Photo note: I found a roll of film in a pea coat that I shot during December in New York and Washington D.C. The developer I took it to in São Paulo has an incredibly terrible film scanner, so I apologize for the weird digital grain.

Jon wanted to play cards, but none of us had enough money to buy a new deck. However, Reggie had a couple thousand outdated business cards lying around for reasons unexplained. We ended up passing them around to draw our own up. Flipping through the finished deck, I noted two things: the majority of young men have unfathomably shitty writing, and said young men when asked to draw a queen will almost always involve a splayed pussy in their art.

We were waiting to go out to a dirty bar with a guy named Caue. I had met him a few days prior. Caue looked and acted like James Franco after a long night of shoveling coke into his nose. At one point, Reggie asked him who he had fucked recently.

“Shit, you should have seen!” Caue said, hair falling down with sweat as he bounced around the room. “I fucked the hottest fucking girl! Oh man! Figure eight! Figure eight!” He grabbed a table and started grinding his hips on it to demonstrate.

“Who was she?”

“Oh man, it was my cousin! She’s so hot!?”

“Your cousin?” I shot out, believing it was just a translation error.

“Yeah, you know. Your cousin, right? My sister’s brother, his daughter. That’s a cousin right?”

“Yeah…”

“Yeah! It’s like the sister you can fuck!” He then proceeded to pull out his cell phone and show all of us a video he surreptitiously took of him fucking a girl in a friend’s bathroom. Meanwhile, he shouted out their conversation, alternating between a man’s and woman’s voices

“Who’s ass is this? It’s yours Caue! I SAID WHO’S ASS IS THIS!? It’s YOURS Caue!”

After that display, we all expected an intriguing evening. In preparation we took shots of some random cheap liquor procured in the ghetto that had a picture of a crayfish on the bottle. The card game passed the Jone for a while, but their glossy backs weren’t kind to the ballpoint pen someone had found on the ground. The cards got so smudged that we ended up spending most of our Jone arguing over what each one was worth. During one of these dust-ups I knocked over a glass. All of the ink washed off the cards. We gave up.

I walked over to the grocery store across the street to pick up more beer. Three gay homeless guys were usually posted up in front, spouting lewd compliments drunk as hell at passerby. In their place were two transvestite hookers passed out across the sidewalk on a piece of cardboard. One had a crack pipe in her hand. Parents and their children just stepped over them on their way to buy bread.

There were three guys in front of me in line, all holding a pair of pint cans. It seemed like a small purchase, but I wasn’t in a position to comment. One guy with a lawyer’s version of an emo-cut was wearing a pink dress shirt, fully unbuttoned and tucked into white jeans. He kept leaving the line and going back to the beer aisle to switch his beers for new, presumably colder ones. He looked at me once with pupils that blacked out both of his irises.

When I got back to the apartment they told me that Caue had canceled on us. I felt bad calling him a pussy when they told me he had taken his mom to the hospital. At least she was supposed to be fine. Instead, we decided to head to Rua Augusta, the city’s hipster Mecca. Fortunately for us, the street was walking distance, and its bars are famously cheap.

We stopped at a deli that had a bunch of people drinking on the sidewalk to try and figure out where the best bar was for the night. I went inside to order a pair of beers and got into a small argument with the guy at the counter over the price. A prostitute stopped hustling a falling-down drunk businessman to spin in her stool and sort things out. I was impressed with her English, and ended up walking out thanking everyone profusely. Back on the sidewalk Jon and Reggie were talking to a small group that was leaning up against a fence and competing to see who could smoke more nonchalantly. One guy had a big pointy black beard and skin tight neon red pants. I avoided him. A girl with bad tattoos and an off-camber haircut stood next to him. She had Reggie stuck in the middle of what, by the looks of Reggie’s face, was an uncomfortable conversation. He later told me that she was a hardcore Evangelical and spent half an hour trying to get him to come to church with her. I think her proud straight-edge values turned him off. Jon was talking to a guy who had a pot-dealing girlfriend in Vancouver. Separate hemispheres seems kind of distant for a relationship, but I wasn’t going to judge.

]]> http://blackfaded.com/2010/02/26/bar-sarajevo/feed/ 0 Derek Mead NYC and DC, December 2009-1 http://blackfaded.com/2010/02/20/carnival-cerquilho/ http://blackfaded.com/2010/02/20/carnival-cerquilho/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:05:27 +0000 Derek Mead http://blackfaded.com/?p=746 ]]>

The guy in the front seat hadn’t said a word more than “hello” in an hour. It was starting to weird me out. The other three of us had been bantering excitedly the whole time in anticipation of five days in the country side, and I couldn’t stop wondering why the guy was so damn quiet. I had tried to get him involved with the chatter, but I forgot his name the moment he told me, so I gave up.

