The Second Strangest Night of my Life
WARNING: THIS IS MY LONGEST BLOG TO DATE
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Sycamore, Il. My friend Adam and I were in town to celebrate my cousin Scott’s birthday, who was living in Sycamore at the time and had just turned twenty-six.
Like gentlemen, we decided to start drinking at 1 pm. We began at a bar that offered $1 beers and $1 burgers, a food and drink special that has lead to thousands of heart attacks and alcohol addictions.
Before we knew it it was 8pm. We had spent 7 hours at one bar, and since there are several bars around the area we decided that it was time to cash out and explore the exotic Sycamore nightlife. To our surprise, even with dollar burgers and beers, we were able to rack up a $140 bill. It didn’t seem physically possible. In fact, it’s not physically possible. If we drank and ate $140 worth of liquor and hamburgers on dollar beer/burger day, we would all be dead. But we weren’t. We also weren’t in the right state of mind to put up a logical argument. Since it was Scott’s birthday I picked up his tab, and then we headed out on the town.
The first bar we stopped at was a karaoke/biker bar across the street. I’ve never heard of a karaoke/biker bar. It’s like having a Nascar/gay bar. But the concept works. The bar was crowded. We hurried in to get some drinks and to sign up to sing karaoke. Unfortunately, Adam and I hurried in so fast that we didn’t notice that Scott was no longer with us.
After about twenty minutes in the bar, we started to realize that Scott wasn’t around. We didn’t think much of it at first, but after waiting around for another thirty minutes and not reaching him on his cell phone, we figured there was a problem. We decided to leave the bar and see if we could find him.
He was nowhere to be found. We called his cellphone numerous times with no luck. He was gone. After walking around for a while and looking for him, we noticed that there was a charter bus parked in a nearby parking lot.
It was a pretty nice bus, so I jokingly suggested that we should go in, see if there were keys, and if so, drive around and find Scott. Even though we would have never gone through with stealing a charter bus, we enthusiastically headed towards it anyways.
The front door was unlocked, so we opened it up and walked in. There was no one in sight. Giggling, I sat in the drivers seat, looking to see if I could find the keys.
Then from the back of the bus someone yelled, “GET OUT OF HERE!!!”
We turned around to see a fully naked man frantically running towards us.
“OH MY GOD!”
Terrified, we bolted out of the bus and into the parking lot, struggling to run away at a fast pace because of how much we were laughing.
“WHY THE HELL WAS THERE A NAKED GUY ON THAT BUS?!?”
What we had just seen made no absolutely no sense. After laughing for a few minutes, we gained our composure and found ourselves back at square one: drunk and alone in Sycamore without the only guy we knew who was familiar with the area.
As we were walking around trying to figure out our next move, we came upon a cop car with a policeman inside. Adam and I approached him and asked if he’d seen a drunk attractive blonde man walking around. It was the only way we know how to describe Scott. We also gave the cop Scott’s first and last name. He put out an APB, asking all the local policemen if they had seen him. There were no reports of him turning up anywhere.
“However, if we see him, we’ll pick him up.”
…oops…
I had just ratted Scott out for being publicly intoxicated. I hoped to God that they wouldn’t find him and arrest him, and if they did, I sure wasn’t going to tell him that I was the one who informed Sycamore’s finest of his drunken state. I walked away from the cop feeling like Benedict Arnold, and since it was getting cold, Adam and I went into the closest bar for shelter.
After two hours of drinking at the bar it was closing time. We still haden’t gotten a hold of Scott, and because we’d been drinking for another two hours, we were drunker than we’d been all night. We stayed until they kicked us out.
At 2 am we found ourselves in the lonely streets of Sycamore with nowhere to go.
Now what?
We knew that Scott’s house was about two miles away, but we had no idea which direction to go. Plus it was dark and we were drunk. We asked anyone we could find if they knew where the closest hotel was. The best answer we got was that there was a bed and breakfast down the road. That sounded expensive. Typically in a life and death situation, like the one we currently found ourselves in, we would be willing to pay that amount for shelter. But we had already had an expensive night. I dropped almost my entire life savings earlier at a bar where everything cost a dollar, and Adam had done the same. Plus we were buying beers for hours afterwards. We didn’t want to spend another hundred dollars. So we walked.
