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March 27th should be one of my favorite days of the year, filled with friends, laughter, and celebrating that I made it to another anniversary of my birth. Unfortunately, as is the case with most of my #DrunkStories, many of them have been complete and utter disasters. What you are about to read are true stories of unfortunate incidents. Names have not been changed; this is the life we have chosen.
My 19th birthday was memorable not for what I did but for why I did it. I went out to dinner with my roommates, which would have been cool if my roommates weren’t my parents. Why was I living with my parents during the Spring of my Freshman year in college? Because that February I decided to have a party in my dorm room. It was everything a collegiate party should be (drinking games, aggressive flirting, 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” on repeat) until the campus police showed up and told us to dump out all of our beer. In a moment of impulsivity, I picked up the entire 2’x6’ beer pong table, bum rushed past the officers into the hallway and through the door to the 3rd floor porch balcony, and heaved the table as far as I could. Thankfully it landed safely in a snow bank below and did not crush a fellow student, but I was in trouble nonetheless.
After being handcuffed for the first second time in my life, I was taken down to the station, booked, and interrogated. I suppose this should have been a traumatic event in my life but when you’re high on Natty Light and Jagermeister you tend not to feel feelings.
I quickly found out that I had very few rights in this situation, and that the school took the throwing of projectiles from dorm buildings very seriously. They released me early that morning, but when I showed up to sociology class on Monday there was a cop waiting to escort me to campus affairs. I can’t pretend to know exactly how Cersei felt during her Shame walk, but now that I was sober I felt the depressing gravity of the situation sinking in.
After a preliminary hearing and a regular hearing and some begging and pleading and “you seem like a good kid but rules are rules,” I was suspended for the remainder of the semester and banned from campus. If you have never done the 6-hour drive from Ithaca to Boston with a silent father and the cloud of guilt that you just got yourself kicked out of school, well, I don’t recommend it. But at least he took me out for a birthday dinner.
Ithaca’s campus affairs idealists might have overestimated my ability to retain their potent life lesson because my 20th birthday was more festive but similarly destructive. Back at campus, I hosted an “open house,” which meant that my friends could come by my room all day and play my roommate and me in beer pong (sensing a theme?). After going something like 25-0 we took a cab to Chili’s for a b-day dinner, where I promptly vomited in the bushes and then passed out in the booth, unable to touch my chicken crispers.
After a quick nap in the back seat of Psycho Steve’s 4runner, I rallied, pounded my leftover crispers, and headed out to a pudding wrestling party. College is extraordinary. Things got blurry towards the end of the night but apparently I shoved my friend Craig in the pudding fully-clothed. I know this because he brings it up like once a year.
I woke up the next morning in bed with a female friend who up until that point was just a friend, so I was incredibly surprised when she said “I can’t believe we slept together.” I wasn’t surprised that I hooked up with a girl that I had zero romantic feelings towards, I was surprised because up until then she was a virgin. Losing your virginity to a blacked out asshole who reeks of chicken crispers and wholesale chocolate pudding is not exactly a magical story.
She implied that we would now be a couple, and I felt like I had to go along with it, not out of pity or obligation, but because she was cool and I didn’t want her first sexual experience to be with a complete d-bag. The relationship lasted for a few months, and while she was fun to hang out with, we never crossed the physical line that we had the first night. Despite my own perceived prowess I didn’t want to push it. I think the aforementioned Fifty said something along the lines of being into sex but not into making love, and neither was going on here.
It wasn’t until May that I realized that by “slept together” she had meant “slept in the same bed,” a revelation that allowed me to congenially end the union over the summer via AOL Instant Messenger. I have grown to love (hell, even invite) confrontation, which makes it ridiculous that there is a possibility that I would currently be married to a woman because I got drunk on my 20th birthday.
Finally, the big 2-1! Legal as legal gets! I turned the silver [bullet] age on Easter Sunday, which was great because Ithaca College gave us Monday off, plenty of time to recover. My mother invited me home for Easter weekend with the family, but I politely declined. Jesus’ resurrection was not going to get in the way of the craziest party of my life.
As the day drew closer, I tried to figure out whether my legal friends and I would go bar-hopping, or if I would just make an epic liquor store run to proudly display my non-fake ID. One by one, each member of my crew told me, with a little regret and a lot of loving caution, that they were heading home to spend time with their families. The crew whittled from 15 to eight to four. And then there were two…a pair of guys who were either Jewish, lived far away, or didn’t like their families. We could have admitted defeat right then and there but instead we blasted some Fitty, tossed back some Jager, and set out on an epic Sunday Funday bar adventure.
We headed downtown, ready to pop bottles or do whatever people did in bars. We walked from door to door like trick-or-treaters, but there was no candy or mischief anywhere. All the establishments in Ithaca were closed that night for the Easter holiday, perhaps God’s greatest “fuck you” since the Plagues of Egypt. It was clearly punishment for years of underage drinking, and sometimes you just need to tip your cap.
On my 22nd birthday my girlfriend tried to throw me a surprise party, which is not the best way to celebrate a control freak. To understand this part of the story you need to know that the state of this relationship was tenuous at best. Maintaining a girlfriend is college is difficult, a challenge magnified by aggressive mood swings and irrational behavior (translation = crazytown). We were staring down the barrel of graduation and the life that comes after it, and we both knew we were doomed, but neither had the gumption to break it off.
So she tried to plan a party without me knowing about it, a losing proposition because there was no way it could have been better than a shindig I planned myself. I’m the party guy. So when she and my friends tried to conspire against me, it went about as poorly as you’d expect.
As the Friday of the party arrived, I knew something was up and desperately tried to influence the proceedings. What if she didn’t invite all of my friends? I thought. What if she did invite that one girl I cheated on her with?! I worried. It was miserable.
A few buddies took me to the bar, a classic ploy, while the house was being set up. I told them I knew what was going on, but they tried to play dumb, not wanting to be blamed for blowing it. They were accomplices in this act of betrayal.
As we returned for the proceedings I went rogue and ran around to the back of the house to enter the party from the rear and ruining the surprise. Clearly I was trying to sabotage more than just the party, but a boy on the cusp of 22 doesn’t always understand why he does what he does.
After putting hours of work into this nice (albeit misguided) gesture, I went full kamikaze. I succeeded in pissing my girlfriend off and we fought all night, which was fine because only half of my friends were in attendance anyway. As predicted, she sucked at inviting the right people.
The event ended shortly after the cake was cut, when she threw some in my face — not in a cute way, in a violent “I WANT OUT OF THIS RELATIONSHIP” sort of way — and all the guests left before any further awkwardness ensued.
The union lasted for a few months beyond college, but the party was probably the beginning of the end. All that said, still the best birthday I had in college.
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