During a brief silence he burst up from a slouch and started yelling.

“When I lived in Canada I dated a Korean girl named Boo-mi! Boo-mi!” he said, laughing as if it was the craziest thing in the world. I shared dumbfounded looks with the other guy in the back seat. He continued shouting. “I always used to say Boo-mi! Boo-mi! Can I finish in your face Boo-mi? She never knew what I meant, so I did it anyway! Ha ha, on your face Boo-mi!” No one knew how to respond aside from laughing, and he returned to his silence.

We were leading a caravan of four cars a couple hours outside of Saõ Paulo to spend Carnival in a tiny farm town that was known for filling up with tens of thousands of hillbillies and city folk alike. Another four or five cars had left earlier that day. In all we were going to cram 30 men and women into a two-bedroom farm house. At least it was supposed to have a pool.

Because we were arriving late and Carnival hadn’t technically started yet, the general consensus amongst our cars was that we’d take the first night relatively easy. We got to the town easily, but no one knew how to get to our house. One of the guys already there had offered to drive out to meet us and lead us back. Rodrigo, our driver, gave him a call. I couldn’t hear clearly, but it sounded like gibberish on the other end of the line. Then it abruptly went dead. Rodrigo tried calling a few more times, but no one answered. No one else could get through.

We waited for an hour. Groups of wildly inebriated people wandered up and down the street in both directions, singing loudly. One guy in a group of 12 walked up through the group, grabbing every girl’s ass, then turned around and walked back down the line trying to steal kisses. He repeated this a few times until he saw us watching him, and took off his shirt and ran down the street singing.

Finally a car came screeching up. Japa, the guy we had been calling, tumbled out of the driver’s seat with two beers in his hand. He was screamingly drunk, and ran in circles yelling and hugging everyone he could find. One beer tumbled onto the ground. The other tumbled into his mouth. A cute girl had suddenly appeared behind the wheel in his car and I wandered over to talk to her.

“Hey, let me drive. I’m good. I swear,” I said.

“No way,” she responded bluntly. She turned up the early-2000’s junior high girl pop punk that was on the radio and had a long pull off the tall can in her hand. A cop drove past.

“Don’t you think it’s unsafe to drink and drive?” I asked in a mock-chiding way.

“What? Are you kidding me?” She burst into laughter. “This is Brazil.”

We took off, flying down the street. People hung out of the car windows yelling at each other. We left the town and continued out into the middle of nowhere. We passed a bar next to a church. There was a huge crowd of people, most wearing leather, in the street and what sounded like a Brazilian metal band was playing on a small stage. We passed another church surrounded by fields.

The train of cars bumped over some railroad tracks and down a gravel road. When we pulled into the house, a big crowd was already yelling over the music and throwing out “I love you man!” hugs left and right. After giving yelled hellos to the guys I knew and doing the awkward hug-and-kiss that I don’t think I’ll ever master with a surprising number of pretty girls, I grabbed a beer out of a huge wheezing freezer still half-full with well over a hundred cans and sat down for a card game whose name translated is “little fuck.” We alternated between handing out beers and shots of a cane liquor called Jamel to the losers of each hand. The Jamel had a picture of a camel on the label, so I figured it was swanky, but I later found out it goes for $1.50 a liter in the favela. Little Fuck is a game based upon guessing how many tricks you’ll win each hand, and gets progressively harder with more people. With 15 people at the table, playing drunk and loose, a lot of drinks got passed around. A few hours flew by. The table was continually smacked, one obscenity or another was constantly flying through the air, and a mountain of empty cans and bottles slowly engulfed a pitifully small trashcan that hadn’t a chance when it was assigned its job.

James and I stopped into a corner café to grab a cup of coffee. We had spent most of the day playing soccer and barbecuing at an indoor place that a large group of friends rented. By the time we left, the group had dwindled to five. We still had a refrigerator full of beer that we’d already paid for, but our attendant said that because we had bought it from the facility, we’d have to drink it or leave it. So we drank it. I’m not going to say that I didn’t feel safe as our driver sped through the city, mostly because I wasn’t feeling a whole lot in general. In any case, caffeine was necessary.

