Social Drinking Excellence: Richard Fleeger

This one comes straight from Glitter's neck of the woods. I thought we might get through the whole month of May without a Rummy Award candidate being brought past my desk. It appears I was wrong. TJ with the great assist.

From WPXI.com:

KITTANNING, Pa. -- Police said a man may be charged with driving under the influence after falling asleep while waiting for food at a Kittanning McDonald's drive-through.

Investigators said Richard Fleeger, 23, fell asleep behind the wheel early Sunday morning. State police said McDonald's employees called 911 after customers complained that the line was not moving.

Fleeger failed a field sobriety test and was driven home by a relative, according to police. Investigators said Fleeger may face DUI charges pending the results of a toxicology test.

*sigh*

My thoughts:

1. Was a field sobriety test even necessary? He was in a McDonald's drive-through after midnight on a Saturday night. That pretty much guarantees you to be over the legal limit. They could've brought in a paddywagon and thrown everyone in that line in the drunk tank.

2. That being said, I'm hesitant to cast Mr. Fleeger as the villain here. Sure, he was driving drunk, and that alone deserves punishment. But maybe his act of dozing off was actually just one of sacrifice. Maybe he risked his own freedom to save that of the drivers behind him. His slumber surely distracted the police from doing anything more than glancing through the windshields of other vehicles where the occupants were still upright and moving.
3. There didn't seem to be any passengers in Fleeger's car. But, given that it was Saturday night, I would say it's highly unlikely that he had gotten so drunk all alone. Given those two pieces of information, it seems quite possible that he was, in fact, making a Mickey D's run for his friends. Imagine just how upset they were when, after quite a bit of waiting for their Angus burgers, they got a phone call asking them to pick him up...without the food. He avoided prison, but there's still a good chance he got his ass whooped when he got home.

Richard, your Rummy is in the mail. You'll find compartments in the base filled with Barbecue and Sweet & Sour sauces for your McNuggets.

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?!?”

Man of the People

"Mmm-mmmmm, bitch!"

I'm not the biggest fan of Guinness, unless I'm dropping a Jameson & Bailey's bomb into it. But I would gladly drink down a pint of it, if I was doing so with the President. And the First Lady gets wifey-props, too, for her little mini-mug.

From AOL Travel:

Obama looked at the assembled crowd and quipped, "I have been told that people are very particular about the person behind the bar." He then glanced at the bartender and said "So people ask for this guy?"

He then took a long sip and said "That's good stuff there."

He looked around a bit, put his hand in his pocket, pulled out some money and stated: "I just want to show that the President pays for his beer."

Obama downed the thick beer in only four slurps. Christy O'Sullivan, a government clerical worker who took a long lunch break to watch the Obama's trip to Moneygall, told the AP: "The president actually killed his pint! He gets my vote. He's the first president I've actually seen drink the black stuff like he's not ashamed of something."

The Liquid Diet

Sometimes simply drinking your booze isn't quite enough. While at least one of the five items on this list of alcoholic dishes is sure to be well-known among our readers, the others look intriguing. Especially the first one:

Gin paper

Is there anything more useless than a cocktail napkin? Well, bartender Ryan Moore decided to fix that by making the napkin out of gin. It all started with a mistake. According to The Daily, Moore, a bartender at Rogue 24 in Washington, D.C., was trying to concoct an alcohol foam to place over food when he accidentally heated and created a thin film that, when dried, turned into a thin, solid paper made entirely of gin and cellulose. Just don’t try to write your phone number on it.

I think they may have made a mistake, however: They omitted Chef Matt Levin, whose culinary exploration of Four Loko is certainly worthy of consideration.

The Dangers of Day Drinking

I love a good round of day drinking. In fact, just talking about it now makes me want to find a porch or patio, a case of cold beer, and some friends to share it with. And I'm still recovering from last night's post-apocalyptic partying. I love it just that much.

But, let's be clear: Day drinking is only for those days when you don't have anywhere to be or anything to do. If you plan on being on the move and accomplishing tasks, then you're headed for trouble. Possibly trouble in the form of a light pole.

Wifey Material: Brittany Dailey

Brittany is a new fav of Crooked Straight's. And as you can see here, she also knows how to relax like a true "On the Rocks" wifey: day drinking.

