Edge of 17 (Part 1)

“Life goes by so fast/You only want to do what you think is right/Close your eyes then it’s past/Story of my life.” –Social Distortion, “Story of My Life”

We heard the sirens coming from a mile away. No one knew what to do. We were way out in the open along a broad two-lane road running through the middle of the area’s biggest housing development. There were a few trees here and there, and glimmers of porch lights illuminating the grass on one side of the road—meaning there was almost nowhere to hide, and few places to blend in with the shadows. We were dead meat for certain.

“Kroger, you moron, you were yelling when we rang that old lady’s doorbell. She fucking heard you,” the fifth dude shrieked.

“Shut the hell up, man,” I said back, feeling my heart palpitating and my palms clamming up. “Shit, I’m applying to college. That’s all I’m thinking about now, I must be crazy doing this crap! I don’t need another in-school suspension! I don’t need an underage!”

“Screw this,” Putnam whispered next to me putting me in a half-hearted headlock. “And shut up about that. We’re not even in school. What’s really gonna happen? Be rational here, man.”

The sirens got closer and closer. I saw flashing lights just a few hundred yards away. Blue. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. Red. The law was closing in quickly; we’d probably be in jail before the night was over.

“Fuck it, dude,” I said, staring at the flashing lights heading our way. “Let’s go bowling.” I took a head-dive under the closest pine-tree next to the industrial park across the street from a handful of boxy McMansions. Kroger followed right behind me, unsettling the frigid water from the needles above. We sat there shivering, getting soaking wet hiding in the mud underneath, hoping to God our entire bodies were concealed. Even as the old rainwater soaked our shirts, we didn’t move a muscle.

At any second, we reckoned, the police would be rolling up. The fifth guy and Putnam sort of moved behind the tree, hoping they’d be obscured by its shadows. And Keeley, our resident renegade, stood against the wall of some large warehouse casually puffing on a cigarette, using his body language to tell whoever might come by “Just try and fucking arrest me. My dad will own you.”

As we heard two cars make a right turn about three blocks away, we had the worst feeling that we’d be arrested for giving the neighborhood squares and their annoying little sons and daughters some innocent, 11th grade shit.

“Mother of shit,” Kroger whispered. “My parents are going to kill me.”

Four hours earlier, probably around 8:30, we were at some independent film festival our high school was having. It was a dreadful bore to say the least, but Keeley knew a kid who co-wrote one of the crap pictures we were enduring. He’d insisted we go because there might be some girl there who wanted to bang him. Why we had to sit through this garbage just so he could maybe get a phone number, though, was beyond the rest of us.

“Who dragged us to this ‘film festival’ or whatever?” Keeley yelled to me across four auditorium seats, forgetting that he’d been the one to get us here.

“You got us here, man,” I said, barely paying attention to whatever was on the screen. “Didn’t your friend help write ‘The Red-Rider’ or something?”

“Yeah, but still, I’m trying to meet up with that girl Clarissa,” Keeley yelled. “She said she’d be here, man.” But, alas, Clarissa was nowhere to be found, so we plotted our escape from the auditorium loudly.

“We should leave,” Kroger said, grinning at Putnam and me. “Keeley, your place?”

“You got drinks?” Putnam yelled loud enough for the whole theatre to hear. Two girls in front of us, decked out in local band t-shirts, tight jeans, and Chuck Taylors glared back at us through thick black-framed glasses as if they’d really been enjoying these pseudo-intellectual “art” films.

“Yeah,” Keeley shot back. “What do you think? Let’s roll, like, right now. I’m driving.”

“You don’t even have your license, Keeley,” Kroger said. It was true—most of us had had learned to drive when we were a year younger. Not Keeley. He was content to pay one of us a few bucks to cart his lazy ass to school everyday. While we’d all been cruising for almost ten months, he still hadn’t bothered taking the test to get his learning permit.

“Right, you’re driving me,” Keeley muttered. “Asshole.”

As the hipster girls glanced back at us disgustedly again, Keeley asked them to join us for a few beers. They sulkily rolled their eyes and looked away. “Fucking lame,” he said, loud enough for them to hear. We tip-toed out of the auditorium so that as few people as possible would see us taking off.

Within twenty minutes, we were back at Keeley’s mansion trying to raid his dad’s liquor cabinet and having a tough go at it. His old man, a chain-smoking cardiologist (not joking), kept his booze locked up in a closet in the basement. He left the Bailey’s, and what looked like a 20-year old bottle of Old Crow bourbon out in the open behind the dry-bar, but his good shit was behind closed doors a few feet over. Or so we thought.

Using the fifth guy’s soccer talents and a screwdriver, we got into the ‘good shit’ quickly.

“Keeley, there’s just a bunch of...uh...triple sec, and like nothing else!” the fifth guy yelled. “I can’t believe I kicked this fucker open for this crap! Motezuma?”

“And a thirty year old bottle of scotch!” Putnam exclaimed, grabbing it from the closet and examining the label. “I bet this is the real shit, man! Let’s drink this.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what he wants to do with this, but take a handle, that’s it,” Keeley said. “Don’t touch the scotch Putnam. My dad’s had that shit forever.”

“Triple sec?” Kroger asked. “Is that good?”

“It’s pretty awful, but we can nail this down straight,” I said. “Give it over. We’ll make margaritas without the tequila. Or the lime juice.”

We passed the handle of orange-flavored crap around for a minute or two, swilling down what we could and put on an actually decent movie. But the drinks, instead of relaxing us, were making us antsy. It was a Friday night, and none of us could stomach just sitting on the couch drinking 40 proof alcohol like it was a big deal.

“Is this what’s happening tonight?” the fifth guy said manically. “Let’s go do something. We need to do things. Things! ”

“What the hell do you do in Blue Acres?” I said to the fifth guy, taking another pull from the bottle. “And, Keeley, this stuff is toxic. It’s way too sweet.”

“Let’s just go out,” Keeley said. “We’ll take a walk around for awhile. There must be something to do. I think that girl Clarissa lives around here...”

“Oh, drop it with that shit, man,” Putnam said.

We got our jackets on and giggled our way back to the end of the street he lived on feeling the minor buzz from the crap we’d been drinking. The early April air blew back against us, and the only discernable smell was Keeley’s cigarette, one of a few he stole from his old man, smoldering in the breeze.

“Who lives over here?” the fifth guy asked us.

“Uhhh...”

DINNNNNGGGGGGGGG. Before we even turned our heads, fifth guy sprinted up to the door, banged the huge doorknocker a few times, and rang the doorbell once or twice. And with no warning, we started to run. Great, I thought. We’re playing ding-dong ditch. I’m a year from graduation and we’re going to go ring doorbells and screw with 45-year olds in the middle of the night. Totally fucking mensa.

“Oh Christ! What are you doing, man?” Keeley yelled. “That’s my neighbor! He plays golf with my dad, and I think he’s like 60. He gets up to piss like six times a night. He’ll definitely call the police.”

“Then let’s run!” fifth guy yelled. “Let him shake it out the window on us.”

After a five minute jog, all of us were wheezing uncontrollably. The fifth guy was the only one still standing, making fun of us for being complete pussies.

“I recognize this house,” he said nonchalantly. “Let’s get it.”

“What?”

“None of us even know what fucking street we’re on. We don’t live in this development,” Kroger barked back, coughing up half a lung. “Why the hell did we just run for five minutes to avoid getting caught?”

“That dude wouldn’t have messed with us,” I said, faking nonchalance, like I knew things would be fine all along.

“Yeah,” the fifth guy yelled. “They can’t run as fast as us.” We looked the other direction, checking the street for anyone looking at us suspiciously. When we turned back around, fifth guy’d all but disappeared. That is until...

