Part III: E'rybody In The Club Gettin' Tipsy

Next stop was Bar Chicago on Division Street. Never been there either. It was fairly nondescript, although it also featured an ugly, pantyless chick dancing above the DJ booth, as well as a midget boogieing on the bar and serving drinks. Another South Side Irish buddy meets us there, so now the Wisconsinites are outnumbered. This doesn’t faze Hoz in the slightest. Unfortunately, Rac was now hunting snatch and was out of the game, but Hoz proudly carried the load alone.

I park Cap’s dad in a corner of the bar because he’s now having trouble walking and I rejoin the group. Cap starts dancing with a slore in a green dress with nice cleavage. Hoz pulls out the camera and starts taking pics of them. The slore flips out and actually snatches the camera out of his hand and begins berating him.

Hoz is 6’4, 250, easily the largest guy in our crew. And he’s hammered. In other words, I would have rather had an Israeli and a Palestinian going at it in front of me than a drunk slore and drunk giant.

She’s going on and on about how it’s rude to take pictures of people you don’t know and stare and treat her like a piece of meat and why don’t we go to a strip club if we wanna stare at women. (I declined to note her boobages were struggling mightily to free themselves from the thin fabric of her dress and that generally makes men stare.) Hoz is trying to explain she was dancing with his buddy and was taking pics of both of them.

I end up getting the camera back from her and getting between them to push Hoz off. He’s furious, so we buy some shots and beers and calm him down before he bodyslams this trick and we have to fight the entire bar, including the midget.

Naturally, no one’s surprised when she comes back over 10 minutes later and blatantly hits on Hoz. Women.

Time to dip. I’m not sure Cap’s dad can navigate the stairs down to the door, and Tone Capone’s not much better. However, crew intact (including Bailey, our newest Irishman), we make it into the limo and over to The Apartment in Lincoln Park.


Andre pulls up right in front of the bar. The first person out of the truck is Tone, and the bouncer takes one look at him and says, “No way.” Dammit. Tone, of course, thinks he’s right as rain, even though I’m not entirely sure both his eyes were pointing in the same direction.

Cap’s dad volunteers to take care of Tone somewhere else along the street – they couldn’t stay in the limo – which I don’t think is a very good idea since he can’t stand. I deputize two of the homies to keep things moving in the club, then run through the growing drizzle to track down Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

At this point, I’m rather sober, just because somebody has to be. The limo driver didn’t even think I was drinking. So, for the first time, at the ripe old age of 30, under an awning in Chicago, I enjoyed the mind-bending experience of trying to converse with two people who are so intoxicated they can’t string two sentences together and make sense. And I did this for half an hour while periodically reminding Cap’s dad that he couldn’t say “Nice ass!” out loud whenever a chick walked by.

Finally, it’s closing time and I meet the crew in front of the club and point out the limo. We’re shy a couple people, so I run inside to round up the strays. Fire’s obliterated, and Buck’s not far behind. Bailey walks up with a drunken grin on his face. Good old Irish boys. I dap’em all and roll out.

Rac’s macking a cute blonde outside the limo, and gets in after me. As we head back to the burbs, he starts bragging that he got four numbers that night. “You can’t count that troll you met and kissed at Bar Chicago, dog,” I said. He actually flushed as cats started guffawing. “Yeah, and the two outside Ugly weren’t good-looking, either,” someone else said.

“But that blonde we just left was TIGHT,” Cap’s dad chimes in. Comedy.

The one thing I missed in the Apartment was Hoz going ballerific on us and dropping five bills on two bottles of Dom. I think two glasses got poured before he chugged the rest of the bottles. Both of them. Seriously.

It’s 3:30 a.m. Hoz and Tone are toast. Tone actually does a slow-motion slump while holding his drink, and Hoz just keels over. Rac, however, is certifiably insane. He starts chugging Jack straight out of the bottle and boasting that he and Hoz won the drinking contest. After taking three or four swallows, he leans in six inches from Tone’s ear and bellows, “WISCONSIN, MOTHERF&#%ER!!” Tone doesn’t move an inch.

Maybe this is karma, but why did the two biggest guys in the crew have to be the unconscious ones? Getting Tone and Hoz out of the limo was a task, to be sure, especially since Tone had passed out all the way onto the floor of the truck and his pants were half off his ass. Rac considered teabagging him, but showed mercy at the last second. Wimp.


Epilogue:

We all passed out at Cap’s folks’ crib that night. At 6 a.m., there was a loud thump and crashing sound in the upstairs bathroom. Cap’s pops had actually passed out while taking a piss and took a mean shot from the sink counter. When he appeared downstairs a few hours later, he didn’t even remember doing it. He just kept saying, “Damn, my face hurts” and wondering who he got into a fight with.

Right after him, Hoz stumbles out into the fresh morning air on the back deck where we had gathered. He sits down, holds his head and looks at us. “Dude … why the F&%# did I buy two bottles of Dom?”

Why, indeed.