On Tempting Fate, Yet Again

Lou's Corner Store via Google Maps Street View.


This past evening I spent with many friends, sitting around a card table gambling money over poker, C-Low and the occasional game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Also, there was some GTA IV and a butt load of booze.

Now when I say a butt load of booze, I in fact mean just that two or three of us brought a 12-pack or less for themselves and others and one of us, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons to follow, brought a full bottle of rum. Granted, it was $11 rum, but it was still a liter of 70-proof rum.

And amazingly this person lost $5 playing cards, won that back and more in dice and thoroughly marveled us by drinking single-handedly a good 90% of his rum. Of course the other 10% was given away to the needy.

We were proud of him. This was copious consumption from a man who usually passes out after a few beers because he often pregames too hard on top of exhaustion.

He was fine. He was coherent, sensical, even articulate. Barring some understandable issues with equilibrium, this kid was on his game.

So we decided to head down to Lou's Corner Store. (You may remember Lou's from my recent post about the Yankees where I attempted to alienate myself from all of New York at once.)

The car ride started to show some where on the guy, though. Mumbling slightly, becoming less coherent, but that could have easily been simple sleep setting in. This is a boy who will sleep anywhere any time for however long he can. We were unworried.

Then we got to the deli, which has stood in that same spot for the last 84 years and has withstood the entire gentrification sand urbanization of our town, as well as a car crashing through it's front wall some years back.

We got there and my oldest friend in the world got kicked out within five minutes for pulling his balls out in the back of the (ridiculously tiny) store and attempting to pee in the isle.


We thought the old man (not Lou) was yelling at a hobo who wandered in through the back. That hobo turned out to be his employee, who thought our friend was black which is both odd in itself and oddly racist. We yelled at our friend to get out of the way of the guy chasing the hobo. Then they herded our guy out of the store. We through him out ourselves once we learned what he had tried to do.

We laughed uncontrollably in the parking lot while we enjoyed our sandwiches, which most likely had not been spit in because the guys at Lou's are not monsters.

They simply don't like people pissing in their deli.

Which is totally understandable.