A Little Beer, Sure, but Never Again with the Tequila

I don't drink tequila.

Well, not much, anyway. I do occasionally have one margarita with a combo platter #7, but never again will I do shots of tequila. Why? Because the one and only time that I did shots of tequila, I vandalized my own car. The year was 1985 and the car in question was an incredibly dilapidated 1971 white Volvo station wagon. It was my first car. Everything about my Volvo was manual. It even had a manual choke -- the purpose of which is still unknown to me -- but I used to like to pull it out at stop lights in chi-chi neighborhoods to be annoying. It also had a factory defect: the back door on the driver's side wouldn't open without a metal on metal, hair-raising squawk unless the driver's side door was already open.

I lived in a trendy, but not yet expensive, downtown neighborhood in a large southern city. I worked as a bartender in a bar that had a bit of an identity crisis. Bands played there every night (except when they didn't show)and this drew a pretty conventional young twenties hipster wannabe sort of crowd. But we were also just down the street from a large drag cabaret club -- and we got overflow from them a lot. It was a pretty fun job.

One night, when I wasn't working, I went with a friend down to the club and we decided to drink some tequila - really, I had only planned to have one, I swear!. Sometime after last call, I remember the DJ and the doorman sort of pouring me into the front passenger seat while the manager tried to open the driver's side back door to pour in my friend before he drove us both home to my apartment.

NO! I screamed as the horrible grinding noise started.

Something is totally wrong with your car, the DJ told me.

I tried to articulate the whole factory defect concept to him. But it just came out as, NOOOOO!

How do I get this door open? The manager asked me.

I tried to explain that the thing to do was to first open the driver's door by yelling at him, NOOOO!

Maybe you should come over to this side, the doorman told the manager.

Somehow I managed to extricate my drunken self from my seat, stumble to the back of the car, open the the way-back door and pull out a giant shoulder bag full of cans of spray paint that I was carrying around for purely innocent reasons. I found a can that sounded like it still had some paint in it, went around to the offending door, and sprayed the word, NO, on it.

Even though all of this happened over 20 years ago, I still occasionally run into someone who remembers the "NO" car.