ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 59
Tony thought. You're just out of high school, and you have a full ice chest
of beer, and the skies are all sunny all day, and you're with good friends,
perhaps your ONLY friends, it seems like life is worth living and a good buzz
is a terrible thing to waste. Time flies when you're getting screwed up on
cheap beer and good smoke, and soon it's later than you know. That tends to
happen when you're soaking up the sun's rays, finishing your fifth (sixth?
eleventh?) beer, watching rafts float peacefully down the river, feeling darn
happy to be alive.
Tony fell asleep on a rock, only to wake up nearly two hours later,
quite sunburned, quite alone. Looking into the sky, he pondered aloud,
"Jeez, it must be close to five. Where are those guys?"
Passing out, waking up alone; that was no new feeling to Tony, as
Larry and Pat were often prone to just let him sleep while they tuned their
thoughts to more constructive practices, such as making the necessary beer
run, or the mandatory burger run. After all, a good buzz requires fuel.
Now Tony is aware ofhow hot the sun has made his sleeping body, and
besides thinking about whether they'll get his with cheese or not, he can only
think of how nice it would be to plunge into the river's depths, to experience
the other kind of liquid refreshment. Without thinking twice, he finds
himself poised gracefully, gratefully, on the rock, arms outstretched, and
. lunges out into space in a spectacular swan dive. Maybe he is still not quite
awake, maybe the day's indulgences ofbeer and weed have affected his brain,
maybe his subconscious, in a suicidal fit, a fancy, contrives the whole thing,
but he just doesn't see the looming shadow of the rock (Funny, he thinks in
that tiny milisecond, after all these years on the river, the countless
successful dives from this very cliff, who would've thought ... ), doesn't see the
submerged rock waiting silently, patiently below the surface .... CRACK!
Tony, the river's own child, comes down with a graceful violence, head
first, thoughtlessly shattering his spine, snapping his neck, ending his life.
Tony floats gently in time with the current, in the arms of his true
love, forevermore to know the bliss of oblivion that he, in the throes of
alcoholic inebriation, has come only close to attaining before.
Pat and Larry now stride back to the cliff, noticeably drunk, well-fed
on convenience.
Larry lets out a stillness-shattering belch, opens a beer, and opens his
big fat ugly mouth: "Where the hell is that boy off to? Leave 'im for an hour
and he's good as gone."
"He's probably indulging in the finer art of female correspondence."
"Is that what you call it, Pat? Anyway, he's probably niding behind
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