I don’t like to work at home, so if I can’t (as the young people say) “do” essays at school, I prefer to “do” them in a bar. Two beers = six essays, and that’s my limit, an hour and a half’s work.

I drink slowly, caught in the aesthetic dissonance of delicious hops and comma splices as I scrawl my comments, making sure my desk, the surface of the bar, is dry.

No doubt many might consider this methodology unprofessional, but trust me, I possess a godlike laser-like remarkable better-than average-ability to focus and shut the rest of the world out as I assess and comment. There are too many distractions at home, too many memories, not enough presences.

However, this week I’ve finished my two sets of essays two days early, so tonight when I biked down to my joint on Second Street, I set out merely to savor a couple of All Day IPAs and consume one pork taco.

I mingled, talked to acquaintances. As usual, listened but said very little. Over the course of my stay, I heard three cool stories by three different narrators.   All three narratives had this in common: really bad shit going down 8 or 15 or 30 ago, but in the retelling, the narrators all smiled and laughed when recounting the horrors.

I’m only going to share the most frightening, because it’s definitely climbed to number one on my ever expanding anti-bucket list.

***

As it turns out, there was a high-speed chase on Folly Monday night. According to my source, the pursuit humped from Artic Avenue across to East Indian, which meant stop signs were run perpendicular to the main Folly Beach thoroughfares (if you can call them that).

Yipes!

My pal on the stool next to me offered that he himself had been a participant in a high-speed chase and was lucky enough to be allowed to drive his arrested pal’s car after the arrest.

Of course, we were all ears.

To edit a ten-minute narrative down to 30 seconds:

Peninsula Charleston.

A cop inhabited Gold Explorer looking down on a front seat of a parked vehicle loaded with cash and heroin.

The driver of that vehicle ignoring the command “don’t move” and taking off a la Tarentino.

Careening across the peninsula, the number of cop cars in pursuit growing and growing.

“It’s like a glow of blue,” the narrator says.

Now they going seventy-plus swallowing bags of dope like starving people raw oysters.

As they reach the summit of the Ravenel Bridge, they see the blue lights of Mt. Pleasant police headed their way.

“You done swallowing?” the driver asks.

“Yes,” the narrator answers.

They come to a stop on the bridge.

All the subsequent search yields is a long hidden cannabis pipe.

They don’t die from the ingestion.

Let’s strike high-speed chases off our bucket lists.*

You can listen to the this song courtesy of Mr. Tom Waits instead.  It’s a vicarious high speed chase extraordinaire.

*Of course, the assumption here is that you’ve already struck becoming a junkie off.