G Love Turns Twenty Three

10:30 pm “Hi! It’s my twenty third birthday (hic)!”
12:00 am “Hi! Verry nahce to meet yooouuu (burp). It’s mah twenny thurd buthday!”
2:30 am “Isss maah twennny thurd tuhday burth, oh hai, ahm drunk . . .”

I, too, have had my nights, and plenty of ‘em, but I think my most spectacular display of drunkenness would have to be the night of my twenty third birthday. As I have mentioned/complained about a few times, my twenty first birthday was less than exciting, involving a quiet dinner with my parents and siblings, a pair of roller blades as a gift, and absolutely not a peep from anyone about the significance of the year. There was nary a drop of alcohol in sight. Well, a couple of years later, I made up for it.

I was living in Ohio, working as a naturalist at an outdoor center in Hamilton, which is located about an hour from Cincinnati. (One thing I took away from that job was the ability to reliably spell Cincinnati, not an easy feat.) Hamilton was a series of strip malls and gas stations, with a Hooters and a Buffalo Wild Wings for your run of the mill nights out, but it was not the place to celebrate such a momentous occasion as the second anniversary of someone’s twenty-first birthday. As such, my fellow naturalists and I piled into as few cars as possible and drove the hour over to Oxford, where Miami University of Ohio is located (has nothing to do with Florida, folks – the Great Miami River, a tributary of the Ohio River, was so named decades before the spring break mecca was incorporated.) Oxford is a college town with tons of college bars, and we all piled into one on the main drag called First Run. It was still relatively early – 10pm or so – and I remember it being not terribly crowded when we first arrived. The boys all clustered around Golden Tee to play golf. I hopped up to the bar with the girls and had my first shot.

That whole night I was never without a beer, and the shots were flying fast and furious. A couple of hours later, the lower level dance floor was hoppin’ and booty shaking songs were ringing out – “raise up, take yo shirt off, and twist it round yo head like a helicopta” is one I think I remember. The boys were now parked at the bar and the girls were all dancing as sexily as possible, trying to get attention. I myself was getting lots of attention. People who can barely stand and slosh beer all over the dancers around them tend to do that. I bumped into one girl who turned around, put her hands on my shoulders, and shoved me away roughly, which perhaps I deserved. At the time, a beastly primal alcohol-fueled anger welled up in me and I stumbled back up off the ground, literally pushed up my imaginary sleeves, and made for this girl, ready to claw out some eyes. My friends had to hold me back. Behold the tuff girl.

I was wrestled back up to the bar, where my friends began the discussion of who was going to take me home. While the responsible friends were thus occupied, one particularly alcoholic friend decided it would be funny to give me a Three Wise Men shot, one last drink to end the night (a Three Wise Men = Johnnie Walker scotch, Jim Beam bourbon, and Jack Daniels whiskey). She handed it to me, and I blinked at it stupidly. “Go on,” she said, “suck it down.” I pulled it up to my mouth, took a deep breath in preparation for shooting it, choked on the fumes and sneezed into the glass. Three Wise Men went everywhere, including all over the face of the friend who bought it. Her startled expression is the last thing I remember.

So, I’m told that after that I fell to the ground, and a bouncer who had noticed my profound inebriation throughout the night decided it was time for me to leave, NOW. He came to me and hooked me ‘round the arms, and as he was dragging me out the door I smiled loopily up at him and said brightly “Ssssir, iss mah twenny thurd birthday tuhday!” “Well, congratulations,” he replied, “and it’s time to go home.” “OK, but iss mah twenny thurdy birthday. Iss mah twenny thurrdd buthday everboddeeeee!” I continued to chant all the way out the door. The designated drivers of the drunken bum were a set of twin sisters, Becca and Erica, and they each took an arm and muscled me to their car. Halfway through the drive home, it would seem that they had to stop so I could throw up on the side of the road. And then I took off in the woods, yelling to the woodland creatures that it was my twenny thurd birthday, and they had to chase me down and talk me into returning to the car.

The next morning, I woke up alone in a twin bed of my friend’s house. I am feeling nauseous now just thinking about that morning. Let’s not write any more about the morning.

Well, I survived, and ever after this night, in later games of I Never, I got to drink whenever somebody said the following:

(a) I never got into a fight in a bar
(b) I never got kicked out of a bar
(c) I never threw up on the side of the road
(d) I never fled my friends in a drunken state and communed with woodland creatures in the middle of the night (hmmm, how often does this one come up?)