Welcome to the Grown-Ass Man Club

I turned 30 in March ‘09. And one of these days I may finally make peace with it. In the meanwhile, I’ve found some comfort in watching most of my friends endure the milestone. My standard text message/Facebook-wall-post on these occasions has been, “Welcome to the Grown-Ass Man Club. We meet on Saturdays. Bring scotch.”

This month saw the induction of two new club members: T.C. and Alex. T.C.’s birthday was on the 16th; his family, Hurley, and I did a little dinner in the South Side that night, complete with a cake shaped like a stein of beer. While the night was fun, it was relatively non-alcoholic (Hurley and I indulged in a couple of drinks each, just because we’re us). Everyone deserves to get ass-on-the-floor drunk in celebration of his or her 30th, though, and T.C. wisely formed a plan to do so.

He was assisted in this by the timing of Alex’s Dirty-Thirty party. Her birthday falls eight days after T.C.’s, and her friends would be holding a bash for her at Whim in Station Square the Saturday between the two days (5/19). T.C. decided he’d start that night with Alex’s soiree, and then move onto one of his own in Shadyside. Since The ‘Side is my turf, I was appointed second-in-command. O’Captain, my captain…

With so much fun scheduled for Saturday, I planned to relax on Friday and conserve my energy. What I didn’t plan on, however, was Pakistanimal getting a “hall pass” from his wife that night. He called me shortly after I’d come home from the barbershop, with designs on getting a whole different kind of fade going.

Me: “I’m staying in tonight.”
Pak: “I’ll be at your place at 8:30.”

*sigh*

He brought a bottle of Kraken with him, and was barely inside my apartment door before he was mixing together two cups of Kraken-&-Coke. While I wasn’t thrilled about having my night hijacked, I couldn’t let that delicious spiced rum go to waste. And then, strangely, I found my agitation being slowly washed away with each sip. For my second round, I abandoned the Kraken and made myself an Elder & Wiser (bourbon, St-Germain, and apple juice). And I soon forgot that I had ever considered not partying that night.

We hit up William Penn Tavern, which had a healthy Friday night crowd buzzing inside. Pak ordered himself a Captain-&-Coke, and I told the bartender that I wanted a bourbon-&-Coke. He handed us a Captain-&-Coke and a…?

Pak: “Is that a bourbon-&-Coke?”
Bartender: “No—I thought you said a ‘bourbon-&-soda’!”
Me: *blank stare*

A bourbon-&-soda? The fuck? I was more than a little disturbed by the lack of hesitation he showed in taking what he thought he’d heard and making it a reality. I know Shadyside attracts a slightly more refined crowd than say, the South Side; but are people around here really ordering that concoction? And at such a rate that he doesn’t even raise an eyebrow when he “hears” it?

He offered to take the drink back and get me a bourbon-&-Coke, but once again I wasn’t interested in wasting liquor. Now that Daddy had gotten a taste, I wasn’t letting any of it get away. I drank the misbegotten mixture as Pak and I lost convincingly at darts to two random guys. When it was time for a re-up, I stepped back up to the bar and gave the same order Pak and I had placed earlier. And once again, the bartender came back with one Captain-&-Coke and one bourbon-&-soda.

I was starting to take this shit personally.

A cute girl sitting in front of us at the bar was Johnny-on-the-spot; she noticed the error before even I could. She took the drink from me, called over the bartender, and told him to fix my order. The take-charge attitude, the Lisa Loeb-vibe her eyeglasses gave, and her pretty face had me falling hard. Before I could start contemplating names for our future children, though, another curveball was thrown, this time by Hurley.

Hurley [via text]: “Come to [Diesel] and call my name. I got bottle service.”

Uh oh.

My nerd-hot love would have to wait for destiny’s next entanglement. Pak and I got to the South Side as fast as we could, and found…pretty much what we expected. Hurley was obliterated, as was his boy who co-signed the bottle service. They had a few random people in their VIP room that they’d pulled in from the passing throng; girls mostly—hot ones, when at all possible. Three bottles of Grey Goose stood on the table with cranberry juice, Coke [“Sure,” I thought. “NOW I have unlimited access to Coke…], and orange juice, daring me. I filled up a glass with Goose and cran, and then took a sip and realized I had grabbed the carafe of Coke by mistake in the dim room. Oh, the irony… The mix still went down smooth. “Yup,” I thought, “I’m definitely drunk.”

