Whoops.
Apparently me not picking up my tux in Chicago was a huge deal, or so one would assume from the frantic calls and voicemails left on my phone. I didn’t really listen to them. But it all worked out. Thankfully PWJ used one of the tux stores that is everywhere and had a location in Lexington, and because he’s cheap, he picked out a tux package that’s common, so the Lexington store had my size in stock. I picked it up Friday when I landed, problem solved.
Since it was a late wedding on Saturday, we all decided beforehand to go out drinking that Friday night after the rehearsal. Everyone was looking forward to it. Everyone but El Bingeroso, who was jumping out of his fucking skin with anticipation. He was super eager to go out and rip shit up for one specific reason: Kristy was not in Lexington. Because of her job or something I don’t care about, she wasn’t coming in until Saturday morning. This meant El Bingeroso could get supremely fucked up, something that was increasingly rare now that he had settled into married life. At the rehearsal dinner, he explained a normal night out:
You want to hear what my life is like now? A few months ago, my ‘fun time’ was supposed to be hanging out with this guy from the office and his wife. He seemed like a cool guy at the office and Kristy got along with his wife, so I thought it would be fun.
I get us tickets to this late-night beer thing at Busch Gardens. There are no kids there so it’s just adults and beer everywhere for the night and is supposed to be awesome. Once we get there, they tell me they ‘don’t really drink that much.’ They’re newlyweds, about 28. They suck more than you can imagine, and I feel misled by the guy’s superficial cool guy act at the office. I’m pissed, and visibly becoming restless with the evening, conversation, everything—so I begin to drink. Copiously. I decide to shotgun two ‘yards’ of beer, those giant tall glasses, made for white trash guys who go to the carnival and don’t realize they just paid 8 bucks for basically 14 oz. of beer, but it’s tall so they figure they got more. They are shocked that someone can drink that much that fast.
Waiting in line for 30 minutes for the rides was bad enough, but listening to the wife was basically killing me. I try to act like I’m sleeping, leaning on the railings, anything so I don’t have to listen to her fucking stories about how she is a preschool teacher. Oh your kids are so cute, tell me more about their fucking finger paintings and dollies!
I interrupt her and decide to launch into my collection of Scottish jokes. I’m cracking myself up. I end the monologue by telling a joke that ends “not so good doc, she bit three inches off my penis, shit in my face, and my neighbor came out of the closet with his hands up.” I nearly choke I’m laughing at myself so hard, but when I look up, Kristy has a nervous look on her face and the couple is looking at each other with the kind of expression they would have if a dirty bum approached them and asked them to wash his asshole.
Undeterred, I tell them I want to go on the Tilt-A-Whirl [ed note: a ride that involves lots of spinning]. They are unsure of my stomach’s capability of successfully maneuvering the ride. I assure them that I’m a tank, built for rock fights and state fairs. No laughter.
We get on the ride, and I began to feel the uncontrollable impulse to vomit six pounds of beer and three pounds of pizza. I yell out, half-joking, ‘I think I’m gonna puke!’, and the woman totally loses her cool. She literally starts to freak out. Not in preschool anymore are you?
I didn’t puke, but miraculously the couple wanted to leave after that. On the way home, they stopped to check the oil in their car, and wipe the front windshield. At midnight on a Saturday. I wanted to get out of the car and kick this guy in the nuts.
THAT is now my life. So fuck all of you, we’re going out drinking tonight.
Can’t argue with that.
After we finish all the toasts to PWJ and his bride, and we get sufficiently drunk on the open bar, everyone decides to not waste time at a normal bar, that it’s a strip club night. PWJ tells us about a strip club that he went to when they came to Lexington to check out the wedding spot. Me, PWJ, SlingBlade, El Bingeroso, Hate, and GoldenBoy head off.
I drive one car, and PWJ drives another. As we are walking to our cars, Hate half-jokingly asks me the question that would define the night:
Hate “Tucker, you get insurance on your rental?”
