You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery

by Mamrie Hart

  Maegan went in close to my mouth to check out the damage, which was a risky move considering the rogue Hot Fries. She shook her head, laughing. “I did keep hearing you drunk singing, ‘Uh-huh! I got a broken face!’ over and over again when you came in.”

  I cleared my throat. “Hey, I’m really sorry if we were loud coming in last night.” I could tell by Maegan’s expression that this apology was warranted. “I swear I’m not normally a huge tequila mess. Just, first night and all . . .” My voice trailed off. I was nervous. Here was this girl I could see myself being really good friends with, and I’d given her the worst first impression. This wasn’t how I was picturing the adult version of me to be. If I was Maegan, I don’t know if I’d even be speaking to this slug of human pantslessness.

  “Totally get it,” she said as she stood up. “Do me a favor, though, and make sure Kat actually comes into work today. She wants to call out sick, but we are really busy and I know she’s just hungover, ya know?”

  “Sure thing,” I said, the reality hitting me square in the face. Not only were they coworkers; I realized that this Maegan was the same Maegan who was Kat’s boss.

  “Oh, and tell her to not roll in wearing sunglasses.” Maegan smiled and left for the day.

  Just when I’d recovered from the first slap of reality, the other hand bitch-slapped me into clarity. Maegan hadn’t gotten into a fight with her boyfriend. After a month of Kat staying in the living room, Maegan was ready for Kat to move out so she could actually have some time to herself in her own apartment. Our apartment not being ready was the worst for Maegan, and I would soon see why.

  While that first night was one for the books (literally; I am writing about it in a book right now), I knew I had to get my shit together. Kat? Not so much. She wanted a Dewey Decimal System of blackout nights. She bounced from job to job. She rarely came home, and when she did, she was never alone. She didn’t bat an eye leaving a random one-night stand in our apartment while I was still sleeping, only to have said dude walk in on me eating Froot Loops topless ’cause I thought I was home alone.*

  I lived with Kat for five months. I remember one night Kat and I got into an argument, maybe a week before I told her I was moving out. During it, she said, “You were fun at camp. Why are you so boring now?” That’s when I was officially over it.

  I was busting my ass, working fifty to sixty hours a week just to make rent, going on any terrible audition that would see me. I didn’t need to be around someone who only wanted me to be the most irresponsible version of myself. I didn’t need someone encouraging me to be a total wastoid so they’d feel better about their mistakes. I can be a total wastoid of my own accord, thank you very much! Speaking of my own accord, she had crashed my Honda Accord a year before and brushed it off! Why hadn’t I trusted my intuition?

  If I was going to be an actual functioning adult,* I knew I needed to surround myself with supportive friends. Friends should be like a good bra, lifting you up. Bad friends are like sports bras. They can do wonders when you go out dancing or during high-energy times, but on a day-to-day basis they really just smush down some of your greatest assets.

  Side note: If Cracker Barrel is hiring a woman to create phrases for its new apron line, get in touch.

  There is one awesome thing that came out of that awkward first roommate situation: the beginning of a long friendship with Maegan. Little did I know I’d end up living in the apartment where I discovered my chipped tooth for five years. Nine years later, I slept on her couch in New York for a week as I tried to convince someone to publish this book. One of these days, I’ll stop crashing on her couch . . . or at least quit spilling things on it. #sorryaboutthelasagna

  As for Kat? Well, Kat’s time in New York ended shortly after I moved out.

  She realized the city was a bit much for her and got the hell out. I found out via Facebook stalking that she went to nursing school and is working as a nurse, with an adorable little boy and a husband.

  Here’s what I learned about living in the Big Apple. (And don’t worry—this book isn’t all life lessons and hidden meanings. I just had to kick it off with a little credibility before I throw in the naked pudding-wrestling story. . . . Kidding! Or am I?) You can carry a pony keg of pepper spray with you at all times; put as many thumbtacks on your doorbell as you see fit. But at the end of the day, sometimes the person you’ve got to protect yourself from the most is yourself.

  Oh, and for the love of God, avoid having roommates at all costs.