DINNNNNNGGGGG.

“Nice!” Kroger yelled, rapidly getting in the spirit of being 12 years old again. He took two quick breaths, jumped in the air, and started running away from us, yelling “Okay, fuck it. I got this one.” He scampered down the street and rang some lady’s doorbell on some overpriced house. No lights. He rang the buzzer next door. Nothing.

“Okay, this is lame,” I said to Putnam. “No one’s even waking up. I haven’t seen one light come on yet.”

“Guess we need to make things more exciting. Let’s try out another street,” he replied. We all slowed down, looked around for a minute or two, and ran across one of the development’s main roads, and made a quick left onto another road.

“Alright, let’s go down a little bit farther, then,” Keeley said, motioning to his right. “I know a couple of the people on this next street. If we get caught, they’ll probably just laugh. Well, maybe. Or they’ll call my parents.”

We made our way down a large cul-de-sac with about five houses, and the fifth guy made a great suggestion: “Let’s each ring one and start running.”

“No. Let’s stay for a minute and watch chaos ensue,” Putnam said. “We can see how many lights go on then.”

We stood in the middle of the block, staring at all five houses, and...ready...set...go! each of us charged at one of the places ready to make some trouble.

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! We heard the doorbells sounding in the night as we ran back toward the center of the block, looking for any signs of life, or people being miserably disturbed at 11:48 on a Friday night.

“Oh, we got them good!” fifth guy yelled. “Watch them call the cops. They won’t do it. Fucking pussies. Let’s knock down a mailbox, too! Just for fun, right? Just for fun!” Fifth guy was jumping around gleefully, tearing circles around us like Speedy Gonzales, acting like he hoped some dude might bring a .45 out of his house at any time and take pot-shots at us like that redneck in Dazed and Confused. Fifth guy, who we all barely knew through Keeley, was the source of entertainment for that early part of the night. To this day, for some reason, none of us can remember who the hell he was or what happened to him after our junior year of high school.

“Are you kidding me?” Kroger said. “Time to run, soon.”

“Yeah, good call,” I whispered to Kroger. “We’ll run when lights go on. Which is likely to happen at any second.”

We watched for a second though, and lo-and-behold, two second-floor bedrooms lit up. People in their bathrobes were scrambling around trying to figure out if the UPS man was ringing to deliver those $200 J. Crew orders they placed just in time for Easter. You knew what was going through their minds...

And in the middle of the night? What the hell is the UPS guy doing here doing here? Hold on, Ethel, let me see if it’s those goddamn kids again. The ones ringing doorbells in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, remember? They woke Joey up and he couldn’t get back to sleep all night! If it’s them, I swear....

They opened the doors, looked around, and babbled “Hello?” through sleep-induced stupors.

“HELLO?! Who the hell’s out there. Don’t think I don’t see you!” some middle-aged guy said, stepping off of his front porch ready to make a run at us.

“Okay, let’s go,” three of us mouthed to each other. We backed away slowly, and spun toward the take-off position.

We ran, and decided to cool it for awhile. We walked around on a few streets until we accidentally found ourselves on the main drag, a two-lane road with big houses on one side, and warehouses and industrial buildings on the other. A car came by here and there, flashing their beams at us so we’d move out of the road. As we jumped to the side for the umpteenth time, we heard a wailing sound cut through the clear, breezy night.

“Oh Jesus, I hear sirens,” Kroger whimpered. “They got us, man!”

“Bullshit,” Putnam yelled. “You’re just paranoid! They’re not going to come this way for a few fuckin’ doorbells.”

We ran back out to the main drag that connected a dozen sidestreets and started hooting and hollering on the side of the road. Keeley and Putnam fired up smokes and started shoving each other into the grass on the opposite side of the road. As we continued walking, the road widened and the sirens came closer and closer. We all glanced at each other, and for that moment, thought that we might get caught--a bunch of high schooolers playing grammar school games. Keeley grinned reassuringly, fifth guy looked dead-set on a mission, Putnam stared up at the stars, and Kroger looked terrified. We all had the same thoughts, but the crazy differences in reaction cracked me up for just a second. But then, another wail sounded, this one appreciably closer than the last. My brow furrowed quickly as I scanned the street for a good hiding place.

Kroger and I, being the biggest bitches out of the gang, took head-dives into some bush hoping to avoid getting caught. If the police were coming, we figured we’d be out of harm’s way. Eventually, everyone but Keeley was hiding, us under trees, Putnam and fifth guy standing a couple of feet behind us giggling nervously. If they came down this way, we'd be dead; Keeley'd give us all away.

We hid down there for awhile not paying attention to anything. We were scared shitless—so, of course, we didn’t hear the sirens fade into the distance. Once we heard some laughter, we both climbed out from underneath the tree, clothes dripping with water.

“Shit,” Keeley said sarcastically. “That was too close for comfort.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you hide?” Kroger yelled. Keeley took another drag off of his smoke.

“Dude, that car was at least five streets away,” Putnam said, smacking Keeley on the back, both of them hooting. “And even if it wasn’t, they weren’t coming this way, man. Look over there, I think they’re heading toward the highway. You idiots.”

The other three guys started laughing at us, and eventually we couldn’t help but join in too. My ears and cheeks were bright red from embarrassment, and my hair was soaked. I guess whatever we’d seen was a figment of our imaginations.

“Yeah,” I said sheepishly, rapidly shaking my head back and forth like a wet dog. “That’s my fault. Thought we were fucked. I thought the cops were coming right down this way.”

“Me too,” Kroger said, taking a few heavy panic-attack sighs.

“You need your inhaler?” the fifth guy asked, laughing and shaking Kroger by the shoulders.

“No. I’m cool,” Kroger wheezed. “I think I’m cool.” He coughed for a minute and jumped back into the street with the rest of us.

“We oughta get back,” Putnam whispered. “This fourth grade stuff's just too heavy. Let’s get some more of that orange flavored stuff.”

“Sounds good, buzz is fading,” Keeley said. “We still have a few bottles left.”

Read more...

Bruce Lee, Motherfucker! (Part 2)

We’d reached the party’s intermission, the few seconds to take some deep breaths, soundtracked by guys idolizing an alcoholic musician who beat Christy Brinkley after he married her (still inexplicable). The bizarre tone shift provided just a moment for introspection, where you reassess everything and realize how ludicrous it is that you’re sitting in front of a piano watching two kids play Billy Joel songs while your girlfriend’s comatose, some kid is asleep in the bathroom, and two kids you barely know are making out on a bed directly behind you. Like I said, you’ll never forget this kind of stuff.

I never experienced a moment quite like that at a party in college, where you really think about the future, about drinking, about your parents’ expectations, and if you turned the porch light on before you left. Once you get past those high school days, you inevitably move forward into the dream that is higher education. In college, you become desensitized to heavy drinking and random sex within about half of a semester, usually to the point where you just discuss it at the diner the next morning calmly, like you just ordered eggs over easy. It plays out like this:

“Man, O’Malley, you were so fucking wasted last night. I can’t believe that after you booted in that sorority’s bathroom sink, you still went to the bar and picked up that girl...er, thing. I’d hardly call her a girl, man.”

[Laughter.]

“Yeah, I know, what a joke. Man, we did way too much last night. Hey...wait, fuck you, that girl wasn’t that bad.”

“She was, bro.”

“Shut up. Shit, Rick just kept buying everyone shots of bourbon. I don’t even think that was Jack, it was probably that Banker’s Club bottom shelf shit. Disgusting. My head’s still pounding.”

[Idle laughter.]

“Nah, Rick was buying Jameson, his taste is too good. It was Diego who was buying that crap bourbon. Oh, by the way, you see who Carrie went home with last night? Yeah, I know, you’re not going to believe it. Yeah, that guy’s like still a virgin I think...”

