You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery (27 page)

I vegged out on the couch and had a
Gilmore Girls
marathon!

My sister and I went to the beach for a few days!

My town had the cutest pumpkin festival!

I got a court date!

Their heads all turned to me.

“Who’s Court? Court Calhoun from the third floor?”

“No,” I corrected them. “Court, like actual court. With a judge and stuff. It’s not a big deal,” I said, laughing, while pulling out my briefcase-size laptop to look up how strict Alabama laws were. “It’ll probably get dropped.”

Four weeks later, I convinced my friend Laura to take this weekend trip down to Alabama with me. This was not an easy feat. Unlike my 2.5-GPA ass, Laura had her shit together. Of course, I didn’t mind missing class to drive down for my Friday court date. I went to class about as often as an Olympic gymnast gets her period, but I wanted to have a copilot this time. I convinced Laura that we should leave early as fuck on Thursday, then we’d be to Alabama by dinner. That way I could make my Friday court date and we’d have a couple of nights to party in Tuscaloosa before making the trek back for Monday classes.

This is what friends do for each other, guys. In her heart of hearts, Laura probably didn’t want to drive twenty-two hours in one weekend so her friend could go to court. But in her Hart that was her friend Mamrie, she knew I’d bug her till she caved. I have family members who wouldn’t do that! But she was like, “Adventure! Let’s do this.”

Of course, I did entice her a little with the prospect of us making it a truly ridiculous time, as I was going to buy a bunch of weed for the road. I know what you’re thinking.
Real brilliant, Mamrie. Your plan is to travel with an illegal substance to make a trip to an
out-of-state court date more fun.
 . . . To that I say, thank you. I thought it was pretty brilliant myself.

We hit the road on a mission. I needed to get down to Tuscaloosa and clear my name, also hopefully not serve any jail time. At this point in the chapter you might be wondering,
Mamrie? Why the hell is this chapter called Alabama Blizzard? Did you seriously miss your court date because there was a fluke blizzard in October in the Deep South?

Close! We almost missed my court date because Laura and I hit many blizzards on our way down. . . . Dairy Queen Blizzards.

If you aren’t familiar with this American classic, the Blizzard is the original McFlurry. It’s ice cream blended with toppings, and it is
beautiful
. It takes away the pressure of having to make the perfect ice-cream bite by incorporating the toppings into the soft serve. I do realize that is the most privileged sentence I have ever written.

We hit the road with a vengeance and a quarter ounce of weed. Weed—spoiler alert—gives you the munchies, and my friend Laura has the biggest sweet tooth of anyone I’ve ever met in my life. When we went to the dining hall, she would make it a point to show us how many desserts she could eat, stacking up the small white Styrofoam containers like they were plates at those sushi places with the conveyor belts. When we went to see the remake of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and Augustus Gloop fell into the choc river, Laura screamed out, “Amateur!” Way too loudly, I might add.

With Laura’s and my sweet teeth in tow, we made it all of forty miles before we were stopping for a treat. First place we saw was a Dairy Queen—no-brainer. We walked in, both trying not to look stoned, which was basically impossible. When the sweet-faced high school girl said, “Hi, what can I get y’all today?” I fell out laughing like I’d just heard the world’s funniest joke.

“Sorry,” I said, still cranking out some Mamrie mumbles, which is basically me laughing without opening my mouth, “thought of something from earlier.”

Luckily, Laura took over. “We’ll just take one large Oreo Blizzard.”

We’d decided before going in—so intensely that you would think we were politicians in a war room—that we would just split one. There was a long road ahead of us and we didn’t need to be gluttonous.

“Y’all want this to go, right?” the sweet-faced high school girl said to us, sticking two spoons in our Blizzard.

“Yes, ma’am,” we said, visions of Oreos dancing in our heads.

