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There was once an old saying: you have not seen anything until you have seen projectile vomit from a game show host. I now live by those very words.
So I’m sitting in a van sipping on a forty-ounce and smoking a big spliff. For those of you who don’t know what a spliff is: it’s a blunt, pot, weed, herb, doobie, chumba or God’s organic plant of meditative life. I’m staring out the window and peeping these waitresses in a nearby diner. It’s a curious fact that the majority of waitresses from Brooklyn diners have big fat asses. Maybe it’s just me, because in this van there are six people, and I’m the only one holding the binoculars. The six people in the van are the most drunken and weirdest people you’ll ever meet. I’m in the front passenger side, and my good Canadian friend, Alex Trebek, who hosts Jeopardy is at the wheel. The other folks we know from an orgy at Plato’s Retreat and decided to pick them up and not leave them out in the cold. These other pop-iconic drunks you might know: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Count Dracula, Stephen King, The Ghost of Henry David Thoreau, and some black ‘cool-moe-dee’ homeless guy just hopped in the back for warmth as I’ve been telling you this story. It seems he has a very bad haircut, or a very bad excuse for an afro. I don’t know what to call it, if you know what I mean. He told me that he castrated himself a moment ago, but I don’t see any blood. However, I do see a bottle of J&B, so he must be seeing pink elephants, that’s for sure.
Anyway, my name’s Parker. It’s my middle name. You don’t need my first or my last; Parker will do. And tonight I want to try and ditch the people in the back of the van to focus on one thing. Getting drunk. Or, even better, more drunk.
“Alex,” I said, as quietly as I could, “we gotta ditch these imbeciles and find us a bar.”
“But I’m Canadian,” good ol’ Trebek said. “I have a show to host tomorrow.”
“Listen, Alex, I’m sick of hearing how Zsa Zsa killed three husbands, Thoreau keeps mumbling some bullshit about wanting to live deliberately off the land, the Count is trying to suck the homeless man’s blood out of him, and the Kingster has a Red Sox cap on, and you know how much of a Yankee fan I am.”
“But tomorrow begins Teen Week.” He had a chipper smile, beneath the furry mustache which he constantly refuses to shave. Only trim.
I shook my head in confusion. “What is it with you Canadians? I mean I enjoy the taste of Canadian bacon, but that’s about it. And another thing, asswipe, what is it with you and these Daily Doubles?”
He didn’t know what to say. For an intelligent Ontarian, which I thought was a religion at one time, he just kept his mouth shut and I kicked everybody the hell out; I would have let the homeless man stay, as I saw the J&B bottle and it kind of reminded me of my youth, but the Bram Stoker feller drained him white.
Finally, off to the bar!
Now just about everybody has a story of a time when they got themselves into such a bad fix with alcohol that they seriously considered never drinking again, or at least with friends. Of course, this is almost always a passing whim and usually doesn’t last past the next smart opportunity to get shitfaced. I’m a drunk. There, you have it. I certainly know in my heart I’m going to drink to excess again; most likely in the very near future. Nevertheless, this is one of those stories. No, that’s an understatement. This is my be all, end all, holy shit did I really fucking do that story.
Okay, so Sunday night started innocently enough when I took Alex to the pub for ninety-nine cent pitchers. Helluva deal, need to do it more often. And we put back six pitchers in the next two hours, no big whoop-de-do, and lost one pitcher, which I could have sworn was right in front of me, in the process. At this point I briefly mused that I’ve never had an overwhelmingly good experience on Sundays when I drank without eating dinner, but that thought passed with the next guzzle. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? I tend to get a little belligerent when I drink on an empty stomach, but it was just me and Alex and I planned on making it an early evening, so whatever. We had a few more drinks to make our lives that much more fun. My current level of inebriation could be described as speaking or balancing quite successfully, but dangerously fired up.
“Tomorrow’s Teen Week,” Alex kept reminding me, and his face was pale and his eyes terribly bloodshot.
“I know, I know,” I hollered at him. “I’ll have you home no later than three. If worse comes to worse, you can always crash at my place.”
After we left the bar, my sense of personal safety and well-being kicked in and I declared that I was going to eat a piece of pizza. Now, anyone who has a general understanding of metabolism and boozing and then eating knows that it was way too late for me; the same could be said about the staggering game show host. Yet what I find most remarkable is that I know this—I know it well—as evidenced by the fact that I’m telling you now. I suppose feeding Alex eggplant parmigiana and eating myself was something better than nothing, even though I was pretty far up the river. So we went to Crusty McArthur’s Pizza where I ate a half-a-slice. Yep, a whole fucking half goddamn slice of “za”, as I certainly had no doubts that all risk to my stomach was eradicated by this pearl of strategy. Afterwards, we continued on our way to more drinking. By the way, if you saw a drunk feller woo-hooing in his boxers and sprinting as fast as he could through traffic along Stillwell Avenue, and you happened to be near Nathan’s on Sunday night, that was me. He’s funny and he’s smart, and he was accompanied by a showman!
