August 8, 2006: Whisky, You're the Divil
I've never been much of a drinker. Sure, I like a Newcastle Brown Ale every now and then, and I've been known to dabble in foofy liqueurs like schnapps, but only sparingly. I got hammered once and only once, at a wedding reception, and that was an innocent mistake - I was all of ten years old and there was a good bit of some kind of lemon-flavored sparkling wine kicking around, along with a distinct lack of direct supervision. I went around cadging the stuff for an hour or so because I thought it tasted good. Before long I was reeling around making a noisy nuisance of myself - more so than a ten-year-old normally does. Half an hour or so after that, I was throwing up in a flower bed in front of the church and being shoveled into the back of the family car for the trip home. The next day I had a head like a train wreck and a devout desire never to do anything like that again. This aversion served me well later in life, making it easy for me to steer clear of illicit high school beer parties and regrettable college incidents.

I am, I accept, in something of a minority here. A lot of people seem to enjoy tying one (or two, or five) on. In my college days, especially, there were some truly heroic drinkers (and I mean that in the ancient Greek sense). One of the most heroic - both in terms of the quantity (and variety) of the booze he drank and of the misadventures he had while in his cups - was a guy we'll call Chris, because that was his name.

Historically, some of the hottest tickets on the serious WPI-based drinker's calendar were the cast parties thrown by the school's theater club, Masque, after performances. Masque cast parties were legendary affairs, possibly the only parties I've personally heard of that were really worthy of the often overused label "bacchanalia". Anyone who was anyone in the drama/fiction-geek scene at WPI in the early '90s went to Masque's cast parties, where the intoxicants of choice were usually industrial ethanol, Everclear, or Jell-O made with one or the other.

Chris was as fond of these rocket propellants as the next guy, but he did have a bit of a problem. The problem was that he was, well... kind of small. He didn't have a lot of body mass with which to diffuse alcohol. The end result was that he tended to move along the entire intoxication process on a sort of accelerating curve. He'd get drunker faster than anybody else, and usually proceed to the inevitable end phase of a collegiate drinking binge before anyone else.

But you had to say one thing for Chris. Even at his lowest points, he had a certain... style.

Case in point: The one Masque cast party, held at the off-campus apartment of a very popular student actress, at which he realized with a certain surprising suddenness that he was about to offload excess alcohol, as it were. Naturally, there was a mob scene in the hall and at the bathroom door (that old Gin Blossoms lyric about half the party moving into the bathroom was probably thought of at just such a soiree). Chris decided to make instead for the third-floor balcony, only to discover it - being the apartment's only fresh-air spot - just as mobbed. This left Chris in the interesting and challenging position of having to push his way, as fast as possible, through a crowd with his motor skills deeply impaired. Also, he couldn't actually say anything to the people he was trying to get out of his way, because if he opened his mouth, well...

Unfortunately, keeping his mouth shut only worked for so long, and getting to the bathroom took longer than that.

A regrettable and messy incident, yes, and a buzzkill for all concerned, but hardly unusual at a college booze party, right? Wrong. If you think so, you underestimate Chris's incredible talent for making situations stranger than they need to be.

As near as forensic investigators (read: Chris's roommate and my future roommate, the indefatigable MegaZone) could piece together later, it happened because Chris knew his time had come and instinctively put his hand to his face in an effort to contain the discharge. Normally this would have caused nothing but a dreadful explosion, but somehow, Chris managed to hold his hand in such a way that it formed a sort of sluiceway for the rejected booze, which proceeded, in a truly improbable but, I am assured, spectacular fashion over his shoulder and onto the person standing immediately behind him.

Who happened to be the immensely popular hostess of the party.

Her perfectly understandable reaction was reportedly something along the lines of, "What th - WHO DID THAT?!"

There were a good many people in the area who were interested in the answer to that question, in fact. She was, after all, a very popular young woman, and the partygoers included many of her admirers - many of them large, beefy young men. Had Chris's role in her sudden drenching with recycled liquor been uncovered, things would probably have turned, er, percussive quite rapidly.

But - and this is how Chris's luck works, both amazingly bad and incomprehensibly good at the same moment - nobody knew he'd done it. Bear in mind that most of the potential witnesses were not in terribly good shape themselves, cognitive-ability-wise, and that Chris had, except for his hand, managed to miss himself entirely. Besides, he had been facing the wrong way the whole time. Who could possibly puke on someone standing behind him?