We drank and charmed ‘til closing time, doing our best to find hot girls to come share in the Grey Goose bounty laid out before us. And, as the lights in the club were coming up, the lights in my blotto mind were going down. Blacked-to-the-out. I awoke with the usual “What-the-fuck-was-just-happening?” startle on Saturday morning, snug in my bed sheets. I drifted back to sleep with the cloudy foreshadowing of a hangover, and the slightly-more-painful understanding that I had an even bigger night still ahead of me.

I arrived at Whim that night as the party began gathering steam. Alex’s friends had reserved a roped-off section of the club, adorned it with special napkins and balloons, and arranged a champagne toast. It was the typical elaborate, thoughtful, but-a-touch-too-ambitiously-austere party that girls tend to naively plan. It was sweet of them, and I’m sure Alex—being that she’s a girl—loved it. As a guy, well…trust me, no man wants a coronation ceremony after losing his twenties. For all the bad that went on during my relationship with The Ex, I’ll always be grateful for the job she did in planning the party for my 30th birthday. It was elaborate, sure, but it never carried that overwrought I’m-a-big-girl-now feel that women usually build into their big parties. In other words, it was fun.

Earlier in the day, Entertainer had made it known that he wanted to join T.C. and I in adjourning to Shadyside for the second half of the night. But now, as Alex’s party got into gear, it was ever-so-obvious that he was already too drunk to make the transition. T.C. and I were taking it easy, and drank only two beers apiece while biding our time until we could escape. Entertainer, on the other hand, was slamming shots and drinking full cups of vodka. Youngins… When T.C. and I kissed the girls goodbye and headed towards the parking lot, we had to leave our comrade to the care of his girlfriend, Shannon, all of us understanding that trying to do the Shadyside portion of the night would likely kill him.

T.C. and I found our way to Shady Grove, where we met up with Tony, Nate, two of Nate’s boys, and our buddy Trip. Beautiful Coors Light girls patrolled the premises, as did a multitude of attractive women who weren’t being paid to flirt with the bachelors among our ranks. T.C. and his wedding band, when not watching on in amusement, did their flirting with shot glasses at the bar. Eventually our friend “Lotus” made her way to the bar, adding a touch of feminine charm to our drunken male banter. Any charm I was adding, however, came straight from the Elder & Wisers I was putting away one after another.

Several drinks and shots had been thrown T.C.’s way by the time she got there, but that wasn’t good enough for Lotus. “You’re not drunk enough,” she protested to T.C. “I’m buying you a shot!” An hour or so later, she looked over at T.C. and said (with a noticeable slur), “He still doesn’t look like he’s drunk!” “Trust me,” I countered, having spotted the telltale signs—talking loudly, eyelids dropped slightly during regular conversation and squeezed completely shut when placing emphasis on a particular point, etc.—that T.C. was feeling it. “He’s crushed.”

We fit in another couple of rounds of shots—and a round of drinks—as 2 a.m. came calling, and then all headed out into the night. Tony, T.C., and I did the gentlemanly thing and walked Lotus home. About halfway there, though, her own drunken “tell” raised its head: stubbornness. Despite being an intoxicated, attractive woman walking along a dark city street, Lotus objected to being escorted. She stopped dead in her tracks and refused to walk any further if we continued to follow her. We negotiated for a minute, and finally she agreed to move on with just me chaperoning her, while Tony and T.C. headed straight back to my place. [Don’t bother asking what kind of sense this makes; I assure you, it makes none.] Once she was safely in her place, I headed home and caught up with the boys as they reached my block. Lotus sent me this the next morning: “Omg what did u guys do to me last night? Haha the path to my room looks like a tornado came thru!!”

T.C.’s night ended with less spinning winds, and more spinning rooms. He hugged my toilet for about 20 minutes, as Tony and I tried to talk over the awful retching sounds coming from behind the bathroom door. When he had finally emptied himself of all that he could force out, he stumbled out to the living room shirtless, and plopped down awkwardly on my loveseat, passing out in mere seconds.

No one said becoming a Grown-Ass Man was pretty.

A Fond Farewell

If “Cooley High” and Boyz II Men have taught us anything, it’s that it’s so hard to say goodbye. On the other hand, though, alcohol has taught us that if you don’t remember it, it didn’t happen. So if a dear friend is moving on in life, but she throws herself a going away party so sadistically drenched in alcohol that you wake up at 5 am the following morning without the slightest clue how you got in someone’s living room, then you never said goodbye and she hasn’t left, right?

