Seven days at sea

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER - ROYAL CARIBBEAN CRUISE


DAY ONE - 11.27 - AT SEA

I depart from Port Canaveral, Florida, on a seven-day cruise with five friends. Before we even set sail I hear a Caribbean instrumental version of "My Heart Will Go On," the theme song from a blockbuster about the most famous shipwreck of all time. This does not kill my mood, and neither does the mandatory safety drill, where we all don bright orange life preservers and sit in the dining room. In the event of an actual emergency, we'll get to die while fine china flys all fucking around us.

Once the ship sets sail, I get a few drinks in me, sing karaoke in the Lotus Lounge and win $120 from the ship's casino. Talk with the casino bartender, who's from Jamaica and claims not to mind the cruise ship's marathon work schedule - fourteen hour days, seven days a week, for six months straight. I eat pizza and mini subs from the all-night cafe, then order room service a half-hour later. I try ordering more room service a half hour after that, at four in the morning, but have the phone hung up on me by an irritated Chinese woman. I head back down to Deck 5 for a second round of mini-subs at 4:30.


DAY TWO - 11.28 - COCO CAY, BAHAMAS

I awake to a hangover and heartburn at 9:30 and immediately suck down four room temperature waters from the bathroom sink in a hurricane glass that reeks of Amstel Light and wet dog. Wait a half hour to get off the ship and ride a tender boat to Coco Cay, an island owned by Royal Caribbean. For some reason, chicken and roosters roam the island, and we're under strict orders not to feed them.

I spend the afternoon lying in a hammock between two palm trees, staring into the cloudless sky. I walk the white sand beach, wade into the ocean and ride a forty-foot inflatable waterslide. It's me, a couple middle-aged Britons and a half-dozen nine-year-old American girls sharing the waterslide, and the Royal Caribbean attendant enforces zero rules regarding summersaults and backflips. I do neither, though I do chuckle at the prominent disclaimer, "Use of good common sense is strongly recommended while using this product."

While I'm bouncing my fat ass down the blowup waterslide, my roommate Jason is a hundred yards away on the shoreline, proposing to his girlfriend Melinda. She accepts, and a veteran married couple spontaneously takes an entire roll of photos of the blessed event.


DAY THREE - 11.29 - AT SEA

Jason and my friend Emma compete in the slot machine tournament, which involves them and a dozen elderly folk tapping the "Spin Reels" button several times per second, even though this does nothing to speed up the slot machine and in fact only speeds up the onset of arthritis in both their right hands.

Before the cruise's first formal dinner, we drink complimentary champagne, and I spend fifteen minutes talking to last night's headliner, Vegas comedian Rick Starr. We discuss the difference between a written comic performance (i.e. the kind of shit I do) and a stage performance (i.e. his kind of shit), and what types of humor work in what situations. Starr isn't much of a fan of mean humor, though, as evidenced when a little old lady shuffles by and I say, "She looks great. She's even pushing her formal walker tonight, with the velvet tennis balls."

Later, Emma reveals the ultimate cruise coup - she's figured out how to get free drinks from the bartenders. It's as simple as befriending the drink server first, tipping cash and just not pulling out your SeaPass card when it comes time to pay. If the bartender wants to charge you, he'll ask for the card. If not, your drink's on Royal Caribbean. I test this theory and earn myself a couple dozen free drinks on the five remaining nights of the trip.

My platonic-friend roommate Jenna gets even more out of one of the bartenders - when I return to the room, c. 3:00 in the morning, there's a sock on the door. Universal language for, Don't come in. Fucking in progress. I resolve to put a sock on our bathroom door from now on when I'm masturbating in the shower.


DAY FOUR - 11.30 - ST. THOMAS, VIRGIN ISLANDS

My five friends and I charter a "private yacht," which turns out to be a beat-up sailboat inhabited by a salty Scandanavian named Captain Karl and his American first mate Tim. Every female friend I have wants to fuck Tim by the end of the afternoon, while Tim seems more concerned with finding the gang member who stole his cell phone. ("I had over 2,000 numbers in there, from people all over the world.") We snorkel through a shipwreck and shallow coral reef, talking a petrified Emma into the water by promising there are absolutely no fish in the ocean.

On the way back, we take advantage of the "Unlimited Rum Punch" promised in the brochure - we each consume five Solo cups' worth, while Captain Karl muses that it's funny the fruit juice in the punch costs twice as much as the rum. Indeed, the booze is dirt cheap down here - I buy two liters of Finlandia Vodka for seven bucks apiece, then transfer them to empty water bottles and walk them right back onto the ship. Sobriety doesn't stand a chance for the duration of the cruise.


DAY FIVE - 12.01 - ST. MAARTEN

We spend the day at an island that's half French territory, half-Dutch and completely lacking in traffic laws. Six bucks a person buys a thirty-minute van ride through ghettos - who knew so many people in tropical climates lived in old railroad cars? - and boarded-up industrial areas.

Our destination: an absolutely gorgeous beach, where clothing is entirely optional. No one under the age of fifty seems willing to walk around naked, and after a couple hours I start to think that even if Adam and Eve hadn't gotten themselves booted from the garden, humanity could have benefited from a little healthy modesty and shame.

I'm offered hashish twice ("best on the island, mon!") but am too paranoid to bite; instead, I drink two-dollar Red Stripes at a beach bar and smuggle more duty-free liquor on the cruise ship. A party in my room ensues, and if we don't set a Room Service record for most orders of orange juice and buckets of ice, we get pretty darn close. I crash immediately after dinner, spending fifteen consecutive primetime vacation hours unconscious and semiconscious in a three-foot-wide bed.


