You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery (16 page)

My parents hadn’t really lived together since I was three. My dad would come home every few months or on holidays, but he’d sleep on the couch. I didn’t know this wasn’t normal. My mom was dropping us off at my dad’s Georgia apartment, not staying and hanging out with her husband. Being a little kid, I never really caught on that my parents had been separated for over five years. They decided to tell my sister and me when we were old enough to understand. Kind of weird? Yes. But I’ve never been a parent before, so there is no judgment. (But I will say that my parenting methods will involve a lot less wool over my kids’ eyes, and a lot more gin in my mouth.)

So now it was all out in the open. I was one of the statistics. I didn’t need to ask if it was my fault. I didn’t need to make sure they still loved me. I didn’t need to milk this thing like an old, dehydrated cow. To prevent confusion down the road, my mom did encourage us to ask questions. I obliged, asking her things like, “When can I get back in the pool?” “What time does the pool close?” “If you remarry, do you think your new husband will have an inground pool?”

The next day, we left San Antonio bright and early. My aunt Debbie and cousin Josh were heading back to North Carolina, so it was just us Hart kids back in the car. My mother put on her peppiest front.
*

“All right, kiddos, I really think we can make this fourteen-hour drive in one day. Who’s with me?”

Shockingly, we didn’t hit the road with the same gusto that we had on the way down. My “honk honk” arm motions to truck drivers were in slo-mo. It was more of a “honk if you get around to it, but don’t stress yourself.” “Love Shack” didn’t have the same spirit behind it after I found out my home was no longer a shack of love. The tin roof of my parents’ hearts? Rusted. My mom did what any
good parent does to cheer up her kids: took us into a convenience store and let us pick out whatever we wanted. Fuck chips. Fuck pretzels. I was getting peanuts and Coke.
*

I sat in the back of our yellow-bumpered Maxima, sipping on my treat. And hey, at least we were making good time—that is, until we heard a loud
bam!
Either Emeril Lagasse was cooking gumbo in our car or we’d hit a major road bump. Sure enough, it was a flat. We all piled out of the car and stood ten feet back on the shoulder as my mom attempted to fish out the spare.

After my mom had said about the fifth cuss word I’d ever heard her say, an 18-wheeler slowly pulled onto the side of the road and parked twenty yards behind us. We all stood there frozen as the driver descended his massive truck and started walking toward us. My thoughts went once again to
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
. Remember how fucking terrifying the truck driver, Large Marge, was in that movie? Even if this driver wasn’t going to be a ghost with a Claymation face, he was at least going to have a hook for a hand. Or a glass eye that he’d pop out and clean in his mouth. As he walked closer, I stood behind my mom, clutching the shit out of Chee-Chee, hoping the driver would be scared of my brother. Looking back, there was no way a crusty truck driver would be scared of a fourteen-year-old with a sarcastic attitude, but hope was all I had at that moment. The mystery man walked toward us, silhouetted by the setting sun. Once our eyes had focused and we could see his face, we saw before us something I couldn’t have imagined: a really nice dude named Tom who had kids of his own back home and just wanted to help us get back on the road.

Phew! Crisis averted. By the time we finally had the spare on, Mom decided to call the rest of the day a wash and just get us to a hotel. That was enough excitement for one day, and the crankiness level had reached an all-time high. Plus, I was
way
too dry from not
having been in a pool all day. So we got back on the road and started looking for a hotel.

Here’s the thing about eastern Texas: The towns are super far away from one another. Like, multiple marathons distance. You might not have to pee when you pass one exit, but that’s risking having to hold it for another hour. If you are hungry and see an exit, just stop. If you wait for the next exit for better options, you might be rolling through that Chick-fil-A drive-through as a skeleton. After about forty miles of desert, my mom declared that the next sign we saw for a hotel was where we were staying. Finally, a sign for a Motel 6 appeared on the horizon.

Even as a nine-year-old with low standards (my all-time favorite game was to play “Homeless Kid” in the woods), I knew that this motel was a shit hole. The woman at the front desk had more cigarette butts in her ashtray than teeth in her mouth. We stayed close to my mom as we walked to the room, constantly looking behind us like we were being smuggled out of Eastern Germany.

