This all takes place in Chico, CA, and this is the year between the years when it was the #1 party school in America (it lost out the University of Florida this year), so there is an inevitable backdrop of drinking in this story...just know the night before, at midnight exactly, I hit a couple of spots, and as entertaining as that was, it pales in comparison to what I was told happened this night (you'll notice some of this is being referred to as heresay, and that's because it was heresay- I have no clear idea what happened the last 8 hours of this story, but, in good journalistic integrity, I only speak of things verified by a member of my party, and at least one "innocent" bystander and/or person I infuriated, enraged, humored or just openly mocked that was not with us, but over the course of the next year was told about things I did to them or members of their party- for all of these things, I openly apologize, again)...but anyway...
...i wake up on the wonderful day...well, i woke up a little late. The bars in Chico, and apparently, everywhere, but I was particularly impressed with this rule the previous evening...i had a couple of adult beverages, and came back to the spot and went to sleep. I awake to a knock at the door, and I assume it's a floor mate to tell me it's time to eat some breakfast before the 9am class. It was that floor mate, but not to tell me to go to class- he had generously gone to class and taken notes for me, which allowed me to sleep in. When I asked why he was being so friendly, he gets a sly smile, which lets me know a couple of things 1) something shady was about to go down, and 2) it was probably going to fuck me over in some way or another. He tells me it's because I bought a party ball (in the early 90's Coors Light made a ball that had 5 gallons of beer in it, complete with a little tap and pump- it was called the Coors Light Party Ball, and I'm pretty sure the reason they stopped making them was nobody I know had ever even heard of them) last night and we were going to drink it BEFORE the evening festivities, so my under 21 cohorts could be involved in some form of the shadiness that would be rapidly approaching. Since my only class of the day had already been missed, I decided a shower, a bite to eat and the total destruction of this party ball (note, it's 9:23am at this point). So I shower, eat some pizza that, apparently, I bought the night before, but have no clear recollection of purchasing, and at 10:00am, we begin. At first, it's just Shambo and myself, 2 dudes, sitting in a room, playing video games (Nintendo, the original, you better recognize) and are listening to his favorite song at the time by some band we thought was solid, but nothing spectacular...
what's your man got to do with me? I'm not tryin to hear that, see...but back to the story. After just a couple of minutes, a couple of other guys come over, the Brians (two dudes on my hall, both named Brian, and as I write this, I couldn't distinguish between them, and I'm definite one was Latino, and one was white) came over, with a case of beer of their own to throw into the party, we had Rudy and Steve, some dudes come over from the other dorm, and they brought a little of that indonesia,
rolled up into these things they insisted we call blunts, and after a couple of tokes, it was obvious where they had obtained such an abrupt and straight forward nickname, as well as some beers of their own (those of you in college living in dorms, it is a lot easier to get away with a party when the day is in it's operational mode- less people are looking out for you partying, they're just trying to get their grind on so they can go home and masturbate to internet porn or play bingo or read Harlequin novels at home with a bunch of cats- they're wholly uninterested with what you're doing as long as it doesn't affect them). After awhile some of the ladies from downstairs came over as well, bringing with them the blender and some blue concoction that seemed like a Long Island Iced Tea, except it was blue (this would later be known as an "Adios Motherfucker" and if you don't know why, google Long Island Iced Tea and figure it out).
We drank and smoked and listened to music for what seemed to be an eternity, but when the second party ball (yes, second, never really sure when it showed up, just know at the end, there were two of them, both bone dry) dried up and a little AD popped on, we knew it was time to mobilize and get something to eat, as it was now close to 3pm and people were heading towards out of control drunk, which would have thrown a monkey wrench in our plans for the day, gotten a bunch of people in trouble and, quite honestly, based on the amount of pot that had been smoked as well, would have inevitably involved members of the Chico Police Department, which most of us had more run-ins with than we care to think about (which could have been one)...after a little time to sober up for the collective, I decided to, instead of going out to a fancy dinner (which I had done the Saturday previous with Ma Dukes) I decided to eat in the dining commons with my peoples, as I would be parting ways with the great majority of my floor mates when I hit the bars a little later in the evening. Someone (I imagine it was probably me, as I was the evil catalyst in this group of people) decided that, while we were at dinner, we should bring a water bottle filled with rum and play a game called 3 man with rum and coke, in the dining commons. It was as dumb as it sounded. But I also know that, as soon as dinner is over, I'm about to go out with some of my friends, and all they've told me about the evening is "you're not allowed to turn down any drinks," which seems like it' s a terrible idea. As I get dressed to start the evening, I was bumpin a little of what was, at the time, the new Pete Rock...