DAY SIX - 12.02 - AT SEA

I encounter an author named Will Rhame. He wrote a nonfiction book called Business Golf, he said, promoted the hell out of it and moved a sizeable number of copies. Then his publishing company went under and he saw next to nothing. Heartening news for a wannabe writer like myself. I can't even get into the ship's "Karaoke Idol" contest - I almost qualify then got knocked out by a Scotsman in a kilt who sings Elvis.

The Mariner of the Seas is such a mammoth ship, fifteen decks in all, that it has its own ice rink and professional ice show. The guest star, Olga from Canada, has me and my suddenly bisexual roommate Jenna drooling. We both vow to put a sock on the door for Olga before trip's end.

Later on, Jenna's bartender friend comes back up to our room and the sock goes on the door again. I'm left to wander the ship with a water bottle full of Finlandia. I entertain a group of strangers in the hot tub with absolutely filthy humor involving our sexy cruise director asking a guy to poop on her chest, "and do it with a smile!" Then wander out to the main pool area and get shot down by a pair of barely legal hotties. ("Um, yeah, whatever, we've already got two guys on the way up here, so you need to go.") Then black out for an indeterminate amount of time and misplace the remains of my duty-free Finlandia. Probably eat some mini-subs on Deck 5.


DAY SEVEN - 12.03 - AT SEA

I sleep off a wicked hangover in the Solarium, a large, sundrenched, mostly enclosed room with a pool, two hot tubs and a bar. I notice five or six different people attempting to read thick books - it's the last day of vacation, and none of them appear to have made it past Page 60. All our shit has to be packed and out of the room before dinner, at which we present our waiter with envelopes containing his tips for the week. Jenna writes a personal note on hers ("Room 1341: Bring your own sock").

We spend our last night at Ellington's, the bar on Deck 14, where the auditorium song-and-dance performers are putting on some kind of jazz revue. The bar's crowded with off-duty entertainers, mostly flamingly gay, who drink Chambord martinis. They call them Chamtinis. The show ends, the bar clears out, my friends all go to bed, and I sit with the bartender, a fun-loving but austere Jamaican who's kept us entertained all week.

I sip Red Stripes as he closes the bar far more thoroughly than I ever would have expected - a Coast Guard health inspection could happen at any time, and the standards are rigid. Our backgrounds are nothing alike, me and this guy, but he's certainly a part of the My Kind Of People club. They're everywhere; all I have to do is stop and look. A cruise has its decadent side, sure, but it does a world of good in erasing geographic boundaries.

Yellow and black attack

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

OCTOBER



INT. POP'S - EAST ST. LOUIS - THURSDAY - 9:33 P.M. - STRYPER CONCERT

When I was 11 years old, I went to my first concert - Stryper at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis. It was me and my best friend at the time, a kid named David who moved to Pennsylvania several months later. We were Christian school kids who weren't allowed to listen to the radio but nonetheless used to sneak peeks at the forbidden world of MTV every time I slept over at his house. Big-haired heavy metal was all the rage, and its Christian equivalent was the band Stryper, whose members were always decked out in elaborate yellow-and-black spandex costumes. I spent sixth grade completely obsessed with the band, and I was ecstatic to see them in concert. David's mom took us to the show, and we tried our best to fit in, but it was much more a hair-metal scene than a Jesus scene. The noise and the crowd were too much for us, and we were out way too late for a school night. We left before the encore.

When I was 24 years old, I went to my first 24/7 bar - Pop's in Sauget, Illinois. Located in a cluster of warehouse-looking strip clubs and a late-night dance club, Pop's serves inflated-price drinks to night owls, service industry folk and representatives of the seediest elements of humanity not currently in prison. Pop's is a slice-of-life playground for a fearless social journalist like myself, and with various combinations of friends, I've been back a dozen or so times in the past three years. There's so such thing as being out too late when you're at Pop's.

This is the first time I've ever arrived at Pop's before two in the morning, though, and my past and present worlds are colliding head on. Stryper, who broke up in 1991 and didn't reunite until a couple years ago, is playing a show on a stage I've only seen graced with unenthusiastic, middle-of-night rock cover bands.

My friend Jason, a Christian school kid himself, was the only person in my current life morbidly amused enough to be dragged along. He remembers Stryper from their mid-'80s heyday, and he's spent several drunk nights at Pop's with me over the years. He's down for the colliding of the worlds. Our only concern is getting to the show in time.

"I only even want to see like the last third of the show," I tell Jason as he's simultaneously parking the car and fielding a cell phone call from his girlfriend, the doctor. "I'm more interested in talking to random fans afterward and trying to meet the band."

"We'll see plenty of the show, including every last note of 'To Hell With the Devil'."

"All I know is, if you make me miss 'The Rock That Makes Me Roll,' heads will."

"That's the cheesiest goddamn thing you've said all day."

My fears were utterly groundless, it turns out. Doors opened two and a half hours ago, and so far all we've missed is the opening band, budding young Christian rockers name of Subseven. The door bouncer tells us Stryper will be onstage within the next five minutes. I whip out my credit card to pay the twenty-dollar ticket price times two, and I swear I can hear that little rectangular piece of plastic groan.

I scan the crowd. Shit, there's not even 500 people in here. The first three people I see are two massively obese gentlemen in their mid-thirties (think Comic Book Guy from "The Simpsons") and a dude in a wheelchair whose limbs are more twisted than your average Pop's patron at four in the morning. I hope he's not planning on getting healed at this show. I think the only thing the Stryper guys will be laying their hands on tonight is the door cash.

