Don't Eat the Fruit

This weekend at work, a young co-worker expressed her joys of going to a college party where the beverage of choice would be WOPATUI. She said it with the wide-eyed, innocence of a post-teen who hasn't realized yet just how much fun life can be without the consumption of large amounts of alcohol.

It reminded me of a party I attended a few years back in my wild-ride, pool "hustling" days. I love to play billiards, I do. The game amuses me and I get a confident stride when I walk into the smokey atmosphere where boys pretend to be men and the hard rock plays, interspersed with blues and jazz. The dark corners are broken by beams of light, the green felt on the marble tables calls to me. The call was stronger in my younger days, in fact it called to me each evening. I found myself leaving work and jaunting to the local pool hall, forever named Bugs in this blog.

Bugs was a place where everyone knew my name. I found my own personal version of Cheers, that Bostonian bar where millions of families watched as Sam and Diane tried to find the balance of sanity in their insane worlds. We had our own cast of characters.

We have:

Bob - the jovial comic who loved to coin phrases such as Window-Licking (yes, Matt's blog has roots from this man)
Mouse - the scary man who hit on me after telling me he beat up his cat
Uncle Ga-ga - The perpetually pregnant man who cleaned his ears with his car keys (yes, the links for Mouse and Uncle Ga-ga are the same link)
AJ - stories to come about AJ - he deserves his own post
Susan - the fun loving girl whose "rack" drew more attention than mine
Michelle - a strong woman who I learned the art of winning an argument who also dated some interesting characters
Dennis - well, I don't like Dennis anymore (since I passed out at a party (when I still drank) and awoke to find Dennis being "friendly" with his hands and my "rack")
Mr. Clean - who wasn't clean, at all. He was just bald. And a jerk. And actually the reason I no longer can be considered a regular at Bugs.
Jessie - one of Mr. Clean's exes and a member of the "Big Tittie Committee"

At the time, Susan was a college student and was going to spend a year studying at an all-deaf university. She would be one of 8 hearing students at that university and the Bugs Crew decided to throw a going-away bash for her. It was my introduction to WOPATUI. Wopatui is a mixture of all forms of alcohol, fruit punch, and to help increase the affect and the taste, fruit is cut up to soak in the liquid.

Here's the thing, if wopatui is made correctly, it is quite potent and easy to drink. It tastes like fruit punch. I like fruit punch.

The party for Susan started while I was working at NABABNA. I got off of work to join the Crew, five hours after the volleyball, video-taped extravaganza began. When I arrived, the patrons were jovial and I decided the wop would quench my thirst.

Like an idiot, I decided to drink 6 glasses of this drink and I was hungry too. I ate the fruit.

Not a good plan. Bob was madly in love with Susan and she was the only oblivious one. To express his desires to see her without coverage, he bought a brand new camcorder. The Crew made a good-bye tape for Susan and many things I forgot about (and things I remembered) were on this tape.

Oh, the horrors. The tape is truly embarrassing to watch.

Once the fruit reached my stomach, my brain shut off. This is in no way a chronological recant of the evening I met WOP and decided to break it off quickly, but it is more random images replaying in my mind whenever someone mentions WOPATUI.

****
Welcome to N'Sync Fans Anonymous.

Hello, my name is Beth and I have been N'Sync free for two years, seven months, and eight days.

I knew I reached my breaking point when I watched the video of my friend Susan and I doing our rendition of Bye, Bye, Bye at a wop party. I heard the clunk of my heels on the cement garage floor, pounding out the beat of the song with authority. The head shake and the waving made me look oh so sexy and wasted.

I was a closet N'Sync fan. There, I admitted it.

****
There was the moment when the woman I FEARED, Michelle, cut me off from the fruit and the wondrous beverage. She told me to "Drink at least four glasses of water before anything else." I took my life in my drunken hands and told her, "No!" as defiant as a child in a department store.

I stopped drinking the wop right then and there.

****
I told random strangers all about the problems in my life. Alcohol and Beth don't mix. There were moments on the video tape of myself and two other people I might remember their names (only because they are stated on the video) in a corner where I announced, as if I were giving an election speech without a microphone to a congregation of voters, all the feelings I had held inside about my parents' recent divorce.

****
The dreaded "Big Tittie Committee" picture. I have a photo of the Bugs Crew women all lifting their "racks" to the world. (I was NOT the only wasted one at this party.)

****
Michelle's lap dance for Bob. Even though he had undying passion for Susan, Bob couldn't stand up from his chair or remove the ear-to-ear grin after the tall, size four, beautiful woman gave him his fantasy dance.

****
And the best part of the video, maybe the only thing worth watching again:

A young boy, a bible college boy, strutting his stuff with a plastic yard chair to R. Kelly. He did a strip-tease dance while grinding against this lucky piece of plastic. The Bugs Crew women lined up against the wall, all hooting and hollering for more. Out of four rolls of film from this party (everyone's cameras), three of them were filled with pictures of this platinum blonde boy losing his clothing and bending in ways we all admired.

After the song ended, Bob and Dennis each lit up a cigarette and had a moment. Who needs Chip 'N Dales?

****
The Crew all wound down and moved the festivities inside. Most of us fell asleep on the couches in Michelle's den while watching the video of the party again and again.

There were fun moments in the night and moments that cloud my memory of how fun the Bugs Crew could be. Luckily, I avoided having Uncle Ga-ga pinch my nipples (this took work) and avoided Mouse's advances. Mr. Clean kept to himself that evening, taking shots of tequila (he didn't have it come out his nose until a later party) and feeling dejected because none of the Big Tittie Committee wanted to see him lick his eyebrows. Jessie had already been influenced by this one in the past.

Oh God, I just remembered having Dennis eat the fruit. I really wish it hadn't been in my mouth at the time. Oh, and when Jessie did the same thing. With Dennis and myself. It was like a 60's love-in for awhile.

Do you see why I don't drink anymore?

To come in the soon-to-be future, the story of the man who is always going to be 5 and his manly hairs.

1 Comments:

At 5:49 AM, CarpeDM said...

This is a lovely cautionary tale of the evils of fruit and liquor mixed together. Fruit is bad. Especially when it has a face and is leering at you from a billboard.

I am glad you have finally admitted your addiction to N'Sync. I have heard that there is finally a 12-Step Program for those under the spell of Boy Bands.

I remember when you brought the tape out to show us one night and how we watched the "Chair Dance" (as it will always be known to us) over and over and over again. My, that was a lucky, lucky chair.

And I think that the moral of this story, how you should not eat the fruit, was displayed quite well in this sentence "Oh God, I just remembered having Dennis eat the fruit. I really wish it hadn't been in my mouth at the time." A clear message for all on why fruit is the devil.