There is No Such Thing as a Free Beer

I studied the airport terminal map for any place serving alcohol. Unfamiliar with most of the chains listed under the restaurants category, I settled on some place in Terminal A that had the word Brewery in its name. I weaved through the other miserable travelers until I found it and took a seat on an empty bar stool. The dinner rush had just ended. The bartender said hello with an exaggerated flamboyant lisp. I scanned the beer taps until I found one I recognized.

“I’ll start with a pint of Blue Moon, and when that’s about three quarters finished, I’d like you to pour me a double gin and seven.”

“Absolutely,” he said before walking off to fill up my beer.

I opened my laptop and hammered away revising a short story. The internet wasn’t free in the terminal, which pissed me off. I sent Lifeat160 (aka Shane) a text saying where I was. Typical in my inability to prepare, I hadn’t recorded when Shane’s flight was touching down. I knew it was within an hour of mine. I was in the process of texting the lone female attending the drinking contest (as our baby-sitter) for Shane’s contact information when a text flashed across the screen.

Shane: I’m in fucking Terminal D.

Griffin: You want to walk over and have a drink or should I head down that way? Doesn’t matter to me. It’s a three minute walk.

Shane: Fucking on my way. Have white hat on.

I pictured an angry Texan in a white cowboy hat stomping his boots in frustration of having to walk four hundred feet. A short time later, a mid-twenties looking guy walked toward the bar wearing a white ball cap. I hesitated for a second until I was sure it was Shane. The self-promoted Lifeat160 Logo on his hat made it obvious.  We shook hands. I was pleased to see he wore a hoodie, which was also my choice of travel attire, and not some eight thousand dollar custom tailored designer suit.

“Why are you so mad? Walking two terminals over is too much for you?” I said, closing my laptop before packing it back into my suitcase.

“No, but I passed five places serving booze that were better than this dump.” Shane sat on a stool.

“Bullshit. Maybe inside the security, but what if we flew into different terminals? This was the only place I could find outside security, unless Subway serves beer.”

“Whatever,” Shane leaned over the bar on two elbows to examine the liquor selection. “This place doesn’t have shit for liquor.” He flagged the bartender and ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks. I ordered another double gin.  Shane and I exchanged stories over three more doubles a piece until we decided to call another writer, TrembletheDevil, who lived nearby for a ride to our hotel. He agreed to pick us up, and before long we were in his car to make the forty minute trek to downtown DC.

We hit up a low key pub on Tremble’s recommendation instead of dropping off our luggage at the hotel. Shane had booked a “balling” expensive-as-hell room for us the Thursday night before we moved to a larger suite for the weekend to participate in the proper drinking contest. Inside the bar, the three of us took seats at the bar. The patio outside was packed with people, but we stayed away because the loud and rowdy environment wasn’t conducive to conversation. I ordered another double gin and seven, as did Tremble. Shane stuck with Jim Beam.

We discussed writing and publishing. Tremble ordered chicken wings. Shane got a side of fries. I elected not to eat, aside from stealing a chicken wing off Tremble, because it would only work against the buzz I was trying to cultivate.

At one point I looked over at Tremble, who has a good three to four inches of height on me and probably forty pounds, “Hey, do you think I could kick your ass in wrestling?”

Without missing a beat and without emotion, he replied “no.” Tremble had wrestled rather successfully in high school and college, and was still a coach.

“What if we wrestled fifty matches? I’m sure I would win one of them.”

“Not a chance. I would destroy you every time.” Tremble said, tearing a meat from bone.

“Sounds like we’ve got a challenge for the drinking contest. Can you hook me up with a unitard?”

Shane jumped in to ask if Tremble had the keys to the gym he coached at. Soon the conversation was derailed with drunken plans to wreak havoc at the gym after hours. Tremble seemed less than enthusiastic at the idea. Eventually I had to take a leak. In my search for the bathroom, I came across a beer pong table in the back room. I mentioned it to Tremble and Shane upon my return. Shane went to investigate and before long had trash talked his way into playing the next game.

