everybody's drunk here

peppers stuffed with cheesy rice, broccoli, breadsticks, water, one piece of fudge

I'm out and about at night with Ross from work. We stop by a Circle K sort of place, probably up around Morningside Park, but it's not the one that's there. It's all white, inside and out, there aren't really shelves of products, though there are some stacks of stuff on the floor, like bags of charcoal maybe, with red and black packaging;, and there's candy & such at the counter, magazines. [I've dreamed of this place before...] There's a line, maybe two lines to two registers. All guys my own age. As I finally get up to the register, I find that impatient guys behind me are actually reaching around me to set down & pay for their stuff. I'm completely flabbergasted. I finally get there and Vangie from Smith's is the cashier. I ask for a pack of cigarettes (she gives me Marlboro-- white and red), and a drink. I pay, but then a tabloid-format magazine down and to my right catches my eye, and before I know it, I've read a good portion of the front page. I come back to my senses, people behind me are very frustrated that I'm just standing at the register. Embarrassed, I buy the magazine and leave.

I get out into the parking lot and I hear Vangie come out the door behind me, calling after us. I forgot my smokes & drink, and she insists that I'm obviously too drunk to drive. I don't disagree with her, though I'm not certain how I got so drunk, or why I chose to drive to this place in my apparent condition. She suggests that we could go get something to eat, leave the car here, and come back for it when we're sober. Good idea. In fact, she recommends a Mexican restaurant over on Central, she'll take us there, and she starts hoofing it down the street, heading off NW toward Central. I trot to keep up.

We work our way through the residential neighborhoods and it turns to day. We three round a corner and there stands a huge apartment or corporate office complex, easily 20 stories high. I remark how weird it is when you think you know the streets in an area but then it turns out you find such places you didn't even know existed. Somehow it is decided that we should get inside this building, probably Ross' idea. Vangie knows a way in, and we follow her. We get up on a section of roof only a couple of stories up and get through a window that is high up in an atrium-like space, lined on the inside with windows, all set back into the wall to give maybe a 6 inch ledge I can barely stand on. And yet Vangie walks down the wall like it's a staircase, simply striding down by stepping on these tiny ledges. I feel stuck, though, uncertain how I can follow her. To complicate things, I have a cigarette in my mough, the smoke in my eye. I start to haltingly step down, I drop the cigarette onto the tile floor below. I make it down, but not without attracting the attention of a man in shirt and tie sitting in an office, the window of which I have just climbed past. He's coming, we book it.

Down down down, through the flourescent-lit halls. Lost and no idea how to get out or away. We all realize we're coming to a dead end tangle of halls, but then we round a corner and there's a "pizza party" set up on folding tables, and we get an idea. Vangie and Ross disguise themselves as business boy yuppie types in their 30's, I do the same. We're all blonde, we're all cookie cutter. We start stuffing our faces with the pizza and fuschia-frosted cupcakes. The guy chasing us comes around the corner, but doesn't recognize us. This is a welcome party for the new associates. This building is the corporate offices, and the tower is the dormitory for all the guys that work here. The guys start showing up, they're all blonde 30-something cookie cutters, too. And they're all drunk. Vangie and Ross are really uncomfortable, but I throw myself into my role, chatting up these assholes. Fuck.