What a pickle

12Jul07

One of my favorite party memories is the time I got drunk and fell off my friend Tim’s roof. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, though. I was on the roof, but I didn’t actually fall until I was climbing down the ladder and stepped off onto a bench, which immediately rolled out from under me. I smashed down on the concrete patio from a height of a few feet and snapped the neck off my beer bottle. And if you needed it, here’s the evidence that I was pretty drunk: I picked up the bottle and drank the rest of the beer right out of the jagged shards of what was left of the neck, heedless of the tiny slivers of glass that were probably sliding down my gullet.

The really disturbing thing is that that isn’t even the most disturbing thing to be put down my throat at one of Tim’s parties.

Okay, now that you’ve got all your blowbang and bukakke jokes out of the way, I’ll continue. This was at a New Year’s Eve party. Tim and his sister Janet had some pretty rockin’ New Year’s Eve parties for a few years. I recall Janet appearing at one dressed in a well-tailored blazer she’d made for herself by cutting a pattern from some garbage bags and stapling it together, which still strikes me as being one of the strangest but coolest things I’ve ever seen a girl do.

Anyway, at this particular event. I ran out of beer way before midnight and wanted another drink. Tim said he’d gladly give me a beer; all I had to do was eat one of the homemade pickles from his fridge in the basement. The catch was that his mom had made these pickles eight years before, and they’d been moldering down there ever since.

What the hell, I figured. So Tim got the jar and pulled one out, and I held my nose and put it down. The gross thing was that it slithered down my throat with the consistency of toothpaste. But the even grosser thing is that the experience didn’t gross me out at all. But I knew later that it really should have. I still have an vivid and concrete memory of the sensation. It was disgustingly soft. And yet, I wasn’t disgusted. And that’s what disgusts me.

It hardly ruined me for pickles, though. As a matter of fact, I actually ate a couple a week or two ago that I knew for a cold, hard fact to be at least three years old. And it certainly didn’t ruin my New Year’s either. Shortly after that, Tim, our friend Andrew, and I went behind the house for a little sliding on the town’s biggest tobogganing hill. As in the Breathalyzer Bend incident, Tim and I had been drinking, and Andrew was tripping out. Andrew ended up wandering back without us after Tim and I fell off our sleds and just laid in the snow staring up at the stars in a stupor for a half hour. Everyone else just chalked us up for dead and carried on partying. I’m starting to wonder why every memory involving the two of those guys seems to involve someone shrugging off the apparent demise of one or more of his friends, but it was still great fun.

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