Number Three: Summer 2003

Back with your third installment of the drunkest nights of my life. As you may come to realize, most of them involve personal humiliation and loss of dignity, and who knows, maybe some destruction of property and relationships as the week goes one.

I'm not sure if you've guessed by now, but each of these stories will involve puking in some form of another, each more humiliating than the last.

Without further ado...

Summer 2003. An innocent time. I was a smooth young lad, returning from my first year of college. My first semester was spent pledging a fraternity; my second spent smoking pot and drinking four nights a week at the fraternity house. While I was posed no danger to top 10% of my class, I was doing fairly well.

I came home with a newfound thirst for alcohol, and a newfound trust in my drinking abilities. Silly me. Exams finished up on a Wednesday, and by Friday, I was moved out of the dorms, and ready to begin my summer. While I waited to get a job (I ended up building decks for part of the summer, and as an electrician for the other part), I had nothing but time on my hands.

So on that first Friday night, a few of my buddies from high school, also home for the summer, came over to my parents house, and we made an evening of it.

I lived in the basement of my parents house, and it is out in the sticks, so it was a popular hangout, especially in the summer. My friends could come over, booze it up illegally, and no one would be any the wiser.

Before college, summer was my time for drinking. I never drank all that much during high school during the school year. I worked most weekends, and didn't have much time.

But the summers, oh the summers. The summer before my senior year of high school, me and a friend used to make it a point to get drunk once a week, and by the end of the summer, we considered ourselves full-blown alkies.

Now, I consider myself a square if I only get drunk once a week. Oh, the innocence of childhood.

Anyways, so my friends came over, and they brought with them maybe a case of beer between about five of us.

My staple back then would be a handle of Canadian Mist that I would pilfer from my parents' liquor cabinet. My mom used to buy a handle of that when my grandma came over, the two of them preferred whiskey sours. They would rarely drink more than a quarter of it, and it just sat there.

That's where I came in. And that's why I can never drink cheap Canadian whiskey again.

So we're drinking beer, playing video games, doing the occasional shot, and talking some bullshit. And as the pile of empty cans grows to fill the garbage bag I had downstairs, the shit-talking ratchets up a notch.

To the point where one of my friends says to me: "Yeah, you've been away so a year, I don't think you can really drink as much as you say you can."

Good sir, you might as well have spit on y ancestor's graves. I don't take such a slight lightly.

I don't remember what exactly led up to this (shocker), but somehow the more than half-full bottle of Canadian Mist got drawn into the mix.

And somehow it evolved (or is that devolved?) into the two of us passing the bottle back and forth between us, taking gigantic swigs of this foul-tasting rotgut. I think another one of my friends was in on it as well.

I do know the bottle was empty when I woke up. Luckily for my friends, we had a friend that didn't drink, so he served as the driver, and drive my friends home.

I woke up, felling like shit, but otherwise okay.

I think my mom called our house from work around noon, and asked how I was feeling.

Thinking nothing of it, I replied that I felt fine.

"Oh, that's good, because you guys had quite a night last night," she said.

How did this crafty wench learn of our nighttime boozing? In a more polite way, I asked her.

"Well, you, [your friend] and [your other friend] woke the entire family up, puking and screaming at each other in the backyard. I'm surprised you didn't notice that we flipped on the floodlights."

Good God.

Apparently, we went out back (where I conveniently had a porch in the back yard, allowing for easy egress and ingress. But it just so happens that every family member's bedroom also had a window that faced the backyard.

So when we went out there, apparently (that word again!), we were talking shit to each other outside, and then just started puking, loud as can be.

My parents flipped on the floodlights, and were treated to some of the Class of 2006's finest puking their guts out all around the backyard.

I'm told it lasted several minutes. With my little brother and little sister watching as well. Both of whom were too young to really understand the appeal of alcohol, so I'm sure they just thought we had a nasty case of the stomach flu.

All three of us.

That's the fourth drunkest night of my life, but it reminds me of a similar story, from the same summer.

Bonus Honorable Mention

The same group of friends came over, and one of them used to smoke weed with me a lot. Back then, this was before my parents caught me smoking (another story in and of itself), so I had all my apparatus in my room.

Well, this was getting towards the end of the summer, and the guy who I used to smoke with a lot was headed off the to Army. You can't say we're not patriotic.

Given that a drug-test is the standard part of the entrance exams to the Army, he couldn't indulge in the sweet, sweet reefer. So what was a man to do?

Well, it just so happens that I had recently purchased some opium from a friend of mine. It was only the second (and last, up through now) time I purchased opium, but I always liked to put a little bit on a bowl, to spice the whole thing up.

Since weed stays in your system from anywhere to two weeks to a month, that was out. But some diligent research on my part, I found out that opium only stays in your system for 24 to 48 hours. Golden, right?

Wrong.

Instead of putting a little bit in a bowl, I decided to pack up my gravity bong with some opium. I don't know if you know what a gravity bong is, but it basically is the most powerful way to smoke. You use a large plastic bottle that fills with smoke, and you take it all in.

I had a 2-liter bottle, so we each took 2-liters of straight opium smoke.

Yowzas.

I felt fine at first, took the hit, and sat back on my bed. Then I started getting the spins. Real bad.

I stumbled to the bathroom, and barely made it to the toilet before collapsing, breaking a towel rack in the process. I promptly deposited what remained of my dinner in the toilet.

I wake up, and my friend who partook in the opium is passed out on my couch. I go to take a piss, and there is puke EVERYWHERE. Everywhere but the toilet, that is.

Now, I could have sworn that I got all my puke in the toilet, but a drunken idiot's memories aren't always correct.

I just assumed that I did it, and I spent the next hour or so scrubbing puke from some obscure corners of the bathroom.

My friend wakes up after I finish, and he goes to take a piss. He comes out, and is like, "Man, I went to puke right after you finished, and I could have sworn I got it all over the toilet. I guess not."

Oh, the delicious irony.