by Mamrie Hart
Yes, I did say eleven hours. Some people might be too intimidated to do a drive this long by themselves, but not me! I love a good road trip . . . and even a bad one like the movie Road Trip. I spend half of the drive pretending I’m a VH1 diva and the other half talking out loud to myself. This usually involves telling someone off from days earlier whom I didn’t have the balls to tell off in the moment. It’s cathartic, and I do it constantly. Why, driving in the car the very morning I wrote this chapter, I told off the waitress who’d rolled her eyes at me at Olive Garden last week.
“B’scuuuuse me! Don’t put ‘unlimited breadsticks’ on the menu if you don’t mean it! You need to change it to ‘five free orders of breadsticks with a side of attitude on the sixth.’ Also, bravo on the slogan ‘When you’re here, you’re family,’ because I haven’t felt this judged since Thanksgiving 1997.”
Driving alone also means there is no one to judge the amount of snacks you consume, with the convenient follow-up of no one being able to judge the amount of farts you rip. There are times when I let my farts go so hard in the car that it makes me go the speed limit. Not because I am worried I’ll get a speeding ticket. I do it because I am worried I’ll be pulled over, roll down the window, and accidentally kill the cop via fart suffocation.
So knowing that I could entertain/exhaust myself in the car, I headed on my one-woman road trip. Eleven hours and five days’ worth of sodium later, I rolled into Tuscaloosa completely exhausted. I got to Virginia’s house and it was a sea of cowboy hats, cutoff jean shorts, and pink plaid shirts tied at the waist. Had I taken a wrong turn and landed in a Daisy Duke cosplay convention? Before I could ask someone where Jessica Simpson was signing head shots, Virginia ran over to me, squealing, and hugged my neck. She was definitely a few games of beer pong deep. Apparently, all these people were at her place pregaming for the night’s activities.
“Are we going to a Barbie rodeo?”
“No, dude. We’re going to a fuckin’ Lynyrd Skynyrd concert! They’re playing on campus.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“No, I’m fucking Dalton, but I am telling the truth.”
She nodded, grinning ear to ear. This was followed by one of those hug-and-jumps in unison while screaming. Virginia had been after Dalton for years. And I was about to hear “Sweet Home Alabama” played in Alabama. It was perfect timing, like randomly walking up on Jay-Z and Alicia Keys performing “Empire State of Mind” in Central Park. Or going to Venice Beach for the day only to find David Lee Roth busting out a toe-touch and singing “California Girls.”* Or being in Rome and saying “When in Rome” after you do anything! I was all about hearing “Sweet Home Alabama” in its rightful place. After all, I was raised in North Carolina. Ninety-five percent of radio stations were classic rock.
The news perked me right up, and I joined in the pregame festivities. The show was exactly as expected: a perfect mix of drunk college kids knowing only “Sweet Home Alabama” and older locals calling out for B sides that Skynyrd has never played live. Everyone in the crowd drank enough whiskey to numb the pain of knowing it wasn’t the original singer. Granted, the guy has been with them since 1987, but you still always know in the back of your mind it’s not the original. Sarah Chalke did a bang-up job as Becky on Roseanne, but she was always the replacement Becky.
I proceed to get ripped on whiskey and might’ve cried a little during “Tuesday’s Gone.” Once all the lighters were extinguished in the crowd and everyone felt how badly they had burned their fingertips on them, we stopped by a food cart. I was ready to go right to bed after finishing my late-night snack, but Virginia had other plans.
“My sorority is having a mixer! You have to come.”
A mixer? Oof. For those of you who aren’t in college, or the closest you’ve come to partying in the Greek system is being late-night wasted at a falafel shop, a mixer is a party between a sorority and a fraternity. I had been to one with a friend before, and it felt like fifty arranged marriages meeting for their first dates. The last thing I wanted was to be a cock block between Beauregard and Georgia, or whoever the fuck I would inevitably offend later in the night.
“Come on! The Delta Chi guys are super fun!” she pleaded, seeing the disinterest in my face despite it being currently stuffed with cheese fries.
“The only Delta I want to associate with is Delta Burke.”
I knew for a fact that Designing Women reruns were coming on at midnight on Lifetime. As much as I wanted to curl up to some quips from Annie Potts, Virginia had a pouty face. She really wanted to go, and I didn’t want to be a boring guest, so I caved.
“It’ll be fun! We don’t have to stay long. And it’s not even being held at their house; it’s at this random bar a few blocks away.”
We got to the mixer and it was just what I’d suspected. Everyone looked exactly the same as a Carolina frat/sorority scene except the accents were slightly thicker. The same clothes, the same jewelry, the same drunk guy named Harrison Edwards IV who was threatening to take his pants off. The only thing that felt foreign was the surroundings. This “bar” felt more like a church’s rec building. It was painted-white cinder blocks, wood paneling, and folding tables set up with beer pong. People were playing darts in the corner.* The bar was already barely stocked, and when I ordered a whiskey ginger, the ginger ale was served out of a two-liter.
