wet smokes
Humid salt heat blew off the boil of black Gulf water, making the air taste like fishy gasoline and broken dreams. Out in the black eternity, the Beau Rivage casino was throwing up a pretty, patriotic sky show. But back in the surf, Steve the Geez was hell-bent on mayhem speed.
We were thigh-deep in the tidal swing when his drunken eyes caught the neon light with a deviant grin. He had seven high-powered mortars—big as grenades—with the wicks twisted into a single, thick fuse. No launch tube. No safety margin. Just a flick of a plastic lighter and a sudden, violent hiss.
Jax and I didn’t wait for the flash; we hit the black water, scrambling madly for the shoreline. Damn, Steve. Always a good time till a fresh idea pushed him right up to teeth skin and death-skirt lines.
We waddled and splashed to get away from the insane Vietnam vet. Usually, after his twentieth whiskey and cola, he’d start engineering the best of bad ideas. Now, he was jamming his beach-built bomb into the crevice of a dilapidated fossil of a dock,hurricane-haggard posts that refused to die, much like Steve the Geez out here on the cockroach coastline.
Out of the water, Jax and I turned, lungs heaving, expecting to see Steve’s head come flying in our direction like a cannonball. Instead, the ballsy bastard had found time to light-a-smoke. Defying death and cigarettes,can’t get cooler than that, I knew somewhere, in the universal frequencies, a proud Randy “Macho Man” Savage was saying, “Ohhhh yyyyeeeaahhhh.”
Steve paused, annoyed. A dud. We chuckled, admiring his pointless grit to blow up the remnants of the dock and himself. He was three strides from the eternal ride when the radiant combustion finally caught.
The fireworks exploded just above the waterline, right in Steve’s face – sidenote: Steve previously had his head nearly blown off in Vietnam.
Jax and I hit the sand, dodging errant, blazing shrapnel. Families fled. A rowdy, pissed-off cowboy type came running up.
“What the fuck is that asshole thinking?” he barked.
“We’re surprised that his brain even works,” I said.
He was too mad to laugh, I guess.
As the heavy smoke dissipated, a hoarse chuckle echoed out of the hazy black. Steve the Geez was still alive,another piece of moiled madness. It was admirable in the dumbest, redneck sense: having enough brazen grit to survive the havoc of your own stupidity.
We waited on the sand as Steve strolled out of the surf, flanked by four Biloxi police officers.
“Don’t worry fellas,” Steve said, like it was a mild fender bender. “I appreciate the consideration, but I’m fine. My cigarettes got wet, but I’ll survive.”
“Fuck your cigarettes!” The cop roared. “You nearly maimed half a dozen people and effaced several vehicles. What were you thinking?”
“Oh shit... hope they’re okay,” Steve said. “It’s always tough to gauge the blast radius with that brand constantly changing their formula. Glad nobody got hurt. Hey, do any of them have a loose cigarette I could bum?”
We didn’t see Steve for a few days.
Nicholas Viglietti is a writer from Sacramento, CA. After Katrina ravaged the gulf coast, he rebuilt homes there for two years. Up in Mon-tucky, he cut trails in the wilderness. He pedaled from Sac-town to S.D. He’s a seventh-life party-hack and rips chill lines out of the madness. Rip-more-reads by the bro-migo breed @: www.clipsfromtheclose-out.com