Tucker “Are you kidding? How many bachelor parties have we done—is there any way I wouldn’t get walk away insurance?”
El Bingeroso “You have insurance!”
Tucker “Yes motherfucker, of course.”
El Bingeroso does a little crow hop, and throws the champagne glass in his hand as hard as he can into the back windshield of my rental car. It shatters so hard, it fucking atomizes.
El Bingeroso “WOOOOOOOOO!! Let’s go get drunk motherfuckers!!”
Hate “Oh yeah!”
GoldenBoy “Hold on, I owe you one too!”
And of course, GoldenBoy proceeds to kick the shit out of the door panels of my Ford Taurus rental. They are surprisingly resilient, and much to his frustration, he basically does nothing but leave a tiny little scuff.
Tucker “HAHHAHA—you pussies can’t even hurt a rental car?”
File that under “arrogance” and cross-reference it with “foreshadowing.”
Once we get to the strip club, PWJ huddles us together outside and gives us a very calm, strict warning about his night:
PWJ “OK, so I’ve been here once before. This place is a bit … redneck. Let’s not get out of hand here guys, OK? And remember: I HAVE TO GO TO MY WEDDING TOMORROW. That is the most important thing here.”
Tucker “PWJ, I apologize for everything I am about to do tonight.”
SlingBlade “So, PWJ, let me get this straight—I’m NOT allowed to punch any of the girls?”
PWJ [let’s out a long sigh] “At least wait until I’ve left, OK?”
The place looks fairly pedestrian from the outside, like any strip club in any southern town, but once inside, it is a whole different story. I have been to BYOB strip clubs in rural Louisiana that were nicer inside than this place. This place looked like a truck stop Arby’s with a Planned Parenthood in the back.
Not to mention the girls. Oh man. It was straight out of a southern ethnography. Outside of the major cities in the South, there are really only three types of southern girls who are single:
Really pretty, but way too young.
Hot, in their prime, ready to fuck … but already with multiple kids and/or divorced.
Old and worn out.
This is because if you’re a woman raised in the South, you either get married and have kids, or you get out of your podunk town and move to a real city as soon as you can.
Well, this strip club had all three of these types of women. The disparities were so weird it was jarring. There’d be one girl who could not have been more than 18 or 19, and was absolutely SMOKING hot, but you could tell she was raised in such a disastrously abusive and shitty home that she was destined to end up dying in a trailer park meth lab explosion. Across the room there’d be the 25-year-old stripper who has what could have been an amazing face if she’d grown up with even basic nutritional standards, but instead is covered with the acne scars and wrinkles that come from after a decade of drinking cheap beer, smoking cigarettes, eating nothing but processed sugar and fried foods, and popping out three kids by two different dads. Not to mention the old ones, that I guess are there to remind of you why every city has an animal shelter. Ever been to one of those restaurants that calls itself “fusion” but doesn’t really know what it wants to be so it ends up just smashing three totally different cuisines together in no logical way? It was like that, except the food had no clothes on. We sat down, got some drinks from the cocktail waitress—no joke, she was missing at least one MOLAR—and it became immediately obvious that we were not the usual type of crowd that came to this place. This was for two reasons:
A bunch of strippers descended on us, thinking we’d be easy marks, and,
We were the only ones who weren’t dressed in Dickies and work boots.
The first stripper who came over was completely batshit. Not even remotely sane. So of course she wants to talk to SlingBlade. You would assume he would light a girl like that up. Nope. He just sat there, polite but distant, not really saying anything, nodding his head as she went on and on, rapid-fire style. Eventually, SlingBlade reached for a cocktail napkin, wrote something on it, and slid it to me. It said:
“Go for help”
I tried to engage her in conversation, to either misdirect her or maybe even buy a dance for PWJ or something. She was having none of it. This girl was LASER focused on SlingBlade, who wasn’t doing or saying anything, he was just sitting there like a patient boyfriend. Finally, she gets called to the main stage to dance and leaves, making him promise not to go anywhere.
