WHEN YOUR COCK GETS STOLEN

As my departure date from the barbecue joint nears — my last night will be on the 31st, provided I don’t find anything beforehand — the wacky events just keep on coming.

Last evening at the barbecue joint was the usual Saturday night affair, what with the standard assortment of revelers blowing off steam after another shitty work week, and young women looking to get drunk and laid, and after my shift ended I settled in at the bar for a round or two before heading back to the sanctity of the Vault.

Notable among the patrons were three guys sitting close to the door, a group of late-twenty-somethings of the neighborhood “’Ey-Oh!” Guido stereotype ilk, steadily getting shitfaced for hours, but basically quite affable, each vying for the attention of our willowy blonde bartender, Joy (or as I refer to her, “the Frost-Giant’s Daughter”). I paid them little attention, and soon enough caught the B63 bus and made my way home. When I came in this afternoon, Jeff the bartender and Andres of the Kitchen alerted me to the fact that our carved wooden rooster — Clucky, the Magical Cock — had been stolen, presumably by the drunken Italian boys; Andres stuck around until 1AM and said the guys were still there when he left, meaning they’d been at the bar for at least four hours and were quite looped when he left, and since the bar doesn’t close until 4AM it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine them sticking around until the bitter end. During that time it was conceivable that the boys could have absconded with Clucky while Joy was taking care of other customers, which really proves how wrecked they were because there’s a lot of other stuff littering the joint that would have made for a more impressive prize (if some motherfucker had stolen my large Ultraman doll, I would have gone on a sadistic killing spree until he was returned safe and sound).

The Ultraman doll in question.

So as we discussed the absurdity of the theft and the possibility of Clucky being mailed back to us one piece at a time, one of the Guido boys walked in, looking like twelve miles of bad road and unmistakably hung over, with Clucky under one arm. He greeted the slack-jawed three of us and placed Clucky back in his customary perch, then explained what happened. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “and I looked on our living room table and saw youse guys’ rooster and asked my roommate what the fuck was it doing in our apartment. So he says ta me, ‘What, ya don’t like it?’ I stared at him and says ‘You’re fuckin’ retarded, you are,’ so I got dressed and brought it back. Sorry about that.”

We accepted his apology through unrestrained peals of laughter, and began to strategize about how to handle such larcenous intent in the future.