I quickly realized that this wasn’t a real bar. This was a makeshift bar set up in a random building. They didn’t want everyone to have to trek back to the frat house and lose steam, but they also wanted all the underage members to be able to drink without an ID. This was the modern equivalent of a speakeasy. Except instead of the password being “piccadilly saxophone” it would’ve been a Dave Matthews Band lyric.
And like any good speakeasy, it got busted by the cops. These cops were hip to this fake bar game and wanted nothing more than to make a few Delta Whatevers shit their pants in fear their parents might find out about their college-y ways.
“Okay, everybody. When we come around, I want everyone to have their IDs ready!” Officer Okra exclaimed with way too much pride. It’s like, dude, you are busting up a beer pong party. There is no need to act like this is The Wire.
The officer went through the lineup, examining each Alabama license like it was the Da Vinci Code. When he came to me, I had a slight moment of panic. Did I use my fake ID? Did I even have my real ID? Back at Chapel Hill, I was so used to whipping out my ID that made me a graduate student named Emily who was twenty-four, but here, for once in my college life, I didn’t use a fake ID to get into a place. There had been no doorman. I’d never claimed to be twenty-one. There was no drink in my hand when they busted the joint. I was in the clear! So, I confidently handed over my actual North Carolina driver’s license showing my real age of nineteen.
The officer scrutinized it and I started to sweat. He looked up at me. “Ma’am, it’s obvious you’ve tampered with this ID.”
“That’s my real ID, and it says my actual birth date. What’s the problem?”
All confidence I’d had two seconds earlier vanished. Had I given him my fake?! All the blood rushed from my face and I turned white as a ghost. Luckily, I naturally have the complexion of a ghost, so I hoped he didn’t notice.
Normally in telling this story I might call this cop an asshole and breeze past the embarrassing details, but since I am trying to write an actual truthful book, I will be honest despite the following being more embarrassing than the time I waited in line for seven hours to get lottery *NSync tickets my senior year of high school. This “tampering” that Colonel Mustard Greens was referring to? It was real. And it was born from a desperate moment in college.
You see, during my first two months of college, I was still seventeen and it sucked. I really wanted to vote go out dancing at the eighteen-and-older clubs with my roommates and get older boys to buy us fishbowls of blue alcohol. So, one
night, in my under-eighteen frustration, I took a thumbtack and tried to scratch out my birthday to say 1981 instead of 1983. As someone who was a bartender for many years, I now realize that this is a laughable act, but desperate times call for desperate measures. After a few good scratches, I knew I’d made a mistake and stopped. The license still said my real birth date—it just looked like someone had gone off on it with some sandpaper or stuck it in a rock tumbler. It looked so amateur. It was like rolling into a bank with a novelty check forged by Mickey Mouse and saying you’d just inherited Disney World—pure, stupid desperation.
I couldn’t deny it. I was scared when the officer pulled out his little book. I didn’t even like to drink Alabama Slammers; now I was going to be thrown in one! I held my breath as he wrote on his little pad. When he was done, he handed me over a ticket for underage drinking. Not that bad! Until I looked and saw there was a court date on it for thirty days after the issue. But that’s not all! The officer didn’t only serve me a court date and a massive pain in my ass; he took my license.
I begged him not to.
“I’m driving back to North Carolina by myself. Can I please just have my license back?”
“No, ma’am, it’s been tampered with.”
“But what if I get pulled over and then I’m driving without a license?”
“Don’t get pulled over,” he told me. Great advice from a so-called enforcer of the law. That was right up there with “Be sure to pull out.”
I was bummed. I tried to shake it, but that was the truth. I left Tuscaloosa the next day with a pit in my stomach. And that wasn’t from all the consolation biscuits I’d eaten to suffocate my feelings. I drove back to North Carolina carefully, trying my best to not get pulled over, which meant actually doing the speed limit. That eleven-hour drive turns out to be more of a fourteen-hour one when you actually adhere to the law.
Back in my dorm room, my roommates and I all sat around telling each other about our fall breaks.
I vegged out on the couch and had a Gilmore Girls marathon!
My sister and I went to the beach for a few days!
My town had the cutest pumpkin festival!
I got a court date!
Their heads all turned to me.
“Who’s Court? Court Calhoun from the third floor?”
“No,” I corrected them. “Court, like actual court. With a judge and stuff. It’s not a big deal,” I said, laughing, while pulling out my briefcase-size laptop to look up how strict Alabama laws were. “It’ll probably get dropped.”
Four weeks later, I convinced my friend Laura to take this weekend trip down to Alabama with me. This was not an easy feat. Unlike my 2.5-GPA ass, Laura had her shit together. Of course, I didn’t mind missing class to drive down for my Friday court date. I went to class about as often as an Olympic gymnast gets her period, but I wanted to have a copilot this time. I convinced Laura that we should leave early as fuck on Thursday, then we’d be to Alabama by dinner. That way I could make my Friday court date and we’d have a couple of nights to party in Tuscaloosa before making the trek back for Monday classes.
This is what friends do for each other, guys. In her heart of hearts, Laura probably didn’t want to drive twenty-two hours in one weekend so her friend could go to court. But in her Hart that was her friend Mamrie, she knew I’d bug her till she caved. I have family members who wouldn’t do that! But she was like, “Adventure! Let’s do this.”