We were headed to meet a couple at a bar in one of the hip neighborhoods in the city. I once asked one of my students – an art director for a big ad firm that DJs, writes grafitti and wears funny pants – about the place because I figured she had legitimate hipster street cred.

“Oh yeah, Vila Olimpia,” she said with little enthusiasm. “I don’t go there very often.”

“Really? I was there last week, went to this old house that was converted into a jazz club. It was awesome.”

“Hmm, I bet,” she said with a suppressed eye-roll. “I just always feel like that the place is really fake, you know? It’s like the people there just spend their parents’ money on weird clothes just so they can stand around acting cool. That’s not my thing.”

I wasn’t so sure, but as I’m hardly knowledgeable enough to discuss the finer points of the hipster credo, I let it go.

I was driving from LA up to Northern California to visit my parents. About six hours in I came across the familiar and ever-enticing split on I-5 where you can either head north to the rice fields and Sacramento or west towards San Francisco. I hadn’t been to the city in a while and was in no hurry to get home and waste away on my parent’s couch, so at the last minute I swerved over in the direction of the Bay. I was driving a new car, so I stretched her out to 95 miles an hour while I called up Alan, a friend from college who I knew wouldn’t mind a surprise visit.

After swearing uncontrollably through an hour of traffic and wondering why drinking a martini while driving isn’t legal when you’re stuck at five miles an hour, I pulled up to Alan’s apartment, a swank rent-controlled place in North Beach. He knew how shitty the drive was, and thankfully whipped out refreshments quickly. We headed up to the roof of his building and relaxed in the crisp clear night. I hadn’t seen him in months, and it was good to catch up on the latest adventures we’d both had. Alan’s the type of guy that’s always excited to talk about interesting things and doesn’t shy away from drink. Usually a good man to have around for a long night.

After a pint or two of vodka tonics the glistening skyline ceased to be simply attractive and became a nagging reminder of our mutual desire to raise hell. We sat in his room trying to figure out where we’d head first. I’d been idly sending half-drunk texts when he burst up from behind his computer.

“Well there it is. I’ve got our destination.” His calm speech stood in stark contrast to the blazing excitement in his eyes. I stayed silent. “Let me break this down for you. There’s a band playing at a bar I really like kid of close to here. I’m looking at their picture right now.” He stopped again and started laughing uncontrollably. “Okay, so they’re called Barracuda. They say they play ‘rock and roll from the epic decades,’ but it seems they focus on the eighties. Holy god, they’re all over fifty, having jheri curls and are wearing leather pants. Oh, and their singer is a massive black dude who looks five feet tall.”

“Well, looks like we’re headed there.”

Photo note: My digital camera charger was stolen (why, I don’t know) and I’ve run out of batteries. At the same time, I can’t seem to find a place that can scan film slides onto CD in Sao Paulo. Until I sort it out, I’ll be pulling photos out of my archives. These are from Hermosa Beach, CA in July 2009.

We had been walking for a few blocks towards the subway when we noticed the flashing lights. A street corner in the middle of downtown was surrounded by a few ambulances and a bunch of small police sedans. They usually drove in caravans of three or four cars. It looked like at least three groups had shown up.

“What the fuck is that all about?”

“Oh, you know. Someone probably got shot.” Jeff left the humor implied. These things happen.

We continued meandering down the street, passing a bottle back and forth, when a guy with a hat pulled low and a new-looking, very large t-shirt brushed passed us, moving quickly without trying to look like it. He was fiddling with his pants. They were quite baggy. I assumed that he was just adjusting his belt until he got closer.

A half-block after he passed I had to ask.

“So, was that just me or was he shoving a handgun into his waistband?”

“Yeah, I think it was.”

There’s not much else you can say to that.

Photo note: My digital camera charger was stolen (why, I don’t know) and I’ve run out of batteries. At the same time, I can’t seem to find a place that can scan film slides onto CD in Sao Paulo. Until I resolve either problem, I’ll be pulling photos out of my archives. These are from Central Onomichi, Japan.

My senior year of college I was editing for our campus paper. As the work was uncomfortably slow, I usually had at least two handles of Black Velvet in my desk at all times, and spent most of my evening in my office getting drunk during production. Send an article to copy? Take a shot. Lay out a photo and write the cutline? Two shots. Send a page to the printers full of offensive headlines? Shit, time for handle pulls.

One of our news editors worked at a desk right outside my office. She’s six feet tall, blonde and has a serious addiction to Jameson. In essence, my dream girl. I’m pretty bad at openly hitting on women, so I usually just try to woo them with zaniness and wit until suddenly we’re naked. So it went at work.

