What would you do?

Standing on the subway platform earlier playing the ol’ what-would-you-do game. What would you do if that D train just pulling in was suddenly slammed in the rear by an out-of-control B train and the whole fuckin mess jumped off the tracks and started hurtling toward you? Would you run? Duck? Hide behind the staircase, a cross-beam? Shit yourself? All of the above? What would you do if the person next to you started freaking out, having a seizure, pulled a gun? What would you do if a cab jumped up on the sidewalk and creamed eight people right in front of you? What would you do if you were one of those people? What would you do if you suddenly found yourself in the middle of a vicious crackhead claw-hammer fight? What would you do if you woke up paralyzed from the eyeballs down? What would you do if you fell down the stairs and broke your leg at 11 a.m. and there was no one in your building and you’d left your phone locked in your apartment? What would you do? Another good one I like to play is “Random Death.” Sort of a variation on the same theme but a little different. You just think about the most random ways to die you can. I came up with it when I lived in Colorado Springs. I used to live downtown and I worked at this bar down the street from my apartment and one day, I was walking to work when this truck came roaring by that had a bunch of big metal pipes sticking every which way out the back. Got me to thinking, ‘What if I hadn’t been paying attention and the guy driving the truck didn’t see me and I accidentally got too close when it was passing by and one of those pipes smashed me in the fucking head and killed me? What would that be like?’ When I got to work, I got behind the bar and got my apron and shit and was waiting for my happy-hour crowd to show up, just shooting the breeze with this guy Brett who was a cook down the street at one of the other restaurants. I told him about “Random Death” and about the truck.
“That’s the kinda shit you think about when you’re walking to work?”
“Yeah. You should try it.”
“Who thinks about that? Gimme another beer.”
Brett came in every day at 3 pm and left every night at midnight. He drank about 20 beers a night and even threw in a few random shots of Jager just to keep it interesting. He lived alone, his teeth were going, his friends had abandoned him. He wasn’t gonna die randomly. He was gonna die from liver failure and loneliness and he knew it. Then the damndest thing happened. One day outta the clear blue, Brett got himself a girlfriend. She just started coming in with him a coupla times a week. He tended to drink less when she was there and he even started coming in only a coupla times a week, too. He was in love with her. She was nice, pretty enough, a good healthy girl who liked to ride her mountain bike and hike and ski and all that shit Colorado people do. She seemed to really like Brett, too. She was always fussin over him, laughin at his jokes, hangin on him. And she was good for him. I mean, he really got his shit together. He started ridin bikes with her and hikin with her and after a few months, they looked like they were headed to the altar. I’ve rarely been so happy for a guy who was practically a stranger to me. Made me think maybe there was hope for all of us, you know?
One night, she came in just as I was closing up. I told her Brett’d already gone home but I’d get her a beer if she wanted. “Sure,” she says and takes a seat at the bar. One beer led to two and then three and then we did a coupla shots of Jag and then we decided to go out to another bar where a friend of hers was bartending and had more beers and more shots. After a few hours, I kinda blacked out. Woke up the next day on my bathroom floor with puke and piss all over me. My head was killing me and I knew I was late for work. I get up and take a shower and go to put on clean clothes and get my ass in gear and that’s when I noticed my front door. It’d been busted open with what must’ve been a crowbar. The jamb was all torn up where someone’d pried the deadbolt away from the wood. There was even a hole where they’d kicked it open and sent the knob into the wall. Immediately, like a shot to the nuts, panic set in. I started lookin around for more clues and that’s when I saw the note by the phone.
I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND.
No name, nothing. What the fuck? I went to the mirror to inspect my face more closely for obvious damage like maybe I’d missed something in my earlier misery but I still had all my teeth, eyes, no lumps or bruises. I figured all would be made clear to me at some point so I said fuck it and went to get dressed. That’s when I saw her hair-tie thing on my nightstand. I went and smelled my pillow and checked my sheets and sure enough, she’d been there. I don’t know if I’d fucked her or not but she’d definitely been there. I couldn’t believe what a scumbag I was. Here this guy’d finally found a girl he cared about and was turning his life around and was all happy and shit, and I’d just fucked it all up for him. The only thing I could figure was someone’d seen us together at some point that night and called him and he’d come over to my house to kill us but instead of finding us in the sack together, he’d just found me on my bathroom floor covered in piss and choking on my own puke, and apparently that’s when he decided not only to not kill me but also to not let me kill myself. You know he probably hated me so much more for having to help me but I guess he didn’t hate me enough to let me choke to death on my own puke. How the hell was I going to face him? I knew I was gonna see him at some point, the town was too fuckin small for us not to see each other. What was I gonna do when I saw him? As it turns out, I never had to answer that question. Three days later, I got so drunk I blacked out again and this time when I woke up, I was in Austin, Texas.

I never went back to Colorado Springs.