Friday, July 27, 2012

To Jail or the Hospital?

I've made a friend in Lexington that I have a strange connection with.  I wouldn't consider us very close, and we haven't really spent that much time together, but we have similar personalities.  He's an asshole in the same way that I am.  We're both smart, dirty-minded, and quick to add our opinions about things.  Usually in the form of a pun or sarcasm.  The biggest difference is that he's cheap.  I don't really have any money, but I'm still not cheap.  Well, he's moving to California this week.  So, we wanted to give him a night out on the town before he left us.

I've actually been having stomach issues over the past couple of weeks, which actually forced me to go to a clinic at one point.  Because of this, I haven't been drinking lately.  Thankfully.

This was roughly the same group of people that drank heavily for St. Patrick's Day, and we all know how that turned out.  The cheap friend who got everyone kicked out of my favorite bar in Lexington, The Penguin, is the same guy that I described at the beginning having the same personality as myself.  I don't know if he felt he had to live up to his last performance, or if he just doesn't have a limit switch.  The mantra we decided on before going out was: "nobody goes to jail, nobody shows their tits".


Shots were had at the first bar.  Shots were had at the second bar, a tequila bar.  Drinks were flowing as soon as it hit midnight, since their house margaritas got quite cheap.  At one point, sparkly eye shadow was brought out and applied to my eyelids, with the ring finger of the girl who owned the makeup, since that's, apparently, the appropriate way to apply eye shadow with your fingers.  I was notified by this same girl that the superpower that matches my personality would be invisibility, since I wouldn't have to wear pants.  So true.


We progressed onto The Penguin, which was tempting fate in the first place.  The first thing that was ordered was another shot.  This time, it was a shot called The Cody.  It's whatever the bartender feels like pouring into the glass.  Apparently, our bartender just got divorced, 'cuz he was on a mission to fuck somebody's life up.  From what the largest person in our group could see, the bartender poured in Jagermeister, Bicardi 151, Gin, Everclear, and a few other un-identified liquids, a recipe that bear-man drunkenly repeated for the rest of the night.


Like I said, I haven't been drinking lately, and I wasn't really keeping up with the crowd tonight, but I decided to suck it up and try this concoction.  As I was shooting it, my body stopped me about 1/3 of the way.  I couldn't finish it.  It was the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth.  I've never bitched out on a shot.  I assure you, you would have also.  Within minutes, the 3 people that were able to put their shots down were nice and drunk.  Then the night got interesting.

Drinks were still flowing.  Dueling pianos were... dueling.  The bar is great fun, which is why I like it so much.  It was great to enjoy it as a fairly sober customer, this time.  Fishbowls were purchased, over-enthusiastically.  Dancing was had.  Cider was flowing.  Before long, everybody in my party was just about blackout drunk, aside from one other girl, who lost her house keys at the tequila bar and got at least one drink/shot behind in trying to find them.  So, I just got to enjoy the cheap guy getting handsy with another girl in our party.  Drunken ramblings.  Big smiles.

We've all been there.  We know things can't go this hard for this long and not start to make a turn for the worst.  The cheap guy started getting a little too handsy.  Although the girl that was dancing with him didn't mind, she wasn't really coherent enough to really make that call herself, so we started playing all kinds of games to calm down that situation.  The lights came on.  It was roughly 2:30am.  The bar had emptied out at some point, and we were going through the motions of collecting our party and our possessions and heading to the door.

The cheap guy, at this point the drunkest person in our party, was starting to get obnoxious.  He was calling everybody in the party the same name.  He made a turn for the bar, which we all started to be wary of, since we figured he would mouth off to the bartender and get booted out of here.  Instead, he got served.  I'm told that he actually told the bartender that he was Bruce Wayne, asked one of our friends to confirm that, and still got served.  Love this bar.


I was on my way out as he started yelling at the bartender and at our group of friends.  Something about getting laid tonight, just with less class.  I just peaced out, and left other people to deal with him.  At dinner, I notified everyone that I held no responsibility to anybody except Annie, even though I was going to be mostly sober for the night.  I look through the window, and I see the majority of my group dragging the drunk cheap guy out, slightly against his will.  They got him outside, he's still running his mouth, albeit mostly incoherently, and he's making it more and more difficult to keep him moving out of the range of the bouncers.  One friend managed to get a trash bag form The Penguin staff before departing.  We managed to drag him down the block a few store-fronts before things really got interesting.

He managed to get a hold of a parking meter and start hanging on for dear life.  He wouldn't budge, regardless how much he was begged or physically nudged.  Then it became apparent that he was having trouble with motor skills, and the shortest girl in our party, who was primarily holding him up, started asking for help.  The whole party got together and convinced him to sit down on some steps.  Our largest friend, bear-man, a 6-foot-something bear of a man, was sitting next to him.  We all huddled up and set plans for cabs and money and getting everyone home safely.  We turn around, and scrawny, drunk, cheap guy is strangling the also-drunken Crossfit monster.

