There are many nights that made Joe the man that he is today. Some were amazing. Some were awful. Most were at a weird spot in between. All of them were unforgettable. In this column, we explore those nights.
Part XXXV
The Beer Pong Night
October 2, 2008
There's an x/y graph, with the x-axis being age, and the y-axis being how much one enjoys a game of beer pong, and that bitch looks like an upside-down parabola, honestly.
There is nothing more thrilling than a riotous game of beer pong when you are just starting to dabble in underage drinking. After a time, though, you start to realize that drinking in and of itself is the real thrill, and the need to "play games" while you drink is almost besides the point. Beer pong, thus, gradually goes out of fashion. You might hear a 25-year-old say something like: "That's lame." Fair enough.
But then you start getting older still, and maybe you start missing those halcyon beer pong days. Maybe you settle down, and the wild nights are yearly counted on one single hand. Maybe you have 387 nights in a row being awoken by an infant who doesn't seem to want to sleep and you start to figure maybe these 3 AM sojourns could be better spent elsewhere. My point being that, yeah, beer pong starts looking pretty great after a while. Who the fuck is worried about being lame anymore? I'd fucking kill for an opportunity to shoot a ping pong ball into a red solo cup right now.
So maybe that's why I am telling this story with rose-colored glasses, this sordid tale about a party ruined by beer pong. No matter how miserable I was after this epic beer pong streak in the autumn of 2008, I would do some pretty disgusting shit to get together with my friends under similar circumstances and play beer pong right now. I may be telling a tale at the nadir of the parabola, but the tale is told from a very large y-value (and not too shabby of an x-value, as I made decent headway into my early 30s).
I can only set the scene from details I remember, and I don't often do a good job remembering details from such nights as this, but whatever: it was a night at Brianna R.'s.
(Sidenote: I've decided I'm going to use first names in this blog post, even though it's been years since I've spoken to some of the key players. If you are reading this, and you feel like your first name betrays your identity too clearly, then let me know and I will initialize it posthaste.)
If you are part of "The Usual Crowd," as we eventually deemed the easiest nomenclature for our tight-knit group of NEast Philly denizen pals, then you know what a night at Brianna's entailed, typically. Her parents were spending a night down the shore at their Cape May Villas home (the home that we'd invade once a year during
Warped Shore—sorry, different story for a different blog post), and we would post up in their rowhome in East Oak Lane, and kill however many number of cases we had deemed
"enough" on any given Friday or Saturday night.
So this wasn't different, per se, than any other of the countless nights we had spent drinking at Brianna's. I guess the only difference is that we were scattered around local colleges in the area, and were doing our respective partying at our own colleges, typically, throughout the semester, so a night at Brianna's during the semester felt like a big deal. It wasn't just "another night" anymore. We were trekking to her house from our dorms. Put it another way: in high school, drinking at Bri's with your best friends was the only drinking option you had, whereas drinking at Bri's with your best friends was a conscious decision against all the other drinking options one might be presented with at college.
None of this context is necessary to the story, the more I think about it. Suffice it to say: we're headed to Brianna R.'s. Her boyfriend Mike is coming in from UPenn, and the other Quaker (Cindy) is hitching a ride. Kev is maybe plodding through MCCC classes or maybe already thinking about careers (and still two years from living at La Salle), so obviously he's there. Meanwhile, Mary (also of MCCC, from what I recall) is headed over to La Salle in her compact vehicle, offering a ride to whoever wants one. The distance from St. Basil Dorm to Chelten Ave. is a raccoon's fart, so a bunch of us pile in, sitting on laps and crouching in trunks—me, my girlfriend Bethany, roommate Sean, Sean's former roommate A.K.A. Hobbes, and Mandy (pre- or post-Beatles tattoo, I forget).
This is a motley crew, even more motley than hangs at Bri's usually are (like: okay, Bri had this thing where whoever partied at her house would have to stick their outspread hand into a container of paint and place their handprint onto her bedroom wall, and there was a record number of prints going up on the wall that night). And if I'm forgetting anybody, then I'm sorry. No, wait—there are a few photos I can check out on Google Photos for evidence. Looks like Big Ed and Andrew R. were there too. I'm pretty sure I see a silhouette of Marielle, though who knows (Scranton is pretty far from Olney).
You know what? Maybe Kev
wasn't there. Because here's the crux of this story: me and Mike paired up for beer pong, and there are only two reasons why I wouldn't have been paired up with Kev in another iteration of
Team Green: 1) Kev and Andrew paired up because they were spending a ton of time together in late 2008 roaming the streets of Fox Chase, and so Kev decided to keep that pair going throughout the night's drinking game of choice, or 2) Kev wasn't there. I refuse to text Kev and ask him about this (I already text him about too many random-ass nostalgia memories that bubble up on any given random weekday morning at the office), so let's assume the latter and move on.
