Cinco de Cerveza
This is one of the Southwest’s favorite holidays. I’ve always been here in the desert when it’s rolled around so I can’t tell you how it goes down in Maine or other small dark places, but it’s big here.
My pal Jimmy Black loves it. Jimmy loves any holiday that gives him a chance to float booze into his brain pan, but this is a favorite and one which he nearly always spends with a "designated driver" tag on his wrist.
I ran into him one year sitting at a bar in a saloon full of plastered college boys and their wobbling girl friends. He had the DD tag on his wrist and was wearing an eye patch.
Very romantic, Jimmy, but what’s with the eye patch and what are you doing sober?
--- I am performing a socially useful and very well-paid service for some of the louts you see around you. I am their designated driver, a service for which I will be very well paid. And I am not entirely sober. Who could endure all of this sober?---
The bar was serving some sort of chocolate marshmallow coffee drink. Jimmy got one free.
---I am about to provide you not only refreshment, but enlightenment. I have provided you with refreshment, but first I must piss.---
Jimmy clutched my coffee mug in both hands and wandered off to the men’s can. It didn’t really occur to me that he was taking coffee directly to the "Gent’s" without first passing it through his alimentarium and out his organ of joy. Besides, it was my coffee. He returned with it and passed it to me.
---Drink and become wise!---
It was laced with tequila, actually a pretty tasty combination. So what about the eye patch?
---I have found it truly useful at the end of a long evening of sobriety and community service to cover one eye for the drive home. There is no point in seeing two of every drunk on the road. And besides, what cop would ticket an old guy with an eye patch and a DD tag?---
Cinco de Mayo was actually a local celebration not much made of apart from the Mexican city of Puebla and Mexican-American communities of the Southwest. In it’s present bloated form it is a monument to the commercial enterprise of the brewing industry and the makers of bland frozen enchiladas.
Cinco de Mayo
