Tieche's Favorite Stories: Number 21

Being a school teacher, I have a captive audience to test out my material on. Over the years, I've learned that there are a few stories that kids consistantly remember. "Hey Mr. Tieche," they'll say. "Tell us the story about the time you wound up in Nova Scotia with the rain slicker and the folk singer from Argentina." So I'm trying to compile them and hopefully will turn them into a booklet at some point. This is a story that I use to illustrate the importance of proper decision making to my out-going seniors. I hope you like it. - DAT

My freshman year of college was a time of tremendous change. You could sense it on that first day of school, as my classmates and I filed into the dorms. This college thing was a big deal. For the first time in our lives, there was no one telling us what to do, checking to make sure we did our homework, or threatening to not let us use the car that weekend if we didn’t clean up that pig-sty that you call a room.

There was a guy on my floor named Eric. Eric, like me, was experiencing for the first time an unparalleled amount of freedom. And Eric used that freedom – like many college students do – to cross formerly forbidden boundaries. Eric used his freedom to get drunk. And I don’t mean a little drunk. Oh no. Eric jumped into the alcohol pool with both feet. One morning, I trudged into the bathroom, wondering what in the world I was thinking scheduling myself a class at 8 a.m. As I opened the door, I saw Eric, lying across the line of sinks. Face down. His forehead was resting on the porcelain rim of the sink, and a dried yellow trail of vomit led down to the drain.

I tried to wake him up so I could brush my teeth, but he just smiled and rolled over.

That was just the beginning.

One night, Eric had been drinking heavily (again) and had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. He went to the restroom to use the urinal. Well, at least he thought it was a urinal. It turned out to be Tim (his roommate’s) sock drawer. Luckily, Tim had purchased a brand of socks that was ultra-absorbent.

A week later, continuing his quest to perfect the drunken stupor, Eric was so inebriated that he fell off the top bunk in the middle of the night, and his head slammed into the back of a chair. The impact shattered his eye socket, leaving him with a nasty purple bruise over most of the left side of his face for several weeks. He looked like a cross between Rocky and Spuds MacKenzie.

You might think that breaking your face might lead one to reconsider one’s decision-making paradigm. Not with Eric. He drank more than a Hummer on the freeway. My sophomore year, we were in the same creative writing class and he wrote a short story about a guy who got drunk with his friends, took his dad’s boat out at night, fell overboard, nearly got run over and killed, and then deftly guided the boat up onto a nice rock for the night. While this is only conjecture, I’m guessing Eric didn’t have to reach too far back into his imagination for that story.

You might think that the novelty of imbibing massive amounts of beer might wear off after, oh, say the first two years. But not with Eric. He was committed to this lifestyle. His fraternity bedroom was wallpapered with flattened 24-pack boxes of Miller High Life. Tasteful.

Our junior year, Eric had been drinking so much, so he decided to go to bed. Having learned form his earlier incident, Eric now steered clear of top bunks. So he crawled into bed, a lower-level bunk. He slept next to the window, where he and his roommates had installed a window-unit air conditioner. Earlier that day, Eric and his roommates removed the unit, because it was now November. Eric, however, didn’t remember this important fact, while he was getting into bed. And he crawled right out of the window. He plunged, head first, two stories below right into the thick shrubs surrounding his fraternity.

The next morning, one of his housemates was walking their dog, and heard a soft groaning from the bushes. Eric had slept all night, wedged into the shrubs, with only the tops of his sneakers visible peeking up from the top of the bushes.

Again, you might think any activity that leads you to have a a near-fatal encounter with shrubbery might make the list of “Things I Need to Reconsider.” But not with Eric. He was astounding in his resilience. He was the Energizer Bunny of Inebriation.

I thought of this today when considering how I make decisions in life and how I want to live my life. Honestly, a large part of me wants to be the kind of person whose life doesn’t serve as a warning for others. If my life is going to be made into an anecdote, at least let the ending not involve me, head-first, in a hedge, vomiting Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Can I get an amen?