I spot the obligatory merchandise table, and I make a beeline. I've been out all day funneling beer into my body - a Stryper T-shirt suddenly seems like it would be a hilarious keepsake worth the 25 bucks. My eyes immediately light on a black T-shirt that features the original album art from Stryper's 1984 debut EP, The Yellow and Black Attack. Beneath the Stryper logo is a depiction of a blue globe whose continents are shaded in with yellow and black horizontal stripes. And they actually have one shirt left in a size XXL.

The shirt looks kind of weird on the display board - its sleeves are cut off with oddly shaped, feminine silver stripes. When I ask the merch stand guy if that's what they really look like, he shrugs. Turns out he's Stryper lead singer Michael Sweet's son, which means he doesn't really have to worried about being fired for lack of customer service skills.

Taking a quick glance around, I notice an attractive lady who's pushing forty but looks several years younger. She has one of the Yellow and Black Attack t-shirts folded over her left arm. I ask if I can take a look at it. She obliges me; it's just a regular old black t-shirt, and I'm sold. The credit card can keep on groaning, for all I care.

The attractive lady pushing forty notices my friend Jason, standing just over my shoulder, points a finger out at him and asks, "Is your name Jeremiah?"

He shakes his head. He does have an older brother named Jeremiah, also a Christian school alum.

"Jason? Jason Faxon?"

The attractive lady remembers Jason from our Christian school and probably more so from the church that was attached to it - Grace Church, one of the biggest in St. Louis. She elbows the man standing next to her, a toned-down rocker-looking type with a stocking cap and leather jacket.

"He's a Faxon," she tells him.

"He's a Faxon?!" He checks out Jason. "Jason! Hoooooh-leee shit!" The guy pumps Jason's hand up and down.

Now it's Jason's turn to act surprised. "Dale Delaney?!"

Now it's my turn to act surprised. "You're a Delaney?!"

This guy was like seven years ahead of me at Grace Christian School, but I remember his dad and mom and younger brother Bradley, who was way too cool to talk to me but seemed impressed with my sense of humor regardless.

"Your dad knew me from a baby," I tell him. "I'm Andrew Hicks. My mom works on the sermons with the pastor. She helped found that church like thirty years ago."

"You're a Hicks?!"

Needless to say, Jason and I end up hanging out with Dale Delaney and his attractive wife quite a bit over the course of the Stryper concert and after. But first, I tear myself away from the impromptu reunion to get a couple beers, buy the Yellow and Black Attack shirt and head to the men's room to change into it posthaste.

The door bouncer was right - Stryper's on stage within five minutes of our arrival, and "The Rock That Makes Me Roll" is like the fourth song they play. Delaney, who was one of the baddest-ass kids at Grace Christian and actually was expelled for his sinfulness and rebellion, is at the age of 33 still a massive fan of Stryper. He asks us if we got the new album. Neither of us can honestly answer in the affirmative. "I got it the first day it came out!" he brags cheerfully.

While Stryper's playing some bland, generic-sounding pop rock off their new album, Delaney and Jason rehash an adolescent memory. Namely, while on a youth group outing, Jason's brother Jeremiah was knocked down in a skating rink by an unchurched hooligan. Jason stepped in to talk trash, and the heathen and three of his friends wanted to fight. Trailed the church bus back and everything. Jason was outnumbered and outsized, and he had one quarter in his pocket. Called Dale Delaney, cashed in a favor, and watched Delaney and a handful of his big-haired rebel buddies beat the crap out of the unchurched hooligans. Supposedly, there's a butterfly-shaped blood stain on Grace's concrete sidewalk to this day.

"Does anybody out there remember the year 1983?" asks Stryper frontman Michael Sweet. The crowd, such as it is, roars appreciatively. "Well, this one's off our debut album, The Yellow and Black Attack, which only had six songs. It's called 'Loud and Clear'."

Delaney starts jumping up and down. He tells his wife they have to get closer to the stage. We tell them we'll catch up with them later. Jason and I need another beer.

We watch the next half hour of the show from the corner of the bar, which is completely uncrowded. Apparently, the Stryper concert attendees are taking that "Thou shalt not drink Bud Light from a plastic bottle priced at $4.25" commandment to heart.

Ironically, though, Stryper just had to replace their bass player of twenty years because the bass player had a huge drinking problem. And Michael Sweet's brother Robert, the drummer, has also been introduced from the microphone as being fresh out of rehab for the same reason. I crack a joke that we should have a cocktail waitress send Robert a Long Island Iced Tea on us, and Jason dismisses it as an insensitive gesture.

--

A couple plastic beers later, we get the urge to wander the concert, maybe actually integrate ourselves into the crowd. But first, a trip up the stairs to Pop's narrow, rickety balcony, where it seems all the parents who brought their small children are hiding. For 10:30 on a Thursday night in East St. Louis, there are a surprising amount of elementary-age kids in attendance. The parents probably think they're doing these children a world of good - one glimpse at the reunited Stryper and there's no way little Courtney will ever want to listen to Avril Lavigne or Eminem again. Who needs 'em once you've been hit with an all-out yellow and black attack?

There's a perfect spot on the upper level where the stage is directly ahead and you can watch the concert through hockey-stadium plexiglass. The noise is muffled, the view is perfect, and after one song, we end up talking to one of these proud parents trying to inaugurate his fifth grade daughter to the glories of Christian hair metal. He tells us all about the Stryper reunion show from 2003, which also played at Pop's but was sold out and featured classic songs he thought he'd never see the dust get blown off of.

