Free You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery by Mamrie Hart

down?
    Aarushi, it’s four p.m.! Get off our back. Here, take this.
I handed her a shot.
It’ll make you calm the fuck down.
    Later that semester, Aarushi would make her first B due to partying so much. I refused to take the blame. But I will take the credit for her record-breaking twenty-seven-second keg stand. When that girl put her mind to something, she’d do it really well.
    Since meeting a guy on our floor was out of the question and putting on pants was required to leave the floor, dating was nonexistent. But in all truth I didn’t want to go out with those frat chumps anyway. They wore pink polo shirts. Pink polo shirts tucked into
pleated
khakis. I am not hating on the Greek system in general. I spent many a wonderful night taking advantage of their parties with live bands and free beer. Hell, I even went with a friend to his frat formal in Charleston . . . dressed in full 1800s Southern regalia. * But frat dudes were mostly my friends, and not people I was interested in.
    The only time I’d ever have luck meeting guys would be grad students or older guys. Lucky for me, I had the greatest wingman for all four years of college: a fake ID. That baby was my BFF. It wasn’t fake so much as it was someone else’s real ID, and I had to scrunch my face up and bug my eyes out every time a bouncer looked at me. But it always worked like a charm.
    One night, my girls and I decided to peel the pajama pants off and go out. We got to the bar and right out of the gate I started having a super flirt session with a very attractive Italian guy. I’m not talking Italian like lives at home and lets his mom iron his underwear and cook him chicken parm every night. I’m talking the straight-up, plays
f
ú
tbol
, is named Piero, and barely understands what I’m saying kind of Italian. At this time, I was super into the show
Friends
(my roommates and I would make sure we were home at eight p.m. on Thursday, and if we weren’t we would tape it on a
VCR
—yep, I’m that old, folks), so I often gleaned my life lessons from the wisdom of that Greenwich Village gang. I knew for a fact that Rachel didn’t need to speak Italian to be able to date Paolo for almost an entire season. If she could do it, Icould do it. After all, I did look like Jennifer Aniston . . .’s overweight cousin, Tonya. I imagined going home with him to Sicily and his mother having me try the marinara from a wooden spoon, making sure the seasoning was right. I’d sip red wine as I helped sprinkle the basil chiffonade on the caprese salad, looking out the window at my new Italian boyfriend as he played checkers with a table of old men from the village. (Like I said, it had been a while since I’d gotten any male attention.) Naturally, I went home with him.
    Everyone relax! There was no stranger danger. I was going back to a house with a group of people, including a girl from my sociology class whom the Italians were visiting. I
knew
her. I knew her name and that she also needed sociology as a requirement. So, we squeezed into their rented convertible, put the top down, and cruised back to her house. About a half mile away, blue lights appeared in the rearview. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Our driver was sober, but Little Miss Idiot in the backseat was eighteen and drunk as a skunk. To be more specific, a skunk who’d just done five Jäger bombs.
    The cop was actually cool (a sentence I never thought I’d say) and told us if we left the car there and walked the rest of the way, he wouldn’t Breathalyze anyone.
Deal!
After all, we had a designated driver (the Italian Screech of the crew), but we’d been dumb-asses to try and fit four people in the backseat. We all piled out and started walking toward what’s-her-face’s my dear friend’s house. About halfway there, I had to take a major whiz. Being the classy thing that I am, I politely excused myself and popped a squat in the woods. Squatting down, listening to the breeze through the trees and the pee hitting