Drunk Again

Let me tell you about the time I passed out. In the Holland Tunnel. In order to understand this story, you have to have a little background information: 1) I drink heavily, and 2) over the past several years, I have lived in various hotels in the Tri-State Area while renovating apartments that I have bought to redo and flip for a profit. At this particular time, I was living in the Comfort Inn in Jersey City, which as you can imagine, is not really where you would ever choose to live. One evening, while drinking heavily in Manhattan, I called for a car service to take me back to Jersey City, but by the time the car had arrived I was barely functioning. I told the driver where I was headed and then fell asleep. By the time we were in Jersey City, I could not remember where I was staying (Not my fault because it was only temporary and so not equivalent to forgetting your own home address.) and so we drove around for awhile at which point he decided to drive me back to the city, to the bar where he picked me up. This is where I start to get feisty.

At some point, I wake up from my blackout, and we're passing through the Holland Tunnel, headed back to the city, so I proceed to argue with him to get him to turn around, but he won’t. So I do the next best thing. I throw open the door to the car and get out. While it is moving.

Mind you, I am so blind drunk at this point that I've forgotten where I live and ejected from a moving vehicle.

The next thing I vaguely remember was waking up on that little track on the side of the road inside the tunnel while some EMTs loaded me onto a stretcher. Apparently, they put an IV drip on me, and I was fine by the morning. I actually went to work the next day. (After returning to Jersey City to change my clothes.)

Did you ever notice that the word shameful and shameless mean almost the exact same thing?

See, people who don’t drink can’t understand how things like this happen. But people who drink heavily do. For example, I have one Mormon friend and she came to a little brunch I had on my terrace a few years ago. I was nervous, wanted to make sure everything went smoothly, so I had a few mimosas. And some Bloody Mary’s. Next thing I know, some of my German friends were drinking schnapps and singing the German national anthem to the holocaust survivor next door. My neighbor called the cops at precisely the time that my Mormon friend called an ambulance, and that is when I realized one critical lesson: Drunks should only hang out with other drunks, and they should generally stay indoors.