I Bet That Won't Happen in Tennessee

I was leaving the apartment with my roommate Copenhaver this evening, and as we were walking down the stairs he commented on the pungent dead-mouse odor that exists as you walk down from the third to second floor. I said I heard that there were no mice in Nashville, and he said he heard that there were no mice on the Upper East Side, which is where he's moving in a couple weeks.

As Cope went to push open the door to the outside, he met some resistance. He pushed again, still the door wouldn't budge more than a few inches. I looked down through the window to see what might be preventing us from getting outside, and saw a drunk/druggie/sleepy/dopey/whatever man lying on his side in the 9-to-12 inches in front of our door. Presumably he considered that a good place to nap during the downpour earlier in the evening.

And napping he was. Big time. We gave a couple more pushes, trying to nudge him out of his stupor, to no avail. Then we enlisted the assistance of a couple passersby, asking, "Hey, can you help us wake this guy up?" Some more nudging from the other side, along with some verbal encouragement, didn't get any kind of response, but we were assured that he didn't appear to be dead.

We couldn't get him awake enough to leave the area, but the man-on-the-street was kind enough to use his foot to move the drunk guy's legs far enough for us to open the door just wide enough to ooch outside.

He was still there (no big surprise) when we returned. Cope lost rock-paper-scissors* and it fell to him to try to move the legs again because he had shoes on and I had flip-flops.

A couple memorable quotes on the way back inside and up the stairs to our apartment:

Me: "Oh god, his face is on the ground now."
Cope: "Well, he is lying on the ground."

Cope: "I bet that won't happen in Tennessee... unless it's you."

*Editor's note: I used poetic license there (What, my blog isn't poetry? Whatever) in order to make the post easier to understand to the average reader. We did not in fact decide using rock-paper-scissors. We used a system called ham-and-eggs whereby the last person to put their finger on their nose has to accept the responsibility of a usually somewhat-odious task. (It usually involves more than two people) The most frequent usage is at dinner when the loser has to take the check and take responsibility for figuring what to tip and what people need to pay. I tried to find out if this game is called ham-and-eggs by anyone else outside my group of friends but couldn't find any usages on the web that weren't referring to the actual food. If anyone knows the backstory, please enlighten us via the comment section.