I managed to drag drunk cheap guy off and rest him up against another parking meter.  The party split at this point, since bear-man decided that if he hung around any longer he was going to have to show the skinny drunk guy how bad the decision to try and choke him was.  Short girl begged me not to leave her holding up drunk guy by herself, but the rest of the party went to make sure bear was ok and going to get home ok.  Drunk guy started losing his grip on the parking meter, and short girl couldn't take any more weight, so I told her to drop him.  Maybe busting his knees or his head would wake him up a little.  She didn't like the idea, but since I wasn't going to help, she didn't really have a choice.  Down he went, face down, sprawled out on the sidewalk.  And that's where he laid, un-phased and still mumbling.

That's when the cops pulled up to The Penguin.  They talked to the bouncer, and one cop turns toward us.  We have no time.  Drunk guy is going to jail, and he will not cooperate with us.  So, I screamed at him to stop running his mouth.  I dragged him into a little, dark doorway leading into a closed store.  I roughly flipped him over, picked him up, threw an arm over my shoulder, got the short girl under the other one, and we started scurrying away.  As soon as we stepped out from the doorway, the cop was about 3 feet to our right.  We just started walking away from him.  Granted, it looked more like 2 people holding up a stiff in the style of Weekend at Bernie's.


"You guys going far?" said the cop, now right behind us.  "Nope, just around the corner," the short girl quickly replies.  On cue, and almost over-top of the correct response, drunk guy turns his head to clearly pronounce, "To Jail!"  I almost punched him out.  I sure as hell wasn't going to jail.  Our Weekend at Bernie's charade continued up another block, around the corner, up another block, and off of Main St.  The cop was apparently satisfied enough with our handling of the situation.

At some point, short girl's husband, over-excited drunk, came back and tried to hail us a cab.  It stopped, looked back at drunken, half-dead Bernie between us, and sped off.  We got skinny, drunk guy about one more block before he started actin' a fool.  He decided that he needed to fight me this time.  It was almost comical.  I just held onto him tight until his fit ended.  At one point he whined, "Why am I so weak right now?"  I'm not sure sober he would have had much more leverage.  I should probably continue on calling him scrawny, drunk guy.  He finally gave up, and we realized that we had only made it about 3 blocks in roughly an hour.  No cabs were going to take us home, so the only option was for me to get my car and drive us home.  My car was probably 6 blocks away.  Maybe more.  Dragging him there would probably take us all night, since he continued to get worse.

The last crosswalk we were in, he gave up and we just dragged him to the next parking garage.  I made sure everyone was ok with the idea, and ready to handle him, then I took off sprinting toward my car, by myself.  I was parked just past the courthouse, with the large fountain and bright lights illuminating its steps.  I ran to my car, pulled out of the garage, followed the labyrinth of one-way streets, and finally pulled up in front of the parking garage I left them.  I got out of my car and stepped into pure pandemonium.


I saw over-excited drunk running around in the parking garage waving one hand over his head clutching the large garbage bag and holding the other hand over his crotch.  "I'm gonna piss myself."  So I left him to find short girl, holding Humpty Dumpty on the ledge as he's vomiting up shredded chicken and alcohol.  Her mascara was tear-streaked and smeared to the sides of her face as if she were wearing a Bat Girl mask.  (Later, she admitted to getting overwhelmed when she realized that if he tried to attack her, she had no choice but to hurt him severely, since she wasn't capable of holding him off like the last two guys did.)  She notified me that a few cops have passed by, and each time they just held his head up and pretended like he was fine.  We let him puke and drool and slip in and out of consciousness until he seemed to have the bulk of what was coming out of his system.  We were at the base of the stairs to this parking garage.  Randomly, other drunken people would come by and either ask us if we were ok or make some comment about how they've been there.


Over-excited drunk shows back up with a bag of pee, only to comment on how he should have saved the bag for pukey-face.  A few times, drunk guy would yell "RUN!!" to a passerby.  One tough guy decided to turn around and get all, "from what? You?"  We had to politely ask him to please forgive him and give us a break.  I can't remember quite what happened, but I do remember the drunk guy exclaiming, "I can't control gravity" as he tipped forward off of his wall and landed in his pile of puke.

We decided this was the best chance to drag him to my car.  We did, getting puke all over each other, and we threw him in sideways.  He refused to pick up his legs, and told us just to break them.  I was happy to, since I was fed up, and I started shoving and maybe even kicking.  Drunk guy yells, "I don't trust him, he's going to kill me!"  Wife climbs in on the other side and asks drunk guy if he trusts her.  He did, so she yelled, "Get in the Fucking car!!"  It felt like 8 hours, but we were finally in the car, and we were heading home.  Over-excited drunk was nervous that he had never seen someone this drunk before, but I told them I would tell them what to watch out for since he was crashing at their house.  (At Michigan, the rule-of-thumb is that you don't take someone to the hospital until they shit themselves.  Probably not the best metric, but it hasn't backfired on us yet.)