I looked down at the pool, half-expecting to see a dead body floating in it. Luckily, it was just a couple of deflated clear balloons, which I would later realize were used condoms. And listen, I don’t mean to trash-talk Motel 6. I’m sure they’ve come a long way since 1993. Motel 6’s motto has always been, “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Well, that they did. Good thing it wasn’t a black light, because Lord knows if you’d let one of those suckers loose in there, it would’ve been a Jackson Pollock painting of bodily fluids.

In fact, probably acknowledging this fact, my mom had us sleep on top of the covers. That is, until we spotted several cockroaches in our room. Then I tucked myself into those covers so tightly that I created a personal panic room.

Despite all the cockroach eggs that were about to be laid in our nostrils, we all fell asleep, but not before setting an early alarm. (Remember when you had to set actual alarm clocks instead of using your cell phone? How archaic!) None of us wanted to be there an extra second beyond what was necessary. So at five a.m.,
we bolted out of bed. Not because the alarm clock went off . . . but because the
cops were banging on our door
.

Apparently, someone had been shot at the ol’ Motel 6, a.k.a. Château Skid Row, and they wanted to see if we had any information. You could see the pity in the cops’ eyes. All these kids crammed into a Motel 6 with a woman who looked like she just had the shittiest day of her life? They must’ve thought we were on the run from our superdangerous father, like Jennifer Lopez’s kid in the movie
Enough
. Finally, all that practice of pretending to be homeless in the woods was paying off!

We used this as our cue to get the fuck out of there. First stop was a garage to get a real tire put on, and then we were back on the road. Once again, my mom was alleviating our pissed-off moods with whatever snacks we wanted! You know what I was drinking/eating in that backseat. Five hours in and we were making up for lost time. At this rate, we’d be in Georgia by dinnertime. And with the inherent guilt of putting his kids through a divorce on his shoulders, surely my dad would take us to Billy Bob’s Pizza Circus for dinner.

Billy Bob’s was essentially ShowBiz Pizza. Once ShowBiz started to go under, it would sell its animatronic animal bands to other arcade-type places. The one in Conyers, Georgia, was named after that band’s lead singer, Billy Bob the Bear. He had the quintessential one tooth to show he was from the sticks. I loved that place. Nothing made me happier than awkward robot animals playing original songs, and spending forty bucks in tokens to win a fruit-shaped eraser set that probably would cost a dollar at Walmart.

I was finally starting to get in an okay mood, imagining my pockets filled with tickets from Skee-Ball, when
bam
!
Another fucking flat tire.
What were the chances? Apparently, the garage in ol’ Murder Motel 6 town had sold us a janky wheel. So once again we were roadside, playing truck driver roulette for someone to stop and help us. Total déjà vu . . .

We got the spare with no time to . . . spare (pe he he), and we were going to ride that puppy for the next five hours into Georgia.
If that spare blew out, we were royally fucked, but we were gonna chance it. Why? Because my mother was going to straight-up put a brick on the gas pedal and send her offspring into a lake if she had to spend an extra hour with us.

As luck would have it, we actually did make it to Georgia on that spare. As we cruised our way through Atlanta, only thirty miles from my dad’s place, I could taste the cheap, greasy pizza. I could almost feel the Skee-Ball in my hand. I could see the blue light going off everywhere when I was crowned the air hockey champion. . . .

And that’s when I realized we were being pulled over.

“What the hell?! I wasn’t even speeding!” my mom yelled as she pulled onto the shoulder. Another curse in the Mom records. I looked at Annie and held up six fingers. She was both unaware of my cursing tally and too enthralled with the cop situation to pay me a lick of attention. As an avid watcher of
Cops
, Annie stared at the front seat like she was back on her water bed, eating Starburst and watching a shakedown.

The cop approached our car and we all held our breath. He agreed that my mom wasn’t going over the speed limit, but apparently spare tires can’t go as fast as normal ones—he was pulling her over for her own safety. What a superobservant po-po! So observant, in fact, that he noticed my mom’s tags were expired. As much as she promised she would fix it the next day, he wouldn’t let up, even going as far as saying, “I pulled over a mama with three young ’uns earlier today that had expired tags, and you know what I had to do? I had to take her into the station.”

