You Can Too
It was 9 o’clock on a Saturday night in downtown Deadsville. Mert’s Pizza, where I worked, had closed at eight, leaving its loiterers unmoored and looking for someplace to be or something to do. Any place. Any thing. But for the last hour nothing had presented itself and so there we sat – me, Gene, and Stan – on the doorstep of the closed pizza place. In one hour we had gravitated no more than one foot from door.
Downtown Deadsville was never a hopping place. The only time the word “teaming” was used in reference to our town was when a local farmer drove his team of oxen through for a parade. But this night was especially quiet. The bar had closed at its customary time of 8 pm, leaving just the country store as any potential draw of people into town. They had seen scarcely a soul and were already mopping up so as to be out the door not a second after 10 o’clock.
While we sat there, pondering the deep questions of life that arise when you have nothing better to do, a pick-up truck pulled up in front. The turquoise colored pick-up was a highly modified, mobile party machine with a custom wooden truck bed outfitted with rear-facing bucket seats, built in cooler, and one of those cassette stereos that you could hear two towns away. It was piloted by Peter, whose father owned the only gas station/ garage in town. It was good to know Peter because he always had a key to the gas station’s beer cooler for late night beer runs. Or if you got drunk and drove your car off the road, Peter could always get the wrecker and with luck, get you hauled away to the garage before the cops even noticed. And although he was one of the “cool kids”, he was genuinely a nice guy and always friendly to everyone. Even the geeks that hung out in front of Mert’s on a Saturday night.
Apparently Peter was also having a hard time finding fun. So as he pulled up beside us, he held a bottle of Yukon Jack out the window and yelled “You Can! You Can!”. With such a call to action, how could we resist? Before long the four of us were sitting on the sidewalk taking hard hits from the bottle of Jack. We had developed a game where as you drank from the bottle, everyone else chanted, “You can! You can!”. Upon finishing your burning gulp of whiskey, you would exclaim, “You can too!”, passing the bottle to one of the other people in the circle where the process would repeat.
After several rounds of You Can, our powers of observation apparently being enhanced by the process, someone noticed that no traffic had passed by for a very long time. In our lubricated logic, it seemed like a very funny idea to move our little drinking circle from sitting on the sidewalk to standing in the middle of Main Street. So we did. After a few more rounds without traffic interruptions, we decided that sitting seemed like a good idea. So we sat in the middle of the street and continued to drink. Eventually someone remarked that a little campfire would be a nice touch. So we foraged for a few twigs and pieces of paper and made toasty little fire. Still no traffic.
Every ten years or so, the news in Deadsville reports some kids, usually drinking, being hit by a train or car. Once in a while it is a thrill seeking couple having sex on the tracks – the danger making the sex even more exciting. In most cases they are just sitting there, daring the fates to smack them off the face of the earth. It is just boredom that gets people to risk their lives. At some point, any place, any thing, seems better than where you are. Bored. In the dark. In Deadsville.
The woman who closed the country store asked us what kind of idiots we were and told us to get out of the street. We put out the fire and went home.
