Trailer: 21 & Over

This flick looks like it could be a good one. This comes from the makers of The Hangover, which is one hell of a pedigree for a movie about heavy drinking.


TJ with the assist.

Something Borrowed

Let me preface this story by saying that it’s not mine; and, because of this, there is simply no way I can tell it as well as its rightful owners. But my friend that relayed the escapade to me doesn’t have a blog—to the best of my knowledge. That leaves it up to me to share it with the world via On the Rocks. If he or anyone else involved should ever want to sit down and dictate a first person account to me, I’ll be more than happy to put it on the page. But it is just too good of a tale to wait until that theoretical day. As I summarized back to my friend after hearing his rendition, “It’s like ‘The Hangover’, but without the happy ending.”

Late Thursday night, after a night of making a modest income at the Rivers Casino poker tables, I met up with Pakistanimal and stopped by our favorite spot in Shadyside. We were shocked to find the place nearly empty, which is rarely the case at 12:30 am on a Thursday night. We would quickly realize that this was a blessing in disguise, though. With all of the time we’ve spent in this bar, we’ve come to know some of the staff pretty well, including “A-Train”, a bartender. And without the usual pressing crowd of patrons demanding his attention and rocketing up the decibel levels, A-Train was able to tell us about the crazy several days he had spent in Las Vegas the week before...

The trip was actually a bachelor party for his brother. Among the wolf pack would be the bride’s brother, who A-Train had never met before the car ride to the airport. Providing that ride was the bride’s grandfather, a no-nonsense old timer. And as everyone piled out of the car at the curbside check-in, the old man grabbed A-Train’s arm and held him behind for a moment. “I want you to watch over my grandson while you boys are out there. He’s a fuckup; he’s always been a fuckup. Don’t let him get into any shit!” [Does anyone else picture this grandfather looking and sounding like Jack Palance, or is that just me?]

On their first day in Vegas, “Brother of the Bride” (BOTB) quickly got obliterated at the pool—to the point where he looked like this guy. The bouncers, as you would probably expect, soon informed A-Train and the other bachelors that BOTB needed to be removed, and offered them the opportunity to do it first. Very gracious gents, those Las Vegas bouncers. A-Train and the guys walked BOTB to his room, despite his protests. When they threw him on his bed, though, he was soon lights out, and wasn’t heard from until the next morning.

As the trip went on, this became a recurring scenario. BOTB would—seemingly without explanation—get irreversibly wasted faster than anyone else in the party. But despite this, the others were able to contain him and prevent any major damage from being done to person or property. And so on the final day in Vegas, when he again turned into a blacked-out mess early in the day and the boys again put him to bed well before sundown, no one thought anything of it.

The next morning the bachelors all awoke and packed up, wary of the 11 am departure time of their flight home. All, that is, but for one guy. With only about 30 minutes left before they needed to leave for the airport, one of the party members gave an alarm that sent chills up the spines of A-Train and his brother: BOTB wasn’t in his room, and had neither been seen nor heard from since the day before. In a last attempt at remaining calm, A-Train suggested someone call BOTB’s cell phone. “We tried that. It was in the room.”

“Fuuuuccccccccccccccccccccc...............”

The next 30 minutes were a frantic search for clues. They packed up his belongings and lugged them to the lobby, in the unlikely possibility that they would find him down there waiting. They talked to bellhops and the concierge, hoping someone had seen BOTB. They called members of the bride’s family back in PA, on the chance that he had called back there because he didn’t know the phone numbers of the guys in the bachelor party. They called the Las Vegas police, in the event that he was wallowing in a drunk tank. They talked to the Hard Rock security team and filed a missing persons report. One of the guys in the party was staying in Vegas an extra day, and was tasked with being the main contact should any information about BOTB’s whereabouts be turned up.

As the departing partiers, including the now sick-with-fear groom, rushed through the lobby to catch the flight for which they were already late, BOTB came stumbling towards them through the front doors.