"This time, no surprises," he says. "The set list is posted on the table next to the soundboard. Look."

I look down through the plexiglass - the guy's totally right. The entire path of the concert is charted in bold, 24-point Times New Roman font. There are two more songs in the regular set, then two songs in the encore and a scripted "closing prayer." Jason and I high-tail it down to the floor, so we can integrate ourselves into the heart of the crowd. Then, half driven by irony and half by the ghost of my 1988 self, I pump my fist and sing along with "To Hell With the Devil" and "Soldiers Under Command." Me and several hundred Bible-believing hoosiers.

The closing prayer is surreal. As stated, I've had a dozen or so dead-of-night drunk experiences at Pop's, witnessing bar fights and tittie contests, and I never thought I'd hear the entire bar fall silent and turn its full attention to Jesus. If just for ninety seconds. It's a stirring moment, beer buzz or no.

--

I've got beer in hand as half the attendees form a single-file line leading into the cordoned-off left half of the bar. Behind the curtain are all four members of Stryper, with Sharpies poised in hand. They've vowed to sign autographs for anyone who's purchased a vinyl copy of their 2005 album Reborn from Michael Sweet's none-too-personable teenage son at the merch stand. Christian school blast from the past Dale Delaney, who bought Reborn on CD the came out, is clutching a shrink-wrapped vinyl copy. He's dying to have the guys sign his ticket stub from a Stryper concert he went to at Laclede's Landing shithole Mississippi Nights in 1985.

But before he gets in line, Delaney wants to have a Red Bull and vodka and bullshit with us at the bar. And talk about his own days spent in a hair metal band, St. Louis' own King of the Hill. Delaney was their drummer, and he went with them to L.A. when their record label decided the time was right to promote the hell out of them and cross them over to the mainstream.

"I was out there for awhile, man. Partied with some crazy motherfuckers." He takes a sip from his plastic cup. "I dated Nicole Eggert from 'Baywatch' - well, this was right before she was on 'Baywatch' - for a few months."

"You bagged Eggert? Are you shitting me?!" My eyebrows just shot up. "I gotta shake your hand for this one. Next drink's on me - I had the wickedest ninth grade crush on Nicole Eggert. I used to watch 'Charles in Charge' every day on Channel 30 after school."

He snickers. "'Charles in Charge.' Yeah, Scott Baio was with her right before me. I got her away from him. That fucker couldn't stand me."

"And you made an enemy of Scott Baio?! Next six drinks are on me!"

Thus begins a five-minute digression into all things Nicole Eggert. I want every story he can cough up. One of those stories involves sex in the back of a limo on the way to the Emmy's, and I'm thinking I wouldn't have been privvy to its retelling had Dave's wife not currently been embroiled in Christian School Catchup conversation with Jason two barstools over.

I bring up a direct-to-video soft-core porn thriller Eggert bared her breasts in. Some early '90s affair called Blown Away, a movie whose sex scenes I had taped in grainy EP mode during a Cinemax airing at the age of fifteen or so and replayed several dozen times late at night with the bedroom door locked.

"She filmed that one while we were together, man. I totally remember reading that script one day when I was over at her place smoking a joint in my bathrobe. It was a piece of shit. I laughed my ass off."

"It had this hilarious love triangle between Nicole, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman."

"I did coke with Feldman."

"Were those guys trying to get with her during the whole shoot?"

"Shit yeah, wouldn't you?!"

"But they didn't succeed?"

"They knew better. I would've stomped the fuck out of those Coreys."

Dale's wife stands in line with the Reborn album and the Ziplocked 1985 ticket stub - she has to be up at 6:30 in the morning, and her patience is waning - while us three guys do shots at the bar. I learn King of the Hill's crossover chances were ruined when the Seattle grunge scene took over ("Fuckin' Nirvana!"). The topic of other Christian metal bands comes up, and Dale, Jason and I rattle off the santified shredders of our past. One Bad Pig, Tourniquet, Angelica, Holy Soldier, Mortification, Whitecross, Bride, and my personal favorite, Bloodgood.

"I know one of the guys in Bloodgood," Delaney says excitedly. "You know what they do now? They're plumbers. Like, they'll come to your house and plunge your peetrap!"

Before the wife returns, Delaney gets exponentially more sloshed and starts talking about how much he likes to fight, how in fact he wants to punch somebody right now. I suggest he take out his rage on the new Stryper bass player, since traditional Strypermania would dictate that the new guy was quite the poseur. Dale says hell no, he'd never punch anybody in Stryper, and he says this reverently.

--

Jason and I stay at Pop's long after Mrs. Delaney drags Mr. Delaney out the door and Stryper finishes signing images of themselves. On the way back from the bathroom, I talk to a trashy-looking woman in her forties who has been a traveling Stryper groupie since the mid-'80s. I ask if she ever tried to sleep with any of them. She acts like it's a completely foreign notion, says Stryper groupies are more like sisters and mothers to the guys in the band. But, shit, she sure has gotten drunk and nose-candied-up with Robert and departed bass player Tim Gaines more than she can count.

I talk to a man in his seventies who came to see Stryper because he saw six of their videos on MTV between 1986 and 1990. ("'Honestly.' That was a pretty big one for them. It was in the lower reaches of MTV's Top 20 countdown for three weeks.") This man is several times the music video junkie I am. He's been taping music videos for 25 years and isn't even a fan of rock, country or hip-hop. He likes classical music, but he thinks music video is an artform, and he's a collector and conneissour. And he can describe in disturbing detail every Stryper video he saw on MTV during the second Reagan administration.

