You know how you resign from a job, and all your work colleagues want to take you to the pub and get you hammered? Ply you with booze, perhaps engage in a few physical challenges midway through the evening and hopefully find you hooking up with a young nubile hottie out with her friends? Maybe even a little out-of-tune karaoke? Or a lot? You know how you look forward to that impending drink-fest with only the merest hint of fear that you could find yourself bondaged to a train carriage on your way to Christ knows where, with no wallet and no phone? Or waking up naked tied to a light pole on a major intersection with an entire used roll of clingfoil nearby? Actually, that last one sounds like a standard Sunday morning at my place…!
To find out why this picture is here, keep reading.
The classic scene of the final-day-at-work-booze-up ended up happening to yours truly at the end of last year, when I resigned from my job at a transport company, a position I’d held for about 6 years. My work image was one of relative abstinence from alcohol, an image I’d tried hard to subvert with conversations about a bottle of wine I’d drunk the weekend before, or how I used to party a lot in my younger days – stuff I’d make up to sound cooler than I actually way. The day I announced my resignation to the office, was the day at least three people came up to me and proclaimed that on my last day, they were going to get me absolutely smashed and make me make a fool of myself. I could only utter one single phrase: bring it on.
From The Juiced Box – Jimmy Barnes: Cheap Wine :
I’ve mentioned before here at the Bar None that I’m not the worlds biggest drinker – I like the casual wine or Rum+Coke, but I very rarely drink to excess. Al’s made a living regaling us all with his stories of drunken excess (much of which can be attributed to his recent lack of visibility here at the Bar None) and while it would make me feel better to say that I can drink along with the best of them, I’m afraid to say, I can’t.
So when the date of my impending a-drink-alypse was set, so was the date for my liver to potentially collapse. Warn the ER, I may be comin’ in. The final day, of course, was pretty easy for me, with my feet up on the desk shrugging my shoulders at all and sundry who thought I’d still be doing some work. Idiots! As a going away present, they gave me an inflatable sex toy in the form of a sheep, as well as a voucher to spend on my other favourite thing: BluRays.
Rodney with his ex-work colleagues at the Bar None...
But the main event was to come. Around 6.30, a number of us arrived for our session at a local drinking establishment (no, I’m not proud to admit that it wasn’t The Bar None!), and I proceeded to start on my first drink. It was a well mixed Rum & Coke, my drink of choice for writing myself off. My wife had decided to drop me off at the bar, and return home to baby-sit my daughter, which was nice of her – especially considering I’d done the same for her the weekend before! Essentially, I was a man out on the town without a leash: a combination of freedom and alcohol makes for a very tipsy Rodney before the night is out.
Since I arrived first (to my own going-away party… what’s with that?) I had to buy my own drink first, which I did, but as I sat down to enjoy it and listen to the godawful dance beats pumping over the speaker system, several of my now-former work colleagues arrived as well. The most common question I was asked that night, as far as I can recall amidst the blur of wonky floorboards and puking in the bushes out the back of the bar, was “how many have you had?”, referring to the quantity of drinks, of course. After about the fifth drink, I couldn’t remember how many I’d had. Not to mention that my drinks were coming with such alacrity that I couldn’t even finish one before I had another in my hand, and you can imagine that had I been in any condition to allow my brain to function properly, I still would’ve had no idea.
Getting ready to start drinking...
After a while, I started to feel very sleepy: it’s a well established fact that instead of getting even funnier and more verbose than I already am, when I have a bit to drink I start to get tired. So there I am, slumped on one of the seats at this bar, a couple of people propping me up and asking me if I needed another drink, when all I wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. But I pushed through. For a while. Funny how you get to the stage where you suddenly realise that you no longer have control over your body, and can recall that moment with absolute clarity later on.
A while later – it could have been and hour or five minutes, I wouldn’t know – I started to get that feeling in my gut that things weren’t right. I’d had a little bit for tea, but probably not enough to stop the vomit-instinct I knew would kick in soon. Sure enough: heave… a bit of a swaying stomach made me reach for one of my mates and ask him to carry me to the lavatory. He and another of my friends do so, with my feet dragging along the floor as I feel them go out from under me. Propped up in the dank, squalid cubicle, smelling a bunch of piss and poo around me, I tried to keep whatever monster was in my guts from breaching the surface. Fuck you man, my gut responded. But I swallowed hard, and forbade a vomit event.
The drinking begins...
I was dragged outside by my now-concerned mates, and as I stood there against a railing, overlooking a nicely hedged sunken garden, I unloaded. All that rum and coke came back up, a creamy stream of projectile chunder looking more like chicken soup than stomach contents. At the same time as it sickened me, I was quite impressed: I don’t think I’ve ever thrown up so hard or so much apart from having a stomach upset. My mates patted me on the back… well, one of them did. At the same time as I was having a conversation with the bushes below and emptying my tea into them, a quite attractive woman came up and started chatting to one of my mates: ostensibly seeing if I was okay, but secretly I think she was trying to pick up. The mate who was being chatted up suddenly seemed to forget I was there.