  Here’s us, years later, at Maegan’s birthday. I had come a long way since that first night. Put together, no tooth chipping, and I only drank half a bottle of tequila that night. #growingup

  Key Lime Crime

  2 oz vanilla vodka

  Juice of 3 key limes (or 1 big juicy lime if you can’t find key limes)

  2 oz pineapple juice

  Splash cream (or nondairy equivalent)

  Crushed graham crackers for the rim

  Simple syrup for the graham crackers to stick to the rim

  Combine all but the last two ingredients in a shaker with ice, shake them up, and strain into a martini glass. If you are feeling crazy, substitute a scoop of ice cream and some ice for the cream and blend dat shit! For the rim job (first rim job joke of the book!) wet the rim of your glass with the simple syrup, then dip it in the crushed graham crackers. A drink and a snack!

  You can sub any type of milk for the cream for a lighter result. I prefer to use soy creamer because I am lactose intolerant; my “lighter result” would be me lighting farts on fire if I used real cream.

  Hold on to your titties, gals, ’cause this chapter is about spring break! Ah yes, spring break. The annual gathering in warm climates where college students come together to bump their warm climates. The breaking of the (cheap motel bed) springs. It is depicted in movies and on TV as a raucous free-for-all of SPF and STDs. But speaking from my own experience, IT IS ALL OF THOSE THINGS.

  Spring break is designed to let college students blow off some steam after a few stressful weeks of cramming for midterms. Or at least that’s what I hear. Fact is, I spent most of my senior year sitting in my front yard with a cooler of beer and a sign that read YOU HONK, WE DRINK. If you’ve never tried it before, you should. It’s one of my top ten ways to get day-drunk. The rules are pretty self-explanatory: Someone honks, you drink. And if you get a cop to honk or light up their siren, you shotgun a beer.

  During most of my college career, my blood alcohol level was higher than my GPA. I am not proud of this fact. Sure, I ended up graduating with a double major, but Lord knows the knowledge retained from those four years is sparse. If I could do it all over again, would I have gone to class more? You’re damn right, I (probably) would have. The fact is, I am writing this book right now because of the career I have built on drinking. . . . So . . . eat shit, student-loan debt!

  Anyway, back to le break. My three friends and I decided that we would be super classy and head to Key West that year. We were all finally twenty-one at that point and didn’t have to go all the way to the Bahamas or international waters to drink legally. So, we headed south. We decided to take my friend Melissa’s car because, duh, she had a convertible. But convertibles don’t have a hell of a lot of trunk space. Try cramming it full of four girls’ duffel bags, each overstuffed with bikinis and condoms, and your roommate Erika’s “just in case” chocolate fondue fountain, and shit gets real.

  I decide to take one for the team by packing light. This meant a small backpack filled with one pair of jean shorts, one jean skirt (it was 2005, don’t judge me), and five white ribbed Hanes His Way tank tops. Or wifebeaters, as we so eloquently call them in the South. I went to a craft store earlier that week, bought iron-on letters, and decked each tank out with “Day One,” “Day Two,” right through to “Day Five.” I figured it would save me the trouble of having to decide what to wear every night af
ter a long day of drinking in the sun. And—I’d be able to see the slow deterioration of my condition throughout the week. For example:

  FRIEND

  (looking at my spring break pics)

  Why are you covered in scratches, with a Corona bucket on your head, French-kissing a stray cat?

  ME

  (points to chest)

  It was Day Four.

  FRIEND

  Yeah, but that still doesn’t—

  ME

  I said, Day Four!

  See? Brilliant.

  Censor bar added because apparently Day 3 is when I decided that bras were unnecessary. And if you’ve ever worn a Hanes wifebeater, you know they’re as thin as Prince William’s hair.

  With the car packed up, all we had to do was just get there. The drive from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Key West, Florida, is about twenty hours. This meant someone was going to be stuck with the dreaded two a.m. to nine a.m. shift of driving. Because I am an insomniac, I was given the honor. Let me paint a picture for you. There’s a purple Volvo convertible speeding down I-95. Inside are three sleeping girls, as a fourth chain-smokes with a two-liter of Mountain Dew between her legs, singing every word of Nelly Furtado’s first album.

