Death in Amsterdam

We descended on the town of Fargo; eight men armed with Rum, Beer, Scotch, Whiskey, more Beer and curling brooms. It was another pilgrimage to reclaim what we believed to be rightfully ours.

Naked women and men, then more women cavorted across the screen as I laid down a hand to make fifteen and peg two. Playing as teams, my partner and I lost as the others signaled it was time to go to the bar.

Drunk from a punch in the face by a liquor heavy drink that had been a vague friend of coca cola you find yourself laying down a twenty dollar bill to buy a round for your friends and yourself. A friendly gesture crosses your mind to buy a drink for the old man sitting next to you comes too late as the bartender retracts his drink and refunds his money. More blurry images give way to a return ride home.

Morning comes like a sin and I tried to remember where I was. My right hand hurts and I’m missing part of a fingernail on my left. These details are filled in as the end of a Bloody Mary is passed around and a mini-van trudges us to the curling club. At the club, the ability to drink a beer while curling takes precedence over the competition but the match still ends with the score in my favor.

At the bowling alley the drunkest man in Fargo confronts me. He meets us with hostility but then promises to take us to his house to watch curling on his Canadian Cable. He exits to the bathroom never to come back again. You win the game without noticing.

The sun, in an unsettling way, leaves the skyline for the day as you leave a bar after throwing darts. After a brief intermission you’re back at the club, talking with an old woman that is setting plans, on the phone, to meet a friend at an adult bookstore when she is done with work. At this point nothing seems too surreal. This fact is made more prominent as you give a fellow curler the shirt off your back. Mercifully your brother is there to give you the shirt off of his.

And you hate this town, you hate everything about it and try to drowned it in beer. A staggering somebody tells you it’s time to eat. Even though you don’t like meat you order a hamburger, demanding of the waitress that they make it as rare as possible.

The blurs continue, first to one bar, then to another. Standing, dizzy in the glow of cigarettes and light reflecting from behind the liquor on the top shelf, you receive a call from the governor that takes you away to a place you would more rather be for two minutes and thirty six seconds.

More strange memories are retained from this evening. Stuffing your brother into a pull out couch, justifying it by saying that he asked you to do it, but still hating yourself because you could’ve hurt him.

Another morning comes to pass, hours before anybody else is alive. Already Uncle Headache is banging out the tune, “Hangovers, Hangovers are no fun/Hangovers, Hangovers hurt someone”. And this time, without music, I’m taken back to a more foul memory. Another time that I pushed the envelope to the breaking point and felt that I lost.

It was snowing outside and the flat landscape provided little protection from the wind. Ashamed and broken down I pulled the hood up on my sweatshirt and wondered how this weekend would be remembered.

Were there stories that are here worth remembering, or was I just another corpse walking around another dead town?