Your weekends (and weeks), consumed by fraternity parties and bar crawls and such, are like some kind of Michael Bay movie. You start out with a big group, doing a power hour or playing ‘ruit, and then you hit up the first party. The kids who can’t drink end up dead after an hour or two, and as you move from the second party, to the third, and then to the first bar, and to the second bar, more and more kids ‘just gotta call it a night, bro.’ People drop from the group, other kids join up, and eventually, you’re in someone’s apartment at 3 AM with kids that you probably only partially recognize.

You order some disgusting, greasy food from that glorified gas station down the road, put on Amnesiac, spark up a bowl, and bullshit about politics and German art films and that chick with the big tits in your psychology class. At this point, you’re as awesome as Shia LaBoeuf or Nic Cage—the last action hero who survives an entire night of liver abuse to enjoy the best shreds of conversation the entire process probably had to offer. You look back on the night, survey the wreckage. Kids fast asleep around you, you walk home and live to see another day.

High school parties weren’t like that I don’t think, and you felt a lot closer to everyone as a result. It was always your group of friends all stuck under one roof or in some kid’s basement. At one point, when most people had the right buzz, someone would do something random. Kroger used to just start making up his own dance moves, and they were so ridiculous, everyone’d just stop and watch for a few minutes. Three or four girls would randomly get into a wrestling match, and kids would just put down their drinks and check it out. It was a time for reassessment, thinking about shit.

Stuff back then unfolded like a two act play—after the ninnies passed out in the early hours, everyone else was standing around that piano, gearing up for the second act, which would undeniably be better than the first...

For some reason, things at Brenton’s house went smoothly for the next twenty minutes. A total fucking lull. The kids who went too hard (and too early) were asleep, the guys who couldn’t keep their hands off their girlfriends were already in bed. Kroger was still jamming away on the piano, though Keeley was nowhere to be found. I went into the upstairs bathroom, peed for what felt like five minutes, and came back out to find a new crowd emerging. The newest phenomenon was being soundtracked by Kroger, as Erica and Keeley were making out on the floor in the middle of Brenton’s den. Brenton, Ray and the rest of us were just sitting there, looking at the spectacle like it was some kind of goddamn magic show.

Keeley and Erica were really going at it on the floor, feeling each others’ every nook and cranny. It was the kind of action that our parents would call “necking and heavy petting” and should only be done in the backseat of a Buick or in your parents’ bedroom when they’re in Costa Rica. Somewhere in the middle of the whole thing, Keeley kicked off his shoes, and Erica tried to take off his shirt.

“This is fucking disgraceful,” Ray said with a wild grin on his face. “But it’s really, really hilarious.”

It was like being at a professional wrestling match, with everyone making stupid asides to each other, wondering if the subjects would ever get privy to the crowd and find a room. If things woulda gone much further, we could’ve filmed a sequel to Boogie Nights in Brenton’s den. Laughing to the point of tears, I covered my mouth and walked in to see if my girlfriend was okay. Thankfully, she was sleeping soundly. I kissed her on the forehead, apologized for being a total prick, and went back to do a shot with a couple of kids from my trig class.

Things started to fade significantly in the next hour, and I was left to amuse myself. Next to your girlfriend going down for the count in the first round, it was the worst thing to happen at the party. No one wanted to chill. I was completely amped while everyone else was settling into ‘70s soft-core makeout sessions all around the house. Bored, I decided to start knocking on the locked bedroom doors.

“Yo dude, open the fucking door!”

“Fuck off, asshole!”

“Dude, Billy, come do a shot, man! It’s only like 2:00!”

“It’s 2:56. Go to bed!”

Then I came up to one bedroom and for no good reason, I just kicked the door in:

“BRUCE LEE, MOTHERFUCKER!” I yelled. It was an unfortunate choice of doors—I got hit in the face with someone’s dress shoe.

“What the hell man? Go to bed you idiot!” The fucking shoe flew out, knocked me in the chin, and I decided that there were other endeavors worth pursuing.

But things weren’t much better downstairs. Ray was barely awake, but pointed out to me that Kroger and some really cute girl were cuddled up on the couch getting after it. Ray pulled out his digital camera and started filming it; in his defense, they were saying some really dumb shit to each other, so it was totally worth having it on celluloid.

“Heyyy...what are you doing?” Kroger said.

“We’re taping you. None of us are ever going to be able to run for president because of tonight. Shit, we probably won’t even be able to get into college,” I bitched back.

Kroger and his lady friend started giggling, so Ray called it quits and went upstairs to find a bed or piece of unoccupied carpet or something to pass out on.

I followed him back up to try to wake people up for a second time, but everyone who’d been hooking up earlier was passed out cold, drooling all over themselves, singing Foghat in their sleep. People were strewn across the dining room, living room, and master bedroom, some guys passed out face down without sleeping bags or even sheets over them. Hammond was still living in the bathroom, I couldn’t find Brenton, Stace or Keeley, and Kroger was downstairs hanging out with that girl.

After mixing the aforementioned Kool Aid & Captain combo, I went back downstairs hoping to just curl up on the floor and pass out. But, it was not to be.

I’m not the kinda guy who usually tries to screw with my friends when they’re getting business done, but with Brenton, it was different. He’d probably cockblocked me at least twice, and this was major revenge. If I’d been sober as a judge, I would never have tried to do it, but I couldn’t resist the temptation. The Kool Aid/Captain blend gave me the burst of energy I needed to pay him back.

“BRUCE LEE, MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!” I shrieked as I kicked his bedroom door wide open.

There, in front of me was a nude art exhibit: Brenton right on top of Stace. Totally hilarious. I should’ve seen it coming, but for some reason, I never expected things to get quite that out of hand. She had a boyfriend, yet no one seemed to care. After this scare, I could feel the last drink of the night take effect—I was crashing hard and things got a little bit swirly. I curled up in a ball under a really warm blanket on the basement floor and drifted slowly to sleep. My last thought before I went to bed was strange: “Holy shit, I think that was Brenton’s first time.”

When I awoke, it was close to 6:30 AM and Keeley and Erica were making out next to me as though I didn’t exist. And it wasn’t like the basement was crowded—there were only a few of us outside of Brenton’s room. Couches and love seats were open for the taking. But, there they were squirming around and breathing heavy.

“Do you have a condom?” Erica asked Keeley.

I was tensing up now. I didn’t want to get up and piss on their parade, so I just rolled over and threw the blanket over my head. Sleep wasn’t coming quick enough, but things were about to get fucked up...again.

“No.”

“Okay...well, um, do you have something else?”

“What do you mean something else?”

“Well...”

I was dying, shaking with silent laughter, but the conversation was too good to get up and disrupt. There was no way I was ruining this moment. One of them was going to do something colossally stupid. No way to stop it now.

“Well, Brenton’s sister and her boyfriend are still up, I’ll see what they have.”

Minutes later, Keeley came barreling back down the stairs with a package of Saran wrap in his hand. “Here, this’ll work!” he exclaimed with what I imagine was a grin on his face. “My brother told me before that this stuff’ll do the job, no problem!”

For the rest of high school, neither of them lived that moment down.

I woke up the next day with my girlfriend somehow lying next to me. I got up for a second, went to the bathroom, and saw Brenton’s door wide open. Erica and Hammond, who was apparently fresh-up from his night with the porcelain Goddess in the can, had changed sleeping venues and were now curled up in bed with Brenton and Stace. Somehow, in the three or four hours I was asleep, two people on opposite sides of the house ended up in bed with two other people. Things probably happened early in the morning, but I never bothered asking. At this point, nothing would’ve surprised me in the slightest.

