I do stupid shit when I'm hammered. Less and less as I get older, but it still happens from time to time. I'm certainly not alone in this. Those of us who are seasoned drinkers, all have a particular poison that causes us to indulge in actions we normally wouldn't. It's that certain drink that sends us on the blurry roller coaster that starts slowly climbing uphill on shots one and two, and sends us screaming down the other side with our arms up in the air and Cuervo in our veins until we hit that flat part of the ride in the morning and find ourselves sick to our stomach and left with nothing but a story. If you're lucky...a funny story. This is one of those stories.
The summer before I moved to New York I was living back home in Pennsylvania. I had just finished a year long internship at a theater company in Florida where I was making $150.00 a week. Once the gig ended that June, I needed to get back home, regroup and save some cash so that I could get back to NY in the fall. My plan was to move back to Ashley, live at home and not pay rent. The problem I found there was that I'd been living out on my own for nearly five years by that point. After a week of being back in the house I grew up in, I realized I would need to tweak my plan.
My friends Chris and Megan were living in Bloomsburg, where I went to college, and they had an extra bedroom available. I told them I needed a place to stay for the summer and they offered me the room. It was kinda like You, Me, and Dupree, but with a chubbier, Italian, Owen Wilson. I was very grateful to be living with them, but I also was a little bummed that I wasn't in my hometown with my friends from high school. I was looking forward to spending the coming months getting into all kinds of trouble with them. I'd been away for a year and knew I'd be leaving for New York soon. So, every weekend I would take a day or two and return to the Wyoming Valley in order to eat my Gram's cooking, let her do my laundry (She insisted. We're Italian. It's a thing.), and spend as much time with my buddies as possible.
We had a routine going nearly every weekend that Summer. Head to someone's house around 7pm, play Texas Hold'em and drink beers until 9pm, head out to whatever bars had the best specials that evening, drink drink drink. Simple.
My friends Josh and Matt were both working as sales reps for Budweiser at the time. This was great for several reasons. Not only were their fridges always stocked, but the company would give them money to spend on Budweiser products at select bars over the course of the night. Not only was I really digging spending time back home with my friends, I was enjoying spending time with my friends and all their free hooch.
One weekend toward the end of the summer, my friends and I were sitting down to our first hand of cards and my buddy Matt said, "We need to end up at the Woodlands tonight. There's a Budweiser promotion." For those of you who don't know what the The Woodlands is, it's a fairly nice resort in Wilkes-Barre with a club in it called, Evolution. I personally am not a club person. I hate standing in line to get in, crowded spaces, and I simply can't watch a grown man dance to techno. However, there was free booze. That coupled with the fact that regardless of what my feelings about clubs may be, they are almost always stocked like a trout pond with hot broads. I love me some hot broads.
The Woodlands was almost always crowded on the weekends. This weekend evening in particular, was really crowded. The place was at capacity. The club itself is a good size, but not gigantic by any means. It took us a very, very long time to walk across the room to the back bar where our favorite bartender was working. We shuffled and crammed our way through a sea of drunken college girls and dudes in neon wristbands holding plastic cups full of Captain and ginger. Finally, we made our way to the back bar and set up camp.
One of the perks of my friends working as beer reps that Summer, besides the free booze, were the Bud girls. Almost all liquor companies are smart enough to place some pretty girls in this place or that place from time to time in the hopes that guys will buy that specific product simply because a hot girl is wearing a t-shirt with that specific logo on it. Everywhere we went Josh and Matt knew these sexy dames because the were employed by the same company. I spend most of that summer wondering why I hadn't taken a job selling beer after college.
Once we were finally settled in at the bar, two Bud girls came up to my buddies and started chatting. Matt introduced me to one of them, a petite wonderful blond whose name escapes me. All I remember is, she was being very friendly with me. Now, I know and understand that it's these girls jobs to be very friendly so that customers buy their stuff. However, this girl knew I was with Josh and Matt. I was an insider. No need for the hustle sweetheart, I'm already on your team. This girl was flirting with me. She said she had to get back to work but promised she would be back to visit in a bit, and we even talked about where we might be headed once we left the bar.
