You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery (25 page)

Once the sun started to set, we knew we needed to suck it up and shower. After all, this was the first day of Day of the Dead and we just
had
to experience it. All week, we had seen signs that there was going to be a special show in the resort’s theater that night. Bartenders had told us it wasn’t to be missed and it was their favorite show all year.

We managed to clean ourselves up, then headed over to the Italian restaurant. I, of course, ordered two entrées for myself and a big ol’ glass of wine to keep the hangover at bay. Once the food arrived and I was tagging out my eggplant parm for my lasagna, I looked up to see that Maegan hadn’t eaten a bite.

“What’s wrong? Do you not like your ravioli? I’d be happy to order a couple pizzas and help you eat those if you like.”

She shook her head and stood up. “I’m having a full-on panic attack. I gotta get the fuck out of here.”

“Okay, do you want me to have them wrap up your food for later? Maybe we should get an order of puttanesca too . . . just in case.”

“I’m not even hungry. I really gotta leave now. I’ll meet you outside.” She peaced the fuck out as I flagged down the waiter to see if we could just get our meals to go. Before I could stop him, he set down the garlickiest garlic bread I’d ever seen. Fuck. I couldn’t just
leave
the food. That would be super rude. Especially since at all-inclusives you don’t pay for anything. I would’ve looked like
some asshole who just orders a bunch of shit and doesn’t eat it because I can.

To keep my conscience clear, I dove right in. I also didn’t want Maegan to be freaking out solo, so I started shoveling it all in fast. There I was, sitting alone with enough food for several people. It was almost as sad as when you order delivery for yourself and they bring you four sets of silverware, just assuming that amount of food
must
be for an entire family. So then you call out to your fake family as you are tipping the delivery guy like, “Madison, I said you can practice cello later. Come eat with Mommy and Daddy.” Because if that delivery guy thinks I ordered food for four, you better believe it’s four swanky, cello-playing people.

By the time I was halfway through Maegan’s ravioli, I looked up and saw the swingers at a table, staring at me with looks of pity. I shrugged my shoulders and pointed outside. “She wasn’t feeling well.”

They nodded like they were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel, a romantic retreat gone wrong. Luckily, they had totally healthy, normal marriages where they fucked each other’s best friends. I wanted to yell, “You have no room to judge the state of my fake lesbian relationship!” but I refrained.

After quickly finishing the basket of bread (I wasn’t raised to waste), I asked for two shots of tequila to go and booked it straight toward our room. Walking back, I heard, “Maaaaamrie,” coming from a couch in the open-air lobby. I looked around and saw no one. I’d almost convinced myself that it was someone’s dead Mexican ancestor coming to talk to me, when I spotted Maegan’s shoes. Like the witch’s in
The Wizard of Oz
, her always-adorable footwear was peeking out from underneath the couch pillows. I pulled one off her face and handed her the shot. I didn’t even need to speak. The rules of staving off anxiety between us were known. Like Haley Joel Osment, I was paying that shit forward.

We sat on the couch until her anxiety went from “I’m going to scream my head off and take a dump on the floor” to “This place is
weird, right?” Mind you, I was still massively hungover and having to make a conscious effort to string words together to form sentences, but I had to be strong for her.

“Do you want to go back to the room, order beers, and stay away from all the weirdos?” I asked, knowing our night of finally seeing some Mexican culture was going to be a bust.

But she impressed me with her resolve.

“No. We are going to the show, goddammit.”

I’ve said before how when you are having a panic attack everything feels just a little off. Like nothing makes sense. Well, I wasn’t even having one and as soon as I walked into this show, I had those symptoms. I can say without a doubt that we were about to witness the weirdest Halloween show of all time.

That’s right, not a Day of the Dead show like we had traveled from New York to see. Nope. This resort didn’t want its snowbirds to feel homesick for All Hallows’ Eve, so it brought the American culture to us. We approached the theater, and all the hotel staff were dressed as very bootleg vampires.

“Watch out!” I warned them. “My purse is full of garlic bread!” No response. This was not my target demo. We entered the theater and it was decked out in fake graves, spiderwebs, fake bats. It looked like someone had given a blank check to a kid at Party City. I
loved
it.

We went to the bar to grab a couple of beers before finding a seat, but the bartender insisted on having us try their signature “scary” cocktail. I kid you not, it was oatmeal with red food coloring and vodka in it, or “Blood Drink,” as they called it. The only thing scary about it was that it felt like you were drinking liquid cement that at any point was going to harden in your throat. I asked if I could get a spoon for my drink, and the bartender was not amused. Or maybe he was. It’s really hard to tell when someone’s face is painted like a skeleton.

