Booze III (3)

This is the third and likely not the final installment in the Booze series.  Based off of the popularity of these posts, I may just stop writing anything else and reflect on my drunken past on a bi-weekly basis. 

Who wants blackened chicken and where the hell is my car? 

These are not two questions that are asked under normal circumstances but if you read on, you will find that the situation I found myself in was anything but ordinary. 

I had been living on the near West Side of Cleveland near the Lakewood border with my good friend Chris.   On a boring Saturday night, we drove downtown in my car and parked at a local garage and went drinking.  We closed down some techno-club which was not in any sort of bar district of the city.  All I remember is that we had to walk down some stairs next to a Thai restaurant to get into the place. 

By the time we left, around 4 am, I had completely forgotten that I had driven the two of us downtown.  Chris was of no help either.  There was nowhere to get food in this neighborhood because it was basically the middle of no-man’s-land.  We got into a taxi and went home, forgetting that my car was in some sketchy parking garage in the middle of nowhere downtown Cleveland.

We get home and are drunk and starving.  Chris goes and begins to run his head under the faucet in the tub like he often tends to do when he is shitfaced.  I am not exactly sure how this helps, but you know what, whatever. 

I get the idea that I want chicken.  And luckily, I had purchased a package of frozen chicken earlier in the week.  Now, I know how to cook chicken, but when I am drunk, I make poor decisions. 

I heated up a frying pan to somewhere near four thousand degrees centigrade, opened the frozen chicken package and blindly inserted the contents into my nuclear hot frying pan.  I then began attempting to prepare some tater tots to go along with my chicken.  I don’t care what anyone says, it would have been delightful.

Somewhere in the middle of this spectacle, I put my head down on the counter next to the frying pan.  It turns out, completely frozen blocks of chicken don’t cook well in a frying pan, they basically just light on fire.  After some unspecified amount of time, I become completely past out with my head in a pile of frozen tater-tots with two pieces of chicken literally in flames, not a foot away from my head. 

I wake up to find Chris, soaking wet screaming at me and throwing baking soda on the stovetop.  He was still soaking wet and topless from having run his upper torso under the faucet for a half hour.  He is about as mad as I had ever seen anyone at me in my life.  For some reason in the midst of this fray, I come to realize that I had left my car downtown and began to ramble about this in some sort of drunk, confused, concerned, I just woke up into an emergency situation, type of babble.  This only added to Chris frustration because I was much more concerned about my car then the fact that I nearly burnt down our apartment building via frozen chicken. 

Luckily, I was able to go get my car the next day after paying a hefty parking fee, the chicken was unable to be salvaged.  Chris and I were able to patch things up, the tater tots were still edible 

Blue Goo and dishes do not go together:

At this time, I was around 21 and living in the middle of absolute nowhere Ohio, while working and in college.  My roommates and I had not done dishes for quite an unacceptable amount of time.  And it was time to do the god damned dishes.  My good buddy Matt and his girlfriend at the time agreed to go to the grocery store, while my other good buddy Ben and I stayed back and took care of the dishes. 

Both Ben and I have active gag reflexes and are unable to stomach disgusting things well.  And make no mistake about it, this dish situation was horrendous.  So I get the idea to mix up a batch of Blue Goo before we did them, you know, to take the edge off the disgustingness.

For those of you who did not grow up in rural Ohio, Blue Goo, is Vodka (a lot of it), poured into an empty Milk jug, and with Blue Kool-Aid and sugar mixed into it.  If cold, it is probably one of the easiest ways to get absolutely rip-shit in no time whatsoever. 

So Matt and his girlfriend leave to go grocery shopping, and Ben and I sit on the couch and begin passing the Blue Goo back and forth until it is completely gone,  time to do the dishes. 

We stumble into the kitchen absolutely blitzed around 11 am.  We decide that Ben will throw and I will catch.  At first, the system was working, we managed to get nearly half of the load clean and then the full brunt of the Blue Goo kicked in.  I began to get warmer and warmer until I was eventually pouring sweat like Jack from Lost.   I took my shirt off and Ben followed my lead.    Just then, Ben begins laughing his ass off but his laughter turned to pain when he realized that he had sliced his hand open on a dirty knife in the sink.  I began laughing at the overall situation just as I realized that I had done the same thing.  So now we’re both bleeding.

Throughout this process, our jeans had become soaked with dish water as did most of the kitchen.  You would be amazed at how difficult it can be to contain dish water after basically drinking half a bottle of vodka while the guy next to you drank the other half. 