When I got up for good, I was ready to go as soon as possible—I needed to be somewhere else and quick. In a house full of one-night stands, empty bottles, and hungover girls, the only thing to do is bolt, get a bacon, egg and cheese, and go back to your basement couch. I got up later than everyone, my girlfriend got a ride with Tina and the hair-holding girl, and Ray, Brenton and I cleaned up the mess of bottles and cups. I was ready for the ten mile road back to reality. Car keys in hand, I walked at a quick clip toward the door. Keeley stopped me.

“Yo, dude, can you give me a lift back?” he inquired.

“Uh, sure man.” Didn’t know the kid, but whatever.

“Cool, thanks. Yo, I gotta get some shit downstairs.”

“Yeah, me too, man.”

“Yeah, my bag’s there too,” Ray chimed in.

We went downstairs to find Erica asleep...no longer in Brenton’s bed, but in her original position on the floor.

“How did she get here?”

“You got me. I woke up two hours ago and she wasn’t next to me.”

“Look, her one boob’s just flappin’ out in the wind here. Who even knows what happened last night,” Ray laughed.

“Yeah, I woke up twice this morning, and each time she was in a different place,” I said. We guessed that she must have teleported her way from carpet to bed to carpet again.

“What should I do?” Keeley asked.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘what should you do’?” Ray said indignantly. “Leave a tip or something?”

“A buck? Joking. Well, uh, well let’s just go, that might give her the wrong impression,” he mumbled.

***

If there was such a thing as a “drive of shame,” this certainly would have qualified. But on the bright side, the police never made it to our party.

I did my share of early-Sunday-morning walks across campus back at school, and some even longer walks when I was with a girl who lived ten blocks away from my place. College presents no opportunities for male walks of shame; they’re more like walks of triumph. You hobble out of a girl’s place after a Thursday night sorority cocktail, realize you’ve already missed one class, your red striped Brooks Brothers tie hanging around your neck underneath your crumpled-up navy blazer. It’s a little embarrassing, but shit, everyone knows what happened last night, and you just smile at the professors and administrators who walk by.

But, this drive of shame was ridiculous because you knew the second you pulled in the driveway you’d need an excuse for however wretched you looked, smelled, and acted. By that morning, after spending a night on low-pile carpet, I looked like absolute hell. My hair was shooting out in at least 90 directions, I reeked of three different kinds of alcohol, and I was nursing a moderate headache. I felt pretty much fine, but I must’ve looked like ten miles of bad road. Now I know how cheating husbands feel when they roll into the driveway to greet the wife and kids with clothes wrinkled from lying on the floor of their secretary’s walk-up and smelling of unfamiliar perfume.

“How was it?” my dad asked as I bounded through the front door.

“Uhhh...great, lot of fun, pretty cool, you know, the usual.”

“Well, good.”

No one commented on the fact that I looked like I’d been out in the wilderness howling with the wolves all night. (In college, I showed up to most of my 9 AM classes looking like this.)

Later, I told my parents about most of the things that happened. They were cool about it. Mission accomplished, no jail time. Move forward. And that’s all you can do.

Going to class for six hours a day, five days a week made all of those high school parties something to really treasure, and even if things got out of control, I always walked out the morning after with a dozen good stories. The jokes that came out of that night and countless other weekends over the coming months made leaving high school difficult. Make fun if you want, but these memories are irreplaceable—everyone still gets shit for the time they made complete asses of themselves at a party like five and a half years ago.

College isn’t like that; not always. Too much free time gives you all kinds of excuses for drinking: parties (at a frat house, with the artsy kids, in the stoners’ pad, etc.), cocktails, bar hopping on a Wednesday, and whatever else. The constant stream of parties and bar crawls deafens the senses like sitting through the two-and-a-half hour running time of Transformers 2. Just like I couldn’t wait to get out of that movie, by graduation, I couldn’t wait to pack up the car and get the hell home.

When you leave for freshman year of college, you ump into it with stars in your eyes: the endless keg parties, the college women, the easy availability of whatever substances you care to experiment with. All this shit sounds epic. But it never lives up to whatever stupid expectations you have at 17 years old. And even when you think the college myths are gonna be the things you treasure forever, they’re not.

When I talked to a few of my good buddies from college on alumni weekend (about five months ago), we all remembered some of the shit we did over the past couple of years. The things we brought up were far removed from the crap perpetuated by the O.A.R.-listening, Abercrombie-wearing, necklace-slinging high school senior. None of us mentioned “that one sick rager at SAE” or “that amazing sorority cocktail where I did a keg stand for like 39 seconds.” These things were meaningless. Instead, we talked about some time we played pool on a Tuesday, drank a lot of pitchers and ended up at the diner until 6 AM. We remembered the power hours where we crammed 20 people into one bedroom and sang Hall & Oates songs (and only felt a little embarrassed). It seemed weak at the time, but the stuff we did before or after a party, or where we went on a Wednesday when there was “nothing better” going on—this shit was important.

I graduated, and it was great to come full-circle. After the car’s packed full of both useful and useless stuff on the Sunday of commencement, you give your best buddies a hug and swear you’ll keep in touch or see them soon. You wave a final goodbye to the guys you’ve lived with for the past year. You throw on your sunglasses and punch the gas, pulling away from the curb at twice the speed limit, windows all the way down, Marshall Tucker on the stereo. And, at that moment, all you want to do is go back to that time when you first snaked a couple of beers from your old man’s stash on a summer night, watched a baseball game, and said to yourself, “Man, could it really get any better than this?” I’m not sure. Back then, you still had to hide the cans under the coffee table so your parents wouldn’t kick your ass.

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Bruce Lee, Motherfucker! (Part 1)

"The Nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated...These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis..." –John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

I think I was the only one still up and not having sex by this point, and that made me mad. It was cresting 4 AM, my girlfriend was passed out on a love seat after a night of too much Vlad, and I was going stir-crazy. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been drinking, but that I’d gotten to the point where I was too amped up from dancing around and yelling at people that I couldn’t sit down and take a nap. So I made another cocktail, a little Captain and Kool Aid (I suggest you never drink this...never ever...) and waltzed up and down the stairs a few times attempting to work out my excitement. I tried to wake people up, but when I’d kick them in the ribs, they’d just start bitching and moaning about how drunk or tired they were. The most common response: “Fuck off, man. I’m trying to sleep.”

On my final dive down the stairs, I decided to go wake up some good friends. My best buddy Brenton’s bedroom was in the basement, and I heard sounds coming out of there. Needless to say, I put my ear up to that bad boy and had a quick listen.

“Yeah, I’m on the pill. It’s okay.”

“Alright.”

“Uhhh...oh...oh, uhhh...” a girl moaned.

“Good shit,” I whispered to myself, an ear-to-ear grin spreading across my face. After drinking for probably close to six hours, liquid courage got the better of me. I decided that I was going to bust down the fucking door and show those kids who was boss. For the second (or third?) time that night, I felt beyond invincible.

“BRUCE LEE, MOTHERFUCKER!!!” I screamed as I high-kicked Brenton’s door wide open. I didn’t know who he was with, so I figured I’d just mess with him for a minute before he had to get up and throw me out of the room using physical force.

“Dude, what the hell? Get the fuck out of here!” he yelled at me, bare-assed, mounting some girl. She was remarkably silent for the moment—and then I saw her face.

“Oh, Christ. Brenton, what are you doing?” It was not the person I expected—I should’ve seen it coming based on the events of the night, but the two of them boning knocked me back a step. He got up and slammed the door in my face which came inches from breaking my nose. Then I cracked up. The next morning was going to be the worst (or the funniest) of many people’s lives.

