A confession: I'm not a big drinker. I probably didn't even have my first drink until I was 23 or 24. I think the drunkest I've ever been is once or twice when I got to the point that I was having trouble controlling my speech volume, but never beyond that. No blackouts, never puked, never peed in anyone's shoes, nothing. Probably lots of little reasons for this. Before you say it, yes, I was a nerdy kid who was a stickler for the rules, and that certainly contributed. Not that we partied much, but my friends didn't drink as a social activity in either high school or college, so there was little peer pressure. I also had some bad experiences with alcoholics and users of (hard) drugs, both in the family and out. If you had to ask me what thing in the world I fear/hate most, it's people who are impaired past the point that they can be reasoned with. This includes people who are 1) very drunk, 2) very high, or 3) very (mentally) ill. I have had to deal with all three in my life more often than I care to remember, and each interaction triggers my fight-or-flight response. There is nothing I hate more than spending 20 minutes trying to convince somebody who can barely walk that no, they are not OK to drive, or that no, it's not OK to start dialing everyone in their cell phone, or that no, it's not OK to sleep on the neighbor's lawn. Also, please quiet down because screaming at the top of your lungs at 3AM is frowned-upon. That's not to say that my experiences with alcohol have been uniformly negative. One of the best nights I ever had was a long get-together with three really excellent people at an upscale bar in Minneapolis. All three of these guys are 1) intensely interesting and 2) intensely funny when sober, and more importantly all four of us knew how to stay about 2-3 drinks ahead of sobriety: just enough to enhance the experience, but not enough for people to do stupid shit. But that's a rarity. When I do go out with friends (or friends of friends) who like to drink, I am always - 100% of the time - the de-facto designated driver/minder/babysitter. I'm not even really "designated;" If I weren't there, they would all be drinking just as much, and whoever was most "OK to drive" at the end of the night would probably drive home. Sometimes a cab would be called, but probably not often. Is this normal, by the way? Unlike my excellent colleagues above, these folks get 2-3 drinks ahead of sobriety in the first 10 minutes, and it's all downhill from there. Eventually I'm back to stealing keys, dodging insults and threats of violence for doing so, getting deeply uncomfortable and sloppy hugs from all the guys who "want me to know they really love me, man" and chauffeuring people all over the place trying to convince people not to puke in the car. I have literally driven other people's cars, uninsured, hundreds of miles while they lapsed in and out of consciousness. FOCUS: When have you been the designated babysitter for your group of inebriated or chemically-altered friends? What challenges have you overcome to do so? ALTERNATE FOCUS: How have you, when inebriated or chemically-altered, inadvertently abused your designated babysitter? Did you ever have any lasting consequences for doing so?
Focus: tonight. Just got back from being babysitter for my buddy and his girlie. Of course, as babysitter came the stature of being the DD. Anywho, they want to go to the strip club and I'm all for it, I just had to not drink while watching half worn out single mothers with cellulite, stretch marks galore, and saggy boobs and not throw up. That was my challenge. There were a fair number of semi respectable looking stripper girls though. A few were actually in shape and could hold themselves on the pole and do different kinds of splits without looking like they are working hard. Also had to watch mine and the friends spending.
(Reflecting on this subject makes me consider that I'm actually growing up. Fuck.) Like many college guys I had some (many) complete blitz'd blackout drunk nights where a buddy and I would kill a handle of rum by ourselves and then take our act to the streets and campus. Showing up at dorms and homes of friends and mere acquaintances with nary a clue that we weren't welcome or amusing. Thank god for the kindness of strangers and college girls with mothering instincts. Especially Andrea. We would mentally abuse this poor girl about her boyfriends, if she was having a lesbian relationship with her roommate, we'd eat all of her food, mess up her dorm room, wake her up at 4AM just because we thought she wanted to Pah-ty!, and a laundry list of other offenses. This went on for two whole fucking years. Yikes. Through it all she made sure we either slept it off, made it back to my buddy's dorm/apt, or were taken care of by friends. Nowadays I think I'm more of a drinking police than a babysitter. My friends are of an age that they should know how much they can drink. Sure it's fun to get shitty every once in a while but know your situation. If we've been out ALL day and over the course of having a drink or two here and there you've gotten bombed then I'll happily throw you over my shoulder and carry you back to wherever you need to be. If it's a Tuesday night and we know we need to work the next day, and we met under the guise of getting a couple beers and watching some baseball then that's what I signed up for. If you've (true story) arrived early, already had a pitcher by yourself, have whiskey shots lined up, are half in the wrapper, and it's just you and me tonight I'll let you know that being babysat isn't an option. You're an adult that needs to make adult decisions. I'll text your SO or even your parents if I need to to let them know what you're up to but that's it. I also put it back on the bartender, letting them know that they're actually responsible for your ass now that they've over served you.
