Well thanks for telling me now, Captain Tardy. "But that woman wouldn't lie to me. She has to know where the hell she works. She made it sound like the easiest thing in the world to find."
Wolf shook his head, "Look: there's the mall, the race track, the college... I don't see any bus station."
This was just my kind of luck. It fucking figured. This lady tells me it's across the street from the Blue Chicken, plain as day, but there's no damned bus station. Now Wolf's telling me he's never ever seen one. Since Wolf had been here at Dover for a while, I automatically assumed he had seen all there was to see of the place. This was Dover we were talking about after all, not the bazaars of Cairo. If I had known that Wolf, while having an intimate knowledge of the Wesleyan College Dormitories and the surrounding environs, hadn't really explored every nook and cranny of Dover, I would've taken his words with a grain of salt. This being 1992, I accepted his judgment in this area without question and began thinking about other means of transport.
As we were coming back down 13, Wolf asked if I was hungry. Yeah, sure. I'm always hungry. "Cool. I've gotta stop by the Pink Elephant to pick up some stuff first. I saw a Chinese take-out place at that strip mall that looked good. Wanna get some of that?"
I replied in the affirmative as we pulled into the Pink Elephant's parking lot. The Pink Elephant was a liquor store, so-called because of the chain of pink pachyderms painted on the drive-thru side of the building. Yep, you heard right: drive-thru liquor, one of the greatest ideas since the invention of the electric lightbulb. Growing up in Virginia, I was only familiar with the ABC, or Alcoholic Beverage Commission. These stores were the only places in the Commonwealth that could sell hard liquor. They were drab, boring buildings with dark windows and a plain sign that read "ABC" up on the roof. I'd always thought these architectural blights had been the handiwork of some pious Southern Baptist, but logically we know that couldn't be the case. It'd have huge flames surrounding the entrance with a huge sign above the doorway reading, "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here" along with an animatronic Billy Sunday standing outside barking biblical prohibitions against the Drink (all from the King James Version, of course). No, it couldn't have been the SBC's that were responsible for the designs. It must've been an Episcopalian who drafted the plans for the buildings. Simple and unassuming on the outside, yet one hell of a party on the inside.
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