Tucker “Dude—what was that? I’ve never seen you hold back with a girl like that.”
SlingBlade “I was afraid she’d stab me.”
Tucker “Come on dude, she’s not that bad.”
SlingBlade “Hell hath no fury like a woman with borderline personality disorder, attachment issues, and low-level dementia.”
He moved positions at the table so that he was now with his back to the wall, in between me on one side and Hate on the other. She didn’t come back over; she just glared at me the rest of the night, like I’d stolen her boyfriend. Creepy.
As some other stripper came up and tried to hustle me for a dance, I noticed a tattoo on the back of her neck. It’s a name, “Nick,” written in some retarded form of calligraphy.
Tucker “Is that your boyfriend?”
Stripper “Yeah.”
Tucker “So if I give you a tip, will it just go to tricking out Nick’s Camaro?”
Stripper “Nick doesn’t drive a Camaro.”
Tucker “An IROC?”
Stripper “NO!”
Tucker “A Mustang? What does he drive?”
Stripper “My truck.”
Tucker “HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE HIS OWN CAR!”
SlingBlade [condescendingly] “Let me take you away from all this. You are so beautiful; you deserve better than Nick. Don’t you realize how many men want to love you?”
Stripper “We have a great relationship, he’s just between jobs!”
SlingBlade “Between jobs. That’s so precious. Did Nick pick that phrase up from CNBC while you’re at work?”
Tucker “How long have you been dating him?”
Stripper “Since high school.”
Tucker “And how many kids do you have with him?”
Stripper “Two.”
SlingBlade “Wow.”
Tucker “So you got knocked up by your high school boyfriend, and now you work at a titty bar to support him, while he sits at home and plays video games.”
She didn’t respond immediately, which says everything. Laughter everywhere.
Stripper “It’s not what it sounds like.”
Tucker “It sounds like you need a new boyfriend.”
SlingBlade [still condescendingly] “I’ll be that man. I’ll even love your kids like they’re mine. I’ll be your knight in shining white Mustang.”
Stripper “Well, that’s your opinion, and you know opinions are like assholes, right? Everyone’s got one.”
Tucker “Opinions are NOT like assholes. You can’t shove your dick in an opinion.”
Stripper “Whatever. I’ll be right back, I’m going to the powder room.”
SlingBlade “You don’t need more whore paint, you’re beautiful just the way you are!”
At one point, two different strippers were trying to get me to pay for dances. I told them that they had to play rock paper scissors for it. They actually did it, so I got a few dances for PWJ from the winner. Afterwards, somehow we started talking about anal. The stripper was into it. SlingBlade was not.
Stripper “You don’t like anal? You’re missing a big part of life there, buddy.”
SlingBlade “Yes, I was in the middle of an especially vigorous masturbation session back at the hotel, and I thought to myself, ‘you know SlingBlade, you need more anal in your life.’”
Stripper “Anal is fun, I like it.”
Tucker “I gotta agree with her on this. What’s the saying: Beer is like anal—you don’t know you won’t like it unless you do it so much you pass out.”
I’m not exactly sure when he did this, and I definitely cannot tell you why he did this, but at some point Hate left the strip club and went next door, bought like five pints of Jack Daniels, came back into the strip club, and passed them out to all of us to drink.
Tucker “Dude, they have alcohol here.”
Hate “They aren’t bringing it fast enough for me and El Bingeroso.”
Pretty quickly after that, shit got out of hand. I was staying pretty sober because I was driving, but Hate and El Bingeroso were not. Hate bought a dance from a girl, and while she was rubbing her ass in his face, he smacked her butt. It was HARD. It was bad. Even I thought it was out of line. You wanna hit a stripper, that’s fine, but you have to make sure she’s OK with it and work out the price.
