Mad-Town
There's nothing like a road trip, especially if it takes 3 hours of driving or less.
Fortunately for me, my buddy Al from b-school lives up in Madison, Wisconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, thousands of hotties, and cheap beer. Al is always ready for guests, as his penchant for misbehavior and debauchery is strongly akin to mine, and he's in a great place to excercise his party muscle.
I spoke with my buddy Seamus, who's been dying to get up there. He found out at the last second that he had to work that night. That sucks.
Then my sister called and made some shitty comments when I mentioned that I wanted to go look at a bar up there. She snapped at me and I snapped back, and in the end she played the innocent. What a crock of crap.
Within seconds of hanging up on my sister, my mom called. (will I ever be old enough that my sister doesn't go run to ma every time someone/something pisses her off? I doubt it.) My mom launched into an absolute ass-ripping, and I'll spare all the details but to say that she has a hard time respecting me and that I'm a huge disappointment. She finished the call by saying, "Have a good time in Madison." I replied, "Have a good time in Madison?! I think I'm going to go kill myself!" I mean, have a great freakin' weekend!
Now that I had the motivation to prove that I could do something right, I threw my toothbrush and a flask of Ketel One into my bag and left. It was a little after 5, so I told Al I'd be there before 8. He said to call me when I got into the city, and that he'd direct me to whichever bar he was at.
Unfortunately, I forgot that it was the mother of all traffic weekends: Memorial Day. Everybody and their mother was on the tollroad up to Lake Geneva and the other resort towns in southern Wisco, so I was pretty screwed. What is typically a two-and-a-half hour car trip increased by an hour, so it was almost 9 when I showed up to the bar.
I was pissed as hell that I was so freakin' late. When I walked up to the Red Room, I immediately ordered Jaegerbombs and a Millter Lite--and did the same thing again about 10 minutes later. Al's roommates, Sampson and Brock, were staring at me in shock. "Dude, you're going to be on the floor if you keep it up like that," Sampson said. "You're a nice guy, Sampson, but you obviously don't know shit about me! Watch and learn!"
To be honest, I was nominally drunk (but not at all shitfaced) when we left the Red Room after about a half hour. I could feel the drinks sloshing around my empty stomach, but I was in no way drunk.
We went next door to Wondo's, which is a fairly typical college bar: hot waitresses, slutty patrons, lots of booze--my kind of joint. We started doing shots immediately, and I bet Sampson that I could rack up a $30 bar tab in under a half hour. (That doesn't sound like that much money, but remember: this is Wisconsin, not Chicago or New York.) Needless to say, I finished off the 8 drinks necessary to exceed our bet, and at that point I was starting to feel drunk.
Just then, a somewhat attractive blonde and brunette started sidling up to us, asking us for drinks. "Drinks? No chance," I said. "Show us your tits," Al said. Believe it or not, this is how easy the girls are in Madison: they were much, much, MUCH more offended that I turned down their demand for drinks than they were at Al's request.
The blonde girl was Wisconsin attractive, which means very flawed but very nice. It turned out she's also a big Star Wars fan, so we talked about Revenge of the Sith, and what she liked and didn't like about it. She said I reminded her of Anakin Skywalker. Funny: others have likened Drunken Pat more to Darth Vader.
After a little more Red Bull, the girl was starting to look downright attractive, in spite of her flaws. When she asked me if I wanted to try a fish bowl, I assumed it was some weird sex game or something, so I said, "Hell yeah!" and headed for the door. "Hey!" she said. "What about the fish bowl?" I sheepishly walked back over to the bar, confused as to why she and I weren't on our way to some bizzarre curled-up position in her dorm room.
I got back to the bar in just enough time to see the bartender hand her a rather literal fish bowl filled with some sort of blue liquid, ice, and about 10 straws. She said, "Here, have a taste." Taste? I don't taste; I chug. About halfway through the fishbowl (or at least 10 ounces of that crap), I still had no idea what it was. Just then Drunken Al started pulling on her shirt, and she reeled back with, "Hey! I'm not that kind of girl!" and immediately thereafter, "Oh my god, you drank like half of it already! You're screwed!" I mumbled something like, "Do you want to do the screwing?" when she and the fishbowl were pulled away by a short, fat blonde with big boobs. "Wench!" drunken Al screamed after her. She stopped and said, "Who's a wench?" But Al said, "Ah, screw them!" And they stumbled off.
