(Author’s note–Yes, for anyone who noticed, I got tired of writing the whole damn thing out–LA)

Tippleganger and Dozzle

Prefatory Remarks

Defining the Tippleganger:

The Spirit half of this little drama

Has a second bottle of wine ever convinced you cut your own hair? Did that darn vodka make you “overshare” sex fantasies you have about your sister’s husband with a mutual friend who cannot keep a secret? How much Budweiser does it take to get you to call your ex at three a.m.?–in spite of what it says about that sort of thing in the restraining order.

Ah, the “challenging” morning after, equally suffered by both queen and commoner, hero and knave, genius and bonehead. And although it’s still all your fault, there stands a good chance that a lot of your crimes were abetted by a Tippleganger.

Pseudo-scientifically speaking, the mischievous Tippleganger Spirit has been around since the blessed First Fermentation. For untold ages this jester-class ghost has specialized in supplying Big Ideas to living persons who have imbibed past the limits of common sense and decency. Although “Tips” may assume any shape, they usually gather-to in the guise of a person (or a close enough for government work version of such) whom the Target Drunk (TD) respects and is likely to listen to. Nobody knows how Tips figure this out. Let’s just say that, as it goes in life, the hereafter is also shrouded in mystery and pitted with plot holes, and leave it at that.

In the Tippleganger idiom, getting a TD to move on a Big Idea is called a Heeding. Tips are all about Heedings. The more embarrassing a Heeding is for the TD, the better.

Your average Tippleganger lurks the places where alcohol is served and they size up potential TDs for their entertainment value. They also peer through windows to see who is drinking alone (solitary sots make excellent “clients”). Although most Tip possessions of TD’s are one-offs, and do not usually stick to the TD’s memory, a Long Term Target Drunk (LTTD), such as Yours Truly, often develops a mutually exclusive Tippleganger/LTTD relationship. My Tip, Duke Dick Head, looks, thinks and in all meaningful ways behaves like Mr. Shakespeare’s Richard Plantagenet, Jr. The Duke usually halts in and begins to whisper suggestions after my third brandy Alexander.

Defining the Dozzle: The all too human living person in this feature

Dozzle is a portmanteau of douche and nozzle. Involvement in a portmanteau is as fancy as things get for this distinctly American hillwilliam; for dozzle accurately describes any one of the millions of droopy-drawered, profoundly unemployable, Kid Rock wannabe meatballs you see hanging out in front of 7-11 because feckless Natural Selection seldom does anything about its mistakes.

Tippleganger and Dozzle

The Tippleganger was depressed. It had been weeks since his last heeding; insecurity and paranoia were creeping in on his ghostly serenity. He feared he had lost his touch. And, now, his insensitive fellow Tipplegangers were beginning to talk; one insolent son of a bitch even went as far to suggest that he open a rehab center and call it “The 13th Step.” Keep on smiling, mo-fo, keep on smiling…

Yes, the Tip was feeling low. So low that he boarded the ferry departing Seattle for Charleston in search of the easiest prey in all of Tipplegangerdom, the American dozzle. Although such behavior was considered slumming and tantamount to a Ladies’ Man getting his swagger back at a brothel, he figured that he needed a confidence builder, regardless of its provenance.

Charleston, Washington, USA, is the natural breeding ground for the American dozzle. You can spot a dozzle by the conveyance of a startling unoriginality that is so lame that it is a new thing unto itself. In a way, a dozzle can be described as an identity thief. Now, that’s not to claim that a dozzle is bright enough to breach bank records or lift social security numbers on the strength of his wit–Oh, hell no. What they do is mimic the styles of hip hoppers, skater boys, punk rockers, gang-bangers, heavy metallurgists, recently paroled felons and smother it with a Neptunian cloud bank composed of Axe filched off the shelf at WalMart and laid on heavy while no one is looking. Dozzles are also notorious lightweights when it comes to drugs and alcohol; all it takes is half a bowl of state weed (legal in Washington) and maybe six swallows off a forty-ounce Colt .45 to make a heedful dozzle.

