Archive for the ‘Stories’ Category
Donka Do Balls
This lady sums up my last couple of days pretty succinctly: donka fucking do balls. Allergies, insomnia, $15k drop in the ole trading account and Gristedes is out of funyuns. Donka fucking do balls. I think mentioning the iPad giveaway ruined my karma – that concept is on hold until there is a karma reversal. At least it’s Cinco de Mayo, so I’ll be able to legitimately start drinking at noon.
I can’t recall whether I’ve told my quatro de mayo story on here, could swear I have but on quatro de mayo last year I wrote the Haunting Poetry of Lady Gaga post. So if I’m repeating myself, forgive me, I’m having a shitty week. In 2000 my boy Jobu came to visit me when I lived in the anus/armpit of California, Fresno. My SOATT (Significant Other At That Time, for those of you who suck at figuring out clever acronyms) was out of town, so we planned to light up the town. The only problem was, I’d literally never been out in anus/armpit; all I really did in my twelve months there was sling pharma and watch movies. So we headed off to a place that we knew would be crackalackin: Chevy’s restaurant (they make their own tortillas, right before your eyes!).
Holy shit, writing this shit must be good karma or something, my account has bounced $3,500 to the good. Guess I’ll keep going with this….Anyhoo, after having some fajitas or whatnot, we retired to the bar area, where we encountered an extremely generous Viet Nam vet/tequila enthusiast. This guy had some fairly outrageous conspiracy theories and was possibly smoking agent orange or similar on the side, but he was gregarious in his shot-sharing. We hung there for a couple of hours until we began fearing for our lives a little bit, then – in a gambit rare for that era of impaired driving foolhardiness – snuck off to a taxi and asked to be delivered to the hottest club in town.
All I remember of that club was that it had some funky-assed neon blue lighting and a pre-Affliction clientele that would’ve made even today’s jersey shore-goers blanch. We ordered a couple of long island teas, threw the ice on the floor, and slammed them like shots, in a METHOD that was popular in the day. That’s where my recollection of the night ended for me.
I woke up in the comfort of my bed the next day at around 1:00 PM (it was a Friday so, ostensibly, I should’ve been working, but since I was a pharma rep I rarely worked on Mondays or Fridays) and had 37 voice mails on my cell and about 16 on my home phone (so quaint that we used to have both.) The cell phone messages were pretty evenly split between SOATT and my man Jobu, who was nowhere to be found in my general apartment area. So I started going through the vmails to figure out what happened – the first several were of the annoying “where are you” type. Then it got more interesting.
The next one was an incoherent Jobu, slurring out “hey man, I lost my pants and they won’t let me back in the bar.” At that point I had to step back from the message reconciliation process and try to figure out a couple of things. Like, how can you lose your pants? And, having lost your pants, how do you still have your phone? It seems like your options are pretty limited when staggering around a strange town with no pants. (My friends generally have a bad history with pants and puncture wounds, and they are generally all related to efforts to climb fences while hammered. Bat Rastard used to live in constant fear of his mom finding out he’d immediately shredded some new article of clothing she bought him, but he still insisted on climbing fences. Myself, I’m more of a gate person.)
It turns out some Fresno State coed found Jobu and, in a moment of compassion, gave him some pajama bottoms and allowed him to sleep on her couch. (Don’t for a moment think there were any other “benefits” accrued in this situation – Jobu may be many things, but suave closer-of-deals he is/was not.) Eventually I found out where he was and went and picked up his duck pajama clad ass. (Seriously, there were little ducks on the pajamas.) He didn’t recall how he lost his pants, but did have his cell phone and wallet; how exactly he lost em will remain a mystery, but my money is on fence-climbing. Moral of the story: if you find yourself drinking tequila with a borderline insane Viet Nam vet in a Chevy’s in Fresno, remember to pick up a spare pair of pants before hitting the next bar.
Donka do balls: If you watch The Soup, you’ve certainly seen this lady 100x, but if you are just sitting around twiddling your fucking thumbs, I highly recommend this clip. Certainly seems like she should’ve blown more like a .3 BAC here.
