While many of my stories involve me stumbling around doing crazy shit, most of them involve me doing it sober.  The reason is simple: I’m not a drinker.  This story explains why.

Growing up, I had very little experience drinking.  My parents took the European approach to alcohol, making it more-or-less freely available.  As a result, booze wasn’t terribly novel or interesting.  I didn’t enjoy the taste of alcohol, so I drank infrequently and not to excess.  Amazingly, this continued through college.  In fact, it may have been a record when I began graduate school having avoided so much as a mild hangover.

It seemed likely I would continue this streak into adulthood.  Graduate students are generally antisocial hermits who develop serious drinking problems in private, rather than throw raucous affairs that maim the liver and find one searching for a toilet (or patch of bushes) in the wee hours of the morning.

My expectations of graduate life proved accurate.  The closest my classmates got to parties were study groups, the majority of which I was expelled from for being… not helpful.  Towards the end of my second semester though, someone finally decided to throw a party.  It was a luau themed affair at a local apartment complex, about as creative as a group of science nerds could come up with.  But it was a start.

The day of the luau was disaster for me.  I had to work on a Saturday, which was bad enough.  After spending hours in the lab, my experiments failed.  Then I had a little fender bender, which delayed me just enough to show up at the party pissed off and on an empty stomach.  A perfect storm was brewing.

5 PM: The party starts off pretty normally, if a tad stiff.  We’re grilling; we’re having a beer.  The people that smoke light up.  Nothing special.

6 PM: The party has settled in nicely and has a good energy.  I’ve moved up to drinking alcohol-laden fruit punch.  We’re eating too: it’s a potluck and my classmates have represented with a ton of good food.  I’m starving and tuck in like it’s my last meal.  Life, once so cruel, is good once again.

7 PM:  I am now rather tipsy.  I am not alone.  Drunken twister has broken out, as has drunken karaoke.  I partake in both activities, adding freestyle rap to such Beatle’s classics as “Yesterday” and “Yellow Submarine.”  My popularity is rising.  I begin consuming needlessly elaborate mixed drinks.

8 PM: I’m officially in the crapper.  My Ukrainian classmate Pavlo informs me that I am not allowed to drink white russians anymore on the grounds that he hates everything soviet-themes.  He begins working as my personal bartender.  I am telling everyone what I really think of them.   

? PM: I have lost the ability to walk, but am dominating a large expanse of couch which I refer to as my “headquarters.”  I inform my classmates that I am both Santa and batman, explaining that they are the same person.  The normally bad taste of alcohol has faded and has become almost pleasant.  Pavlo has begun to prepare drinks he calls “Last Waltzes,” which are mixtures of all remaining species of alcohol.  At this point, the only thing left is scotch and red wine.  Isn’t it illegal to mix those?  The brain cell originating this thought dies a lonely death as I drown it with Glenlivet and Bordeaux. 

? PM/AM. ? Day: Some time has passed.  I can walk again.  I’m on the pool deck of the apartment complex, collecting what will be my final indelible memories of the evening.  Now the people who don’t smoke have lit up.  I respond to this development with a very erudite “Oh, we’re smoking now?”  I’d never made it through an entire cigarette in my life.  Now I’m puffing a black and mild like I’m a member of the Wu-Tang Clan.  I am also at the absolute limit of my alcohol tolerance.

The party (and my inebriation) are threatened.  Carl*, a classmate of mine, had been swimming in the pool and had taken a break to grab a beer and light one of his many tobacco pipes.  As he strolled back onto the pool deck, a cop responding to a noise complaint comes up to the edge of the pool area.  Upon seeing the cop, Carl (who’s 25) regresses to the mental state of a high schooler who’s been caught drinking.  He tries to shield his brewsky and blend in.  Sadly, Carl had been swimming in his tighty-whiteys, and there are few underwear-clad, pipe-smoking, beer-drinking folks to co-mingle with.  The cop noticed his sad attempt to palm his beer.  “It’s OK.  I don’t care,” says the cop offhandedly, “I just want you guy to keep it down.”  Carl, who was almost as drunk as I, picks a bad time to assert himself.  He levels an accusatory finger toward the officer and pronounces “I got no problem with you” in a tone that one should not adopt toward law enforcement.  Carl and the cop stare at each other for several seconds, locked in a subtle game of intimidation.  It appears that things are about to escalate when Carl power-chugs his beer while attempting to maintain his blazing gaze.  It didn’t work.  If it had, the party might have been broken up and this story probably would have turned out very differently.

