Making it All Better

Well, this past weekend didn’t turn out quite like I had hoped. Zach’s poker game got cancelled by his girlfriend, so no easy money. The Penguins forgot that you need to score goals to win hockey games. And Sunday I suffered through one of the worst nights of beer pong that I have ever had the distinct embarrassment of being involved in. Luckily there was plenty of alcohol to wash away my sorrow in each case.

Friday I decided to stay in, and put down several glasses of whiskey to ease my itching check-raising hand; Sunday night I drank enough beer to almost make me forget that I was even losing my beer pong games (I think at one point I was laughingly taunting my opponents like DeNiro in “Raging Bull”). Saturday I was at Sports Rock, enduring the Pens’ sudden impotence like a jilted lover, telling myself over and over, “It’s not my fault, it's not my fault.” Around the same time that they were packing it in—sometime early in the third period—I discovered that bottles of Miller Lite cost $4.25, but mixed drinks cost $4.75. Emotional scarring (from watching my team squeal like a pig) coupled with some simple economics meant I was suddenly double fisting bourbon & cokes. Then a random stranger, probably equally unnerved by the hockey game, gave me a free bottle of Hoegaarden (he had ordered it for someone who had abruptly left), which was about to come in handy.

Of the 16 or 17 people in our party, just over half were large, drunk males (such as myself), some of whom posses a special ability to get kicked out of places (such as myself). So of course, the smart money was on the 5’2” blonde sorority girl amongst us to be the one to “m-f” the bartender while flipping him off with both hands, prompting him to call in two bouncers and three city cops to escort us to the door. Here’s where experience pays off: measuring the amount of time I had left in that particular establishment for the night, and comparing it to the amount of time it was going to take to trek to the next watering hole, I discreetly slipped the bottle of Hoegaarden into my pocket, and then made a show of chugging my bourbon & coke. Once we were outside and the cops had walked off, I pulled the bottle out and calmly sipped as we headed up the street. One of the girls turned to say something, did a doubletake, and said, “Where’d you get that?”

“Come on—I thought you knew me?”