We took that as a sign to resume the bar crawl, and we went all over the place. I lost track of how many bars we hit, but I remember somewhere in the vicinity of five or six, with multiple drinks at each. The fishbowl had, indeed, screwed me.
It was at Madison Avenue that I had the great pleasure of seeing Brock--who had been sitting off to the side most of the night in an early and vaginal drunken stupor--intentionally drop his beer so that he would not have to drink it. "What'd you do that for?!" Al screamed. "I don't want it, man. Screw that beer." He was completely done. I remember him suddenly not being there a few minutes later, presumably on his way home.
Then we went to Mad Hatter's, truly a sign of how drunk we were. It's a dump, impressive only for its hot barmaids and cheap pitchers of beer. We definitely did not need cheap pitchers at that point, but that's exactly what we had. Al happens to be in love with one of the bartenders there, but she was unfortunately not working. Ah well, we had a shot in honor of how hot she is anyway. Then a pitcher. And another shot. And a final pitcher. I started to hit on a hot girl with a big-ass blonde pony tail. She was very tall and receptive, but the wanna-be-her-boyfriend she got stuck out with on a date apparently didn't take to me too much. Well, fuck him, I kept hitting on her anyway, as Al and Sampson (Brock must have been safely tucked in at that point) took turns corralling him and buying him drinks so as to distract him. The girl was hot, but I was teetering on the edge of blackout, so I don't remember how (or why, or if) our conversation ended. By the time Al declared that it was time for food, I was a fucking mess. I could have been easily persuaded to join the Army, that's how hammered I was.
I have the vaugest whisps of recognition of being at BW3, a buffalo wing specialy chain. (It's owned the same guys who run the restaurant of the same name on Lincoln Ave.). Al said I mumbled incoherence, something like, "I need more cigarettes." With that, I stumbled out into the streets, a wild and loose maniac in a city all but totally unfamiliar to me.
I remember breaking up two guys who were on the verge of brawling; they gave each other a big hug and admitted they were just drunk (as I suspected). I somewhat remember going back into Mad Hatter's to resume hitting on the hot blonde, but I can't say for sure how long I was in there. I remember walking down the street, and I remember thanking the stars it wasn't raining. I remember it being about 2 in the morning.
Then, total darkness.
Next thing I knew, it was 5 in the morning, and I was standing in front of a gas station. I ran my fingers through my hair and, OUCH!, discovered a bumb the size of a baseball on the back of my head. I realized just then that the left side of my jaw was rather tender, and the area where the jaw met the right ear hurt as well. These injuries combined to create a freight train of pain that suddenly came flying forth into my head. I stood there for a moment, trying to get my shit together. Amazingly, I still had my watch, wallet, all credit and ID cards, and car keys.
My cell phone was dead, so I went into the gas station to buy some cigs and use the phone. The poor high school kid stuck working the late shift looked terrified. I was, of course, the kindest patron imaginable; it's just that he had to deal with Drunken Pat. He's never seen anything like it, and I doubt he ever will. Thankfully, Al had left me about 10 messages on voicemail with his street address. If he hadn't done so, I would have had no way of getting in touch with him, would have probably ended up spending the night in a hotel downtown, and might never have tracked down my car.
A cab showed up and asked me how to get to Al's house, and I started laughing. "Look, lady, this is my second time here, I just drove in 8 hours ago, I've got a bump on my head the size of a grapefruit, and I don't know where I've been for the last three hours. Call me crazy if I ask you to handle navigation duties." She gave me an evil look, and put the car in gear.
Of course, Al lives nowhere near the downtown bars, and I'm pretty sure I passed out on the ride. The cabbie wanted to help me in, but I told her to go find some other drunk to get home safely.
