To this day, my mother thinks that the badge of my worst drunk experience actually came from an allergy attack.
That's the beauty of mothers: They don't like to believe that you're really, truly capable of even half the stuff you've actually done.
And this one, she'd be alarmed to discover, was a pretty shameful whopper.
It was the spring of 1998. Final exams had just ended, and as such, all of campus and its clusters of nearby off-campus apartment complexes had erupted into enormous, debauched, beer-sodden bacchanalia. All was right in the world.
Doug's apartment complex had a courtyard in between two rows of buildings, and it enabled a property-wide party where people wandered in and out of people's places without much care for who they knew there. Everyone had kegs. Everyone had music. Everyone had drinking games: Drunk Driver, Circle of Death, Asshole, Three-Man. The works. (Because when you're an undergraduate in a terrible town like South Bend, you learn to make your own fun until you turn 21.)
My favorite game (besides Asshole, which lets me indulge my tyrannic side when I'm president, which is often) is Cups, in which two teams face off across a table, each with a plastic Solo cup half- or a quarter-full of beer. When the race starts, the first person in each line downs their beer in one gulp, rests the empty cup on the edge of the table, and flips it until it lands cleanly, face-down. Then the next person goes, until one team beats the other.
This somewhat ridiculous process has the dual effect of getting you drunk quickly, as you are effectively doing shot upon shot of beer, and making you noisy and extremely combative.
I am particularly good at Cups.
I rarely miss on my first attempt, and I play into the competition almost immediately. I talk a lot of trash, I cheer a lot, and there is much unexplained dancing.
On this particular night, the keg was Icehouse, which is strong enough to be a very poor choice as a chugging beer. The Cups matches began in furious earnest, and my newspaper pal Shannon and I quickly emerged as the obvious ones to beat. We embodied all the truly hideous qualities inherent in the best Cups players: We were excellent, we were unstoppable, we were loud, we were boisterous, we were dragging people onto our team when others started to defect, and when people didn't seem that interested in playing us just for fun and bragging rights alone, we began rudely challenging their skills and calling into question their very manhoods.
Naturally, we were trashed. When 1 a.m. rolled around, Doug caught Shannon and I as we were plunging toward rock bottom: drunk, slouched, weaving, and trying to play cups against each other, because we'd steamrolled the competition and driven away any potential opponents with our total Icehouse-fueled competitive arrogance.
"Grab a cup, Doug, I'm gon' tip my cup over and you won't have tipped yours and the win will be won," I slurred.
"Um," he said.
Then he escorted me back to his bedroom. "I love you, too, honey," I mumbled, falling onto the bed. "That's nice," he said. "But that?s not why we're here. You need to pass out."
"I need to RALLY," I shouted, standing up with my finger aloft in triumph.
Motion was not my friend. I immediately fell back onto the bed, gnawed on my lower lip for a second, and pointed out, "But I should puke first, just a super quick vomit, and stuff. Real fast."
That "real fast" turned into "real hard, and for about an hour." Eventually I passed out, but not before some pretty painful heaving and the forcible expulsion of most of what I'd eaten that day, and possibly the day before, and likely anything I'd even thought about consuming the next day.
When I woke up the next morning, I shuffled into the bathroom, my head pounding, my throat burning, and my stomach still lightly churning. Splashing water on my face, I exhaustedly looked up in the mirror... and yelped.
"What is it?" Doug mumbled, rolling awake and facing the bathroom.
Horrified, I shuffled out with my hands over my face. I peeked with my left eye between my fingers.
"It's bad," I said.
He sat up. "Nothing is as bad as all the real fast vomit last night, is it?" he teased.
"Having a souvenir? Worse," I trembled, revealing my face.
Doug recoiled.
Or at least that's how I remember it; the details are hazy, as I was otherwise occupied by moaning, "OH MY GOD I LOOK LIKE GODDAMN FUCKING SATAN."
I had burst a blood vessel in my right eye. The very force of my reverse peristalsis, the heft of my heaving, actually popped a vessel that stained the entire inside corner of my eyeball a pure, deep red.
There was no white to be seen on that half of my eye. This was not a subtle hue, a discreet little fleck of scarlet that could be passed over by the casual observer. This was a giant, honking patch of shiny red death, and it practically assaulted anyone who got within a mile of me. You could actually see it coming before you could make out the rest of me, and it looked ready to kick a little ogling ass.
The eye captivated and horrified everyone whose paths it crossed. "EW!" screamed my friend Sarah. "Oh my GOD, HAC, what the hell? That's disgusting!" gasped MB. "Nice," Doug smirked repeatedly. "Mommy, what's that? Why is that girl evil?" whimpered small children. "Yeah, I'm not with that one," shrugged my left eye.
Baseball caps didn't cast enough of a shadow. Paper bags didn't give me enough air. I tried walking around with my head down, but when the cute senior basketball player from my acting class passed me in the dining hall and said, "Hey, Heather, how are you?" I just instinctively raised my head and smiled and said, "I'm just fine, and you?" At that point, he threw his tray in the air and fled.
Actually, he made nice, then walked away really, really quickly. But it's the same effect: I was a repulsive creature.
I had no idea what to do. I couldn't tell how long the eye would remain red. I had a summer internship at the Austin paper to begin in three weeks. Would I show up looking like a crazy junkie whore? Or some demented patriot with her blue eyes, white eyeball, and blood-red stain of shame?
And what the hell could I tell my mother, who would be picking me up at the airport in Florida in a mere ten days? Would Visine earn its slogan and indeed get the red out?
In the end, no. At least, not demonstrably. The Eye of the Red Death shone bright, a beacon of infamy, for a full week. But suddenly, as if by magic, as if strolling through God Quad back to my dorm each night had somehow had the Holiness By Osmosis desired effect, the red patch started shrinking. By the time I'd driven from campus to Austin, parked my car, and flown home for a quick vacation before returning to begin my internship, the inside corner of my eye boasted nothing more than a yellowish blotch on it.
That wasn?t enough to dupe my mother, of course. She mother peered at it, confused, not entirely sure if she should say anything, as if I had an enormous pustule on my face and was blithely pretending it didn't exist.
"Did something..." she began carefully. "I mean, is that something in... What is that?"
"Oh," I sighed, shaking my head. "I had the worst allergy attack when we moved out of the dorm. I sneezed so much, I burst a blood vessel in my eye."
She stared at me for a second. "Oh, all the packing must've kicked up a lot of dust," she then cried, hugging me with great pity and affection.
"Yeah," I sighed, smiling devilishly over her shoulder. "Yeah, Mom, it was so awful."
I got away with it. But even now, every time I'm so lucky as to be hanging my head over a toilet bowl praying for either sweet, beautiful death or a sudden and non-explosive end to my nausea, I wonder for a split second if lightning might strike twice -- if the Eye of the Red Death might be looking for a return engagement.
I wonder.
But not enough to put down my drink. Cheers.
In that vein, we put together a wacky little Web site to chronicle The Summer Of Excessive Drinking And Inappropriate (But Eye-Approved!) Behavior.
Drunky But Funky is still in its nascent stages; we'll be adding more embarrassing photos, for sure, and adjusting our indivudual pages as we continue to embarrass ourselves throughout the summer.
We'll update it with whatever inane and insane shenanigans develop when we hit the bottle and it starts hitting us back. Drop by, say hi, join the movement -- but most importantly, have a good laugh at our expense. We'll drink so that you don't have to -- but, you really should, you know.
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