More whiskey, indeed

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I was three years younger than Paris Hilton is now when I got thrown in the Denver City-County Jail drunk tank in 1977 because a buddy of mine got lippy with a salty Colfax copper during my going-away party (I had just graduated college and was moving to Vermont, so a few of us thought it would be smart to try to drink Denver dry).

It was Labor Day weekend, and the jail was definitely open for business. We climbed the barred walls for a while and made primate-house noises until the booze wore off. One of our roomies, a peckerwood with a bad perm in a leisure suit who was in for trying to pick up a hooker, said he could see his apartment from our cell’s window. He wasn’t calling anyone, ‘cause he was married and his boss was a born-again, and as far as I know he’s still in there.

A duster (PCP freak) confined to a single cell all by his lonesome spent the night marching up and down and hollering incomprehensible shit at the top of his lungs until a jailer finally threw open the mainline door and shouted something along the lines of, “Keep that shit up and I am gonna be forced to consider you an asshole.”

“What’s an asshole to you?” screamed the duster.

“You an asshole, muthafuckah!” hollered another drunk-tanker. “Now shut the fuck up, we tryin’ to sleep!”

I expect ol’ Paris is sleeping purty damn nice tonight, diamond-studded ankle bracelet or no, in her 2,700-square-foot, four-bedroom, three-bathroom, Spanish-style home on 0.14 acre above the Sunset Strip in the Hollywood Hills. And if there are any dusters there, well, no doubt they are invited, honored guests. And anyway, sleeping is overrated.

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