***

Everyone remembers their first beer, although my first brew was actually four glasses of wine with my parents in a ritzy fusion joint somewhere in California. The waiter just came over with my parents’ wine, poured them two glasses and then proceeded to fill mine. Before I could say “I’m only 15!” my dad slapped my hand and grinned at the sommelier. A few drinks later, after digesting the best Carpaccio (among other things) I ever had, I was feeling toasty warm and blathering about early American history to my parents as my dad, in a rented Volvo, tried to navigate through an unfamiliar city.

Of course everyone remembers the first time they got drunk. My first time was the summer after my sophomore year in high school, so I guess you could consider me a bit of a slow starter. I went over to my buddy’s place after work one day and we just started bombing shots.

“Well, here you go, bro. It’s all hard, so I’ll fill you up a shot,” a scruffy guy two or three years my senior yelled a few seconds after I came through the door.

At the time, I was pretty worried, even though I’d had my share of beers before, all stolen out of my downstairs refrigerator in the storage room. The only time I’d really seen hard-A was in my dad’s scotch glass at a restaurant. Your first shot of vodka is something completely different from your first Rolling Rock. I figured that this moment was going to lead me to a life of alcohol dependency (okay, fine, that’s ridiculous, but they brainwash you in high school) or worse, to a naked lap outside or a trip to the emergency room to get my stomach pumped. My hand trembling, I held it up to my lips, and drank down half of it, feeling the burn in my throat, esophagus and stomach as it swam through my digestive tract. I waited a couple of seconds and finished the rest, grinning.

“Come on, man. You’re better than that. Here you go,” the kid laughed as he put another shot in my hand. I took this one down quickly, feeling a doubly worse fire surge through my body.

“Whoooo!” I yelled, slamming the small glass down on the counter like Stiffler would’ve in one of those American Pie movies.

“This your first time?” one of the other kids I worked with asked.

“Yeah, for this kinda shit, yeah, it is. Can I just get a beer?”

Two of the older guys there started cracking up, and a couple of girls made sideways glances at me like I just asked for a Diet Coke. “Well, fuck it, I can do another one of those,” I said. We all filled shot glasses up and toasted to a great summer. That event seems ironic, because if, in college (or after) I’d ever asked for another shot of Raspberry Smirnoff instead of another beer, I would’ve gotten booted out of my own house.

We didn’t get out-of-our-mind drunk that night, but I tried to do my share, mixing up some of the most god-awful cocktails I ever made. I do not recommend my 11th grade special though—raspberry and green apple vodkas mixed with orange soda. It was like a diabetic’s worst nightmare.

And if you remember your first time getting drunk, you’ll also be able to look back fondly on the first time you got drunk with all of your best friends and the whole thing went completely to hell. For some people, their first time getting sloshed was like this. Mine wasn’t—by comparison, my first night of drinking was laid back. Everything was mellow, no one acted dumb. I think I might have even slept in a bed that night.

The true, batshit-crazy party moment for most people consists of:
1. About four kids puking (bonus points if someone has to get rushed to the ER)
2. Someone passing out in the bathroom (bonus points if two or three people pass out in different bathrooms; even more bonus points if two people pass out together in the same bathroom)
3. Two or three of your friends losing their virginities (bonus points if it’s with the person passed out in the bathroom)
4. Shit getting broken (by accident or on purpose, bonus points for irreplaceable antiques or works of art)
5. Someone getting naked in front of everyone (bonus points if it’s outside, during the winter)
6. A 4 AM house call from the cops to tell you that Ms. Estelle Waters from next door hasn’t been able to get to bed even after taking 7 Ambien CRs (bonus points if the cops come in and have a drink, or if you go to Estelle’s house and bring her sleeping pills to your party).

Regardless, our disaster night was after some semi-formal dance during my junior year of high school. Brenton and I had been planning this thing for a couple of weeks. Parents out of town. Sister said she’d buy us a lot of liquor. Lots of reasonably attractive girls who could do maybe two shots. In theory, it sounded like heaven.

My girlfriend and I left the dance early to get over to Brenton’s house for the festivities. After making out in the car for about forty minutes until Brenton’s sister came out to yell at us for leaving the headlights shining through a neighbor’s window, we walked inside and started making drinks. The kitchen looked like a palace (i.e. a liquor store)—bottles of Vlad, Banker’s Club Gin, Captain Morgan, magnums of pinot grigio, and bottles of Tortilla Gold tequila were strewn all over the place. For a party with maybe 15 or 20 high school juniors, half of them girls, it was enough to put most of the people there in something resembling a coma.

Since my girlfrined got drunk like four times in her life, she obviously thought she could handle half a Solo cup full of Vlad mixed with red Gatorade, no ice. I grimaced at her cocktail choice and decided to stick with a standby, a Captain and Coke. More people were arriving, so I started chatting with everyone, meeting people’s girlfriends, challenging people to drinking contests, etc. Before I could look again, my girlfriend was back at the punch bowl pouring another vomit-before-midnight special. Ray, a guy I’d call a temperate friend, started giving me shit almost immediately.

“Your girlfriend’s gonna be really drunk man, you need to do something,” he said to me in the kindest, least condescending way possible.

“Ehhh, I doubt it, man. I think she got drunk in like ninth grade for the first time. She probably has a good tolerance,” I said tongue-in-cheek.

“Really? Oh, wow, I didn’t know that,” he said, seemingly taking this statement seriously.

“Yeah, well, I just found out. When I told her to take it a little easier, she just barked that back at me. I mean, we’ll see, I think it’ll be cool.” I assumed she’d be bombed in about 45 minutes.

“Dude, she’s still wearing her dress from the dance, but has her jeans on under it. Are you sure?” he laughed. “But, in her defense, she’s a good dancer.”

Scratch that—she’ll be shot before 11:00.

“Goddamn it.”

My expert prediction about shit being “cool” at first was as correct as the one about that Y2K scare bringing the world to a cataclysmic end. The next thing I know, it’s only 11:20 and I’m getting screamed at by three girls who, at that time, were complete strangers. I was just having a nice conversation with a couple of friends, when all of a sudden...

“Get your ass in here,” Tina screamed. “Your girlfriend is sick and all you can do is sit around and talk to your friends. No, it’s okay, just go make another drink.” Though Tina is now a good friend of mine, I thought she was mighty intimidating right then. Imagine meeting someone for the second time only to realize she’s an Ethel Merman-sound-a-like with a bone to pick.

“I’m only on my first...no wait, second...” I wasn’t taking anything she said seriously, and commenced giggling with a couple of the kids around me to piss her off. Whatever, I figured. She’ll probably just give up and leave me alone. How bad could things really be?

“This is your girlfriend, get in here and take care of her. This isn’t funny. Something really bad could happen. You know, people die from this!” She was being wildly overdramatic, I thought. If everyone remembers their first beer and their first drunk, then they remember the first time they did too many shots and spent a night chained to the toilet. And they also remember that they got through it fine, albeit with a blinding headache the next day.

After being verbally assaulted for a couple of minutes, I sauntered down the hall and opened the door to Brenton’s sister’s room only to find her already sloshed over a bucket generally used for mopping floors. One of Tina’s insanely annoying friends was holding her hair back and giving me dirty looks. I took a step back—things were a lot worse than I’d initially thought. Maybe Ethel Merman had a point.

“Didn’t you pay attention to what she was drinking?” bitched hair-holding girl.

“What, are you kidding? What am I here, the fuckin’ babysitter? Shit, I’ve only ever drank a couple times...” I was searching for the right thing to say, my mind feeling fractured. The alcohol was making me giddy and weird, but there were blips of rationality pulling through to keep me in place, seeming to tell me, “You need to take care of this situation. It’s the right thing to do.”

