The Lost Night: Holiday Party Edition
I did not come lightly to the open bar. Which, in hindsight, was a mistake.
I didn’t go into the holiday party thinking i was going to fully black out. But to be honest, I hadn’t entirely ruled it out either.
At that time in my life, it was always a distinct possibility. (Not to brag, but I hold my liquor like an absolute champion now. Took years of diligent practice.) Which I am only vaguely ashamed to admit.
To put it concisely, I really liked to get after it. With impunity. And without grace.
It was one of the things I did for fun, for better or worse (mostly worse, I guess, with several notable exceptions that we can talk about some other time, maybe over drinks), and I’ll forever subscribe to the notion that nothing beats fun. Even if and when your mode of catalyzing a good time is going to quite possibly be detrimental in several different ways. And is definitely going to hurt somethin’ fierce the next day. But buy the ticket, take the ride. Just make sure you have enough left in your coffers to pay the piper when he inevitably comes to collect.
“I’m going to be the drunkest guy at the party,” I boasted (as if this were something to boast about), half-jokingly, in passing, to several of my colleagues as we worked throughout the day to wrap up our assigned tasks and client deliverables so we could clock out and really enjoy the holiday party without constantly checking our phones for urgent emails or Slack notifications. If our mobiles were coming out, it was gonna be to drunkenly text someone we had kissed or hoped to someday kiss, goddamnit. We weren’t interested in going back to the office to make edits to a piece of branded content we didn’t care about. We were more hell-bent on drunkenly blowing up our love lives, as one does.
My prediction was not met with disbelief.
And it should not have been.
Because it really came to fruition.
Now, of course, blacking out an office holiday party is not something I would recommend. While not at all uncommon, to the point that it’s a trope, it’s never really a good look. Especially if it comes with negative consequences. It’s generally not the best way to seek out a well-deserved promotion that comes with more responsibility. That’d be counterintuitive. You don’t wanna give the person who can’t rip a few shots of Jager or whatever and not keep it together a position in the C-suite, probably. Even if they’re excellent at spreadsheets.
But it is one way to live.
And live I did, that night.
Some would say I’m lucky to be alive today. That strikes me as melodramatic, especially as someone who rather regularly strolled around New York City in a whiskey-soaked stupor with little to no regard for his own well-being or self-preservation. But you be the judge as this story — which will likely strike panic in my mother’s heart, even though it occurred many years ago — unfolds.
I don’t think i’ve ever come lightly to an open bar — one of the most magnificent offerings I’ve ever experienced with any modicum of regularity. They’re an absolute treat. If you go to an event where they have one, it’s like being on a one-night all-inclusive vacation. It’s basically an invitation to go on an extreme bender. This, of course, if you are extremely irresponsible and a practicing lush who has pretty much zero self-restraint or control (like me). Or you feel like you’re overworked and wildly underpaid, and choose to look at the open bar as a gift in lieu of an actual Christmas bonus because your company isn’t even gonna give you so much as a Jelly of the Month Club membership (like me).
I viewed this open bar, which was serving Johnnie Walker Black Label, a beverage I could absolutely not afford on my own but loved with all my little potentially alcoholic heart, as both an opportunity and something of a challenge. So as soon as my colleagues and I arrived I hit that bar hard. Got really knees up.
When the bartender told me they couldn’t serve shots neat then served me a snifter on the rocks, I looked him dead in the eye while I removed the ice with my hand and threw it in a trash can.
Just kidding. I’m a drunk. Not an idiot. (This is arguable.) The two don’t always go hand in hand. And that early in the night I had the wherewithal to know that kind of behavior could get me 86’d with a quickness. And I wasn’t about to let these motherfuckers cut me off over such nonsense. I was just a man who emphatically preferred his scotch neat, and I was going to get my just desserts.
So I waited until he turned around, then threw the ice in the trash.
Within the next 90 minutes or so, I proceeded to do this more times than I can quantify.
I recall literally nothing about the night after that.
Literally. Nothing.
I am of course unsure when I blacked out. I guess that’s what blacking out is all about. So the rest of the night is not just a blur. It’s a chunk of time I have completely lost that will never be found, unless I dabble in some sort of strange therapy that unlocks that sort of thing, which I am not eager to do. Not because this night was (to my knowledge) traumatic in any which way, but because if I truly open the recesses of my psyche it could come with some real revelations I have no interest whatsoever in uncovering.
I’m lucky that I didn’t do anything too stupid, but I’ve always had a pretty solid drunken autopilot that kicks on in times when I desperately need it. It’s like a guardian angel of sorts that comes from within, for someone who has never believed in guardian angels.
Far as I know, the stupidest thing I did was sidle up to the bar and start slurringly talking off the ear of the company’s founder, the man who had created a website in a real bootstrap kind of way from a basement in his parents’ home many years prior, and had managed to build it into quite a media and publishing sensation. An empire, even. The guy was, at the time, worth a lot of money. Like, unfathomable amounts. (This would not last.) I had never actually met him before. The closest we’d gotten was rockin’ a piss next to each other in one of the office restrooms on several occasions. I spent a lot of time in the office restrooms. Not because I was doing drugs in there (not a big coke guy; also couldn’t afford it), but because I urinate with more frequency than anyone (diabetics included) you have ever met in your entire life. I also sometimes liked to softly cry in there.
I had no business speaking with this man in any context. He was worth millions upon millions, while I lived in a studio apartment that didn’t even have a full-sized refrigerator. We were not the same, aside from a mutual social awkwardness that we both tried desperately to hide.
A dear friend of mine extricated me from that situation, and then several friends decided it was time that I call it a night — something I’ve never been particularly adept at judging on my own. They were bolstered to do so by my boss, who suspected that I may have been on something additional to good ole’ Johnnie Walker.
