Drinking Tales - Volume 1

With Bradoween's festivities coming up, I figure I'd relay some of the not-so-memorable stories involving yours truly drinking far more than he should have. Call it a foreshadowing.

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Bar Golf

It was 1991 and I had recently graduating drinking school (college). A friend from school had gone onto grad school at Yale and was living in New Haven. He invited me and a buddy down to celebrate his birthday by playing bar golf wherein we'd have at least one drink in 18 different bars.

He had the route all mapped up and we began pretty early in the day so that we'd have a decent chance of finishing. One of the best ideas was bringing a disposable camera to take pictures at each "hole" and chronicle our adventures with pictures.

I knew things would go incredibly wrong on Bar #1 when the bartender, after seeing what we were planning, made us all drink an extra shot "on the house." Refusing free liquor is a no-no, but we were all hesitant since we all knew that we were going to have trouble drinking 18 drinks this evening. But we took the shot anyway.

One of the rules of bar golf is that you get a mulligan. You can take 1 bar off and drink soda, water, or nothing at all. I believe my mulligan came at bar #12. I was keeping up with the crew, but just barely.

Not soon after, my liver passed the tipping point - the point at which I could no longer process alcohol fast enough. At bar #15 I began to doubt my ability to keep conscious. I was basically carried to bar #16 and sat in a booth. It was a restaurant/bar and being late at night, there was nobody around. I simply put my head down on the table and rested.

When you're in such an amazing stupor, you forget a lot of things. But somethings are so memorable, they're etched in my memory forever. I'll always remember the kind soul, who upon seeing me in my sad state, nudged me awake and asked if he could by me a cappuccino. How utterly odd. I said no thanks and put my head back down.

Then it came. Or shall I say "they" came. Multiple regurgitations of dinner came flowing back through my esophagus and onto the floor under the table in the booth I was in. That's not good. Next thing I remember, I'm getting escorted out of the bar by security. My friends who had managed to process their alcohol a bit more efficiently came to my rescue. We realized that this was the end of bar golf for the evening and we hailed a cab for the ride home. But not before I blew chunks again on the sidewalk.

My friends, in a display of very poor judgement, had me sit in the back seat of the cab between two other people. Dumb? Yes. Lucky? Yes, because I was able to forego any more upheavals during the cab ride home. But once I got out of the cab, that was another story. Boot city.

The best part and the worst part was the next day. Not only was I hungover, but my clothes were a mess. I didn't pack a change of clothes so we had to spend the morning washing the chunks off my pants and shirt. During this down time, we searched frantically for the film from the camera we took with us the night before. For the life of us we couldn't find it.

The guy in charge of the film swore that he brought it home and put it on the countertop before passing out. It turns out one of the cats in the house must have knocked it over onto the floor as we found it under a heating baseboard across the room.

The pictures were hilarious. You could see us getting visibly drunker as the night wore on. There were shots taken that I had absolutley no recollection of. During the night, we had lost a couple of people that had started at the beginning and picked up a few on the way. There were girls sitting with us at one bar who were not at all bad looking. Too bad I have no idea what I said to them.

To this day, that night of golf has proven to be one of my own personal epic adventures with alcohol. Truly, I do not measure up to the likes of the CantHang crowd, but for me, it remains one of my more infamous evenings. I still have the pictures somewhere.