  But having the dreaded shift allowed me to wake up my friends in style. As soon as I saw the WELCOME TO THE FLORIDA KEYS sign, I cranked up the song “Kokomo” and opened up the convertible. The sun was rising over the crystal-blue water, and we sang along with the Beach Boys. Everything was majestic . . . until we realized we were still three hours away and were at a traffic standstill. The lyrics “We’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow” had never rung truer.

  Now, you would think four girls ready to party would book a room right in the center of town, hoping for their hotel to be packed full of hotties with bodies. Cuties with booties. Wrecks with pecks. One-night flings with ding-a-lings. Menaces with penises? Ok, I’m out.

  Regardless, that was not our style. We booked a room at the Atlantic Shores, the clothing-optional gay resort on the edge of town. This might seem like a strange choice, but let me break it down for you.

  Q: What looks tacky when you’re rocking a mid-2000s bandeau top (besides said mid-2000s bandeau top)?

  A: Tan lines. Can’t get tan lines if you don’t have to wear a bathing suit.

  Q: What is the last thing you feel like doing when you are hungover as fuck?

  A: Sucking in your stomach. No need to hold in the Corn Nuts gut you acquired on your twenty-hour drive. Those old gay men weren’t going to do a double take on your body unless you had a birthmark that was the spitting image of Streisand.

  We took a spin around the grounds, which looked like any average roadside beach motel. Honestly, besides the dicks, it could’ve been a Motel 6. It made me wonder how many unassuming couples checked in to this hotel not knowing what they were getting themselves into. I could just picture it:

  Barbara, start the Volvo. This place is a sin inferno . . . a sinferno! Barb, did you hear that? I made a pun!

  (Cut to Barb with her jaw on the floor as a naked man walks by.)

  Despite its family-friendly facade, the real action happened at the infamous pool. Ah, the pool.

  The best part about staying at the Atlantic Shores, besides the lack of shame, was the pool—specifically, the pool bar. The angel on the snack bar microphone would call out people’s orders in his best Kathleen Turner impression. You’d hear, “Jeff? I have one big, juicy sausage ready for Jeff at the snack bar. Jeff, this wiener is getting cold. Get your ass down here, Jeff.”

  We ate the hell out of that snack bar. I distinctly remember dropping ketchup on my bare chest, using a fry to wipe it off, then eating that fry. And no one batted an eyelash. The only time our naked existence was even acknowledged was when one old bear came up to my friend Kirby and said, “Damn, girl, you are whiter than a refrigerator.” To be fair, Kirby makes me look tan, and I look like I was raised in a cave.

  The Shores was built on a rocky edge of the water, so there was no beach. The pool was actually built on a dock, with a fence to protect it from peepers. However, the fence wasn’t that tall. Occasionally, you’d stand up to stretch your back and hear cheering, only to see a wall of dude bros at the neighboring hotel. They literally would just be waiting, beers in hand, like they were tailgating at a NASCAR race. This doesn’t seem that weird until you remember that we were the only girls there. Surely they weren’t constantly hawking that fence on the chance of seeing, at most, eight pale boobs. These frat bros were peeping at a nudist gay resort. Fraternity homoeroticism at its finest.

  While the days were spent poolside, the nights were out on the town on the main drag of Duval Street. It’s what you would expect from the Florida Keys. Everything is low-key and people crack open their first beer way before noon. It’s basically the incarnation of a Jimmy Buffett song, which makes sense because he lived there for many years, and it’s where he opened his first Margaritaville restaurant.*

  Now, I can totally handle a place having a Jimmy Buffett vibe to it, but I can’t really handle the amount of actual Jimmy Buffett they play in the bars. I sincerely believe that is why everyone drinks so much there—to deal with the constant parrot-head soundtrack.