The doors of Al's house were all locked. Crap. I tried the garage code, which I found out later that I had remembered it correctly. Unfortunately, I totally lacked the motor functionalities required to type use the keypad. So I went around to the sliding door in back, and started wailing on the door. Angus the dog ran up and started barking. Thank god. One of those idiots should wake up. Sure enough, Sampson pulled the door aside and exclaimed, "Oh my god, bro, you look like shit!!! Get onto the couch!"
I dutifully dropped onto the couch, but Angus was intent on getting some action off me. I kept trying to throw him to the floor, but he was persistent as hell. Earlier in the night, I'd mentioned to Al that I thought he was crazy for not getting Angus' balls clipped, that there would be negative repercussions. Sure enough, I found myself being raped by a teenaged English Mastiff. After a few minutes of wrestling a canine, I had enough. I stumbled into Al's room, made sure the dog (and his libido) stayed in the hall, and passed out on the empty half of Al's bed.
The next morning, after universal declarations of amazement at my ability to find my way to safety in a strange city while completely blacked out, we attempted to dislodge from my mind the details of the night. We were wholly unsuccessful.
Al and I planned on stopping by my family's golf course in Kenosha, which Al had never seen. Neither of us had figured, however, to have first-class hangovers all morning. We didn't even leave Madison city limits until 2, and I was still in considerable disarry at that advanced hour. My head was throbbing, from the dual blow of hangover and mystery bump.
Before heading to golf, we stopped by a hot tub warehouse in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. Al is intent on making his back porch the center of the Madison social universe, so he became very intently engaged in conversation with the fat-ass pool salesman. I stood there for about ten minutes until an enormous wave of nausea began to brew. I hustled back to the car, jacked the seat all the way back, and calmly talked myself down from puking. Abe finally knocked on the window, and said, "Sack up, Sleeping Beauty. I'm following you." We got back on the road and into Kenosha in no time.
Upon arriving at the course, I took reams of crap from the regulars (who were, needless to say, drunk) about how terrible I looked. I made them feel the still massive bump on my head (they were appalled), and I bought them a round of beers.
Though I own a golf course, I never took to the game but as a consolation prize, I've become the greatest golf cart driver in the history of man. Al's becoming a bit of a golf fanatic, and he flew through a nearly emptry 18 holes in (I'm not kidding) 2 hours. It was like speed golf. He didn't even bother to keep score.
We tossed about business ideas, as often happens on the golf course, and Al nagged at me to get my real estate license and move up to Madison. Seriously, if I move up there and maintain my current level of party, I would die of liver cancer within a year. But he's got some wild-sounding ideas that he always seems to make happen. I'm going to take the test, and maybe we'll just try to do business from two different cities. I know he's done a number of deals in Chicago already, so maybe we'll step it up down here. Maybe we'll both just split time between here and there. That's where we left it.
On the 18th green, I asked Al to toss me his cell phone so I could check my messages. I had three messages. The first two were Drunken Al mumbling his address. The third was the keeper.
"Hi, Pat, it's Maria. I'm just calling to see if you're still alive and got home okay, so give me a call. Hope you're okay. Bye."
I fell onto the grass laughing my ass off, as I threw the phone to Abe. He too started laughing hysterically. I guess I hooked up with a girl named Maria. (I hope it was good--not that it matters.) Unfortunately, because my phone was out of batteries, it didn't register her number in caller i.d., and she didn't leave her number. I'd love to find out a) if I had been able to perform with any semblance of skill in that state, and b) if she knew how I'd gotten the nasty bump on my head. The answer lies in Maria, but Maria lies in shadows.
We took my car to the cheap cigarette gas station at Sheridan and Russell, and did some browsing in my favorite porn shack, Sheridan News and Video. Then we picked up Al's car again back at the course. He was meeting up with his old roommate in Chicago, and he told me to call or stop by when I cleaned up. We followed each other for most of the way down, until Al pulled off onto the Edens. I took the tollroad past O'Hare, because you can drive so much faster on the tollway.
With my head still pounding something awful, I was lucky to make it across the street from my garage to my building. I got into my place at 8:56, almost exactly 24 hours after I had arrived in Madison, and I didn't even have the energy to take a shower. I was asleep before the clock said 9.
