theriotbefore.com

“Why aren’t you drinking?” Freddy asked me loudly.

It was three in the morning and, for the first time since we showed up in Chicago six hours earlier, I was without a beer. My head spun. My stomach was knotted up and sternly refused to accept any more alcohol. It instead demanded penance paid in the form of something greasy.

“I’m not drinking because if I have one more, I’m going to throw up.” My voice strained to get over the bar’s blaring speakers.

“So,” Freddy shrugged, the logic of my argument apparently lost in transit, “I threw up hours ago!”

“What?! Are you serious!”

“Yeah, of course. I did, after all, have like seven beers and some whiskey. ” He responded with a sort of “everybody’s doing it” nonchalance. “It’s no big deal.”

He was cut off by Jon, normally the most reserved member of the band, walking by, arms victoriously held up in the air, proudly proclaiming that he was going to show Chicago how to party. I believe he followed this up with a “wooo!”

Lost in the intersection between drunk and exhausted, I stumbled outside to try and clear my head a little. Milwaukee Avenue was still busy, full of people who appeared almost eager for their inevitable meeting with regret the next morning, and I stood among them, as one of them, squinting in street lights that somehow seemed too bright, trying desperately to unwrap a tamale I had just bought from a nearby street vendor. It was locked in paper and tied at the ends, and my fingers fumbled with the tiny string knots like my hands were merely acquaintances of mine, corn meal spilling out onto the street. I managed to eat about two-thirds of the tamale, while the rest was lost, unwillingly offered up to the rats and pigeons, the underlords of the city’s vast ecosystem.

The next morning I woke up at 10:30 in desperate need of a bathroom and a Tylenol. I crawled from my sleeping bag and looked across the room. Freddy and Cory slept on adjoining couches in front of a window, behind a coffee table littered with empty cans and cigarette butts. Jon was missing. I hadn’t seen him since the aforementioned “wooo” and his absence brought me to form two opposing conclusions. The first being a sort of sly, high-five accompanying, “Way to go Jon!” The second, a grave, concerned, “Oh no, Jon!” I hoped for the former, hoped that he had impressed someone with his partying skills, maybe a lady, that they had become friends, and that she was currently fixing him eggs. But I worried this wasn’t the case. I had left the bar an hour earlier than everyone else and was nearly asleep when they got back. I remembered there being talk about how they had lost Jon somewhere in between the bar and the apartment. His phone’s battery was dead, he had never been in Wicker Park before, and there was little hope that he’d make his way back to the apartment. Even if he did, there was no way he could get a hold of one of us to come open the downstairs door. Cory, thankfully sober that night—and the 700 or so that preceded it— hopped on our friend Pablo’s bike in a last ditch attempt to track Jon down. But he was nowhere to be found. We had gone to sleep hoping he was ok. When he was still missing that next morning, I bleakly pictured him laying on the street next to my tamale crumbs, lost, incoherent, squinting in the morning sun, arms still in the air, using the last of his long depleted energy to “wooo” one final time before passing out amidst muttered proclamations of Chicago’s inability to party.

I dressed in yesterday’s clothes and grabbed my computer, hoping that I wasn’t too hungover to coherently update the blog. I walked a few blocks to the van and was relieved to find Jon asleep on the loft behind the back bench. Apparently he had wondered aimlessly around Chicago the night before until reluctantly taking a cab back to the first bar we had gone to, the only landmark he could name. From there he found the van and fell asleep. I was glad he was ok but still a little disappointed he was eating eggs.

Nevertheless, this are going really well. I have a lot to update (including prank calls to transcribe) and I swear I get to that in the next few days.

Brett

P.S.

Oh good god this isn’t a stretch!

When I was in high school I taught my golden retriever, Hobbes (RIP), how to open the back door of our house. I was really impressed. Little did I know, this actually qualified him for the vice-presidency of the United States.