And of course, El Bingeroso is hootin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on, and before I know it, in a strip club stuffed with illegal Mexican immigrants, union factory workers, and farmers, all the bouncers were watching us. And not even being subtle about it. There were five big dudes, standing within 20 feet of our table, staring at us.
Right around this point was when I think PWJ ended up bailing. He even snuck out quietly, he was that afraid of getting arrested the night before his wedding. Then, one of the bouncers sees something.
Bouncer “Hey, what is this? Is this a Jack Daniels bottle?”
Hate “That’s what it looks like.”
Bouncer “You can’t bring these in here! Whose is this?”
Hate “I have no idea, they were here when we got here.”
Hate argued with the guy for at least ten minutes about the bottles being there when we sat down. He had him convinced that we were just victims of circumstance, and the dude was going to buy us a round of shots as a apology, when El Bingeroso decided to get up on a chair, pull a JD bottle from his blazer pocket, and take a swig in front of everyone while screaming at the top of his lungs:
El Bingeroso “YYYEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!”
And that was that. SlingBlade left with PWJ, so it was me, El Bingeroso, Hate, and GoldenBoy who would be driving back in my car. I’d stayed pretty sober, so I was fine. Out in the parking lot, El Bingeroso was not. He was having problems walking, ping-ponging off of cars, garbage cans, people, everything. That is, he was having problems until the sight of my rental car clicked in, and a series of bachelor party-related memories triggered an adrenaline rush that propelled him on a straight line sprint in cowboy boots that ended with him kicking one of the door panels on my rental car as hard as he could. Apparently trying to kick a field goal with a Ford Taurus is a lot like playing pool—the drunker you are, the better you are—because he put a huge fucking HOLE in the side of the door panel.
Tucker “Dude …”
GoldenBoy “Shut up you asshole, you have walk away insurance!!”
Hello karma, and fuck off.
We finally get El Bingeroso to stop kicking the car and get inside of it. He gets in the car, but he doesn’t calm down. He’s in the back next to GoldenBoy and Hate is up front with me. He rips the headrest off Hate’s seat, and starts using it like a hammer to break the rear passenger window. Well, auto glass is difficult to break, and after a couple of minutes of exhausting and unsuccessful work, El Bingeroso gives up. He drops the headrest, then leans his head against Hate’s seat.
El Bingeroso “I don’t feel good.”
GoldenBoy “Tucker, pull over!”
Hate “YOU FUCKING PUSSY! YOU HOLD THAT SHIT IN!”
El Bingeroso “I’m gonna puke!!”
GoldenBoy “Pull over Tucker, pull over! HURR
Y!”
Tucker “Hold on, hold on!”
Hate “DON’T YOU PUKE YOU PUSSY! DON’T YOU FUCKING DO IT!”
Strangely, he went silent for a second. There was no “puke” scream. Then I clearly heard the distinctive splash of vomit. A LOT of vomit. Like when you pour out a five-gallon bucket from the top of a ladder.
GoldenBoy “Too late.”
Hate “YOU FUCKING PUSSY! EAT IT UP YOU PUSSY!!!”
El Bingeroso “I don’t feel good.”
Because Kristy wasn’t coming until the next day, El Bingeroso didn’t even get a room for Friday night. I had a double, so he passed out in the other bed in my hotel room. I made sure he lay face down with his head over the edge of the bed, put a trashcan beneath it, and went to sleep.
Since I didn’t drink much that night, the next morning I woke up relatively early. I got up, checked El Bingeroso’s trashcan—there was pretty much nothing but drool in it—and then went to pee.
As I walked back from the bathroom, I saw something on the floor, right at the edge of the El Bingeroso’s bed: A big, round black ball of … something. I looked at it and looked at it, I even got down on my knees and got up real close to it, because I honestly could not figure out what it was—picture a big meatball sitting there on the floor, but hard and dry. PWJ called me: