Chris opens a pack of cigarettes with one hand while he's driving and sticks one in his mouth. Keeping his eyes on the road, he fumbles around for the dash lighter and pushes it in, then pops it out. He nearly drops it en route to the tip of his cigarette, but he doesn't miss a beat, just sort of taps it on the edge of freefall, pops it back into the air, then catches it in a neat three finger grip. Still not looking. No burns; just a lit cigarette a second later. This is characteristic of him: clumsy when he is aware of himself, graceful when he isn't.

--Man, I am so pissed, he says. Fucking horrible day at work. Old people on their last legs staggering into the pharmacy every five minutes, going where the fuck's my medicine, you fuckers? Drooling at the mouth, pushing a walker along or dragging a babycart with an oxygen bottle or riding in their fucking wheelchairs; skin sagging around their necks and elbows, spotted from liver dysfunctions or webbed with broken veins from years of drinking Everclear and Olde English; one guy with no arms and no legs pushing the joystick of his powerchair with this horrible sealed off stump where you can still see old sutures, skin folded over deformed knobbly bone. The living dead, man. Fucking walking around. Or not walking; the living-dead-walking-sitting. Zipping around in their souped-up wheelchairs down Route 27, off the sidewalk in a car lane and in the wrong direction, stump pushing the stick as far as it will go. But yeah, work. Zombies staggering around the parking lot of a Jersey strip mall pharmacy. Moaning: where the fuck's my medicine? I called yesterday and I want my pills. I want my emulsions, my precipitates, my syrups, my painkillers, my insulin, my incontinence meds. Where are my creams? My suppositories? My solutions? My powders mixed into gleaming glycerin whipped into a lather, my compounds whisked gently into thick and fragrant oils, my oils emulsified in the finest industrial ethanol? My nitroglycerin to keep my ticker ticking. My Viagra to keep my pecker pecking. All day! All goddam day I had to deal with these people, tell them their meds were going to come tomorrow or the day after or a week after they called; that we'd call them when their stuff was here. And what do I get? More moaning. More fucking Day of the Dead shit. I never even knew old people could curse like that. Flecks of spit flying from their mouths, flakes of dried skin falling off their scalps, bad smells waking up in their pants. Hell. I'm telling you it was hell. I need to kill something now or I'm going to fucking explode. Shit needs to die!

--We're going need some beer, I say, as I know he expects me to say.
Killing shit is thirsty work.
--Fuck yeah.

Last summer, I had time off from grad school and Chris was only working three days a week. Much of the rest of the time, we sat around my apartment playing a video game called Dynasty Warriors 4. The premise of the game is that you are a Chinese general circa the year 200 AD, in the Three Kingdoms era, and you have to lead your followers to victory against other generals and their followers. In gameplay, this translates to endless waves of identical bloodthirsty Chinamen coming at you from across a vast digital expanse. The mist of draw distance mimics the fog of war. You mash your buttons in certain well-defined sequences, and slaughter them as they come. The game's Japanese, and so you can't really help feeling a little bit uncomfortable as the polygonal Chinese die by the thousands at your hand, like maybe you're somehow participating in some game producer's demented recreation of the Rape of Nanking. But dammit, it's fun. Appeals to some sort of deep seated repetition compulsion. And besides, in the game's defense, it's bloodless. The game producers coded all the gore out, the flailing limbs, the flying heads, the spilled entrails. By our count, half a million defenseless Chinese fell at our hands that summer. And yes, it is thirsty work. We drank beer by the gallon on some of those summer evenings.

So now we're heading to the Skullsplitter store. The Skullsplitter store is the Skullsplitter store because it's the only place we know that sells our favorite beer, which is named--what else?--Skullsplitter. Skullsplitter beer is Skullsplitter, apparently, because that's the nom de guerre of the big red-headed fucker wearing chain mail and horned helmet who is featured prominently on the four packs. And the beer comes in four packs because it's 9.2% alcohol by volume, and will kick your ass if you drink more than four. And of course split your skull in the morning, whether you drink one or four or forty, but who cares? Morning's a good twelve hours away. And in the meantime, like the man said...