And I talk to a guy a year younger than me who tells me with a completely straight face that he owes Stryper his life. As an adolescent, he was depressed for months straight, was determined to commit suicide. Until he listened to a little album called In God We Trust, from a little band wearing yellow and black and spouting inspirational lyrics like, "The devil's not your friend / The truth is not a lie," and, "There doesn't have to be any pain / Forever you and I will reign." That's enough to make any young man untangle his noose.

"I'd give anything to meet those guys," he says.

"Well, if you would've gave twenty bucks to the merch stand, you could have met them like five minutes ago."

"I don't have a record player, and besides, I already paid fifteen bucks for that album on CD. I just want to shake their hands and tell them they changed my life."

"I know where their tour bus is. Let's go see if it's still there."

"I'll go to their tour bus! I'm not afraid! I'm not afraid of anything!"

He says this two more times while sitting on his bar stool. I finally get him up and we head out the front door of Pop's. Make a sharp right and walk past the building into a wooden-fenced area whose gate is wide open with a tour bus behind it. The suicide guy keeps talking about how he'll knock on the door, he's not afraid, he's gonna do it. Thirty seconds later, I end up knocking.

A guy in his early twenties comes to the front of the bus and pops the door open, steps outside. Tells us the guys are all tired out from playing eighty minutes of killer Christian rock and roll and signing all those images of themselves after. He's the tour manager, this guy, and we trade stories about our childhood histories with Stryper. The suicide guy repeats himself yet again and makes the tour manager promise to tell the guys in the band that they saved some kid in St. Louis' life.

I tell the tour manager about how when I was in sixth grade, I had posters of Stryper all over my room, and my mom feared for my developing sexuality. My grandma gasped, realizing this band was the embodiment of the demonic creatures from the bottomless pit in Revelation 9:8. To quote the Apostle John: "Their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as THE HAIR OF WOMEN."

The tour manager gets a quizzical look on his face, then thanks us for our support over the years and hands each of us two souvenir yellow and black guitar picks bearing the Stryper logo. Jackpot. These babies are six bucks a pair at the merch stand. I pocket the picks and head back inside the bar that never closes. Away from the world I knew and back to the world I know.

Shopping tips and suicide attempts

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

SEPTEMBER

On a crisp pre-fall evening, returning from a multiple-bar night of drinking, I go grocery shopping at 2:45 a.m. I remember Richard Simmons once saying a person should never shop on an empty stomach because all they'll buy is junk food. I wonder what he'd say about shopping when you're half-drunk - under no other circumstances would I purchase a four-dollar snack bag of Honey Roasted Soy Nuts.

I'm thumbing through a Weekly World News, awaiting my turn in line, when I begin to overhear the guy in front of me. He's probably in his early seventies, with the manic energy and haphazard personal grooming effects of Matthew Lesko, the wacky "Free Money From The Government" infomercial guy with the yellow question marks all over his blue suit jacket.



Our grocer's Lesko is yanking bottle after bottle of T. Marzetti's salad dressing from his cart. He has nine in all, and he's bragging about their sale price to the uninterested overnight checker. "Ninety-nine cents? From three twenty-nine? Unbelievable! No one even pays attention to this stuff!"

When the checker scans Lesko's two-pound bag of green onions, he corrects her on the price. "Oh no, honey, those should ring in at one forty a pound. It's the white onions that are one forty-five." His dispute over a dime holds up the checkout process by three minutes or so, as the checker abandons her post to investigate prices in the produce department. I shake my head and continue reading about the latest adventures of Bat Boy.

Twelve hat-box canisters of Quaker Oats come out of Lesko's cart next, and again he feels the need to brag about the sale price. I finally put down the WWN tabloid and ask him, half-jokingly, if the fact that the oatmeal's on sale necessitates that he buy a dozen of them. Wrong thing to say. Instead of taking offense, Lesko treats my remark as a friendly one, and I'm locked into conversation.

This man is a professional grocery shopper - he never pays more than half-price for anything. He hits every local supermarket after studying the circulars for sales ("IGA has the best prices on meat, but Shop 'n Save is tops on dairy"), and he buys in bulk accordingly. Not just canned goods, either. Lesko knows how to keep produce fresh for a month. The key is to put your perishables on the shelf above the crisper. These secrets, he tells me, were learned in his previous career as fresh foods distributor/supplier/buyer/manager/some shit.

He finishes his transaction with the checker, paying cash with exact change, and the conversation continues. I swipe a credit card and push my cart toward the front door, and the conversation continues out front. Lesko proves himself the ultimate saliva-spewing close-talker, moving on to tales of his other previous career as a professional gambler. He made a living counting cards in all the major casinos and being banned from Vegas, Atlantic City and our local Harrah's. He has four Ferraris, this crackpot guy in the ripped T-shirt, and the sixty bucks he just saved on groceries will allow him to fill all of their tanks with gas.

"Imagine losing everything in a day," Lesko tells me when I say I've gotta go, my wife and kids are waiting for me at home, and they're starving, and only my cartful of groceries can save them. He tells me he knows a thing or two about starving - he had a stroke a few years back, and he was broke at the time. He spent several weeks lying flat on his kitchen linoleum - couldn't move, think, feel or eat. Then somehow he got the strength to pull himself up to his kitchen table and pop open his Rolodex.