When the two of them had finished eating, Shane ordered two ounces of Jim Beam and mocked my gin. I scoffed at his false bravado and changed my order to match his.

“Now you’re drinking a man’s drink,” Shane spewed arrogance before slamming back the entire drink.

I took a sip not realizing he was doing the whole glass, “Well shit. I didn’t know you were chugging it.” I let my tastebuds adjust to the bourbon  and then downed the rest of the glass.

“We’ll do it again, then.” Shane said, flagging the bartender down and demanding two more drinks. We emptied the booze down our throats. We were ready for beer pong. With a fresh pitcher of shitty beer, we walked into the backroom.

The area surrounding the beer pong table was sparsely populated. An older couple sat on one end locked in a battle with two dudes. A couple of guidos hit on some unattractive females. Aside from these few people and ourselves, only the occasional patron searching for the bathroom came through.

Shane, his confidence heightened further by the alcohol, continued the trash talking. In a similar spirit, I demonstrated my drinking prowess – “what kind of a pussy leaves behind an entire full beer?” – by downing half a leftover beer at a side table, saving our fresh pitcher for the actual match. Shane matched my awesomeness by grabbing the glass from my hand and polishing off the second half.

We spent the next ten minutes talking shit to random people in the bar until the current game of beer pong finished. When it was over, Shane and I filled up our cups and took our rightful position in front of the table. The old couple had won. Tremble was content with sitting aside and watching us make fools of ourselves. I stepped up and missed my first shot. The old guy nailed his, and I downed a cup. Shane took his first shot and it glanced off a rim. The old lady missed her shot. I took my next shot and drained it. My first successful beer pong shot in my life (I usually don’t play drinking games, it takes too long to get drunk). I raised my arms in celebration. Before I could scream more about how skilled I was, Tremble and the other team were ruining my moment. Apparently there was some bullshit rules violation about my elbow crossing the plain of the table and thus disqualifying my shot. Fucking bureaucrats. The old couple let it slide though, probably suspecting I was about to flip the table.

When Shane stepped up for his next shot, he announced himself like he was making a WWE ring entrance. All the hype was for not as he missed wildly. He was so pissed he insisted on taking another shot, and this time didn’t even hit the table. I laughed. Enraged at his inadequacy, Shane attempted to refill his beer at a nearby tap. Problem was, the tap was part of a disconnected portable bar. A bartender walked by and shook his head as Shane pulled at the tap and I tried to explain why beer wasn’t coming out.

I went back to fill up my beer beside the beer pong table. Shane took a seat in a chair beside the table, crossed his arms, rested his chin against his chest and began rambling to himself, occasionally raising his voice to talk about how much money he makes. I took a step back and my legs gave out. Unable to regain my balance I smacked the back of my head against another table. I was quite surprised as I lay sprawled out on my back. I propped myself back up to my feet, rubbing the back of my head in modest embarrassment.

At this point Tremble stepped in for the incapacitated Shane who was teetering on the brink of unconsciousness. I said to Tremble, “How the fuck does this guy expect to win a drinking contest, if he can’t even handle a few ounces of bourbon?”

Tremble took over shooting duties for the team until some random guy joined in the game. I could hardly stand up straight, let alone throw a ping pong ball. They were able to pull out a victory over the couple.

***

We’re outside the bar. Shane is sitting on the curb. Tremble has the hood of Shane’s sweatshirt in his fist to make Shane appear as though he is conscious while we flag down a cab. A cab stops outside the bar. Tremble goes to talk to the driver. Shane falls back on the sidewalk. He begins gurgling in his own vomit.

