw it in the front seat when I abandoned the car. I went out to the bushes to look for a key I concealed for just such an event. All I found was a half-empty half-gallon of Old Thompson someone hid in the bushes. “Half-empty,” I muttered to myself. I unscrewed the cap and took a drink. It was still hot from a day in the summer heat. “Hell, I’m an optimist,” I said. I took another drink. “If it was a fifth, my cup would runneth over,” I said. Nobody heard me. I didn’t bother to repeat the statement.