You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery

by Mamrie Hart

  I quickly went and found my friends, who at this point were way too drunk to be handling small mammals. If I remember correctly, they were reenacting the rabbit scene from Fatal Attraction.

  “We gotta go.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We came. We saw. He came. I saw.”

  We got the hell out of there and promptly passed out in the comfort of our own weird hotel. Sure, there were penises at every turn at our place, but at least they weren’t spitting at us. I guess with every experience like this, at least you come away learning from it. So, what did I learn that night?

  I learned that you can’t just go out looking for someone. It needs to happen naturally, or you’re gonna end up going home with someone who probably isn’t that cute in the light of sobriety, based on him orgasming by a mini make-out session. But the most important thing I learned that trip: Never go to sleep with your chest shellacked with glitter. The next morning you have to peel that shit off and it feels like . . . Well, have you ever accidentally gotten superglue on your fingers and they get all dry and you have to rip off your skin to make it go away? This felt like that. Except on your whole chest. Your whole chest. If homeboy hadn’t creamed his pants and actually had tried to feel me up, my boobs would’ve felt like a gladiator chest plate. I could’ve deflected a bullet like Superman.

  I also learned to lay off Jimmy Buffett a little. Even though I’d rather put a foot-long Q-tip in my ear than listen to Son of a Son of a Sailor again, some of his song titles are a different story. I hopped on the old Wikipedia to look some up, and it turns out they perfectly describe certain times in my life. For example:

  “I Wish Lunch Could Last Forever”

  —This is how I feel every day at lunch.

  “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (and Screw)”

  —This is how I feel after three shots of tequila.

  “My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus”

  —This is how I feel after eight shots of tequila.

  “You’ll Never Work in Dis Bidness Again”

  —This is how my book agent will feel when I turn in this chapter.

  I got a little nostalgic for the Shores a few years back and thought about doing a girls’ trip, only to find that it had closed back in 2007. What a shame. The room was so-so, but lying out by that pool with no tan lines or inhibitions was a thing of beauty. Turns out that tanning buck naked in your front yard while eating nachos just doesn’t feel the same, no matter how disinterested the men driving by are. Rest in peace, Atlantic Shores.

  Topless Tuesday

  3 oz gin

  1 oz dry vermouth

  1 oz pickling liquid

  3 dashes Tabasco

  3 pickled okras

  Combine all ingredients, except for the okras, into a shaker with ice. Swirl vigorously. Strain and garnish with one of the okras. The other two are to eat while you make your drink.

  When I was little I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of clubs. I wanted secret handshakes, and special badges, and meetings in a tree house. I imagined myself calling the meetings to order with a hammer for a gavel and everyone cheering when I proclaimed that we would be spending our dues on a pizza party. Despite my visions of grandeur (and breadsticks), my attempts to organize clubs never really panned out.

  Okay, fine. They were a disaster. I started a cooking club, Club Sandwich, but it went up in flames when the members said they didn’t want to do the dishes. Next, I started a fashion club, the Sew Cool Club. One puffy-paint sweatshirt in and that was kaput. I then started a mystery-solving club, but there was a severe shortage of mysteries around town. By week three, I had to fake that my mom’s expensive necklace had gone missing and that we’d been chosen to crack the case. While I dusted the banister for fingerprints with baby powder, the two other members of the Miss-tery Club played Sonic the Hedgehog on my Sega. Later that day my mom found her necklace in a laundry basket and was pissed. In my defense, I was able to crack the case. It was me.

  The closest I ever got to being part of an organized club was being a card-carrying member of Pizza Hut’s Book It! program, in which kids got free pizzas for reading books. The greatest part about this reward system was that there was no way for them to regulate it. Technically you could walk in there, point to the teenage cook, and be like, “Reggie, why don’t you take five and ice that wrist, ’cause I read eight hundred books this week and plan on treating my entire town to personal pans, buddy.” Not that I would ever have had the balls to do that! I was a total Goody Two-shoes, and I wouldn’t have wanted to lie to get free personal pans. I could have single-handedly shut down the Hut with the amount of books I was reading.

  There was one book series in particular that I was crazy about: The Baby-sitters Club.* As someone who now skips parties to stay in and watch Shark Tank, I can tell you that the concept of a club that also generated profit made little Mamrie’s mind go nuts. But my dreams of running my own BSC (and getting a private landline in my room for meetings) were squashed instantly when I didn’t get a single call my first week. In the South, people don’t really call “sitters”; they just drop their kids off at their closest relatives’ (closest being distance-wise, not relationship-wise). There wasn’t any of this “pay someone eight bucks an hour” mumbo jumbo. It was just . . .

  Drop her off at Granny Bo’s house.

  Granny’s so senile, she thought kitty litter was Grape-Nuts last week.

  She’ll be fine for a few hours.

  By the end of fifth grade, I had more failed clubs than Miami in the late ’90s. Little did I know that it wouldn’t be till a decade later that I would finally found a club that would not only succeed—nay, it would flourish. And like most things in college, it involved the two Bs: boobs and booze.

