You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery (21 page)

We weren’t five miles from home and my anxiety was through the roof. I wanted to scream but decided to approach the situation
with the calmest and kindest version of my voice. The one you put on when you meant to order your enchiladas without sour cream but then they come out with sour cream and you know it’s your fault but still want them to fix it. That voice.

“Gabriel, honey. I’m going to need you to drive safer. I seriously have car anxiety and you’re
kiiiinda
driving like a maniac. I want to arrive alive.” And he did drive safer. For about three minutes. I tried to block out almost crashing into the back of a Smart car (which would’ve
certainly
killed the people in it) with happy thoughts of blackjack and backup dancers. Every ten minutes or so I would try to sweetly crack a joke to get him to pump the brakes.

“Hey, Gabe! Could you speed up a little? We haven’t gone into the future yet!”

“Gabriel, did you have to join the union to stunt-drive for
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
or just sign a waiver?”

“Gabriel, knock knock? Who’s there?
Slow the fuck down!
”

He’d apologize and slow down, then, sure enough, he’d accelerate right back up.

Luckily, I had filled a twenty-four-ounce travel mug with champagne and was sucking that thing down like a malnourished newborn. The three of us were glued to our phones. When we weren’t texting our loved ones good-bye before our imminent fiery crash, we were texting each other.

I can’t believe I’m going to die without having seen Britney live.

I can’t believe I’m about to die with a 24 oz can of Corona between my legs.

I can’t believe I’m going to die before winning a Webby!

I think Grace just farted.

We spoke only through these secret communications, like Dayanara and Officer Bennett leaving notes for each other in the first season of
Orange Is the New Black
. This texting wouldn’t have been so awkward if the car wasn’t completely silent. While we’d had visions of jamming to the entire Britney anthology all the way to Sin City, we had no such luck. Gabriel’s auxiliary input was broken, and radio was the best he had. But there’s not a lot of radio in the middle of nowhere. So we rode in total silence, except for the clacking on our phones, big swigs of beer, and the occasional “
Aw fuck!
” of Gabriel’s almost running off the road.

About two hours into our drive, we asked Gabriel to pull off at the next exit so we could pee. We were in the straight-up desert at this point, but we eventually pulled into a mega gas station surrounded by nothing.

I love big gas stations like this. The South is filled with them, and whenever I was on a road trip as a kid, I asked to stop and check out the selection of tchotchkes. In North Carolina this meant How to Speak Redneck books, Native American figurines, and confederate flag bottle openers. For the weird stretch of desert between L.A. and Nevada, this meant slim pickins. I tried on a few trucker hats but decided I didn’t need to put
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
STAYS IN MY BLOODSTR
EAM
on my forehead.

“Mame! Check it out,” Grace said while holding a teeny gun above her head. It looked like the world’s cutest stickup. “It’s a tiny Taser gun.” God bless Grace. She knows a miniature can always brighten even my worst moods.

“Be careful,” the clerk said from behind the register, “that thing hurts like a motherfucker.”

Must’ve been his desert accent, but I heard that as, “Try it with reckless abandon!” Needless to say it shocked the living hell out of me. No, really—the actual living hell that I was in. Because for a brief second, I wasn’t focused on imminent death in Gabriel’s car. It’s all about distraction. Like when you pinch your leg while getting a flu shot. I had to buy that baby Taser.

We finished buying our bags of chips, adorable Taser, and tall boys of Corona (NECESSARY), then headed back to the car. Once we got there, Gabriel was nowhere to be found—but the car was completely unlocked. Completely unlocked as all of our laptops lay in full view. For three girls whose careers are the Internet, this could’ve been real bad if someone had stolen them. Gabriel got lucky, but I still felt like I had to say something to him, make him understand that this shit was not okay.

He looked dumbfounded. “It’s a safe area,” he assured us as a gang of motorcycles pulled in and a buzzard circled over our heads.

“It doesn’t matter, dude. Our stuff is in here. You have to lock the door when—” Before I could finish, Gabriel was sprinting back toward the gas station.

“I think I left the keys in the bathroom!” he yelled over his shoulder.

I looked at Grace and Joselyn in disbelief. It was official: This man was an idiot. I felt like we were on
Punk’d
. And not even the classic
Punk’d
with Ashton Kutcher, but the bad remake version hosted by Kellan Lutz. All we could do was pray to get to Vegas safely and take a bunch of beers to the face to numb the anxiety. Defeated, we got back in the jalopy, and after screaming at Gabriel to not enter the highway on the off-ramp, we were back on the road.

