I'm Having More Fun Than You

by Karo, Aaron

  PUB LIFE

  Some of my buddies used to play Erotic Photo Hunt, which is an electronic bar game that shows you two pictures of naked chicks and challenges you to find the differences. Then one day the local bar changed it from Erotic Photo Hunt to regular Photo Hunt. Suddenly we were counting how many petals were on the daisy a little girl was holding and it just became weird. However, the electronic novelty that all bars should be required to have is a photo booth. These amazing devices enable you to hook up with a chick in private, without having to leave the bar, plus you get the pictures as proof. Try doing that with Buck Hunter.

  Do good architects consider themselves above designing bars? I can’t think of any other structures that are laid out so poorly. Most seem to sport the “hourglass” shape in which the front of the bar connects to the back via a narrow channel barely big enough for a single red blood cell to pass through. Plus that’s the way to the bathroom. Where there’s one toilet for two hundred wasted people. And it’s broken.

  * * *

  GLOSSARY

  REFILL LIMBO

  Occurs when you’re having casual drinks with friends, they order another round from the waitress, but you still have half of your beer remaining and are momentarily unable to decide whether to order and chug or pass and sip.

  * * *

  Let’s take all of the bathroom attendants out of bars in LA, New York, and Miami and, like bouncers, put them in stadiums and airports where they’re desperately needed. It’s a waste to have attendants manning bathrooms in bars where their sole purpose is to provide obnoxious kids a cleaner surface to blow lines off of.

  You’ve never seen a guy prouder of himself than when he’s pissing in the bar bathroom with no hands. Every time I go in there, guys are unzipping at the urinal, putting their hands on their hips or behind their heads, and exulting in what they have accomplished. Other guys, however, get enraged when someone takes a shit in the bar bathroom. They stamp around yelling, “It fucking reeks! I’m gonna find the guy who did this! ” You want to find the guy who took a dump in the bar bathroom, huh? I’ll tell you who it is—it’s the happiest guy here.

  LADIES’ NIGHT

  Occasionally, I’ll be hitting on a girl in a bar and just know I don’t have a shot. Things will be going pretty well, and then I’ll ask, “Can I get you a drink?” And she responds, “Actually, I don’t drink.” Sometimes she’s just trying to get rid of me, but when she’s actually being serious about not drinking, I’m devastated. I mean, how am I supposed to take a chick home if she’s sober but I’m wasted? That’s like trying to beat a team in football when they have your playbook. I just want to shake her hand and say, “Well, it was great meeting you, but clearly this isn’t working out. I’m gonna go find someone whose decision-making abilities are a bit more impaired.”

  * * *

  OBSERVATION

  The only thing worse than talking to a girl at a bar and not realizing that you’re wasted, slurring, and swaying, is talking to a girl at a bar and knowing that you’re wasted, slurring, and swaying. My gut tells me to stay the course. But the look on her face tells me she’s horrified.

  * * *

  I think there should be a law against UPT—ugly people touching. Have you ever noticed that the ugliest couple at the bar is always all over each other? And they both have all these weird pimples and rashes and shit? Listen, I know you’re excited to have finally found the only human on earth actually willing to go down on you, but I’m gonna vomit in my fucking beer if you don’t stop slobbering on each other.

  If the situation at the bar is dire and I’ve gone through my list of usual booty texts, sometimes I’ll drop a line to a one-night stand from like three years ago. If she never responds, I automatically assume she’s engaged. But sometimes she responds right away to tell me she actually is engaged. The message is always something like: “yeah I was just tired of going to the same shitty bars and getting drunk every night like an idiot. so what’s up w/ u?” And I sheepishly put my BlackBerry down and order another twenty-five-cent pitcher.

  PUT IT ON MY TAB!

  I was partying it up after a show in Chicago when I accomplished a first for me: I had two different tabs on two different cards open simultaneously at the same bar. Some might call this reckless. I call it “building credit history.”