Mad-Town is pretty awesome.
Fortunately for me, my buddy Al from b-school lives up in Madison, Wisconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, thousands of hotties, and cheap beer. Al is always ready for guests, as his penchant for misbehavior and debauchery is strongly akin to mine, and he's in a great place to excercise his party muscle.
I spoke with my buddy Seamus, who's been dying to get up there. He found out at the last second that he had to work that night. That sucks.
Then my sister called and made some shitty comments when I mentioned that I wanted to go look at a bar up there. She snapped at me and I snapped back, and in the end she played the innocent. What a crock of crap.
Within seconds of hanging up on my sister, my mom called. (will I ever be old enough that my sister doesn't go run to ma every time someone/something pisses her off? I doubt it.) My mom launched into an absolute ass-ripping, and I'll spare all the details but to say that she has a hard time respecting me and that I'm a huge disappointment. She finished the call by saying, "Have a good time in Madison." I replied, "Have a good time in Madison?! I think I'm going to go kill myself!" I mean, have a great freakin' weekend!
Now that I had the motivation to prove that I could do something right, I threw my toothbrush and a flask of Ketel One into my bag and left. It was a little after 5, so I told Al I'd be there before 8. He said to call me when I got into the city, and that he'd direct me to whichever bar he was at.
Unfortunately, I forgot that it was the mother of all traffic weekends: Memorial Day. Everybody and their mother was on the tollroad up to Lake Geneva and the other resort towns in southern Wisco, so I was pretty screwed. What is typically a two-and-a-half hour car trip increased by an hour, so it was almost 9 when I showed up to the bar.
I was pissed as hell that I was so freakin' late. When I walked up to the Red Room, I immediately ordered Jaegerbombs and a Millter Lite--and did the same thing again about 10 minutes later. Al's roommates, Sampson and Brock, were staring at me in shock. "Dude, you're going to be on the floor if you keep it up like that," Sampson said. "You're a nice guy, Sampson, but you obviously don't know shit about me! Watch and learn!"
To be honest, I was nominally drunk (but not at all shitfaced) when we left the Red Room after about a half hour. I could feel the drinks sloshing around my empty stomach, but I was in no way drunk.
We went next door to Wondo's, which is a fairly typical college bar: hot waitresses, slutty patrons, lots of booze--my kind of joint. We started doing shots immediately, and I bet Sampson that I could rack up a $30 bar tab in under a half hour. (That doesn't sound like that much money, but remember: this is Wisconsin, not Chicago or New York.) Needless to say, I finished off the 8 drinks necessary to exceed our bet, and at that point I was starting to feel drunk.
Just then, a somewhat attractive blonde and brunette started sidling up to us, asking us for drinks. "Drinks? No chance," I said. "Show us your tits," Al said. Believe it or not, this is how easy the girls are in Madison: they were much, much, MUCH more offended that I turned down their demand for drinks than they were at Al's request.
The blonde girl was Wisconsin attractive, which means very flawed but very nice. It turned out she's also a big Star Wars fan, so we talked about Revenge of the Sith, and what she liked and didn't like about it. She said I reminded her of Anakin Skywalker. Funny: others have likened Drunken Pat more to Darth Vader.
After a little more Red Bull, the girl was starting to look downright attractive, in spite of her flaws. When she asked me if I wanted to try a fish bowl, I assumed it was some weird sex game or something, so I said, "Hell yeah!" and headed for the door. "Hey!" she said. "What about the fish bowl?" I sheepishly walked back over to the bar, confused as to why she and I weren't on our way to some bizzarre curled-up position in her dorm room.
I got back to the bar in just enough time to see the bartender hand her a rather literal fish bowl filled with some sort of blue liquid, ice, and about 10 straws. She said, "Here, have a taste." Taste? I don't taste; I chug. About halfway through the fishbowl (or at least 10 ounces of that crap), I still had no idea what it was. Just then Drunken Al started pulling on her shirt, and she reeled back with, "Hey! I'm not that kind of girl!" and immediately thereafter, "Oh my god, you drank like half of it already! You're screwed!" I mumbled something like, "Do you want to do the screwing?" when she and the fishbowl were pulled away by a short, fat blonde with big boobs. "Wench!" drunken Al screamed after her. She stopped and said, "Who's a wench?" But Al said, "Ah, screw them!" And they stumbled off.
