'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."