Ian MacAllen

There are many like it, but this one is mine. The winter break between my first and second semesters of college was coming to end. Practically speaking, winter break brought on a long four weeks of sobriety and dial up internet pornography in the confines of my childhood bedroom. I was ready for winter beak to end.

A friend was hosting an end of winter break / birthday party; the next morning we would all be returning to the dormitories, but this seemed an excellent transition to alcohol abuse. The only conundrum was getting there and back again. We weren’t stupid enough to get loaded and drive forty five minutes home on the Garden State Parkway. Luckily, Curtis convinced his girlfriend to drive us all south.

During the car ride we talked about our expectations for the new semester. I showed off a new pair of shoes I purchased over the break. Curtis flashed the five fifty dollar bills he had for the next semester’s books. I still wasn’t clear why he thought bringing two hundred and fifty dollars in large bills to a party was a good idea.

We arrived at the house on the early side. Maybe a half dozen people were there wandering about with cocktails in an inappropriate attempt at post holiday merriment. Another group attempted to play beer pong on a dining room table; there was, however, an acute shortage of beer making the beer pong game ever more difficult.

There wasn’t just a shortage of beer. There was a shortage of any inebriating beverages. I came up with an innovative solution: drink fast, thus ensuring a greater portion of the available assets. The strategy proved effective and just as the last of the beer was allocated to the beer pong game, I was well on my way to having a wonderful buzz. The liquor went quickly, and all that remained were sugary schnapps better suited to hangovers than drinking binges.

Then someone arrived with a bottle of tequila.

One bottle of tequila surely isn’t enough to satiate the demands of an ever growing party. And being that I was still employing the strategy of drink faster than everyone else to maximize the rate of intoxication, I hit the tequila bottle hard. I did shots of tequila, then filled tumblers and drank it like a fruity mixed cocktail, sans fruity mix. Whatever else was happening at the party was irrelevant, although I would later learn that the acute shortage of alcohol was alleviated by large quantities of beer, vodka, gin, scotch, and other things brought by more thoughtful guests. I of course was unaware of this development, concentrating on the tequila.

Then the tequila bottle was empty. I’m not sure how it happened. I wasn’t the only one drinking it. I was being quite generous passing it around as often is the case with other people’s alcohol. When the empty bottle was discovered, the girl that brought it yelled at me. She apparently hadn’t had any yet. But I got mine in the end.

I felt it coming, the tequila, seeking its revenge on me. The house, hot with bodies and booze and revelry, felt cramped and suffocating. I stepped out onto the front porch. There were little piles of snow on the ground from a storm the week before. The air was cool and fresh and just what I wanted. Then I threw up.

I vomited over the side of the porch railing into the bushes onto a pile of snow, the warm bile steaming up from the ground. I wiped my mouth clean, then projected another steaming stream of vomit towards the ground. I stood there for a moment collecting myself, smelling tequila permeating up from the piles of goo recently extricated from my stomach.

More guests arrived. I greeted them calmly. Surely no one would know what I had been up to. A few more minutes in the cool air and I stumbled back inside, relieved.

Then everyone decided they were hungry.

We crowded into a dumpy diner a few blocks away, a place that no one would care that we smelled like tequila or vomit. I ordered something. Even then I wasn’t really clear on what was happening.

While I was enjoying the incredible intoxication, Curtis made his way to the bathroom. Inside the bathroom he came across a pair of townies. The townies were looking for trouble. And money.

The townies ask Curtis for a few dollars. And being that Curtis, despite his faults, is all too generous with this sort of thing and offered them a dollar. The problem though was that Curtis didn’t have a dollar. He had five crisp fifty dollar bills. He reaches in and searches through the wallet in front of the townies, and then explains very casually, that regretfully, he doesn’t have any small bills.

The townies suggest strongly that they want some money. They stand between Curtis and the bathroom door and reiterate their request. Curtis tries explaining, at least as best as a drunkard can, that he has no small dollar bills, but otherwise would. He doesn’t seem to be comprehending their request. Just then our friend Drew pushes in on the bathroom door. He senses something happening and asks, sensibly, if there is a problem.

Drew and Curtis than slip out of the bathroom, book money still in his wallet. But the townies have apparently been causing some other problems in this diner, which is really saying something since the diner is willingly putting up with two dozen largely underage drunks loudly consuming greasy food.

The cops are called to haul away the two townies. But I don’t yet know about the townies. I don’t know yet that Curtis has almost lost two hundred and fifty dollars in the men’s bathroom of the Scotchwood Diner. I also don’t know where I am at the moment. But I do know what police lights look like, and I do know that I am very drunk. All this leads me to believe that the police are here for me.

There is a moment of panic where I try to hide under the table before all reason sets in and instead I try to dash for the door absolutely certain I could out run these cops even though I’m not exactly sure where I would go. I am stopped by someone at the table. Maybe the girl who’s tequila I drank. And she advised that I should sit quietly in my seat until the police have left (though I am still sure they will only leave when they have taken me away).

The police escort of the townies out of the diner, and then Drew and Curtis explain about the bathroom. We will live to drink another day.

In the car riding home, I notice bits of dried vomit on my new shoes. Then I think about waking up early the next morning to move myself back into the college dormitory. I swear off drinking for a full twelve hours. Tequila though, I still won’t drink.

Ten years later, at a bar in Cambridge, a pretty young woman bought my friends and I a round of tequila shots. I protested. She insisted I drink it down. I threw up a little bit into a pint glass and then raced for the bathroom to finish the deed. Maybe in another ten years I’ll give it a go once more.