“Not going to New Jersey isn’t procrastinating, it’s common sense.” ~Igby

From the “Hello, Live With This” section of the memory banks:

Hangin’ out on a summer night. New Jersey, straight off a loud, punk-tinged musical high. Muggy, low-key drunken revelry. Street corner parties have their plusses, a soft parade of city lights and interactivity with the community being two of them.

Some of the boys, all braced and laced and overtough, were passing a bottle of Night Train amongst them. To say most Skins have a death wish is doing them a great verbal disservice.

I, given my predilection for suspecting that more people than not have some form of cooties (or, The Cooties, as they are referred to in presence of royalty and highsoc types, real or imagined), was sipping on my very own bottle of Absolut Citron (vodka gimlet without the prissy glass, yo), palming it in fine, unsophisticated fashion.

A junkie on the curb, kit being employed for the God-knows-how-manyeth time that day, about fifteen feet away: It was only three ay emm and he was already rockin’. We were paying no attention to him until he shot the words lazily into the air.

“Whatcha drinkin’ over there?” He was all tied off, head bent to the task at an angle that allowed a green cast to come over his face. Neon dermatitis.

Bemused, where hours back and sober he would’ve told the junkie to get the fuck off his street and maybe worse, Cooper laughed and called out, “Night Train, man. You wanna swig?”

The junkie, watery-eyed and sinking the steel, said, “No way.” And as he deftly did the push, he jabbed at irony and changed Coop’s beverage of choice for a lifetime.

“That shit’ll kill ya.”