2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

The Beer Grabbing
by Jon Olsen
I'm following my friends to the door. We're finally leaving this awful
party. Still drinking the can of beer I just opened, I help myself to another
from the mini-fridge in the living room, slyly slipping it into the
pocket of my tweed jacket. Miller Lite is all they have, not my favorite,
but it's free. I'm reaching for a third can when our drunk host confronts
me. "What the fuck do you think you're doing" he asks. He swats the
opened can I'm drinking from my hand. It lands on the carpet with a
bouncy clunk and begins gushing out a foamy puddle. I reach down and
grab another can from the mini-fridge. "No!" our host shrieks, knocking
it from my grasp. It hits the floor and rolls under the couch. I can't help
but wonder why he's knocking the beers out of my hand instead of
punching me in the face. It would make more sense.
I remember words spoken years ago by my best friend Hank, that
huge unstoppable redneck of doom, “One of these days, someone is
going to beat the shit out of you. Someone is going to punch you right
in the face.” He told me this while driving home from a party, drunk,
chased away by his friends after five of them had to drag him off a guy
who made the mistake of kissing his girlfriend.
I grab another can and again he knocks it away. It ricochets off the
wall and bursts, geysering cheap horse piss into the air. Spectators move
back to avoid the spray.
I have never been punched in my life, not yet anyway. In high
school it almost happened once. A gigantic, lumbering jock with a
wispy adolescent mustache loomed over me after gym class. "I just want
you to know that I don't like you and I think you're a fucking faggot and
I'm going to punch you in the fucking mouth," he told me. "That's
gonna happen real soon."
I was scared, but also a bit thrilled. Nobody had ever threatened me
with violence so unambiguously before. I wasn't sure how to reply, so I
just said, "Okay." He never ended up punching me. He never even
spoke to me again. I wondered if I had inadvertently intimidated him.
Did he think I was unperturbed by his threats, when I was actually frozen
44 Santa Fe Literary Review