How about a nice Hawaiian punch?

This post is in honor of Murphy.

She is currently on a trip to visit her friend Mary, who has what we in the 'biz refer to as connections. Some friends of hers gave her, Mary that is, a gallon of alcohol. Now, before you shrug that off, it's 200 proof. That's pure alcohol. Hell, that's almost jet fuel. The following is true. Parts have been omitted, not because of selective memory, but because I was too liquored up to remember them.

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We all have our High School drinking stories, I guess, so here's one of mine. It was a Friday and my best friend and I were at Stargames (the local arcade..this was the 80's people) trying to find something to do. It was difficult to find entertainment in Carson City, so something to do usually amounted to buying a case of beer and getting squishy.

As we're discussing who we can have buy for us (remember that?) a friend....Let's call him John... walks up. He asks us if we know anywhere we can go party. We start to talk about shoulder tapping, and he pulls out a fifth of Everclear.

For those of you not in the know, Everclear is grain alcohol. They've wimped it down to 151 proof, but during the era when this story took place, it was 195 proof. The scariest part is that if you were of age, the shit was legal.

195 proof. Again, for those of you that don't know, if you divide an alcohol's proof in half, you get the percentage of alcohol in the liquor. 195's pretty close to pure grain. Scary shit. The warning label on the bottle, and I'm paraphrasing here basically said "Mix this shit with something before you drink it, or you're going to fucking die."

So, we've got our alcohol for the night, now all we needed was a place to drink. Not hard to find, when you've got a 5th of the strongest otc booze in town. Of course, we found a place.

This is where things start to get hazy. I remember whose house it was, and I remember playing pool. Then John comes out of the kitchen with this gargantuan bowl of Hawaiian Punch. It was a struggle to find drinking implements for the 15-20 (?) people there. I had a white coffee cup, inside of which, attached to the bottom as a result of some cup manufacturer's sense of humor, a frog. No, not a real one, it was made of coffee cup material.

I remember looking around at all the people, and thinking it was a bust. I mean, with all these people, we'd never get drunk. So, I was on a mission. I had 3, maybe 4 cups, and then the bowl was empty. I go back to playing pool, now waiting to leave. Imagine my surprise when John comes out with another bowl.

Hazy now gives way to broken. I don't know how long we were there, nor do I remember how many cups I had from the second bowl of punch. I do, however, remember that on my out, I saw a glass full of punch. Your average, oh, I don't know, 12-14 ounce tumbler. With a glib, "We can't have that, now can we?" I picked it up and drained it.

Party over, we head back to the arcade. I remember being there, but not getting there. I saw lots of people. I don't remember that, either. They all did though. One thing I do remember is being out behind the arcade with a couple friends smoking a joint. Like I really needed to get high at that point. The next clear memory I have is when it's time to leave.

We're going to give John a ride home, so he jumps in the back seat of my friend's bug. I sit in the front and close the door. I opened it right back up, and expelled copious amounts of punch on the ground. My friend asks if I'm ok and all I can say is "just go home." We drop John off with no incident, and get back to G's house.

As he's unlocking the door, my gorge is rising back up. I push past him, and rush the bathroom. Doing my best to be quiet, I begin perhaps the worst 45 minutes of my life. Surely the worst at the time, and perhaps of all time. The expression 'dry heaves' is now one with which I am intimately familiar. Somewhere in the middle of it, I manage to knock the toilet seat down, waking G's mother.

Understandably concerned, she comes to the bathroom door. I manage to convince her I'm ok, and she leaves. I, however, continue with my newfound ab excersises. I manage to crawl down the hall, and into my sleeping bag.

Now, after an evening like that, you might expect that I'd be as intimate with the word 'hangover' as I am with dry heaves, but you'd be wrong.

The only ill effects from that night, other than everyone I know remembering just how fucked up I was, were a month of 'no fucking way I'm drinking', and an almost religious aversion to Hawaiian Punch. No shit. Even the smell made me sick for like 10 years.

So, that's my ode to Murph...I hope she's careful and doesn't barf up a lung.

Later,

T.