The Alcohol Diary: Chasing the Night

Do me a favor and picture the following scenario:

It’s Saturday night, around nine o’clock. You’re hanging out at your buddy’s place with a bunch of your friends, and you’re getting ready to go out to the bar. You’re pre-gaming; the game is on, you’re dressed up in your polo or your button-down, your best pair of jeans and your brown Sketchers (or your black square-toes or your immaculate white Nikes.) If you’re a real douche, you’re in your skin-tight Affliction t-shirt and perhaps some sort of designer boot. You’re eating pizza-bites and making clockwork-like trips to the little fridge that survived four years of college and now resides in your buddy’s living room solely for these types of situations and doling out Bud Light cans across the room, save to the poor bastard who pulled driving duty. Pre-gaming really is the best part of the night, in some ways. Everyone is relaxed and cracking jokes, and the entire night is in front of you. Right now, everyone has an equal opportunity to get laid (because really, isn’t that what going to the bar on a Saturday night is about – the slight chance that you will meet a young, uninhibited, morally (and God-willing, physically) flexible young lady who doesn’t have time for phone number exchanges or dinners and will invite you back to her place?) Sure it is. Don’t act like you’re above it. Okay, so now it’s almost 10:30 and you’re ready to go. Fashionably late friend just got there – and even though he looks like an unmade bed, it’s the fashionable kind of unmade bed, which required that extra hour. Driving-guy is ready to drive. Half of your friends have achieved the perfect level of buzzed, where they can simply work with a beer every hour or so to maintain it; they don’t get sloppy and they don’t lose their buzz. These are the professionals. A couple of your buddies appear to be at that perfect-buzz level, but a poorly-timed shot may send them on a detour into puddle-town. That, or they will lose their buzz about 45 minutes after you arrive at the bar and will most likely just be cranky for the rest of the night. These are the Shaq’s and T.O.’s of the group – you’d think they would be a productive part of the evening, but really they just end up destroying the chemistry of the night from the inside out. Finally, there’s that one friend who hit the pre-game like it was the Super Bowl, and is already slurring his speech on the way out the door. While everyone else was pacing themselves, he was in the corner doing shotguns by himself, while the designated driver screamed at him like Duke from Rocky IV. “This is supposed to be an exhibition! EX-HIBITION! This is supposed to be pre-game! PRE-GAME!” I like to call this guy the Colin Farrell. He peaked too early, and will now be an insufferable douche for the rest of the night.

You get to the bar, and the night plays out fairly routinely; two of your buddies who kind of have their own thing going on end up setting up shop at the end of the bar and spend the night doing shots and drunkenly confiding in one another (and the way they stand, with one’s arm draped across the other’s shoulders as he pulls him in tight to tell him something extra profound somehow only makes them look marginally gay.) Other friends scatter to the dance floor, where they kind of just bob their heads and every once in a while dip their shoulders to the beat, because it’s not that they can’t dance, it’s just that they’re too cool to. Meanwhile, you and another buddy have decided to Maverick-and-Goose it over to a group of girls you recognize from high school who have gotten more attractive, and therefore less likely to have anything to do with you, but you’re going to give it a shot anyway. And the Colin Farrell? He’s outside on the curb being mocked by the people waiting on line to get into the bar after reverse-shotgunning all those beers into the bathroom stall. Before you know it, it’s 2am – the bar is thinning out, you’ve spent $80 and at this point, there is zero possibility of going home with a female… but, no one is really all that tired (even Colin Farrell is semi-coherent and catching a second wind.) What should you do? Should you

A) Search for another bar where there might be more girls

B) Go back inside and scheme on the dregs of the bar-skank brigade the way a turkey vulture picks at the corpse of a flattened raccoon

C) Slam the last forty dollars in your wallet down on the bar and do your damndest to get alcohol poisoning (or at least ensure that you piss the bed)

D) Cut your losses, go to the diner, eat bad food, mock your Colin Farrell friend and call it a night

If you answered “D,” you would be correct. Contrary to what Richard Marx tells us, nothing good comes from holding on to the night. In fact, after 2am, nothing good has ever happened to anyone…anywhere…in the history of the world. Sadly, we all know this. Yet, how many of us ever choose “D?” Be honest; we never choose “D.” Instead of cutting our losses and capping the night off with some tasteless humor and a plate of gravy-fries, we always want to chase the night.