“Hey, do you guys want a ride?”

Sam and I were walking back to a friend’s apartment after leaving him behind at a rich person’s mall. He was waiting for a girl he was interested in, but after twenty minutes of standing around exchanging disdainful looks with pastel polo-clad yuppies we had decided to strike off on our own. In keeping with the wealthy vibe of the place, most people drove like douche bags, and we ignored the car honking behind us until a car full of young looking girls screeched up next to us.

“Uh, sure.” We were only a few blocks away, but I wasn’t going to turn the offer down. It wasn’t until I had squeezed into the back seat that I recognized them as the 19 year old girls we had met the night before.

The prior afternoon most of the ten guys I was sharing a penthouse with were already exceedingly drunk. One of them, a man only known as Japa, had spent the better part of an hour yelling obscenities inside the apartment before he took to the balcony.

“I’M JAPANESE! SHIT! I’M JAPANESE!” His screams in Portuguese echoed off the surrounding buildings. A few of the other guys started whistling as loudly as possible. I was hung over and had yet to drink that day, and the unending explosion of noise was pushing me closer to suicide than I’d care to admit.

]]> http://blackfaded.com/2010/01/13/riviera-brazil/feed/ 0 Derek Mead Riviera, Brazil-5 http://blackfaded.com/2010/01/05/conversion-therapy/ http://blackfaded.com/2010/01/05/conversion-therapy/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:40:15 +0000 Derek Mead http://blackfaded.com/?p=554 ]]>

I had just moved into the city after visiting my old roommate Steve a few months prior. After a night getting drunk with one of his friends – a gay dude who shared a similar distrust of the two women who ordered cheeseburgers and chili fries rather than drinks while refusing to chat – and another night seeing bands too hip for their own good, it seemed the right idea. I savored a few weeks at my parents’, sitting on the couch in my underwear trolling Craigslist for jobs I may or may not have been qualified for and lining up as cheap an apartment as I could find. With a job cleaning lab equipment lined up to remind me that my degree was worthless and a nondescript room open in a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification, I packed my shit up and grabbed a flight.

The first few weeks convinced me that I had made the right choice. I only worked half-shifts while I was being trained (although I question the necessity of learning how to wash a beaker) and spent the rest of my time and all of my money watching obscure bands at dingy bars with Steve.

Soon, however, his next term of law school started up, and mixed my unnecessarily odd working hours, we hardly crossed paths. My coworkers started talking on Tuesdays about which happy hour we’d attend that Thursday. Happy hour usually just consisted of me watching the rest of my shift get shit-faced by seven o’clock and try to fuck each other before stumbling home to their wives and husbands. The three day buildup to the event helped me pass my free time, but eventually I started ditching happy hour early to wander bars by myself.

After a few weeks of skipping out on my coworkers – the first time I tried to say good-bye early, my boss yelled “PUSSY!” at me all the way out of the bar, so I just snuck out after that – I stopped going altogether. I didn’t expect to find the promised land by striking out on m own. I just wanted to avoid ever having a drunk middle-aged woman conspicuously rub my thigh after she complained about her kids to me all day at work.

The tall, mousy blonde with ‘70s librarian glasses strutted through the living room to have a smoke in the backyard. She was wearing tall black heels and a black lace bra peeked invitingly out of her teal plaid shirt. She seemingly had forgotten to button the top four buttons.

“Hey! Dave! Are you listening? Are you down?”

With effort, Dave pulled his attention to four friends spread around the couches. He had come along with them to their mutual friends’ barbecue, and as usual in situations where he knew no one, he had spent much of the evening in the kitchen getting quietly drunk.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll get involved.”

As Dave had become accustomed to in his experiences in Santa Cruz, the evening had consisted of eating a lot of good hippie food and standing in circles smoking a lot of weed. The owner of the house, a wildly stoned gentleman with a massive red beard, was in the kitchen jumping into conversations with nonsensical remarks and passing multiple joints around. In the backyard, a small group sat around a fire pit, braving the cold with an armament of beer, whiskey and tequila.

Dave had gotten too paranoid to hang around the group outside, so he had returned to the relative comfort of his friends. Before he was distracted by the blonde, the group had been talking about smoking an L, and at that point he wasn’t going to turn down more weed.

“Fuck yeah,” said Rachel, the one girl in the circle he didn’t know. She was also the one he had heard the most about. “It’s twenty bucks a blotter, but you might just want to split one.”

