8/11/05: The Best Beverage Ever

This is one of those days when I type up a dumb college drinking story that I would usually tell out loud, boring anyone within earshot. I think I might do this once a week from now on. So feel free to go cruise porn if you're not interested.

In addition, this story takes several leaps back and forth in time and place. Not in an interesting, cool, Pulp Fiction kinda way, but in an annoying, disorganized-brain kinda way. My Vitton.

In addition, I am so unhappy with the way it turned out that I am going to publish the whole thing in strikethrough text. For a non-strikethrough version, you can click here.

In what I think must have been the summer of 1993, a bunch of the old college buds went to visit Brady P., who was living deep in the suburbs of Chicago at the time. Like Libertyville/Mundelein deep. It was probably just a long weekend, but looking back it seems like a full week. I got a real sense for what it means to be living in the deep-ass suburbs of Chicago. I'd never spent more than two straight days in the suburbs before that, I don't think. I mean any suburbs, not just Chicago's. The country, sure. The city, sure. But not the deep-ass suburbs like that.

When I say deep, I mean it was like an hour and a half to Chicago. If we wanted to go to Chicago to drink, we had to rent a hotel room. Which we did. And we went out in Chicago and we had a big night. I think it was that night that turned me around on Chicago. Before that, I was all, blah Chicago, what's the big deal? But that night the city opened its arms to me and showed me its huge heart and it bought me a few drinks and said, "You're among friends. Have another." And by 4am, as Brady and I traversed half the city on foot, sharing a bag of SmartFood while we searched for our hotel, I had a new home away from home.  

Earlier that evening, at maybe 8:30 pm, we were all in some generic downtown bar, half-watching the White Sox and A's on the tube and bragging about all the stupid stuff that seems worth bragging about when you're 23.

"Remember that night when we each drank 26 beers?"

"How about the time that I caught the tennis ball out the car window*..."

"Who'd win in a fight, Oly or Dillahunt?"

Change the names and I'm sure you've had the conversation before. Anyway, one of my friends, let's call him Jimmy, decided to tell us about his secret gift.

"You know, there were nights in college when we'd go out drinking and I wouldn't piss the whole night."

"That's horseshit," came the reply from several of us. I mean, that's horseshit, right?

"No, for real, I can drink beer all night long and not take one piss," Jimmy said.  "If you want, I'll do it tonight."

We had been drinking for about an hour at this point, and Jimmy had not pissed yet.  So we decided to call his bluff. But just to make sure he didn't nurse one beer the whole night, we split into teams of two, with each team being responsible for keeping up with the other teams' beer intake. The idea was that if one member of a team had a "no mas" moment, his teammate would have to pick up the slack and finish his beer for him. Terrific fratboy stuff. So we paired Jimmy with Little Scotty F., who was a little more refined than the rest of us, which is to say he wasn't as likely to drink 26 beers in a night as we were. We knew that if we paired Jimmy and Scott, Jimmy would have to drink at least his share, because Little Scotty wasn't gonna pick up his crumbs if he came up short.

So we carried on like this for maybe three hours, and in that time each team consumed maybe 8 or 10 beers per person. It was a strong pace. And Jimmy, true to his word, never excused himself to hit the head. It was fucking impressive. I probably peed 9 times in that span. We were in perhaps our third generic bar and I was pretty much blotto when the waitress came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

"You better get your friend out of here," she said to me, motioning to her left.

I took a look and there was Jimmy, face down on the table. He had given it a huge effort but in the end the toxicity of the beer did him in. We helped him to his feet and walked him outside the bar. He vomited in the street. We pointed and laughed as he did it again. Then we sent him home in a cab with his teammate so we could keep the night alive. 

In the next 24 hours, he would produce more vomit than I have in my entire lifetime. He filled half of one of those medium-sized hotel garbage cans. The next day, on the drive back to the suburbs, he forced us to pull the car over in the middle of the highway so he could vomit again. Then, when we finally got back to Brady's apartment complex, he demanded that we pull over again so he could do his business once more. We were only like ten feet from the parking space, but that was ten feet too far for Jimmy.

He climbed out of the car before we even stopped, ran onto the grass, dropped to his knees and vomited again. But there was no vomit left in him, so all that came out was a long, thin strand of bile, which stuck to his chin and fluttered elegantly in the wind like a little kite. I'll never forget that sight; a human being in complete disrepair. To this day he is occasionally referred to as Jimmy Bile.

