"Friday Night Part 1 "
I went out Friday night. I suppose that should be expected of any self-respecting young urbanite in SoCal. It’s Friday, the workweek is over, time to go out. Off with the blue jeans, on with the well, blue jeans. Forgive me; I work from home. I met James, one of my last remaining drinking buddies at his house in Huntington Beach, and we bounced around the local pubs and nightspots in downtown HB.
Ironic I should lament about the loss of drinking buddies for a Friday night out considering how little I actually drink. Ninety percent of the time, the most potent beverage found in my hand is an iced tea. Unsweetened. With lemon. I'm a wild man, I know.
But regardless of my well-known featherweight tolerance for alcohol and my borderline obsessive-compulsive propensity for healthy living, socializing as a single male in America does require, at least to some degree, the conspicuous consumption of alcohol. As such, I am known, on rare occasion, to head out into the wild places and throw back no more than a shot or two of premium tequila. Hell, if you’re gonna have a drink, have a DRINK. I don’t dabble in the light beer. I go straight for the buzz.
Rarely, however, do I actually go the distance and tie one on. About once (OK maybe twice) every year I go out intent on getting a little drunk, bingeing right up to the edge, wandering around with a goofy, light-headed buzz and my capacity for good judgment just about drowned in liquid confidence. I occasionally like to teeter on this edge between intoxicated and fall-down drunk. To this day, I can count on one hand the times I have visited this place, and not once have I jumped (or fallen) off that cliff into the dark side of social drinking: the land of porcelain worship and blackouts, two-day hangovers and coyote sex.
I have – for better or for worse – had the foresight and self-control to avoid these well-known experiences. Hell, I’ve only had two hangovers. I know some of my readers are thinking I’m missing out. Others, perhaps currently caught in the middle of one of those throbbing mescal nightmares, might be ready for a conversion to my usually prudish lifestyle.
I suppose the closest I have come to losing control while dancing with alcohol was during a visit to an Aussie pub in London about two years ago. I was in London for a few days after my famous trip to Africa, and met up with a group of Australian guys in a poor British attempt at a traditional American bar. We were all unimpressed with this tacky, pseudo American dive, complete with jukebox, pictures of the Blues Brothers and Elvis Presley, and really, really bad nachos, so they took me a few blocks away to a local Australian pub. They were three friends from OZ, a beach blonde surfer punk, his huge, nearly Neanderthal football player brother, and a fierce looking, bald, pierced friend of theirs with the general shape and composition of a brick. For the life of me, I can’t remember their names, which is not surprising all things considered.
I partied with this surly group of Australian booze-hounds and a nineteen year old, red-haired, Kiwi fireball and her conspicuously promiscuous mom. Her mom, at some point during the course of the evening, began making out like a teenager with one of my new Australian friends, only to disappear to who knows where with him for who knows what, all much to her daughter’s initial disgust and eventual panic.
This is probably a good time to thank my mom for giving me a more traditional upbringing.
Regardless of how well you think you can hold your liquor, you haven’t partied until you have partied with citizens of OZ. From five to near midnight, I had a nonstop supply of bottled screwdrivers (apparently this is what they decided I was to be drinking), purchased for me and placed in my hands. It was a two fisted event for sure, and they were tossing drinks back at twice the rate I was. I spent the evening drinking with them until closing, when this drunken motley crew went back to their flat to party some more with the equally intoxicated female family from New Zealand.
That's when I chose to ditch this little party from the South Pacific. But by this time my head was completely clouded, my bladder entirely engorged, and I found myself running though the empty streets of London just desperate for a toilet, cursing myself for not using the head before the pub shut down for the night. My bladder was pushing on my ribcage, and I was running around with what felt like a gallon of orange juice and vodka sloshing around my abdomen. Fumbling to find foreign change for a pay toilet in the dead of night while three sheets to the proverbial wind is not a pretty picture. Had I no change, I would have had to break down that door or defile someone’s doorway, and neither option seemed particularly attractive considering I had to fly back to the US the following day and didn’t want to be sidetracked by an unplanned stay in a London jail cell.
In case you were wondering, I did eventually find the right combination of coins for that door and was finally, thankfully, blissfully able to relieve myself of the burden from that evening of consumption. I swear I have had orgasms that were less intense.
Yeah. It's the one story from that trip to Africa that I didn't tell. And definitely the most intoxicated I've ever been.
I suppose some of my friends might like to remind me of the time they claim I passed out during my 27th birthday party after a succession of Patron shots and glasses of really good sangria that they so graciously purchased for me. But to this day I insist that I wasn’t sleeping. I was merely using drunken logic to solve the problem I was having standing. If I can’t stand, might as well lie down. At no time did I loose consciousness, and hey, it made perfect sense at the time. Of course, lots of stupid things make perfect sense when you've been beating up brain cells on a Friday night, which is precisely why I usually stick to the iced tea.
