From New Orleans:

“Teenwolf!”

A beer bottle soared across the conference room, liberated and free for one last beautiful, tranquil moment.

“Hey, Teenwolf!”

The bottle, empty, impacted with the wall. It bounced backward and plummeted to the floor with a soft but solid thud.

“Teenwolf!”

For the past week Adam had become known as ‘Teenwolf’ for the thick mane of hair, dyed the color of night, that crowned his head like an irregular distended halo, unwieldy, untamed and unclean.

Adam turned in the direction of the call, spying a table near the rear of the room behind a small sea of placid faces.

“Yeah, Teenwolf!” an older gentleman said, waving. His nose was red, his hair white, his features robust. “Come here and let us buy you a shot!”

The unfamiliar man sat beside his wife and the two of them appeared old enough to be Adam’s parents. Seated around them at the table were Ryan, Joe and myself. We’d made friends with them and were enjoying his rounds of drinks.

“Your friend here was telling us that you’re like a modern Gallileo,” the man said as Adam approached.

“The bottles don’t break!” Adam exclaimed.

“Ha! They’ll break eventually, I’ll betcha! And if they don’t break then soon enough they’ll be breaking you!” the man said, seeming to find this clever.

“Take a seat, Teenwolf,” Ryan said, smiling. “They’re impressed.”

“What’s your pleasure?” the man asked.

“Black Sambuca,” Adam said, sitting down.

“Black Sam—so that’s it! Soon you’ll be spending the night on the throne with the green shits, sure enough! No more worries about unbreakable bottles!” the man said and erupted into a loud spate of laughter, dousing us with another blast of sour whiskey vapors.

Adam picked up an empty bottle from our table and launched it across the room.

The man’s wife, silent, looked displeased and a little frightened by her physical proximity to Adam’s apparent dementia.

Earlier, while Adam sat at the bar, he had accidentally knocked a half-empty bottle of Bud Light to the floor. He was impressed that the bottle had bounced, once, rather than shatter into pieces on the floor. Adam’s reverence for reproducible and observable data had prompted him to draw a formidable swill from the beer in his hand, thereafter holding the empty bottle out before him, releasing his fingers as he swallowed.

The body fell, bounced and came to rest.

Adam repeated the experiment, alerting Joe, who sat beside him, to his remarkable discovery.

“Watch this,” he said, elbowing Joe.

For added effect Adam raised his arm above his head and released the bottle into the ether.

Joe watched as the bottle, still intact, returned to the earth after bouncing once.

“Did you see that?” Adam asked.

“It’s called carpeting, Adam.”

“But this is a bar!” Adam exclaimed.

“It’s a conference room that they turned into a bar,” Joe said.

“But they don’t break! It’s like fool-proofing a bar. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t break these bottles.”

“I’m sure if you wanted to,” Joe began before reconsidering. Adam tossed another bottle out in front of them. The bottle hit the ground, bounced twice, then came to rest.

“Look! It did it again!”

Joe rose from his stool and walked away.

Our makeshift bar, carpeted, was located in the Kennedy conference room of the New Orleans Wyndham Hotel, near the airport. Knowing better than to upset tourists and local Louisiana patrons with an egregious deficiency of drinking space while the hotel underwent extensive renovations, the resourceful management had turned the conference room into a temporary bar, removing most of the unnecessary furniture like podiums, microphones and other multi-media hardware. The result was a sparsely furnished room littered with a small multitude of folding tables and a long simple counter with several stools alongside.

After Joe had left him for better company, Adam found that other patrons seated nearby were giving him a more satisfactory reception. This audience seemed impressed by his antics as he downed increasing amounts of beer to procure more bottles to cast into the air and entertained by the showmanship with which he executed this process. By the time I entered and took a seat with Ryan and Joe and their new friends, Adam’s experiments had devolved into throwing the bottles across the entirety of the room with an energy more sinister than that of innocent scientific inquiry. The menacing expression on his face coupled with the savage qualities of his physical appearance as he wound up like a pitcher at the mound, taking aim at the far wall, seemed to intimidate the Wyndham employees into silence, and no one, not even the bartender, felt confident enough to confront him or even suspend his service.

Most unusual, however, was how the evening crowd continued talking complacently among themselves, seemingly unaware of or indifferent to the wild-haired menace throwing empty beer bottles nearby. Several people raised occasional cheers as they watched in awe of the young man’s temerity, but Adam was more or less just another fixture in an otherwise ordinary New Orleans portrait.

And then this amiable couple at our table decided to feed him more liquor.

“So why the name Teenwolf?” the man asked.

Adam didn’t answer but threw another emptied bottle against the nearest wall. His arm seemed to have lost some of its control and accuracy, finally succumbing to the massive amounts of liquor coursing through it, and the bottle soared erratically through the air like a crippled pigeon before falling against the wall.

“I’ll bet it’s because of your crazy hair, eh?” the man continued.

“What?” Adam said, turning back to him. “No. I got it because I like to surf on top of vans, shave my back and drink the blood of unbaptized young. Like Whitney Houston in her prime.”

The man erupted with another blast of sour whiskey air and the cocktail waitress returned with our round.