My Weekend: Part II—Ticket No. 667

The morning after Part I of my weekend, I woke up with three vivid indicators of what had taken place the night before:

1. a beautiful Ecuadorian (“Lady Friend”) was cuddled next to me;
2. my head was pounding like a performance of “Stomp” was taking place inside of it;
3. Chappy was facedown on the couch in my living room.

And I still had a bachelor party to go to. Ouch.

I got to the bar (where the bus would be picking up all of us) an hour or so later than most of the other guys. When I walked in, Bill (the bachelor) had just been handed his gift: a t-shirt prominently displaying a picture of him and his bride-to-be, as she placed a big white flower behind his ear. One of our friends, “Bucket,” had randomly found the picture on a photographer’s website, and I think Bill wanted to crawl under a table when he saw it immortalized on a white tee. He definitely wasn’t too eager to put it on; he avoided doing so for about a half hour, ignoring our requests and leaving the shirt in the box. He resisted, until we finally issued a threat: we, as a group, would not let him onto the bus unless he had the shirt on. Would we really leave the bachelor behind, excluding him from his own party? Yes, yes we would.

He acquiesced, though, and a potentially ugly (but hilarious) scene was avoided. While I sat at the bar catching up with the guys, none of whom I had seen in quite some time, I noticed an exceptionally cute girl sitting on the other side of the bar. I pointed her out to Justin, who said she waitressed there during the week, and that she was only like 19 or 20. After a very gentlemanly round of “I’d like to [insert adjective for sexual intercourse] that,” we moved onto other topics. Suddenly there was a loud crash, and when our heads shot around to Tony’s place at the bar, we found him holding the bottom half of a tall draught glass, with beer all around him. He had knocked over the glass and caught the bottom as the top shattered on the bar. We were only seeing the end result—Tony holding the remains of the glass upright—though, and it gave the appearance that he had smashed the glass with his bare hand. From somewhere in our group came, “Beer was so good you had to crush the glass, Hulk?”

Once we were on the bus and headed towards the South Side, it became apparent that our bladders needed attention. Some braved the tricky art of using an “empty” while onboard a moving bus, while the rest of us held out. We made an unplanned stop at the White Eagle, since it’s one of the first bars on that end of Carson St. One of our friends (Frankie) ordered some beers, and had the bartender put a straw into Tony’s. Turning to him, Frankie said, “I don’t want you to drop another one and hurt yourself.”

When we left the Eagle, our bus got bogged down in the typical Saturday night traffic that you find on Carson (put 200+ bars, clubs, and restaurants onto a single, narrow stretch of road, and that’s what happens). We continued to pound beers until arriving at Jack’s Bar, which is at the opposite end of the drag. Jack’s was crawling with girls of the slore variety, and Bill’s t-shirt quickly became an attraction. Even if a girl walked past without any initial thought of signing it, one of us would quickly grab her and push her in his direction, Sharpie in hand. Some chose to write along the bottom hem of the shirt (on either side), with comments that were…risqué. There are a lot of dirty, dirty-minded girls here in Pittsburgh (no wonder I haven’t followed through on my vow to move away yet). One girl, Tiffany, wrote, “Bill, I’ll never forget that one night…” [Note: I promise you, Stacy, that he doesn’t know her; I was one of the guys who grabbed her and sent her his way.]

Around 11:30 pm or so, we headed back to the bus. While walking down the street, one of the bride’s cousins (Jesse) stopped next to a car sitting at the red light. A cute girl was in the passenger seat, so he motioned for her to roll down her window. When she did, he said, “Why don’t you and your friend come with us to the strip club?” (no one games better than drunk guys). I walked over to collect him, but before I could tell him to get on the bus, I heard my name called from inside the car. Leaning down, I saw HHM sitting in the driver’s seat. “Hey [HHM]! Sorry about him…want to come to the club?”

We headed towards Silky’s (without HHM and her friend), a strip club down the street from Club E. The reason for going there instead? The cover charge at Erotica is $20; at Silky’s it’s $10 (high rollers, all of us). The decision would prove to be fortuitous, though. While sitting at the stage living it up, a dancer with a roll of raffle tickets made the rounds. $2 entered you into a drawing for a free lap dance—I kid you not. Feeling good, I justified the purchase to myself by saying, “Eh, it’s only $2.”

Five minutes later, the DJ read off the winning number. “Six…six…seven.” I glanced down at the small orange ticket laying next to my beer. In my head it went something like this: “Let’s see; six, six, sev—woooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww!” If you were to tell me that I ran over to the DJ booth like a Florida retiree who was just told to “come on down” on The Price is Right, I wouldn’t be surprised. A 5’5” brunette walked over and grabbed my hand, and off we went up the stairs to the lap dance room. She told me to take anything out of my pocket that would interfere with her “dance,” so my wallet and keys went to the upstairs DJ. Then she told me to…adjust myself, to allow for maximum enjoyment [*sigh*…I can’t wait until my mother has to read that]. Off came her lingerie, and away we went. I wish I could remember the dancer’s name, because I would readily offer a high recommendation to anyone seeking to hire her. Or marry her.

Grinning, I returned downstairs to the “you lucky son of a b***h” comments of my boys. Some of the guys wanted to go to Club E, so we left Silky’s en masse. Though some of us (myself included) didn’t want to pay another $20 just to get in the door, we figured that we would sit on the bus and finish the beer we had on there while waiting. There was only one problem: the bus was nowhere to be found. Instead, we sat on the sidewalk across the street like the last six kids to get picked up after soccer practice.

For whatever reason, I reached into my pocket for my wallet, and had a gut-wrenching realization: I hadn’t retrieved my wallet and car keys from the DJ in the lap dance room at Silky’s. I can now tell you from experience, that nothing can make a large, drunk man sprint down a dark street like the unsettling thought of his wallet sitting vulnerably in an unfamiliar strip club.

Sunday morning, ten of us tossed around stories from the night that was. Eventually, talk came to the cute off-duty waitress at the bar where we had began the night while awaiting the bus.

Me: “What a piece of a**.”
Justin: “Yeah, she’s something.”
Bucket: “Wait, the young one sitting at the bar?”
Me: “Yeah. The smoking hot one.”
Bucket: “That’s my cousin!”
Jesse: “Oh yeah—I know her. She’s a big whore.”