“Okay, then,” she said, walking toward us. That’s when the unthinkable happened: She flipped our Blizzard, our precious, precious Oreo Blizzz, upside down. Laura gasped. What was she
doing
with our dessert? My instincts kicked in and I started to put my hands underneath it to catch it. I just stood there with my hands out like a firefighter who’s about to catch a baby from a burning building. But to our
horror
delight, the Blizzard was staying in place. We looked on at this cherub-faced fifteen-year-old holding our ice cream upside down, monotonously counting out loud to three before flipping it back upright.

“There y’all go. Enjoy,” she said, handing it to us like it was no big deal. I slowly reached out and took the Blizzard, not knowing how to respond. Once back in the car, Laura spoke first.

“Da
fuck
was that?”

“I have
no
idea!” I said, shoveling Blizzard into my mouth. I knew I needed to get as much in as possible before handing it to Laura, as we were both superfast eaters. Our other friends refused to split apps with us because they knew we would be licking the ramekin of marinara from the mozzarella sticks clean before they were finished putting their napkins on their laps.

She motioned for me to hand back the Blizzard, then said with a mouthful of Oreos, “I don’t know what just happened, but I do know I’m gonna want another one of these in a hundred miles.”

And she wasn’t lying. Halfway into South Carolina, we stopped for another Blizzard. Sure enough, the girl flipped it upside down with a completely blank expression, counting out loud to three.

Once back in my Accord, we ate our Blizzard in silence. We sat
there dumbfounded, passing the Blizzard back and forth. Mind you, this was before smartphones. We couldn’t just google “What the fuck kind of Blizzard mantra does Dairy Queen do” to calm our stoned-as-a-goat brains down. No, no. We didn’t know what was happening, we needed to know, and we were too high to ask.

The only thing we could do was cross another state line and get another Blizzard. By God, this mystery would be solved! At this point, though, we weren’t very hungry. We’d already split two Blizzards. Cut to us smoking some more weed.

By the time we spotted our first DQ in Georgia, I was so high that I was laughing at the local radio commercials like it was a Dave Chappelle album. Inside, I thought a fat kid eating a banana split was funny. I thought I was going to pee my pants because of a woman’s shirt that read
I
’
VE GOT CATTITUDE
. We walked up to order our Blizzard, our eyes looking like albino rabbits’.

“Hey there, ma’am. We will take one large Oreo Blizzard,” Laura told the teenage boy who was so pissed he was working at the DQ instead of at the skate park.

I was standing behind Laura laughing so hard that zero volume was coming out of my mouth. I looked like I was screaming with the mute button on. “Mamrie, you have to get it together or they’ll call the po-po,” Laura whispered loudly at me.

“You called him ‘ma’am,’” I said, wiping tears from my eyes.

“I did not. . . . I did? Son of a biscuit,” she said, laughing with me at this point. Unamused, our DQ employee told us that our Blizzard was ready. “Moment of truth.”

“Here you go.” He handed us our Blizzard. We stopped our giggling immediately. Our faces went blank as we stared at him, waiting for him to do the flip. “Are you going to take it?” he asked us, completely confused. Laura reached out slowly, taking the Blizzard from him like candy from a stranger.

Back in the car, we ate our Blizzard in silence. The only noise was our stomachs. After eating one and a half Blizzards each, they sounded like whales giving birth. So much for that whole “not
being gluttonous on this trip” idea. I was so full, I was literally short of breath. I went to unbutton my pants and they were already undone. Then came the paranoia.

“We weren’t imagining the first two flips, right?” I said, genuinely concerned.

“We couldn’t have. There’s no way.”

“Did we get
Training Day
ed? Did we imagine it?”

“Mamrie. We did not get
Training Day
ed. We are stoned.”

We continued down the road for a while, bellies aching from the amount of dairy coursing through our guts. These days if I ate three
bites
of a Blizzard, that Blizzard would turn into a tornado of farts.

Three more hours down the road and we were finally crossing the Alabama state line. I couldn’t let go of what we had witnessed, though. The truth was out there and I needed to find it.
*

“We gotta get one more Blizzard.”

“Are you crazy?!” Laura asked me, already knowing the answer.