Long Version:
All you really need to know:
Later,
Chilly17
A Vegas Story
I haven’t been quite as active this week as I’d hoped…had buddies randomly show up in NYC the last two nights and unfortunately didn’t break my recent string of acting like an idiot. The one good thing is that I think I’ll be pretty calm for Vegas tomorrow, since I feel like absolute dogshit right now….although that will prob change for the worse on Saturday when xmashangover shows up…
Anyhoo, even though I’m working on another “Matters of Grave Concern” piece, I figured since I will arrive in Vegas at noon thirty Friday I should relate my first ever Vegas story. I made my first ever trip to LV back in 1997, in the nascent stages of my gambling love (also referred to as the Chilly Seventeen Endowment for Underprivileged Suquamish Millionares). I was making the trip with some college buddies: Totalgreen, Majalah, and Longback. It was MLK weekend and I for some unknown reason had a rare patch of time off, so I got in on Thursday night, a day before my buddies, and even optimistically brought my golf clubs (not a huge pain in the ass or anything).
Given my love of drinking and gaming, one might think that me arriving a day early was a decision fraught with danger. Not so, my friends, not so. See, I had a system. I had $1,000 to gamble for the entire trip, so what I was gonna do was just chill at a low limit blackjack table that Thursday night, have a few beers and then get some shut eye so that I’d be ready to rock when everyone else showed early Friday evening. Foolproof.
I got to the MGM Grand at like 9:00 PM and was down at the tables shortly thereafter. This is important, because I had zero cash while traveling and pulled out $500 when I got there (please note that that is later than midnight eastern and that $500 was my max amount for daily ATM withdrawal). What a wonderful place!I was astonished that you could order specific brands of beer in bottles, all complimentary. I sat down at a $10 blackjack table and immediately went on a soul-crushing downward spiral where I lost like 73 hands in a row. Cut losses and retreat? Never.
A thinking man plans for negative contingencies, and so I had packed my checkbook. I raced through that first $500 in approximately 32 minutes – but I had five Bud Lights in that time frame, so it wasn’t all bad. The kind proprietors in Vegas are very cool about cashing checks, even for complete strangers. Up to a limit of course, that limit at the time being $500 for newasses such as myself. No problem, all I needed to do was quickly double up and then I’m back to even and can get some fucking chicken fingers and call it a night.
Lady Luck was not my friend on that Thursday night – I continued to get spanked like Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. I amped up the drinking to ease the pain, mixing in some of the hard stuff on an empty stomach. By 10:45 I was down $1k, which was my limit for the weekend. Fuck it, limits are made to be temporarily exceeded, right? Unfortunately, I had maxed out my bank account and my check cashing privileges at the MGM Grand. No problem, there are like 45 casinos, I’ll just go across to New York, New York and cash another five hundy. Except those cagey casino fuckers are all interconnected; the word was out: Chilly was maxed out as far as LV was concerned. Fuck. Time to angrily stumble to bed.
I woke up on Friday at 11:00 AM rocking a horrific hangover and the slow realization that my cash flow problems weren’t going away soon. I couldn’t hit the ATM until 9:00 PM and my reinforcements didn’t arrive until that evening. I was starving and had only $5 to my name. Somehow I couldn’t even order room service until Longback showed up with his credit card (there were some “hiccups” with my credit back in the day). Fuck. Being a resourceful degenerate, I did what any rational thinker would do in that situation. I decided to find a check cashing establishment.
A great place to hear some interesting stories
These places are great; sure, they charge usurious rates and trap poor people into a vicious cycle, but they also represent a precious commodity to those in dire straits. That commodity? Hope. I figured there were tons of these places in Vegas, so I just set off on foot, procuring a cheeseburger at the Shell station with my last remaining $5 (not a good choice, by the way). Even in January, Vegas can get kind of warm. I walked past a college campus (UNLV?), numerous construction sites, and all manner of seedy storefronts. No check cashing joints to be seen. At about two hours in, I was sweating approximately as much as Shaq in a bikram spin class. At two and a half hours, I passed a casino that I swear was exactly the same as the off-strip place Chevy Chase goes to in Vegas Vacation. At three hours, I started seeing literal mirages, not the hotel/casino kind of mirages.
And then, through the shimmering haze, in a strip mall so similar to all the other strip malls, I saw it. CHECKS CASHED. Thank God – I was very near to going fetal right on the griddle-temperature sidewalk. The kind gentleman only charged me $75 to cash a $500 check (after doing a background investigation that took roughly the same amount of time as your average senate confirmation hearing). Covered in sweat, exhausted and possibly suffering from E. Coli poisoning, I have never been happier to pay a 15% fee for a check that he was 100% positive would not bounce since he spoke to my bank for like an hour.