LESKO: I called every name on there, and no one would help me. Because I wasn't rich anymore. These people kissed my ass nonstop when I had money, but the second I lost it, they stopped being my friend.
ME: Why didn't you just call 911?
LESKO (ignoring me, plowing on): I finally called Meals on Wheels and ordered a week's worth of food.
ME: I thought you didn't have any money.
LESKO (ignoring me, plowing on): And you know what they sent me? Each meal came on a three-compartment tray, with a serving of meat, a vegetable and a starch. No meal had over 150 calories. They were literally starving me.
ME: But you didn't die.
LESKO: No, I called the local food pantry. They sent somebody out to deliver enough food for a month. I told 'em not to leave the food on the porch, because people would steal the bags. So I left the door unlocked for them, and they brought me bags of food. You know what they gave me?
ME: What'd they give you?
LESKO: A one-pound bag of marshmallows, a jar of pickles, some canned beets and three boxes of crackers. No meats or cheeses. So I ordered pizza.
ME: I thought you didn't have any money.
LESKO (ignoring me, plowing on): I ordered pizza, and when it arrived, I told the driver he could eat it himself. What I wanted was real groceries, and I told this Ay-Rab I'd give him fifty bucks to drive to the store and get the items on my list. He came back with the wrong shit, so I bitched him out and never saw him again.
ME: You were that hungry and yet that discriminate?
LESKO: I wanted the items on my list. So I called back to the pizza place, asked to have a different driver sent over, and I paid another guy fifty bucks to shop for me. That guy just took the money and never came back.

Lesko spent two years living like that, he tells me, while the monthly, rubber-banded apartment newsletters piled up on his doorknob. No one checked on his health, and he wasn't able to start any of his four Ferraris. He didn't sleep one minute of those entire two years - and when he finally did manage to sleep through a night, he awoke to the worst horror of his life, being back in that reality.

So finally he decided he wanted out. He attempted a dramatic suicide with the help of a pair of fifteen-pound dumbbells from the apartment complex weight room. Carrying the dumbbells, he waded - fully clothed and smelling like ass - into the shallow end of the pool, with the intention of marching into the deep end and the great beyond. But he couldn't do it. Life was too precious.

He climbed out of the pool, dripping and stinking, returned the dumbbells to their weight room rack, and he got a local cab company on the phone. Paid the cabbie twenty-five bucks to jump one of his Ferraris. Got the car started, was on his way to the grocery store to finally buy himself some food, and the battery died again. He was stuck in a Maryland Heights intersection in rush hour traffic, and a cop car pulled in behind him. Wouldn't help him. Luckily, there was an auto parts store nearby, and Lesko was able to persuade the owner to leave his store unattended and install a new battery in the Ferrari himself.

LESKO: I had my car back, running like it was brand new. And you know where I went first?
ME: To the IGA to buy fifteen jars of half-price mustard?
LESKO: I went to Arby's. I ordered five beef and cheddar sandwiches, and I sat there for three hours, savoring every bite.
ME: I can imagine.
LESKO: Then I went across the street to Schnucks, and I spent seventeen hours shopping.
ME: Seventeen? That's like eighty minutes per aisle!
LESKO: I pored over every item one by one, picturing in my head how it would fit in my cabinet. I filled three carts.
ME: So you mean to tell me, you hadn't eaten in two years, you were in desperate need of medical attention, and you were toting three carts around the Schnucks for an entire waking day?
LESKO: I tipped a couple of the bagboys to help me. They stood watch over the extra carts while I made three separate trips home to fill my pantry.

So it was a happy ending for this guy, and he swears every word of it is true. Now he lives a life electrically charged with vigor, subscribes to 27 periodicals and "has an insatiable desire for knowledge in every area." Yet he's afraid to get in his car and drive home because there's a security truck sitting at the edge of the lot. It's raining now, and I tell him I absolutely have to go home. He talks to me another five minutes while I toss my keys from one hand to the next and pop the SUV hatchback open. Finally, my close-talking Matthew Lesko doppelganger catches the hint, and I decide no more grocery shopping in the middle of the night.

Five-paragraph essay

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

AUGUST

I'm a contestant in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's search for a new 20 Buck Bernie columnist. The lucky winner will be dispatched to area bars, pubs and other drinking venues to sniff out bargains on intoxicating liquor and report his or her findings back to the community on a weekly basis. I've already made it to the final ten and had my picture in the paper - a headshot of my outstretched tongue beneath a giant beer tapper - and now I'm campaigning for enough votes to finish in the Top 4.

I'm taking a break at Krieger's, a local sports bar, with eight or so friends. If I get the gig, nights like this - spent sitting on my ass, drinking one 23-ounce draft Budweiser after another - will be considered scholarly research. Indeed, the topic of writing dominates the conversation for most of the night.

My friend Emma wants to know if writing ability can be taught. I tell her the basic tools of grammar, vocabulary and organizing thoughts into a presentable format can certainly be taught, but that the raw talent and voice of a writer is a genetic, individual gift that is either received or not received. Emma tells me the only writing format with which she is comfortable is the five-paragraph essay.

EMMA: So here's how I do it, if you tell me to write five paragraphs about why I like my bedroom.
- - First paragraph: "I like my bedroom because I have a nice bed in it, because I have a big fish tank in it, and because I have a TV in it."
- - New paragraph: "I like my bed because it has a fluffy pillow and Winnie the Pooh sleeps with me."
- - New paragraph: "I like my fish tank because it has three fish and a little castle for them to hide in."
- - New paragraph: "I like my TV because it has a lot of channels and it keeps me entertained."
- - Last paragraph: "That's why I like my bedroom."

