Methinks that this is a story that will need to be told from several perspectives, namely 1) mine and 2) anyone who was more sober than me on the evening in question. Number two will include, I suspect, a large percentage of lower Manhattan.
I'll start towards the end.
It was clearly time to leave the Musical Box drinking establishment. I had just thrown up 500 gallons of whiteish unpleasantness on an empty bar stool, and the immediate future promised more of the same. My excellent friend Ty, always solid in a crisis situation, began moving me towards the front door, accurately assuming that barfing on the exterior of a bar would be more readily acceptable than barfing on its interior. I recall moving towards the door at a pretty high rate of speed (relatively) under Ty's guidance. The three individuals between me and the door were also exiting, but under much less urgent circumstances. Ty asked them to move. They did not. He reached out a hand to kindly, gently brush them aside. Apparently the sight of Ty's hands makes me throw up, because I did so, in familiarly massive quantities, all over said hand and the unknown individual who had failed to react to said hand. This was quite a projectile feat, too.
At that point things get a little fuzzy. I remember people yelling unkind things at me in a New York accent. I remember throwing up on the outside of the bar. I remember a 10 year old kid on a razor scooter trying to sell drugs to Ty and whoever else had come out of the bar by then. My eyes were watering heavily from the effort of throwing up. I was standing, but barely.
At some point Jim put me in a cab with his roommate, who had graciously volunteered to escort me back to Jim's apartment where I could die in peace. The cabbie, as I recall, had nothing resembling variable control of his brakes or gas, choosing either to accellerate as quickly as possible or stop as violently as possible. This resulted in what felt like a seventeen hour ride back to the apartment during which my head was either being pitched forward to slam into the plastic safety divider or thrown backwards to smack the headrest. My memory of the ride is essentially:
Wham! (forehead in pain)
Brief pause, world spins around me.
Wham! (back of head in marginally lesser pain)
Brief pause, world spins around me.
(Repeat seven thousand times)
Upon arriving at the apartment, I deposited the remaining contents of my stomach on the sidewalk (or, as Jim's roommate called it, "Left a bat signal"), and staggered upstairs to pass out on the couch.
Apparently, the non-barfing elements of the group stayed out another three or four hours, ending their night at a diner as the sun came up. They staggered in at some ungodly hour and all passed out, only to be awakened at about 10 by the annoying vomiter, who, because he had cashed out early and thrown up all of his alcohol, was well-rested, healthy, and ready to hit the city immediately. This is not the sort of person you want to deal with if you've been out until the break of dawn. It is a difficult thing to be such a hassle to your friends in two completely different ways, but I managed to pull it off. And then I made them go see a play about math. Awesome. I am that guy.
And now, back to the beginning, or what of it I can recall...
We had dinner at a cool Thai restaurant in Brooklyn, where I consumed two Citron and Sevens and a plate of Chicken Pad Thai. I have no doubt about what I ate because a regurgitated version of it was stuck to my shoes the next morning.
From there it was off to Manhattan, although I don't remember how we got there. I wasn't drunk yet, I just can't remember. Subway, possibly? Pumpkin-shaped carriage? We started out the night in a Sake bar, this bizarre, dim, underground grotto-like place that was clearly designed for short people (read: Asians). It was cool in its own Asian grotto-like way. It was there that I learned about sake. First, you can have hot sake or cold sake. Second, you drink sake - I think the cold variety - out of these weird square box thingys. Or maybe those were just the coasters and I ended up drinking out of them. I don't know. Again, I was not very drunk yet at this point. I did, however, chug some sake with another member of the group, probably Lou. He seems like the sort of person who would goad me into chugging sake. It is worth noting here that sake is very sweet and very heavy. Imagine mixing a little rum with a lot of syrup from a can of pears and that's about what the stuff is like. It is not, I repeat NOT, conducive to chugging. We emerged from the Hobbit hole some time later, and I remember feeling moderately drunk and not terribly happy in the stomach area. Then it was on to the Telephone Bar, where things get very blurry. I recall drinking several mixed drinks, an unknown percentage of which were actually mine. There was some glass breakage (I was very very much that guy), and after an unkown amount of time, we left. I recall being on the streets of Manhattan and purchasing a bottle of water (or possibly someone bought it for me?) at a convenience store. There is a good chance I shortly threw the water at someone or nothing. Also, I drunk-dialed my brother and my sister, which may have been slightly surprising to them, as I am typically the "good" child of the family, whatever the hell that means. We arrived at the Musical Box, place of employment of friend G. The sake-originated unpleasantness, compounded massively by the roughly seventeen drinks of unknown ownership consumed at the Telephone Bar, was now growing to be a substantial problem. I ordered a glass of water from G and sat on a giant red velvety couch, trying very hard not to move. While I succeeded in not moving, everything else failed at it, which defeated the purpose of my stillness. After between 30 seconds and five days of sitting on the couch, it was clearly time to go throw up. I may have notified Ty of my plans, or he may have alertly realized my need, but somehow I ended up at the end of a four person line for the bathroom, with Ty trying to explain that it would be a good idea to let me go first. Nobody was listening, so I backed up his well-reasoned argument with evidence of my own, vomiting on the nearest bar stool. From there, the rest has already been told.
For the record, there has been some debate on the reasons behind the inhuman quantities of barf that I expelled on NYC that evening. I initially maintained that the full blame rested on the sake, a substance which I have never consumed before (and, obviously, will never do again). Other parties have pointed out that the seventeen drinks at the Telephone Bar likely trumped all sake-causality arguments. While I have given some ground to these parties, I still maintain that the syrupy Japanese nectar of death was at least partially responsible for the mess, as I have never in my life thrown up with such violence and in such quantities, no matter how many of Lou's Jack and Cokes I've stolen and chugged.
Now, would any of you goobs who are actually going to write anything on this beast please jump on here and fill in the details of the rest of this evening? It's not all about me.
-Tyler