We took that as a sign to resume the bar crawl, and we went all over the place. I lost track of how many bars we hit, but I remember somewhere in the vicinity of five or six, with multiple drinks at each. The fishbowl had, indeed, screwed me.
It was at Madison Avenue that I had the great pleasure of seeing Brock--who had been sitting off to the side most of the night in an early and vaginal drunken stupor--intentionally drop his beer so that he would not have to drink it. "What'd you do that for?!" Al screamed. "I don't want it, man. Screw that beer." He was completely done. I remember him suddenly not being there a few minutes later, presumably on his way home.
Then we went to Mad Hatter's, truly a sign of how drunk we were. It's a dump, impressive only for its hot barmaids and cheap pitchers of beer. We definitely did not need cheap pitchers at that point, but that's exactly what we had. Al happens to be in love with one of the bartenders there, but she was unfortunately not working. Ah well, we had a shot in honor of how hot she is anyway. Then a pitcher. And another shot. And a final pitcher. I started to hit on a hot girl with a big-ass blonde pony tail. She was very tall and receptive, but the wanna-be-her-boyfriend she got stuck out with on a date apparently didn't take to me too much. Well, fuck him, I kept hitting on her anyway, as Al and Sampson (Brock must have been safely tucked in at that point) took turns corralling him and buying him drinks so as to distract him. The girl was hot, but I was teetering on the edge of blackout, so I don't remember how (or why, or if) our conversation ended. By the time Al declared that it was time for food, I was a fucking mess. I could have been easily persuaded to join the Army, that's how hammered I was.
I have the vaugest whisps of recognition of being at BW3, a buffalo wing specialy chain. (It's owned the same guys who run the restaurant of the same name on Lincoln Ave.). Al said I mumbled incoherence, something like, "I need more cigarettes." With that, I stumbled out into the streets, a wild and loose maniac in a city all but totally unfamiliar to me.
I remember breaking up two guys who were on the verge of brawling; they gave each other a big hug and admitted they were just drunk (as I suspected). I somewhat remember going back into Mad Hatter's to resume hitting on the hot blonde, but I can't say for sure how long I was in there. I remember walking down the street, and I remember thanking the stars it wasn't raining. I remember it being about 2 in the morning.
Then, total darkness.
Next thing I knew, it was 5 in the morning, and I was standing in front of a gas station. I ran my fingers through my hair and, OUCH!, discovered a bumb the size of a baseball on the back of my head. I realized just then that the left side of my jaw was rather tender, and the area where the jaw met the right ear hurt as well. These injuries combined to create a freight train of pain that suddenly came flying forth into my head. I stood there for a moment, trying to get my shit together. Amazingly, I still had my watch, wallet, all credit and ID cards, and car keys.
My cell phone was dead, so I went into the gas station to buy some cigs and use the phone. The poor high school kid stuck working the late shift looked terrified. I was, of course, the kindest patron imaginable; it's just that he had to deal with Drunken Pat. He's never seen anything like it, and I doubt he ever will. Thankfully, Al had left me about 10 messages on voicemail with his street address. If he hadn't done so, I would have had no way of getting in touch with him, would have probably ended up spending the night in a hotel downtown, and might never have tracked down my car.
A cab showed up and asked me how to get to Al's house, and I started laughing. "Look, lady, this is my second time here, I just drove in 8 hours ago, I've got a bump on my head the size of a grapefruit, and I don't know where I've been for the last three hours. Call me crazy if I ask you to handle navigation duties." She gave me an evil look, and put the car in gear.
Of course, Al lives nowhere near the downtown bars, and I'm pretty sure I passed out on the ride. The cabbie wanted to help me in, but I told her to go find some other drunk to get home safely.