I ask Emma what kind of grades she used to get in English class. She says, "Oh, I flunked kindergarten, and for the next thirteen years, it was all downhill." The topics of conversation shift to how truth is usually disguised as fiction, while fiction is disguised as truth. To how a writer's personal philosophy creeps into every aspect of his work. To how the collective of contemporary words is undeniably shaped by centuries of literary antecedents. Emma interjects: "I just coughed and I peed a little. It made my underwear wet. I can feel it."

I end up not getting the 20 Buck Bernie gig. A shame, too, because after the five-paragraph essay thing, I pledge to Emma that I'll write a column about her backyard and call it "Emma's Bar."

Lily's last fireworks

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

JULY

For the second straight year, I spend Fourth of July in my friend Emma's backyard. Attendance comes and goes all day, but the comic MVP is my buddy Greg "GTO" Oakes, who's been babysitting his wife and her friend from out of town all weekend. The wife makes me promise to get Greg trashed, since he so clearly deserves it, and a trip to the convenience store yields two pints of Jagermeister and a four-pack of Red Bull. On top of the twelve pack he's already consumed.

With an apparently razor-sharp Frisbee, Greg manages to decapitate a porcelain yard gnome and then insist on paying for it.

EMMA'S MOM: Don't be silly, just put it over by the garage and I'll Superglue it.
GTO: Nope, I'm buying you a new gnome. I insist. I just need an estimate, a price check on a gnome. Price check on a gnome, please!

Then, while running backward to retrieve a giant beach ball, Greg knocks a board loose in Emma's decades-old wood fence and yells for her boyfriend.

GTO: Johnny! Johnny! Need a hammer! Johnny! Hammer! I'm serious! Dead serious about the hammer, buddy!

Then, as we're watching a fireworks display from the roof of the Ameristar Casino, Greg manages to bellow louder than the fireworks themselves.

FIREWORK: Boom!
GTO: D'ja guys see that one? They call that one the Cincinnatti Sizzler!
FIREWORK: Eeee-eeee-eeee-eeee!
GTO: Hear that one whistle? That's the Birmingham Banshee! Huge in the South!
FIREWORK: Kablow!
GTO: That green one, that one's pricey! It's imported from Ireland! The Dublin Detonator!

Greg is concerned with making sure Johnny's decrepit grandmother Lily, who's sitting on a stool three cars over, gets to see every firework.

GTO (yells): Like that last one, Lily? Sure you got a good view?
LILY (yells back): I can see fine.
GTO (whispers): Just wanna make sure she has a good time. This might be her last fireworks.

Lily will pass away in December, and Greg will walk around for weeks after, shaking his head and saying somberly, "I killed that poor woman."

We head into the casino after the fireworks, and Greg sucks down three double Screwdrivers in twenty minutes time. Then latches onto a sixtyish black woman who keeps hitting Showcase Showdown bonuses on The Price Is Right nickel slots.

GTO: Pick the deodorant! Pick the deodorant!
BLACK LADY (picks the deodorant)
SLOT MACHINE (dings with victory)
GTO: You got it, sista!

Greg passes out in the back of Jason's car upon our return from the casino - not the back seat, the actual hatchback area - but regains his comic poise as we sit around Emma's pool and watch Johnny's makeshift fireworks display. Johnny has rows of storebought fireworks set up on two sheets of sawhorse-supported plywood, and GTO has a one-liner handy after each firework.

The police soon arrive to break up the proceedings and promise to arrest the homeowners and issue disturbing-the-peace summons for all the guests if we don't quit with the fireworks and head inside. The fireworks cease, but we continue our horseplay in the pool for another three hours, and Greg somehow makes it to work at eight the next morning.

Cedar Point, Put-In Bay, Kelley's Island, Soak City and the Thirsty Pony

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

JUNE

I'm the third wheel on a car trip with my roommate Jason and his girlfriend Melinda to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. I'm an overgrown child when it comes to amusement parks, and Cedar Point is almost universally agreed among theme park and coaster enthusiasts to be the best of its kind. It's three times as big as our local Six Flags, with fifteen coasters (including a 310-foot-tall, 93-mph blue monster known as Millennium Force, to which that I would willingly vow roller coaster monogamy) and a mix of old-school and new-school spinning, gravity-defying rides.

We stay at room 3655 of the Sandcastle Suites, which is on the corner of the park property itself and grants us the right to enter the park an hour before its official opening time. We spend a solid, hot, beautiful day at Cedar Point and ride damn near everything, and we take several extracurricular trips away from the resort itself.

Take a ferry to Put-In Bay, a touristy island on Lake Erie, and sing karaoke at a bar called the Boathouse. Take another ferry to Kelley's Island, rent a golf cart and sputter our way to wineries and breweries while amusing ourselves with the coin-operated Breathalyzer machines that are hanging on the wall. I jump from a .10 to a .12 in a half-hour.

Spend two evenings at the Thirsty Pony, an enormous eatery/drinkery that features gambling on closed-circuit horse races from three Ohio venues. I lose two bucks on horse six in race eight, and we drink Leinenkeugel Red from a 120-ounce draft beer juggernaut known as the Giraft. This thing is about three and a half-feet tall and has its own tap and everything. Requires a $300 credit card deposit, just in takes it takes a shattering plunge from the table.

Spend the day at Soak City, Cedar Point's waterpark, where I learn that after spending two hours drinking frozen margaritas at the Swim-Up Bar, your heart pounds straight through your chest the next time you climb the tower to the body slides. But that, under the influence, the waterslides seem twice as fun and you don't even give a fuck about chlorinated water shooting up your nostrils.