  Whenever I end up at a campus bar while on tour, it’s an opportunity to relive my glory days. I was once at a bar at Northwestern that was having a special that was something like $2.50 for a thirty-two-ounce beer—essentially, a shitload of beer for very little money. I ran up a $175 tab. Turns out that when I’m back at college, the cheaper the special, the more likely I am to buy rounds for everyone of everything but the special. So essentially the exact opposite of what I was like in college.

  * * *

  ETIQUETTE

  If you’re a male friend of mine and I offer to buy you a drink, order a beer. I was just being nice and didn’t expect you to request a Long Island iced tea with four top-shelf liquors. Do I look like I’m trying to fuck you?

  * * *

  Even when I’m in a situation where I can’t pay with a credit card, I still manage to throw money away for no reason. Once I drunkenly tossed a crumpled-up hundred-dollar bill at a recalcitrant cab driver. Which would have been obnoxious enough had I not added, “Say hello to Benjamin McKenzie.” I’m pretty sure I meant Benjamin Franklin—whose face is on the bill—and not the actor who played Ryan on The OC.

  PARTY LIKE A ROCK STAR

  Two of the maxims that I try to live by are related: work hard and play harder, and go hard or go home. In other words: take care of your responsibilities before getting absolutely destroyed; but if you’re not gonna get absolutely destroyed, don’t even bother showing up at all. Let’s face facts: I’ve been out of college for eight years. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still party like a rock star. I really look at myself as a twenty-first-century Peter Pan: it’s not, “I won’t grow up” it’s more like, “I will grow up—as long as I can still throw up every other weekend.”

  Whenever someone says to me, “I don’t have to drink to have a good time,” my response is always, “Well, I do.” Have you ever been sick or the designated driver and gone out with your best friends in the whole world when they’re drinking but you’re not? It’s not fun at all. Not even a little bit. I try to pretend like I’m having a great time but secretly I can’t wait to get home, strip down to my boxers, and just watch the shit out of my DVR. I think that going out with your buddies when they’re fucked up and you’re not is actually detrimental to your friendship, because you realize what jackasses they are. I’m looking around thinking, “Good thing I’m not like that when I’m drunk.”

  * * *

  GLOSSARY

  BLOODBATH

  An event of epic drunken debauchery. As in, “Dude, I hear this party tonight is open bar.” “Really? It’s gonna be a fucking bloodbath.”

  * * *

  Ever say goodbye to everyone after a long night and then get halfway down the block only to realize you forgot your jacket? You always have to go back, acknowledge the weird looks everybody’s giving you, respond to irritating little gibes like, “Hey! Back already?” then reclaim your jacket and hoist it skyward while doing a half-lap around to demonstrate to the gathering crowd that all is well and you’ve simply returned to retrieve the North Face you now rue ever having purchased.

  As the hour grows later and later and my friends and I grow drunker and drunker, I become increasingly vigilant about which bar to head to next. As soon as it passes 1 a.m., I always start suggesting bars closer and closer to home. I’ll say, “How about that lounge at Hollywood and Ivar? No? OK, what about that new place on Santa Monica and Fuller? No? OK, OK, how about that bar on Melrose and Harper? How about that, huh?” And my friends are like, “Karo, there’s no bar there. That’s your apartment.”

  * * *

  VOLUNTARY ALCOHOLISM

  I don’t need to drink every
day. But when I do drink, I have absolutely no self-control and get obliterated every single time. I either have zero drinks or fifty drinks. I call this condition “voluntary alcoholism.” You know you’re a voluntary alcoholic if…

  You’ve never tasted Red Bull without vodka in it.

  You go straight from work to the bar and stay until last call. Even though you always lose your laptop bag.

  You’ve known so far ahead of time how fucked up you’re gonna get that you’ve called in sick for work the next day—before you even went out.

  When you’re pre-gaming with your buddies, and you have to take a shit, you take your drink with you.

