It's so good when it hits your lips

All Shook Up

Some of the names in this story have been changed to keep the characters from being grounded.

Seventh grade. Stewart's parents were out for the night. I had never, to this point, actually had a drink -- the closest I'd come to illicit substances was smoking a bunch of dried crabgrass my friend's older brother convinced us was pot. So in my own defense before I relay this horrible tale, let me just say: I wasn't ready.

Thinking back on it, Kurt had probably started drinking at his house before he came over. He was one of those kids who would've been diagnosed with ADD if they were diagnosing kids back then; Kurt spent much of his time running into things and speaking at volumes usually reserved for auctioneers and coxswains, which is exactly what he was doing when he walked in. If I remember correctly, it was his idea to go for the vodka.

We took turns swigging; Kurt and Stewart taking big pulls, me doing my best to keep the firewater out of my mouth. I couldn't understand why they wanted to do this, but I wasn't about to say anything; these kids were cooler than me, you understand. Eventually, enough crept passed my lips and I started to feel that tingle in my fingers.

Wait a minute, I thought. This could be fun.

We stopped at some point to stumble through the neighborhood lying about sex and punching things and eventually passed out playing video games, Kurt splayed out on the pool table.

I woke up in the middle of the night, my head spinning. I stood up to get a glass of water and that's when I saw him. Kurt's head was hanging off the edge of the corner pocket, his eyes open, only the whites visible. He looked much like the frog we'd recently dissected in biology class. I poked him once, then harder a second time.

Nothing. Kurt, I decided, was dead.

Completely panic-stricken, my virgin blood now pumping with booze-fueled adrenaline, I started to shake him. Nothing still. Later, in college, I would see tons of people in this state -- I'd be there myself on occasion. But at the time, this was unprecedented. I did the only thing I could think to do: call his parents.

Kurt came to about 30 seconds later; I didn't have the stones to tell him what I'd done. So we just waited there, him falling in and out of consciousness, me praying that I'd been dreaming when I called his folks. Then we heard a knock on the door. Kurt looked up at me, his face white.

I'm sure, if I really tried, I could think of a worse moment than Kurt's dad showing up at Stewart's house. But I can't recall one now. He was a scary guy -- one of those gym-rats with the bulging neck veins. He walked in, without a word to me or Stew, grabbed Kurt by the arm and pulled him out of the house. This was 1995, just after the Nancy Kerrigan Olympics, and as Kurt stumbled along, he looked back at me and just mouthed the word:

"Why?"

--ML

Tallahassee Nights

The first time I ever got drunk was in my dorm room at Florida State in the fall of 1997. I was 17 years old and an alcohol novice. Oh, I had been around drinking in high school, but it was always of the "I swiped this gin from my parents liquor cabinet" variety, and I never much cared for anything my friends were loading up on. On that fateful evening, however, I was determined to finally find out what all the fuss was about. I would not be denied in my quest for inebriation.

A few friends and I bribed a junior to pick us up a bottle of "something, whatever" from the liquor store, and we retreated back to my room with our score: a handle of Jim Beam. Perhaps we should have requested something else, but mixed with some Pepsi, the Beam worked out just fine. For a while. Five drinks in I was yelling, making bad jokes and self-administering police sobriety tests, all the while claiming that alcohol had no effect on me. By eight drinks (probably an hour and a half in), things were getting hazy. I stood up to go outside and wobbled quite a bit. I was heading out to smoke a cigarette (probably the third one I'd ever had), thereby consecrating the sacred alcohol/tobacco bond cherished by so many throughout time.

Of course, something had to give. As I made my way to the eight-floor landing, I had to use both walls of the narrow hallway to keep myself upright. Once outside, I puffed deeply on the cancer stick, delighted by the long stream of smoke that exited my mouth and danced in the harsh glow of the institutional spotlight that bathed the landing. My head spun, my stomach turned, I opened my mouth and everything I had eaten for two days spilled out Stand By Me, barf-o-rama style.

Of course, I was thrilled. "That was the easiest puke I've ever had!" I raved. "I just opened my mouth and out it came. I didn't even have to do anything." My drunken friends just nodded in agreement. They understood.

Alcohol makes everything better.

--JB

D'oh: It Was O'Doul's

The first time I was drunk I was, come to think of it, not drunk at all.

Surely I'm not the only one whose first time went something like this: I was 14. No wait. Thirteen.

I had three friends named Sarah. I was just beginning to understand the brevity of the word popular, and on this particular weekend of pseudo-drunkenness the hippest and tallest of the Sarahs had invited me and a gaggle of girls to spend the night at her place on Applewood Road.

