You're the Worst

Friday night was spent with a handful of good friends’ at Jacob Wirth, a restaurant in Boston that has become a favorite Friday night spot in my group of friends.. Jacob Wirth is one of the oldest restaurants in Boston’s theatre district with some pretty excellent traditional German food, good beer on draught, and a piano man on Friday nights. Mel, the piano man, is a middle aged guy who is not afraid to tell you how pathetic your drunken shout-singing is, but who also loves a good crowd around his piano on a Friday night, so he’ll settle for your horrific singing. After many a pitcher of beer, some delicious fried pickles, and bellowing gut singing, we dispersed and started making our way in different directions. Amy and I had missed the last train to Somerville, so decided to take a taxi home.

Things get a little hazy here, but we had to stop at an ATM to give the cab driver money for our fare, then stumbled our way to 19 Banks. When we emerged in the morning from the blur of the previous nights festivities, we started to do “damage control”.

“Damage Control” is defined as the act of assessing what may be missing from your life the morning after a night of heavy imbibing. I am a pretty responsible drunk, so I don’t usually have too much controlling from the damage. This morning, however proved to be special. I opened my wallet to make sure all the necessary pieces of plastic where still in fact there and calculate how much cash I had blown. One very important little card, also known as a form of Debit, seemed to have grown legs and left my wallet. My heart rate started to accelerate upon realizing the problem. Where could it be? Jacket Pocket? No. Loose in the purse? No. On Amy’s floor near all of my other stuff? No. In my shoe? No.

Retracing the events of the previous night brought us to the conclusion that it either fell somewhere in the ATM area when we were getting money for the cabbie, or was sucked into the machine and not returned. Amy, while talking me back down from cold sweats, high blood pressure, and a near anxiety attack, is walking with me in the snowy cold New England weather to the bank to ask if the may have found it.

I walk up to the first available teller, and I am sure I look like I hit the bottle hard last night and that maybe the bottle also hit me, repeatedly. I begin to explain to the gentleman “See, I’m starting this road trip tomorrow, and I seem to have lost my ATM card somewhere between your ATM and the bed I fell into last night, I was wondering if maybe you have seen it?”

The kind sir responds professionally with “I can take a look, do you have your ID on you?” I’m thinking, yeah, I can do this, it isn’t the worst possible thing that could happen if I lost my debit card right now, is it? I mean, worse things could happen, like losing my right arm or, having an aneurism.

So I unzip the wallet to rifle around for my ID, and out of nowhere, magically returned to my wallet, is said debit card. Now, I am not one to overreact when I think my debit card is missing, especially in crucial times of need (yeah right.) but I can tell you that I pulled out every card and assessed that had in fact been missing. I mean, I swear on my life it was NOT there. How, had it supernaturally just reappeared in my wallet?

As I that my debit card is in my magic wallet, I chuckle to myself and look up to see the guy waiting for me to hand over my ID. I kindly say “oh. Here it is.” And I turn to Amy and say “I think God just smiled on me.”