Sixty miles outside Vegas, we were miraculously still alive, but we encountered another situation. A text on my phone came through from Joselyn: “Has anyone else noticed that we have zero gas?” Sure enough, I looked and saw the gas meter hovering just above the “we’re fucked” line. At that point I had more gas in my system from all the Bugles I’d housed.

“Hey, Gabriel, you might want to stop for gas.”

“We’re only sixty miles away, though.”

You could practically hear our eyes collectively roll into the backs of our heads. Did this motherfucker think that you could
drive for sixty miles with the gas light on? Driving was literally his job. I took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly without being condescending.

“Gabriel. You need to get gas. I want to see Britney Spears tonight, not be stuck on the side of the road with coyotes.”

He pulled off at the next station and we watched from the backseat as he struggled to pump the gas. He looked like a virgin on prom night. I kid you not, he went into and out of the gas station three times trying to figure out how to prepay, and he stared blankly, as if he had never pumped gas before in his life. I could’ve offered to help him, but I needed to stay put and focus on my breathing because I was
this close
to spraying gas all over him and lighting a match. I would’ve straight-up
Zoolander
ed that Chevron.

After his third trip to the cashier, he finally got it pumping.
At least we aren’t going to be stranded roadside!
I thought, the small things in life seeming so meaningful. He got in the car, then looked dumbfounded.

“Shit! I think I left the keys in the bathroom.”

“Dare I say, oops, you did it again?” Joselyn said as Gabriel slammed the door, completely ignorant of her fabulous joke.

Gabriel eventually realized he’d just left the keys on the roof of the car (I slipped Grace a five-dollar bill because she’d called that one) and got back in the front seat. There are few things as satisfying as watching the gauge on the gas meter rise all the way back to the top, particularly in situations of distress. Gabriel cranked the engine, and we collectively gave a sigh of relief watching the meter climb, but after two seconds, it stopped. It wasn’t even at a quarter tank. I looked at the gas pump to see that Gabriel had put a whopping
ten dollars
in the tank.
Ten!
Mind you, this was the same car that was supposed to be taking us back to Los Angeles the next day. Why wouldn’t he just fill up the tank?

I couldn’t bite my tongue. I had to speak up about this last hour we were going to be on the road. Joselyn wasn’t even going to
Britney with us. She had a stand-up show in a few hours and we needed to get there. Gabriel was about to get a piece of me.

“Okay, Gabriel. Before we pull out, there are some rules for this last hour.” Gabriel nodded, listening intently. “First, you are
not
to go over eighty miles per hour. Next, you are
not
allowed to text and e-mail from your phone. We need to get to Vegas alive and you need to drive safely. This shit is not okay.”

He began to rationalize his driving, but we weren’t having it. Joselyn cut him off, but not before he got out one excuse: “I’ve been driving since eight o’clock last night, so I’m a little tired.”

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

He had been driving since eight p.m. the previous day? By my approximation, when we got in his car and told him Vegas, he had already been driving for sixteen hours.

We all squeezed each other’s hands in the backseat. It was like there was an unspoken agreement among us to just make it to our hotel and not bother voicing our unhappiness.

As we finally pulled into the Cosmopolitan, he had to get in his last words. “I know we had some bumps in the road”—to which I burst out laughing and Grace, being the nice one, kicked my ankle to shut me up—“but I really need you to rate me five stars. If not, it could be bad for my job.” I was about to point out how killing three women after driving warp 7 would also have been bad for his job, but before I could, Grace kindly told him not to worry about it, and we got out. I was tempted to drop to my knees and kiss the ground like an astronaut returning from a tough mission.

We checked in to our rooms and immediately ordered room service cocktails. Normally, on a night when I knew I would be drinking for hours and hours, I would just drink beer. But not after that ride. I needed something stronger. Lemon Drop martini it was.

That night in Vegas was a blur, but allow me to recount the evening’s events for you. I don’t want you to feel like you missed out, but I also don’t want this chapter to be as long as
War and Peace
, so here’s the recap of debauchery:

1. We saw Britney and it was so much fun. She kind of danced like she was being
Weekend at Bernie
’d and didn’t sing a single note the entire show, and we loved it. We knew we weren’t going to see Celine. This was Britney. And bless her heart.

2. We found out our British YouTube friends from the Sorted Food channel were also in Vegas that night from London. We met up with them after the show, and I drank eight hundred Lemon Drops. Even though it was a girls’ night, what can I say? Boys. Sometimes a girl just needs one.

3. One of their handsome British dads was there. I flirted with said dad and warned Barry that I was his new mama. I may or may not have made him call me Mama all night, but that’s a pretty standard Drunk Mamrie move regardless.

