One of my best friends got married yesterday. Marriage. That’s a mouthful. I’ve known him for 12 years. We used to get into bars with fake ID’s, drink copious amounts of coffee discussing pointless subjects and do stupid things like lie our way into the morgue to see dead bodies or go down the sewer pipes to see what the city was like from underneath.

We tend not to notice the prevalence of light until we’re confronted with the utter lack of it. The sewer made a very thorough job of stating that fact. Suddenly we were enveloped by blackness, the entrance we’d left behind become a single orb of light floating about. I turned on the flashlight, silently recalling all the urban legends about swarms of giant rats and crocodiles that hide in the sewer. Up front, two tiny eyes reflected the light back at us. Horror set in. We started screaming at the top of our lungs and huddled together as a single mouse went past us. Then we recovered composure, tried to hold on to what little pride we had left, and went on. He kept saying he felt like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables.

We went from the sewer pipe into a rain drainage pipe. It was somewhat smaller and very dusty but had half open manholes that let air and light in. We kept going that way for some time, finding nothing more dangerous than poisonous spiders, and came out into an unkempt patch of land that housed a dry riverbed. The smell of decomposing flesh turned our attention to the big Rottweiler that was hanging from a tree with a rope round its neck, lynching style.

We eventually made it to street level, several blocks from where we had started, and walked back. I decided I should read Les Misérables and tried to forget the dog.

There he was yesterday, standing next to the altar, reading the corniest passages from the Song of Songs to his bride (because that’s the kind of guy he is), and all I could think about was the time we went into the sewer.

— sergio on February 08, 2004