***

Tremble is pissed. Three cabs have refused to take us to our hotel. The two of us also realize we have no idea where Shane booked the fancy hotel suite. Tremble goes to deal with Shane. Feeling fatigued, I decide to take a seat on my small suitcase. In a moment very much like when I would spin around in circles as a child and then suddenly stop, my center of balance was going haywire. I hold a glass of beer. I suppose I brought it out from the bar. The world spins, all the sudden I hear shattering glass and feel the cold, gritty thud of concrete against my face. I roll over and prop myself up. I want to laugh because it all seems so funny. Tremble looks at me with a mix of horror, disbelief and irritation. I pull my hand away from my face. Sticky. A palm covered in blood.

***

We’re driving in Tremble’s car. Shane is in the back seat still gargling his vomit. Everything is sepia colored. I have my hoodie off and pressed against my face to stop the bleeding. Occasionally I pull it away, and lift the bottom of my undershirt to wipe away the blood that is getting in my mouth and eyes.

***

We pull up to a nearby hotel. Tremble leaves and comes back in a few seconds. No vacancy. I exist in a world where the only colors are tints of brown and yellow like the stale glow of a streetlight.

***

We’re parked again. Tremble says we have a room. He fights to yank Shane from the back seat. Eventually we manage to drag Shane onto the pavement in front of a back hotel door. Tremble walks around front of the hotel, through the inside, and out the door. We struggle to hoist Shane’s one hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight up the stairs. The first flight leaves us both breathless. There’s still one more to go because our room is on the second floor. I try to bury a shoulder into Shane while Tremble pulls him from under his arms. The plan fails when I lose my balance and smack my face against the wall. The bleeding starts again. Tremble loses his patience and starts slapping Shane like a step-child. He pinches his ear until Shane finally rouses from his sleep.

“Walk up the fucking stairs or we’re leaving you here,” Tremble growls. Shane stirs enough to push off his feet as we continue to drag him up the stairs and down the hall.

***

We are in our hotel room. Everything is dim. Shane is on the floor in a seated position against the foot of his bed. I’m lying in the other bed. Tremble is concerned for Shane’s well being. I sit on my bed and call the girl who is supposed to pick us up in the morning and take us to our next hotel where the drinking contest will occur. I inform her about our change of address.

***

It’s morning. Shane is awake. My face is stuck to the pillow. I peel it away and go to the bathroom to assess the damage. The girl knocks on our door and I answer. She looks shocked to see me in the state I’m in. Eventually I lay down again. Shane and I attempt to piece together a night that makes no sense.

“Jesus,” I say trying to understand how I ended up so messed up. “We sure did it up last night. If that’s just us having a few drinks, I don’t know what the hell is going to happen at the drinking contest.”

Shane sits on the edge of his bed, balling up his dirty clothes. “Fuckin… how did we even get so drunk?”

“I don’t know, we downed two doubles of bourbon back to back before playing beer pong, and really that’s the last solid memory I have.”

“Ahh, that explains it,” Shane laughs.

“I guess it does,” I say, checking to make sure my face hadn’t started bleeding again. “But I have never smashed my face repeatedly no matter how drunk I’ve been.”

Shane rifles through his wallet, tossing all his cash in a clump on the desk. “Where the fuck is all my money? How much did I spend?”

“How much are you missing?”

“Like, fuckin, four hundred dollars.”

“Holy shit.”

Tremble had attempted to call Shane’s sister from Shane’s phone the night before. Shane calls her and has an awkward conversation to ensure nothing too terrible was said to her. The girl orders us some pizza, which arrives in twenty minutes. After eating, I doze off again.

***

I woke up a few hours later after the girl kindly phoned the front desk and got our checkout extended until 3pm. Time to leave. As if finding out that he paid almost three hundred dollars for our thoroughly mediocre hotel room wasn’t enough, Shane was livid that one of his Lacoste shoes is irreparably scuffed. He couldn’t even find the other shoe. We searched the room for ten minutes while packing up our belongings. Shane also realized he was covered in all sorts of cuts and bruises. The phone rang. I felt too rotten to answer, so I asked the girl to do it.

