You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Basement Frat House
5 people in one basement.
It’s closed quarters like a submarine with shag carpets.
Every smell, every snort, every chortle is a public exhibition.
I have a hangover fueled by a day of tailgating debauchery. My head is throbbing like it’s hooked up to coal grinder at the local plant.
It’s the last night of a four day football weekend in South Bend, Indiana. After 10 hours of tailgating at the greatest parking lot party in all of South Bend, our night concludes around last call at some dive bar called the Line Backer.
“It’s the best bar in South Bend,” someone says.
In Indiana that’s like saying men in Dolphin shorts is sexy. It’s just wrong.
It’s 2:45 am and we should be sleeping. Instead, we are trying to enter a bar that is simply a jail cell with christmas lights and tv.
This is the best bar in South Bend?
Oh my God.
This place is a beer coated popsicle. It’s under arm hair on your deodorant stick. It’s that taste in the back of your esophagus after you eat red peppers.
We try and enter this chamber of horrors but the body count is high and the music straight out of Compton.
I try to walk through the den of bodies, being tossed around like a cork in the ocean.
It’s a mosh pit of stupid, with dumb music and people so plain and ordinary you almost wonder why they even exist.
I feel claustrophobic and decide that going further into this dance floor of fat and sweat is dumb like cow tipping in a mine field.
We drink our drinks in a tent to the side of the Line Backer. It’s really just an outside parking lot with a tent and a space heater.
Best bar in South Bend?
OMG!
This place is like sucking on your buddy’s running socks after a 3 mile jog.
So our designated driver who has only had 3 hard liquor drinks gets us back to the shangri la that is our friend’s lovely neighborhood on the outskirts of town.
The lawn is pristine and green. It looks like a fertilizer commercial minus the Scotsman wearing the kilt.
Our friends have outdone themselves with food and hospitality.
The house is quiet. The other 10 people who partied for the better part of a day and a half are comatose somewhere on couches and bedrooms. Only dumb asses returning from the greatest bar in all of South Bend are awake, thinking they are sober and quiet and walking softly like ballerinas in cotton coated slippers.
We go down the steep stairs into the basement. For some reason there are no banisters to hold on to, a codes violation to be sure. My balance is unsteady as my equilibrium threatens to throw me down the stairs like a gambler who owes money.
We get into the darkness. Two teenage boys are fast asleep. There are baby snores.
“Don’t wake the kids,” one drunk dumb ass says stumbling down the stairs.
“Damn these stairs are steep,” another inebriated buddy says in a slightly hushed howl.
“it smells like ass down here,” a third drunk plowing down the stairs bellows as the lights pop on.
“Turn off the Lights. The boys are asleep.”
There are snickers and stomping and burps.
It smells like a fermenting sausage processing plant in this basement.
I see my bed and head to it. I barely have the energy to take off my shoes. I’m so dumb at this point, I don’t think I remember how to even untie my laces.
I fall on my back and the darkness blankets my brain like a warm glove.
I hear two teenage boys asleep snoring little boy dreams.
On top of that I hear the quiet roar of 3 men reeking of hours of consumption and tail gating.
They are loud and delicate like 3 horny grizzly bears waking up from a winter’s solstice.
“don’t wake the kids,” one says.
“Yeah you said that all ready,” another bellows.
I laugh.
The whispers become grunts, like cavemen fornicating in the dirt.
One of the crew lays down. He is out. Cold. I think he half passed out and half decided this was the time to sleep. He really had no option after 12 hours of stupidness.
I want to call Guinness book of world records and get the time for fastest route to unconsciousness.
The guy was asleep faster than it takes to Google the phrase Dumb Asses Falling Asleep.
I am one of the senior members of this pirate enterouge of stupid.
There is only one roll out bed and I’m on it. The other guys wanted it, but being the oldest member of the stupid club, they acquiesce to my needs.
That means i get a mattress on pegs.
No big deal. I could sleep on a bed of nails I am so blasted.
I close my eyes.
They hurt. My eye lashes hurt. My eye lids hurt. My brain hurts. My face hurts from the inside.
It’s radio. My brain is filled with blackness and shooting bursts of drunken color and images of the dummies I have partied with for four straight days.
Whispers are now snickers. Snickers become low guttural guffaws. Chuckles become snorts and piercing laughter.
This contingent of crazies is so wasted, they not what they do.
The guy who passed out is now a target.
I can’t see anything because my eye balls do not work, but I listen and I laugh.
One guy sneaks up to the passed out guy.
“Dude, he’s out cold. Check this out.”
I hear paper rip. I hear laughter.
“Oh my god, you can’t do that.”
“Dude, he’s out.”
“He’s gonna wake up.”
“He’s dead”
Then a pause.
What’s going on I think to myself.
My brain searches the darkness and the light show of a melting mind.
My ears listen for signs, a clue….
Then laughter so loud I expect the teenage boys to jump up screaming “is there a fire?”
The laughter is loud like a chain saw.
I sense lights going on and off.
“Turn off the light A**Hole. You’re gonna wake the kids.”
Yeah like that’s a top priority now, right.
I listen. What happened.
The lights go off.
“Get your camera.”
“I need lights, dude.”
The lights go on.
There is more laughter.
“Oh my God. How did you….”
Laughter and someone falls into a closet door.
Crash.
WTF, I think to myself.
I need more information.
“How did he not wake up?”
Laughter.
“He did so many shots dude, he’s out cold.”
“That’s awesome.”
Click. Click. Click.
Laughter.
“It won’t stick to his skin,” one says.
“Bend it down,” the other replies.
“He’s gonna wake up.”
“No chance.”
My mind is racing. I am tempted to wake up, to look, but I am weak, exhausted. There is no way.
I just need more information.
“These nose strips will stick to anything. Oily skin. It doesn’t matter. Bend it down.”
Laughter and camera sounds.
I hear the teenagers stirring.
Someone somewhere in the darkness farts.
Par for the course I think to myself.
The laughter will go on for several more minutes. The lights go on and off and on again like a basement version of Studio 54.
All of a sudden the black void of unconsciousness washes over me.
I won’t wake till the dawn bursts through the window directly over my face.
It smacks me in the brain like a two by four to the head.
I have no idea what happened till hours later.
The guys now hung over as hell come up the stairs.
They are disoriented. They look like frat house laundry pulled out of the dryer before the cycle completed.
“What the hell were you guys laughing about last night?”
“Huh.” one dumb ass says.
He pulls out his phone and opens up the photo shop.
He bursts out laughing.
I look at the photo.
There is a nasal strip on the drunk guy. But only part of it is stuck to his nose. The other end is attached to nothing so it is standing off his face like a flag pole of breathing problems.
The picture is so dumb we all start cracking up reliving the moment.
Suddenly my radio show has an image to go with the fatuous insanity.
We stumble to the coffee pot and pour ourselves something other than booze hoping that the cob webs will go away quickly.
We stare at the picture repeatedly and begin to recall the night.
So much fun.
Life’s Crazy™