“Maybe I am. But we gotta crack the mystery of the Blizzard. A Blizzard in every state.” She looked at me like she might puke. After a deep inhale, she held her hand out like Thelma reaching for Louise before they drive over the cliff. I placed the freshly packed bowl in her hand, cranked up the music, and went in for our last round.

I felt like I had just given the pep talk in
Rudy
, but instead of the outcome being a hardworking kid getting a shot, it was two girls getting stoned and eating way too much ice cream. We walked into that Dairy Queen like we owned the place. In my mind there were wind machines and AC/DC playing, but in reality it was just fluorescent lighting and easy listening. I’m pretty sure I palmed a small child’s face to get him out of my way as we headed directly to the register.

Laura took the lead. “Hiiii.”

“Yes, you are,” the judgy teenager behind the counter said, too proud of his joke. I stood a few feet back from the register with my arms folded across my chest like I was the bouncer at Marquee (or a really pouty Michelle Tanner). We wanted answers, and nobody was getting in the way of it.

“We will take one large Oreo Blizzard, please,” Laura said, looking over her shoulder as we nodded at each other slowly. From a distance it must’ve looked like we were about to rob the DQ and were just
verrrrry
bad at it. The snarky teenager rolled his eyes and headed to make our treat. Laura joined me a few feet back from the register and also folded her arms. Nothing to see here. Just two extremely high college girls who think they are in the Secret Service.

After what seemed like a lifetime, he came to the counter holding a freshly whipped Blizzard. We approached the counter like it was a roulette table and we had just put all our money on red.

“Here you go, one Oreo Blizzard,” he said, holding it out to us. Then, right before we could grab the cup, he flipped it over. It felt like it was in slow motion, but again, I had smoked more weed and eaten more sugar in the past eight hours than I had in my entire life. He started counting. “One Mississippi . . . two Mississippi . . . thr—”

Splat!

We looked down in horror, mouths agape. The teenager looked back and forth between the dumped Blizzard and us, until his manager walked up, a scowl on his face.

“Chad, that’s five this week. Go get some rags and clean up this mess.” Chad skirted away as the DQ manager reached out and shook our hands. “Well, looks like that Blizzard wasn’t thick enough for you. I’ll be right back with your prize.”

Prize? We were still totally fuckin’ baked and thus extremely confused. But who cares? Prizes are always fun! I don’t care if it’s a temporary tattoo out of a cereal box or
The Price Is Right
’s showcase showdown that’s only a tacky dining room set, a year’s worth of Woolite, and a portable outdoor sauna. Laura and I held hands,
awaiting our inevitable diamond tiaras that read
THE DAIRY QUEENS
or keys to the franchise à la Willy Wonka.

“Sorry for the wait, ladies. I wanted to pick you out a good one.”

A good one? You mean, you had trouble deciding between the pink and yellow Jeeps? Determining if we got the trip to Lake Havasu or Miami? Writing us a million-dollar novelty-size check or a regular-size check to keep it classy?

We looked up to see this man, the hope for our new life, with a shit-eatin’ grin, holding a massive Oreo ice-cream cake.

“Here’s your Oreo Blizzard ice-cream cake! Enjoy!”

What the actual fuck. We would soon learn that DQ was running a promotion that said if your Blizzard wasn’t thick enough, the customer could win a free cake. So that flipping and weird counting? Some boss’s idea of being a real showboat to the customers. Benihana has their onion volcano, and I guess Dairy Queen wanted a little flare too.
However
, it was up to the franchise owner’s discretion, which explained the one in Georgia not doing it. What was never explained, and what I’ll always wonder, is how after driving through three states and having eaten a bucket of Blizzard each . . . Laura and I ate the majority of that ice-cream cake as we rolled into Tuscaloosa.

The rest of the trip was full of surprises. We got to Tuscaloosa and were so sick that we couldn’t go out drinking or have any fun. Laura and I stayed in and watched
Friday
as Virginia and all her friends went out. When I got to court, I was terrified. I felt like I was going to shit my pants but knew it was just an aftereffect of consuming two gallons of ice cream the day before.