I’m guilty; I’ll admit it. In my tenure of going out on Friday and Saturday nights, I have played all the roles - I’ve been driving guy, the professional, Shaq and Collin – and many times, I’ve been guilty of trying to chase the night. Most times, it was because the inordinate amount of alcohol I force-fed myself throughout the night somehow convinced me that I was actually having fun. “C’mon, let’s go to another bar! We can’t see straight, we’re burping recycled Jack Daniels into our own mouth once every eight minutes, our speech sounds like Corky Thatcher having a conversation with a deaf guy, and our shirt is soaked through with equal parts spilled beer and man-boob sweat. THIS IS AWESOME!!!!” Ugh. That was my reason for chasing the night – I drank to excess, and figured that, since I hadn’t vomited or passed out yet, that meant I was supposed to keep drinking. In the morning, my violent hangover and empty bank account would lace into me like a henpecking housewife. “I told you we didn’t need those last four shots. What good did they do? You made an ass of yourself, you got puke on your new shirt, and now we only have eighteen dollars left until the next paycheck. God, I wish you weren’t such a jackass!” Just for fun, have a look at the results from a few of those nights when I just refused to let it go:

1. New Paltz, sometime between 2002-2005 (is it bad that the first half of the double-aught decade all blends together?) We’re out at Murphy’s, and it’s been a fairly uneventful night. I’m drunk, and slowly getting drunker. I’ve somehow managed to convince myself that Maia D’Edgidio was making eyes at me, and that the cordial, “Hi-haven’t-seen-you-in-a-while” hug I got from her might have had potential to blossom into what would have to be one of the most improbable hook-ups of all time. Fuck off, I said I was drunk. Anyway, Pat V. must’ve driven that night, and he was ready to go. 99 times out of 100, Pat and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to these things, and I would have left with him. But, like the devil on my shoulder, Pat H. was in my other ear, saying all the right things to convince me to stay. He always said the right things…uh, I mean….nevermind. Not gay. So, I ended up staying with him and Chris F., who I believe was working overtime on some pretty little New Paltz college girl. Do you know what happened after Pat and the other guys left? Me either. There is nothing significant or memorable about the extra hours we spent in the bar that night. Here is what I do remember… we had no ride home. I feel like Pholbes and I got on one of our “we’ll-go-by-the-grace-of-God” pseudo-philosophical kicks, and somehow convinced ourselves that we would find someone that would give us a ride. We did not. Do you know who ended up picking us up? Mr. Fiorentino. Charlie Hustle himself, drove out to New Paltz at 4am and picked up his twenty-something son and his two jackass twenty-something friends from the bar. I remember very little of the car ride, save the feeling of extreme embarrassment I felt.

2. New Year’s Eve, 2004(?) 2005(?) Who the fuck knows? We are in New York City at one of those pay-$200-and-get-open-bar-all-night deals. There are very few attractive women at this party. I am crazy-glued to the bar, over-tipping for free drinks because the bartender is hot, has tattoos and is wearing fishnet stocking on not only her legs, but her arms as well. I am in love, and like a guy who thinks he has a shot at bringing home the stripper, I am funneling money into her tip cup in exchange for a few flirtatious smiles and a brush of her fingers across my forearm. Women are wily, and I am a complete idiot, for the record. One of my friends is devoting his time to hitting on a woman who looks like Kelly from The Office’s grandmother. Pholbes is upstairs at former New Jersey Net/current San Antonio Spur Richard Jefferson’s private party. By the way, Pat walking around referring to Jefferson as “Rich” all night long is still one of my favorite memories. Anyway, as the party clears out, I refuse to vacate my bar stool. Open bar has ended, and I am now paying for drinks. The alcohol in my system literally outweighs the hemoglobin at this point. My friends are clearing out, but I stand fast. Why? Who the fuck knows. I sat by myself at the bar for at least another hour, before finally deciding that it was time to vacate. I get into a verbal altercation with some random dude on my way out, and it’s like 80:20 that I provoked it. By the grace of God and Baby Jesus, I make it back to Brett’s apartment (a couple of the guys may have actually come back for me – I don’t really remember.) I close the night out by spooning with the toilet, only a step or two shy of sleeping in the bathtub like Casper at the end of Kids.