Steph—oh she of the wondrously foul mouth and generous pour, packed neatly within a demure “girly-girl” exterior—recently came to a realization: Like others before her who are high on talent, personality, and ambition, she has finally accepted that Pittsburgh is no place to waste her life away. And so, eager for opportunity and a better life, she has decided to move to New York City. [Note: If anything in the prior two sentences came across as sarcasm, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth; the tone is meant to be more of a seething jealousy.] Ever the enabler, last Friday she christened her departure by hosting a party that also broke the proverbial champagne bottle over the bow of my belligerent inebriation.

I started the night by meeting Dupa on Mt. Washington. Each of us parked our car near Jay Swag’s house, with the hopes of falling down either there or somewhere near there when all was said and done. Dupa arrived a good 20 minutes later than me, having had a minor fender-bender while in transit. Some clown with a less-than-agile right foot had not hit his brakes early enough, and as a result slid into the back of Dupa’s car as my friend sat idling at a red light. The two drivers pulled off to the side of the road to inspect their respective bumpers; luckily no real damage had been done.

Dupa: “He said, ‘My bad man, I’m kind of in a hurry.’”
Me: “Did you exchange insurance?”
Dupa: *completely serious* “No, I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and got back in my car.”

We made our way to Station Square via a rectangular blast furnace on rails that the Port Authority of Allegheny County has the nerve to call the Monongahela Incline. Air conditioning and the Incline have yet to meet, and on Friday it was 92°F with humidity somewhere in the mid-90th percentile—at 7:30 pm. And that was the outside air temperature; inside the small, enclosed rail cars, you could double each of those numbers. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Station Square bars pay the Incline operators to pump heat into the funiculars just to ensure that customers go searching for cold beverages when they get to the bottom.

Round 1 of Steph’s party kicked off at Bar Louie Station Square with dinner and drinks in the VIP area, thanks to a friend of mine who hooked us up [astute readers will note that this is the very same VIP area that hosted my 30th birthday celebration last year; Dupa almost looked out of place without a bachelorette party participant perched on his shoulder]. I, of course, made use of the $34 all-you-can-drink-top-shelf special that my friends and I have looked back upon fondly since last year. Chelsea, a wonderful princess of a waitress, made it her duty to have a new Red Bull and Ketel One ready for me as I finished each previous one. And the party’s attendance count grew as quickly as my drink count did. Bill, Shannon, The Entertainer, and even Hurley joined the throng of people bidding adieu to Steph’s life as a Pittsburgher. And my friend “Biff” arrived after pulling together an impromptu—yet well-executed—prank.

It was simplistic in nature and origin: Early in the night, Dupa sent a text to Biff to ask if he was on his way. Biff, feeling saucy, decided to respond with “Who is this?” Dupa showed us the text, and then responded with, “The guy you met in the bathroom at Elixir last week.” While he did that, I quickly shot off a text of my own to Biff: “[Dupa]’s almost buying it. Keep going.” And so began our dance (forgive my paraphrasing, but neither Dupa nor Biff gave me a transcript, and I was a good four or five Red Bull and Vodkas in by this point).

Biff to Dupa: “This is [Biff]’s mother. He has a new phone with a new number, and he gave me his old one.”
[Dupa begins to bite, but is still skeptical. He asks around the party if anyone knows of Biff changing his cell number. All along the way I’m behind him mouthing the words “SAY YES!” to everyone. At Bill’s suggestion, he sends…]
Dupa to Biff: “Prove it—show me your breasts.”
Biff to Dupa: “That’s highly inappropriate. If you want to talk to [Biff], his new number is 814-xxx-xxxx.”
[Dupa is stammering. Steph, Bill, and the rest of us are laughing hysterically. Dupa recognizes the “814” as a Johnstown area code, and suspects it to be the phone number of Biff’s buddy, Pete.]
Me to Biff: “You almost had him, but he figured it out when you used an ‘814’ instead of a ‘412’.”
Dupa to Biff: “That’s a Johnstown area code, so I know that’s not his number.”
Biff to Dupa: “That’s his work number. His personal cell phone is 412-xxx-xxxx.”
Biff to Me: “Don’t worry, I fixed it.”
[Dupa’s really worried now, as the added depth to the story—and the added alcohol he had consumed as time went on—was now convincing him that not only had he just told his friend’s mother that her son had picked him up in a public restroom, he had also asked her to show him her boobs.]
Dupa to Me: “Fuck! *thinks* I should text [Baby Joey] and ask him if [Biff] changed his number.”
Me to Dupa: “Probably worth a shot.”
Me to Biff: “He’s going to text [Baby Joey]!”
Biff to Me: “Don’t worry, I took care of it.”
Dupa to Joey: “Did [Biff] change his cell number?”
Joey to Dupa: “Yeah, the other day.”
[Dupa crumples into a ball, fully expecting an ass kicking in his near future.]

