Jake and Falcon were the guitar players in one of my favorite Salisbury bands, a punkabilly tinged combo that was big on the hard drinking, drug taking, tattoo getting stereotype of those kind of bands. I went to Falcon's house one night for a after party after one of their shows and arrived right in the middle of a bourbon drinking contest between Falcon and a girl that was part of his circle of friends.
They squared off in the kitchen, going shot for shot. His opponent was about 6 foot 3 and proportionately sized for her height, but she was still a woman, so the slowly revealing fact that she was winning this contest was quite a shot to Falcon's ego.
He started getting more louder and belligerent; if he was going to lose, he was not going quietly. Pans were clanged; a bottle of hot sauce was opened and waved, drawing red stripes in the white ceiling. The bottle of bourbon was drained empty, but an auxiliary one awaited.
Falcon's roommate, Mark, was not too keen on the prospect of an even drunker Falcon, so he hid his other fifth of alcohol. Falcon went on a semi-coherent rampage through the house about his missing bourbon and about how he wasn't going to lose a drink off with a girl. He ambled upstairs and down, but came up short.
He was yelling in the living room about how much we sucked when Jerry, a slight kid who had just moved to the 'bury, spoke up. He had been passed out for so long on the floor at the party that someone had put a blanket over him, but Falcon..s ranting had woken him up. He stood up and yelled,"Why don't you shut the fuck up!""
If this story was ever dramatized, this would be the cue for the sound effect of the needle falling off the record. All of us more sober people looked at each other, Jerry was about 7 inches shorter than Falcon and had the muscle tone of a English dandy, this didn't look like it was going to end well. But Falcon didn't react the way we had thought he might.
"I like this guy, he fuckin tells the truth!" and then they kissed. They locked into an embrace with such force that they fell over the couch and onto the floor, still in each other arms. We looked on with slack jawed amazement.
But bellicose clamoring and male on male make-outs weren't getting him closer to his missing whiskey, but he did know the culprit.
"Mark! Give me my bourbon!" he yelled upstairs as he went up after him. Yelling was soon replaced by furniture sized crashing and the grunts of physical contact.
Then suddenly it stopped, and Mark stomped downstairs and sat on the couch, breathing heavy and hard, still in fight rage mode. His face was covered in blood and it didn't seem to be his, Jake immediately ran upstairs to see how Falcon was.
Falcon yelled from upstairs, "Mark, let's see how tough you are without a Samurai sword!"
Jake came down with an announcement, "Anyone who doesn't want to talk to the police, should probably leave right now," so off we went.
I saw Falcon at a bar a few days later. He still had all his limbs, thankfully, but his face looked like it had gotten hit with a whiskey bottle, because it had been. His face was still pretty swollen and discolored with a jagged stitch going from the top of his nose up to almost his hairline. I asked him if he was looking for another place to live.
"Nah, as long as he pays my hospital bill, we're fine."
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