"Oh my god
Becky, look at her butt..."
Inside the bar, which still smelled of last night's beer and the failed attempts to clean it up, the music was blaring through two huge, carpet covered speakers in the center of the dance floor. It was dark inside, and despite the fact that we had missed "actual" Spring Break week, the place was fairly packed. Women in practically see-through wife-beaters sold beer out of remote beer stations throughout the bar; small, ice-filled coolers jammed with cans of Bud Light, Bud, and MGD. Frat Boys (way more frat boy looking than us) threw down cold Jagermeister shots and ogled the meat market around them, periodically peeling their eyes off of the multitude of partially exposed breats to smack each other with joyous high-fives. Within minutes, we were high-fiving too, like the monkeys around us.
"So Fellas (yeah) Fellas (yeah)
Has your girlfriend got the butt (hell yeah)
Tell her to shake it, (shake it), shake it, (shake it), shake that healthy butt...
Baby got back"
"SPRING BREAK!" we cheered as our canned American beers clinked sloppily above us. None of us could dance, and yet somehow we found ourselves desperately trying to fake it in a sea of hair and Obsession perfume and cologne. We took advantage of the shooters girls in "Candy Store" baby-doll tees, tray passing test-tubes of Alabama Slammers, Fuzzy Navels, and Slippery Nipples. Lights and bass filled the room and the DJ announced, "Alright ladies, are you ready to get those tee-shirts....WET?"
Cheers, beers, tears of joy from Ben and I. Mike and Jesse high fived and hugged each other in elation. We were on Spring Break.
"...Cuz them punks like to hit it and quit it
And I'd rather stay and play
Cuz I'm long and I'm strong
And I'm down to get the friction on..."
Blurry images of pitchers of water poured on beautiful women and shooters and Jagermeister and shotgunning beers and dancing like we could, and feeling like the trip might actually be worth all of the work it took to get here and so many wet tee-shirts and beautiful, wonderful boobies...
"We gotta go."
I blinked. If this was girl trying to take me home, she had a very deep voice. I turned to see Mike, who looked as drunk as I felt, struggling to focus on me with a very serious look on his face.
"My anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns hon..."
"But, my anaconda..." I began.
"Seriously, we have to go. I told my dad we'd be there," he said.
It took me a second to catch up. Oh SHIT. The bar-b-que.
"Oh, man. But this is fucking AWESOME," I pleaded.
"We'll come back," he assured me. Yeah, right. I didn't believe it for a second. I knew he meant it, but I also knew that we wouldn't be back. Not that night at least. Jesse and Ben walked over, draining the last of their beers. Apparently, I was the last to be reminded of the fact that our short foray into some semblance of a real Spring Break© was about to end for the evening. I sighed, finished off my Bud Light, and left it on the sticky, booze-soaked bar. "Fine, let's go."
We hopped in a taxi and headed back to Mike's house, all of us way beyond buzzed and deep into full-on drunk.
The bar-b-que was not a party. It was, in fact, a bunch of people standing around, sitting in lawn chairs, reminiscing about things of which we did not know or care about, and grilling conch (more on that later).
The small house had a chain-link fenced yard, and was surrounded by houses with similar layouts. It was the sort of area where, if being chased by police, you would have to climb over a bunch of fences to get away. The sittingdown-b-que had an odd assortment of characters, who all easily could have starred in an episode of COPS (come to think of it, as drunk as we were by the time we arrived, we were quickly becoming candidates too). There was:
Kenny the fugitive, who was on the run from some kind of legal problems up in New England. He drove a Toyota pickup with a Rock 101 sticker on it. He had crazy eyes and looked like the kind of guy that might kill you with a tire iron if you pissed him off.
The Goat. The most stereotypical stoner I've ever seen. He had a round head of frizzy hair and a goat-like beard. I'm guessing that was not a coincidence. Most of the things he said were unintelligible and he was the butt of all of his friends' jokes.
Wolfie. Wolfie was actually the most dignified of the crew. He sipped red wine as the rest of us downed watery canned beer and chuckled with an air of superiority as The Goat told stories about some "pig" he almost "nailed."
"The Women." They were all wearing eyeshadow. That's what sticks in my head. As far as I remember, they were all spouses or girlfriends of the men in attendance. Mike's dad promised us women, he just never promised they'd be single. Or under 30. Or attractive. Although their husbands or boyfriends were there with them, that didn't stop any of them from hanging all over the new meat (us), at their nightly bar-b-que.
I missed the wet tee-shirts and Obsession. Instead, we were now faced with ladies in purple and turquoise tank tops that said things like...
"I'm not as think as you drunk I am."
...and in airbrushed cursive...
"Ft. Lauderdale."
I'm always suspicious of people who wear shirts emblazoned with the name of the city they live in. If it's airbrushed, add 30% to that suspicion. If it's a purple or turquoise loose-fitting tanktop, get the fuck away. It's not a fair scale, but it works.
Unfortunately, getting the fuck out of there was not an option for us. To be fair, Mike's dad was kind enough to provide us a place to stay, and we were polite kids. We didn't want to insult him by blowing off his bar-b-que. At least, I wasn't.
And suddenly, I was drunk enough to start enjoying it.
Alcohol can be a great equalizer when dealing with people you wouldn't normally give the time of day to in real life. Somehow, Kenny and I became drinking buddies. Before I knew it, we were pounding beers together and he was explaining the fine art of grilling conch. As I chewed the rubbery shellfish, which is actually a marine snail that lives in the beautiful shells some people make horns out of, I decided to give myself over to the situation we were in. That happens to me sometimes in life. I realize that there is no clear way out of an otherwise undesirable situation, so I decide to make the best of it and try to enjoy the things the other people around me are enjoying. I think it helped that someone was passing around a joint. One of the nice things about pot is that it can make you hungry enough to eat marine snails, and high enough not to care that you're eating something known as a marine snail. That much, I know.
The Goat became even more unintelligible as the night wore on, but I had over the course of the night, become one of the people using him as the butt of jokes. Before long, I was high-fiving Kenny about the fact that "the goat couldn't get laid by his own wife with someone else's dick!" Hahahaha. {high five}.
After lots of awesome jokes just like that one, I noticed that Kenny and The Goat and I were the only people left. In my state, time had forgotten it's rules and the things I normally would have noticed; like everyone else leaving (including my three friends) went somehow unnoticed.
"Holy shit, we're the only three left, " I slurred to Kenny.
"The only two is more like it," Kenny said, pointing to my right.
The Goat was snoring in the lawn chair, mouth agape.
It was fugitive Kenny and I left at the bar-b-que, with no sign of anyone else.
"Hey, do you want to go for a ride?" Kenny asked me.
I was drunk, but I wasn't stupid.
"Sure," I told him.
Oh yeah, I guess I was stupid.
"I'll get my truck," he told me, as I wondered how quick my death would be, "Let's go fucking PARTY."
Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.
"WoooooooohooooooOO!" I yelled.
Drunk Shane had apparently buried the body of Rational Shane, and he was making the decisions now.
Where have you gone Sir Mix-a-Lot...