4. All of us decided it was a good idea to go get our dance on at the club Marquee. I was wearing a Snoop Dogg sweatshirt and leggings, which was shockingly not up to the dress code, so Jamie, being the chivalrous British chap he is, gave me his blazer to wear over them. I was the most clothed woman in Vegas, looking like the office manager at Death Row Records. That’s My Prerogative.

5. We danced. A lot. The kind of drunk dancing where you’re not even doing real moves. I think I just marched for a good two hours, and I may or may not have told a girl wearing a Tupac dress that she didn’t know shit about hip-hop.

6. Grace and I left Marquee at four a.m. and
neeeeded
to play blackjack.

7. I stopped in at a gift shop to grab an electronic hookah and told the security guard that he was a “tall drink of water.” At least that’s what Grace says I said.

8. We sat at electronic blackjack for an hour, talking about
how we couldn’t wait to get back to the room and eat our room service leftovers, like we were chained to the machine or something. We were in the zone. Grace won a hundred bucks and I ordered a White Russian because I forgot I was a vegan for a minute.

9. Back in the room we stuffed our faces, then moved the room service table outside someone else’s room so we didn’t look like pigs.

10. The next day, Joselyn told us that she’d gotten so black-out drunk after her show that she’d accidentally shattered an entire bottle of Ketel One and gotten kicked out of the club. As she was telling us about her misadventures, she reached behind the microwave and found a cup of sweet potato fries. Apparently, I had hidden them in my wastoid state because I wanted them all to myself. I’m guessing my game plan had been to wait for Grace to fall asleep so I could eat them, but I didn’t follow through.

Early mornin’ comes way too soon when you go to sleep at five a.m. It felt like there was a pissed-off gorilla in my brain rattling my skull like a cage. Which means we had done our eighteen hours in Vegas perfectly. Lucky for us, our Sorted Food friends were headed back to L.A. that afternoon as well and could give us a ride. I can’t tell you how much of a relief this was for me. The only thing left to do was tell Gabriel. So, like the mature and rational adults we were, we broke up with him via text message. Nothing mean. Nothing shitty. Grace simply texted him, “We found another ride back to L.A. Thank you!”

The trip back to L.A. was downright lovely. Handsome boys with British accents cracking jokes as I shoveled potato chips into my mouth? Heaven. Poor Joselyn didn’t speak the whole time, she was so busy fighting off hangover nausea. The only thing she could do was take deep breaths and stare at the horizon.

It’s no shocker that we made it back to Los Angeles safely and
faster than we had gotten there. We pulled off my exit and just as we came to a stop at the first light, Joselyn bolted out of the car and ran to the entrance of Griffith Park. That poor thing had held off for the entire ride and now she was puking her guts out less than a mile from home.

Eventually we got a text back from Gabriel. It was borderline awful, and he said that Grace was a bad person. But we had zero regrets. We had successfully had our own
Crossroads
adventure!
*

1 oz lavender-and-honey simple syrup

2 oz chamomile-infused vodka

Juice of ½ lemon

For the simple syrup, all you have to do is combine 1 cup of water, 1 cup of honey, and ½ cup of lavender buds into a saucepan on medium heat. Let it simmer for about 5 minutes, then remove from heat and strain out the lavender.

For the vodka, throw in 2 chamomile tea bags for every 12 ounces of vodka you want to infuse. So if it’s a regular-size mason jar, throw in 2 regular-size tea bags. Let it sit for an hour.

Combine all the ingredients and take that shit to the face, be it over ice, shaken and strained, or warmed up in a mug. You do you, girl/guy/dog that likes booze.

S
ince I was a little girl, I have always had problems sleeping. On television, you always see kids get tucked in and immediately fall asleep. Does that happen in real life or is this strictly a Stephanie Tanner scenario? ’Cause when my mom tucked me in and turned the light off on her way out, I was awake all night,
convinced
that Bigfoot was about to crawl through my window. (Side note: My mom let me watch
Unsolved Mysteries
, so I spent the majority of my childhood terrified of every noise in the night and also wanting to be a re-creation actor when I grew up.) I distinctly remember being a fifth-grader and lying in bed at three a.m.
thinking,
I am the only kid awake in the world
. The insomnia feeds the anxiety, the anxiety feeds the insomnia, and my night would become a human centipede of sleeplessness.

One side effect is sometimes I would be extremely hungover at school after a long night of staring at the glow-in-the-dark Troll stickers on my ceiling, wishing I could sleep.

No amount of shoelace barrette or sweetheart neckline gonna cover up the fact that this fifth-grader was running on four hours of sleep.