She answered the phone, “Hello?” – “Oh yes, we were just looking for that.” Covering the phone with her hand, she whispered, “They have Shane’s shoe.”

“Ask them how they know it belonged to us?” I told her.

The girl asked and then hung up the phone, “He says they just had a feeling after someone found it in the middle of the parking lot.” I smiled at the thought of the desk clerk watching us on his security cameras drag a seemingly lifeless body up the back stairwell.

***

Later in the day, after rocking out hard to Freebird multiple times during the drive over, we pulled up at our new hotel room to hang out for the night before starting the drinking contest the next afternoon. I turned to the girl, “When did you get to our hotel room in the morning?”

“Really, you don’t remember?” She said.

“I kind of remember you walking in, but I must have still been drunk.”

“When I came in you were standing in the bathroom and your face had dried blood caked on it. You looked really scared.”

“Weird.”

That night Shane and I talked about what happened over and over again, having almost no luck filling the gaps. I sent Tremble a text and told him to give us any details he had. He replied “HAHA. You don’t remember at all?” He said he’d do a write up. Before he sent the write up, I hopped on gchat and we had the following conversation:

Tremble: yo

Griffin: god what a mess Thurs. night was. how the fuck did we get so drunk?

Tremble: you guys must have drank a FUCKTON at the airport – you guys really didn’t drink that much at the bar.  I think you guys had about… 8 drinks in an hour and a half

Griffin: yeah. that’s the weird part. And I was fine up until we started playing beer pong. At the airport I had no more than 4 doubles and a beer.  Usually when I drink, I remember everything.

Tremble: yeah after the beerpong you guys just snapped… ya know, roofies may have come into play. you guys were drinking leftover beer from earlier games, and I didn’t touch anything on the table

And suddenly it all made sense.

Moral of the story: There’s no such thing as a free beer.

OR

Don’t drink leftover beer at rapey bars.

Lifeat160′s brief write-up of the night is here.

Here is Tremble’s full, somewhat edited to protect anonymity, write-up starting from when we moved to play beerpong:

After the other couple went up three cups to your one, Griffin lost his balance trying to put a beer back on the table, crossed his feet, stumbled to his left and slapped his head on the side of another table. He was dazed, but not bleeding and otherwise okay. Around the same time [redacted] had decided to sit down, and began babbling about being wealthier than everyone else, and being awesome.

At that point I figured you’d both hit the wall, and stepped in to shoot for both of you. Some random dude, who seemed to be at least casually familiar with the couple, stepped in and took some pong-shots with me. The other couple seemed amused at the antics, and basically wanting the game to be over so they could get out of there.

The male member of the couple is mildly suspicious as I look back, but not really. However at some point one of you began to drink at least one of the drinks the three college-aged kids and two heifers had left behind – although I can’t say for sure if that was before or after Griffin fell over. There was definitely still beer in the cups when you guys began to play though.

Me and the random dude, Mike, managed to beat the couple, at which point [redacted] began to act pretty erratically – going up to a clearly empty set of taps and attempting to fill his beer glass from them. A bartender came by and laughed. At that point I figured it was time to go home, as [redacted] had given up on the empty taps and was slumped over in his chair.

Griffin and I hauled a barely coherent [redacted] outside, and I forcefully sat him down on the curb. We set about planning to call a cab, and I went into my trunk to get your bags. It was shortly after last-call, no later than 1:15am. As I went into my trunk, [redacted] fell back onto the sidewalk, unconscious. I sighed, gave Griffin his bag, and went to sit [redacted] back up since he’d began making gurgling noises and I didn’t want him to aspirate on his vomit and die.

While I was sitting [redacted] up, out of the corner of my eye I see Griffin lose his balance as he squatted over his bag, and do a header into the back of my car and then the street, shattering his beer glass in the process. Griffin’s head begins to bleed pretty enthusiastically, and I get him to pull his outer-shirt off and put pressure on his head wound. [redacted] begins to barf vociferously all over the curb and himself.

