Dancing with the Devil.

Took the day off, last Friday.

Had originally planned to lounge around the house with M, who was on a week long break herself, when I got the following voicemails:

1. Adman, its Half Tempted. Call me back as soon as you get this.

2. (fifteen minutes later) Adman, its HT, again. Have I got a deal for you. But you have to call me in the next fifteen minutes. Call me right back, okay?

3. (two hours later). Okay. So the deal is, you need to take the afternoon off work, come down and drink with me. Get drunk, actually. It won't cost you a thing and you get your drink of choice.

(pause)

The Mesa Police Department will pick up the tab...

I reflected...

Life is strange, I thought to myself. The one-time cries of "don't knock anyone up!" have been replaced with "when am I going to have grandchildren?" and now this.

Resigned to my fate, I called back:

Gettin' drunk on the Man? I'm in!

So, Friday afternoon rolls around and I find myself ensconced in an empty fire engine bay, along with a dozen-or-so other wannabee drunks at a training facility for Mesa's finest.

(As you may've guessed, they wanted to do field sobriety testing for newbee cops and vets seeking re-certification. How did I do? We'll get into that a little later).

Knowing that I would want to look and feel my finest for this event, I'd neither bathed nor shaved and had adorned M's "Rock For Choice" t-shirt (proclaiming a woman's right to an abortion!) which had been extricated from my sweaty gym bag.

Initially, the only conversations I could get were with a barely twenty-one-year-old kid ( looking more like 13) and my buddy, HT. The kid grew quickly tiresome but I managed to teach him the Kung Fu Game ("when you can snatch this quarter from my hand it will be time for you to leave...") before disentangling myself.

As for HT, she handled herself with grace and aplomb:

1. not getting sick -and-
   
2. not making an ass of herself!

Two goals she'd set for herself at the outset. There may've been a third goal as well but who remembers after all that alcohol.

Eventually, some other peeps warmed up to me as well. One guy, a veteran officer only 2 months from retirement, even took to nicknaming me "Scruffy" and punching me on the arm ever so often. I took this as a sign of affection.

Of course, he had a couple in him by then.

Re: My Sobriety Field Test - after consuming approximately 8 drinks in somewhere around 2 1/2 hours I passed* both the field test (Nystagmus) and the breath-a-lyzer with a .05 blood alcohol level.

How, you may ask?

A good magician never reveals his tricks.

Besides, if you were lucky enough to dance with the devil and tell the tale, you certainly wouldn't want to brag about it - especially in detail.

*I should point out - there's a new law on the books which requires no more than one drink, pill (prescription or otherwise) or even, as I understand it, a sign of sleep deprivation, for an individual to be deemed "slightly impaired" and therefore guilty of DUI. This one would be tough beat, regardless.