The doors of Al's house were all locked. Crap. I tried the garage code, which I found out later that I had remembered it correctly. Unfortunately, I totally lacked the motor functionalities required to type use the keypad. So I went around to the sliding door in back, and started wailing on the door. Angus the dog ran up and started barking. Thank god. One of those idiots should wake up. Sure enough, Sampson pulled the door aside and exclaimed, "Oh my god, bro, you look like shit!!! Get onto the couch!"
I dutifully dropped onto the couch, but Angus was intent on getting some action off me. I kept trying to throw him to the floor, but he was persistent as hell. Earlier in the night, I'd mentioned to Al that I thought he was crazy for not getting Angus' balls clipped, that there would be negative repercussions. Sure enough, I found myself being raped by a teenaged English Mastiff. After a few minutes of wrestling a canine, I had enough. I stumbled into Al's room, made sure the dog (and his libido) stayed in the hall, and passed out on the empty half of Al's bed.
The next morning, after universal declarations of amazement at my ability to find my way to safety in a strange city while completely blacked out, we attempted to dislodge from my mind the details of the night. We were wholly unsuccessful.
Al and I planned on stopping by my family's golf course in Kenosha, which Al had never seen. Neither of us had figured, however, to have first-class hangovers all morning. We didn't even leave Madison city limits until 2, and I was still in considerable disarry at that advanced hour. My head was throbbing, from the dual blow of hangover and mystery bump.
Before heading to golf, we stopped by a hot tub warehouse in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. Al is intent on making his back porch the center of the Madison social universe, so he became very intently engaged in conversation with the fat-ass pool salesman. I stood there for about ten minutes until an enormous wave of nausea began to brew. I hustled back to the car, jacked the seat all the way back, and calmly talked myself down from puking. Abe finally knocked on the window, and said, "Sack up, Sleeping Beauty. I'm following you." We got back on the road and into Kenosha in no time.
Upon arriving at the course, I took reams of crap from the regulars (who were, needless to say, drunk) about how terrible I looked. I made them feel the still massive bump on my head (they were appalled), and I bought them a round of beers.
Though I own a golf course, I never took to the game but as a consolation prize, I've become the greatest golf cart driver in the history of man. Al's becoming a bit of a golf fanatic, and he flew through a nearly emptry 18 holes in (I'm not kidding) 2 hours. It was like speed golf. He didn't even bother to keep score.
We tossed about business ideas, as often happens on the golf course, and Al nagged at me to get my real estate license and move up to Madison. Seriously, if I move up there and maintain my current level of party, I would die of liver cancer within a year. But he's got some wild-sounding ideas that he always seems to make happen. I'm going to take the test, and maybe we'll just try to do business from two different cities. I know he's done a number of deals in Chicago already, so maybe we'll step it up down here. Maybe we'll both just split time between here and there. That's where we left it.
On the 18th green, I asked Al to toss me his cell phone so I could check my messages. I had three messages. The first two were Drunken Al mumbling his address. The third was the keeper.
"Hi, Pat, it's Maria. I'm just calling to see if you're still alive and got home okay, so give me a call. Hope you're okay. Bye."
I fell onto the grass laughing my ass off, as I threw the phone to Abe. He too started laughing hysterically. I guess I hooked up with a girl named Maria. (I hope it was good--not that it matters.) Unfortunately, because my phone was out of batteries, it didn't register her number in caller i.d., and she didn't leave her number. I'd love to find out a) if I had been able to perform with any semblance of skill in that state, and b) if she knew how I'd gotten the nasty bump on my head. The answer lies in Maria, but Maria lies in shadows.
We took my car to the cheap cigarette gas station at Sheridan and Russell, and did some browsing in my favorite porn shack, Sheridan News and Video. Then we picked up Al's car again back at the course. He was meeting up with his old roommate in Chicago, and he told me to call or stop by when I cleaned up. We followed each other for most of the way down, until Al pulled off onto the Edens. I took the tollroad past O'Hare, because you can drive so much faster on the tollway.
With my head still pounding something awful, I was lucky to make it across the street from my garage to my building. I got into my place at 8:56, almost exactly 24 hours after I had arrived in Madison, and I didn't even have the energy to take a shower. I was asleep before the clock said 9.
Mad-Town is pretty awesome.
posted by Pat at 3:17 PM
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