The worst thing I've ever done to a babysitter was violently insist that they take me to McDonald's and buy me food. I think because I'm a girl and the babysitter was a guy, he didn't mind so much that I punched him in the face. But I felt really awful the next morning about it. The worst experience I've ever had as a babysitter was with my cousin. We were at a night club with a friend of hers. She got drunk enough to fall asleep on the bar (I mean lying across the bar.) I had to drag her out a back entrance, in February, and wait for a cab because her friend was still having fun and didn't want to leave. We waited in the snow for about an hour. The cab driver helped me drag her into my apartment, where she slept in my bed and I took the couch. She wakes me up at 5 in the morning to tell me that she pissed in my bed. It was a brand new matress that I had just bought the day before.
Focus: I was the designated babysitter a lot in my second year of university, for financial reasons if nothing else. I worked a crap job so all I could allocate out of my week's pay for going out drinking was $50. Now this was PLENTY for one night out (I wish it was still so fucking cheap) but if we decided to do Thursday and Saturday nights, I often couldn't drink the latter so I'd be DD and babysitter for a bunch of 19-year-old guys. Fun. But my worst babysitting experience came two or three years ago. I was headed to a local bar for a friend's going-away party one Friday night, but I had to work at 4.30am the next day so I intended just to have a couple of beers. By the time I got there, things were in full swing and people were taking advantage of the girl's parents' generous bar tab. One girl in particular, who probably weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, was really putting them away. I'd met her only once before, we'd been pretty flirty and I thought she was an alright sort. But when she laid her head down on a tall bar table, shut her eyes and went ghostly white, that changed my perspective. Our other friends were trying to get her to sit up but she didn't want to hear it. For some reason (probably that I was basically sober) I realised she was going to hurl everywhere, so I lifted her up, carried her to the ladies room and knelt her down in front of a toilet, but not before she lost half her drinks down my arm and back. As I was putting her down on the floor, security charged in and abused me for being in the ladies room, not seeing that I was covered in someone else's puke. Everyone else was too drunk to care so it became my responsibility to get her into a cab - but she was too fucked to tell me her address, and no cabbie would take the chance of having puke in his backseat at 1am anyway. One of our other friends who knew the address was also driving, so I ended up manhandling this girl into the back of a two-door car and keeping her awake for the drive home to where she lived with her folks. Once there, I had to carry her unconscious ass inside and put her to bed, all the while trying to make sure her parents didn't wake up and find some unshaven dude lugging their unconscious daughter around at 1am. But it was totally worth it though, because a week later she wrote on my Facebook wall, "Wow, I've never been that drunk." You're welcome.
I was an inconsolable, black out, waking in my own vomit, drunk at one point in my life. There are times I am sure my friends wanted to kill me. Many of them prevented me from driving on more than one occasion. I've been pass out drunk at 11am at work, screwed up business meetings, woke up in class with no recollection of even getting there, and had to do the walk of shame and call over town looking for my car. How I didn't end up dead in a ditch is a miracle and I owe a lot to the people I had around me. I heard someone say "There is nothing worse than a sloppy drunk woman" and I have to agree. However, it took me not being babysat and suffering major consequences before I stopped inadvertently trying to drink myself to death. Plus, once you stop being an absolute disaster with an open wallet, sometimes you realize those good friends you thought you had who took care of you were merely taking advantage of you. Eventually, I realized being the clown and putting on the Kittie show was getting old. As payback, I get saddled with the babysitter role now. Now I am the one making coffee, stopping people from driving, cleaning up puke, helping people change clothes, convincing them that one more" will, in fact, hurt and hurt a lot. I draw the line at making midnight runs to the liquor store or driving a bunch of drunk lunatics around. I can see once in a blue moon getting out of hand, but when someone does it consistently, I can't be around them. It reminds me too much of the past and how hard I am still working to repair the damage I inflicted. A few weeks ago, some of my girlfriends and I got together to go dancing and to a drag show. These women, who I have known my entire life, acted like they were freshly turned 21 and just then discovered alcohol. Some of them are school teachers and nurses. (We're in our 30s) Before the hour ride home, they had an argument over who was OK enough to drive and acted in ways I know for a fact they regretted the next morning. (kissing, stripping in the car, yelling at their husbands on the phone...etc) I just kept getting more and more annoyed and wanted to yell "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" When I was telling my boyfriend about it, he kindly reminded me of my behavior in the past. People never forget the dumb things you have done drunk and will remind you of it.
