Desperados Under the Eaves

In another thread, TiB member Allord posted:

I've seen this phenomenon before. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big drinker. What I have learned is that for some people, when you are drinking, the destruction of ordinary things is a wildly more enjoyable experience than if you were sober. I've always had an aversion to this; when I was very young scenes in movies of people smashing shit or breaking it for no good reason actually made me sick to my stomach. I guess I was worried about the waste? I don't know.

FOCUS: What shit have you broken/destroyed while drunk? Was it advertent or inadvertent?

ALT FOCUS: If you destroy shit when not drunk, why? Were you one of those kids whose absentee parents didn't notice they were making thermite in the backyard? Did you crack your neighbor's swimming pool with improvised depth charges lobbed over the fence?

 

Focus: Aside from the usual pile of chairs, plates, glasses, and the occasional piece of drywall, I am happy to say I am not a destructive drunk, by and large.

Alt Focus: Sober, however, is a different story altogether. One of my personal favorite days was when I was visiting a friend's house, and we designed a potato gun. Except we had like a 3 foot PVC pipe, industrial strength hair spray, and 1 lb. potatoes. We also had a target floating in the lake about a mile and a half away. Spent an entire afternoon nuking the lake with these things and I'm fairly certain we hit a speedboat. Otherwise, I have been known to meticulously design large things, literally taking days to get it just right, and then, after admiring for a minute or two, taking a baseball bat to it or just straight up stomping it. This includes wooden things, lego structures, and of course beer bottle pyramids.

But by and large I'm not so much a grand destroyer of worlds, but a sneaky revenge oriented little shit.

 

This wasn't me.

I have a Romanian friend who is built like a brick shithouse. He's usually pretty good at holding his drink but he should never, ever drink red wine. The last time he did, he got into an argument with a toilet. We have no idea what it was about, but it was one of the old, heavy porcelain top and bottom jobs.

He didn't like what it was saying to him so he took the tank lid off and proceeded to smash the whole toilet until it was rubble; with water going everywhere and his bleeding all over the place.

In the morning, he woke up with absolutely no recollection of what happened wondering why his hands were cut to ribbons.

 

How timely.

Not sure if this exactly fits the focus, but I destroy relationships. Normally I'm a happy drunk, but sometimes the drink can kick my depression into overdrive, and I turn into a seething ball of self hatred who can't understand what the point to anything is, why anyone would want to be around him, and who then over reacts to everything.

This would be the reason why last night I managed to fuck up what felt like could be the most amazing relationship with the most amazing girl I've ever met. So here I sit, drink in hand, waiting for her to get in touch so I can actually know whether I've hurt her so badly that she can't be with me.

Fuck-that was a bit whiney wasn't it?

 

I'm normally not a destructive drunk, but when my best friend and I get together, it's like the meeting of the keymaster and the gatekeeper. A few from our highlight reel:

1) Freshman year in college, we were told by our R.A. that we had to remove all non-university provided furniture from our dorm rooms before heading home for the summer. Taking a couch and our shelving system down a couple of flights of stairs sounded like a lot of work, so we decided to get loaded and fire them out of our window while our R.A. watched from below.

2) Sophomore year in college, we were in different fraternities, his having a much more destructive streak than mine. When I needed to get my fix, I would go over to his house, chug a bunch of booze with his roomates, and fire old couches out of his window. Then we would call their pledges in the dorms at 3am and have them come over to bring the couches back up to his room. Rinse and repeat.

3) When I bought my townhome in Dallas, I had a big "housewarming" party on Saint Patrick's day. My buddy flew down from Chicago, got totally wrecked, and chucked a bunch of patio furniture off of my balcony while my next door neighbors watched. Not overly impressive except for the fact that I had borrowed the furniture from my neighbors for the party. We were almost 30 at the time. My neighbors were in their 50s.

4) A year later, I went up to Chicago for the Old Town Art Fair and attempted to repay the favor. Unfortunately, his condo complex had implemented a policy that all patios needed to place netting around the exposed balconies so that people (or the occasional couch) wouldn't fall out. He stayed the night with his girlfriend, so when he left, I removed all of the food from his pantry and fridge, and smashed it all over his patio. I had to leave for the airport the next morning before he came home, so I left a suicide note on his patio door from "Chips". Not nearly as fun as breaking furniture. But still fun.

