You get in the van, drunk, with no place to stay

“You get in the van, drunk, with no place to stay.”
New Year’s Eve: What a wonderful party, especially when you're playing in a band in some backwater hick-ville. It's a really awesome holiday when the contract you have for the gig blatantly states you get a hotel for the night, because, after all, it is New Year’s Eve. The champagne is going to be liberally passed around by fat guys with beards and sweaty women. You’ll be playing until four in the morning, you’ll probably pack your stuff up by five, and you'll be asleep on your feet, wanting nothing more than a nice warm hole to crawl into before journeying home in the dead of godforsaken winter. So, you work hard: you play for five hours, you make people awkwardly dance, you watch unspeakable acts of depravity. Only because you know at the end of the night there's a Motel 6 somewhere that has a room with your name on it.

You drive to the motel, ring the bell on the counter. The other guys in your band order a pizza. A receptionist waddles up and tells you the whole place is packed, has been for weeks, and you're screwed because all the other places in town are also booked. You explain that the bar manager said he reserved you a room weeks ago, but the receptionist just shakes her head. You know it's going to be a bad, bad morning.

"Well, can we at least eat the pizza in the lobby?"

She lets you have that one concession.

The pizza guy comes and it's ten below zero outside. You're drunk and eating pizza, pizza you don't taste because home is a five-hour drive away. So, the anger rises in you and you can't do anything to stop it. You get in the van, drunk, and with no place to stay.

The sun rises as you drive home, you’re blinking profusely just to stay awake. You get some crappy coffee at a gas station and swerve into the ditch twice because the roads are icy, and you're drunk and sleep-deprived. The fear of god gets put into you when a semi passes you under a bridge, spraying your van with snow, blinding you, and making your scrotum tighten. You start thinking about life and death, how this could be it, how two truckers just died in a nearby town doing the same thing last weekend. The sun makes the ice shiny and it looks like you’re driving on a sheet of glass, glass leading to nowhere. Happy New Year, asshole.

–Stosh Jonjak