This is a story loosely based on my "adventures" when I used to go out to parties with friends. There's two more coming that are in direct relation to this that will make this a sort of three part story.
The music is turned up half a rotation on the silver knob. "Volume 35", the display reads. Bass pounds through the subwoofers, a machine gun ensemble of kick drum and chugging guitar riffs. Rocky's trying to tell a story, and you can't hear anything over the chorus melody in the back seat.
This is the winter before I stopped drinking.
There's six of us. Four crammed in Rocky's black-cherry Scion TC, along with empty soda cups and stale fast food to-go bags. Lisa and Julie following. By this time, my system is full of six bottles of Blue Moon.
"Pre-funking", Rocky calls it.
"Are they still behind us?" John asks, flicking ash off the cherry of his cigarette. Alex doesn't move next to me, eyes drooping and red. Stoned.
Looking through the back window, Lisa's swerving. Her big truck back and forth between oncoming traffic and hitting parked cars. She's dancing, paying more attention to the music than her surroundings. Julie's just laughing in the passenger seat. The big ending of the song reaches it's climax, and secretly, there's a mild hope in the back of my mind that they'll get in a head-on collision.
In a perfect world, I'd remember why I make the decisions I do, even when I'm drunk.
Out in front of the garage, on the right side of this house off 22nd ST, we're smoking weed. Alex, John, and me. A chunky college student in a red Cougars sweatshirt approaches. "Can I get in on that?". Like all smokers are friends.
The bud glows orange in the hole on top of the shiny, red apple. Alex takes a huge drag, his lips perfectly sucked around the end of the carved out tunnel in the side, like he's eating an asshole.
"You gotta stop hanging out with Lisa," John's telling me, as Alex lights the bowl up again. "She's bad news."
The drug smuggling fruit is passed around the circle a few times, and my vision is fogging up. "I'm good," the smokey red thing coming by me a fourth and fifth time. John blows a big cloud of smoke into the air above us, and it slowly dissipates and merges into the natural fog hanging over the city.
Standing there in the dark, my toes are numb.
Rocky's walking up the driveway, following the row of shrubs on the left. "You guys are still out here?" He says, "Let's go the fuck inside, it's freezing."
Inside the party, the room is an oversized basement full of people we've never seen before. A bar sits at the far end, in front of a big mirrored wall and mood lighting on the back shelf. The rest is big empty space for mingling, or dancing. There's couches sporadically placed, and a hallway down one side of the room where people are fucking in the bathroom. Hip hop blasts through the speakers and we're talking in a big circle just louder than normal speaking volume.
Usually, I'm not a fan of this sort of gathering, but I figured it would be better to try and meet new people than to sit around at home. I am looking for love, after all.
Jimmy starts telling a story about work, and I'm heavily debating whether or not I should have come here. Mid sentence, he stops and asks, "who are all these people?"
Glancing around the room at all these faces, they look distorted in the dim lighting. Like hollow shadows you can't get out of your dreams, or the warped, nightmarish features people acquire when you're having a bad acid trip. Giving it a second thought, I decide to drink instead of making small talk. "I don't know," I say.
Beer after beer, Rocky tells worse stories than before, and my ability to comprehend is quickly diminishing. Lightweight.
John comes over and interrupts. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, no one cares," he says, the words rolling quick off his tongue like a mantra under his breath.
He turns to me and asks to be his wing-man. "You see those two girls over there?", looking over his shoulder and pointing at a pair of attractive blondes. My head nods. The roof of my mouth is dry against my tongue, and every taste-bud scrapes along like I'm licking rocks. Swallowing, words try to come out, but it's just slurred garbling. "Alright, come with me," he says.
I'm following quick behind, almost stepping on his heels so I don't lose him in the crowd of people. It's not that the room is overly crowded, I'm just drunk enough to get lost if I don't focus.
When we approach the two, they're just standing in the middle of the room talking to each other, holding their mixed drinks. Their hair looks curled and nice. Lots of volume. They're both wearing skirts, and dangly necklaces. One has an owl, and the other, a locket.
John introduces himself, and then me. He's trying to play suave. Like he's done this before. He gives his big blue puppy dog eyes a few times while they're talking, and tilts his head to one side to pretend like he's really interested. You don't need a wing-man if you're truly interested. Girls know that. He tells them that we go to med school, and that we're both aspiring neurologists. "Do you know what a neurologist even is?" My whisper is subtle and John doesn't hear. The last of my beer goes down with ease. This might be my eleventh.