To discriminatory wit, another drink with Trebek and we were on our way to further adventures. Now I was most definitely ripped. I stumbled with my friend into the bar up the street. The cute Puerto-Rican bartender I have a crush on was working, which was a stroke of luck because I was really in my best form. Her tits were so big and protruded over the bar it was as if they were speaking to me. And after practically screaming to my buddy how hot she was while she was all of four feet away from me, I sucked down a couple of tequilas.
“Heyyy,” the Latina said. “You lookin’ good tonight, Parker. Waz up?”
“I don’t know what’s up,” I said, as by now I couldn’t see straight, “and I don’t know what’s down. But your cum buttons are staring at me. Can I touch them?”
She gave me the eye and walked away, saying something in her native tongue, and it went something like this: “Cogida estœpida”.
“Did I just embarrass myself, Alex,” I turned and asked him.
He staggered over. “I’m a game show host. We have Latin literature many an occasion as a topic on the board.” Then he burped. “She called you a stupid fuck.”
I finally decided that this was to be my last consumption of the night. Though the details that followed are somewhat of a mystery to me, as Alex told me he was an alien from the planet Zorga, and he was only on earth pretending to be a game show host. He told me that that’s where all Canadians come from. But where the hell is Zorga? Apparently, I forgot about it, and we just got up and left, declaring I didn’t know what my alien friend was going to do but I was going to bed.
After getting home it was time to pay the piper. The mothership wasn’t going back to Zorga, or a flight to Los Angeles, it seemed, so Alex crashed. This was the moment I set into stone with the first two forty-ounces and the first pitcher hours earlier. I walk in the door, barely able to stand on my own when Alex unleashes a torrent of puke the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the college days of guzzling a fifth by myself for sport. The problem here was that I was so far in the bag, which makes it really hard to aim the puke, I did the same. It splattered across the walls of my living room. Both of us! As a career heaver, I usually pride myself on being able to hit the toilet no matter how blacked out I am.
“You stupid mother fucking Canadian Ontarian Zorgan,” I yelled. “Look what you did to my living room. And look what you made me do!”
I guess it was from so much pressure on our systems, or maybe it was simply a complete and total lack of physical control, but the next thing I know the host of Jeopardy is shitting uncontrollably. No warning, no idea, and his slacks are filled with mud. My diet for the evening of beer and cheese probably weren’t doing me any favors either. My main problem of many, in this case Alex, is that I can’t stop puking while this is happening. I believe the only possible escalation for this kind of situation would be if I actually spontaneously combusted.
My subconscious recoiling in horror, I try to pinch off the flow of Alex’s bowel before the trouble reaches ground level. But it was too late, I too have just shit on the carpet. I repeat, there is fucking doodoo on the rug! Look at me now, mother. You’d be so proud of your son: thirty-one years old and he’s shitting on the carpet with Alex Trebek, a man who now claims he is from Zorga. And who would have thought it took dexterity to clean it up? No motor skills or training required. Just mashing the poo into the rug; falling down repeatedly doesn’t help either.
I guess this total voiding of all cavities must have brought me to a higher level of lucidity, because I did the only sensible thing. I jumped in the shower with my clothes on and tried to regroup. Falling down persistently in wads of shit though, I almost crashed through the glass shower door a couple of times before I got the dirty duds off. I might have taken a nap in the tub, but details on that is sketchy. I cleaned myself and my clothes as much as I could and called it a night.
I went to my bed, leaving a stink trail and swimming in hurl, and passed out.
The next day I woke up in a dreamless slumber. I consider ways to pawn this responsibility off on someone else. I kicked Alex Trebek the fuck out! I take parts of the rug, the comforter, and my own clothes to the bathroom, the scene of much earlier crimes. My equilibrium problems are still going strong, so I bounce off the walls on the way, leaving last night’s stink trail in the hall. And let me tell you, if I had only known Alex Trebek was a Zorgan. I would have been prepared, because I sure didn’t sign up for this duty when it first came aboard.
So that’s pretty much it. I wake up Monday morning, still partly in the bag to rotate laundry and sections of carpeting and take exhibits A, B, and C down to the dry cleaner. The Asian man stares at me in astonishment. “Are you serious?”
“Serious as shit,” I said to him.
I’m told this is going to cost $99.00. That’s right, $99.00 tagged onto a night of pants-crapping and projectile-vomiting that started off with 99 cent pitchers.