Looking back, this was a crock of shit. There was no way he just happened to pull over two moms with kids for the same offense in one day. Unless this guy was living the lamest version of the film
Groundhog Day
, he was just trying to scare my mom.

Just like Puss in Boots in the
Shrek
movies, she broke out her big, sad eyes, telling the cop all the crazy shit that had gone down in the past twenty-four hours: the roach motel, the cops, the first flat tire, the
second
flat tire. We followed suit and looked up at him like three
Tiny Tims. By the time my mom got to the emotional crescendo of “And I just told them their parents are divorcing,” the cop had melted. Mission accomplished. He sent us on our way, and Mom quickly snapped back to normal. I was only nine years old but I remember thinking to myself,
Umm, who took my mom and replaced her with Dianne Wiest? This woman can act!
I shot Chee-Chee a “check this bitch out” side-eye.

Thirty minutes later, my mom was dropping us off at Billy Bob’s to meet my dad. In my head she told us she loved us unconditionally, then opened the doors to her Maxima and told us to “tuck and roll,” without ever dropping below thirty miles per hour. When she retells it, she assures me that she took me inside, had a totally normal and nice convo with my dad, catching him up on the past forty-eight hours, then kissed our foreheads and drove the last six hours home.

With my overalls pockets filled with tokens, a fountain Coke in hand, and a pack of peanuts from the snack bar, I was happy again. This was going to be an okay summer. . . .

Oh!
That is, until we found out my dad had a psychotic flight attendant girlfriend who was about to take over our summer like a Somalian pirate. Cynthia. She was downright batshit, but hey, at least now I had a hookup for peanuts. That’s the thing—with that summer and hard times in general, you’ve gotta take the salty with the sweet. It’s always a balance. My parents were divorcing, but at least I had never once seen them fight.

If you’ll allow me to make one more analogy, which even if you don’t, I’m going to anyway because I can’t hear you: Like this tasty cocktail, don’t keep everything bottled up. Sometimes you’ve got to let the nuts out. In this case, Cynthia was the nuts and luckily my dad let her out real quick. ’Cause dat bitch was cray cray!
*

3 oz white or coconut rum

½ cup pineapple juice

1 tbs cream of coconut

½ cup ice

½ cup cubed frozen mango

1 chilled shot espresso

Combine everything except the espresso in a blender and blend. Pour your frozen best friend into a fun glass, shaping the top into a peak. Then pour your chilled espresso floater over the top. It’ll swirl in and mix with your drink as you go along—and it’ll look a lot prettier than mixing it in to begin with, which will leave you with a brown drink. Gross.

This is your classic poolside piña colada, but we give it an extra kick of caffeine by adding espresso to keep things moving.

I
love to travel. I
lurve
it. Whenever I’m in a new place, my adventurous side kicks in—I want to see everything, do everything, drink everything. But there is one side of me that hates to travel. And that, ladies and dudes strong enough with your masculinity to read this book, is . . . my
back
side.

That’s right, this chapter is about one of the biggest pains in my ass
: travel constipation
.

For some reason or another, when I go abroad, my very
regular digestive system ceases to function. And when I say “regular,” I mean military boot camp regular. Sing it with me, everybody!

I don’t know but I’ve been told

I’ll poop every morning till I get old.

I don’t know but it’s been said

I poop as soon as I get out of bed!

When I wake up in the morning and have my coffee, it’s a fuckin’ go. It has become so Pavlovian that I can basically hear the name Dunkin’ Donuts and have a solid BM. America runs on Dunkin’ and Dunkin’ gives me the runs. Fuck it, if I see a bra tag that says “DD” I’m probably gonna drop it like it’s hot.

My regularity is so dependable, in fact, that my morning routine is scheduled around it. If I’m just chilling at home, writing in my underwear with my tiny dog in my lap (spoiler alert: like I am right now), then I drink coffee at my leisure. But if I’m headed to an audition and might be in traffic for an hour, I’d better down that cup of joe with a solid five minutes carved in to sit on the can playing Candy Crush before I leave my house.