We took our seats while chewing our drinks. As the lights came
down, a random man’s hand tapped my shoulder. I jumped in my seat to find the swinging quartet behind us.

“Hey, hot lesbians. If you get scared during this show and need to hold each other, I won’t mind.” We forced a laugh through our porridge-tinis and turned back around.

We inched our chairs forward a little and kept spooning down the oatmeal vodka as a guy in a Grim Reaper robe and Jason mask swung a fake sickle at us. I leaned into Maegan.

What followed was quite possibly the greatest thirty-minute show I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen that
Full House
episode with two Michelles. If you have never watched a four-foot-ten-inch Mexican man in drag lip-syncing to “Sweet Transvestite,” or seen a dude (in whiteface) dressed as Freddie Mercury pretending to play “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the piano while four guys stand behind him with flashlights and rocker wigs acting out the actual music video,
you have not lived
.

Everything was based on Halloween but just a little off, kind of like dollar-store snacks. You’ll go to the store craving Cheeze-Its, but settle for Chee Zits. It’s close but not quite there. For example, Halloween is all about skeletons. Fact. But when they brought out ten people dressed as glow-in-the-dark skeletons, they danced to Huey Lewis’s “Back in Time,” from the
Back to the Future
soundtrack. It didn’t make sense. Halfway through, Maegan and I had lost it. The hangover mixed with the chunky cocktail on top of sitting in front of people who thought we were a couple sent us over the edge, and we were crying from laughing so hard. Here we had come all the way to Mexico and the closest we were getting to Day of the Dead was a knockoff Beetlejuice dancing to “Simply Irresistible.”

Maegan’s anxiety had finally calmed and she squeezed my leg to assure me she was all good. That is until ol’ Beetlejuice decided to come into the audience to ask for a volunteer. We were practically sitting under our seats to avoid him, when his hand reached out and led Maegan onstage.

Despite the admirable attempt at stage makeup and gunked-up teeth, this BJ was no Michael Keaton. It was actually Captain Giggles, the shy bartender. It was kind of sweet that he needed the safety net of his terrible costume to be able to talk to her. It was like Mrs. Doubtfire without the prosthetic boobs and toying with your children’s mental health. And that, my sweet readers, was the day Maegan met her husband.

I kid!
That was the day Maegan had sex with her first Mexican bartender.

Still kidding!
That was the day Maegan started washing down her Xanax with tequila. This concludes kidding.

The next day we rolled our hungover selves into a cab. This time there weren’t any retirees with Drambuie. It was just two shocked women in awe of the night before.

We boarded the plane with our flight must-haves (
Us Weekly
and Doritos) and found our seats. And don’tcha know, when the stewardess came by to grab our drink orders, Maegan ordered a water. A water! On a flight!

She had stared danger (and a knockoff Beetlejuice) right in the face and come out having a great time. I, for one, still needed a margarita. Those swingers were weird, y’all.

I
n the previous chapter I told you guys my
lucha libre
costume disaster. I’m not going to lie; that one was a doozy. But that wasn’t my only foray into Halloween costume fuckups. Here are my top low points, in chronological order.

Let us throw back a shot for each!

Halloween 1988 Was Bananas

Most five-year-old little girls want to be princesses, or mermaids, or princess mermaids for Halloween. But not me! I had a very specific vision in mind: I wanted to be Miss Chiquita. Yep, as in the little lady on the blue label on bananas. All I knew about her was that she wore a huge fruit hat, but that’s all I needed. I could tell from that quarter-of-a-square-inch sticker that this woman was regal as fuck. Especially her posture.

I told my mom my plans, and her eyes lit up. “Well, Mamrie. Chiquita banana is not a real lady. But she is based on a woman named Carmen Miranda.” She went on and on telling me about how Carmen Miranda was an Argentinean actress in the ’40s and at one point she was even the highest-paid woman in US cinema. (Looking back, did my mom have a lady boner for Carmen
Miranda? Because she sure did know a lot about her.) I was very impressed, and so my decision was made.

There was a costume contest at the local fire department, and I was out for blood. I knew I had to have the best costume, so Mom and I worked together to arrange something fittingly regal. For the dress, I wore a light blue genie costume that I had from a previous dance recital. For the hat, my mom bought a bunch of plastic fruit, which we glued to a cowboy hat. The top even had one of those paper accordion-style pineapples. Pretty brilliant.

I was confident that I was going to win, but I wasn’t taking any chances, so I went the extra mile and created a song.