I ended up getting forty hours of community service for my charge, which I spent picking up trash and cleaning up elementary schools in my home county over Thanksgiving break. It was embarrassing, sure—but not as embarrassing as explaining how I managed to gain seven pounds on a three-day road trip.

2 oz dark crème de cacao

2 oz Baileys Irish Cream

3 oz vanilla vodka

For the rim: Freeze an extra-dark chocolate bar, then grate it very finely. Mix half chocolate dust, half smoked sea salt. Dip the rim in chocolate syrup, then dip it in the choco-salt mixture.

Combine all your booze into a shaker full of ice. Shake as hard as you can to attempt to burn a few of the many calories you are about to consume with this decadent drink. Strain into a chilled martini glass. Calmly proceed to have mind blown.

D
on’t worry. This chapter is not three thousand words about my undying love for Cheech & Chong. The courts told me that would be a violation of the restraining order. Instead this is a celebratory drink in honor of quitting a bad habit. Cheech, I wish I knew how to quit you.

The summer before I moved to New York was spent on the Outer Banks with Melissa, my Topless Tuesday cofounder and overall hell partner in crime. Her mom was nice enough to let me crash in the guest room of their beautiful beach house. It was situated right on a golf course, which I couldn’t imagine growing up on. The closest hole to my childhood home was the one my next-door neighbors dug in their yard, filled with a hose, and called an inground pool.

I waited tables all summer at a seafood joint. Little did I know that this would actually be helpful training for when I would work at that seafood place in New York. And thank God I didn’t know, because that would’ve killed my postcollege optimism! While I was making customers believe that our tuna was to die for (never tasted tuna in my life), Melissa worked in the costume department for a historical play called
The Lost Colony
.

But when I had actually had a night off and Melissa was free from hemming loincloths, we were throwing parties. That is, when her mom went out of town. Lucky for us, Melissa’s mom, Marie, is a complete hoot (it’s where Melissa gets it from) and went on trips with her girlfriends often. True story: One time we threw a massive mojito party at her place and the next day Marie decided to come home early. It was basically that scene from
Weird Science
where the place is trashed and gets cleaned up in a rewind, fast-motion tornado. I’m almost positive the classic ’80s “pick up a pizza box off the floor to find a passed-out partygoer underneath” move happened. By the time Mama Marie walked through the door, the place was
sparkling
. We totally got away with it! That is, until Marie noticed that her entire
huge
mint bush in the yard was mysteriously missing and she went all Italian mother on me.
*
And when Italians get mad, it’s on a whole different level. The first time I saw Melissa lose her temper I basically ran a tornado drill.

I digress (also, I just had to google “I digress” to make sure I’ve been using that phrase right for the past ten years). The point of this chapter is not to tell you about what a
horrible
houseguest I was in the mid-2000s. The point is . . . going to happen at some point in this chapter. Back off.

So, these were the months leading up to my big transition to New York. Now, a rational person would spend the summer hitting the gym before hitting the audition scene. But I am
not
a
rational person. I’m a rash of a person, at best. I decided to take a different route. In my head, I was about to be too broke to afford food. As soon as I got to the city, the pounds were just going to slide off me. I was going to be a
starving artist
. I was preparing for a total bohemian lifestyle. It was going to be just like
Rent
but with slightly less AIDS. So, I decided to consciously spend the summer packing on some extra pounds.

That’s right. I gained weight—on purpose. I prepared for that move like a bear prepares for hibernation, just getting a good ol’ basecoat of blubber that would, no doubt, melt off as I ran to catch subway trains and 20-percent-off Bed Bath & Beyond coupons blowing in the wind.

In my head, I was gonna be a goddamn waif by Christmas. You know how in the movie
Se7en
Brad Pitt finds that guy who’s starved to death in bed and then he just pops up and scares the shit out of you? That was
goal
weight.

