I was thinking a call to the drill press hot line. Where is David K Ward when we need him?
Last time I saw David, he was sitting in the alley between the old Cave 9 building and the new Art and Design school on Magnolia in downtown B'ham. He was wearing a blanket and a large section of a rug that must have been thrown out of one of the old homes in Forest Park. He had a Mickey Mouse baseball cap on, and he was wearing thick hunting boots.
I saw him slouched up against the wall with a broken bottle of boone's farm in his left hand. Obviously, it was empty of liquid. There were the remnants of a McDonald's happy meal box next to him. It looked like he had stuffed the pictures of the cartoon characters on the box into the top of his vestment.
His right hand was stroking his wiry, grey beard. He was staring at the wall opposite of him, and when I approached him, I could faintly hear him muttering these words, "Whiskey, tango, foxtrot."
He repeated them over and over again. Feeling a sense of pity, I left him five dollars and the stub from the ticket of my last Auburn game. He gazed directly into my eyes, and they began to tear up. I thought he was about to say something important, but then he muttered the same three words:
"Whiskey, tango, foxtrot."