And anyone who knows me knows I like my women well-rounded.

Don't Get Mad, Get Even

Revenge is a shot best served with a “fuck you” chaser.

On the first night of my Dirty-30 celebration two years ago, TJ hit me with a death blow in the form of a somewhat improvised shot. He’d wanted to order me a Liquid Cocaine, but the bar didn’t carry Bacardi 151. In its place, he asked them to mix Goldschlager with the Jager and Rumple Minze that come standard. If I remember correctly, I called upon my Czech ancestors to curse his soul then and there. Or maybe it was my Seminole ancestors. Or was it my Creole ancestors? All I know is that I wanted some supernatural being to make him feel the same pain that I felt for the next 15 minutes, as my night dutifully faded to black.

I now owe one (or all) of those ancestors dearly, because my call was answered on April 15, 2011.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. On that night, TJ, his son’s mother (“Glitter”), and her boyfriend went to dinner and a Tom Green show in the Waterfront. Chappy, Tony, Dupa, Jay Swag and I started the night in the South Side for the Pens’ game; we then traveled to Bar Louie afterwards (minus Swag) to meet up with TJ’s trio, as well as Mr. & Mrs. Prince of Ligonier, to celebrate TJ’s birthday. The birthday boy was already showing signs of being tipsy, though it may have just been a Friday night free from responsibility, and not the alcohol, that tilted him. As for Glitter, it was most certainly alcohol that was putting in work. She greeted me with a hug, but it was less old-acquaintances-seeing-each-other-after-an-extended-time, and more giddy-five-year-old-at-Disney-World-squeezing-the-ever-loving-shit-out-of-Goofy. TJ reported that she had been drunk enough to loudly interject during the comedy show earlier in the evening, even causing Tom Green to pause and acknowledge one of her comments. Glitter was clearly in honey badger mode. She really didn’t give a shit.

Not too long after arriving, I noticed a trespasser in our ranks. A slim, tall guy in a tight shirt and product-heavy blonde hair had driven the lane and was now face-to-face with Glitter. Given her state—and that her boyfriend was standing next to her—I didn’t find this news relaxing. And when I saw her boyfriend put his hand on LFO’s chest (Glitter would later make the hilarious observation that he looked like a member of LFO) and push him backwards, I immediately darted into the fray, stationing myself between Glitter’s man and the self-tanner spokesmodel.

I hadn’t been the only one watching this pot boil. One of LFO’s friends arrived on the scene at the same time that I did, and quickly had his hands on his tight-shirted comrade to pull him away. But it was soon apparent that LFO wasn’t overlooking the potential fight that his actions were provoking; on the contrary, he was openly inviting it. Before I knew it, he was back on our side of the bar, inches away from me. As Prince, TJ, and Glitter’s man barked from behind me, I laughed off LFO and tried to talk some common sense into him by saying, “Get the fuck out of here before someone destroys you.”

Oddly enough, those soothing words didn’t seem to calm him down.

Let’s review the situation here: LFO was the most metrosexual man on Earth. He had two friends with him, neither of whom was overly imposing, and neither of whom had the same hard on for fisticuffs that he did. I had TJ, Tony, Prince, Chappy, Dupa, and Glitter’s BF lined up behind me. Even in a one-on-one tangle, LFO would’ve been a light snack for any one of us (aside from maybe Chappy; but he’s just dirty enough to use a bottle or other foreign object to tip things in his favor). But, beyond all that, we also had an ace in the hole: the bar’s manager, Stefani [not to be confused with Steph] is an old friend of Dupa’s. There was no scenario in which any of this ended well for LFO.

Although his buddy had once again pulled him over to their side of the bar, LFO continued to mouth off at us, while most of us did our best to ignore him (Prince, full of beer and childlike glee, was mouthing provocations towards him from our side, only to turn back to us and giggle, all to the disapproval of Mrs. Prince). Eventually LFO walked over to the front doors, yelling for any one of us to join him outside. As he stood there in auto-erotic gesticulation, he felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned around, he found himself face-to-face with the police that Stefani had called. Checkmate.