When it comes to relieving myself, I am shameless. I will go anywhere, anytime. If I need to go at a party and there is a line of fifty people behind me, you’d better believe I’m taking a seat. Number two is my number one priority. It’s the healthy thing to do! When I was younger, I remember hearing that if you hold your pee in for too long, the toxins from the urine release back into your body. This
terrified
me. The phrase “If you gotta go, you gotta go” became my mantra—nay, my
lifestyle
.

But for whatever reason, my dirty work goes on strike when I’m abroad. Can butts get jet lag? Is my butt just super
racist
patriotic? Is my ass just so damn proud to be an American that it literally doesn’t give a shit about other countries? The jury is still
out.
*
All I know is that my bowel movements cannot get through customs. And because I am a thirty-year-old woman with the imagination of a ten-year-old boy and the pores of a newborn, here is how I think a conversation between my ass and customs would go.

Int. Any Other Country’s Customs

CUSTOMS GUY

You look different from your photo.

Did you do something to your hair?

MY ASSHOLE

Yes, I was recently bleached.

(Customs guy looks at photo; story checks out.)

CUSTOMS GUY

Have you left the country before? It appears your passport has no stamps.

MY ASSHOLE

If you want to see a stamp, go about a foot above me and check out that horrendous Chinese symbol tramp stamp on the lower back. She thinks it means “courage.” It really means “pork.”

CUSTOMS GUY

There is no time for jokes in customs, ma’am.

MY ASSHOLE

Sorry, I like to keep things
loose
.

CUSTOMS GUY

Okay, look, I’m not trying to be an asshole but—

MY ASSHOLE

(offended)

You sonofabitch!

(Asshole is then detained and given a full cavity search, much to her enjoyment.)

END SCENE

Okay. Now that my parents have
officially
thrown this book into the fireplace, let me regale you with a timeless classic. I call it “A Tale of Two Shitties.”

It was December 2011. Maegan and I decided to escape the harsh New York winter with a lil’ vacay in Puerto Rico. It was the land of rum, beautiful beaches, Ricky Martin—and where I didn’t shit for
six days
.

We stayed on the island of Vieques, where my friend Stefanie from NC had recently moved to. She pulled one of those “I’m on vacation and I love it here so I’m not leaving” moves that regular people think happen only in movies. At the time, she was living with her friend James, another US expat, who happened to have an old-school Airstream trailer on his property, right by his pool. Stef hooked it up and Maegan and I had a place to stay for free! James was a total sweetheart and the poster child for old hippie surfer dudes. He spent his days hanging by the pool and starting to drink at two p.m. One night, we invited him out to dinner with us and it took him two hours to find a pair of flip-flops because he hadn’t worn shoes in four years. His motto was “No shoes, no shirt, no idea where I am right now!”

It wasn’t until around day three that I realized I hadn’t dropped a deuce since arriving. I had hoped that since PR is owned by the US, my ass would cut me a break. But no such luck. Apparently,
my butthole has stricter standards regarding PR than the Miss America pageant.

The first possible cure was, of course, coffee. I always say, once coffee hits my mouth, my drawers go down south. But even some Puerto Rican French press was no match for my stubborn bowels.

Next, I tried excessive amounts of beer, another old reliable. (Hey! It’s not like I
wanted
to drink eighteen Medallas a day—it was for my health.) But sadly, that didn’t make me go either, although it did make me almost accept a marriage proposal from a toothless local. James, knowing my struggle and being the gracious host that he was, found fresh aloe vera and peeled it for me to eat raw. Still nothing. He chopped down coconuts and watched me guzzle the fresh water in them, hoping that would lube up my tube. Nada.

James the Saint even offered to have butt sex with me to spark some movement. Although I politely declined, I was honored that he would’ve gone doggy style with me to make my stay more comfortable. That’s hospitality! Take note, Martha Stewart.

I fucking loved those coconuts. Obviously rum was added to all of them.

Despite all the effort, I was still totally blocked. By day five, my full belly was stuck out so far that I looked like E.T. in a one-piece. I was rockin’ a straight-up second-trimester pregnant belly while drinking a forty-ounce beer, floating on a pool noodle. The disgusted looks I got from strangers on the beach became a drinking game.