“Blotter? What?” Dave had assumed that they were talking the “L” that Biggie Smalls smoked in limos. Who the fuck is so pressed for time that they shorten “LSD” to “L?”

“Yeah, we’re gonna drop tonight. You’re in, right?”

Dave wasn’t particularly interested, but the blonde walked back in the room. “We getting out of here yet?” He fell in love with her impatience, and discreetly raised an eyebrow at Katie, the one friend in the room who wouldn’t mind him getting sleazy. She just laughed and nodded. ‘Oh well, what the hell. If the blonde’s in, fuck it,’ he thought.

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

The group of eight said their pleasantries and left. The blonde, whom he found was named Jamie, was driving Rachel and a girl that had yet to say a word. Dave hopped in with them.

“So, Dave, how many times have you tripped before?” Rachel asked, looking at him in the passenger mirror while she checked out her makeup.

He contemplated acting cool and casual, but a sudden honest streak hit him. ‘Fuck it,’ he thought. “Well, none. But shit, let’s get weird.”

“Oh, now worries. It’s Jen’s too.” Apparently the mute girl had a name. “I’m the right person to be with. I’ve done all kinds of hallucinogens, and I’ve dropped acid at least a couple hundreds times.” Dave raised his trademark eyebrow. “This batch is from one of the original California families that have been making it for decades. I’ve taken it two or three times this week and it’s really clean and lucid. You’ll be fine.”

Dave was suddenly thought of his freshman year of high school and the senior in his algebra class that always prefaced his tripping story by explaining that taking four hits in a year was enough to make someone legally insane.

They arrived at Rachel’s place. The living room was filled with seven men and one woman, all arguing over a Dungeons and Dragons game. All of the guys were similarly monochromatic, with pale skin set off by long black hair and all-black clothing. The smallish girl was primly dressed and, in a more relaxed setting, could have been quite cute. Dave winked at her and she immediately buried herself back in her cards.

The other car of girls showed up and Rachel herded everyone into the kitchen for drinks. Most had decided to take a half dose after having just finished a 72 hour weed and vodka binge. Rachel, as that night’s leader, had initially supported the idea, but it became apparent that she had agreed only to get everyone to agree to drop.

“I’m telling you guys, this is just super clean, lucid stuff. You’re going to want at least a full blotter,” she started.

“Yeah, whatevs. That shit usually knocks me on my ass. I think I’ll chill on a half tonight,” Katie countered.

“I don’t know, I took four hits earlier this week and felt fine. Totally lucid,” Rachel said, slightly more animated.

“Well I don’t give a fuck who does what. I’m just tired of waiting,” Jamie said quietly from the corner.

“I’m so sensitive to acid. I’ll go BONKERS no matter what!” Dana’s trademark high-pitched giggle broke the mild tension brilliantly. Rachel said something like “I don’t know, I still think you all should be taking at least the full blotter. It’s such clear stuff,” under her breath, but no one heard her as they split up the blotters. After hearing her say “clear” and “lucid” so many time, Dave was about to question if those adjectives were completely antithetical to whole point of hallucinogens, but figured she was just looking out for their best interests and let it go. Dana handed him half of her paper, everyone said “Cheers,” and popped them in their mouth.

He was suddenly struck by the thought that there is no image more stupid than that of a bunch of snappily dressed young women grinding on small bits of cardboard. The paper dissolved, he washed the pulp down with the last of a half-pint of Black Velvet he had forgotten in his coat. Grabbing a couple beers, he followed the rest of the group past the loud squabbling over hit points in the living room and into Rachel’s bedroom where the girls planned on getting dolled up to hit the bars.

Not giving a shit how he looked based on the assumption that dinner-plated sized pupils were fashionable enough, Dave busied himself playing with a large rabbit that suddenly appeared from under the bed. He gestured with its ears towards Jamie on the other side of the room, but she only responded with a polite smile. Suddenly, she burst forth in the most assertive tone he had heard from her all night.

“I think we need some blow. Anyone interested?” She scanned the room and received a few nods. Eventually her eyes settled appraisingly on Dave.

Forgetting the rabbit, he was suddenly forced into a severe moral dilemma. Saying no would surely eliminate any small chance at getting frisky with Jamie, and he had already said yes to the acid on that same premise. On the flip side, he was pretty drunk, had no idea where said LSD was taking him, and figured that cramming coke up his nose would most likely guarantee a limp dick for a week. ‘Fuck it,’ he thought for the umpteenth time that night. ‘Hopefully acid gives you boners.’