When they called out my age group, I sized up the competition. Cat? Get real. Pirate? Ahoy, idiot! And don’t get me started on the toilet paper mummy. I was gonna crush them harder than an Adderall the night before a final. We started walking around in a circle for the judges, and that’s when I broke out my secret weapon. I put on my best samba strut and sang, verbatim: “Chiquita Banana puts the mambo in the fiesta! Chiquita Banana puts the mambo in the fiesta!”

It was catchy as hell, and I still get drunk and perform it at parties sometimes. I could tell I was killing it because I looked over to see my mom bragging about me on the sidelines. “Yes, isn’t she amazing? Mamrie insisted on being Carmen Miranda to pay homage to the legend. So mature for her age.”

We lined up to receive our awards and I could almost feel the Little Caesars gift certificate in my hands. The fireman walked right up to me, extended his arm . . . and handed it to the cat. The
fuckin’ cat
. Real imaginative. But, you always learn something from defeat. Especially at a young age.

And that, my dear readers, is when I learned you will get ahead
only
with mediocre, generic bullshit.
I kid!
Seriously, the cat did win but I learned zero lessons whatsoever. I was robbed!

Halloween 1992 Was Out of This World

The first few years I lived in North Carolina, I would still go up to New Jersey to see my childhood bestie, Kara (#Baltimorelayover #neverforget). In fourth grade, I went up over Halloween weekend because she was throwing a party. I prepared a sick martian costume (with all this cool glow-in-the-dark puffy paint on it) and knew I would win her costume contest. Finally, redemption for my Carmen Miranda fiasco!

The only problem was that Delta had lost my luggage and it wasn’t going to be delivered in time for the party. After some serious cursing (I had just learned the word
bastard
and loved it, although I still needed help with context. I told the airport employee to find “my bastard luggage”), Kara’s mom, Terri, took control. Terri was determined for me to still live my Halloween dreams of being a martian, goddammit.

Terri was the young, cool mom. She smoked Kool cigarettes; had bleached, teased Jersey hair; and would drive us around in her used Jaguar while listening to Rod Stewart. She looked like a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet version of Christina Applegate during her
Married with Children
years. To this day, I think my sister still wants to be Terri Dreyer. Terri obviously had Kara really young, because I have a distinct memory of her turning thirty on one of my visits. She always had a different boyfriend whom she and Kara lived with, which might sound sad, but said boyfriend was always trying to get on Kara’s good side and ended up spoiling her. The bitch had a tree house with electricity.
Electricity.
Her tree house was more livable than most of my neighbors’ homes in North Carolina.

Being the coolest, Terri let me raid her closet to put the best martian ensemble together. She dressed me up in her wackiest clothes and even had a silver metallic Tina Turner–esque wig to complete the look. I trusted her to make me look good, and felt confident walking into that party. And it was a great Halloween party, full of classic activities: We bobbed for apples, danced to the “Monster
Mash,” what have you. Finally, the time came for the costume contest. There was no parading for the judges, although I was prepped with a martian-themed song and dance, obvi. Everyone just wrote down on a sheet of paper who they thought had the best costume.

I was nervous. Maybe I should’ve performed my original song titled “Outta-This-World Kind of Girl” to seal the deal. I paced back and forth around the party. Which wasn’t that easy to do because Terri had put me in these crazy thigh-high boots with toilet paper stuffed in the toes to make them fit. Once the votes were in, Kara announced the winner.

“Listen up, youse guyz, the winner of the costume contest is . . . Mamrie!” I couldn’t believe it. I had actually won! I graciously accepted my Halloween gift bag, complete with fake shrunken head, and took a bow.

It was only after the party that I learned just how insane my winning margin was. Apparently I got nine out of the twelve votes. That’s right. Seventy-five percent of the entire party agreed that I, the “hocker,” should win. Yep. All the boys at the party voted for me, thinking that my martian outfit was actually a hooker’s. Hell, a win’s a win!

God bless a fourth-grader’s spelling, and God bless Terri for helping make that win possible with her slutty, slutty wardrobe.

Halloween 1993 Was More Than I’d Wished For

There were some great moments in 1993. The gang from
Saved by the Bell
finally graduated high school. I choreographed my cheerleading squad’s halftime dance to “Whoomp! (There It Is).” And I had the best Treasure Troll collection in my county.
*
I was so obsessed with Trolls, in fact, that I had my heart set on being one that October 31.

My friend Nick was throwing a party and, classic me, I waited till the last minute to get my costume together, but I knew it would be easy. I had seen Troll wigs at the mall and would wear a little belly top and shove a rhinestone into my belly button. Easy peasy.

The day before the party, I asked my aunt, who was watching my siblings and me for the weekend, to take me to the mall to get the wig. She pursed her lips. “Oh, Mame. No can do. I’ve gotta make dinner for you and your brother and sister.”