 

The most memorable bout of drunken destruction I've had was when one of my roommates moved out in college. He had graduated and was leaving to start his first job, but didn't want to take his shitty college furniture with him. So that night before we left for the bar we set his dresser out on our front porch, and moved his desk onto the balcony. At the end of the night we come back drunk and giddy for what we were about to do. Two of the guys went up to the balcony while the rest of us waited out of the way on the porch with bats, hammers etc. They tossed the desk off the balcony onto the dresser, and the desk just exploded. Then we all rushed in to destroy the remains of the dresser. Our porch was completely covered in wood chips the next morning, but it was worth it. Destroying stuff is second only to sex as far as after bar festivities go.

 

I was walking home from a bar near a buddy's house one night with a bunch of friends, when we came to a railroad crossing. The crossing gate was raised, so I decided that it would be fun to climb it. When I had climbed halfway up, my weight caused the gate to lower. Bells ringing and lights flashing, the gate slowly lowered with me riding it all the way. We tried in vain to get the gate to go back up, but eventually gave up and ran back to my buddy's house, laughing hysterically the whole way.

The gate remained stuck in the down position for two days until the transit department fixed it, and folks on that street weren't too happy to have to drive another couple of blocks down the street to get out of their neighborhood.

 

I rarely break things when I'm drunk, I'm normally busy unsuccessfully hitting on women, drinking more or peeing on things. In the old house, the landlord was going to renovate the basement, which meant having to do demo work. Instead of doing it himself, he bought us a tonne of liquor, a whole bunch of hammers and told me and my friends to go to work on the basement - it was a fun couple of hours tearing apart the walls down there.

Best part about all of that is we found someones math homework from the 1950's and a 10" blue dildo - which we later found out was left there by one of the chicks who attended one of our previous parties.

There was also another time where my friend pulled a stop sign out of the ground, cement base and all. I'm almost certain it was already loose but watching him rip that thing out which staggering drunk is pretty fucking amazing. He carried that thing for a couple of blocks before he got tired and stuck it into a divot in the ground, near a road - it stayed there for about two days.

 

In undergrad, burning couches was always a great past-time, especially after a big football win.* However, the best furniture-burning time definitely happened right as summer started after my junior year. Since I had a lot of senior friends who were graduating, I stayed in town for a few extra days after classes ended to attend some graduation parties. Well one night, after attending a grad party and getting properly fucked up, my friends and I raided the dumpsters of apartment complexes, which were overflowing with mattresses, box springs, couches, etc that were thrown away from tenants moving out. We gather the largest, most flammable items we could and moved them onto the volleyball court of the apartment complex. We set the trash ablaze, and proceeded to toss a gasoline can into the flames, which gave us a nice little "boom." As we watched the bonfire, people from the apartment complex next door actually hopped the fence with some chairs of there own to add. After a little while the cops came, and even though there was no one else around except for 7 drunk guys, we didn't get in any trouble. Fun night.



*No I did not go to West Virginia, but I always said that if it weren't for WVU, then Virginia Tech would get the bad rep of being the rowdy, irresponsible, redneck school.

 

Alt-Focus: I like to burn shit. I'm not really sure why, I just know I enjoy seeing stuff get eaten up by flames.

 

Ive never been super destructive, but I've had my times, usually fueled by the antics of people I'm with. A few times that stand out.

My old roommate BB was the epitome of a drunken vandal. He once found an old saw on our friends wooden balcony and drunkenly sawed a few of the slats from the railing area and kicked them out. Don't ask me why he thought that would be a great idea. We also once, after a night of drinking the last night of freshman year, used a T-ball bat to destroy an entire old set of patio furniture. The plastic table went to pieces pretty quick, but the chairs (aluminum with the plastic criss-crossing pattern in between) took alot of smashing. But did that metal ever get bent up. That particular incident I look back on with a bit of shame, cause it was completely absurd.

BB's crowning moment of stupidity and destruction came the last night of college. He came home from the bars a bit before everyone else. At this time, we lived in a house broken into an upper and lower apartment. I was in the lower, he in the higher. Well, seemingly fueled by a sadness that college was ending, he proceeded to use the vacuum cleaner as a bat and broke open 3-4 bags of garbage, including one filled with leftover spaghetti and sauce. Once that was finished, he bashed the vacuum into a few posts and the wall, exploding it into hundreds of pieces. Now he looks back on it with laughter, while one of our other roommates parents, to this day, speak his name with disgust and hatred as they arrived to pick their son up for breakfast in the morning and were greeted with that sight.

