Submit to Descent

As mankind races towards extinction, do not expect everyone to cross the finish line at the same time. There are front-runners. Sprinting towards self-annihilation. It is they who shall reach the End long before the rest of us. Them & their shortcuts. Or they might even accelerate the extinction process for the whole lot of us. If you look around, you’ll find it easy enough to spot these front-runners: champion armageddiots operating entirely on energy drink & reptilian instinct. Drink. Eat. Shit. Drink. Eat. Fuck. They often cluster together. Fuck. Shit. Drink. Cluster together in places like this. Eat. Shit. Eat. Places like Johnson Street Yacht Club.

I am passing through Raleigh. City of Oaks. Earlier, I found a muse in a cocktail lounge. Uniquely unique. She doesn’t care for agave spirits; she makes buttons supporting Palestine; she has a tattoo of Charlie Chaplin; she’s never met anyone who likes Avatar. The cocktail she mixed for me (with agave-spirited mescal, ginger, lemon, scotch spritz & all spice) renewed my faith in humanity. Only briefly. Because as soon as my muse learned of this faith renewal, she urged a remedy. Relocate to Johnson Street Yacht Club, she insisted. Gaze at the abyss. Resume despair. Act before it is too late. 

Ergo: I’ve arrived at the edge. At this urban yacht club. This dive answers the age-old question: what if we combined a McDonald’s Playland with a frat house? Its just as Sir Walter Raleigh envisioned it. The ground level bar is closet-upstairs dark. & cool. Most of the day-drinkers are on the top deck, sunning themselves like lizards, leaving the barkeep below bored. Even his inked skin has existential ennui. I watch as he serves 2 ingredient well-drinks, shots of cinnamon liquor, cans of White Claw. I opt for a Tecate. It comes cold with an an exhumed corpse of a lime wedge. I journey upstairs.

The upper deck is where it’s at. The people. The good ole boys with paunch bellies and Milwaukee’s Best tallboys and t-shirts featuring stock car drivers. I hear one say to another, we could have been at Cracker Barrel by now. The another responds, I know. The younger good ole boys all wear post-irony mustaches &/or mullets and use obscenities – e.g. “fuck” – not as an expletive, but to italicize, dressing their fucking word-salad with inedible vulgar parsley. I overhear one starter-kit G.O.B. tell another, I made your dad a fucking bottom. At least there the “fucking” is descriptive for type of “bottom”. Yet… such words!, casual accusations of sodomizing another fella’s father: should not these be fighting words? But the honor culture of the south is dead, man. Fucking dead. What would the Hatfields think? The McCoys? This next gen of good old boys has gone soft. 

There’s a dog barking. Right here. Top deck. Labradoodle. What a dick?

And what would the Hatfields & McCoys think of the tubular slide which takes passengers from the top deck to splash onto the concrete below? The womenfolk accompanying the good ole boys appear bolder than their male counterparts. Each, in turn, gulps her White Claw to completion, kicks off her wedge-heels and launches herself into the slide to be spat-out downstairs. She lands disheveled: tennis skirt upended, sunglasses scratched, golf visor on the loose & drifting down her ponytail. Resilient, she runs up the external wooden staircase to the cheers of her peers. She is victorious. Then the next damsel in summer dress performs a similar spiritual plunge. 

I’d never. I haven’t kept my vertebrae united this long only to break my neck in Wake fucking County. 

Signs warn the slide is hella fast. Slide at your own risk. But isn’t that a part of the great cosmic joke? Live at your own risk. What’s the alternative? 

Speed times acceleration is equal to velocity, one smarty-pants in khakis says as he observes the sliders. Yeah, his day-drunk friend agrees. Makes sense. I’m on my second Tecate when I overhear another snippet of conversation, a voice saying, I’m not like other girls, I am a man. I look to discover the source of the statement, finding only fellas in fugue. Carolina blue. 

The gathering of twenty-somethings disperses: women down the slide, G.O.B.s taking the stairs. One booze bus exits as another arrives. This dive is a turnstile. A new batch of asshole ascends to the top deck. 

The labradoodle is still here. Barking. What a dick?

The dog is between two women. Thirtyish. An attractive black chick with curly black hair has the barking abomination with curly white hair. Curly white hair yellow-tinged… perhaps the labradoodle is a chain smoker? The other woman, sitting in a matching chair, facing her girlfriend, is a white woman. Sipping on CherryWine. Arguably white, her thin skin pinkens before our eyes. She should not be on the sundeck. Or perhaps it is the CherryWine responsible for her shrimpening. As if she were flamingo. 

Are you still seeing that guy?, the pinkened girl asks. What guy?, the response. That guy who works in the downstairs bar, pink clarifies. No. No, like, we’re friends, I see him, but no. I don’t know. I am about to give up. Faulkner!, the black girl yells at her dog. Faulkner!, no! What do you mean?, the pink girl asks. Like…, says the black girl, men… they’re either under-employed. Or crazy. Or… they don’t like dogs. Faulkner!, no!

The pink girl is smug. It will work out, she says. You’ll see. I found William after all. And I was where you are. I was going to see a therapist because I’m like: I don’t… I don’t like any men. But then I met William. 

Mmhmm, the black chick humors her friend as she takes a sip of her White Claw. Faulkner barks at a bird. Faulkner has not abandoned the honor code of the south. Fucking bird deserves to fucking die. 

It’ll work out, you’ll see, the pink girl insists. I mean, girl… I was crazy. William turned me down the first four times I asked him out. The fourth time, I had to call him with my sister’s phone so he didn’t recognize the number. And, I mean… look at us now! We’re expecting a baby!

Well… okay… look at you know. 

Checking my watch, I realize I have had enough.

After quaffing the remnants of my second Tecate, I approach the slide. I gaze into the hellmouth of this plastic blue wormhole. Fuck it all. I plunge. 

Whoof!

Hella fast. I am launched onto the concrete, arriving just before I departed. 

I stick the landing. Incredibly, I stick the landing. 

I am mildly concussed from that first turn, but I did it. I slid. I lived at my own risk.

Who: Johnson Street Yacht Club

Where: Johnson Street in Glenwood South district of Raleigh; nowhere near water or actual yachts

What: cold cans of beer, seltzer or CheerWine soda

Why: why not?, steer into oblivion