Alan Hanson

I sleep on a friend’s floor after drinking heavily and smoking a large amount of ‘grass’ and around 3:30 just as I had fallen asleep there is a knock at the door and I’m told I should get up and ‘come out here’. I’m fogged as fuck and as I cross through the kitchen into the living room I notice the door wide open, a moaning from the bathroom, a middle aged man in half a fireman’s outfit and the entire front half of the house swathed in red and blue lights. Emergency vehicles idle on the street and the air is hot and dry still at 3:30 AM as it hushes itself through the opening. To my left is our other friend, hugging the toilet, shirtless, trashed, scared. More firemen enter the house and they ask what he’s had. We tell them he’s just drunk. No drugs, no allergies, just faced, sir. One stifles a laugh. Someone suggests we get him a small trash can for the ambulance ride incase he needs to Ralph Macchio again. I rise to the task. I do not know why. But I am half-asleep and still very high and there are no trash cans in this goddamn house. I panic. I must accomplish this goal quickly and I am failing and falling apart. There. Bags. Trader Joe’s sturdy paper bags. But one isn’t enough. If he pukes in one it will become moist. Two is better. So I spend an eon or two trying to marry these godforsaken grocery bags. I finally make it happen and hand the bag to our friend who is now in a chair in the living room, half-lidded and mumbling. He goes to grab the bag like a guy getting his ass kicked in the tenth round of a boxing match. One ghostly, limp swipe. He grazes the bag, it falls to the floor, and now the firemen are moving him to the ambulance and they don’t need the bag anymore. The bag was pointless. Someone gets directions to the hospital and standing there with the firemen in the house I try not to erupt in laughter. The entire scene is absurd and I am inebriated and I know he will be OK and it’s all just so ridiculous that I can’t help myself. I bite my cheek and my stomach quakes trying to spit out uproarious laughter. They leave and I go back to bed and in the morning he is fine and I go home. The whole thing feels now like a thing I observed rather than participated in. Quite possibly not even real. Maybe a lucid dream. And now it’s hot, so hot, and LA is on fire, again, so I might as well drink the left-over beer in the fridge and be careful not to get alcohol poisoning.