There are few things I find more frustrating than being the babysitter. I drink quite often and while I do not get so drunk that I need to be carried/saved from an argument/stopped from bullying or harassing people anymore, I get annoyed when I have to play that role when a dozen beers and countless scotch and sodas have travelled down my throat. Then again I am sympathetic because, like Kittie, I was/am a horrible degenerate.
Though I wouldn't trade my close friends for anybody, the answer to that question is: How about every fucking night I went out drinking? Most people hate this task, but if there's one thing I can do in life it's knowing how to control drunk people and tolerate them. I was usually known as the "guy who reasons with the police". I was also a very valuable friend, because I was the only one that never blacked out so I could provide them with valuable colour commentary on the two hours or so that they time-travelled through when they kicked the busker's change bucket all over an entire street intersection. Or the fact they would never back down from anybody, no matter what the odds. Or they used an expired credit card in the cab and then decide to go track star. Good times.
I went out with a few friends last night to see a band in Coolangatta; a friend of mine and his wife, and one of my ex-girlfriends. I was driver. Apart from the general hilarity of the self-important hipsters that were hanging around trying to give me dirty looks without giving it away (oldish (for them), solid guy with shaved head, goatee, black t-shirt, black pants) my friend decides he's going to have a few drinks and a good time. Nothing wrong with that at all. Well, except that he doesn't drink often, he's loud and exuberant at the best of times, has no filter between his brain and his mouth and hates most people. After about four Jack and cokes without having eaten anything all day, he was in top gear. He yelled, he screamed, he jumped around, he wrestled his wife into a booth several times to dry hump her, he took his shirt off and waved it around his head, and proceeded to headbang and slamdance for most of the night. All he was missing was facepaint and claymore. The band was good, he was better. That was until about three songs from the end when he crashed, very suddenly. He went very quiet, didn't move and "didn't feel very well". We packed him into the car at the end of the set and drove home. All he could say was "uhhhhhh" and "I want chippies". We stopped at a McDonald's drivethru to get some food. As well as the fries, he wanted nuggets because, and I quote, "You can't spit in a chicken nugget, motherfucker!!". He proceeded to scream this every time someone came near the service window. I have no idea how we got our food. I called him today and he said he was fine, and a bit tired. "But my neck's a bit sore..."
I've only woken up in someplace that was not my bed or couch twice in my life and didn't know how I was there. It was actually my bathroom floor. I'm a little of a control freak when I drink and I'm always thinking about "Logistics" so I don't feel like my night is a waste. As the babysitter: I usually am drinking with two friends. Friend 1 is half Irish half Polish who at any random night can be a two beer queer or Frank the tank. Either way, if you aren't as equally drunk or drunker than he is, he's fucking miserable. Getting him home is impossible unless he is fed, literally fucking fed. When I'm driving he'll argue about how to get home telling me the wrong way and then yell about wanting to get home faster. Friend 2 once drunk usually refuses to leave unless he has secured sex for the night, regardless what she looks like. This has led to me literally dragging him (who has 30 lbs on me of muscle) out of the bar because friends don't let friends sex uggos. He has told the most elaborate lies to try and be left at the bar to go home with some VJJ. You think "Hey, just let him sex up uggos." Oh no, if I do that, he'll yell at me all day the next day, and will go out of his way to cockblock me the next few weekends. But if I successfully prevent him from said uggos, he usually pays for all drinks the next night out. Since I'm unemployed, I'll do the extra babysitting. As the babysitter abuser: Out with Friend 2 being DD while he has been studying for some stupid accountant tests, I have a long conversation with Jameson and I become a raging asshole. Well I just state statistics, recently, I got Friend 2 car keyed because I drunkenly shouted to 2 different bachelorette parties standing in the parking lot "Hey ladies! Live it up tonight because divorce rates are 50-60% for couples in their early 20s, but you don't have to worry about that because you bitches look old as hell!"
For all the people who have been the designated non-retard, you have no idea how helpful you are. I wouldn't have made it through college without being dead or in prison. I had to outsource my sobriety in multiple places. I had a girlfriend who got on my ass about it and drove me all over town until I passed out. She didn't drink, not a drop because she was a good Christian (while that's probably a funnier story I'll leave it out for the sake of avoiding religion). Anyway, she didn't help out enough so I made friends with some Muslims who couldn't crack a beer without feeling guilty. They were only willing to deal with that shit 1-2 a week so I had my roommate pitch in on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I haven't been the sober person for years, but all of my experiences were fucking awful. Back in high school there was a bar that offered all you can drink for $6. Who could say no? Not the Canadian asshole and Swedish-Chinese uber slut. An hour after we get to the bar neither can stand while the Canadian hits on the slut who's asking every guy within a pole's reach to make out. Another hour later and the Canadian is about to go home with a 13 year old girl (don't ask) and the slut is lying in a pool of her own vomit. I drag both of them to a cab, agree to pay the extra $40 and we're on our way to my house. They start puking all over the cab so the driver demands more money and I have to take my shirt off to wipe the vomit from their faces to make them 'presentable' in case my parents wake up. So let's see, I saved them from being murdered by their own parents, had my entire evening ruined, lost a shirt, and spent close to $80 on these two slobs. What thanks do I get? The slut asks me for an after day pill because she may or may not have fucked a guy behind the bar last night, and my Canadian friend meekly apologizes and scampers away after a shower.