“Well, if we’re jumping down the rabbit hole, might as well go all the way.” He fired back Jamie’s tough look and she smiled.

“Alright, I’ll try and get an eight-ball,” someone said, but he didn’t notice. The bunny had quickly become far more interesting than before. It was the biggest rabbit Dave had ever seen. And the ears! They were fucking huge!

Rachel came back in the room snapping a small baggie between her fingers. “Anyone got a tampon?” The room burst into disbelieving laughter. “No, you fucking idiots, I’m not on my period. I need it for this,” she said, gesturing at the lines she was chopping up on a mirror.

Hunched over the floor with a goddamned tampon shoved up his nose, Dave couldn’t help but wonder why anyone at that moment would want to look at themselves in a fucking mirror.

The girls gathered up their myriad items and they headed out to a bar. Walking in surrounded by women in fur coats, Dave couldn’t help but feel like a respectable, even envied, member of society. He even stood up straight. The bar lit only by red lights. It opened up into a room with booths around the walls and comfortable, desk-like tables on rugs in the middle. One group was circled around a fireplace in the wall. Every person in the Victorian room was smoking, a refreshing sight in a lung-obsessed world. Feeling the gentleman, he ordered a whiskey soda and slid into a booth. Jamie had just snuck a bump, and lightly rubbed her finger under her nose while her nose twitched. It was so adorable he almost passed out.

Conversation in the booth carried on in the booth as cigarettes were rapidly finished and stamped out in a candle on the table. Dave was mostly distracted by the groups around the room. The guys around the fireplace all crossed their legs like grandpas and pontificated with their smokes to an excessive degree. None had drinks, and he figured the bartender hated them. At one of the tables in the middle of the room a big guy and a tiny girl were laughing their asses off and talking shit to one another and no one in particular. They had plenty of empty glasses around them, and seemed like excellent folk. On the far side of the room six guys sat crammed into a regular booth, rather than grabbing the open corner. They were drinking designer beers and all had the clean cut, vaguely fashionable, guilty look of cheap European travelers trying to look like rich Europeans to impress women. Or, considering their seating arrangement, maybe they were hustling for men.

Someone nudged him and he realized that it was time to leave. As they were heading out, Jamie bustled over to her car and drove off. Rachel explained that Jamie was having some personal problems and just wanted to go home, but not to worry, they could easily walk to where they were headed. The other girls offered a mix of supportive comments and questioning of why she would take acid when she was stressed, but Dave just wondered how often it was that a blowed-out broad in a fur coat and derby hat was flying around on the road in her fashionable car. Probably pretty regularly, he decided.

The next bar was a classy affair with dim lights and a DJ in shirt and tie spinning jazz. Jen and Rachel grabbed a small table while Dave picked up drinks. He was too fucked up to read the names on the taps and, for some reason, found himself having trouble putting words together, so he just pointed at one. The bartender raised an eyebrow, Dave shrugged, and the beers appeared without a word exchanged.

“Oh, nice choice. I love that beer,” Jen said when he came back. He couldn’t be sure if she would have said that to anything he brought back or not, but it was nice to hear nonetheless.

“Yeah, top notch,” Rachel concurred. “So, you want to go in the bathroom?” Dave’s eyes must have gone wide. “No, you horny jackass, I’m not fucking in a bathroom,” she laughed. “We were going to go powder our noses.”

“Oh. I mean, I knew what you were talking about. Let’s go.”

There was nothing awkward about talking to Jen as she peed and Rachel fed him a bump off of a car key.

In one of those bits of time travel that tend to sneak up on you, Dave found himself in a house surrounded by yelling women. The original group had drifted all over town over the course of the night, but had reunited at Dana and Katie’s place. It’s surely impossible to find a group of nine half-drunk, extremely high women that’s calm and quiet, but as the rest of the cocaine was quickly stuffed into faces, things quickly devolved into chaos. Dave only realized he was yelling when the rest of the sound in the room shut off.

“Jesus, guys!” One of the other roommates was standing in the living room with crossed arms, wearing pajamas. “It’s four in the fucking morning on Sunday and you guys have been screeching for over an hour! I’ve got to work tomorrow! Shut the fuck up!”

Dave was in the backyard when she came out, but a few girls were in the kitchen and couldn’t see that the roommate was still in the room when one yelled.

“Fuck that shit! I’m too fucking high to be quiet! Hasn’t that bitch heard of ear plugs?”