Okay, me and Mike start playing beer pong with whoever wants to face us. I sure as shit don't remember the first game or the first opponents. I do know that it was suicidally decided that we were playing ten-cup beer pong tonight, as opposed to the usual six cups. I do not remember whether we were playing with actual beer in the cups or chugging after a water cup is hit, but that's kind of moot—ten cups means 66.6% more drinking. (Photo evidence suggests that beer was going in the cups, which means that the water cups for washing the balls were working extra hard that night, since Brianna had cats.)
I should also probably note at this point that my partner, Mike S., erstwhile PoYB editor, then-future law school student, refers to beer pong as "Beirut" because he is an Ivy League frat boy FUCK. This isn't relevant. None of this is relevant, really; I'm just reveling in the memories, and I'm writing unnecessary paragraphs. Sorry. Back to the story.
We start smiting opponents. From what I recall, it was a healthy mix of nail-biters and blowouts, and a healthy mix of random pairings of opponents. And, of course, it featured the requisite measure of cracks about certain members of the team "carrying" the other member, exclamations about elbows over tables, arguments about proper reracks, and so on. This continued for some time.
It continued for a long time, if we're being honest. What started as a routine start-of-the-night activity eventually turned into the night in toto. It's like 12 AM and me and Mike are still going strong, trying to scrape together opponents (which was getting more difficult by the hour, since at this point our host is so drunk that she falls asleep in the shower, and at least two partygoers, having met tonight for the first night, are now in the darkness of the basement performing who knows what hanky panky). And we keep winning.
Okay, another sidenote: there's a reason that we kept playing beer pong throughout the course of the night, as opposed to, say, walking away from the table with a 11-0 record or something. At age nineteen, I had not yet
forsaken the bucket list that I had foolhardily
compiled in high school, and note one of the items on that list: "45. Go 20 games of beer pong in a row." I know it's tough to look toward the future when you're still a teenager, but I was certainly clairvoyant enough to know at that time that there wouldn't be many opportunities in the future to complete this specific task. It was now or never, I surmised.
Should've chosen never. By Game 18, everyone was fucking miserable when they step to the table. I'm drunk as FUCK, Mike is splitting time between throwing pong balls and making sure his girlfriend doesn't drown in the shower, everyone else is trying to enjoy hanging out together without being harassed by two beer pong assholes in the living room. But this is important to me, for some fucking reason, and Mike—who was probably pretty fucking loaded too, though he'd never admit it—appreciated the importance too.
I should also reiterate at this point that my girlfriend Bethany was indeed at this party, and had probably lost a couple games already. I only bring this up to point out the fact that I brought my girlfriend to a party, hosted by someone she didn't know, at a house she had never been to, and had then proceeded to mostly ignore her for a very large majority of said party, instead choosing to rack red solo cups over and over. Call it a Reverse Lloyd Dobler. In other words, my victories at the beer pong table were inversely correlated to my victories in my relationship. I was not a good boyfriend (in general, but also specifically tonight).
And so I reiterate this point because we have now reached Game 20. It is now past two in the morning. People are starting to mark spaces where they plan on laying their sleeping bags. Our beer stock is reaching a perilously low level, but has somehow survived the night. I'm far closer to blackout than any person who has plodded through nineteen games of beer pong in a row has any right to be. And our opponent for Game 20 is decided to be Bethany, with Mary as her teammate.
I remember fighting a lot with Bethany when we were dating and drunk. I'm typing this and laughing, because I'm 32 years old and this was thirteen years ago and we were dumb fucking teenagers—i.e. this isn't me being mopey or anything. I'm just saying we used to get angry at each other a lot. I'm just setting the scene here. I remember one time, maybe weeks before this beer pong fiasco, hanging out in the townhouses with Bethany, and we're absolutely
screaming at each other in the courtyard, and that at a certain point realizing that neither of us could even fucking remember what we were even fighting about in the first place, we were so drunk. We can laugh about it now (and indeed, probably did the last time I saw her, at
a wedding, though I was pretty drunk then too and don't really remember what specifically we reminisced about), but at the time, it was fucking miserable.
We were both competitive too. All four of us were pretty competitive, as far as I remember (and, we should probably note here that Mary most likely had an ax to grind at this point in the night, since I had no doubt busted her balls relentlessly about an incident that had occurred in that previous spring, one that involved drunken romance, one that she was in the vortex of, one which I won't elaborate on here, and but one that I was just learning the finer details of that autumn, and found pretty hilarious, and I'm sure Mary found pretty not hilarious, at the time).