When I was really stoned that summer, which was most of it, and stuffing my face with mozzarella sticks, I’d turn to Melissa and declare, “I’m about to be a starving artist, dammit. I’m doing this for my health!” This, of course, was met with her rolling her eyes so hard that you’d expect one of her eyeballs to pop out like a pug’s.

Summer came to a close and I quit the waitressing job that I’d gotten by promising I would stick around after the summer. I didn’t have time to explain the catch-of-the-day specials to tourists anymore—I was off to make my NYC dreams come true!

There was one part of my big-city fantasy that was true: I was poor. Besides a duffel bag of clothes, the only possessions I moved to New York with were an air mattress with a hole in it and two cartons of cigarettes. And as we all remember, three hundred bucks and an out-of-control roommate.

For my first few weeks in New York I slept on that deflated air mattress, folded in half, with a sheet over me. That is about as comfortable as sleeping on a pool float that has been ripped to
shreds by a pit bull. I would lie on the uneven hardwood floors of my room and say to myself, “I bet this is exactly what female comedy icon Julia Louis-Dreyfus had to do when she first moved to New York.” I’d smile to myself before remembering that JLD actually came from a family of billionaires.

Then I’d go take my fifth hot bath of the night because our landlord refused to fix the heat and I didn’t want my tears to turn to ice.

The saddest part about this visual is that I would actually bring guys back to this pathetic scene. (
Rutabaga!
) I don’t just mean someone I hit it off with from a bar down the street. I’m talking about someone I met in the East Village and would allow to take a thirty-dollar cab or hour-long subway all the way into Brooklyn, only to see that the charming girl in the cute vintage dress lived in squalor. Lord knows for that trek these guys must’ve thought I lived in an expansive Dumbo Loft that my daddy had bought me. That, or that they were gonna get laid. Either way, they would be left sorely disappointed (sore because sleeping on hardwood will do a number on your back).

There was one particular post–drunk hookup morning when I realized I might want to rein it in a little bit. After a typical night of sweaty dancing on Avenue A, I brought a hot guy back to my place, another sad notch on my make-out belt—a belt that was getting long enough to fit pre–Subway Jared. The next morning, he rode the subway into Manhattan with me. A risky move, but I had to go to work and he insisted on escorting me in.

He was way into me, saying things like:

Mamrie, we should totally go to the MoMA this weekend.

So, Mamrie, where do you want me to take you to dinner Friday?

I nodded and listened to him, all the while thinking to myself,
I have no idea what your name is. Is it Joseph? Naw. Josephs don’t have lip piercings. Oh good God, did you have a lip piercing last night? UGH. Maybe it’s Joe. Joe seems like a common New York name.

I took a break from my inner monologue to see that Dude was looking at me, concerned. The train climbed the Manhattan Bridge
as the morning sun glistened on his lip ring. I decided to come clean.

“Look, I think you are great. You are super cute and I’d love to hang out with you again, but I need to admit something. I have no idea what your name is.”

He looked hurt. Fuck, it was Joe. I should’ve just called him Joe. Before I could apologize to Joe, he spoke.

“My name is Scorpion.”

...

...

I waited for him to laugh at his own joke. He sat there deadpan. Who was this comedy genius keeping a straight face after that? What kind of a nightmare would it be if I had actually brought a dude home who goes by Scorpion? That is when I realized that he wasn’t joking, and I needed to pump the brakes on hooking up out of boredom.

After all, I was in New York! There were plenty of other things I could do for fun. The
Friends
gang never watched TV, but they loved watching Ugly Naked Guy through his window. Could voyeurism be my new entertainment? Ya damn right it could.

And that is when my smoking really turned up a notch. Instead of going out, I would sit in the bay window of my empty living room, chain-smoking and drinking ten-dollar magnums of Yellow Tail chardonnay. I’d watch the “A Bum Talking to Pigeons” show. If the bum decided to pull his wiener out, I would change the channel and watch the “Old Lady in the Adjacent Apartment Yelling at Her Husband” hour. After a month of this, my tobacco well ran dry. So, I quit cold turkey.