Back to the night before. After we sent Jimmy packing, we headed out to another bar. It felt like we had been out for about twelve hours. Stuff just kept happening.  At around 3am, I looked across the bar and saw Mark McGwire standing there, hitting on a waitress so hard I actually felt embarrassed for him. Seeing him in the bar after seeing him at the game on TV earlier that night** was difficult to compute. It was, again, like one of those episodes of Seinfeld with so many subplots you can't believe they're all part of the same episode. It was like the night had split into two distinct nights and somehow we had managed to exist in both. We had achieved a small measure of time travel through booze. Another time travel incident that comes to mind was the night that same year when I went out to watch a Knicks playoff game in NYC, partied with cW and company deep into the night, and didn't arrive back at my Brooklyn apartment until around 6 am. When I got there, our New York Times had already been delivered, and it contained the box score of the game I had been watching that same night! It seemed impossible. I thought of all the people who had to do stuff in order to get that paper to me. The stat guy, the typesetters, the guy who runs the printing press, the delivery guys. There's just no way all that work could get done while I was out filling my gut with booze.

Anyway, back to Chicago: McGwire was there sweating this rather attractive bar maiden, practically demanding her phone number. I decided to approach him. I was lit up like a Christmas tree at this point, and I hadn't even really been following baseball for a couple of years, but I felt some bizarre need to tell Bic Mac how swell I thought he was. He was pretty nice to us for awhile until his handler dude told us to get lost.

I specifically remember this exchange:

Me: You know, you have a chance to hit 600 homers.
McGwire: Nah, I've been hurt too much.

He ended up with 583.

Back to the suburbs. After his virtuoso performance, Jimmy had to rest for a full day while the rest of us kept on living. We all stayed in that night and had a few beers in front of the tube, except Jimmy of course, who just chilled. Finally, the day after that, we all went out to shoot hoops. Brady drove us to an outdoor court that was adjacent to the community swimming pool. It was a beautiful court, it had that tennis hardcourt kind of surface, and the pool was about 200 feet long. It was unbelievably hot that day, but I don't remember if we swam or not. Probably not. I do remember being blown away by what beautiful facilities they had in the suburbs. I mean, a mint basketball court like that and nobody playing on it? What the hell?

The heat was so bad that we could only play a game or two of two on two before we had to sit down. But I was feeling strong that day, despite a lingering hangover, and I was playing one on one with whoever would take me on between two on two's. It was that day that I developed my spin move. I remember because I was playing one on one against somebody, I think it was Jimmy, and I just tried some crazy spin and it worked. That's what one on one is for, working on crazy moves that you'd never try in a game out of respect for your teammates.

The move was pretty impressive. Jimmy is a big tall stud and a great defender, but the move worked on him several times in a row. Feeling good, I looked over at Little Scotty, who indicated that the move was a travel. I dunno. To this day, nobody's ever called me for it.

Little Scotty and Big Dave and Jimmy and company were pooped, so they sat on the edge of the court while Brady and I went on a beverage run. We drove over to Cub Foods or some other mega-market, and we stocked up on Powerade 20-ounce bottles. We probably bought like ten. I immediately took a liking to the bulk purchasing mentality of suburban life. Just buy a whole bunch of stuff. It's cheaper out there anyway.

This was the early 90's when All Sport and Powerade had recently emerged as competitors to industry standard Gatorade. All Sport got more press out of the gate. Shaq endorsed it, I remember that. I tried it once and found it to be disgusting and sweet, the Pepsi to Gatorade's Coke.

But this was the first time I had ever tasted Powerade, and it blew me away. I had the Blue flavor and it was cold, real cold, probably 33 degrees. The mouth of the bottle was made of thick white plastic, which I assume was there to lend a thermos-like effect, preventing your lips from warming the Powerade as it flowed through the opening. It worked, yo.

It was easily the best beverage of all time.

To this day, I rank Powerade right up there with Gatorade. Especially their blue flavor. That shit's tight.

Life's been busy as hell but the project that we've been working on has finally ended. I feel a little sad about it being over, and I'm sad I missed the wrap party. I had to come home and deal with some household shit. Our bathroom flooded, for one thing. The ceiling is destroyed. Stuytown is a lot of good things, but it is by no means a luxury apartment complex. As one of the workmen who came over pointed out, the only thing they spend money on is the flowers.

I did see the lovely EJ jogging through the complex today on my way home from work. God bless people with the willpower to jog. That is hardcore.

Alright, if you made it this far, you deserve to see this. You lucky few.

Whodat (8 points)?

* OK, this is still worth bragging about.
** McGwire had actually sat the game out with one of his thousands of injuries.