Despite being stunned by their missing comrade’s miraculous materialization, they wasted no time with explanations. They shoved him into a cab and sped as fast as possible to the airport. Along the way they learned two things:

1. BOTB had spent the entire previous night at the strip club across the street from the Hard Rock, receiving private dances from a stripper to whom he’d taken a shining.
2. BOTB was still, to that very moment, blacked-out drunk. He had no clue where he was, what was going on, or why everyone was so panicked.

When the group reached the front of the security line at the airport, the TSA agents took one look at the wounded soldier. “No.” Several minutes of begging, pleading, and promises to sober-up and look after him finally convinced the security agents to let them move on to the gate. Once there, party members were dispatched for coffee and food to combat the inordinate levels of alcohol coursing through BOTB’s body. They tried to get information about his night out of him, but he seemed to know almost as little as they did. Someone suggested he check his pockets.

BOTB clumsily reached into his left front pocket, and pulled out a receipt. He handed it to A-Train, who looked it over. “$1500. Damn. What about your other pocket?” BOTB fumbled around with his right pocket for a moment, finally pulling his hand out; clutched in his mitt was a wad of receipts as thick as a wallet.

He thrust the small bundle towards A-Train, who took a moment to read through them. When BOTB asked what the total was, A-Train couldn’t do it. He handed them to someone and said, “You tell him.”

“Fifteen…thousand…”

They asked BOTB how he’d racked up that many charges on his credit card. He told them that the card company, after a point, began calling the strip club each time they rang up another exorbitant charge. “They’d hand me the phone; the card company’d ask about the charge, and I’d say it was ok. After a while they started making me fingerprint the receipts for confirmation. And they just kept bringing out champagne…”

Member of group: “Did you at least get head or fuck her or something?”
BOTB: “No…”
A-Train’s brother: “Do you know how many call girls you could’ve gotten for $15,000?!?”

"The Hangover Part 2" Trailer

The boys are back, Memorial Day weekend 2011.

The Hangover on DVD

Just released today, this standout ode to morning afters is fully "On the Rocks"-approved. I ordered a Blu-ray copy over a month ago; TJ used his connections to secure a copy of the DVD last week, and some of our crew had a small Friday night viewing at Chappy and Toe's.

If you haven't seen it yet...then I'm just glad you're out of the coma you had to have been in for the last eight months. If you have seen it, then you know that this is a "must-have" for any true boozehound's collection. Go get you some.

Hungover Weekend

Sometimes life imitates art. Friday night a few friends and I went to see the hilarious new film “The Hangover”. Sunday morning I was nursing a raging hangover on one of those “how the hell did we get here?” mornings.

“The Hangover” is, to put it simply, brilliant. The concept—a Vegas stag party gone wrong—may sound basic and predictable, but the plot is executed flawlessly, providing enough shock to keep things moving along quickly. And the dialogue between the characters is spectacular. Almost all of my friends—even those who saw the flick with their respective girlfriends or with other groups of friends—have been tossing quotes back and forth since Friday night, nearly jamming up Facebook with rapid-fire wall posts, status updates, and comments. Most enjoyable, at least for me, is the sense of familiarity you feel while watching three guys try to piece together their night. All of us have had those bad, blackout-riddled binges, and there is an instant connection built between the audience and the characters because of this. On the way home that night, Chappy and I started talking about personal “WTF?” mornings that were in some way comparable to the one in the movie (the first thing that came to mind for me was my Sunday morning at Ohio University several years ago).

Saturday Tony, Dupa, Chappy, myself, and others congregated at South Side 86 in the South Side to watch what was supposed to be a definitive Penguins victory in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Unfortunately no one seemed to tell the Pens that there was a game, and we had to endure watching a 5-0 scraping. Maybe we had a premonition of what was going to happen; during the first intermission, most of our large party moved up the street to Rumshakers for $2 shots. The first round was a double round of Grape Bombs (grape vodka and Red Bull). Mitch Canada handed them out two at a time, and no one could pretend any of this was going to turn out well.

