Freddogg Off The Chain

WHISKEY YOU'RE THE DEVIL

Back on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1962 I got into a hallway fight on the 80th floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City with my lifelong friend Joe whose high school nickname was Asshole and that’s way before it became cool to call everyone Asshole and even today now that Joe’s 62 he identifies himself as “The Hole!”

Joe threw an empty pint bottle of whiskey at me, expecting me to catch it, but having drunk a half pint myself, I was exactly paying attention. The bottle hit me under the right eye and I dropped like I had been shot. I woke up to a cut that probably needed stitches, a swollen and discolored check, but way beyond feeling pain.

Joe apologized and I kept reminding him of his nickname. He was a senior in high school, I was only a sophomore. We were trashed on the 80th floor inside a den of sickness that could never be believed. The entire hotel was in riot mode except everyone was laughing. I kept after Asshole then he finally got mad and told me to shut up and stop crying just because I got hit in the face with a whisky bottle traveling 60 miles and hour.

So we started to fight, rolled onto the floor and a crowd came around and they yelled for blood. That’s when we figured we were friends providing entertainment to strangers so we turned on the crowd and they ran because Joe always looked crazy and I looked like Carmen Basilio after a 12 round pummeling.

We went down to floor 60, got off the elevator and started walking down the hallway. There was a black phone on a table. My other friend Bob said, ”Phone’s for you" and ripped it out of the wall and threw it into a mirror shattering the class. Bob laughed, thinking that was the funniest thing he ever did. We went around a corner to find a guy emptying the entire contents of a room into the hallway. We helped him set up the bed. He said he didn’t know why he was doing it but probably because no one was stopping him.

Then we went to the grand lobby where the party was just crazy. It was like a co-ed Oyster Eat minus the oysters and blue grass band. In fact, it was nothing like some firehouse Oyster Eat. This was sheer decadence for its own sake. It was lawlessness not some orchestrated ‘Gone Wild: video.

A handler and his boy were working the crowd taking bets that this guy could drink an entire fifth of Seagram’s Whisky on a non stop elevator ride down from the 85th floor . People stuffed money into a top hat and the handler wrote down their names. They didn’t come near me because in the sea of insanity I was the scariest looking creature.

Two observers accompanied Whiskey Boy to the top floor. This was old school pre-digital. A brass dial pointed to number 85. The numbers were in intervals of five. Down came the elevator The crowd yelped and hollered, no one barked because human barking hadn’t been invented.
The elevator reached the lobby and the door opened. Whiskey Boy was draining the last drops from the bottle. The spotters shook their heads up and down affirming he had done it.
Everyone applauded, then Whiskey Boy got this look like Stan Laurel. It was that blend of total confusion and stark self awareness. Whiskey Boy fell forward in what looked like a staged pratfall. The crowd went berserk. Whiskey Boy was dead!

People stared to leave because young drunk people don’t like being around young dead drunk people. I stood and watched as firemen came and took Whisky Boy away. Ironically, I too was Whisky Boy and they kept looking at him then back to me.

“You know this guy, ”a fireman asked. “Whiskey Boy is all I know!”

“Yea, I bet, ”he responded, not realizing the twisted humor in his statement.







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