People are dancing around me, grinding on each other. Dry humping. The room spins and tilts with every jerk of my head. My mind drops into a purgatory. A blank canvas where nothing appears. My mouth is still dry, and all that my brain paints is water.
"We just heard about this party through a friend," the girl with the striped skirt says. "We don't really know anyone here."
My eyes scan back around the room and the present moment hits me. Why are we standing here? Who are these girls? Turning and walking away, John's by himself watching me stagger over to the couch where Alex is sitting. "Sweet," he says turning to follow. The girls look confused, and continue talking to each other. Under his breath he says, "well, there goes that plan."
My friend, Ryan, says skirts are for sluts, anyway.
A few beers later my hips are swinging to the music. Up against some girl. The music is so loud I can feel the bass beating in my chest.
John's sitting on the black leather couch on the side of the room. His head is in his hands. Too much weed.
Rocky grabs my arm and yanks me away from my dancing partner. She's sweating, and so involved she doesn't notice my absence.
"Let's go." Again, words are trying to come out, but there's nothing there. "You don't even like dancing, what are you doing?"
A song later Lisa's drunk-driving me back to Rocky's house, and my inebriated brain is in and out of consciousness. Lights pass by in flashes. She keeps jerking the wheel, and my head's tilting with the movements like an overused rag doll.
By the time we get back, my eyes are almost too heavy to keep open.
We're sitting in Rocky's basement, and Lisa's talking too loud. He shushes her and says "you're gonna wake up my parents."
She apologizes, giggles, and then pulls a half empty bottle of Carlo Rossi out of the fridge and pours us both a full red cup. "I can't drink anymore."
"Come on," She's telling me. "I can't drink alone. Then I'd be an alcoholic."
I look around the room for some backup, but Rocky's in his room, John's in the bathroom, and Alex is passed out on the couch. So deep a sleep, he might've been borderline comatose.
She shoves the glass into my hands and the red liquid swishes around inside. A drinking glass had never looked so uninviting. I think she notices my hesitation because when I look up, she's staring at me with anticipation and says, "come on, a little wont hurt". Taking a deep breath, I tilt my head back and press the cup against my lips so she'll shut up. Sipping, the red liquid is bitter all the way down. My mouth starts to water, and my tongue gets heavy. Turn to the side- dry heave. I try to hide it, but it's too obvious. My entire body is convulsing as I try to keep my insides from spilling all over the shiny linoleum floor. My eyes are watering and Lisa's giggling and telling me to drink more. Forcing down the rest of the glass, the urge to throw it all back up is a watery feeling in the back of my throat. "I need to lay down."
When I stumble down the hall to Rocky's room, he's sitting on his computer. "I need somewhere to sleep", I say.
I follow him back out into the living room, and he grabs a big mattress from against the wall and drops it in the middle of the floor next to the couch. "It's not a bed, but it'll do", he tells me. When it hits, dust flies up, and there's a big brown stain in the middle of the sewn pattern. I cough when the dust particles rise up to my face because it feels right. I can be an asshole sometimes. "Yeah, it's gonna have to do."
The springs dig into my back when I lay down, and Rocky covers me with an oversized indian blanket decorated with a tiger. Looking to my right, Alex is there. His mouth hangs open, and his face is distorting with the spin of the room. I close my eyes, and my body feels like it falls into the white light behind my eyelids, spiraling all the way down.
Three days later, I'm on the phone with Alex. He tells me Lisa and I had sex that night. News to me. Surprising news, to say the least.
On the other end, I hear him say, "Ow, fuck dude".
"Sorry, I just....what? I don't get it. I don't remember anything. I don't know how that could be possible."
I try to pull that night out of my memory, but all I'm coming up with is a collection of still frames. It's like digging into a bucket of lukewarm water to find the remains of a soggy loaf of bread. Faces, beers, and flashes of light. Oh, and the red wine. The dreaded red wine that I almost puked up all over the spotless floor. I definitely remember that. Where was Rocky and John? Who was I dancing with? Where could we have had sex at?The night had so many missing pieces that there was no way I could put them together.
"Oh, it's possible", he says.
"I'm sure it is. I just don't get how I could even 'perform' in that state of mind."
I remember learning in health class that the more you drink, the harder it is to get an erection. I wonder if that applies to hormonally charged young adults, or if we have super power-like sexual advantages over our future selves of ten years senior. I just don't get it.
"Don't worry, you were fine." He laughs and says, "I watched the whole thing."