  Side note: I dated a baseball player for most of high school, and one year he had a superstition that before every game he had to eat grilled salmon and listen to Buffett’s entire Son of a Son of a Sailor album. This was a very difficult spring. Although, it could’ve been worse. He could’ve had one of those superstitions about wearing the same gross-ass pair of underwear all season. But, I’m not judging. I have my own superstition. It’s simple. In order to have a happy life, all I’ve got to do is not date athletes.

  The day came to finally put on my “Day Five” shirt. Here it is, the finale of spring break, and I haven’t so much as made out with anything. I know this is shocking considering the accommodations I chose, but still. I couldn’t go back to North Carolina with my only mistake being that knee-length jean skirt (again, 2005, people).

  We each shelled out twenty dollars to go to a foam party. How my friends dragged me into it, I’ll never know (but Jägermeister might). I don’t like being in things I can’t see the bottom of. I don’t swim in water that isn’t completely clear. This foam party was the adult version of those circumstances. And no amount of soap bubbles can clean what I imagine was on the bottom of that club floor. I lasted five minutes in that bubble bath of bodily fluids.

  We left and went to a bar on Duval. It was then that I fell in love . . . with the fabulous, gay bartender. You would’ve thought he was John Waters seeing Divine for the first time. He bought my girls and me two too many shots, and even sent us up to the private roof bar. He might have vaguely looked like Freddie Mercury, but that night, I was his Queen. I was his Fat Bottomed Girl. I was not telling these types of bad jokes.

  So far our last hurrah in the Keys was going gangbusters. My girls and I danced, and took shots, and we even got our chests painted. I went for a psychedelic theme, complete with tons of glitter. It took us a few minutes of walking around with our glittered-out versions of Starry Night on our bare chests to realize no one was looking. Once again we were surrounded only by gay men. I refused to have gone to spring break without so much as kissing someone, so I threw on my Day Five tank (carefully, because of the paint), said good-bye to my mustachioed new BFF, and left to hit up one more bar, making sure there were obviously straight college guys there before entering.

  And as if on cue, a cute man appeared! And he was super cute. That, or I was super drunk—I didn’t care which one was the truth. We talked for a bit and I thought to myself, I will put my mouth on that mouth. I told him about the Shores, and he told me that he and his friends were staying at a weird bed-and-breakfast that had rabbits running loose on the grounds. I assumed this was either the weirdest or the most brill
iant way to get a girl to come home with you, because I was definitely going to have to see.

  Now, hold up, I didn’t go with him alone. Mama didn’t raise no fool. Well, technically she did, but it was my brother. (Hey, Dave!) I brought my three girls with me for safety. And sure enough, that place had bunnies running all over the place. Key West is fucking weird, you guys.

  So, we all hung by the pool and played with bunnies and continued drinking. Finally “dude” and I took a walk and actually had a deep conversation. If I remember correctly, I believe it went “Blah, blah, blah, put your tongue deep in my throat.”

  (RUTABAGA! I repeat, RUTABAGA!)

  Finally! I am getting a little action! I thought to myself. We started making out and, I gotta admit, he was a great kisser. But apparently, so was I. Because after about three minutes of making out, just when I thought he was gonna go for a boob grab, it happened. It came out of nowhere. Seriously, it came out of nowhere. That’s right. He full-on jizzed in his pants. Even worse, he sounded like a goat while doing it. Not like a cute little goat you’d find at a petting zoo. More like one of those screaming goats that geniuses remix on YouTube.

  In the immortal words of the Beach Boys, we got there fast and then we took it slow. And by that I mean I froze. My tongue was still in his mouth, and I froze like a statue. How do you react to something like this? If this were someone I was dating, I would’ve comforted him and said, “It’s totally fine, babe. Don’t be embarrassed!” Later, at our friends’ dinner parties, we would regale them with the story of our “first kiss,” all while laughing and passing the haricots verts.

  But this wasn’t a guy I liked. This was essentially a stranger. One I would probably never see again. So, what did I do? I remembered what to do if you run into a bear in the woods. I put my hands above my head and slowly walked away, still facing him but avoiding eye contact. I even hummed to break the silence. I full-on hummed “Don’t Cha,” by the Pussycat Dolls, because that shit was the theme of spring break.