Out and About

Friday night I wore my skin tight satin dress, white with silver flowers embroidered all over it. It was Frank’s Deb ball birthday. I drank excessively. There was wine at the birthday dinner, pink champagne and a little whiskey when we stopped at the house to dress, another glass of wine at the bar, a vodka tonic, sips of Dana’s vodka tonic, a beer bought by Mike…then Jason and I left for The Hole where, he insisted, we would do shots of tequila.

When we arrived I convinced him to give me a break first. The place was packed. I ran into two of Asher’s friends who I met in Chicago, but they barely said two words to me. One of those words was, “you look different,” and I was convinced that they were snubbing me because I had been in jeans when I met them before and now I was dressed like a girl. I shrugged them off and Jason and I danced around a bit or did something while Dana flirted with some girls from school. Then Jason said it was time for tequila.

“I’ll puke,” I said, “there is no way, I just know I’ll puke all over the place.”

“Don’t say that!” Jason shouted and I held my tongue.

We sidled up to the bar and he ordered two shots and a Budweiser. The bartender got it wrong and opened a Rolling Rock. Jason corrected her mistake and I got to keep the spare beer. We hit back the shots and Jason immediately puked into his hand. It seemed so unlikely that at first I didn’t believe that that it was really puke, due to this and my impeded motor skills I did not recoil as quickly as I normally would have. Some splashed on my shoe, but otherwise I was golden.

The shot didn’t faze me and I drank the Rolling Rock while we battled our way towards the bathrooms. The lines were endlessly long, so I chose the shorter of the two and pushed our way past, “He just puked!” I announced. “We just need to use the sink!” We easily pushed our way into the first bathroom only to find that there was no sink, just a container of hand sanitizer. We sanitized and exited making our way to the front of the long line.

This was a rough line and simply explaining our circumstance wasn’t quite enough, we had to do a little pushing as well. As the door opened we ran in and shut ourselves inside. We washed up and as we left someone threw a beer bottle at our heads. Luckily Jason got revenge by wiping his still smelly puke hand on them. We decided it was time for food.

We walked for a bit and then I stopped in KGB bar to pee. It was around 4, so the place was completely empty except for a few sleazy stragglers. One of them tried to accost me on the way to the bathroom, but seeing me eagerness to reach the toilet he backed off. When I emerged he put his arm around me and tried to make friends, all I could do was stare at his shaggy chin-length hair and fat wrinkled face and shake my head in disgust saying, “no thank you.” He asked that I at least take a photo with him and I shrugged in agreement. His elderly friend pointed a camera phone at us and clicked. They crouched over the camera and nodded with satisfaction.

“Let me see it,” I demanded. They showed me a completely dark screen. I could decipher what seemed to be the outline of my head. “It’s totally black!” I said accusingly and waved them off, focusing my attention on making it down the very long flight of stairs. I met Jason back down on the street.

We wanted French fries, needed them in fact. Unfortunately all that was available was pizza. I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I took two bites, stood up and walked over to the entranceway of a nearby fine dining restaurant and vomited. I could hear the proprietors exclaiming in Japanese as I retched and I wondered to myself why they didn’t bother trying to chase me away. After throwing up I felt much better, but by now I was sick of wearing satin, so I gathered my clothes and got changed in the doorway of an apartment building a few steps away from where Jason sat finishing my slice. The pizza place had a bathroom, but this was simpler than negotiating the stairs. We hopped into a cab and high tailed it back to Astoria, chatting about throwing up the whole ride home.