MY LAST DRINK

At the social gathering people ate sliced carrots, while other people shook their stuff as Marvin Gaye got it on. Some people in the basement, standing in a circle, passed a joint around. Upstairs the photo album’s pages fanned the lips of its onlooker as I diverted my attention from there to the loosely laid cord coming from the electrical outlet. I eyed the cord to the amplifier as I spoke with a man about this and that and other stuff. My this or that or other stuff were apparently interesting; this man, in the midst of kissing his cup, stopped. What compelled this man to hold the cup and its apparent alcoholic contents an inch from his lips as he stared at my brown face, trapped in the suspense? I don’t know—I forgot cause a friend came from behind—interrupting my conversation—wrapped her arms around me neck, as though she was going to put me in the full nelson. She was drunk, cordially—joyfully. Beer in left hand below my shirt collar, she began laughing. 

In a drunken slur, into my right ear she said, “Oh, I got a joke for you; this gone make you funny. You know that Freudian Slip poetry had actually—” 

She had stopped suddenly, as if putting on the emergency break before racing through a red light. A distant voice had laughed then said her name. She jerked, undoing the full nelson, to see what was funny. Had she been the butt of somebody’s joke or was someone simply pleading with her to race over and hear this new funny, newer than the one she’d planned to tell me. I’d like to know what was so funny because with that joke and jerk and the undoing of the full nelson a droplet or two of beer in her left hand slept onto my tongue—four years and three longs months after my last taste.