The only witness who could reliably tell what had happened was Zoner, and he certainly wasn't going to clear it up for the would-be pummelers. He had to live with whatever wreckage they left behind. He felt it in the best interests of his domestic peace to get Chris the hell out of there before anything else went wrong, and so he did.

Fast-forward one year. Another year, another Masque production, another cast party. The hostess of the previous year's party had graduated, but had stayed around Worcester for the year-end Masque blowout. Naturally, Chris was present. This time he did a bit better, holding his liquor with an unusual facility - for most of the night. The only real hitch came when Zoner drunkenly suggested that Chris should apologize to the young woman in question for vomiting on her the year before. This Chris proceeded to do, presumably freaking her out a bit. Other than that, things went reasonably well. The wind-down phase of the party found the same woman sitting on a sofa, chatting with Zoner... until she suddenly froze, a look of surprise and horror spreading onto her face.

Chris had slumped into the couch next to her, casually picked up her arm, and begun nibbling on her fingers. This went on for a while, with both the arm's owner and Zoner staring in disbelief. When it finally penetrated Chris's brain that he was being observed, he looked up, vaguely realized that the object of his attentions seemed, at the least, surprised, and said apologetically,

"Pardon me. I have a limb fetish."

Once again, it fell to Zoner to effect an extraction. Well, actually, he cordially offered to beat Chris up for her - "He's my roommate, it's my right!" - but she declined.

Chris was forever doing things like that in his cups. One night he came home from a gala evening at some other apartment party - a party at which he had apparently been toyed with somewhat by a young lady he admired. Standing at the base of the stairs in his on-campus apartment, he loudly declared, "Women!" before smashing his head into the wall facing the base of the stairs. His head punched clean through the drywall, which collapsed - revealing a time capsule of sorts within the wall, left behind by some previous occupants who had also, apparently, had trouble with that wall. There were various odds and ends in there, clearly left on purpose, including the bill from the school for repairs to the wall (dated sometime in the early 1980s, if memory serves).

Zoner, it must be said, was not known for his temperance in those days either. He was present for most of Chris's greatest hits, and though he could hold his liquor better than his roommate, he had his share of high notes as well.

A few years after leaving WPI, I was living in an apartment not far from campus with Zoner and another guy, both of whom were either still students or had just graduated. Our roommate Tom was gone somewhere - back home for the summer, possibly - but the end-of-year party season was still running. Never having been much for that scene myself, I was at home, and at around midnight I was sitting in the corner of the living room answering some email on the computer set up there when I heard keys rattling in the front door's lock.

It took a little longer than usual for the door to swing open, and in came Zoner and our friend Josh, both fresh from the latest Masque occasion. They were leaning on each other and giggling madly, making a lot of noise by trying to keep quiet as drunks will, and they reeled across the living room together as if they were participating in a three-legged race, bumping into furniture and almost knocking over lamps and things. Each incident brought on a fresh wave of giggles, followed by loud mutual admonitions to keep quiet.

I sat quietly and watched them proceed in this way. They crossed the living room, passed within a couple of feet of me into the kitchen - I could have reached out and swatted either one of them without getting out of my chair - and raided the refrigerator and pantry for more booze. Then, laden with clinking bottles and trying elaborately to be both careful and quiet, they made their way back to the front door and out. As Zoner made to shut the door, Josh cautioned him once more with the same line they'd been using the whole time:

"Shh! Careful! You'll wake up Gryph!"

Gryph, of course, was me - my college nickname, for convoluted reasons, was Gryphon - and I'd been sitting there in plain sight the whole time. The living room lights were on and I was sitting right next to a working computer; I couldn't have hidden if I'd tried - but they'd gotten it into their heads that I must be in bed by now and were determined not to disturb me, in the process making enough noise to wake up a dozen roommates. Zoner swears to this day that he had no idea I was there.

Mind you, Josh and I are old drinking buddies ourselves. A few days after my 21st birthday, he and I got all liquored up in celebration of that august event. ... And by "got all liquored up," I mean I bought a six-pack of Zima, I drank one, I think Josh drank two, and then we fell asleep in my living room watching Gunbuster. Not exactly a gala evening to approach anything Masque ever threw.