So I tried to take care of things, but I ended up looking like a full-on ass nugget. My girlfriend started apologizing profusely to me, having stopped the scene she was putting on when I barged into the room. She was sort of listing to and fro like a sailboat in high tide, and probably enduring the spins that eventually get so bad the room doesn’t go ‘round in circles, but upward and downward making you feel like you stared at a slot machine for a few too many hours.

“Jesus, are you alright?” I stammered. I’d never seen anyone go half-catatonic on two Vlad and Gatorades. Maybe Tina was right—maybe we were gonna have to make an ER run tonight, though God knows who would’ve take the wheel for that ride.

The rational part of my brain wasn’t speaking so loudly anymore, and for every second I stood there, I was thinking “Shit, this sucks ass, man, having to take care of drunk people only an hour into the night. If this was a dude, we’d just let him puke in peace and check on him once in awhile to make sure he didn’t fall over and get a concussion. But, noooo, we’ve gotta stand watch here with four people.” As I turned to leave, rationality made a comeback.

“I’m here for you,” I said, sounding only moderately convincing.

Then, Captain Morgan reared his head. Even though I was only mildly buzzed, I heard the 20 or so people outside, having fun, some dude playing an atrocious rendition of a Beethoven symphony on the piano, guys passing around a bottle Pinot Grigio like a canteen. “Just get out now, things will be fine,” my drunk thoughts spoke. “DO ANOTHER SHOT! IT’S A PARTY!”

She fell asleep about two seconds after I said that, but Tina and the girl holding her hair back had me in a hostage situation, not saying anything. They were watching my every move with mean little eyes. One of the girls was on the other side of my girlfriend, Tina was by the door, and someone else pranced in to give me the hairy eyeball. Going to have an outburst in 3...2...1...

“What?!” I yelled. “It’s not like I had this in mind, man.” I slurped the last couple of sips out of my Solo.

“Whatever,” Tina said, rolling her eyes and stomping out. As soon as she left guard duty, I got the fuck out of that room to rejoin the party. About an hour had passed and I felt like I probably had a lot of catching up to do. I joined Brenton and Ray for a shot of tequila in the kitchen.

My ex-girlfriend Stace (we were still good friends, somehow) was at the party too, and had shown up there with Brenton after her boyfriend refused to take her to this dance. Stace and I were still pretty close, so she was confiding in me about her not-so-secret crush on Brenton and whining about her boyfriend.

“I mean, Brenton’s like so sweet. Todd’s just such a...you know, he just doesn’t treat me like his girlfriend. Like he thought he could just say, ‘No Stace, I won’t take you to the dance,’ since he’s hanging out, playing cards,” she said, slugging a vodka-tonic and encouraging me to pour another drink. “But, like, I fucking called Todd’s bluff and went with Brenton. He’s just like the nicest guy.”*

“Yes, Stace, Brenton and I have been best friends since 7th grade. He’s good people. But, you sure this is gonna be a good idea? We’re all drinking and—well, you know.”

“I know, I know, it might not be the best idea. Nothing’s going to happen though, you know that,” she said smiling playfully at me, putting her head on my shoulder. “Brenton’s just the nicest guy.”

“Yeah, I mean...”

“He’s sooo cute, too!”

Glenn Beck repeats fewer talking points than Stace when she’s got Smirnoff coursing through her veins, but she’s cool. Fun to drink with, not a total pain in the ass, and not throwing up in a trashcan, bucket, or toilet.

But something quickly broke up this semblance of a conversation. As I opened my mouth to make a snide comment to Stace, somebody, completely red in the face, raced up and started giggling like a schoolgirl. Here we were, not even two hours into this soiree, and this kid’s screaming: “Dude, Hammond’s passed out in the fucking bathroom wasted. You gotta check this out! He’s totally shot!”

I checked it out and started giggling too. I was more sober than anyone in the joint save the two guys who weren’t drinking; but Hammond was indeed napping in the bathroom, headphones on (guesses on the music choice?), spooning with the crapper. His glasses were half falling into the toilet. It was a sight to behold, especially because he hadn’t thrown up, but just chose the bathroom as the most suitable place to catch a few quiet hours of sleep.

Stace came in and started grabbing my ass for absolutely no reason.

“This is horrible. Your girlfriend and some other girl are already passed out, too.”

“I’m aware of this. I think they went a little too hard right in the beginning. Vlad and Gatorade almost never leads to a long night.”

“Well...I mean...”

“Look, he’s just hanging out there. Not doing anything. I think he’ll be fine. Gotta go, Stace.”

After I ran to the kitchen to stir up another bev, I came back into the master bedroom for what appeared to be a dance party, a frequent occurrence at every gathering we had for the next year and a half. Hammond was passed out in the bathroom a few feet from the bedroom, but kids were dancing around to Duran Duran, and Bon Jovi, not giving a shit that some guests were already down for the count. Woah....oh, livin’ on a prayer! chants filled the room. No one was really dancing, but just jumping and spinning around, grinding on whatever girl or guy got closest to them. It was a pre-school party that’d gone awry because someone put Benzedrine in the fruit punch.

After a half hour of this, Stace started grabbing my ass again and pulling me toward the king-sized bed. When I looked around, everyone had pretty much filtered out, leaving “Jessie’s Girl” blasting through a laptop. How the hell did I miss the disappearance of, uhm, everyone? I thought to myself. And now...Before I even completed the thought, Stace was kissing me. I knew from the get-go this was a bad idea, but I just went with it. I guess since we dated at one point, it didn’t feel like that big of a deal. It was. What a supremely dumb move, I thought to myself a few days later as I tried to explain myself. But that rational part of my mind, which served me reasonably well an hour or so earlier, had now all but flicked off. The warmth of the alcohol took hold.

Jessie is a friend, yeah I know he’s been a good friend of mine...

As we were getting after it, feeding each other typical ‘you’re such a good kisser’ lines, clarity all of a sudden flashed through my body: “Wait, fuck, what the hell are we doing? This is dumb, really dumb.”

“I know, but it’s just like, whatever, she’s not your type.”

You know I wish that I had Jessie’s Girl [...killer synth riff...]

“Oh Jesus. Okay, one that’s not true, and two, we need to get out of here. And, fuck, three, you have a boyfriend. And a date tonight. And, uh, fiv...I mean four, they’re both good friends of mine. Holy shit, let’s just go do a shot.”

Where can I find a woman like that?

I got up from the bed figuring we could sneak out of the room only to run into the holding-back-the-hair girl right inside the doorway, voyeuring in on our sesh.

I play along with the charade...

“What are you doing?” she inquired, flicking her hair near my face.

“None of your business!”

“I just saw you—“

“No, you’re mistaken. We were just listening to Rick Springfield.” I bolted out of the room, mixed up another drink in the kitchen, and heard people playing piano.

This kid I sort of knew, Keeley, had started playing some Billy Joel tune, probably “Piano Man” or “New York State of Mind.” Kroger joined him on the bench, and “the girl everyone hooked up with,” Erica (everyone) had started hitting on both of them. She was sitting in between them on the piano bench, trying to make out with Kroger, and then started licking Keeley’s ear when Kroger just ignored her. The mini-concerto kept up like that for a bit longer as they tried not to notice her. If time allowed, and they didn’t know “Free Bird” (whenever someone plays music at a party, there’ll always be one guy who yells this out) I was going to make this request from side two of Piano Man:

In the morning there’ll be hell to pay/Somewhere along the line.**

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*I showed Todd, a buddy of mine and Kroger, this thing and he wasn’t a huge fan. For most of the humor, you had to be there. His only response: “Well, that’s a time in my life I’d rather not have to live through again.” Incidentally, he and Stace got back together, broke up, and ‘got back together’ a few other times in the next year or two.