I'll admit to loving the sound of glass breaking while drunk. Sophomore year, my friends had a corner in their unfinished basement where we literally would chuck empty bottles against the wall and they would sweep it up monthly or whatever. Well one day, I was drunk enough where I decided that wasn't sufficient and began pitching them into the street and we all cheered at the sound. The police attention we drew wasn't part of the plan. Fast forward to a few months ago, I was visiting friends in Cleveland. Fueled by Four Loko (shit seriously makes you lose your mind and do foolish stuff), we came back from the bars and decided the best way to clean was pitching all the empty cans and bottles out their 4th floor window on to Euclid Ave below. The last empty, a bottle of Stoli, nearly struck a police cruiser and lead to the police screaming at us and shining a spotlight in the window for an hour as we hid in the bedroom hoping they would leave (which they finally did at like 4 AM.) Needless to say, I think I am over my glass breaking phase.

 

I had a bunch or roid boy meat head fraternity brother who destroyed everything. We used to impersonate them by standing with our arms at our sides and going "Let's get drunk and break shit." In our dumbest meat head voice.

During the last week of my junior year we had destruction that was just intolerable. Our fraternity did something called "senior send off" this involved all the seniors basically giving away anything that had the letters on them or anything of value. It also meant all the leaving seniors did a power hour and put down some bottles of liquor. It was always a mess but this year it was ridiculous.

In my house we had the video game NBA JAM it was a donation from alumni. We also had a pinball table that was pretty nice (funny enough it was a South Park game and "respect my author-ity" always rang out in the house.) Anyway towards the end of the sendoff (only about 10:30 p.m.) a big idiot frat brother of mine named Bernie got down in a three point stance a obliterated NBA JAM. Then the rest of them followed suit and proceeded to smash both games into a million pieces. You have no idea how much of a mess these machines could make, plastic, wire, glass, shit absolutely everywhere.

I was so furious because they were nice things to have in the home. After all the mayhem and all the drunken morons were huffing and puffing I calmly walked up and knocked Bernie out cold. I was so angry, I don't know why but I was furious.

Bernie wanted to fight me for the next five homecomings until he finally admitted that he deserved it for being such an asshole. To his credit three years ago he bought the house an arcade game.

 

I burn stuff, shoot stuff, hit stuff, and pee on stuff.

I might also have some anger issues, but whatever. Great example: few weeks ago, I got pissed, took my baseball bat ("home defense" = wife shuts up) and charged outside toward the old wooden dog house. Took a few swings, but that wasn't doing it. It wasn't satisfying enough. So I go inside, grab the shotgun, take a shot of tequila (drink responsibly kiddos) and start throwing birdshot into it. Whatever, I was already drunk at that point, so I did what most people inevitably do when they drink -- grabbed some lighter fluid, aim-a-flame, and lit the bitch up. Then I stood there, reveling in my destructive power, and pissed on it. Why not? I wasn't hurting anybody, and it was awesome.

I've destroyed trash cans, dog houses, firework bags (fireworks + gasoline = big explosion), clay stuff (I had a ceramics class in college and they looked awesome when they exploded), trees, etc. One time a friend and I found an old abandoned camp site on our ranch, so we shot the shit out of everything there -- mattress, plastic pitcher, gun case, air filter, metal toilet, carpet, linoleum flooring, tackle box, and some other things that exploded real good.

 

If you lean this way, I recommend gathering friends, cracking a tall can, and breaking some old TVs.



That final death flash is a thing of cathartic beauty.

On the unintentional tip, I broke a rib once. There's nothing you can do about it - you won't even get good drugs - and it hurts like a motherfucker for 4-6 weeks.

 

Bones, confidences, vows and laws.

 

I absolutely love getting properly shitfaced and destroying beautiful things. One night, my buddy and I used a ramset to shoot at a beerymid. Of course, we never hit the fucking thing, instead the nails glanced off the basement walls, ripping chunks out on every shot. We were getting "rid" of an old pong table, so naturally we grabbed a couple claw hammers and turned it into a drinking game. We smashed the ever loving shit out of this table, with splinters and wood chips flying everywhere. It was glorious. Then we shot bottle rockets at it. Probably should have taken it outside for that one...