I was in a terrific mood. It was summer, with my friends, their fluffy wonderful Bud girl angels, and free beer. Life was good. This is exactly what the mid-twenties should be. Sadly, I'm the kind of person who can never just sit back and enjoy something, even when it's perfect. I always think it could be better. And since things were pretty good already, and I was coming out ahead on points by not spending any cash so far, I thought I'd invite another friend to join us that I'd gotten close with that summer. Mr. Jose Cuervo.
Chilled Cuervo, no lime, no salt, it what turns me into a first class asshole. I have done more next day apologizing to folks after hanging out with Jose, than any other liquor. I'm thirty now and have stayed away from that shot for years now; But when I was twenty five, it was the only game in town. While Cuervo had lead me to do some pretty awful things, that summer it lead me to one particular disgusting action over and over again. Pissing. I was constantly getting smashed and urinating somewhere I shouldn't. Ice rooms at hotels, under the table at a restaurant, even my mother's closet once. Yes friends, I was some sort of drunken piss freak. It was a dark, weird time.
It was now nearly midnight. I was SMASHED. The club was the most packed I had ever seen it. We crammed in to this sweat box. Shoulder to shoulder, nowhere to go...and I had to piss. Now, if I wanted to go to the bathroom here, it was a long difficult trek back the way I came through the dance floor and outside the club to the bathrooms in the lobby of the hotel. That would have been the adult thing to do. The following is what happened next. It began with this conversation.
ME: I gotta piss.
JOSH: So piss.
ME: I don't want to walk though the crowd.
JOSH: I don't know what to tell ya.
ME: What if I just piss right here?
MATT: Don't!
JOSH: Don't do that, Mergs.
MATT: Seriously
(Long drunken stare at both of them.)
ME: I'm gonna do it.
Both of them shook their heads and did their best to get away from me which was nearly impossible considering the amount of people in the club. I walked up to the bar and pressed my stomach up against it as I unzipped and settled into do my thing. I was lucky, really lucky, that no one was paying attention to me, because I was about to take one of the longest pisses of my adult life. It was epic. I imaging the place needed a sub-pump the next day. It went on forever and I really cannot express to you enough the epic volume of this horrible idea. It was like the end of O Brother Where Art Thou?. As I zipped up a noticed people one after another noticing a puddle at their feet, all the way down the bar. I quickly zipped up, stepped back, and turned around to see my friends. Josh and Matt looked at me like disappointed parents shaking their heads. I was quiet please with myself.
As I was about to ask my friends where we'd be heading next, I felt a tap on my shoulder. As I turned my head I prayed that I wouldn't be turning into the fist of some huge bouncer who knew what I did. It was quiet the opposite actually. It was the petite, blonde, Bud girl from before. She was holding a tray of shots and smiling at me. I gave my friends a look as to say, "I got this." I began to turn so I might lay some drunken knowledge on this betty, when something happened. Everything was suddenly chaos. The room was spinning. It was spinning, because I was falling. I was falling because as I turned to say hello to my Bud girl, I slipped on my own puddle of piss. Time slowed down as I was on the way to the floor and began to realize what was happening. Time nearly stopped however when my feet, crashed into her feet, and she too was now on her way to the floor. Her, her tray of drinks, and myself all came crashing down onto the warm puddle of Cuervo soup I contributed to the floor of the club.
Laying there on the ground in a pool of my own piss, my boozy dream girl laying there with me, and a crowd of people laughing harder than you can possibly imagine, I thought, "Maybe that last round was too much." Bud girl cried out, "I think someone spilled a margarita!", as her friends helped her up and took her to the bathroom. That was the last I ever saw of her. As I got to my feet my friends were looking at me with smirks on their faces. I looked at them and said, "Can we stop at my house so I can change?" Almost in unison they both replied, "Nope. You're staying like that."
I began to say goodbye to Jose after that night. Saying goodbye to him eventually lead to me always using a proper restroom like a grown up. Although I didn't get to go home with Bud girl that night, I ended up with a story that I enjoy. I enjoy it, because people seem to love hearing it. For me, in the end, that's what matters. Have fun if you go out tonight friends. Enjoy the weather, each other, and go easy on the shots.
Happy Friday Gang.