  When you get to a party and there are no cups left, you’ll drink out of anything. That includes the children’s Dimetapp dispenser you find in the cupboard. Example: “Yo dude, let me get to the keg! Come on, I’ve got two teaspoons here! I’m taking the twelve and older dose. Goddamn it. It’s all foam!”

  When you get to a party two hours late and everyone’s already wasted, you totally panic, overcompensate, start lapping people, and end up getting twice as fucked up as anyone else.

  When you go to the bar and order two beers, and your friend asks who the other one’s for, your response is, “I don’t understand the question.”

  * * *

  TAKE IT TO THE HOUSE

  No matter how old I get, there will always be a special place in my heart for good old-fashioned house parties. I’m not the only one. There’s an entire faction of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings out there who live seemingly mature lives—but only to the naked eye. Take my friend Mike, an accomplished software developer in New York whose downtown apartment has actually been passed down for years to successive generations of graduates from his fraternity—like an off-campus party house. Or my buddy Justin, a producer here in LA who had trouble finding a new apartment because he couldn’t find one big enough to fit his beer-pong table. Unfortunately for him, “Hardwood floor quickly soaks up cheap beer” is typically not an amenity found on Craigslist.

  Women my age have stupid fucking birthday parties. I love that they wear a little party dress and tiara, crimp their hair, and invite five hundred dudes. That’s if their party is at a bar; if they decide to have it at an apartment, it’s even worse. You see, despite my penchant for taking over a friend’s house for a rager, one thing I outgrew years ago is dressing up. On average, one in four Evites I receive from chicks is for some sort of elaborate costume/theme party that reminds me of sophomore year. If you’re a strong, independent woman nearing thirty, you should not be throwing parties entitled Pimps & Hos, Forties & Hos, or Golf Pros & Tennis Hos. Unless you want to do Regular Guys & Hos, in which case I’m in.

  The last time Justin (he of beer-pong table fame) had his annual Super Bowl party, he decided not to get a keg because it was just too much of a mess. That turned the first quarter festivities into a game of “Let’s see how many fucking beers we can jam into this fridge.” The thing is, given all our combined years of drinking experience, I am still struck by my friends’ complete inability to purchase the right amount of booze. It’s an inexact science by any measure. I feel like half the time the cups, ice, and liquor run out in about forty-five minutes, and the rest of the time the party’s host is left with a bounty of alcohol so great that ten months later I find myself back at my buddy’s place polishing off a frosted-over bottle of Skyy and asking, “Wait, dude, is this left over from St. Patrick’s Day?”

  * * *

  GLOSSARY

  CBP AND SECOND-ROUND EVITES

  Sometimes I’ll go weeks and months without a birthday party, and then all of a sudden I simultaneously receive a dozen different Evites from friends of various backgrounds inviting me to shindigs, blowouts, and the occasional bash, all to celebrate their birthdays…on the same night. CBP, or Clustered Birthday Phenomenon, occurs without any logical explanation. It is a dangerous epidemic too, usually resulting in exorbitant amounts of money being spent at annoying parties with people I don’t really like.

  And have you ever opened an Evite as soon as you received it, noticed that over a hundred people had already responded, and then realized that the host blatantly forgot to include you the first time? Receiving a Second-Round Evite usually makes me want to attend said party even less than I did before, which is damn near impossible.

  * * *

  If anything is going to stop an all-night rager from continuing, it’s not gonna be the neighbors or the cops. It’s gonna be that guy with the downstairs bathroom that gets all fucked up when you have a party. I always feel bad for downstairs bathroom guy as I’m pissing on his toilet seat and rifling through his year-old copies of Maxim. Strangely enough, though, the next morning I forget all about him.

  Walk-up apartments on really high floors can be great for parties, because whenever someone gets to the door it’s a grand entrance—newcomers exult in having made it all the way up and then comically overdo the heavy breathing. Plus, the party goes all night because people would rather drink stale beer and make idle conversation than climb back down all those fucking stairs.