Of course, I did entice her a little with the prospect of us making it a truly ridiculous time, as I was going to buy a bunch of weed for the road. I know what you’re thinking. Real brilliant, Mamrie. Your plan is to travel with an illegal substance to make a trip to an out-of-state court date more fun. . . . To that I say, thank you. I thought it was pretty brilliant myself.
We hit the road on a mission. I needed to get down to Tuscaloosa and clear my name, also hopefully not serve any jail time. At this point in the chapter you might be wondering, Mamrie? Why the hell is this chapter called Alabama Blizzard? Did you seriously miss your court date because there was a fluke blizzard in October in the Deep South?
Close! We almost missed my court date because Laura and I hit many blizzards on our way down. . . . Dairy Queen Blizzards.
If you aren’t familiar with this American classic, the Blizzard is the original McFlurry. It’s ice cream blended with toppings, and it is beautiful. It takes away the pressure of having to make the perfect ice-cream bite by incorporating the toppings into the soft serve. I do realize that is the most privileged sentence I have ever written.
We hit the road with a vengeance and a quarter ounce of weed. Weed—spoiler alert—gives you the munchies, and my friend Laura has the biggest sweet tooth of anyone I’ve ever met in my life. When we went to the dining hall, she would make it a point to show us how many desserts she could eat, stacking up the small white Styrofoam containers like they were plates at those sushi places with the conveyor belts. When we went to see the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Augustus Gloop fell into the choc river, Laura screamed out, “Amateur!” Way too loudly, I might add.
With Laura’s and my sweet teeth in tow, we made it all of forty miles before we were stopping for a treat. First place we saw was a Dairy Queen—no-brainer. We walked in, both trying not to look stoned, which was basically impossible. When the sweet-faced high school girl said, “Hi, what can I get y’all today?” I fell out laughing like I’d just heard the world’s funniest joke.
“Sorry,” I said, still cranking out some Mamrie mumbles, which is basically me laughing without opening my mouth, “thought of something from earlier.”
Luckily, Laura took over. “We’ll just take one large Oreo Blizzard.”
We’d decided before going in—so intensely that you would think we were politicians in a war room—that we would just split one. There was a long road ahead of us and we didn’t need to be gluttonous.
“Y’all want this to go, right?” the sweet-faced high school girl said to us, sticking two spoons in our Blizzard.
“Yes, ma’am,” we said, visions of Oreos dancing in our heads.
“Okay, then,” she said, walking toward us. That’s when the unthinkable happened: She flipped our Blizzard, our precious, precious Oreo Blizzz, upside down. Laura gasped. What was she doing with our dessert? My instincts kicked in and I started to put my hands underneath it to catch it. I just stood there with my hands out like a firefighter who’s about to catch a baby from a burning building. But to our horror delight, the Blizzard was staying in place. We looked on at this cherub-faced fifteen-year-old holding our ice cream upside down, monotonously counting out loud to three before flipping it back upright.
“There y’all go. Enjoy,” she said, handing it to us like it was no big deal. I slowly reached out and took the Blizzard, not knowing how to respond. Once back in the car, Laura spoke first.
“Da fuck was that?”
“I have no idea!” I said, shoveling Blizzard into my mouth. I knew I needed to get as much in as possible before handing it to Laura, as we were both superfast eaters. Our other friends refused to split apps with us because they knew we would be licking the ramekin of marinara from the mozzarella sticks clean before they were finished putting their napkins on their laps.
She motioned for me to hand back the Blizzard, then said with a mouthful of Oreos, “I don’t know what just happened, but I do know I’m gonna want another one of these in a hundred miles.”
And she wasn’t lying. Halfway into South Carolina, we stopped for another Blizzard. Sure enough, the girl flipped it upside down with a completely blank expression, counting out loud to three.
Once back in my Accord, we ate our Blizzard in silence. We sat there dumbfounded, passing the Blizzard back and forth. Mind you, this was before smartphones. We couldn’t just google “What the fuck kind of Blizzard mantra does Dairy Queen do” to calm o
ur stoned-as-a-goat brains down. No, no. We didn’t know what was happening, we needed to know, and we were too high to ask.
The only thing we could do was cross another state line and get another Blizzard. By God, this mystery would be solved! At this point, though, we weren’t very hungry. We’d already split two Blizzards. Cut to us smoking some more weed.
By the time we spotted our first DQ in Georgia, I was so high that I was laughing at the local radio commercials like it was a Dave Chappelle album. Inside, I thought a fat kid eating a banana split was funny. I thought I was going to pee my pants because of a woman’s shirt that read I’VE GOT CATTITUDE. We walked up to order our Blizzard, our eyes looking like albino rabbits’.
“Hey there, ma’am. We will take one large Oreo Blizzard,” Laura told the teenage boy who was so pissed he was working at the DQ instead of at the skate park.
I was standing behind Laura laughing so hard that zero volume was coming out of my mouth. I looked like I was screaming with the mute button on. “Mamrie, you have to get it together or they’ll call the po-po,” Laura whispered loudly at me.