Stag

Christopher asks a question today involving stag parties. It made me think about my husband's stag.

We (the families) were all staying in dorm rooms in the college where we'd gone to school for the days leading up to the wedding, and the stag party was held a couple of nights before the wedding. All the male relatives on both sides went to the frat house where the best man lived (Beast was not a member) for the raw-beef-n-onion-plus-BEER festivities. My dad, Beast's dad, Beast's brother (age 16) and my oldest brother-in-law (the neurotic nutcase) all were back to the dorm within an hour or so. My brother stayed, because he likes a party, and he was "only" 10 years older than these guys.

Eventually they wandered over to The Club, the unofficial Campus Bar about 5 blocks from the Beta house. The whole point of The Club, even today, is to sit on sticky barstools, watch ESPN and the girls/guys in the bar and get blitzed. The decor is Early Beer Sign and Cheap Poster. There's a jukebox. It's in an old turn-of-the-19th-century house; all the walls on the main floor are removed so there is one room (excepting restrooms). The bar itself is in the "living room" and there are mismatched tables and stools in what used to be the dining room/kitchen area. Not big. That's ok; there are picnic tables outside in a fenced off "Beer Garden" (i.e. the former driveway).

Who knows how long the group stayed at The Club, but on the way back to the Beta house, carrying their last cups of beer, and walking down the train tracks, a cop car cruised past. Panic ensued: it's illegal to have uncovered booze on the streets in W. Everyone scattered. The rest of the guys at the party were all familiar with W. Not so my bro, certainly not at 2 a.m. with a twelve-pack (or more) of beer in his gut. It took him about an hour to eventually stagger back to the Beta house; it's not a big city, really, and he did remember that following the train tracks would get him in the right vicinity. Unfortunately, he went the wrong way on the tracks for awhile...

The next morning Beast drove us to my sister's. She'd been watching my bro's 2-year-old, and she was hosting the Fourth of July cookout for the families. Beast picked me up at the dorm with bro already in the car, looking puke-colored. Beast, being used to all-night carousing, looked perfectly fine. I heard the bare-bones version of the exciting night.

We stopped to pick something up on the way to my sister's...and bro took advantage of that moment to vomit in the parking lot. And that's how the trip went. He actually didn't have to stop the car until we were close to my sister's (about 45 minutes later), but he kept moaning and swallowing really hard. He vomited a couple of times around the corner from sis's house. And when we got there, and she saw his condition, she lit into him and verbally flayed him about being a crappy parent and how his kid missed him--there were some other issues I won't go into--and he threw up a few more times in the bathroom. Don't think he drank much at the cookout.

There was probably a selection of porn movies at the stag party, maybe strippers, godonlyknows...I wasn't told about any of that. Just about how funny all the 22-year-old guys thought my brother was. He laughs, ruefully, about it nowadays.

He's also married to a depressive alcoholic with anger management issues now, so... I don't think he drinks much at all anymore. He kinda got it all out of his system when he put two-and-two together about driving while inebriated and throwing a drunk out of an ambulance once. I think he'd go for a bowling-and-poker stag party.