Focus & Alternate Focus: We were having a party for a friend who was shipping out and another of my friends was the DD. She was dead set on only having one rum and coke that night but at some point I convinced her to do a shot of Jack with me...then another...then another...you get the point. Turns out I was sobering up right around the time she disappeared to the bathroom for a marathon session of vomiting. Suffice it to say, I took over driving duties that night. The disturbing thing was that as I was carrying her out to the car the bouncer stopped me and almost didn't let me leave because he assumed I was going to take advantage of her.
Sounds pretty god damn familiar. I'm usually the guy that gets the "wtf happened last night?" texts from half the people in my group, and on the off chance I actually did get blackout drunk (very rarely), my friends would actually be pissed that I couldn't remember what happened, or wasn't there to have their backs, even though there was no earlier agreement that stated I wasn't allowed to get too drunk. While it's kind of annoying, I've been that guy in the group for 10 years, so I'm pretty used to it now. I have two sets of close friends, one in the city I'm in now and one in the city I grew up in, and they're both made up of nothing but people that love getting wasted multiple nights per week, and then going to their job the next day. I've always been a pretty heavy drinker that is able to keep his head on his shoulders for the most part, so while I don't have many stories that follow the Focus for my group of friends, one time definitely stands out above all others for babysitting someone drunk. Spoiler tags because it's fucking long: Spoiler A friend of mine decided to celebrate his birthday a few years back at a pub, and one of the people that showed up was a girl he used to work with that apparently had a crush on him at that time. I got to the pub sober at about 10 p.m. and she was already drunk off her ass, flirting with everyone in the group, but mostly with the birthday boy. Obviously, his girlfriend at that time (who was sitting beside him), had a problem with that. She told me, "If that drunk whore doesn't get away from Mike, I'm going to scratch her fucking face off!" Somehow, I got the feeling that she wanted the drunk girl away from her boyfriend, so I asked her to come to the bar with me and we'd do a few shots. She agreed, and off we went. We ordered a shot and a beer and talked for a while, then I went to the bathroom. When I got back, my buddy that was bartending told me she ordered four shots of vodka and drank them while I was gone. It was about 11:30 by then, and my friends wanted to go to a club. I tried getting her to come with us, but she refused, so off we went. About half an hour later, I got a text from my bartender friend, stating that I had to come pick that girl up. While I didn't even know her last name, I knew she was there alone and was pretty fucking drunk when I left her. I was still a nice guy at the time, so I paid for a cab, and went back to the pub. I walked in the door, and my bartender friend picked up her purse from behind the bar and handed it to me (or tried to at least, I wasn't in a purse-carrying mood). He said she wandered away from the bar a few minutes before and left her jacket and purse there, but he didn't know where she was now. Right after he mentioned that, a female server came up to the bar and said there was a girl passed out in the bathroom. I asked what the girl was wearing, and confirmed it was this drunk idiot. She had locked herself inside a stall and was passed out, wrapped around the toilet. Eventually they got the door open and a bouncer had to pick her up and carry her out of the bathroom. He got her outside the bathroom and she saw me and recognized me, which apparently was all the manager of the pub needed. He told me to get her out of here before she caused more problems and he called the cops. She told me she had a car there and she needed to get it home so she could go to work the next morning, so we hopped in her and I drove her back to her apartment. I fireman-carried her out of her car and up the five flights of stairs, threw her on her couch, and started to leave. Then she started throwing up, violently, all over herself and her living room floor. I got her into the bathroom, and had the pleasure of sitting there for the next two hours, making sure she didn't choke on her own vomit, and listening to her talk about the child she aborted two years earlier. She finally passed out on top of the toilet and was apparently all out of anything else to throw up, but just in case, I waited around and watched TV until she woke up again and I could make sure she was fine. She came to in the morning and had no fucking idea who I was. After I explained we met at Mike's birthday and she got so drunk at the pub I had to take her home, she had a look on her face like "Oh shit, it happened again". She drove me home, offered me her number (I politely declined), and we went on our separate ways, never to see each other again. Fun night.