After a 15 minute conversation with the officers, LFO decided—completely by his own accord, I’m sure—to leave for another bar without any further words or glances in the direction of my crew. With things quieted down, the two female bartenders and a couple of the waitresses came over to share their own encounters with LFO that night. “He was telling everyone that he’s the hottest defense attorney in the city,” reported a waitress. When someone mentioned his two-sizes-too-small shirt, Alyssa—a bartender and Maxim Hometown Hotties contestant—shrugged her shoulders and cracked, “Never trust a man with frosted tips and his nipples out.”

When I suggested that Alyssa, at 5’2”, should try fighting me just like LFO had, she quickly jumped up on the bar and flexed in my face. The thought that I might get frog splashed by a tiny amateur model in the middle of a bar gave me enough pause to consider just how likely my boys would be to believe that I let her take me down. Not very likely, I’m sure.

I would eventually triumph over the short people, though. Stefani, herself all of 5’nothing”, asked for my help in getting a bottle of whiskey down from a high shelf. When she had taken the bottle back behind the bar, I stepped up for another Miller Lite draught. Chappy, however, had also decided to order another drink, and flagged her down first. When Stefani came walking back over with his bottle of Bud Light Lime, I voiced my displeasure.

Me: “I can’t believe that, after I just helped you get that bottle down, you’re going to serve him first!”
Chappy: *laughs in victory as he reaches for his bottle*
Stefani: *grins* “You know what? You’re right. *pulls back the bottle, which was only inches from Chappy’s hand; turns, and puts it in a refrigerator beneath the bar*
Chappy: “Wha..? Hey!”
Stefani: *to me* “Miller Lite draught?”

Chappy was left to whine in protest until after I’d been served my beer and had walked off laughing.

It soon occurred to me that, even though it was close to midnight, TJ was in great condition. This was just unacceptable. I stepped up to get my homie a birthday shot, but froze for a moment while trying to figure out just what to order. Then a villainous grin swept across my face. TJ, looking at me with his eyebrow cocked, sensed something bad was afoot. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I know exactly what I’m getting you.” And if there was any internal doubt about the sincerity of my desire for revenge, it was likely erased by this: When I called over Alyssa, the first thing I asked wasn’t if she knew how to make a Liquid Cocaine; no, the first thing I asked was, “Do you guys have Bacardi 151?” When she frowned a “No,” she likely felt I was going to be disappointed by that response. Oh, how wrong she was. Instead, I smiled. “Great!” I may even have cackled.

I ordered the Goldschlager/Rumple Minze/Jager blend of hell, and then heard lines from Nas’ “I Gave You Power” in my head as I called TJ over: “He walked me outside, saw this cat, cocked me back, said ‘Remember me?’”

Me: “Remember my birthday a couple of years ago?”
TJ: *ice grills me, knowing he can’t argue his way out of this*

I handed him the shot, and Dupa tapped me on the shoulder.

Dupa: “What did you buy him?”
Me: “The Goldschlager/Rumple Minze/Jager shot he got me for my 30th.”
Dupa: *grinning* “It would be pretty messed up if I bought him the same thing right now, wouldn’t it?”
Me: “Yup. Do it.”
Dupa: “On it.”

TJ, to his credit, tossed back the first shot like a soldier. When he was handed another by Dupa, though, just as the first pains from my shot began working their way through his veins, there was murder in his eyes. He gathered his strength, and after a minute tossed back the second one. When he handed over the empty glass, Chappy handed him a Three Wise Men. I think I heard his soul cry.

Then again, it may just have been his Jewish ancestors being summoned.

Fail Tale

My first thought was to make this a "Social Drinking Excellence" post, but two things changed my mind:

1. I can't verify that this guy was drunk when he did this.
2. There's not a whole lot of story here, just a horrible fail.
   

Not only that, but he dropped and wasted beer. And I simply cannot reward such crimes against humanity.

From Tampa Bay Online:

Authorities are looking for a bungling beer bandit who stumbled during the getaway, dropping his purloined potables.

Polk County sheriff's detectives are seeking information about a man stole two cases of Bud Light from the E-Z Food Store at 15 Acuff Road on Wednesday.

The man ran out of the store with the beer but apparently tripped over his own low-hanging pants. He dropped the beer but dived into the back seat of a waiting black Chevy Malibu that then sped off.

Rumors that Racktacular was the getaway driver have yet to be substantiated.