Toothless in Seattle

"Alfred" and his daughter circa 1993

Yesterday I was reminded of a story regarding an old friend of mine. I'm not really in touch with.....let's call him Alfred Pennyworth for the purposes of this post.  He was in the class ahead of me in Tech School down at Hurlburt Field and was stationed to Ft. Lewis like I was.  He had cross-trained into the job and came in as a Staff Sergeant.

For a brief time he was also my supervisor, maybe a month or two.  We were friends and I sometimes babysat for him so he could get out with his wife.  We weren't the best of buds or anything like that, but we did have a couple of moments.  There are a few NSFW moments in this post, so I'll have to save them for after the break.



Still with me?  Great.

When I was stationed at Ft. Lewis the single guys were allowed to live on McChord AFB, which is next door.  One Friday evening I was staying in because I had to do laundry and prepare for a camping trip on Saturday when there was a loud thump on my dorm room door.  Imagine my surprise when the unlocked door flung open and there stood Alfred.  Even though he lived off-base, his presence wasn't a surprise because our dorm was spitting distance from an on-base bar.  Alfred and his wife liked to drink and party a bit.

"Get dressed bitch, we're going to Seattle."

Huh...what?  I asked what's going on and was quickly rebuffed.  "You heard me, get dressed bitch."  I know better, so I grab my stuff and head out the door with Alfred.  On the way out to the car he tell me that an old buddy of his is in Seattle and we were going to pay him a visit.

When Alfred first joined the Air Force he was a linguist.  Over the years he had lost touch with a good friend of his from "back in the day" and he had just learned that not only was his friend out of the service and living in Portland, but was visiting Seattle, which is just a quick trip.  Seattle is a short drive from Tacoma, where McChord is.

We met up with Alfred's friend and after introductions we're asked if we want to have a drink.  If you knew Alfred you would know that this was the real plan all along and this wasn't so much a question as it was a statement of what we were planning on doing next.  The reason Alfred's friend...we'll call him Bruce, was in town was because he was a radiator salesman and there was some regional industry conference going on.  We took a few minutes to establish our cover of new radiator salesmen ("Boy that X37 is a hot seller!") and headed down to the bar.

For a small conference, whoever was the host went all out.  It was an open bar and they weren't stingy with the drinks.  After a while we wanted to leave though because it was a bit too loud.  The party had a small mini-keg of good beer which was being ignored due to the open bar.  It was a shame that the beer wasn't being drunk, so we went ahead and liberated the keg for a small room party.

We ended up not getting to drink much of the keg because a local industry woman wanted to take our group downtown to show us Pioneer Square.  Our cover was that we were from out of state so we had to play dumb and ended up going along.  Bruce wanted to see Pioneer Square anyway.  At that time Pioneer Square had a large group of bars next too each other that shared a single cover charge.

After paying the cover charge we go to the first bar where our "host" wants to show off by ordering us a round of Jägermeister followed by a beer chaser.  Neither Alfred or I liked Jägermeister so we downed those shots as quickly as possible and then enjoyed the beer.  Our host drank her shot and then only a sip of her beer, complaining about the taste.

Now it is important to note that Alfred is of Irish descent and after a few drinks he gets a bit rowdy.  Alfred got right up in our host's face and starts screaming, "You made me drink Jägermeister you whore, now drink the damned beer!"

By now I was pretty buzzed and I used to have a bad habit of wandering off by myself when I was intoxicated.  The next thing I remember was everybody coming to find me on the park bench I went to go lay down on.  Somewhere along the way I had lost my front tooth.  Now this isn't as dramatic as it sounds because I had actually lost that tooth years before.  I had a temporary replacement on a cheap retainer that went missing.

The group was heading back to the hotel and they gathered me up.  When we got back Alfred was missing.  He had gotten in a different cab back at Pioneer Square.  This was in the day before cell phones so all we could do is either wait or go back and look for him.  Since Bruce saw him actually get in the cab we decided to wait.

A half-hour later Alfred shows up at the room with a huge grin on his face.  He did get into a cab and came to the hotel.  He went to the room and was banging on the door.  We weren't answering and after a while he looked over and noticed that the ashtray had a big, fancy "S" impressed in the surface.  The problem was that were not staying in the Sheraton, but in a Hilton.  The ashtray should have had a big "H".

After a good laugh we crashed and head back to Tacoma just in time for me to make the camping trip.