But it wasn’t all bad—like when it came to slumber parties! There are a few precious years growing up wherein birthdays are either at the roller skating rink
*
or are slumber parties (or Discovery Zone if you’re a badass bitch). When it came to slumber
parties, I was in my element. I already had the prank calling in the bag. “Ummmm, can I speak to Seymore Butts?” Incredible. One time I called a random number and didn’t ask for anyone. I just pretended I knew the woman who answered and hoped I sounded like one of her friends or that she would be too polite to ask who I was. We talked for fifteen minutes.

And forget about the sleeping shenanigans! I was
always
the last kid up. At the beginning of every slumber party, everyone is warned that the first person to fall asleep is gonna have a prank pulled on her. First one to go to sleep gets shaving cream in her hand and then we’ll tickle her nose. First one to go to sleep is getting her hand put in warm water so she pisses the bed. First one to go to sleep gets her bra put in the freezer. Needless to say, that never happened to me. And that wasn’t just because I didn’t need a bra till I was fourteen.

I was the kid playing all the pranks. I was like a small female George Clooney, and the party was my
Ocean’s Eleven
set. I would have my coconspirators, the naive bastards who thought they could be on my level, helping me at first. But one by one, they would drop like flies. There’d be a whole finished basement of girls with toothpaste on their foreheads, while I was outside jumping on the trampoline as the sun came up. By the time everyone would wake up pissed, I was in the kitchen making cinnamon rolls with the mom, looking innocent as fuck.

When I didn’t have people to torture at night, I had other ways to entertain myself. Besides gluing my own photo into
Tiger Beat
magazines, I watched infomercials. Fact: In fourth grade while all the other little girls were writing to Santa for an Easy-Bake Oven or Suzy Q’s First Yeast Infection doll, I asked for a food dehydrator. That’s right, a food dehydrator. And I got it too! Dried banana chips? Check my lunchbox, bitch. Homemade potpourri? Fuck you—you want lavender or rose petals? I have received so much joy from Tony Little’s ponytail bouncing around on a new
workout machine, or an unnamed British dude hawking the latest circum-ventilation roaster (#restinpeaceRonPopeil). To this day, if I am awake after two a.m., I am totally content to watch an infomercial that I’ve already seen ten times.

Now that I’m an adult, I no longer worry about not sleeping. Instead, I relish it. I am night owl, hear me hoot! Granted, I might not feel this way when it’s four a.m. and I have a six a.m. call time. But that is what coffee and adrenaline are for. In fact, my insomnia comes in handy on those mornings. When I was filming my first movie,
Camp Takota
, Grace had a decent amount of crying scenes. Her trick to get herself to Teartown? Not sleeping! The lack of sleep and subsequent overcaffeination could get her to cry on cue. It’s been said that this is also Meryl Streep’s technique.
*

And who really needs sleep when you can just have coffee? I believe that I can do anything with a big-ass cup of coffee. And I ain’t no coffee snob. Fuck that. My ideal cup is straight-up blueberry flavored from 7-Eleven with three of their tiny amaretto-flavored creamers. I don’t get it when people talk about how amazing a certain brand of coffee is. Or when I go to a trendy coffee shop and have to wait ten minutes for a cup, watching it go through a version of the board game Mouse Trap. The barista will assure me, “Because of the elevation of these beans, we have to fully evaporate the impurities for the truest taste. It’ll just be, like, forty more minutes.” Excuse me? Fuck to the off. Maybe my taste just isn’t sophisticated enough. It’s the same way people discuss the bouquet on a certain pinot noir as I sit nodding and drinking Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s through a squiggly straw.

Now, a lot of people ask me, “Mamrie, why don’t you just take something to make you fall asleep?” Good question. Yes, I know all about natural sleep aids like melatonin. But they too have side effects. Apparently melatonin can cause extremely vivid dreams,
and the last thing I need is my dreams of Ryan Gosling to be more vivid. Lord knows, I’d wake up on the floor in a pile of feathers and sawdust because I would dry-hump my bed down to nothing. Okay, what about a powerful FDA-approved sleep med? There’s everything from pills I can’t pronounce to the adorably named ZzzQuil. But here’s the deal. I don’t want to build up a tolerance to them. I understand this may sound strange coming from a girl who can finish a round of Edward 40 Hands and then go out for cocktails, but I have my limits.