Last night was one of my roommates' birthday. After I got home, in my whiskey fueled black out, I say to my other roommate, "I'm gonna go wish him a happy birthday!" After being informed that he's probably getting some birthday sex, I shout "EVEN BETTER" as I full on boot kick the doorknob. Blew right through the jamb, again splinters and wood chips flying everywhere. We can't even find the metal plate that goes to the frame. Evidently the door was unlocked.

 

I'm a well-behaved drunk, but in my youth we did some damage. My childhood best friend had Baptist parents who were very involved with protecting his soul, but not especially concerned with his physical activities, going on 6 week long trips and leaving him to mind the house. Some of the things we did:

We made a homemade potato gun, and that was fine. Then we upgraded to lemons. Lemons will go through a standard suburban fence faster than the neighbours can scream at you. They will also go through your neighbours aboveground pool, causing you to lie on the floor of your friend's home with the curtains shut and the lights off terrified of police involvement. Failing to learn our lesson from that one, we then stuffed half cups of gravel on top of tennis balls for a shotgun effect, turning the asbestos fencing behind our target (yes, we were dumb) into more of a lace pattern. We went back to lemons for a while, firing them at each other across a park, but amazingly no-one was seriously injured. We fired them at our high school (at night, not while students were there) from a friends house across the road, although I don't think we ever hit anything. Once, we tried golf balls, and put holes through sheet metal. This finally (mostly) stopped on the day we decided hairspray was for pussies, and we were going to use petrol as the fuel. The gun exploded and set my friend's back lawn on fire, which we stamped out with bare feet. It is HARD to cover up burnt patches of lawn. This pattern of escalation until catastrophe was a hallmark of our teenage years...

Same friend, more advanced chemistry lessons at school, different explosive devices. It all began with some dry ice my Dad unwisely bought us, and the old glass coke bottle. That exploded without killing any of us, and we were off. Next was the citric acid and bi-carb soda in drink bottles (don't do this, it WILL explode in your hand when you shake the bottle), thrown in a random panic. However, our best was yet to come: hydrochloric acid (why hardware stores sold this to 15 year old kids I don't know) and alfoil in 1.25 coke bottles. This shit was LOUD. And spattered acid everywhere after it boomed. Cue our reign of terror with mailboxes at hated math's teacher's houses, wheelie bins, etc. Eventually one of our friends bragged, then got caught, then turned us all in. Surprisingly, after a chat with the principal, nothing came of it. We kept on doing this until I held on a little long to one of the bottles, and caught a chip of plastic maybe 1cm under my left eye. I still have the scar, a decade later.

My brother is a lunatic drunk. He has put vacuum cleaners through windows, scaled a two story house to rip the door off a room where his friend had left the drinking night to have a domestic, been wrestling with people and gone through a solid back glass door, a massive front window, and definitely a few others I'm forgetting.

Oh, and my friend knocked over a shisha and melted the carpet in our rental house about 2 weeks ago.

Other than that, we are calm and reasonable adults.

 

Well given the fact that my post inspired this thread, I guess I don't need to retell that story. Except that after we threw that shit off the balcony we went down and smashed the larger pieces and the door up for the hell of it.

I missed one hell of a drunken night my friend had. Apparently he and his roommates had just started drinking and there was a nice wooden desk in their yard. No one is clear on who came up with it, but they made a drinking game out of driving nails into the desk. If you swung and hit the nail you had to drink a can, if you missed and hit the table you had to drink two cans, if you drove the nail all the way into the desk in one hit everyone else had to drink a can. They got through two 24 packs of natty really goddamn fast and wound up just forgetting the game and smashing the shit out of the table with the hammers.

One of them walked off to buy some groceries to make dinner. Their neighbor, a she-beast who lived with a collection of fat chicks, stepped up to complain about the noise they were making in their shennanigans, so what does my friend do? He grabs the fire extinguisher from the kitchen, runs next door, and hoses down the entire porch with it. The she-beast steps outside just as the guy who went to the store walks past with his arms full of groceries and he gets a full force screaming at.

They wound up spending the rest of the night cleaning up the neighbor's porch, but he said he'd do the whole night over again in a heartbeat.