“Them? Oh, they’re fine. Dave will just want to eat frozen pizza and Annie is already stunting her appetite with menthol cigarettes.”

“What was that?”

“I said . . . Annie can just make a sandwich.”

After a thirty-second stare-down, my aunt still didn’t budge. “If you want to be a Troll doll for Halloween, I can help you with your hair. I can tease it to stand straight up and then we’ll spray it purple.” My own hair, huh? I doubted her at first, but then I remembered that she had been a beauty queen back in the sixties. She could probably work wonders with a can of Aqua Net!

What I didn’t know was that when my aunt said she could tease my hair straight up, she didn’t mean like a Troll. She meant like a straight-up
beehive
. I had a purple beehive. She didn’t want me wearing a belly top in the cold, so I was forced to wear a Troll sweatshirt and leggings. Between the frumpy outfit, purple beehive, and my prescription glasses . . . I didn’t so much look like a Troll as I looked like a woman from a
Far Side
comic.

Halloween 2003 Gave Me the Blues

I’ve never been one to try and pull off the sexy look at Halloween. This may sound surprising considering my aforementioned stint as a “hocker,” but it’s true. When I went to college at Chapel Hill, every year our main party drag, Franklin Street, would be filled with sexy versions of everything. Sexy librarians. Sexy
policewomen. Sexy pediatric heart surgeons. The way I looked at it, why waste your sexy outfit on the drunkest day of the year? At the end of the day, if you wanted to get laid, YOU WOULD GET LAID.

Given how ambivalent I was about trying to slut it up, my junior year my roommates and I decided to go as the Smurfs. I’m talking pre-CGI hanging out with Neil Patrick Harris Smurfs. The classics. I took charge of putting together our costumes. Obviously we would need white sweatpants and royal blue shirts. I broke out my very limited sewing skills and transformed white pillowcases into hats and shoved in pillow stuffing to keep them tall. We obtained some white slippers and
blam
. The only thing left to do was paint ourselves blue from head to toe.

This seemed easy in theory, but shit, to get an even color on our bodies took a lot of coats. Racists who do blackface are the worst of the worst, but I gotta give it up for their endurance. If they only used that stick-to-it attitude to learn about equality, the world would be a better place.

After the paint finally dried, we ended up looking like this:

And we wondered why we didn’t get laid. We were fucking terrifying. Please note that we WERE blue. I swear.

We were ready to hit the town, starting at my friend Rachel’s party. Rachel lived in the Warehouse, a gorgeous building that I wanted to live in but couldn’t afford. It was the only industrial-looking apartments in all of Chapel Hill, and it was all exposed brick and tall ceilings and magic. It was the type of apartment that I imagined I would be living in once I moved to New York. This was before I realized that it costs about eight hundred dollars a month in New York to live in a walk-in closet with a rat for a roommate.

When we showed up at Rachel’s, the party was bumping. It was the perfect place to get our pregame on before hitting Franklin Street. And we needed to pregame
hard
because on previous Halloweens, the street was so packed it was difficult to get into a bar. By the time you made it one block, you were already sobered up. I decided to not take any chances, and so I created the “BarBack.”

What’s the BarBack, you ask? Well, allow me to explain (cracks neck and knuckles, then clears throat for just a little too long). The BarBack is for the drunk on the go. I took a normal backpack and threw in a waterproof cooler lunch bag filled with ice. Next, I tossed in a shaker and disposable shot glasses. Finally, I threw in the elements of a classic shot: the Kamikaze (vodka, Rose’s lime juice, and triple sec). And there it was. Now I wouldn’t need to worry about finding a drink, though I should have been concerned about
losing my mind
.

And lose my mind I did. I was so proud of my BarBack invention that I showed it to—and took a shot with—everyone I talked to at Rachel’s party. I was handing out shots left and right. I thought I was Tom Cruise in
Cocktail
, except I hadn’t accidentally gotten Elisabeth Shue pregnant. At least to my knowledge.

Needless to say I got positively blackout drunk that night. I had spent hours on my costume, only to remember wearing it for about an hour. I
do
very clearly remember sitting on the curb on Franklin Street, throwing up on my white slippers. My poor roommate Erika, who was Smurfette for the night, had to deal with me and she was
pissed
, and understandably so. There is nothing worse than looking
forward to something, only to have your idiot friend get too drunk so you have to go home early. I felt terrible. But not as terrible as my brain felt the next morning! Just to paint you a visual: Imagine a girl painted blue, asleep on her kitchen floor, with shrapnel from a Totino’s pizza feast all around her. Waking up with cheese on your shoulder is bad enough, but throw in a roommate with a chip on her shoulder and it’s brutal.