Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Stoli

 

There was a rightness to it, a dozen of us
sitting around in a circle, mostly naked, to celebrate
Gaetan’s birthday. The Stoli bottle circulated, taking
us to a place transmuted into the right kind of
drunkenness, even as a few yards away, through
thick insulated walls, South Philly churned in its
filthy bowels as usual, ready to toss the game for
the rest of Philly, also as usual, leering that any interested
party could imbibe the right way here, get a new game
on, see if we could handle the rawness, realness,
righteousness of being naked on what was shag
carpeting. This, a room otherwise unfinished, littered
with instruments, amplifiers, speakers, not many amenities
to mollycoddle the posh. The bodies of all & sundry

had ways & means of being posh anyway, Anastasia
clipped from a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, heart-stopping
as a Jersey born & bred vixen could be, calculating
as Springsteen’s Candy. I wanted to be wild, had a lot
to learn. By the time the bottle reached me, I had, also,
a lot to prove. I was compelled to say to this crowd, I
belong with you. Not that anyone noticed me in particular,
or were reserved if they did. In any case, I drank seven
or eight shots of Stoli at once. After a fifteen minute
daze of utter ecstasy, which was able to unfold itself
because I did it, I’d been approved, I knew I was in
here the right way, I knew (also) I’d be sick if I stayed, so I
quietly put on my clothes, staggered out into the autumnal
mud of 13th Street, just north of Ellsworth, & my own circle closed.