In March of 1984 I was playing drums in a band named “Tracer”. We played in and around the Hampton and Newport News areas of Virginia. Sometime during that same month, we had a house party which drew around fifty or sixty people. One guy who showed up was a well-known fixture in the area, who almost never wore a shirt, only worn-out jeans and white cowboy boots. They were snakeskin boots actually. We nicknamed him “Snakeboots”. Snakeboots was usually stoned or drunk or both. I don’t recall ever seeing him *not* intoxicated with something.
Snakeboots came, saw and conquered: a bottle of Tiquila. As he tried to leave the house, he staggered feabiliy to the backdoor which was through the small kitchen. He reached to hold onto cabinets, counters and walls because he was pretty drunk. But he slipped on a puddle of beer and landed his forehead on the corner of the countertop, right before the back door, with enough force to feel the impact through the floor with our feet, standing 12 feet away. He stood back up quickly, but with half-opened eyes, and turned to say “I’m alright, dudes”. We could easily see the white “V” indentation in his forehead where the blood had not yet rushed back into the area where it once filled. We didn’t see him again until the following morning. Some kids knocked at the front door and asked “is he ok?” and pointed to Snakeboots, passed out, face down in the middle of the front yard. He only had one boot on. The other boot was in the backyard.
It was a great party.
No comments:
Post a Comment