3 Albany, NY, a couple of years ago. Jeff and I are out and about, up to our usual antics (drinking far more than either one of us normally would for no discernable reason whatsoever.) We spend the majority of the night at Café Hollywood, and end up across the street at Bombers. We meet up with my friend Courtney and we have a great time. When we leave Bombers, it is clearly time to go home. I convince Jeff that we need to hit one more bar. There was some tiny little hole in the wall down the street from Bombers that Jeff said he wanted to take me to (this was about 75 drinks ago, mind you) and we decided to head down there. Jeff went back into Bombers to go to the bathroom, and I waited outside with Courtney. At some point, Courtney went home and I was out on the street alone. It had been almost a half hour, maybe more. I must’ve missed Jeff. I figured he went down to the other bar without me. So I head down there. The bartender is a buddy of Jeff’s, and I ask him where he’s at. The bartender says he hasn’t seen him. So I have a couple of beers and I wait. Jeff never posts. I leave. Miraculously, I navigate my way back to Jeff’s apartment. I bang on the door like Fred-fucking-Flintstone for five minutes, but to no avail. So what do I do? I take a walk around the corner to my car (and not even my car, but a rental car that I drove up. It was one of those God-awful, half-car, half-station wagon things. A Pacifica? Was it a Pacifica?) and get in. Relax, I didn’t drive it. I slept in it. I slept in it in the dead of summer heat. I needed the AC, so I turned it on. Then I passed out. I wake up around 6am, sweating like Rex Ryan. The AC is off. Why is it off? Because the battery is dead. I walk back to Jeff’s apartment and bang on the door some more, this time adding in a little homage to Mark Wahlburg in Fear; looking into the peep hole and screaming, “Let me in the fuckin’ HOUSE!” (Okay, I made that last part up.) Jeff groggily answers the door, lets me in and immediately goes back to bed. In the morning, we venture half way across town to get jumper cables from his brother, Daniel. Daniel mocks us, and rightfully so. We then proceed to put on an utter spectacle; two men in their mid-twenties trying to jump start a car and having no earthly idea what they are doing. We almost set the car – and our balls – on fire. Jeff had to call his dad and have him talk us through it. I’m not making this shit up, I swear. I wish I were. God, I wish I were.

I could literally list ten more instances of fucked up things that happened because I wanted to stay out and drink when I should have just gone home, but I don’t know how much more of my stupidity I can write down before I decide to dowse myself with kerosene and light myself on fire. The point is, nothing good happens after 2am. I know this, yet that last story took place no longer than two years ago, and there have been a couple of other times where I’ve tried to keep the night alive on life support down here in Florida, when I should have just pulled the plug (much like many of Florida’s residents. ZING! I hate old people.)

All jokes aside, I’m not really ashamed of any of that stuff I just recounted. At the same time, this isn’t a nostalgic, “hey-I-loved-drinking-my-face-off” memoir, either. I’ve outgrown the desire to drink for drinking’s sake (thankfully.) But those experiences, as well as the ones where I just let the night die its natural death – are all mine, and I would not trade them. When you’re in college, chasing the night isn’t as dangerous. All of the stupidity and fucked up situations that come with dragging out the party turn into great stories for the next night’s pre-game. When you’re twenty-two and you’re stumbling around drunk at 3am with a bloody nose and piss-stained jeans, you’ll wake up and die laughing about it with your roommates. You could even tell it to a girl, and it won’t necessarily prevent her from giving you a handskie at the end of the night. But if you’re still stringing the night out at 28 and, oh, I don’t know, getting rides home from the police because you were walking down the road at 3am cursing wildly to no one but the snakes and armadillos and your apartment is easily ten miles away and you may or may not be shirtless and you’re drunk dialing your best friend and telling him how much you love him like your ship is going down… it might be time to learn to let it go.

Not that I know anything at all about that last part. I mean, it’s not like that shit actually happened to me or anything. Where did I leave that can of kerosene?