In tribute to Hunter S Thomson .....
- I've got my hand over the plughole, just in case.
- In case what?
- In case you drop it in the sink!
- I'm not going to drop it in the sink. Keep still, will you?
- Just get my gear out of my ear!
He didn't add apart from anything else, I'm desperate for a boot. He didn't need to. Anyone with half a gram of the finest Afghani brown heroin stuck firmly in his or indeed her ear canal, and not melted on a square of tinfoil in front of him, would have been desperate for a boot. I was desperate for a boot, and by the lord I was owed one for doing this. My skaggy sense was tingling. I could almost smell the mix of rotten fish and hospital corridors.
So there I was standing over him as he lay over the washbasin, fishing in his earhole with a pair of eyebrow tweezers I kept in my tobacco tin survival kit for such occasions as might be necessary, with the aid of a tiny flashlight built into the end of a cigarette lighter, also extracted from said tin, and held between my teeth. So preoccupied were we both with our predicament, and especially with the matter of its timely resolution, that neither of us had remembered to lock the bathroom door. Gentle reader, if you take away only one lesson from this, then let that lesson be: always lock the bathroom door.
It was only after I had successfully extracted my travelling companion's stash from its temporary lodging, and probably screamed with joy and maybe even done a little victory dance though I could not remember for sure, that I noticed the decorated war veteran backing his wheelchair slowly away from the open door -- and all the customers in the bar turning and staring.
I groaned inwardly. The dude probably had an iPad on him, or a smartphone. Damn things were easy enough for old folks to use, anyway. Not like the clunky text-only terminals we used to use to zap (hah!) a story down the nearest telephone with a 300 baud acoustic coupler, straight into the paper's mainframe. In just a few short minutes, there would be rumours flying all over the internet about crazy druggies doing unspeakable things to one another in bathrooms. They would never understand, the poor bastards. Never understand at all .....