**”Somewhere Along the Line” is easily the best cut on Piano Man, rivaled only by “Traveling Prayer” and “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” (and perhaps “Stop in Nevada”). Also, if you know any kid who “sort-of” plays piano, chances are the only tunes they know by Billy Joel are “Piano Man” and “New York State of Mind” and maybe...just maybe, “Only the Good Die Young.”

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Travels with Henry (Part 2)

“Dude, Henry, are you cool man?” I asked him.

“Tanggggled up in bluuuueee...she was-a-married when we first met, soon to be divorrrrrced,” he sang back to me. Then, standing up straight, “Yeah, it’s all good.” He was giggling like a son-of-a-bitch now, laughing at everything Rachel was saying, trying hopelessly to share some random anecdotes with the teetotalers we just bumped into.

After grabbing some food, we found ourselves in a series of bars, pubs and dives. The entire sequence of events between 9:00 and midnight was a blur. We must’ve run into our friends who lived downtown, because I suddenly noticed we were rolling about 11 deep. We started chanting “Sweet Caroline” on the way to a pub, throwing in the “dun-dun-duns” and the “so good, so good, so good” interludes. A few of the kids (who started a little bit...scratch that...way wayyyyy too early), stumbling around like a pack of three-legged dogs looking for sympathetic owners, called it quits around then and took a later bus back. For most of us though, the night was still young. My cell phone read 11:58 PM as we exited a very cool bar that I promised myself I’d remember how to get back to.

Obviously I got lost going down that way the next week.

We were eventually heading through Temple Bar, which if you’ve spent more than four days in Dublin-town, you’ll know is filled with tourists, English and American usually, trying to get a grip on reality through a very intense chemically-induced haze. What’s more, around St. Patrick’s Day, the scene down there is like that kicked up two dozen notches, with everyone wearing funny hats, scarves, and shirts proclaiming “I’m Irish and I like to fuck” or something along those lines. On this particular Saturday, there were 16-year old girls swigging green beer, people with heavy English accents trying to ask you directions through a slew of mispronounced verbs and nouns, and Americans screaming “Born in the U.S.A.” It was a lot like that Mardi Gras scene from Easy Rider where Captain America and Billy drop acid and start to see all kinds of crazy shit happening with the floats and people wearing wacked-out costumes on Bourbon Street. Overwhelming. Of course, we all realized that we were more sober than half of the people out that night.

“Henry, I think these fuckers are more tanked than we are,” I belched, killing the back half of a pint someone handed me as we waded through the crowds.

“Yeahhhhh, tanked motherfuckers. Let’s go! Porterhouse! Gin and tonics! It’s what the cool kids are doing!” he replied, half of the time trying to join the bizarre crowd that engulfed us.

“Good call, but it’s gonna take us a year to get through this mess of people.”

Rachel chimed in: “You guys need to stop being such bitches. Let’s go, right now. I can get us there.” Thankfully, this girl could drink and she could navigate. Within eight minutes, we were sitting at one of the four bars in the Porterhouse, pint glasses in hand, waiting for the booze to really take hold.

By 12:45, Henry’d switched back to gin and was telling me about his reasons for only drinking hard alcohol.

“No, I’m only drinking gin from now on, or whiskey, because beer makes you fat. You get it, baby? And [grabbing the limited rolls on his stomach] I need to lose weight. You get it?”

“That’s bullshit, Henry. Look, that tonic water’s got a ton of sugar in it. Look at the back of your little bottle of tonic. Fuck, well, they don’t have calories on there. But you just paid like two euros for that little thing. Anyway, gin has calories, too. You know I heard a pint of Guinness only has like 150 calories.”

“Yeah, well this has like 70 calories. Read it and...oh, damn, they don’t have the calorie count on here. Shit.”

“If you’d just listen to me...”

“No! Wait, yes! Look...see...I’ll tell you about Bombay Sapphire...”

Whatever. No use arguing with a fanatic. I jumped back into the conversation with Joe that’d became heated and somehow gotten back to On the Road. My beatnik friends were screaming at each other, loudly debating the merits of Kerouac’s two most famous sagas.

“No, you don’t get it, man. On the Road isn’t Kerouac’s master-work. The Dharma Bums is—I mean that’s the ultimate thing, like at the end, when he goes up on that mountain for 40 days alone. It’s a test of his will, you know?” Mikey was yelling this, attracting a crowd of several Americans who wanted to argue the point harder than he did.

“Shit, Mikey, that’s bullshit man!” some guy yelled.

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t give me that,” Joe screamed back. “On the Road is a staple of pop culture, I mean those parts in Denver were just mind-blowing...”

And on and on. Joe and Mikey were practically leading a class discussion on Beat Generation lit, and I wasn’t in the mood to dig too deeply into that scene. That’s a conversation better left for dorm room lava-lamp watching with Dark Side of Oz in the background. In the middle of a bar on St. Patty’s Day, forget that crap.

Since Henry was everyone’s favorite kid, he was buying every girl in the place drinks. Rachel and one of her friends were kissing up on both of his cheeks after every beer or shot he bought them, and he just kept throwing shit on his American Express card like prohibition was making its way across the Atlantic. It was approaching 2 AM, and the drunken Yanks around us were asking for “Voka/Re-boos” instead of “Vodka Red Bulls.” Finally, Henry pulled out his card to pick up a few more beers, put it down, and turned away for a second to speak to someone about a class project he was working on.

“Look, this lady’s gonna give us a fucking A on this thing, man. Me and Tom got the whole system figured out. We’re arguing that the Iraq War was completely just. Let me tell you about this article...”

But, in the midst of his stupor, one of Rachel’s roommates proceeded to take off with his card (I think she asked first?) and started ordering. Beers, shots, mixers, whatever; Henry’s old man was gonna pick up the tab for everyone. His dad was probably just waking up to a nice Sunday breakfast only to find, as he approached his computer, that his son just put $200 worth of booze on his account, and he’d be regretting ever telling his son that the card was “for emergencies only.”

It was at this point that she flicked his credit card right into the trashcan and the night needed to end. The bar was overflowing with sweaty, rainsoaked twenty-somethings shoving up against us on every side. Henry, when he saw the card incident, clearly went a little crazy talking to Liz. Even though I tried to calm him down, he went forth with his mission to reclaim his Platinum Amex. She didn’t know what to say to this exchange:

“Seriously, Liz, that was my dad’s credit card.” She tried to interject, but he just kept rolling, saying over and over, “You threw it in the trash, look, look in there, I know it’s in the goddamn trashcan. What the fuck? NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE HELL??!?”

Liz was beyond befuddled. When the nicest kid on the program comes up to you, reeking of juniper berries, demanding you dig into a trashcan to find his card, you take a couple of steps back. Then, you realize there are some things you can’t take seriously.

“Henry, it’s fine. You should probably go home,” Liz said, not taking here eyes off the jacked bartender pouring everyone shots.

He came back my way, avoiding her, hoping to God he’d find that card before he’d have to call his dad in the middle of the night asking him to cancel it for the third time in two months.

I could only imagine that exchange.

The first two times were no big deal: “Sorry dad, I got pick-pocketed in Prague. I couldn’t do anything.” “Sorry dad, I left it at a bar. Nothing happened though, it was a Tuesday night, I’m sure no one paid for anything on it. Yeah, okay, so we spent like $30 on beers. The exchange rate is rough.”

This one wouldn’t work out so well: “Sorry dad, after I bought like six rounds of drinks, some girl just snaked it and started ordering a bunch of shit on it. Oh, by the way, can you put another two grand in my account? We’re leaving for Berlin tomorrow. You know my address here, right?”