Like I said—I was pretty fucking loaded at this point, so there are only like three things I remember about that Game 20. One was that it was an insanely close match. Like, tighter than 99% of all the beer pong games I've ever participated in. There were bounces, blocked shot, ricochets, rimshots, arguments performed at top volume, and so on. It was down to one-cup-to-one-cup at least, maybe even overtime. Two was that no one was having fun. We were all ultra-competitive; it wasn't about fun anymore. To me, it was all about striking an item off my bucket list, finally. To our opponents, no doubt it was about fucking up Joe K***'s night after he fucked up theirs, having imploded any idea of having a fun and wacky night by forcing everyone to play beer pong for six hours straight.
Three was something that I remember vividly think about at the time, and sincerely meaning it, however fucked up it sounds now: "If Bethany beats me in this game, I am going to break up with her." I wasn't joking around. Had she sunk the final cup on our end of the table, the I would've said that we're through, and walked away.
Which is SO fucked up. In that kind of fucked up way that years later is fucking hilarious to consider, but still—fucked up. But true. I was taking this VERY seriously. Beer pong, of all goddamn things. For a bucket list that could only have been important to me for a couple of years tops. I was willing to do anything, including change my Facebook Relationship Status, to make it happen.
This isn't even the point of this essay, but it's important to consider, this truth about myself, that I sometimes have fucked up priorities. It was easy to forgo any chance of meaningful friendship or romance on this particular night when I had the opportunity to win twenty games of beer pong in a row.
Well, me and Mike won Game 20, and that was mercifully the end of beer pong for the night. No high fives were exchanged—everyone was too exhausted and anguished from the ordeal. The romantic discord continued, as it is wont to do when everyone has more than a dozen beers in them. Brianna would bear witness to Drunk Joe getting so angry at his girlfriend that he throws a lighter against a mirror in the dining room, almost smashing it (thankful for a bunch of things in this regard, including the fact that property destruction during drunk relationship strife was a teenage-only thing, the fact that Brianna and my other best friends from growing up have stuck by me despite the fact that I am was an asshole for a lot of it, and the fact that a lot of my friends made dumb, drunk, and now-silly-seeming decisions that night so that throwing a lighter is only like mid-tier in the context of this particular evening).
So yeah, maybe not the best night for anybody. And yet, I still keep coming back to this night, out of all the countless fucking nights we got loaded at Brianna's, as one of the most memorable. That has everything to do with the beer pong marathon.
Beer pong was a game that we had to have known at the time was getting to be a little too juvenile, and yet, we were still hanging onto it as one of the last bastions of our youth. By playing 20 games in a row, it's possible that I was hanging onto it a little too tightly. The grip strangled the party.
Despite the fiasco this particular night turned into because of beer pong, I have no regrets regarding beer pong in general. A few months ago, I holed up in the Poconos with a few college friends for a full weekend of alcohol and friendship and
Titanic. At 11 AM on Saturday morning, we found ourselves on the back patio, divided on opposite ends of a rectangular table, red solo cups arranged in the familiar triangular pattern. I immediately felt at ease. Throwing a pong ball into a cup and hearing that double-plink of plastic and water, I felt like I had finally found myself, after a long time searching.
So while October 2, 2008 was an absolutely miserable night for plenty of reasons, I still look back fondly on it. I mean, I was hanging out with my best friends on a random Thursday night getting loaded, which is something that will never happen again for the rest of my life. It was a night that, despite its many downsides, was instantly memorable (and those downsides look funnier and funnier as the years go on).
But October 2, 2008 was important because of beer pong. It highlights this dumb little drinking game (and beer pong is dumb, the more you think about it), a game that became a through line for many of the otherwise disparate drinking nights I had in my youth. Family basements, sweaty frat houses, random backyards, we went to parties in so many different places, and the one guarantee—besides the joys of getting drunk—was that beer pong would probably be played.
You have something to hold onto to during nostalgia trips in between Excel spreadsheets at the office. Remember that random party we went to in Cheltenham with Kev's friends? Yeah, I do, because it almost came to fisticuffs over a beer pong loss. Remember that rager in Cindy's backyard? Yeah, definitely, because I went 0-6 that night on the beer pong table. Remember hanging out at Andrew H.'s shore house? Yeah, but only because we played beer pong in the garage and it was the first time I drank all summer.
Do I remember that one random night at Brianna's house? Though there were many, of fucking course I do. I went 20-0 at beer pong at the expense of actually have a fun time.
Nah, fuck it, I had fun. Always did with these friends, with this beer, at this house. And since we're getting to the age when we start getting all misty-eyed about something so pedestrian as a drinking game, I will no doubt find myself, some years in the future, around that ol' familiar table, facing off against my hometown buddies, shooting a ping pong ball into a red solo cup, playing beer pong once again.