I pull up to their apartment, get out of the car, walk toward his door, and the wife starts screaming, "he's not breathing."  At that point, Annie calls my cell phone.  She's made it home with drunk girl that got felt up, via a taxi that was taking drunken bear home, but realized that I have the only house key, since I have the car.  As this conversation is happening, I have pulled open unconscious drunk guy's mouth, pulled his tongue forward from blocking his breathing, stuck my finger into his throat to do a throat sweep (darn right I'm American Red Cross First Aid / CPR / AED certified!).  I punched him in the chest a few times, it's hard to do chest compressions when I'm on the phone.  "Get back in the car, we're going to the hospital.  Annie, we have to go to the hospital, I think drunk guy stopped breathing."  "Well, can you swing by and give me a key, Angel is going crazy?"  (Really, Annie?  I'm about to drive someone to the emergency room, and your drunk ass wants me to swing by with a key so you can take a nap?)


So we're heading to the hospital.  Over-excited guy is drilling me on what's going to happen to him, and if he will get in trouble.  I explained that they could charge him with public intoxication, but that it rarely happens.  However, if he decided to start swinging at a doctor, or if his flailing injured a nurse, then his ass was grass.  Somehow, drunky heard us and started begging for this not to go on his record.  Wife, who was slapping him in between frantically yelling his name and checking for breathing, mentioned that he actually looked like he was coming to.  In order to avoid incidents and potential criminal charges, the husband and wife team vowed to stay up with him all night and make sure he was ok.  Drunk guy was calling us all by the same name still, but he changed it to the name of over-excited guy, so maybe he was coming around.  I busted a U-turn.  They decided they could call the ambulance if necessary.  Phone call, "...bring me keys..."

We pulled back up to their house, we carried him inside the house, and he even asked us to let him go up the first flight of stairs himself.  He managed, but only because the couch is right in front of the steps at the top.  Straight forward, down on the couch.  Phone call, "... bring me keys..."

Drunk guy decides he needs the bathroom and gets up himself.  I explain to the couple about what positions to keep him in, most importantly not to let him pass out on his back.  How to check for breathing, etc.  Phone call, "...bring us keys..."  I'm on the stairs, about to leave, wishing them luck when Boom! the drunk guy falls in the kitchen, straight onto his head, no hands out to break his fall.  Fuck him, I did my part, so I left.

I drove home.  Not a single phone call.  I figured they gave up and broke a window.  I pulled into my dark driveway, and they weren't sitting at the front or back porch.  I walked up to the back porch, opened the screen door, and started to unlock the dead bolt.  From behind me, I hear moaning, see beings start to lift themselves up from the ground, and zombie toward me, arms outstretched.  Turns out it was Annie and the girl that got felt up, who had passed out in our back yard.  Felt-up girl passed out on top of the picnic table.  Annie on the ground.  (She later found a bunch of bug bites on her legs.)


I was still revved, so I offered to drive felt-up girl home, who was starting to look on the sober side herself.  It had, at this point, been about 3 hours since I had last seen her.  Annie stumbled inside, set down her bottle of water, and stumbled off toward the bedroom.  I drove felt-up girl home, windows rolled down to suppress the puke smell permeating the car, and I returned home.  I grabbed the pet stain and odor remover from under the stink, and I cleaned the interior of the car.  I went back inside and stripped down my absolutely disgusting clothes, dropped a line on Facebook, and jumped in the shower to get all of the puke out of my hair, off my skin, and out of my sense of smell.  Finally, at roughly 5:30am, I fed my dog breakfast, and I passed out beside a deep-sleeping Annie.

The next day, between hashing things out with Annie and meeting everybody except scrawny, drunk guy and felt-up girl for Sunday dinner, a full picture of the night developed.  The group not stuck with scrawny, drunk guy ended up at a pizza parlor.  It's likely they were actually eating a pizza on the steps of the courthouse as I went sprinting by to pick up my car from the garage I had parked in at the beginning of the night.  (There have been many jokes about me pulling a scene from Scrubs and stopping to enjoy pizza with them while leaving the married couple to deal with drunk guy themselves.)  The water bottle Annie had at the end of the night was from the pizza place.  That group got to see two guys get into it at the pizza place after one accused the other of cutting.  They also had a random incident with a lost, drunken person, but without a doubt, had a calm, pleasant night compared to us.


The couple that had to stay up all night with drunky didn't appear to have any more major incidents.  We had apparently gone through the worst of it together.  There was one moment where his face got stuck to the inside of the trash bag that he was drooling into, and they had to help him not smother himself.  There was also a pretty spectacular moment where he had his pants around his ankles and his head buried in the toilet when he exclaimed that he was going to get laid tonight.  His odds weren't really in his favor.

One person said something that really nailed the whole night down for me.  We were inches away from losing drunk guy to the police.  Hell, if things got really crazy and I ended up going to jail, I would have had sparkly eye shadow on for my mug shots.  Plus, Annie made it clear that, though I said I only claimed responsibility to her, she was the person that I took the least care of.

What age does your group of friends have to be before nights out on the town don't create blog posts this long?
~RoB

P.S. Nobody went to jail, nobody showed their tits.  Not for lack of trying.

1 comment:

  1. Jesus Christ. I'm calling you Rob. We shall talk. I know everyone you're talking about and it's an understatement to say i'm shocked...

    ReplyDelete