After I gave him a stern-talking-to, Henry finally coaxed one of the nicer bartenders to dig his credit card out of the shitbag. As he held it between his thumb and pointer, the thing dripping with God-knows-what, we knew it was time to go and get some pizza. We ran across the street, each of us devoured a large, and we took cabs back to our apartments.

“Thank Christ I got that thing back,” Henry muttered, almost falling asleep in the back of the taxi. “My dad might’ve made me fly home after that one.”

“Shut the fuck up, Henry,” Rachel and Liz babbled in unison. I woke all of them up once we made it back to our apartments and paid the fare myself. We stumbled into our respective buildings not saying more than “Uh, seeya later and shit.”

***

I felt a heavy kick on my mattress at about 1 PM the next afternoon. Henry and I got out of bed, both fully clothed from the night before with “Tell the Truth” blaring out of my laptop. I fumbled through my pockets, thankfully found my wallet and phone, and looked through crumpled up receipts from the food-and-bar tab from the night before that was hellishly large to say the least. Henry’s tab was more than twice what mine was. I heard mumblings of “shit” and “fuck” as we banged out the door to grab some Gatorades and Pringles.

We weaved our way through minimal crowds to the convenience store just off campus. And then we weaved our way through the aisles at TESCO, wandering through the beer aisle (yeah, we grabbed a six pack of Carlsberg), then the bread aisle, then slammed into a few shelves of diapers before we got our bearings. When we finally got the necessities, Henry pulled out the Amex and slurred, “Don’t worry, I got you bud.”

“Thanks boss.”

“Forget it. God, that was a long fucking night.”

“It’s good you found that nice bartender to dig through the trash to get that back to you, boss.”

“What do you mean?”

“Uhhh...dude, you told Liz that because she stole your dad’s card she had to fish it out of the trashcan. You seemed adamant about that. You thought your dad would have to cancel it again.”

“What? Oh hell, did I call him?”

“No, no! You almost lost the card, though, don’t you remember when it got pitched into the trash?”

“Well, yeah, but fuck...”

“Liz, she took it from you, bought a ludicrous last-call round of drinks.”

“What? Oh, Christ, yeah. Liz, some people’ve got no respect, you hear me? No respect!”

“You don’t even...”

“Yeah, you’re right, the whole goddamn thing’s a...total fuckshit. Did I ever tell you about this hangover cure? Two cans of Pringles and three Gatorades. I’ll be functioning better than ever in no time.” He pulled a receipt out of his pocket. “Oh God. I hope my dad lets this one go!”

We went back to our rooms and laid around watching Freaks and Geeks for a few hours. My stomach felt like I’d just ingested a Super Size Me amount of McDonalds, and I wasn’t looking to leave the couch until about 8:30 that night. Henry went back to bed somewhere in the middle of the afternoon and I didn’t see him until 11:00 the next morning. He was still feeling the effects of his Humphrey Bogart-inspired night when we got to the airport that day for a flight to other parts of Europe.

Right now, I’m still feeling the effects of that night. Face it—studying abroad is an intense vacation schools pawn off on a lot of people as a tremendous learning experience that apparently makes you a more intelligent, interesting, and marketable student. But really, it’s this simple: if you have the means to leave college for a few months, you do it. Don’t get me wrong. My time in Ireland was unquestionably one of the finest four-month stints of my life. I traveled all over Europe, I tried great food, drank amazing wine, met some of my best friends, and went to class only half as much as I would’ve had to if I’d stayed in the U.S. And after doing enough time at a liberal arts college, confined to a ten block radius, I think I needed that vacation. Call me spoiled, but it's the truth.

Of course, I have friends who swear to the Holy Father that their abroad experiences meant “so much to them” and were a “total learning experience” and “gave them so much insight into other cultures.” The jury’s still out. One of my best friends learned to speak another language almost fluently which is unbelievably cool and completely useful. I guess for some people, it can be pretty transformative, especially if you spend 10 or 11 months amid a completely unfamiliar people. “Life changing”? Maybe. Going to the post office is life-changing if you meet your future wife there buying stamps. “Broadening your horizons”? I’m still dubious when people spew that tripe.

I guess for a small minority, the travel abroad experience brings an expanded worldview, but for most of us, it’s just Freedom that we’re after. All of my friends, at one point or another, were reading Kerouac during the trip, and as Joe, Mikey, Henry and I sat drinking a couple bottles of wine the way Ray Smith from Dharma Bums would’ve, we discussed the whole thing. We agreed that, at that specific moment in time, every day was liberating and exciting, never knowing what you’d end up doing from one week to the next.

Freedom comes with a hefty price tag and thankfully our parents were willing to foot the bill.

It’s clear that we didn’t understand a fucking thing. The whole Kerouac-inspired phenomenon lasted a few short months, but we were really more like Albert Brooks and his yuppie wife in Lost in America. In that pic, Brooks and Julie Haggerty (his spouse) kept babbling about Easy Rider and freedom. As yuppies, they looked at Easy Rider as a guiding light, but they had a “nest-egg” (i.e. $190,000) to live off of. Obviously it was the same with us. None of us were like Sal Paradise. We’d nothing to do with the legacy of Captain America. We never panhandled and we sure as hell never sold coke to Phil Spector to fund a two week getaway. In all, we were only luckier than Brooks and Haggerty because no one ever gambled away our cash in Vegas. We just got to feed off of our parents’ nest-eggs the whole time.

I stayed in touch with Henry. He’s still more grounded than I am, so when we’re chatting, our conversation always turns back to the nights in Dublin where we talked constantly about some idea of freedom and tried to live it. He got serious with a girl in Dublin soon after That Night, though. And then he snagged a job after graduation and started seeing another lady. So, all we’ve got now are simply memories of being unencumbered and stupidly happy. It’s all pretty much a dying part of his life. But for me, it’s something I’m hanging on to and still blathering about. I sit looking at my journal from the spring of ’08 realizing I can’t get the goddamn trip out of my head. Memories of street corners, shitty food, pubs, running to catch a bus, and babbling about philosophy still pique my senses. Nest-egg or not, I’m stuck in the past.

I lived the next year and a half of my life after Dublin in that same faux-Freedom haze, just hanging out with friends, moving from party to party to bar to party, knowing the college grading system well, and doing just enough to keep my GPA around a 3.6 or 3.7. I woke up during senior week the day after I took my last final, and found, to my surprise, that I’d made Dean’s List and graduated Magna. My thoughts at the time still came back to that clichéd Talking Heads lyric...you know it...“Well, how did I get here?” I still ponder that same damn question right now.

Really, who knows how I got there? All of this feels like a fantasy, 15 months I won’t ever forget. Even as I thought I was being responsible during that Freedom period in my life, keeping up grades, not missing (much) class, writing A papers professors called ‘analytical’ and ‘thoughtful’ and ‘well-researched’, the whole ordeal seems like some wonderful recurring dream. Yet it quickly ends like this: you receive your diploma in late May, shake the college president’s hand, and watch the assembly line of black-gowned graduates in front and back of you smiling, waving, shouting. When you take your seat among the masses, the grin rapidly turns to a furrowed brow, and everyone sits with lips pursed, eyes shifting rapidly, the “holy-fucking-shit” impulse trapped in their bellies.

Then one thing becomes abundantly clear: you’ll never be able to go back. Sure, you’ll make it back for one alumni weekend, one senior week excursion, and an impromptu weekend when you’re 25, realizing you’re way too old to get black-out drunk three days in a row. Your old idea of Freedom will be nothing but a memory by then. The nest-egg is all but fucked. You’ll finally realize Kerouac drank himself to a hideous death at only 47-years old. Things will never be the same again.

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