At this point I begin to worry, since I wasn’t sure how bad Griffin’s head wound was and [redacted] was still very unconscious and now covered in vomit. Griffin and I realized neither of us remember what hotel you guys are supposed to be in, so I go into [redacted]’s pocket, take out his phone, and after some fumbling figure out how to work it and pull up the hotel info.

I sent Griffin back into the bar to clean himself up (after some convincing), since there was too much blood to tell what kind of wound he had anyways and I was busy holding [redacted] up by the scruff of his shirt so it wouldn’t be obvious to any cops passing by that he was, in fact, incapacitated. While the side of Griffin’s head was covered in blood, two or three cabs had slowed down, taken one look at us, and then sped right along. After Griffin’s head was cleaned up, one cab slowed down but explained the hotel was out of his range – despite our pleas.

Maybe he saw [redacted] splayed out on the sidewalk where I’d had to leave him to go talk to the cab, checkered with vomit.

After that I realize there’s no way you guys are gonna be able to check into the hotel anyways, since the reservation’s in [redacted]’s name, and – Weekend at Bernie’s aside – the hotel probably isn’t gong to let us drag [redacted] to the front desk, slap his ID on the counter, and accept our reservation. So I went back into the bar to ask the bartender where the nearest hotel is, and tell Griffin we’re stuffing [redacted] into the back of my car and heading that way.

It took a bit of jamming, but we eventually folded [redacted] unceremoniously into the backseat, and headed to the hotel. The first two hotels were full, but finally we found one with a vacancy. By then I’d already heard the tell-tale gurgling of [redacted] puking into my backseat, so I was glad to get him out of the car. I use cash I’d yanked from [redacted]’s pocket to book the room, and head up to the room to look for a back entrance since I figured the middle-aged Indian man behind the desk might freak out if me and Griffin’s bloody ass hauled [redacted]’s lifeless passed out body through the front doors and into the elevator.

After making sure our room key worked, I found the back stairwell, and popped the doors open to see where I was. The doors locked shut behind me, so I went to the car to explain to Griffin we were gonna haul him out of the car, up to the backdoors, then I’d go back through the front doors with the bags, go up to the room and then come back down the staircase to let you guys in.

Which worked perfectly, and we got [redacted] into the back staircase. At which point we attempted to get [redacted] up the two flights of stairs… which didn’t go so well. We got him to the first flight, at which point Griffin’s face started to bleed all over the place again since he’d been rubbing it against [redacted]’s sides and the wall while trying to get him up. I sent [redacted] ahead to the room, and then after some slapping and ear-pinching got [redacted] to give me a little bit of help hauling him up the last flight.

At which point I just dragged him under his armpits and into the room. Where we left him propped up against the bed, as I didn’t want him puking in either bed.

It is frightening to think how successful the roofies were in fucking us over. I ran over many different scenarios with Shane and Tremble as to why we fell victim to the drug. Was it inadvertent? Did the bartender hate our guts? Did the old couple count on all three of us dropping so they could rob us? Unfortunately, we will never know the real answer.

What’s even more frightening is thinking what would have happened if Tremble had ingested the substance too. Or worse yet,  what happened to the poor girl/guy who was the intended victim, if it wasn’t us. I can handle a fuckload of liquor — more than anybody I have ever met. But this stuff knocked me flat on my ass, and I still can’t remember 90% of the stuff that happened that night. I’m pretty sure somebody could have said “hey dude, can I borrow all the money in your wallet?” and I would have gave it to them. Even when I think back on the night, I don’t remember ever being scared. I was suggestible and happy the whole time. Thank god Tremble was around to keep me from face-planting into traffic or worse.

So, boys and girls, it really is true when they say don’t leave your drink unattended at the bar. The drugs are no joke. And, unless you’re professionals with a death-wish like 160 and myself (and maybe even not in that instance) don’t be an idiot and drink second-hand beer.