(This is probably a good time to mention that I was not on anything illegal. Though I was on a generic version of a drug called Celexa, an SSRI which is most often prescribed for depression and anxiety, two things I had been combatting for years. And which is absolutely not a great thing to combine with a staggering amount of alcohol and a mostly empty stomach. I thought it was good for me back then, but would soon find that SSRIs, while they have saved the lives of many, were not my pharmacological friend.)
They helped me up the stairs of the club, and held me up while they called an Uber that would take me from Manhattan to Brooklyn and my own bed, where I could sleep it off and live to fight another day.
Two of my coworkers somehow extricated my address from me, and poured me into the backseat of a car. One of said coworkers, bless him, gave the driver a few bucks and his phone number — told him to text him when I got home and had staggered safely into my apartment building.
And off I went into the frigid New York City night.
I woke up bright and early the next morning, feeling right as rain, aside from some moderate dehydration and the perplexing and disorienting sensation that comes with having zero recollection of how you got home and into your bed, where you fell into a fitful slumber to some reruns of Step By Step.
I only felt okay because I was still hammered out of my goddamn mind. There’s really nothing like coming to after what i assumed was a solid night’s sleep to still have more than a buzz on. It felt like I wouldn’t get to an even enough keel to operate any sort of heavy machinery for, like, a week or so. In a scenario like this, you know you’re living on borrowed time — that an excruciating hangover will at some point set in. (We’ve already covered having to pay the piper.) So you just have to accept there’s nothing you can do to prevent it unless you start drinking again, which isn’t always an option, and just ride it as long as you can.
I decided to do what I would normally do in this sort of situation: I showered, dressed and headed to the office.
On my way in, I checked Slack to find I had some concerned messages, mostly from my friend who had put me in an Uber and told the driver to text him when I arrived in Park Slope.
I assured him I was fine, and without knowing what I had done or what had transpired, felt the shame and anxiety creep in that come with the knowledge that you’re a grown-ass man who has had to rely on others to ensure you get home after willfully and irresponsibly tackling an open bar like it’s your last night on Earth.
I wondered if I’d done anything that might get me scolded. Or even fired.
I was the first one into the office, which was very out of the ordinary. I knew my savior friend liked to start the day before everyone else got in, and i wanted to see what kind of intel he could give me about whatever shenanigans I had gotten into 12 hours prior.
When he walked in I asked, “How was my night last night?”
He regaled me with a few tales about how much of a Slop Tart I’d turned into, and caught me up on the evening’s events. Luckily, I had just been happily drunk, albeit way too happily drunk. I hadn’t done anything really egregious except stumble around and babble incoherently. Which, still not great, but it could have been much worse.
“How was the rest of your night?” he asked.
“The rest of my night?”
“After getting in the Uber.”
“Oh. Right. We’ll go with ‘unclear.’”
“I really started to worry when i got a text from the driver,” he said.
“This isn’t gonna be good, is it?”
“Not really.”
“What happened?”
“He said, ‘Your boy jumped out of the car in the middle of Chinatown, told me to have a good night and drive safe, then started strolling down the street.’”
“Chinatown?”
“Apparently.”
“I do love dumplings,” I said.
“Yeah. I kinda figured you might’ve just gone for a snack.”
“Sounds like me.”
“Or that you were meeting up with a girl around those parts.”
“Doubtful. Anyway, I have literally no recollection of that. I remember nothing, until I woke up in my own bed this morning.”
“I’m not entirely surprised.”
“Shit. I’m sorry, man. Thank you for taking care of me. Not your job.”
“I know. But it’s cool. I was just worried. And I’m glad you’re okay. Also, are you still drunk?”
“Oh, 100 percent.”
“Nice.”
Good people are good people.
We decided to Harriet the Spy that shit to try and figure out what had become of me. I hadn’t been carrying cash, and there had been no charges to any of my credit or debit cards, nor any cash withdrawals. There was no paper trail to rely on when it came to piecing together how I had gotten from Chinatown to Park Slope, which is roughly three-and-a-half miles on foot. That’s a lot of space to cover when it’s freezing outside and you were, by all accounts, practically unable to walk when you were last seen by people you know.
I hope I didn’t trade certain goods for services, but I will honestly never be certain.
I will never know for sure exactly what happened that night.
As coworkers trickled in, many of them in a cripplingly hungover state, they were all surprised to see me alive, seemingly unscathed and already at the office.
I made sure to assure my boss I had not been on illicit drugs, only ones that had been prescribed to me that had some side effects I hadn’t expected (though I had honestly been warned about them). She said she didn’t care what drugs I did, just that she was concerned about my well-being. Which was nice.
I wasn’t in trouble. I was going to keep my job.
Then she asked if I was ready to go to the Lower East Side, to Mission Chinese, for a Facebook Live event where some of my colleagues and me would sample a bunch of dishes that included Kellogg’s cereal products fusioned with the restaurant’s normal fare. And talk about them.
The hangover fully set in about halfway through the meal, during which we all looked like we were going to die.
We powered through, though. And in one segment of the video, after sampling a dish, I said, “I’m gonna have to blow a rail of Lipitor after i eat this.”
I did get in a little trouble for that.
I learned my lesson. These days, I don’t drink to the point of blacking out. I still drink, but I’m simply better at it, and don’t take a medication that exacerbates drunkenness to a scary degree.
And when it comes to office holiday parties, I show up sober, and I show up late — around the time when everyone else is already pretty tuned up and have loose lips. That’s when you hear all kinds of things they wouldn’t normally say to you, which is often more entertaining than attempting to consume as much hard liquor as humanly possible in a short window of time.
It can still be a good time.