  It began as a normal Tuesday in the fall of my senior year. This particular day, my friend Melissa and I were drinking bourbon on the rocks and smoking cognac-dipped cigarillos. Melissa and I didn’t consider ourselves best friends so much as hetero life partners, or HLPs. Allow me to explain. It’s a proven fact that women live longer than men. So we promised that when our significant others died we would move in with each other our last few years, Golden Girls–style, and really whoop it up. Anyway! Melissa, who is now a successful costume designer and is still my HLP, was teaching me how to silk-screen. Sounds like a pretty normal Tuesday, right? The only difference is that we were doing all of this topless.

  Why topless, you ask? I think it started because we were working with paint and didn’t want to stain our shirts. I am the queen of staining shirts. If I could legally be topless whenever I wanted, it would save dozens and dozens of Forever 21 blouse casualties every year. But the real reason we were topless was because Melissa is the least modest person I know. She makes Miley Cyrus look like an Amish girl who’s not interested in Rumspringa. And with good reason. I’m almost certain the song “Defying Gravity,” from Wicked, was inspired by her tits. And while I don’t go around topless at the drop of a hat, I’m not self-conscious, either. Growing up doing dance competitions and recitals, you had to change costumes in front of a roomful of other girls. I’m not saying that I would go spread-eagle in a tutu or anything. But we were a couple of friends with our shirts off. It wasn’t sexual. It was convenient!

  The next day, I felt like an Acme anvil had landed on my brain, but I also felt rather accomplished. That was the most fun I’d had in a long time, and I came away with a new skill set. Not to mention I felt super liberated having done it all without a shirt on. I started to understand why guys take off their shirts when they do yard work or other tasks. Yes, it’s probably to keep cool, but there is something about going bare chested that makes you feel like a boss.

  The next Tuesday, Melissa called me up (this was before texting was a thing, and I actually would answer my phone). “Want to come over and drink whiskey and make dream catche
rs topless?” Fuck yes, I did. I wanted to make that dream catcher and catch my dream of these Tuesdays becoming a regular thing.

  Melissa and I kept up this routine for the next month. We started telling our other girlfriends about our Tuesday tradition, and we always got one of two reactions:

  Oh, you two! You guys are the craziest. Gotta go. I have a proctology appointment to get an even bigger stick put up my ass. Ta-ta!

  Or:

  I. WANT. IN.

  Slowly but surely, we started inviting people to join us in our new Tuesday ritual. Of course, we were very select about it.* First, it was my roommates. It wasn’t awkward because we had already seen each other’s boobs a gazillion times. In fact, I could’ve described their boobs to a police sketch artist and had a perfect rendering. One Topless Tuesday in and they were hooked. We let my gay best friend, Jacob, in on the action, then my roommates’ closest friends, until we had a solid dozen girls (plus Jacob) who came every Tuesday.

  Each Tuesday was assigned to a different person, meaning that person would be responsible for our activity that week. This could be anything from learning to change a tire to making pillbox hats to learning to give yourself a breast examination. Whatever we did, it was always complete with a ton of laughs, a lot of bourbon, and a lack of shirts. It was the perfect combination of a craft night and a raging party, without ever having to worry about what to wear.

  Word about our club started spreading fast. I got stopped in the quad by people asking if they could join. Friends of friends of friends wanted in. Melissa and I would be introduced at parties as “Those girls with the Topless Tuesdays that I was telling you about.” But the moment I really knew my club was becoming a campus legend was when I was asked about it by my French professor.

  Here’s my history with this French class. When I was in college, students were required to take three semesters of a foreign language. I had been dreading it and, naturally, waited until the last three semesters of school to sign up for one. The obvious choice was to take Spanish, since I had taken it in high school and remembered un poco of the language. But when I signed on to my dial-up Internet to get my courses for that year, the only Spanish class left was at eight a.m. I would be rolling into class still drunk from the night before if I went in that early—so a two p.m. French class it was!

  Some people in this world can take a three-day trip to Paris and come back speaking perfect French. I, however, am terrible at learning foreign languages. I can tell you every word to No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” even though I haven’t listened to it in a good six years, but ask me to count to ten in French and it ain’t happening. Luckily, I had a supercool, young teacher (let’s call him Jacques) who understood my plight. Jacques was always joking around in class and would allow us to do video assignments or other creative projects in lieu of papers. He had longish curly hair and an air of gay to him, and he always lit up a smoke right after class, which I think is required when you teach French.

  One day at the beginning of the semester, when I could see that the struggle was real, I timed my exit from class perfectly to bum a smoke off my teach. I continued to time our exits so that we would sit and have a cigarette together for the next few weeks. He’d give me one on Tuesday; I’d give him one on Thursday. It was probably the longest relationship I had with a man in college.

  After a particularly tough day of studying gender in nouns,* I just laid it all out there.

  “Look, you know I’m terrible at French, right?”

  “Oui. You are what we call in French, le dumbass.”

  “I can respect that. Anyway! I need these credits to graduate. I’m never going to be good at French. Can we strike up a deal?”

  He took a big drag off his Parliament Light.

  “You teach levels one through three. I need one through three to graduate. I’ll take your classes, try my best, make really fun projects, and always have cigarettes waiting. Just don’t fail me. Please?”