The constipation didn’t let up the entire time we were there. We floated in the crystal waters on an empty beach, and I felt like I had an anchor holding me down. We canoed through the magical bio bay, and as I watched the water droplets that looked like stars, I wished on them that I could take a crap. No such luck. Despite all of my and James’s efforts, I can honestly say that I’ve never gone number two in Puerto Rico. Obviously, as soon as the plane’s wheels touched down on American soil, it was
on
.

Ahem
. I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to the bathroom attendant at LaGuardia Airport. What I did in there was not okay. You didn’t deserve that.

Although PR was painful, in retrospect, it was child’s play compared to the first time this travel hex happened. This one is a doozy and lasted for over a week. Dare I say you’ll need to exercise some constipa-tience for this story?

It happened when I went to Bali for Hely’s thirtieth birthday. You remember Hely from facilitating my torture Brazilian? She had family there, and they were kind enough to let her and a rotating cast of friends take over their house for a month. She had invited us a year earlier, and I couldn’t believe I’d actually saved the money and booked the flight. At twenty-four, I felt like this was the most adult thing I’d ever done.

I was
So. Damn. Excited.
Bali was supposed to be majestic. The beautiful beaches, the smiling people, but most of all . . . the peanut sauce. I FUCKING love peanut sauce. I’m gonna go ahead and say that peanut sauce is my number one condiment, but don’t you dare say anything to hot sauce. If I lost hot sauce’s trust, I don’t know what I would do.

There’s a joke in the South that goes:

How do you get a southern girl to suck your dick?

How?

Dip it in ranch.

Followed by a high five and those two dudes going back to playing
Halo
.

But me? I’ve always hated ranch. However, if the only peanut sauce left in Bali was on someone’s ding-a-ling? Well . . . then I’d have me a new boyfriend.

While I’ve been an on-and-off vegetarian and vegan since the ripe age of nine, this trip was during the few years I fell off the conscientious wagon. In Bali most of my meals consisted of chicken satay and peanut sauce with a side of white rice with peanut sauce followed by some more fucking peanut sauce. I couldn’t get enough.

It wasn’t till about day three that I noticed all that peanut sauce that was coming in was not going out. Nothing was coming out, in fact. My butt should’ve been pumping out peanut sauce like one of those machines at Whole Foods that let you grind your own peanut butter, but alas, it was not.

I tried old faithful: coffee. Lucky for me, Balinese coffee is super potent. They brew it as dense as tar over there, so a couple of cups of that, and I was sure to be sittin’ pretty. I jumped in headfirst. I probably had four cups of coffee in this serene, small back garden of a coffee shop. I caffeinated so hard that, I swear to God, I could feel my eyebrows growing. But I still didn’t have to go. I take that back. I did have to go, in the sense that I needed to
leave
that fucking garden immediately. I had reached full-on panic attack caffeine levels and found myself in my own
Requiem for a Dream
but with fewer butt-to-butt dildos.

(Although, come to think of it, a couple of dildos probably would have helped the situation. Dammit, be-hindsight is always twenty-twenty.)

After a few days of not going, wearing a bikini was just straight-up embarrassing. Or, I guess,
more
embarrassing than usual.

I was more clogged than Bigfoot’s shower drain, so I decided that I needed to take a more radical approach. Since I was in Bali
and needed some medical attention, I decided to do what the Balinese do when they are constipated. And I knew just where to go.

The year I went to Bali was the same year the book
Eat, Pray, Love
, by Elizabeth Gilbert, came out. In case you haven’t read it, the book follows the author’s journey as she finds happiness through the food in Italy, meditation in India, and then love in Bali. If you haven’t read this quintessential lady book, do it now.

In the book, Gilbert becomes friends with a woman named Wayan, who owns a Balinese healing center in the mountain town of Ubud. While Wayan helps her with her messed-up knee, the two become lifelong friends. I had to meet Wayan for myself. Why?

A. Because I had just finished reading the book and thought it would be cool to meet this character in real life.

B. Because I was backed up further than a subway line when someone falls on the tracks, and I thought maybe she could help!

I had a plan but I needed travel buddies. Going to Wayan wasn’t like walking a couple of blocks to go to a drugstore. This place was three hours away, and in a country where I’m pretty sure I saw a macaque driving a Vespa.