BY LANCE DOILY So it looks like Freddy got popped again. Depending on who you ask, it went from a routine traffic stop for a broken taillight to him taking a page out of Rex’s book and getting nailed going a buck-twenty on the wrong side of the Parkway. Either way, it ended with Freddy blowing a county record .48% and nearly paralyzing a state trooper with a perfectly executed atomic drop. After all the paperwork goes through this will end up being his 11th DUI, not bad considering he’s been consistently inebriated for the past 26 years (any break he had was due to it being court mandated). He maintains that if he were a baseball player and only struck out 11 times over the course of his career he’d be a first ballot Hall of Famer, and it’s hard to argue with that logic. It’s worth noting that Freddy got all his DUI’s between the hours of 7AM-3PM, statistically the hardest time to get nailed. So obviously kudos and shots were in order.
I know this sounds fucked up to an outsider, but us regulars here at Murph’s take pride in our DUI’s. Some quick calculations after a head count shows we’ve got about 44 DUI’s in the bar right now between the seven of us, and we ain’t done yet, my friends. I’ll put that up against any number of early risin’ regulars from the “Life took a big ol’ clumsy shit on my head” crew at the Hopper, to the squirrel eaters in Sussex County. Now you might be wondering how we’re able to accumulate all these DUI’s when state law dictates you’re permanently off the road after four of them. I admit Stone Marino went on a straight up balling tear through the precinct a few years ago that exonerated about 15 of them, but it doesn’t hurt that Murph’s is owned and operated by the venerable “Skunk” Murphy himself. Skunk possesses almost unfathomable power in Passaic County due to reasons of questionable legitimacy I’ll have to tell you all about down the road, but we’ve learned to look the other way if it means holding onto our trucker licenses a little longer. And there’s not a man alive who’s benefited more from this than our beloved Smitty. Smitty’s an electrician who apparently does all of his work from the hours of 3AM-6AM, since he spends every other waking hour on the stool in front of the draught tower. Great guy though; he helped me out in a massive bar brawl I’ll tell you guys about next week.
Speaking of the devil, look who comes stumbling through the front door right on cue, good old Smitty himself, wearing nothing but sweatpants and a smile. Smitty is the undisputed leader for DUI’s in the county, and possibly the free world. Right now he’s sitting pretty with 21 of ‘em, resting comfortably above Floyd Darvis from Clifton with 12 (although to his credit he did rack them all up in a remarkable 6-month time period). As for me? Well, I’m not normally the type to puff my chest out, but even though I only have five, I got four of them in four different counties way back in the winter of ‘88, a record that has yet to be topped. Not gonna lie, I have to say that overall I’m a pretty good drunk driver, and the cops know and respect this. But man, what’s been happening lately? Back in the 70’s, the judge would come to your bar, make you buy him beers and shots for a few hours, then challenge you to a drunk driving contest on the Turnpike. Now it’s .04% for drivers with commercial licenses. I’ve probably got enough residual booze left in my teeth to blow that.
I should mention before everyone gets all up in arms that over the course of our drunk driving careers we’ve only racked up maybe $ 100K in property damages at best, and never hurt anyone except for ourselves (and usually the arresting officers). Now far be it from me to be a whistle blower, but why don’t you take a drive over to the Tilted Kilt and ask of couple of their regulars how their DUI’s went. Like Kyle, two measly DUI’s resulting in three dead and 75+ tenants without an apartment complex to go back home to. Or Big Ivan, the old Coors delivery guy who drove his rig into a Shop Rite during a Can-Can sale and packed the hospital with hundreds of the elderly within minutes. As for jail-time, forget it. Big Ivan alone did more time than everyone here combined in the last 25 years. I hate to be the guy who brags about still being able to drive due to having a gay buddy who gets the cops to blow him and and a bar owner who tells even the state governor what to do, but these days you learn to take what’s given to you.
PREVIOUSLY: The Auspicious Debut Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Second Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Third Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Fourth Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Fifth Installment Of Blotto
PREVIOUSLY: How I Came To Know Lance Doily