...we head downstairs and start playing 3 man at our table (3 man is a dice game where someone is essentially "it" (the 3 man) and any time anyone rolls anything that has a three, or equals three, they have to drink until they roll a 3 and can give the 3 man away, or until someone at the table rolls double 3's then they are the 3 (wo)man), which started as a small game, and when the Resident Assistants busted up the game, there were 23 people playing the game, with 3 sets of dice going- I left the game when the second set of dice came and figured it was getting out of control. The only irony is that I was the person that started the game and yet wasn't there when it got busted (and it made me look great when people blamed me and I wasn't there- an easy win for me). I left to go to a place that was the closest of all the bars near the campus, a bar called Madison Bear Gardens, which was built on the site of an old bank, and had some of the most diabolical drink specials in the world (for example, my favorite was the 2-10 Thursday special of 1.75 burger and fries and 1.75 pitchers of any beer in the house- Chico was famous for specials that seem to be even against good business sense, but seemed to work for them (how can you justify giving away .10 drinks, even if for only the first 10 minutes?!?). The special of the day at the Bear? $2.00 pitchers, of course. When you live in Colorado, the local tap is Coors. If you live in Missouri, it's Budweiser. But when you live in Chico, CA, it's Sierra Nevada- and you can get most types, on tap, in most bars in town (it can really spoil a brother who, would for the first year and a half after I moved, ask for Sierra Nevada Porter, on tap, from places that had never heard of Sierra Nevada, as a mountain range, much less a potent potable). We stop there, have a pitcher (each) and take the first two shots (someone got me a "blowjob"
i wiped the cream off with my fingers, drank the shot and wiped the cream on someones face, which i'm pretty sure was not part of our party (which, from what i understand, was a common, and very recurrent theme of the evening- me trying to either include people in our entourage, or me trying to keep/kick people out that same entourage...we go from bar to bar, where we take at least one shot per bar, but seemed more like 4-5 shots per bar. They told me to keep track of them at the beginning of the evening, but i'm sure I wrote the answer to a physics problem someone asked me on the back of the napkin at the second bar (some kind of sobriety test, which was the death of me, as i passed all of them and they ratcheted up the shots and the severity of the shots after every test- didn't help my friends asked pretty easy questions). The last bar I remember was a bar called Lasalle's, which. like most Chico bars, had no real specific type of clientele, just a ton of random people, which is the perfect storm for a birthday entourage with no real voice of reason. The bartender got everyone a round of shots (jagermeister- cold doubles for all), and gave me a special shot called a Barmat (which is exactly as it sounds, a bar mat (troth, rag, etc) placed in a shot glass, with a hint of grenadine to offset the atrocious taste combinations that can happen when you give someone the run-off of every overspilled drink- for the record, mine had the distinct tastes of some kind of wine and gin as the dominant taste, if my palate was more refined, i could have identified more of the repugnant flavors, but a combination of events was going to thwart even my best efforts: 1) i was, at this time, laughably drunk and in no state of mind to identify my own sister out of a police line up, much less try to distinguish between variant alcohol "flavors" and 2) they put grenadine in the drink to cover up the taste of death with a hint of cherry (or whatever in the hell grenadine taste like- haven't had any in any memorable capacity since I last had a Shirley Temple- and I'm not even sure I was a teenager then..anyway, after I drink my barmat, i have no really clear, consistent and cogent memory of the block of time...all I know is when I came to, in the afternoon the next day, I had an amazing headache, an unusually large sum of money in my wallet, based on what I remember leaving, I seemed to be entirely out of pot (which, in my college days, never really seemed to happen, oh, how I miss those days), and I, for some god-forsaken reason, had sawdust in my hair. I'll repeat that, sawdust in my hair. I immediately called one of the guys I went out with, and asked, in as calm a way as humanly possible, "What in the fuck did you all let me do last night?!? I have sawdust in my hair! What kind of barn did you take me out to?!?" To this, he tells me this abridged story of a small sub-section of what happened in the evening. I remember the conversation as if it was yesterday. I will preface this with, I DID NOT believe him when he told me, until I tried to go into the bar...well I'm getting ahead of myself...
..."Dude, you were Robert Downey Jr. fucked up last night! That shit was insane. So you don't remember going to Riley's last night? For dollar night? Dude, you were in rare form, even for you...don't worry, we made sure you didn't do anything arrestable...so anyway the bartender offered you anything you wanted, and you asked for a Long Island Iced Tea...you kept saying you didn't know where Long Island was but you loved their tea...at some time the bartender told you someone offered you a drink- it was a barmat- you seemed to almost embrace the idea...you knocked it back, jumped on top of the bar, and sang, along with the jukebox, the full first verse of Alive by Pearl Jam,
got the bar to sing the chorus with you and then you fell off the bar, onto the floor [aside: which, apparently is where all the sawdust came from]...we obviously were asked to leave the bar, went to like 5 other places and ended up at the fraternity house, where you proceeded to, while throwing up in a trash can next to you, beat all of us out of about $175 [aside: which is where all the money came from]...I walked out of the fraternity house, on my own power at around 5:30am and walked to my former home, and then to my home at the time, and apparently just passed out.
of course, i can't verify any of this...
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