You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery Read Free Page A

a lot of conversations that went something like this:
    Hey babe, if I take half of another Ecstasy, will I be normal around the sitter in three hours?
    Yeah, babe. But just remember tomorrow morning we have Daphne’s couples baby yoga graduation and then Conner’s prohibition BBQ.
    When the concert wrapped up, we found Maegan and Doug. I was pretty drunk at this point, but I could tell that Maegan wasn’t in the great mood that she’d been in on the ride here. Kat didn’t seem to care, though.
    “We should all go into the city and do karaoke!” Kat said, pumping her fist.
    I full-on squealed at this idea. I love—I love, love,
love
karaoke. I don’t care if I’m staying by myself in a Holiday Inn; if the hotel bar has karaoke, I’m there. I will shamelessly sing “It’s Raining Men,” complete with jazz runs through the crowd to a roomful of strangers. If this was what life in New York was going to be like, I was going to be kara-okay with it.
    “I think we are going to sit this one out,” Maegan said. “But y’all have fun.”
    I was sad she wasn’t coming, but I could tell something was off. Maybe she and her boyfriend were fighting. I gave her a big hug.“Thank you for being hospitable,” I slurred in her face, literally spitting on the
spit
part of the word.
    And with that, Kat and I started our vocal warm-ups and headed to the train. Now, a train all the way from Coney Island to the East Village can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to seven days. To pass the time, I pretended to pole dance on the train poles, which is a total rookie move. You can always tell tourists in New York by three things: (1) they are standing in front of the Empire State Building trying to decide if Earlybird or Valencia is a better filter for their Instagram; (2) they think it’s worth it to wait in an hour-long line for Magnolia Bakery cupcakes; and (3) they think they are the first people to pretend the poles on subway trains are stripper poles. Kat beatboxed as I put on my best sultry face and swung around, completely falling on my ass.
    Later that year I would try pole dancing again, and the results would be even more embarrassing. I know we have karaoke to get to, but this is worth a tangent, trust me.
    A friend of mine from college, Sean, had taken a job producing one of those terrible “We’ve Got Three Dozen Kids” shows as soon as we’d graduated. Although being surrounded by an army of Christian values and perms left over from ’94 sounded like hell, he was making a serious paycheck nine months out of college, while I still considered a fine meal wandering around Whole Foods stuffing my face with free samples. He came to visit New York one night and was ready to spend some of that hard-earned Christian scrilla. He had been kind of a nerd in college, so I knew he was going to be peacocking.
    I met a very drunk Sean at a bar in the East Village, along with a few of his friends whom I didn’t know, but they seemed nice. We drank a ridiculous amount of champagne, vodka, and whatever else we could form the words to order. After several hours of imbibing, Sean got an idea to keep the party moving.
    “Let’s go to the strip club. I’ll buy everyone lap dances.”
    Brilliant idea!
Look at me, chugging champagne and getting lapdances paid for on a random Monday night. I am the white female P. Diddy!
I thought to myself. I was two seconds from starting my own clothing line (instead of Sean John, it would be called On the John), feeling completely pimp. Until then, I’d only “made it rain” with IOU slips. I felt like my baller status was at an all-time high—that is, until we arrived at the
actual
strip club around three a.m.
    Sapphire, conveniently located under the Queensboro Bridge, was the saddest thing I had seen since I caught my high school history teacher crying by himself during
Titanic
as I waited to sweep the theater. I had expected to roll into a place with crazy lights and lots of bass pumping