The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club by Laurie Notaro Page A

“She wanted to eat us.”
    “You were holding up traffic,” he added.
    “She was going to eat us alive,” I stressed.
    “Have you been drinking, Miss?” Barney asked.
    Oh my God.
    “Yes, I have. One drink. I only had four dollars, and I am a failure at being a whore,” I replied.
    “Step out of the car, please.”
    Shit, I thought, it’s never good when they ask you to step out of the car, I’ve seen this on
COPS.
Bad Laurie, bad Laurie, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
    “I’m going to give you a Field Sobriety Test,” he told me. “Have you had any head injuries?”
    Oh God, I thought, scratching my scalp. What constitutes a head injury? I fell out of the car drunk one night and hit my head on a river rock in the yard once, no, twice; I cracked my head on the toilet another time while I was passing out; I crashed into a telephone pole in the third grade on a field trip because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking; my mom whacked me with a hairbrush on my eleventh birthday because I bit my sister.
    “I don’t think so,” I decided.
    “All right. This is what you need to do,” he said. “Pretend there’s a straight line here, and I need you to, heel to toe, start out with your left foot first, place it directly in front of your right foot, heel to toe, in back of your left foot, directly along the straight, imaginary line, traveling westbound, heel to toe, nine times, not eight, not ten, swivel with the heel of your left foot, spin a cartwheel, a back flip, heel to toe, complete a Flying Dutchman, and then do a back bend. Leave your cigarette in the car, please.”
    I had already practiced catwalking in the bar, so I figured that I might be able to do the drunk walk, although it seemed a little more complicated. And, if I do this, I wanted to ask him, do I get an endorsement from Wheaties? However, I recognized that this was no time to be a comedian.
    I handed Chris my cigarette and began my routine, though I would have preferred to have background music, like Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ with Disaster” or anything by Foghat. I began, heel to toe, heading westbound, nine times, outdid myself with a one-handed cartwheel, and flawlessly executed the back flip, although my aerial was a bit sloppy.
    “Sorry,” I said when I was done, “I have a slipped disc in my back.”
    Barney didn’t believe me, I could tell.
    By this time, two other patrolmen had stopped by to join the fun of administering a drunk test to a sober girl, the lights of their cars flying about, transforming the Mobil station into a full-fledged carnival.
    “She’s drunk,” I saw them agree as Barney and his security guards with real guns, Goober and Gomer, nodded their heads in unison. “That girl smells like a still.”
    I had failed the coordination test. I failed it. And I was sober as the day I was goddamned born. They decided to proceed onward to the technical “pen and light” test, for which none of them was certified but they gave to me anyway.
    It was at this point that I noticed all of the cars migrating to Patti’s house, all the occupants of which recognized me in the Mobil parking lot, which by now had enough cops in it bugging me to qualify as a homicide scene. Some of the people I knew in those cars even waved at me after they honked.
    Goober came forth with a Bic pen and flashlight in hand, and told me to follow the pen with my eyes without moving my head. He started off slowly, moving the pen to his right, my left, then moving it back, and all of a sudden the pen started whizzing around, darting back and forth, up and down, sideways, like the lights of a crazed UFO. I thought Goober was having a seizure, so I just plain stopped trying to play his game and looked him dead in the eye.
    “I AM NOT DRUNK,” I said sternly. If I was, the drunk test would have seemed like a lot more fun than it really was.
    Goober, Gomer, and Barney huddled together, rock, paper,