As we were arriving earlier, the male bartender was tossing a guy out onto the sidewalk. The tossee, a middle-aged man who seemed to be a live preview of how drunk the rest of us would soon be, had received fifty cents in change after paying for a beer. Feeling generous, he announced to the two bartenders, “THIS one is for you, and THIS one is for you!” while sliding one quarter in each of their directions. Neither of them was amused by this, and moments later he was flying across the sidewalk.

One of our boys, “Jay Swag,” had inexplicably come to the South Side dressed in a white tee. Normally you won’t get through the door at Rumshakers in this attire, but the place was still empty and the bouncers were being lax (hence the bartender removing the aforementioned drunken philanthropist himself). The bartender went into the back and brought out a green Rumshakers t-shirt leftover from St. Patty’s Day, and gave it to Swag to wear. Feeling jealous, I asked if he had any 2XLs in the back. He disappeared into the back room and then came back with one. It was quite possibly the best $10 I spent all night.

LRG eventually joined us, which just meant more rounds of shots being bought and handed out. During one round, he pointed towards the female bartender working that night, and made it known that he was impressed by her…measurements. This is a standard drunken pastime of LRG’s, so I decided to cut through the rigmarole. I called her over:

Me: “Excuse me, but do you have a boyfriend?”
Her: *a little stunned* “Uh, no.”
Me: “Okay, my buddy right here *pointing at LRG* is a little shy, but he thinks you’re really hot, and would like to meet you.”

I then shoved LRG towards the bar, and walked away chuckling as they shook hands.

Soon we were stumbling our way back down the street to Jimmy D’s, and then to the White Eagle Inn. At the Eagle we caught up with our friend “Belle”. About 5’7” with long blonde hair, Belle may look like a girly-girl, but she’s one of the boys. She drinks, parties, and curses as hard as the rest of us; all of which made it that much funnier that she had caught the bouquet at a wedding earlier in the night. But—in true “On the Rocks” style—Belle turned this symbol of trite-tradition into a prop, bringing it with her to the bar for the noble cause of sheer humor. Wearing a sleek black dress and high heels, and armed with a beer bottle in one hand and a wedding bouquet in the other, she rocked out in a dive bar full of cigarette smoke and gruff looking guys with paint and sweat stained blue collars.

“New from Mattel, it’s ‘Pittsburgh Barbie’! Whether squatting behind a car parked off of Carson Street, devouring a ‘Cap with egg’ at Primanti’s, or dancing on the bar at Calico Jack’s in a miniskirt, this girl is all Burgh! ‘Pittsburgh Barbie’ comes complete with her own Steelers jersey, IC Light bottle, and public intoxication citation!”

I have not yet been able to confirm that we took more shots at the White Eagle, but I feel certain that we did, based on the following:

• The Eagle is renowned amongst the area’s drinkers for selling Rocket Fuel by the pitcher;
• My memory of the evening has large holes in it, beginning soon after we arrived at the Eagle;
• No matter how accomplished and intelligent any particular one of us may be while sober, when we drink we replace the thought “I should slow down” with “I’M STILL STANDING! MORE BOOZE!”
• I don’t remember, but have video evidence of, Dupa and Belle dancing; he would cast out an imaginary fishing line, and she would get “hooked”, cupping her hands on either side of her face and flaring them out to mimic fish gills. He would then reel in the imaginary line as she danced towards him, wriggling like a freshwater bass.

At bar close we walked to Mike & Tony’s for gyros (I choked down two in about the same space of time that it would take most people to eat only one), then caught a cab. For some never-to-be-determined reason, we told the driver to take us back to Dupa’s apartment instead of mine, which was closer. Sunday morning I awoke facedown on one of his couches, without much recollection of anything past the gyros.

I did, however, have a green Rumshakers t-shirt.

It's Like "What If On the Rocks" Went to Vegas

If you don't know where I'll be tonight, then you just haven't been reading this blog. Only daddy-duties are keeping TJ from joining Dupa, Chappy, myself, and others from going to see this tonight. Giggity.