Eventually we stumbled to the Sycamore Fire Department.
The back door was open, so we entered. At first we couldn’t find anyone. However, because fireman have shifts where they work for three days straight, we knew they were somewhere in the building sleeping. And since fireman are supposed to help people, we figured they would be more than willing to give us a lift back to Elgin, which, if you go fast enough, is only a hour drive round trip.
Luckily, although my judgement was dangerously distorted, it was functional enough for me to immediately realize that breaking into a fire department to wake up a sleeping fireman and request a ride was a ridiculous idea. Adam couldn’t have agreed more. We left.
We were back on the street with nowhere to go. There was a teenager skateboarding around at this ungodly hour, so we talked to him for a while. Part of me hoped that he would become our friend and eventually invite us to his place for a sleep over.
“Great,” I thought to myself. “Sycamore has turned me into a child predator.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would never want to stay at this kid’s place. The type of parent that allows their son to be out in the streets at 3am is not the type of parent that owns a house that I would want to sleep at. But it was getting cold and I didn’t have a coat, so it was becoming essential that we find a place to stay. That’s when the teenager informed us of a location that would take us in…
The 24 Hour White Hen Pantry up the street!!
We were saved! We’d found a place that we could stay at for free!
We rushed to the White Hen and informed the attendant of our plans to stay there for the next three or four hours. He seemed a little weary of the idea, but we assured him that we would buy stuff and wouldn’t be sleeping there. After he agreed, Adam bought us eight 5-Hour Energy Drinks and a bouncy ball.
After we downed two 5-Hour Energy Drinks each in 10 minutes and got my body temperature stabilized, we headed outside to play with our brand new ball.
Instead of playing the typical game of catch, we decided to play a game where we threw the ball as hard as we could at the pay phone attached to the White Hen. Unfortunately, because of the thirteen hours of drinking that preceded the purchase of the ball, our aim was off. Unwillingly the objective of the game went from throwing the ball as hard as we could at the pay phone to throwing the ball as hard as we could at the window next to the pay phone.
The attendant wasn’t excited about this game.
He informed us that we could play with the ball, but since we almost broke the front window at the White Hen over a dozen times, we could no longer throw the ball at the building. Fair enough. We quit our previous game and started playing monkey in the middle, with the White Hen building acting as the monkey. We were tossing the ball over the roof to each other, and within minutes, while trying to catch the ball, I tripped over a cement block and fell straight backwards, violently hitting my head on the pavement. Thanks to Bud Light I felt no pain, but that fall will most likely cause me some sort of mental disability in the future.
Because my brain had just physically shifted in my head, playing ball no longer seemed fun to me. We sat back inside until it was getting close to 5 am. Since the sun would be coming up soon, Adam and I decided to try and walk to Scott’s house. We drank two more 5-Hour Energy Drinks (making it 40 hours of energy consumed in a two hour period between the both of us) and started heading to Scott’s house.
We walked…
and walked…
and walked…
By 7 am the sun had come up and I was freezing. The worst part is that we were nowhere near a residential area. We were completely lost. We walked past a sign informing us that St. Charles was 24 miles away. This wasn’t good.
Then my phone rang.
It was Scott.
“Dude… I’m so sorry. I just saw that I missed sixty calls from you guys last night. Where are you?”
“We’re near a soccer field. Are we close to your place?”
“…… oh my God… not at all. Wait there. I’ll come and get you guys.”
We had walked in the opposite direction of Scott’s house.
Ten minutes Scott later came and picked us up. It turns out that the biker/karaoke bar wouldn’t let him in because his license had expired two days earlier, and his first instinct was to run back home. Literally, he ran home. Because he had been drinking he fell a few times on the way and had the scrapes to prove it. Then when he got home he went into one of the deepest sleeps ever, rivaled only by Juliet Capulet and Rip Van Winkle. He never heard his phone ring once.
Scott was living with his parents at the time. So when he took us back to his place to get some rest, my aunt, who suggested that I blog about this experience, was awake. We told her the full story, from the naked guy chasing us to Adam and I turning White Hen into a homeless shelter. When we were done telling our tale of survival, she asked…
“Why didn’t you just call the house and have me pick you up?”
……….fuck.