Spend three drunk, ghost-town, twilight hours by myself back at Cedar Point in a rainstorm, gambling that the rain will let up and I'll be able to ride in the front car of all the roller coasters without having to wait in line. Indeed, through the lightning and showers, the park stays open and the staff hangs out in rain slickers, but only one ride appears to be open, in a tiny open-air building housing a '60s carnival throwback called the Matterhorn.

This is a 360-degree uphill/downhill spinning ride, and it's a lot of fun if you're ten years old or intoxicated (and probably especially if you're ten and intoxicated), and I'm the only one riding. The straight-faced ride operator curtly informs me that he thinks the ride should be closed and that someone's going to get hurt in this weather, but his bosses won't let him close it down. So I take a seat next to the operator's booth as he delivers his scripted pre-ride announcement over the intercom even though I'm three feet away, staring him down.

HIM: Welcome to the Matterhorn.
ME: Thanks.
HIM: Please keep your arms--
ME: Got it.
HIM: --and legs--
ME: Uh-huh
HIM: --inside the car at all times
ME: No problem, man.
HIM: Please secure all loose articles--
ME: I don't have any loose articles.
HIM: And enjoy your ride. Dick.

I do enjoy my ride, and as instructed by the ride operator, I walk safely to the exit, then I weave back through the empty line and get back on the Matterhorn. I also ride the Scrambler in the rain and climb into a Monster car before a particularly frightening bolt of lightning cracks the sky and the operator comes around to kick everyone off the ride. At 9:52, with eight minutes to close, the weather is suddenly beautiful and I'm stuck in the back of the park riding the mine train. All those famous roller coasters from the Travel Channel, and I've walked several miles in soggy shoes and socks to ride the goddamn 1969-vintage mine train.

'Biggest Loser' audition / 27th birthday / Casino makeout

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

JANUARY

My friend Emma drags me with her to an open casting call for the NBC reality show "The Biggest Loser". This is a program where the morbidly obese compete against each other to see who can drop the most weight in ten weeks while the cameras capture all the humiliation and occasional triumph.

The auditions are for groups of three to six. Emma, two other hefty friends and I sit in an oversize Dave & Buster's banquet room for several hours, with Emma retreating to the adjacent bar seven times for vodka tonics. She wants to be lively for the producers. I stay sober, although I do indulge in a Reese's peanut butter cup thrown to me by a 350-pound woman four tables over who has a paper grocery bag full of them. She's chucking peanut butter cups to appreciative fatties the room over.

A table of quarter-ton black ladies has close to a dozen McDonald's bags of food on their table. They came prepared. Our table didn't plan on being kept waiting so long - we're pondering, on an almost dream sequence level, what we're going to eat when we get out of here. We drown out our subwoofer-esque stomach grumblings by reading aloud from the Dave & Buster's restaurant menu.

By the time we hit the audition table, Emma has a thick house-vodka buzz and charms the thirtysomething female producer. Who calls her back the next day to tell her they loved her energy but that she needs to get herself a new team. The rest of us are weighing her down. Pun very fucking much intended.


FEBRUARY

My 27th birthday celebration stretches over three nights, culminating on a Sunday. I work open to close but am visited by a quartet of regular customers who bring me a cake and sit me down at an empty restaurant table so they and the staff can sing to me. It's a touch childish and humiliating, but the card they give me has a fifty in it, and my mood is thoroughly elevated.

After work, I head with my roommate Jason, his girlfriend Melinda and my friend Jen G to Alton, Illinois, and a massive bar and grill called Fast Eddie's, for frosty sundae glasses of draft Coors Light and 99-cent baskets of fries. After ten of the former and three of the latter, we go up the street to Argosy's Alton Belle Casino, which reminds me of a hundred slot machines and a dozen table games installed in someone's old rural house.

We sit in the ground floor veranda, pounding vodka drinks and watching a duo of elderly ladies lose damn near a hundred bucks apiece on a pair of deceptively named Something For Nothing nickel slots. The casino bartender gives us extra green olives with every round, and we start tipping her extra. Soon she's dropping plastic sword skewers with a dozen or more jumbo olives into each drink, and after a few rounds we start sword fighting each other across the table. The pink swords break the easiest.

Sometime around three in the morning, Jen G falls out of her chair.


MARCH

At the local Harrah's casino, a bartender who is a dead ringer for a thirtysomething John Ashcroft pours me a baker's dozen corpse-stiff Ketel One vodka cranberries. Emma leaves me at the bar to talk to a mid-twenties girl who wants to mooch a ride to the East Side strip clubs. I decline, we keep talking, and continually apologizes for how drunk she is. Refuses to believe I'm an anesthesiologist or a systems analyst, so I come clean and tell her I'm a waiter.

Two minutes later, my tongue's in her mouth, and the episode is being recorded from at least a dozen angles on the tinted-dome security cameras. And suddenly I see Drunk Makeout Girl get yanked back in her chair by Emma, who's screaming, "Bitch, this is my man! What the fuck are you doing?" I go along with it, apologizing profusely as DMG swears up and down that, "He didn't tell me he had a girlfriend, I promise. I just want a ride to the strip club." Emma finally lets her off the hook, we have a good laugh, and DMG tells us we're some sick fucks.

The last thing I'll remember about the night is seeing the same girl like five minutes later talking to some other dude six seats down the bar. Her tongue goes into his mouth as well. The next day, Emma will tell me I had lengthy, deep bar conversation with a neutrally dressed, masculine-looking old lady. And, at one point, between topics, completely killed the vibe with my drunken aside, "Not to be rude, but what gender are you? I mean, I really can't tell."