Finding Five Grand at Applebee's...
*** A true story.
I'm going to estimate that this incident happened at some time between 2001 and 2003. I'd like to be able to say that I could remember exactly when, but with the drinking and the drugs I was doing at the time, who knows… Me and a group of about five of my druggie friends had a Friday afternoon and evening ritual that normally began at a dive bar somewhere in town. (***The exact “tradition” was a three step process: bar, dinner, then strip club.) Since it was payday for the working class we liked to set up shop somewhere stationary to conduct our deals.
We'd normally assemble at the agreed upon bar around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, depending on how late we were up getting high the night before. This meant day drinking in addition to trips to the bathroom to snort coke off of a filthy toilet tank. I wasn't quite as OCD back then, but believe me I did consider the germs, but I was too much of a drug fiend to give a fuck.
We'd head out to the parking lot to smoke a joint here and there, since this timeframe pre dates recreational weed by a decade or more. We sure as fuck couldn't do THAT inside at the bar like many places nowadays. By the mid afternoon we'd all be pretty much lit, and we’d all try to figure out where we were going to head to for dinner eventually. We never went anywhere particularly fancy, just somewhere with a variety of options and reasonable. On this exact evening we had decided on Applebee's over near what used to be Gwinnett Place Mall. Of course this meant jumping in our cars and convoying across town drunk, high, and who even knows what else. It's a wonder that we even made it around town doing some of the stupid things we were known to do at the time. I guess that it's true, that God looks out for “drunks and fools” and we were both…
We arrived right at the height of the Friday evening rush, probably around 7:00 or 7:30. The entire hostess area was shoulder to shoulder with people, and they were on about a twenty or thirty minute wait. While we were standing there in the throng of masses my buddy Al saw something on the floor. He said it looked like a bank envelope and he crouched down and acted like he was tying his shoe as he retrieved it. He said he was going to go to the bathroom to check it out and he'd be right back.
About three minutes later he came rushing out of the restroom, walking quickly, and said “let's go, let's go, let's go!”… We all filed out behind him, and of course everyone was wondering why in the fuck were we all the sudden bailing on the dinner plans we'd agreed upon.
When we got all the way out to the car he flashed this giant stack of hundred dollar bills, and handed out $200 each to the five of us standing there. It turned out that the envelope contained exactly fifty crisp one hundred dollar bills, and somebody who was waiting for dinner at Applebee's that evening had apparently dropped it on the floor… How the Hell could someone be just walking around with five grand in an envelope and NOT secure it properly in their pocket or purse? I honestly felt bad for whomever lost it, but at the same time if you've got that much cash on you, then you need to be more careful.
It was too late now, as we were already outside, and now we needed a new dinner plan since we’d apparently abandoned our original strategy... There was a Longhorn Steakhouse across the parking lot from where we were standing, so Al said that he'd pay for all our dinners there with his newfound windfall. The weirdest thing is that he was the only one amongst us who didn't drink OR do drugs, so that's probably why the “universe” granted him with such luck instead of one of us other druggies…
We went over to Longhorn and really blew it out big-time on his dime! Top shelf margaritas! Appetizers! Steaks all around, plus sides and dessert!… By the time we left for the strip club everyone was fat and happy, and I still to this day can't believe that someone dropped an envelope with five grand in it on the floor at Applebee's…
I honestly don't even remember which strip club we went to afterwards, but the memory of that fat stack of newfound cash has stuck with me ever since…
This was awesome - excited for the Luna live!