When Biff finally walked into Bar Louie chuckling, Dupa was more relieved than angry. I think it’s safe to say that finding out your friends have been messing with your head is a far better alternative to finding out that you’ve brazenly asked your friend’s mom to sext you.

The party moved to Buckhead at about 10. We had not planned on going there, but given its location (across the street) and the temperature (Bar Louie’s air conditioning was turned off, inexplicably), it just made good sense. Despite the lack of forewarning that Buckhead’s staff was given, Steph was able to negotiate free admission for everyone in her party (good luck pulling that one off in New York).

Things rapidly got hazy, for all of us. Dupa was “iced” by Entertainer, while Shannon and I openly wondered why we even associate with them. Steph pinballed between the four or five clusters of partygoers that had formed around the club’s main bar—and did shots at each stop. Biff held court in one of the huddles, with several of the party’s beautiful women around him; this led him to say to Dupa, “You see this? You see all of these girls? I look like the man right now, right? Nah. None of them want me. I’m deep in the ‘friend zone’.” And Hurley and I, each armed with an open tab of our own, caused me to tweet, “Hurley and I might have the most violent friendship in history. We literally will spend any amount to kill each other with shots.”

Legitimately twisted, he and I followed Steph’s bar crawl to its third location, Whim; Dupa, Entertainer, and Shannon, however, all set off for Jack’s Bar in South Side. This was my first time being inside Whim since its previous life as my beloved Margarita Mama's. It has a very Studio 54-ish feel to it; that’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s not a deal-breakingly bad thing, either. I’d only recommend it for those times when one finds himself in precisely the same circumstances in which Hurley and I found ourselves that night: part of a group that featured a high percentage of females, in high spirits, and floating towards a blackout, with no real agenda for the rest of the night.

After a beer or two—and possibly more shots (my ability to memorize was seriously hindered by that point, but I certainly wouldn’t rule out our sadistic game of “Last Man Standing” following us to Whim)—my boy and I finally bid adieu to Steph and the remaining partiers, deciding to cab our way over to Jack’s. When we found our three fellow refugees from the party at the back bar, they were engaged in the same activity as before: championship boozing. Some of our friends who hadn’t been a part of Steph’s celebration had also joined up at Jack’s, and they were no less enthusiastic than the rest of us to order more rounds of shots and drinks. I can—and more or less have to—sum up the rest of my bar night with the following two simultaneous conversations that took place the next morning.

Me to Dupa (in person): “Where did you lose me last night?”
Me to Hurley (text message): “Where did I lose you last night?”
Dupa to Me: “I think when you left Jack’s to go to Rumshakers.”
Me to Dupa: “We were at Jack’s?”
Hurley to Me: “Too many shots. I don’t know. Maybe Jack’s?”
Me to Hurley: “No, you were with me at Rumshakers.”
Hurley to Me: “We were at Rumshakers?”

I woke up alone in a living room, sitting upright on a couch. I wasn’t wearing my shirt or my shoes. The TV was on, and with a random infomercial playing on the screen. I looked around some more. I was in Jay Swag and Mitch Canada’s living room. But it had been weeks since I’d seen either of them. At least I thought it had. Had I met up with Swag somewhere last night? How else would I have gotten into their living room? Did I break in? I began looking around the room for my shirt and shoes. Nothing. I carefully made my way up the stairs to the guest room. There were my shoes sitting neatly in the corner, with my wallet and watch stashed in them. And draped over a chair was my shirt. I laid down on the bed, content to sleep for another few hours, when one last thought made me jump up. Opening my phone and using the light from the screen, I checked inside my wallet. Debit card? Check. Credit card? Check. License? Check. I exhaled and fell backwards onto the mattress.

As I drifted off, I thought to myself, “Did I see Steph last night?”