But, here’s the deal, guys. I was a
smoker
. I wasn’t a smoker for a long time, but for that brief moment in time, it was hard-core. Like Romeo and Juliet’s love. The romance between me and Parliament Lights was so intense that it quickly burned out. But who could blame me? I grew up outside of Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. And if you know nothing about that town, you still know that’s two brands of cigarettes with a hyphen in between them. Cigarettes are, like, free there.

In fact, no shit, I went to the R.J. Reynolds cigarette factory as my fifth-grade field trip. Picture a group of thirty ten-year-olds shuffling through a cigarette factory.
Look, children, this is where they make the menthols.
And the kids go,
Ohhhhhh
. Everyone smoked. And everywhere. You could smoke while picking out a new hose at Walmart or let your ashes fall into your scattered, covered, and smothered hash browns at Waffle House. It didn’t matter. What did matter is cigs were eleven bucks a pack in NYC.

The week of quitting also happened to be the same week I landed a job. Things were looking up! Maegan was still managing the recording studio and had an open receptionist spot. It was a revolving door of celebrities and also had an air hockey table. You know the type. I loved the people there and the prestige of saying, “Yeah, I work at a recording studio. It’s like, okay, or whatever.”

All the glamour aside, truth be told, the pay was shit. I was making eight bucks an hour. That’s before taxes and with an eight-hundred-dollar rent. Needless to say, I worked every possible second of overtime I could eke out and still barely broke even.

Luckily for me, my responsibilities weren’t exclusive to answering the phone and ordering celebs’ lunch. (Hello? Have you ever ordered
American Idol
Season 2 winner Ruben Studdard a
Reuben
sandwich? The man stays on brand.) No, no. There was one other line in my job description that really changed the game for me.

And that, my friends, was being in charge of the candy dish. Pardon me, the two candy dishes. First, there was the classic old-school dish. You had your butterscotches, your peppermints, those strawberry candies that have the splooge in the middle. It was a senior-center panty dropper of a candy dish. But then we had the chocolate dish to class up the place. I’m talking Hershey’s Miniatures, mothafuckas. Tiny Kit Kats, tiny Reese’s cups. Hershey’s
Nuggets Special Dark.
All
the top names. Of course, there was also a constant stream of the classic miniatures like Mr. Goodbar and Krackel.
*

It was my responsibility to keep these dishes stocked. I had the coveted key to the snack closet that held the arsenal of treats. Now, before we start judging, please know that it started off so innocently. I would have a couple of pieces of chocolate here and there.

Oh, I better grab a mini–York Pattie; I’ve got coffee breath!

It’s only three o’clock? I’ll just take one Hershey’s Dark to curb my appetite for a healthy dinner.

Hi, Sharon! Have you lost weight? I’m gonna eat a 3 Musketeers in your honor! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . Sharon?

And that’s when shit derailed. I quickly learned that I could survive solely off this candy during the day and not have to spend money on groceries. Which helped, since I was more broke than Owen Wilson’s nose. But what kind of person wants to eat chocolate all damn day? I’ll tell you who. A person who just quit smoking a pack of cigs a day, cold turkey.

My intake of candy went off the charts. I was eating so many miniature candy bars that I would actually stick my hand deeper in the trash can to hide the wrappers. I didn’t want the shiny evidence sitting there on top.

I remember being in a client-services meeting and my boss saying, “Guys, seriously, we are going through, like, four hundred percent more chocolate than we normally do. What’s the deal?” That’s when I sheepishly raised my hand and admitted that the FedEx guy helped himself to two handfuls a day.
*

This terrible diet lasted through the entire winter. Whatever
money I saved on food was being spent on larger pants, but I couldn’t help myself. At this point, I was addicted. I’ve always scoffed at those stupid magnets and aprons about “chocoholism.” You know the ones. They’ve got a doodled grandma in sunglasses saying, “Hand over the chocolate, and no one gets hurt!” But there I was, slowly turning into the live-action version of a
Cathy
comic. ACK!