6.

The last thing was the worst thing we never did. It was Wayne and me on the prowl, Saturday night in the Big Easy, though nobody except tourists called it that back then. Both of us were legitimately single, not screwing around on some innocent girl at home sewing our letters onto our jackets. No, high school had left us behind like the last ship to leave Elba and we were mired in the real world of college and shitty jobs. Wayne had not yet found God or the police force and was open to almost any sort of skullduggery. So there we were at some Tulane bar drinking nickel draft and hitting on the chicks. I was always a failure at that sort of thing. Bukowski said to avoid bars and churches but I hadn’t read Buk yet and knew no better. I thought alcohol and pheromones were a good combination. Our experience that night indicated otherwise, or just how far astray a man might go if he was lonely and angry and drunk and immature and generally a piece of shit. Which was me. Or how far Wayne might go, a lonely man with the memory of a pizza face and no girls ever walked up to him and said, “I want to fuck you,” which is what happened that night at a bar on Claiborne Avenue. And there we were, the three of us, Wayne and a blonde from Missouri and me, drunk and giggly and going for a ride in the Honeybee. I had decided that we were going to do her, me first, then Wayne and he thought that was a brilliant plan. Missouri was drunk and high and cared not a whit. As Wayne wheeled us randomly through the uptown streets, she and I made out in the backseat, pulling at each other’s clothing. I’d given her a fake name and Wayne giggled every time she used it.

“Stanley,” she said. “No.”

Yes, she said no. Maybe I was simply imagining what she said earlier, the whole part about wanting to fuck. If so, why was she here in the Honeybee with two guys she’d known for less than an hour? Why had her friends let her leave? Didn’t they know how dangerous and stupid this was? And shouldn’t someone teach her a lesson?

“Stanley,” she said. “Take me back to the bar. Stanley, please. Please don’t do this.”

And she was crying, terribly afraid. Wayne looked over his shoulder when we stopped at a light. He was still smiling. If I had started punching that girl in the jaw he would have laughed like it was TV wrestling. If I had ripped her blouse off and pinched her nipples, raised her skirt and yanked down those panties put on so prettily earlier that night he would have still been smiling. If I had destroyed that girl’s life, utterly ruined her mind, ended her college career in New Orleans, shamed her family, shamed hers, shamed her friends and of course shamed Wayne and me and everyone who ever lived to breed us, he would have still been smiling. I had taken him that far; farther than I ever wanted to go. It would have made us brothers in a way we never would have intended. I wonder if Wayne would have joined the police force if he had raped that girl with me. I wonder if I would even be alive to have that thought. I might have simply thrown myself off a bridge with a long fall to ask forgiveness for the worst night of my life.

But of course that didn’t happen. I told Wayne to turn around and take this whiney bitch back to the bar.

“Thank you,” she said, moaning. “Oh thank you so much Stanley.”

“Stanley,” said Wayne with a laugh. He made his voice high-pitched like a shrill housewife. “Stanley, I need you to take out the trash.”

The light changed and Wayne made a u-turn, taking us back to the people we were before we left the bar, before we let ourselves almost give in to the worst side of our souls. I’m grateful we didn’t cross the line. I’m sure Wayne is too. The only gift I could ever give him was not leading him so terribly astray. If there’s a heaven, he’s in it, that special place where dead policemen go to watch over us mortals. There they are in their ghostly squad cars, patrolling the Earth, fulfilling their mission of saving us from ourselves.