I took my pants off because they had become gravely uncomfortable.  At the time, I did not wear underwear so I was basically nude, standing in a puddle of dirty dish water, with my hand bleeding, laughing my ass off and drying dishes. 

Then Ben took his pants off.  To my surprise, he had smacks on, AKA tightie-whities.  Now for whatever reason, Ben did not want to take off his boots so he attempted to take off his jeans over his boots without taking them off first.  This is a feat that is tough for someone who is not fighting a half liter of 80 proof vodka.   So Ben falls down, hard onto the linoleum, right in the middle of the most disgusting puddle of dirty dish water I had ever seen.  He begins laughing and I begin laughing at him. 

Just then, Matt and his girlfriend return from the grocery store.  Mind you, they only left about an hour before.  And when they left we were completely sober.  But what they returned to was something that nobody could have possibly predicted.  Two men, both absolutely hammered, soaking wet, one in his underwear on the floor laughing his ass off and myself, drying dishes in nothing but my birthday suit. It was like some sort of crazy, southern, gay swing party.  We all shared a nice, long laugh.   

We were able to get the dishes done and mend our various wounds, I then past out on the floor of my bedroom for about six to eight hours as did Ben. 

It is all fun and games until you accidently knock your friend out and get questioned by the cops:

When I lived in Cleveland Heights my friend Ben and I used to frequent a wine bar down the road from us.  We were there often, as we could walk to and from our apartment.  Now this is sort of embarrassing but in order to make the walks more entertaining, and due to the fact that we had both been making fun of the immensely popular at the time “X-Games” recently, we came up with a game we called “Extreme Walking”. 

“Extreme walking”, was basically just normal walking, except you have to be drunk and do stupid jumps and tricks while doing so.   For instance, if there was a curb in your way, and you jumped over it, while doing a 360 was considered, to us an extreme version of walking. All the while, the other person would commentate the exercise like one of those, ubber-hip, skater boy, douche bag, X-Game announcers.  It was fucking funny to us. If you don’t think it is, try it once; I guarantee you laugh your ass off.

After about a year, both of us had become formidable extreme walk men.  We had gotten to a point where we began to try to distract each other’s maneuvers by pushing each other in mid-air in some cases. 

Most of the time, this practice was harmless but unfortunately, on this evening, I did not account for black-ice.  Ben leaped off of a landscaping planter onto the sidewalk next to me.  In an attempt to prevent him from sticking the landing, I pushed him.  He slid about 10 feet to his right and fell down and slammed his head into a glass window.   Normally there wouldn’t be anything funny about this.  But in this case, the window was for this brand new, underground, ultra-trendy nightclub which was absolutely packed inside.  So when Ben’s head smashed into the window, the laughter from inside was fairly audible to everyone outside.  So I naturally began laughing with them.

Everything began to happen fairly quickly at that point.  I realized that Ben did not get up in a reasonable timeframe.  And just as I began to get concerned a cop came out of nowhere and pushed me onto the ground and began screaming at me.  I remember he called me “tough guy” about 5 times, rapid fire.  It is really weird to have someone calling you “tough guy” when you had no intentions of in any way trying to be tough.   It occurred to me, that he thought we were fighting and that I had done this on purpose. 

Then I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was.  Like, what am I fucking Batman?  Like in the middle of a fight, I would have the foresight to realize that my opponent was about to land on some black ice, and I would then use that to my advantage to make him slide 10 feet into a glass window.   

Finally Ben woke up with nothing but a lump on his head and we explained the whole situation to the cop.  This wasn’t easy; try explaining something like “extreme walking” gone wrong to a police officer!  He then reminded us that he had every right to arrest us for public intox and/or disturbing the peace, but this time he would let us go with a warning.  Thank you Mr. Officer, I don’t know how I would have ever explained how I got arrested to my cellmates for this one.  What are you in for Tyrone? “Murder”, what are you in for Jack? “Murder”, what are you in for Matt? “an extreme walking incident”.  

Then the cop told us to “be more careful next time” and that “Ben got lucky by not being more seriously injured”.   But it isn’t like Ben had even been examined for any sort of a concussion or anything, so I felt like it was a little too early to make that sort of an assumption. So unless this cop moonlights as the best neurosurgeon in the world I find this statement to have been a dubious claim.   Finally he let us just walk away.  We went right back to extreme walking.