While it may take me a long-ass time to fall asleep at night, once I finally drift off, I am out. I apologize to any future partners or roommates who live with me, because if there is a fire, our asses will be burnt to a crisp. An intruder? It was nice knowing you. This bitch can sle-e-e-ep. Unlike my mom.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the part of the book where I divulge my mommy issues. My mother happens to be an adorable southern woman who is a loving grandma and makes a mean Crock-Pot of pinto beans. She also happens to be a severe insomniac. Ever since I can remember, she has taken hard-ass drugs to be able to fall asleep. If for some reason she runs out while the pharmacy is closed for a three-day holiday weekend, she does not sleep for three days. It’s an actual
waking nightmare
. So the last thing I want is to love me some sleeping aids and then not be able to sleep without them. Although, it does provide for some great stories.

There’s a witching hour when my mom’s sleep meds kick in, but not enough to knock her out. This is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing my mom high. She usually just saunters around in her little robe, watching TV and doing the whole “I’m not sleeping; I’m resting my eyes” routine. You know the one. You and a friend are watching a movie, and to make it appear like you aren’t falling asleep, you throw in an occasional laugh or “mmhmm.” One time, my mom did this, but she laughed and said, “Oh, those Polacks!” I don’t remember what we were watching, but I do know it had nothing to do with Polish people. And
that
is the
moment I learned of my mother’s burning racism for Polish people.
*

The best witching-hour story is “The Night of the Choco Taco.” Picture this. It was 2003. I was a sophomore in college who only lived two hours from home; so, every couple of months I would make the drive to get a home-cooked meal and watch cable. At around “pull out my hidden bottle of wine, my mom is asleep” o’clock, I heard the mom-shuffle. Sure enough, she rounded the corner in her robe and slippers with a cup of hot tea.

Caroline joined me on the couch to watch
Iron Chef
. As she sat down, she immediately spilled her hot tea all over herself. While I was worried she had burns from the scalding hot water, she was cracking up.

“I’m gonna fix me another cup,” she said, and walked out of the living room, laughing like we were watching a Dave Chappelle special.

“Grab some paper towels!” I yelled after her as I went back to my beloved Food Network. A few minutes later, just as the chairman was about to announce the winner, she was back. She handed me the paper towels to help her wipe up the spill, but before I could get it off the floor, I looked back at her. She was eating something.

“Mom, what are you eating?” I asked.

“What does it look like? It’s a choco taco.” The woman was eating a taco shell filled with chocolate ice cream and topped with sour cream. Yep, an actual taco shell. Tell me that ain’t some straight-up stoner shit right there.

The best part is the next morning, she was dead set that my stepdad ate all the chocolate ice cream and didn’t leave her any. ’Cause that’s right, folks, some sleep meds make you
sleep-eat
. That’s the last thing I need. And this is coming from a girl who once got high and ate Funyuns dipped
in butter.

Sometimes my mom being on sleep meds was a major advantage for me, especially in high school. During my senior year, we had one of these incidents. I had a humongous exam on
Hamlet
for my AP English class the next morning, and while I should have stayed in and studied (like any of you reading this who are still in school should do), I had other plans. Our neighboring county didn’t have school the next day, so my friend Ashleigh and I headed over the bridge to a house party. Not the wisest choice, but we figured we’d socialize for an hour or so and be back in time to study for the final.

Once we got there, it was a full-on house party. Ashleigh wasn’t drinking, since she was driving, so when the party ran out of mixers, she volunteered to do a grocery store run. By the time she got back, the scene was a lot different than before. . . .

ASHLEIGH

Mamrie, what the hell are you doing?

I’m sitting at a table across from George, a six-foot-four-inch lumberjack of a man. Empty shot glasses covered the table and people cheered around us.

ME

Whadduz it look like I’m doin’? George challenged me to a shot-off and I’m kickin’ his assssss.

Yep. In the course of twenty minutes, I decided it would be a good idea to go shot for shot with a giant. Luckily, Ashleigh carried me to the car, but not before I told the guy I was seeing at the time, and I quote, “I don’t want no one-minute man.” What can I say? Missy Elliott was super popular at the time, and that dude had the bedroom skills of Urkel. Not Urkel’s suave alter ego, Urquelle; I’m talking pure “Did I do that?” Urkel. Yes, yes you did do that. And you did that way too fast. Moving on . . .

We drove back over the county line, and Ash served as a crutch, leading me up the stairs to the bedroom. Once we got to the top we heard, “Mame, is that you?”

My blind-as-a-bat mother was holding on to the wall to lead herself up the stairs. Now, in any normal scenario, I’d have been caught. I just hoped that my mom’s sense of smell wasn’t heightened since her sight was gone, as I smelled like I’d taken a long soak in a batch of bathtub gin. Add to that the fact that it was a weeknight and I was coming home at one a.m.? No
bueno
. But luckily for me, my mom had taken her sleep meds.