A Night in the Ruts

You won't believe the night I had. Seriously. It's so fucking crazy that it's almost not even possible. Imagine me sitting in my apartment with Gene, my roommate, playing Scrabble for points to see who is going to buy dinner at Maxie's. I'm beating Gene soundly and looking forward to ordering half the damn menu to punish his cheap illiterate ass. I'm going to order appetizers and fried chicken and gumbo and several pints of beer. Plus desert. And coffee. Just as I lay down the tiles to nail Quixotic off of the C in Gene's Socks, the phone rings. It has that indescribable bad news quality, but I answer it anyway, on account of just earning 69 points on my last turn. How could anything go wrong? Easy. The voice on the end is frantic. It's my younger cousin, Myron.

"Frank? Frank? Frank, is that you, Frank? Oh shit, man, I'm in big trouble, Frank. You got to help me."  

Myron is a big-time fuckup, but a pretty decent human being, these two things not being exclusive as I'm sure you know. He developed a pretty bad coke habit in the 90s. It was crazy because he was on the chess team and headed for an Ivy League school to study physics or recombinant gene technology or something. But he fell hard for Cindy Mortellaro, this trashy girl who chain smoked Newports, drove a Camaro, and hung out at the bowling alley. Two months later, Sandy had taken up with Kevin Piworski, a bowler who was supposedly "about to turn pro," and poor Myron was left heartbroken, scoring drugs behind the Armory on Niagara Street. He had cashed in all the Google  stock he had purchased with his Bar Mitzvah money and was living large, but in a bad way. So, after rehab and all the other "interventions," Myron eventually straightened out, made it through college, and fulfilled his destiny as some kind of engineer, designing water pipe systems for cities.  

Sorry cut things off in the middle of the story, but I put a nice olive pizza on the stone in the oven and it's about done. I'll be back tomorrow night...

Frank