Kevin Down Under

“I broke-ded my phone,” Kevin told me when he got into the car.

“Well…that certainly sucks,” his sober sister driver told me.

“No, Erin, I just…the battery fell out…I have to put it back in.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Fuck you, Erin,” Kevin said as I pulled away from the bar.

I knew it was going to be good when I got a text message from my brother that said, “Underneath your clothes there’s an endless story.” After that, one of my friends sent me a message that said Kevin was going to be trashed by the time he got home.

Finally, I got a phone call from Kevin. I answered and heard:

“When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer. I’m down on my knees, I want to take you there. In the midnight hour, I can feel your power. Just like a prayer your voice can take me there.”

He sang to me and then immediately launched into the upcoming verse. He paused a few times to shout at me to dance, but other than that, he never broke verse. It was my own little private show. And I loved every minute of it.

Anyway, I never have him in the car, and he’s blathering his drunken-nonsense while trying to put the battery back into his phone. Once it’s inside, he throws the phone against the dash and yells at it. Of course, I look at him like he’s a drunk, crazy person.

“Well, Erin, I just hate that phone. I’d love to fucking throw it as hard as I can. I’d like to throw it and hit a road sign.”

“That would be fun. Why not go to New York and throw it off the fucking Empire State Building.”

“Well, because I still have like two years left with this phone, and if I do that, I’ll have to pay $300 for a new one.”

“That wouldn’t be fun, so yeah, I see your point,” I tell him as we turn off of Diamond Avenue onto First Avenue.

“Hey, is Wendy’s open!” he asks me. It is 1:30 a.m.

“No, but I think Taco Bell is.”

“Well, fuck a bunch of Wendy’s,” he says. This conversation is copied several times, with the name of the restaurant changing as we pass Arby’s, Ritzy’s, Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, and Burger King (even though it is across the street from Taco Bell) before we arrive in the Taco Bell drive thru.

Kevin is leaning over me perusing the menu when the speaker crackles to leave. Apparently, in his drunken stupor, Kevin imagines that the speaker is either at a low volume, or the workers are deaf because he’s yelling at them to see if they have the great big, giant burrito. They don’t. Kevin says some choice words and continues to peruse the menu, settling on the number eight – 3 soft shell tacos.

I drive around to the window and Kevin starts digging in his wallet for money. It’s five dollars and change. He’s counting his one’s, but he only has four one’s and no change. This proves a problem, and the drunk fool starts blathering on about how he doesn’t want to break a fifty. I grab his wallet, recount the ones and see he at least counted right, and then I grab his debit card out and hand it to the worker.

We continue home and he asks about my sister who was flying in from Ft. Lauderdale. I tell him she couldn’t get a flight home, she had to be routed to Louisville and that dad is picking her up, and she’ll be home when we get there. He decides he wants to call, an idea I nix for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that if Andrea is still with my dad and she hands him the phone, he will agree to a dinner that he will have no recollection of agreeing too tomorrow morning, and Andrea and I will have to go along for the fun. Not that I don’t like dinner with my dad, but it’s always Sunday dinner, and Sunday is a sacred day – Do Nothing Day.

So I tell him about Andrea. How her plane landed, but no one could de-board because of a medical emergency. They were held on the plane for over an hour, when the ambulance finally arrived. My advice is, if you plan on having a heart attack, waiting for an hour on the ground for an ambulance to arrive is not going to help your situation. Kevin insists that the medical emergency is a brain tumor because then they’d have time to operate, whereas the heart attack…well…you’re gone.

We finally get to the house and Kevin grabs his meal and his Ipod Touch and stumbles up the driveway into the garage door that he opened (and I closed). The dog’s cage has been moved and he gladly starts talking about how he had to move it. I would applaud his efforts, but really he was the only one who ran into, and that was more often than not because he was drunk. Andrea opens the door into the garage knowing full well her little brother is drunk.

“I moved the dog’s garage…I mean cage,” Kevin says slurring and stumbling all over the cage in the effort to show off his work.

“That’s nice,” she says and we both pull him into the house. He sits on the couch, shoving soft shell tacos into his mouth as we both try to get the full story out of him.

While he’s eating, we turn out attention to Andrea and the medical emergency. We also find out that the airport has lost her luggage, which is kind of a big deal because her scissors are in there and she’s a hairdresser and has appointments in the morning. Kevin finishes his tacos and stands (staggers more) and tells her that if he was there, he would’ve told them all to “Suck it.”

“They can suck a dick!” he says and repeats. “Suck a fucking dick,” he says with his voice raised until mom yells from her bedroom that he is being too loud. He looks panicked/annoyed and then he rises up and crashes onto his knees on the carpet.

Andrea and I have to hide our giggles and laughs, and Kevin crawls over to where we are sitting and starts apologizing for rousing our mother. He decides it is time for bed, but wants Daisy with him. Daisy is terrified of him at the moment, and she starts running from. Kevin bends down to pick her up, but she takes off and he ends up face-planting into the carpet.

Andrea and I laugh even more. And finally we get him tucked into bed. Then we stayed up and watched Team America because Pearl Harbor sucks, but not as much as I laughed last night.