So happy to have some cash, I decided that I’d swing back by that Vacation casino, win $200 and then take a cab back to MGM where I’d eat a gourmet meal featuring the finest fried offerings. The plan was foolproof. Inside, the casino was as bizarre as its exterior suggested: War and I think Uno were prominent table games. Minimum bets were $0.25. I sidled up to a $1 high roller blackjack table and pulled out $200, determined to double up and then leave.
And, shockingly, I could not lose at that fucked up Vacation casino. After about an hour, I was up $1300. At the first sign of a setback, I got my ass into a cab and went back to MGM, up $300 for the trip. Honestly, I’m not sure it even really existed as given my state of dehyrdation, exhaustion and desperation, hallucinations were definitely not out of the question. Whatever, I was suddenly flush, hallucinations or no. My buddies arrived later to see a possible crime scene (an extended family of chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks had met their unfortunate and grisly demise). I finally did make it to the fetal position, and I slept like a newborn baby. Everything worked out just as planned; I was fully funded heading into the group portion of the weekend. Sweet – things were about to get interesting.
More later,
Chilly17, optimistically planning to finish this on the plane but glad I’m not dragging fucking golf clubs
A Friday Story
I had high hopes for this week, what with the drinking hiatus (save for 36 hours last weekend – it was a holiday), the working out, the reading. My newly clear head certainly seemed destined to write some hard-hitting pieces on healthcare, the economy or the seemingly tenuous state of Brad and Angie’s relationship. Instead, I just started sleeping another five hours per day (now up to 16!). So nothing hard-hitting, thought-provoking or tumescent.
Anyway, I was watching The Office wedding last week, which I enjoyed immensely – despite the fact that much of the plot was eerily similar to Marshall and Lily’s wedding two years ago on How I Met Your Mother. I’m generally okay with repetition (as anyone who’s read the same thing six times on this site is well aware of.) But one aspect of the show reminded me of a lunchtime day at the Naval Academy some 15 years ago or so…
I’m relating this story second-hand, but I have it on good authority that it is factually correct. The photo above is from King Hall, the Naval Academy’s massive cafeteria – allegedly the world’s largest – where thousands of people are served a delicious (lunch) or horrendous (breakfast, dinner) meal almost simultaneously. The machinelike precision of the cafeteria workforce is a pleasure to watch in action, and visitors come to marvel at the spectacle. For the mids, King Hall is an important place, beyond just getting some food. Back in the good old days, plebes used to get f*cking screamed at non-stop throughout every meal (when no visitors were present, of course) for not knowing arcane facts about some upperclassmen’s favorite team/current event/cartoon. Good times. Now, I’m pretty sure there are mani/pedi stations at every table, and the pitchers of water have ice and cucumbers in them.
There are something like 600 tables in King Hall, and they are arranged mostly by company – you sit with the people that you live with, basically, for the structured lunches. Members of athletic teams ate together at “team tables.” This story is about the golf team table. I won’t go into unnecessary detail about Academy food, it was not that great, except for some of the lunches. That’s were I found out I love gyros; that was easily the most polarizing lunch offered – people either loved or loathed it, and there was always a ton of gyro meat for the plundering. If, for example, you hated the lunch that was offered, you might just make yourself a pb&j. Complete with USNA-branded peanut butter (there used to be an academy-owned dairy or something, the milk and juice was branded as well – trivia).
Anyway, on one Friday afternoon, one anonymous midshipmen golfer was enjoying a pb&j in lieu of what was on offer. He had chosen chunky peanut butter, a reasonable choice. I’m a smooth man, myself, but I can understand the appeal of chunky. He was laughing, shooting the shit, imagining the good things to come over the weekend, when he bit down upon a particularly difficult peanut. Giving it his best effort, he could not grind the thing down into a familiar comestible chunk. A startled look grew upon his face, catching the attention of others at his table, causing a stir as they mulled what could be causing the struggle. Ultimately the midshipmen golfer realized that he was going to have to pull out the offending peanut particle. Upon removing the gnawed item from his mouth, he gave it a look and found….
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a yellow toenail.
Like you wouldn't totally eat that
This development caused midshipmen golfer to vomit in projectile fashion, leading many of his comrades in long irons to do the same. It was like Stand By Me up in that mother fucker! The Office’s cold opening had some group hurling, and jogged the old memory. I apologize.
Have a sweet weekend,
Chilly17