  With that Jacques took another long drag on his cig (the French are so dramatic), put his backpack on, and said, “See you on Thursday,” and walked away. Just like that.

  Cut to later in the semester. Jacques was writing some shit I didn’t understand on the board, while I was in a different world tallying what ingredients I needed to pick up for the aphrodisiac Chinese cooking class at Topless Tuesday that afternoon. We were three months into the club, and it had circled back to being my day to lead the activity. There were about twenty people coming that day, so that would mean . . . three gallons of lychee martini? Do lychees make you want to hump stuff? I was snapped out of my thoughts by Jacques’ voice.

  “Again, next Thursday, please come in with a two-hundred-word paper, in French, telling me the plot of your favorite movie.”

  A two-hundred-word paper in French? I didn’t know two hundred words total, let alone how to put them together in some semblance of order. Walking outside, I let him know that I probably would be cranking out some sort of video or other alternative project because this assignment wasn’t going to happen. That’s when he said it:

  “Mamrie, I’m still surprised you’re so bad at French. After all, you have so much in common with the culture. You love to smoke, you’re always eating cheese in class, clearly hygiene isn’t a huge priority.” I nodded. “And from what I hear, you have no problem with nudity.”

  Fuck a duck, he knew.

  I stared at him in disbelief, cheese tumbling out of my mouth and hitting the brick walkway.

  “It’s a small campus, Mamrie. Word spreads.” Then he casually put out his smoke and walked away.

  Wait a sec. Small campus? Small campus? University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill had thirty thousand undergrads alone. Talk of Topless Tuesday was making its way around campus quicker than herpes in the southwest dorms.

  I decided we needed to institute some professionalism in this club. We couldn’t have randoms showing up and storming our meetings, or have professors gossiping about it. Yes, I understand professionalism is a strange word to hear from someone who at the previous Topless Tuesday wore unicorn stickers as pasties while singing Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” on the karaoke machine. That isn’t the point. The point is this was my moment. The club I dreamed of having for all those years was finally happening—and I wanted to make sure it was the best ever.

  Melissa and I got down to business. We usually had around fifteen regular attendees at our TTs (which sounds like “titties” when you say it, and although I would like to claim that brilliance, I am just now realizing it ten years later). First, we needed to make their membership more official.

  I knew that when the sororities on our campus invited new members to join, it would take place on Bid Day. As soon as pledges got their bouquet of balloons or Tri-Delt monogrammed hoodie left on their dorm-room door, they would run screaming to the quad like they’d just taken down a pony keg of Red Bull and vodka.* But we weren’t a sorority! We were the antisorority, in a way. I know this isn’t the case with all of them, but you so often hear those horror stories of sororities that openly discuss girls’ looks when choosing whom to let in.*

  I know Kelsey H. isn’t the smartest—I’ve actually seen her eat a fake apple—but have you seen her abs? They are amaze. She’s in!

  Mary Catherine is seriously at least four pounds overweight, but her dad does own the largest Sea-Doo company in the Southeast. She’s in!

  Topless Tuesday, on the other hand, celebrated all looks and body types. The only mixer we needed was ginger ale for our bourbon. So on our “bid day,” we decided to take a classier approach. Melissa and I dressed up in our nicest silk robes (yes, there was more than one silky robe option) and had my roommate drive us around to each new member’s house. There, on their doorstep, we would hand them a formal, handwritten invitation (with a personalized poem inside) and a glass of champagne to toast their membership. The whole thing was risqué and rid
iculous, but there was an air of elegance to it. Well, until we got to about the eighth or ninth house, and then we were just drunk girls in robes, cheersing way too loud. I might’ve puked in a yard—who’s to say?

  The following Tuesday, we invited the newbies to the first-ever Topless Tuesday Welcome Potluck Dinner. We were throwing it at Melissa’s house, and because it was only a minute’s drive away, I wore jean shorts, a silk robe, and nothing else. However, I did have my deep fryer and ingredients for fried okra.*

  I parked my Honda behind Melissa’s house in the yard. I knew a lot of people were coming and there was limited parking, but we were close enough for me to park in her grass (a true sign of friendship in the South). As I rounded the house to her front yard, I saw a few new members headed inside and decided they needed a proper welcome. I put down my FryDaddy full of grease, opened up my robe, and shook my goods while singing out, “Welllllcome to Topless Tuesday, bitches!”

  Just as I was about to ask them to help me carry my shit, one of them turned around and spoke.

  “There’s a For Rent sign in the yard. We were just hoping to see the house. . . .”

  Standing there, robe open, ta-tas to the moon, you could’ve heard a cricket blink. It was a silent standoff. They looked shocked. I looked naked. They looked at my boobs. I still looked naked.

  We stood there, not knowing what to do for what felt like an eternity but was probably ten seconds. I had to make a move.

  I could’ve apologized, could’ve told them that now probably wasn’t a great time to see the place. I could’ve. But where’s the fun in that?

  “You wanna see the house? Sure! Come on in. Just a heads-up, though, we are having a party. So you’ll have to stay for a drink.”