When I was in college the first time, my best friend was Roy.  Roy, like Jethro Bodine, considered himself an international playboy.  Roy did have pretty good luck with the ladies, but not nearly as much as he claimed.  I base this on the fact that he and I went out virtually every Friday and/or Saturday night, yet neither of us ever had a date.  We always planned on "picking up" some girls.  To the best of my recollection, that never happened.

    We went out one Friday night to our favorite club in Jackson.  The Zodiac.  Here's how you say it, "the ZOOOOOOOOO-diac".  That's how the DJ would say it.  It was a velvet and day-glow poster black light extravaganza!  By the way, we always started off our Friday or Saturday night off with a trip by Horace Slay's car lot.  He specialized in muscle cars and in particular, corvettes.    I had a 68' Firebird 400 and Roy had a 69' Vette, so we would compare our cars with what was on the lot.  I was surprised to see that they are still in business today at Horace Slay Auto Sales.  Anyway, it was a super cold and clear Friday night and we went to the Zodiac in my car.

    We were at the Zodiac for hours and Roy drank more than his share of draft beer.  I remember quite well him sitting there playing bongos on the wobbly table top, spilling beer all over the place and proclaiming, "Draft beer doesn't make me drunk!"  Obviously Roy couldn't tell he was, by every definition of the word, drunk.  Roy thought of his bongo playing as a sort of mating ritual.  In his mind, women would see how well he could play the tabletop and they would be swooned.  This is similar, in nature, to the Satin Bowerbird's plan.  The difference is that the Bowerbird gets lucky once in a while.  It was probably 2 a.m. when we decided to leave.  It was a long way home, too, about 60 miles.

    We had gone about 50 of those 60 miles when out of the blue Roy slapped his hand on the dash and screamed, "STOP!  I GOTTA TAKE A LEAK!"  I was going about 65 miles per hour and his sudden outburst took me by surprise.  I whipped over to the shoulder and locked up the brakes.  Roy had apparently opened the door about the same instant he shouted because it flew open due to deceleration.  Roy rolled out of the car and out of sight down the embankment as the car continued to skid forward along the shoulder of the road.  The dome light was on, so I couldn't see much, but I backed up and looked down into the ditch through the open door.  I sat there for a minute hoping he wasn't dead, but I didn't want to get out and look.  (Some friend, huh?)

    After about a minute Roy, covered in dirt and leaves, comes climbing back up the ditch bank and into the car.  He got in the passenger's seat and asked, "What are you trying to do, kill me?"  He closed the door and started playing bongos on the dashboard.  He was no worse for the wear but I was somewhere between relieved and disgusted.  Yeah, he could have been killed but he could have also sprung the door by throwing it open while I was standing on the brakes.  When we got to my house, he cleaned the frost off of a four inch diameter spot on the windshield of his Vette, got in and drove off.

       The next morning he called me from work.  "What did we do last night?  Man, I'm so sore I can hardly move." he asked in an incredibly nasal voice.  He said the only thing he remembered was driving home looking through a tiny hole in the frosted windshield and going about a hundred miles an hour.  I told him what he'd done and, of course, his reply was the same as the night before.  "What were you trying to do, kill me?"