It should be noted that Sarah had an older brother who I used to think looked like Jonathan Brandis, but whose square-jawed handsomeness I now liken to Matt Damon.

I wore my shortest short shorts and paraded about her three-story farmhouse on the lookout for any sign of said older brother. When Sarah suggested we break into her father's beer stash in the basement I was the first to say, "hells yeah."

The basement was a carpeted oasis and smelled like grapes and sour dusty things. On hooks leading downstairs her father had hung orange hunting vests in bulky, down-filled peels. It was the rumpiest of rumpus rooms, with the utmost potential for teenage debauchery. In the years that followed, we'd use the mounted deer heads as fuzzy taxidermy-inspired beer holders.

Anyway, what went down that first night was an experiment in placebos and pubescence.

We giggled and elbowed our way into the musty cellar portion of her basement where her father had allegedly concealed his "good stuff." Sarah clumsily cleared a clutter of mason jars and old Tupperware containers.

"I know it's back here," she said.

And there it was. The stash -- several cans of something called "O'Doul's."

I imagine I said something like, "Ohh, let me at 'em." as I stared valiantly into the mini-fridge like Indiana Jones in The Temple of Doom.

I cracked an O'Doul's, rabidly chugged its nonalcoholic nectar.

Sweet Jesus, I thought. I'm getting drunk already!

By the time I'd emptied two green cans, I was officially a raving lunatic, thrashing and rolling around in an orange hunting vest, ramming my girlfriends with trophy deer heads and howling things like, "I'm sooo drunk!"

By O'Doul's number three, the Matt Damon-esque brother had come downstairs to put the kibosh on my stone sober tomfoolery. I believe I went to hug him in my orange hunting vest, confessing inanely to my crush. But this, I truly can't remember.

Come to think of it, I can't remember much of what happened that night. Alcoholic or no, those beers got me sloshed.

--HK

the SUPER SOAKER

My first drunken evening was too messy to divulge here. Instead, let me tell you a cleaner tale.

It all went down on Valentine's Day Eve. I'd been working late shifts at this club in downtown Providence, R.I., when an acquaintance dropped off an invitation to a V-Day masquerade bash at his quaint, colonial-style house in Somerville, Mass.

V-Day had never been a holiday particularly worth honoring in my book -- certainly not worth crossing state lines for -- but the invite came from a friend whose reputation for throwing some of the sluttiest, hardest-core, den-of-depravity-style parties in the land preceded him.

I had no choice.

Out front, a whole crew of masked people wearing blankets around their torsos were stumbling onto the terrace to smoke and touch each other, their giggles steaming against the February cold. Inside, the living room was lined with tapered candles and three-layer tortes shaped like phalluses -- and a big one in the middle somebody kept calling the "lava pussy cake." (I'm not making this up.) On the back stairwell, I saw a large black cat eating what looked like sprinkles and wearing a toy-sized mask.

The party was more coquettish than overtly sinful, with half-dressed guests simply ogling each other in the kitchen or participating in something only vaguely sensual, like fondue.

Who knows what it was that brought my defenses down -- the liberating anonymity of wearing a mask, perhaps -- but it wasn't long before I, too, decided to join the drunken revelry. And by "join" I mean "pour myself seven Dixie cups' worth of gin and amble over to the lava pussy cake to get to know it a bit better."

Which is when, not coincidentally, the rumbling began.

It started small, just little burps and some stumbling. A swirl of "Joel, are you OK?" followed me to the couch, where I sat down and lay back, still.

"Oh, man!" said a voice. "We've gotta get this guy to a bathroom." That's when I started letting it all flow out of me, a slick wet trail in my wake.

Man oh man, I thought. I'm king of the world.

After spewing heavily into the bathroom sink, I decided to stumble into some guest rooms and continue my rampage. It was like a game: Door A, Door B ...

"Oh, why not?" I determined, projectile vomiting into a study and a master bedroom. I was The Incredible Masked Puking Avenger, and took no prisoners. "Who are yeh?" I'd ask a pair of teenagers in matching cat masks. Though intoxicated, I could see the panic in their eyes. "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe," I said, savoring the moment. "Wanna taste?"

It wasn't long before somebody notified one of the hosts that a phantom spew machine was on the loose at his V-Day party. He found me back behind the kitchen, shimmying up some stairs and coating another banister.

Sheepishly, I looked down at my ruined pants, my bile-crusted shirt. And for a brief moment, neither of us had a clue what to say. He looked me in the eye -- and then, without another word, burst into some of the hardest laughter I'd heard in a long, long while. "That's some of the most fucked up shit I've ever seen," he said, fighting to catch his breath.

And then I threw up on him.

--JR

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