The invisible Tip was alone with his thoughts at the bow of the vessel. It was winter in the Pacific Northwest, and although it made no difference to the ghost, a thirty-knot headwind had insured the Tip’s private misery. The Tippleganger was feeling cheap and miserable. Yet his isolation, and an inner sadness that was getting to be as tiresome and whiny as a Morrissey CD, didn’t last much longer. Whatever little god that looks out for Tipplegangers on the skids must also have on board that same ferry. How else to explain the sudden appearance of an American dozzle already polluted on…

“Buckfast!!!” The Tippleganger silently screamed with glee, and he did a little happy dance when he saw the dozzle and got a load of what the guy had a load of. “This dumb bastard is gacked to the nines on Buck-fucking-fast!”

Tipplegangers have a supernaturally keen sense of smell when it comes to alcohol identification. Even potions that hadn’t been invented yet or were no longer drunk during their lives are immediately known to them once they become Tips. A Tippleganger can tell whether you have mead or sack or twenty-year-old scotch or Bokay apple wine or PBR or cough syrup on your breath by just looking at you. Yet not since the halcyon days of Four Loko (until the prudes at the FDA pulled the plug on it) had he caught whiff of the type of beverage that he heard did most of the heavy lifting for Tips in the UK. Somehow, this dozzle had gotten into some Buckfast even though it wasn’t sold in the US.

No matter. No reason to look a gift dozzle on Buckfast in the mouth.

Ye gods, what a dozzle it was. A regular factory prototype. He was a skinny, short little shaver someplace in his twenties. He was wearing a Kevin Durant jersey, an Oakland Raiders cap from which the type stringy dirty blonde hair you never see on the head of someone who scored high on an SAT, hung listlessly. Naturally, his pants were down to his knees, thus exposing a not entirely fresh pair of Spongebob Squarepants boxers. His sneakers were untied and he was carrying a skateboard slathered with energy drink stickers. Fortunately the headwind had dispersed much of the dozzle’s personal atmosphere of Axe, but you could still tell that he’d recently been to WalMart.

But none of that mattered as much as the wonderful nectar that the dozzle had in his system.

“Buckfast,” the Tip whispered, mystified by his good fortune, but not to the degree that he didn’t quickly act on it.

A pair of wholesome college-aged girls came out on the bow, and laughing and yelping at the wind; they immediately took shelter behind a windowed enclosure, which was open at each end, thus still technically a part of the bow. They were young and pretty and well dressed; girls way the hell out of the dozzle’s reach. For a second that last thought almost caused the Tip to feel pity for the dozzle. But a second look informed him that the dozzle, though a meatball, was not mentally challenged, and that he willingly chose to be the way he was because it required no work on his part. The Tip glanced back at the girls behind the glass and decided that they were the sort of girls neither attracted to laziness nor the embracement of ignorance as a culture.

The Tip gathered-to as Kevin Federline; good old K-Fed came in handy for something at last. Only the dozzle could see or hear “K-Fed.” Although the Buckfast had left the light-weight dozzle in a semi-catatonic state, enough of its syrupy antisocial sweetness was there for the Tip to manipulate.

“Hey bro,” Said K-Fed/Tip; easily heard by the dozzle despite his condition and the wind howling off the sea.

“Brah, whoaahh…dude, I got your CD at my baby mama’s crib. Had to come out for a sec…Some dude…some dude in a band…some dude says he’s in a Scottish band shared…”

Although that intel somehow clarified an item of minor curiosity for the Tip, it wouldn’t have mattered if the dozzle had been fed the Buckfast by a unicorn in a leisure suit. Not now, not on the verge of winning a heeding.

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“Bro,” K-Fed/Tip, said, with the badboyish I Don’t Care if You Come Stay Lay or Pray attitude that girls who have zero self esteem and even fewer IQ points find sexy. “Them chickens over there are checking you out.”

“Dude…I know,” lied the dozzle.

“Say,” said K-Fed/Tip, “Why don’t you give them a treat and go all Leo DiCaprio.”

Here the Tippleganger pushed, just a little. He placed that scene from Titanic in the dozzle’s tiny mind, and associated it with sex.

“Oh, dude…yeah,” said the dozzle, already on his way to the very front of the bow.

“You’ll be layin’ more pipe than Exxon,” the Tippleganger laughed and laughed and laughed, exalted after finally ending his heeding losing streak.

Upstairs in the pilot house the first officer sighed. “Captain, we’ve got yet another douche nozzle on the prow screaming he’s King of the World.”

The Amoral: How Much Buckfast Can a Young Buck Suck Fast Before A Tippleganger Plays Him For a Horse’s Ass?