Red Headed Slut: The Drink, or The Chick?

Let me begin with a statement of fact: I do not go to bars very often. I’m married, so I’m not biting at whatever slick-smiling bait the guys might be dangling in my direction, and I’m insanely talkative (who knew?), so having to yell over a crowd and an endless loop of drunken karaoke “Livin On A Prayer” really cramps my style. That said, what happened a few Saturday nights ago does not happen very often, which is cheery good news for my girlfriends, my husband, and my liver.

The weekend before St. Patrick's Day of Drinking All Things Dyed Green and Regrettable, my girlfriends Martha, Lauren, and Melissa and I had decided to get together for a girls’ wine night, our standard celebration for all of us being in the same place at the same time, which happens less often than Joan Rivers gets laid. So once every fourteen years, we converge on Martha’s house to chow spreadable cheese products and plow through the supermarket’s finest vintage offerings—preferably the ones sold in the largest authentic vineyard jugs under the NEW LOWER PRICE sign.* Martha’s house has become my personal binge-drinking black hole: Every time I leave to head over, I say to Lawyer Boy, “I’m not going to drink that much, and I’ll probably be home early,” which we now understand is code for, “Show up after midnight with the snow shovel to scrape me off the sidewalk, and load me into the back of the car like a slaughtered hog.”

So we hug and squeal hello and OMG WHEN DID YOU CUT YOUR HAIR I LOVE IT!!!, top off our glasses, and chat about our lives, a group of lively young professionals embarking on their meaningful careers and life journeys...and me. We (they) are all busily engaged in doing productive, important things with our (their) lives. Here, let me show you:

• Lauren holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke, and is currently pursuing an MBA at Darden Business School.
• Martha is a CPA, which means she passed that horrid Triple Frown of an exam, which I hear is like being butt-raped by an adding machine except for less fun.
• Melissa just finished an RN program and is now a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at a big hospital. She's also planning her wedding, which we all know involves more blood, sweat, and tears than saving babies.
• I, meanwhile, frequently make cupcakes.**

I started out the evening very proud of myself, because I only upended three glasses of wine in three hours, and had refrained from chugging from the chunky bargain bottle of alcoholic antics.*** I should have seen the finger-painting on the wall and gone home when the girls started talking about going out, but ever the social sheep that I am, I followed the herd through the rain to 3 Monkeys, a bar I only see the inside of when I'm too drunk to remember that I suck at bars, and usually humiliate myself in ways that embarrass my gender as a whole. Melissa, however, is really good at bars, and within two minutes of seating ourselves in a booth covered in someone else's spilled drinks and social failures, she had two random upstanding gentlemen who were in no way looking for a one-night stand, leaning over our table and begging to buy us drinks.

Immediately upon our arrival at the hooch hut, Martha had bought us a round of red-headed sluts, which taste like messy college nights spent pretending to be old enough to drink in public, and then we had the good sense to order a round of beers. By the time a dude shorter than me named Michael Doyle, Our New BFF Du Jour, was slurring over our table about buying us a round of Irish Car Bombs, I was far enough down the road to Bourbontown that 1) a drinking contest seemed like a great idea, 2) a drink that mixes beer and liquor seemed like a great idea, and 3) continuing to drink heavily seemed like a great idea. I was the only one of our pretty party who felt it necessary to try to drink a stranger under the table, so "Michael Doyle" and I went toe-to-toe with the car bombs, frantically chugging before they curdled into slippery pint glasses of baby vomit.

AND I WON. Me beating someone at a drinking contest says less about me than it says about him, and what it says about him is that he drinks like a toddler with a sippy cup. As much as I wanted to bask in the glow of my victory for the rest of the evening, the alcohol and my bud Michael Doyle had other ideas, and I spent the rest of the evening trying to pretend that I could still drink like I pretended I could in college. The events of the rest of the night are based largely on conjecture, since none of us left the bar able to remember what exactly had happened, as the Demon Liquor had stolen our memories, dignity, and my most favorite purple sweater. What I think happened was this: I beat Michael Doyle at car bombs TWICE more, I continued to gloat, I lost my sweater, we went to another bar, I bragged and drank and hopefully did not dance, and all the sudden I was on the bar floor, which is nastier than falling into a Port-a-John at a Billions O' Burritos Festival. It was at that time that the bartender casually suggested that we depart for the evening, whereby "casually suggested" I mean "told us in no uncertain terms to drag my drunken liability-laden ass out of their establishment."

One-what-the-hell-thirty in the morning found us (well, the rest of the girls and my body) standing outside the bar trying to hail a cab, stay out of the rain, and prop me up on the curb like a wasted Lindsey Lohan at an afterparty/in a club/on a movie set/in public at all. The cab drivers, traitors to my quest home, refused to take us since I looked like an ominous threat of a vomitous nature, so the girls ring-a-linged Lawyer Boy from his peaceful slumber to come scrape me off the sidewalk and load me into the car like a slaughtered hog, per my earlier encoded promise. As soon as the car began moving in the direction of home, the Mount Vesuvius of used drinks erupted all over Lawyer Boy’s car, which I tried to argue was the “upside” to the whole situation, with LB firmly insisting that his car covered in the contents of my stomach was, in fact, a “downside.” I settled the argument by proclaiming it an “upside-slash-downside,” and either the debate ended there or I passed out, whichever happened first. I stumbled into the house, fumbling as I shed a trail of failure-soaked clothing in my wake (otherwise known as my front yard).

I woke up the next morning on the bathroom floor, under a snuggly fleece blanket, wearing my socks, one contact lens, and the previous night’s makeup smeared all over my face a la “Braveheart.” I had no idea how I had gotten there, where my other contact was, or why I felt like I’d been hit upside the head with a dead ox. LB filled in most of the blanks for me, but Martha summed it up best in an email the next day: “Lauren said that when she went to your house to drop your purse off, she saw a pile on your front porch that she thinks was your shirt. Well done!”

Well done, indeed.

*Sadly, and much to my surprise, they are still not selling neon twisty-straws taped to the sides of wine bottles.

**If you know of any jobs that make use of my particularly impressive skill set, I'm also really good at making up new lyrics for songs on the fly. Favorites include my version of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl," which is henceforth "I Kissed A Squirrel." (and I liked it/the taste of his nuts and berries/I kissed a squirrel just to try it/I hope my cat friend don't mind it/It felt so wrong, it felt so right/I might be up in his tree tonight.)

***Yes, I CAN have fun without alcohol.****

****Sometimes.*****

*****Only if you make me.