The cop leaves.  I go back inside and Pavlo makes me another Last Waltz.  When I came back outside, people were being thrown in the pool.  The party organizers made an executive announcement: “Noah does not go in the pool.  If Noah goes in the pool, he will die.”  I protest this in an eloquent speech to a member of the party planning committee.  “What are you saying Noah?  I can’t understand you,” she said.  Apparently I was more fucked up than I realized.

A black patch.

I wake up and the party is gone.  I’m lying on a couch in someone’s apartment.  What happened?  I am... actually, I don’t know where I am either.  But I am among friends.  In fact, 3 or 4 of my classmates are standing over me, looking at me as though I am about to do something entertaining.  “What’s going on?” I ask.  Everyone looks confused at my utterance.  I try to tell them my English must be rusty from disuse.  No one laughs. 

Someone I don’t know comes over with a trashcan.  “Here’s your bucket,” she says, flashing me a sweet smile drenched with sympathy.  “What do I need this bucket for?” I try to ask.  Once again, the part of my brain that translates thoughts to words is on hiatus.

Another black period.

Bright light wakes me up.  Daylight is streaming in from a window to my left.  It sears my retinas and my head begins to throb.  My brain feels raw.  I turn away from the window, squinting like an old man.  The world swims into focus, and what I see disturbs me greatly.  I’ve moved again.  I’m lying in a bed now.  On the other side of the bed is a girl I am reasonably (let’s say 70%) sure is one of the party’s hosts.  I’m not sure we’ve ever actually spoken. 

Fuck.  This is how most illegitimate children start.  My first inclination is to sneak out.  This seems like a fine idea, but for one small fact: I am trapped.  My clothes are gone, as are my keys, wallet, and cell phone.  Most disturbingly: I’m wearing only a pair of boxers, but they don’t belong to me.  Another red flag goes up.

My ninja-like escape becomes a moot point when Patricia (that was her name, my brain informed me) stirred and awoke.  She opened her eyes, blinking the sleep from them, and turned in my direction.  I remained entirely still, hoping against hope that she would only be able to see me if I move.  Alas, I am spotted.  Her eyes widen, groggy but still registering some measure of shock.

“What are you doing here?” Patricia asked.

It’s a fair question.  I decide to tell the truth.  “I have no fucking idea.”  I try a bluff.  “What are you doing here?”

‘I live here!”

Touche.  While we’re getting things out in the open: “These aren’t my underwear.  Umm… are they yours?”

She considers this, checking beneath the sheets to ascertain her own state of undress.  “I don’t think so,” she said.

I groan, torn between relief and headache, when she asks “what’s that on your arm?”

Another good question.  There’s a scaly yellow patch on my forearm.  I prod at it and quickly rule out an RDI (random drunken injury) and -hopefully- fast-acting STDs.

Until now, we’d had a surprisingly lucid and civil conversation, but it’s time for this bird to fly the coop.  I jump out of bed to find my clothes and affect my escape posthaste.  Still, this isn’t too bad.  If this passing out and waking up with the host of the party is the worst thing that ever happens to me, I was going to live a charmed life.

