An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 9.
Sorry it's been so long, but the real world was busy dragging me into new stories; wait a few years, and maybe there'll be happy endings to share. Now is the middle time, where I struggle to find out if I'm at the denouement of a past life, the start of a new one, or just a long stay in the middle. If you were patient, thanks. If you weren't, I don't blame you.

After a solid hour and a half of E minor and drums, accompanied only by the sound of a swooning throng (these were our friends...they swooned a lot, some of them professionally), it was decided that we should all go back upstairs and drink heavily. I abstained, since I had a house party to run. (When the party was at my house, I saved my drinking until it was only Jono and I, and cleanup was over; many a melancholy moonbeam has lit our way from the porch to the morning...as with so many others, I can't imagine why he still puts up with my maudlin nonsense.)

Jacques was buzzing like Wall Street at an IPO, and it soon became apparent that he had quite a bit of company. With some folks, it's hard to tell; Teri was still bubbly when sober, for example, and Wendy was still utterly and completely bugheaded, so I tried not to offer her anything that might make matters worse. I chose this moment to start really laying groundwork with Terri, trying (somewhat) desperately to subtly chat her away from her friends, one of whom had apparently spent an afternoon with some Manic Panic hair dye...the other should have spent forty times that long on a couch in a brownstone. Together, they were like the postmodern Wonder Twins. I theorized to Jacques that if they swatted their pale, angry hands together, they'd take on the form of angry animals...but really COOL really angry animals. Jacques laughed, but it might have been the expensive beer talking (Jacques brought his own, many times...I never took it personally, for some reason; maybe I was just happy to have somebody nearly my size in attendance, so I'd look like less of a circus freak.)

The evening wore on, and some of the small fry (not a misnomer or insult, really; they were all younger and less prone to binge drinking than the dozen or so professionals lurking in the kitchen/living room/front porch) decided to leave. Adolf, Gook, and Muggs left (they were longtime saddlemates, and had arrived together, too), so Matt and I walked them out, watched them get into Adolf's car, and waved from the front sidewalk (in West Haven, only the Italians had hedges that year; most of the semi-Irish had hewn them down so we'd have a clearer view of the police. The West Haven Irish, at least in my old neighborhood, have long had a corner on the noise-complaint market, and we'll part with it only when you run out of cops.)
When they reached the corner of Ocean Avenue and Morris Street, the same corner that had so successfully eluded Dio Phil, time hiccuped; there was one long pause, one quick burst in the middle, and then there was an ache in my abdomen.

I used to wonder what God's piano sounded like when you hit that lowest E. The resonant gong would probably stop time, steam the blood from your veins, and drain every ounce of soul out of you. Assuming this wasn't the last thing you heard, the return of these natural essences would be like rebirth...but that's not what happened. That's not what I heard, actually, although for nearly a full second I was certain it was. What I heard was Adolf's car being slammed into at a reasonable speed by an oncoming motorist.