--Shit needs to die, Chris says again. He's still fuming over work. He has unresolved issues with anger. Also, he likes to repeat himself (yes, more repetition compulsion). Also, he knows I know he likes to repeat himself, so he's hamming it up. This is my role, I think now, as I've thought many times before. I am a catalyst for my friends. Around me, they feel free to be caricatures of themselves. I like it. Maybe that makes me a caricature of myself, I don't know. But who cares, who the fuck cares?

--You think this is enough? Tim's going to be there.
--Oh. Right.

So we bring a four pack of the good stuff and a six of Sam Summer over to the counter, and a twelve pack of Killian's for when we run out, or for when Tim shows up. You guys again, says the cashier. Yep, we say, and then we're driving north on Route 18 with our trunk full of fine and not so fine beer and the windows open and the sun about to set but still shining out on a fine Saturday evening, and the disintegrating clouds the color of fake plastic flamingoes and what could be better? A little conflict, that's what, a little excitement. Five minutes into the drive some maniac in a minivan switches lanes two inches in front of us without signaling and we're swearing up a storm, turning the air blue, but we don't really care. Maniac soccer moms with delusions of Grand Turismo are everywhere on Saturday evenings, and sudden vehicular annihilation feels more like an unfulfilled promise than something to be feared, and really we're just swearing because it's the thing to do. It's Jersey, dirty Jersey, the Garden State of Assholes, and I fucking love it.

--Because the oil refineries at night look like unholy automated Rube Goldberg machines from a puppet theatre adaptation of Dante's Inferno;

--Because everywhere you go at any time of day or night you can hear the roar of traffic like the sound of waves;

--Because it's dangerous and crowded and grimy and there are drunk frat boys riding around in shitty jeeps yelling obscenities at you and you feel free to hate them and there are girls with fake tans and peroxide hair wearing pink miniskirts in the middle of December and you feel free to hate them;

--Because no matter how much you hate yourself, there is always somebody you can hate more, and somebody who will hate with you. And these are your friends, your brothers in hate.

Five minutes after we've stopped swearing, an electric blue Civic hatchback with a spoiler as big as the hatch and a coffee-can exhaust pipe passes us from the right lane doing ninety and then cuts across three lanes of traffic to make the exit for Route 1 and we still don't care, just swear some more.

--I could take that guy if I wanted to, says Chris.
--Yeah, yeah, twin cam 3.4 litre engine, blah blah, I've heard it before, I say.

(I know absolutely nothing about cars)

--Hell yeah. That guy just looks fast. This car has power, dude!

And to punctuate, Chris turns hard, putting his shoulders into it. Tires squealing, beer bottles clinking in the trunk, car practically leaning on two wheels popping a Bo-and-Luke, and we're on the exit for Jay's. We're the juggernauts of the jug handles, bitches, holy terrors of the highway exit ramps. Behind us there's a couple of horns blaring, a few jerkoffs telling us to learn how to fucking drive, assclown! --all already dopplering off into the distance. We're not dead, they're not dead, who cares?

And then we're there, and pressing the buzzer on Jay's door.

shaogo says re I could fall in love with Jersey at sunset: I take exception to the descriptions of the elderly contained herein. We'll all be there someday. And judging from the tone of anger and hate in the rest of this writeup, you too will be an old person who's impatient and curses a lot. Maybe, so will I.

--Please note: while the people in this piece are based on real people, mostly, they are also caricatures, fiction. Including the "I." Actually, especially the "I." Don't make the mistake of confusing me with my characters, please. I think I make it sufficiently clear in the piece that I'm making fun of myself--like, say, in the sentence where I pretty much come out and say that that's what I'm doing. Thank you for reading.