  Ultimately, my favorite thing about house parties is that they usually present a rare opportunity to do kegstands. I actually once cut my lip trying to do a kegstand. And when I say “once” I mean it was less than a year ago. That’s right, I still enjoy the occasional kegstand. To me, a kegstand is the ultimate display of defiance. Because a kegstand requires two things that are not always readily available: a keg and enough crazy friends willing to hold you up. When you get to be my age and can still look around to find both, well, life is good.

  WASTED

  For the past six years, I’ve organized a mid-afternoon pub crawl through New York City for my friends in lieu of a birthday party. There’s just something about drinking during the day that appeals to me. I think it might be the drinking during the day part. When I turned thirty, I decided that would be the last year. I don’t know, for some reason vomiting in the street in broad daylight seems fine at twenty-nine but a little uncouth at thirty-one.

  I wouldn’t say I’m a bad drunk, just an inefficient one. I tend to lose all short-term memory. One night when I was still living in New York, Chi called me sixteen times to tell me where to meet him. By the time each call ended and I put the phone in my pocket, I had forgotten the address. Chi also likes to say that I’m a terrible person to tell your secrets to because I get drunk and reveal them. But technically that’s not true. I usually get drunk and reveal my own secrets, which is actually worse.

  It bothers me that every liquor ad has a little line at the bottom that says, “Enjoy responsibly.” First of all, you can’t really enjoy liquor responsibly—that’s an oxymoron. Furthermore, responsibility is subjective. When Triplet #2 was living in London for a year, I visited him, drank too much, and threw up in his apartment. That was irresponsible. But I threw up in the garbage can, which was responsible. But the garbage can didn’t have a bag in it, which was irresponsible. And it was mesh, which is just plain gross.

  When I was with Triplet #2 in Australia, I took him out for his birthday. Our other friend on the trip, Jen, was able to get us upgraded to a gourmet suite in the Sydney Marriott. This worked out well, as I was able to utilize the bucket that held our complimentary champagne to vomit in profusely after taking three birthday shots for every one of Trip 2’s. The following day, we were scheduled to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the top of which offers spectacular views of the Opera House and the rest of the city. Unfortunately for me, one of the prerequisites for scaling the bridge was passing a breathalyzer test. Even at 3 p.m. the day after drinking, I still failed. Don’t judge me.

  * * *

  GLOSSARY

  DBD

  Traditionally, I write the acronym DBD in black Sharpie on the back of my left hand before any drinking binge I predict will turn into a total bloodbath. These events typically include my birthday and New Year’s Eve, as well as a few wild cards such as weddings and Yankees
playoff games. DBD stands for Don’t Be Dumb and is meant to remind me during moments of severe inebriation not to do or say anything stupid. Has almost never worked.

  * * *

  One year I was out boozing with the boys in South Beach when I started to get that tickle in the back of my throat. Of course, my first instinct was to throw up in my BlackBerry. I literally took my BlackBerry out of my pocket, held it in front of my mouth, unlocked it, and then vomited into the keyboard—into the nooks and the crannies. Broke it completely. But the worst part was calling T-Mobile and trying to get a new phone. I was sitting there in Miami with my fucking PukeBerry, talking to the customer service rep, and he wanted to start “troubleshooting.” I remember the guy said, “When you go to Tools, then Options, what do you see?” I scrolled through, looked at the screen, and was like, “Um, pizza. And some corn.” There’s always corn in there, right? I don’t even eat corn. Forget about fixing the phone, I just wanted to know where all that corn came from.

  I once dated a girl who claimed to be a raging party animal like myself. However, no one gets drunk and embarrasses himself quite like I do. When this chick claimed to be a bigger idiot than me when wasted, I actually took offense. I said, “Are you saying that if we were equally drunk, you could out-embarrass me? No way!” And she was like, “But Karo, if I’m drunk and someone tells me to do something stupid, I’ll do it.” I said, “Darling, if I’m drunk, I come up with the stupid ideas myself and execute them. I’m like a one-stop shop of embarrassment.” That really put her in her place.