Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Story Time..."Your Porch, Is My Porch"

“Officer, my friend Mollie is still at the bar.  I am almost 77% sure of this.  If you just take me there I can probably find her if you let me go back into the bar.”

This is not how I planned on spending the end of my Friday night.  But hey, when buy one get one drink specials are involved you never know.  The night started at my before mentioned friend, Mollie’s house.  Quietly enough we had a few beers with friends before going to a bar I had never heard of before.  We were supposed to be doing a bar hop about an hour away but decided we wanted to be lazy alcoholics that night, not ambitious ones, so we stayed close by.  The bar was only about a mile or so down the street from her house.

From the outside it looked like someplace I would go in a dream if I wanted to hang out with Roseanne Barr and a drunken fisherman who would take me out on his boat after for some PBR and sushi he bought at a gas station.  On the inside it was surprisingly not bad.  There were still plenty of women resembling Roseanne in certain lights. Which obviously only meant one thing; I would have a much better chance of leaving with a guy who’s not eating $1.99 sushi and offering me PBR because they were all already taken by the various Roseannes.  Little did I know though, that by the end of the night the only guy I would be with would be the officer putting me in the back of his cop car.  Maybe I should have just hit on him.  Maybe I did.  Your guess is as good as mine.  It turned out it was a decent spot inside with a pool table I could lose on, a dart board I could win on, and a dance floor I could make a fool of myself on.  I fully intended to take advantage.

My drink of choice at that time was Captain and Coke.  My drink of choice at that time, that specific night was double Captain and Coke.  Along with every other drink anyone wanted to buy me that had the word double in front of it.  After the first drink is when we found out it was buy one get one for girls.  This made me smile.  And drink heavily.  We all headed to the back to play darts.  I am sure some things happened in between the bar and the darts but the evening as a whole is still a little foggy.  Perhaps one, or maybe seven shots were mixed in there somewhere.  As we were playing darts that feeling hit me.  We have all experienced it.  “I wonder if I am standing straight. I am pretty sure I’m swaying wildly right now.  I should try to act normal.  Wow, I’m fucked up.  No, no I’m not.  Come on, just act normal or everyone will know I’m already drunk.”  Because of course at this point no one could tell I was drunk from the fact that I had already downed enough alcohol to make David Hasselhoff say “slow down”.  But of course, we all still try at this point to blend in and be normal.  This is when you start leaning on things to try and stabilize yourself, laugh when other people are laughing even though you’re not even involved in the conversation, start focusing way too hard on how you’re walking to the point that everyone can see the concentration on your face, (and you still don’t walk that good) over enunciating everything to sound not drunk.  Which of course all of these things do nothing other than make you look even more drunk than before.  We’ve all been there, and I definitely was there that night.

I can’t tell you exactly what occurred after darts.  I can tell you that once I get an idea in my head there is no stopping me.  Once I get an idea in my head when I have been drinking, you might as well go home; there is definitely no stopping me.  I can also tell you I like wandering from time to time.  I will just get something into my head that makes me think, “Yeah, I should leave and go do that.”  Whatever that is…I never know. 

Mollie helped fill me in a little on her side of the story.  Around midnight she started asking everyone if they had seen me; no one had.  She looked around and couldn’t find me, and assumed I had left.  As she started to really wonder what had happened to me someone came up and asked if she was Mollie.  “Who’s asking?” was her response.  They responded with the unfortunate, “Your friend Amy is in the back of a cop car out front.”  Excellent.

Soon before that, I had apparently decided it was about that time, that time for me to leave and conquer whatever it is that needed attending to immediately.  I vaguely remember concentrating on walking in a straight line.  I did this by focusing on the white line on the side of the road.  It wasn’t going well.  You know it’s bad when even you are laughing at yourself because of what a drunk asshole you look like.  But then you quickly stop laughing because you realize what a drunk asshole you look like.

After that it’s a little blurry and the next glimmer of insight I had on the night was lying down on some sort of bench.  It was extremely uncomfortable and I wasn’t quite sure where I was, how I had gotten there, or why I had gotten there.  This bench just so happened to be on a porch…belonging to a person…that I did not know.  I had left a bar that I was having a great time at, with people I know and like hanging out with, to walk away and find a bench that wasn’t comfortable and was on someone’s back porch who I didn’t know.  That’s right; it wasn’t even a porch right in the front of the house.  I walked to the back side of the house to get to this porch.  It was apparently very important that I get there. The next thing I remember is a cop waking me up.  The people who own the house found me outside sleeping.  I can only imagine some of the things going through their heads.  I only regret one thing about this entire night, and it is that I didn’t get to see the look on their faces when they discovered me or for that matter, how they discovered me.  It’s blank what happened as soon as he woke me up, so we’ll fast forward to once I am in the back of the car. 

“Where you coming from tonight?”
“That hick bar.”
“What bar is it?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been there before.  It’s right down the street.”
“Do you even know where you are right now?”
“Touché.  We may not be down the street anymore.  Wait, my friend lives on Lake road, or Lake something.  I know we’re by a lake…right?”  I said extremely proud of myself.
"Lakeshore Road?”
“Sure, that works.”
We came to the conclusion soon, that the bar I had left was Cooper’s.  And it seems like the drive back took awhile so who knows where I had wandered to.
“Are your friends still there?”
“My friend Mollie is still at the bar.  I am almost 77% sure of this.  If you just take me there I can probably find her if you let me go back into the bar.”
“You are not going back in the bar.”
“But I have a tab open.”

He didn’t find this amusing.  We got to the bar and he told me to sit there and wait.  So I sat and waited and looked to my right to see Mollie standing there, arms in the air laughing and shaking her head in utter confusion.  I flashed my pearly whites and gave her a “Hi Mom!!  Look at what I’m doing!” smile and wave from the back of the cop car.

The officer let me out of the car and told Mollie to take me home.  I then told him not so fast, I still have a tab and I am not letting Roseanne mooch off of my MasterCard.  Mollie stepped in saying she would go get my card.  The officer shook his head and left.  No tickets, no handcuffs, just a good old ride back to the bar from the cop.  I have to assume he just didn’t feel like filling out the paper work for “dumb drunk girl sleeping on bench on stranger’s porch”.  I was obviously harmless.  A hot mess, but harmless.

We went back into the bar to get my tab.  I was greeted by a dozen people who I didn’t know, giving me high fives and offering to buy me drinks.  This excited me because that cop totally ruined my buzz.  Mollie convinced me it wasn’t the best idea to stay which I agree with now, but at the time I really couldn’t understand her logic.  So I got a few more hugs and high fives from fellow drunken strangers and then we were off.

We got back to Mollie’s and I explained the pieces of the story that I could as they laughed and stared in amusement of my complete lack to ever have a normal evening.  Mollie also shared with me that she was offered a job there as a bartender, which she took.  I didn’t know how to take this.  I wasn’t sure if it was good news or bad news after the night I had just had.  And then I came to my senses and said of course its good news. 

The next morning Mollie came out to the couch where I was sleeping and could do nothing but smile, laugh a little, and shake her head as she sat down next to me.  I only had one thing to say with a goofy hung over smile on my face with smeared make up and bench head. 

“You’re working tonight….right?”

1 comment:

  1. Glad I could help wake a sleeping child. My work is done for the day

    ReplyDelete