#164: "Just Drive"
Artie bought a new boat. We met Inky for beers last night at Le Oyster House to commiserate over Slothrop and all Artie wanted to talk about was his new Bayliner. So after a while, we jumped in a yellow cab back to Artie’s girlfriend’s. Artie was chatting up the cabbie in the front seat and Inky was quiet. I could tell he wasn’t feeling so good when he tried to roll down the window but didn’t make it in time and threw up oysters and Rainier Beer on his shoes in the backseat. He wasn’t drunk, so it must’ve been the raw bar. The cabbie couldn’t have been nicer about he whole thing. If it were me, I don’t know. But the guy pulled into the Denny’s lot and we all cleaned out the backseat and Artie gave the guy 2 hundred-dollar bills for the trouble. Inky rallied so we walked from there & Artie picked up a six-pack on the way down the hill. When we got to the boat, I was still just expecting a bigger sailboat, but he led us to cabin cruiser at the neighbor’s slip, which he’s renting bc Syd’s isn’t big enough. Maybe Syd’s rolling in it, but I half wondered if Artie didn’t put the thing on his corp Amex. I didn’t ask, figured it was rude. We sat out on the boat and the sun melted over the Olympics like it does on clear nights, and Inky dunked his shoes in the lake. We kept bringing up Slothrop, but Artie didn’t want to hear it. He was doodling in his notepad so we let it go. We kicked around some caption ideas until Syd chased us out @ midnight. On the way out, Artie said, “Don’t worry about Slothrop. He’ll be gone in a week.” He said it with this casual kind of confidence, like he knew it. Inky came in with a headache this morning and, despite the Slothrop directive, he cleaned up the sketches that were already in our inboxes bc what else is he supposed to do? The Committee was deadlocked over the 3 versions. It was 3-3-3, so we ran it through the S-MCSS and all three came back with an identical 14.5. Never seen it before. So the Committee is stymied. They decided to put the submission on hold until they could figure out a tie-breaker. I’m posting all 3 here, so you can choose for yourself. Slothrop was oddly subdued, but he voted for #2. -Ed.