I make it four or five steps before seeing something that makes me freeze.  A size 14 footprint, thinly outlined by something that looks pretty nasty, was planted squarely in the bedroom doorway.  There was another, and another.  I followed the trail into the living room.  Another footprint and I saw my shirt, followed by my shorts and shoes in rapid succession.  And then I learned what exactly the scaly stuff on my arm was.  On the opposite wall of the living room was the couch I remembered lying on the night before.  It was covered in a prodigious amount of puke.  I’d hit everything: the wall, the coffee table, a biochemistry textbook; anything within a fifteen foot circle was at least speckled with regurgitations.  In front of the couch was the trashcan I’d been given.  It was partially filled with vomit.  At least I’d tried to use the bucket I thought with absurd pride.  The trail of vomit led from the couch, across the living room to my clothes, and then thinned to footprints as it reached the doorway to Patricia’s bedroom.

As I registered the fact that I’d completely trashed a sizable portion of her home, Patricia padded out into the living room, accidentally stepping into one of my puke-prints.  She looked down to see what she had stepped in.  I watched as her eyes slowly tracked the increasingly messy trail back to the couch.  Her eyes grew larger as she tracked the mess on her ruined carpet, then her ruined furniture and, finally, swung back to me. She released a high, thin wail and began to cry.  I got the hell out of there.

As the adrenaline subsided in the parking lot, I realized I was suffering from one of the worst hangovers in the history of man.  I had the stamina of a toddler and my brain felt like a testicle that had been stepped on by a cat.  Like many burgeoning alcoholics, I went the route of blaming others for my troubles.  In this case, I called Pavlo to complain.  It was that or an ambulance.

I explained the situation.  Pavlo agreed to help.  I drove over to pick him up, and he told me to drive.  He gave me a little speech.  “Noah, you can be one of the great drinkers of your people if you can learn to handle the sickness.  Look at me.  I am Ukrainian.  We are the strongest drinkers on earth because we know how to fix hangover.  I will teach you.”

Pavlo sounded so sure in his convictions that I began to believe he could help me.  I asked him what his plan was.

“You need Coca-Cola and grease,” Pavlo said.

This sounded like a recipe for repeating in miniature what I had just gone through, and I said as much.

Pull over, said Pavlo, pointing to a passing Burger King.  I had no energy left to fight.  I pulled in.

“Where are you going?” asked Pavlo.  “The entrance is that way.”

“I’m going to hit the drive-thru,” I said.

“What’s a drive-thru?” Pavlo asked.

Great.  I was taking advice on curing a hangover from someone who’d never heard of a drive-thru.  The craziest thing was, he turned out to be right.  I felt human almost immediately.  Later, I learned there was a scientific basis for the “cheeseburger/milkshake” theory of hangover recovery.  The high levels of sugar counterbalance low blood sugar levels, while the greasy burger coats the stomach, promoting recovery of the digestive tract.  It works especially well when you grind six advil into your drink.  When in Rome, ask a Roman.  When drunk, ask a Ukrainian.

Despite this miraculous recovery, this story does not have a “happily ever after” ending.  There was some fallout.  First, I had literally destroyed the couch with concentrated bursts of my gut-spawn.  There was nothing left to clean.  It was just over.  Two days later, I was pushing a brand-new couch up to Patricia’s second story apartment.  After factoring in the cost of the couch, tax, and delivery, I estimated my cost-per-drink for that night was in the range of $35 a pop.  I’d also thrown up on my friendship with Patricia.  While we would hang out and eventually become friends, I was never invited to her apartment again.

When I delivered the new couch, I was fairly surprised when someone other than Patricia answered my knock.  Apparently, Patricia lived in a three-bedroom apartment, something I had failed to notice during my initial visit.  This begs the question: how did I- nearly naked and stumbling drunk in a darkened and unfamiliar apartment- manage to crawl into the correct bed?  Was it luck or latent drunken survival skills?

Finally, I made the mistake of posting a condensed account of the events of the evening when the dust settled.  The next day I found a surprise in my inbox.  My grandmother had written me a missive imploring me to curb my reckless drinking habits, lest I grow up to be the second coming of my alcoholic grandfathers.  She urged me to consider alcohol counseling.  Having a septuagenarian offer to host an intervention for you is officially hitting rock bottom.  As far as I was concerned, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.  Thus, my fickle affair with alcohol was largely ended.

And no, I never found out whose underwear I was wearing.

* Names are pseudonyms.