Immediately after my spewgasm, I began to feel better. I didn’t know it at the time, but this feeling would pass. In the moment, though, I decided to get back to the bar, and my other friends, and keep drinking. My legs still wouldn’t work right, so I was half-carried, half-staggered back to the bar, propped up on a stool, and made to drink more. I say “made” when I really mean “self inflict”. A few Jager Bombs later (a mixture of Jagermeister and Red Bull), and I was completely, utterly, irrevocably fucked. And by fucked I mean totally smashed. I didn’t even know which way was up. I think it was to the left, but I wasn’t sure.
The drinks are taking effect.
After a few drinks (I think), I began to feel horrific again, and once more asked to be taken outside where I could safely release my stomach again into the bushes. I did so. But at that point, somewhere in the fog my brain called “thought”, I realised I’d had enough. I was beyond fucked, and I had a wife and child back home to get to – if I thought a taxi would stop and pick me up, I might have fumbled my way through the process. But the wife of a good mate came out, I grabbed her arm and asked her to take me home, in the most forceful manner I could. Not because I hated her or anything, but because I wanted to impart just how fucked I was, and how important it was for me not to be offered any more drinks.
She and her husband slid me into their car, and while my guts probably had no more contents to eject anywhere, I wasn’t about to take a chance. I grabbed an old McDonald’s bag stashed in the back seat and held it to my face like an aircraft sick-bag, and we began the journey back to my place. A journey which seemed to go on forever, with all the lights, motion and sounds of a city in party mode (it was a Friday night, after all) scrambling rational thought and creating a discombobulating discordance that made me even more disoriented. They dropped me out the front of my place, where I staggered down the back to where the garage door opened as I fumbled with my keys. I was going to go in the back door, since I didn’t want to wake the good wife, and with our bedroom quite close to the front door, thought the sound of me struggling with something as complicated as a fucking door lock might cause a reaction I didn’t need. The fact that she’d left the front door unlocked, and had told me she would before I even left, had been forgotten.
Really starting to feel it now....
I couldn’t open the back door. The exterior light had blown, and blown good, which meant the moonlight dampened by a think band of cumulonimbus had to be enough. It wasn’t, and I think I stood at the back door for about fifteen minutes convinced I’d be able to pull an Ocean’s 11 out my ass and get inside. I staggered back, and slumped against the car parked there behind me. God I was tired. I don’t recall ever being so tired in my life, at least, not this week anyway. I decided to rest my head on the back of the car, just for a moment. Moment. Moment. Several moments. Waking with a start, and wondering just how long I’d stood sleeping on the car like an idiot, I made the decision to go in the front door, my memory suddenly recalling the open-door policy we’d instigated that night.
Stumbling through the front door with the subtlety of a hamstrung elephant, I slid down the hallway to the lounge, where I was going to sober up a little. On my way, I grabbed a bucket from the laundry to catch any future vomit (one can never be too sure) and slid, sighing with gratitude, into the soft, cushiony embrace of our modular lounge. By this stage, I’d started to think about what had happened during the night: I had gaps, and that wasn’t a good sign. But I don’t think I did anything untoward, except the bit with the vomit…. and that was to be expected.
Been here? Let us know!!!
My evening ended with me waking up at about 6am, a carpet-mouth and slightly fuzzy head, getting a drink of water (the first of many that day…) and going to bed. My wife woke up a while later, and left me there (so she said) to sleep it off. To this day, the best recollection I have of the night is a gallery of photos on Facebook, the contents of which I’ve shared through this article. Considering a photo of the tits of the “Hottest Girl At Work” was taken (see photo below) and I don’t even remember it, I consider the evening to be the highlight of my life thus far.
So why recount this story? I know it’s not that alarming, nor is it the wildest night many of you have ever seen, heard or participated in. I didn’t wake up tied to a pole with clingwrap, nor did I find myself naked on a train bound for somewhere I didn’t know; for a casual drinker such as myself, though, I thought I managed to scrape through a potential disaster like getting hammered into oblivion with a great deal of fortitude. I didn’t embarrass myself (any more than normal), nor did I injure myself or anybody else in my efforts.
However, the following day, when I went to pull my keys from the pocket of my jeans, I pulled out a condom. I don’t carry condoms as a matter of course, because I have a wife and always know I’m faithful to her, but it did surprise me. My investigations revealed that one of my friends had decided it’d be a good larf to put a condom in my pocket for the wife to find when she washed my clothes… yeah guys, a great larf!
So I ask you, dear reader: tell us your best drunken story. We want details, and the gorier and more insane, the better. Drinking stories make me laugh hard, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because in order to achieve them we must make ourselves truly inebriated, a consequence of too much drink, but it’s a choice we make, and the consequences can often be hilarious [Ed: They can also be downright dangerous, but we aren't here to pass judgement on those who drink to excess!]. The comments section below awaits your tale of drunk. Get to writin’.
