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written by: Mark

The climax of our four agonizing years of high school was spring break, more or less. Trapped for four or more years in frigid Michigan, never seeing enough sun to get a real tan, in March seniors had the chance to break out of their shells and break out the sunblock in a tropical, possibly foreign locale. My spring break vacay was in South Padre Island, Texas; not exactly exotic, but filled with as many non-english speaking Hispanics as your Cancun’s or Bahama’s.

This trip was before everything; before I knew how to drink, before I knew how to spit game. Okay, well I still don’t know how to spit game, but that’s another, more depressing story. The point is that no alcohol tolerance + no pick-up abilities= boring vacation. Mostly boring, until the last two days. Then the real purpose of Spring Break--to see what happens when young, inexperienced drinkers have access to large amounts of alcohol for the first time, finally became apparent.

It’s Sunday morning; Easter Sunday, and instead of going to church I’m getting drunk. My friend Aaron (all pseudonyms are used) is obsessed with finding these two girls we met in the pool last night; one of them was tan and skinny, another medium-weight and pale. You can guess he already called the hot one. We’re sitting by the pool, and oh my goodness, they walk right by us. I gesture to Aaron that we have found our target. Aaron goes over to initiate conversation; I closely follow. We are on a trip with five other guys; all of them are too scared to approach women they don’t know, so they all follow us. In all fairness, while in a sober state I didn’t approach too many women either.

We talk a little; we get names (Taylor and Amanda, yes those are their actual names, because who the fuck cares about them?) and we make plans to get Mexican food and then drink. Dwayne, one of my other friends, attempts to leave with the girls by himself. I thwart his attempt, and soon we are sitting in the back of one of South Padre’s drunk-driving-preventative-cabs, going to eat.

Dinner is uneventful, but when we get back to the hotel all hell breaks loose. People seem to be coming in our room with beer every two seconds. Kids are rolling joints on our tables and smoking cigarettes and doing beer bongs on our balcony. One of the kids, Jake or Jordan, I forgot, breaks the glass balcony door. He doesn’t break the glass, but he throws the door off its hinges and it collapses on the floor. This is only a short time after Dwayne has broken the door off of our fridge for about the tenth time. He also broke the doorknob the night before.

Sometime later Jake, Jordan Aaron and I decide the room is getting a little crowded and filled with penis, so we leave to go bong some beers in the stairwell. I am still afraid of the almighty beer bong—which I now believe is both the most amazing and destructive drinking-related invention ever—so I watch Jacob and Jordan and Aaron go around in a circle taking beers out of a 24-pack and skillfully bonging them. Aaron is about to bong his second beer I think; he is in the ready position (hose up, funnel down) when a hotel security guard bursts through the door. Aaron freezes like a deer in headlights, and we all think the same thing. Busted. This is still America, after all, and we’re a good three or four Spring Breaks from being able to drink legally. But all the security guard does is say “You gonna hit that or what?” Of course, Aaron hits it.

After the security guard leaves Aaron bongs a third beer and pukes. He pukes down the stairwell, down four or five flights of stairs, creating a dense puke rain that coats all the stairrails like gravy on mashed potatoes. At this moment Dwayne happens to be walking up the stairs. We hear him cry out as he realizes his friend has puked on him.

The beer is gone and we figure it’s time to hit the narcotics. Jake pulls out a prerolled joint and we light it in the stairwell. We’re doing the old puff puff pass when the same hotel security guy comes in again. Jordan, who is holding the J, panics and eats the whole thing, while it still lit. The guard says:

“What are you guys doing?”

Jordan: Chillin’.

Guard: It doesn’t smell like chillin’.

I don’t know what smells more like chilling than marijuana, but anyway we take this as a hint to get out of the stairwell and head back to the room.

It was about this time, or maybe later, when our chaperone Dave enters our hotel room. Dave is a pretty cool guy; he’s only 21, old enough to buy us beer, yet young enough to have little to no sense of responsibility. That lack of responsibility is clearly demonstrated when he starts making moves on Amanda. Now, I am pretty sure these girls are both only sixteen, which is no big deal for me. I wasn’t even 18 at the time, so, if it bleeds, it breeds, as Aaron would say. Amanda is sitting in Dave’s lap, and I’m pretty drunk, so I suggest to Taylor and Dave and Amanda that the four of us go to our other room—the one without fifty dudes in it—and get more comfortable. They all agree, except somehow I end up sitting on the balcony sipping a beer five minutes later. My friend Josh has taken my spot. I’m not really sure how.

Anyway, Taylor comes back about ten minutes later almost in tears. Everyone asks her what’s wrong and she responds, “We went into the room and Dave… he…he put his hand down my pants.” Well, what the fuck were you expecting, a game of Candy Land? I resist the urge to call her a cocktease and rub her back, consoling her. I figure drunken sex is out of the question, but I can definitely procure a consolation prize if I play the sympathy card right. Unfortunately, I play the sympathy card wrong. Ultimately, I get too drunk and spill beer everywhere. I take the funnel part of a beer bong and start yelling at everyone. Dwayne tells me to sing the Michigan State fight song, in honor of our friend Wally, who is going to MSU and couldn’t make the trip. I of course oblige, but my inebriated state causes me to forget the melody. While I am trying to remember I sing the Notre Dame fight song to pass the time. Later Aaron pours an entire jar of peanuts on my head; I don’t know why my mom sent a jar of peanuts in my luggage, my guess is she prophesized I would have the urge to take a shower in them.

So Taylor is a cocktease but Amanda is not; she’s just a slut. She comes back an hour after she leaves with tousled hair, smeared makeup and a generally-disheveled, drunken appearance. Jacob or Jordan immediately cusses her out, pointing his finger at her and calling her a “beer slut”. This is a term I’ve never heard before, but it is now part of my regular vocabulary, right next to the insults “slut face” and “hoe bag”. Amanda is almost in tears, and for good reason too. Soon the ten or so guys in the room are all chanting in chorus “Beer slut! beer slut!” To save face she begins to kiss all her detractors; of course my sex-starved friends can’t say no.

From there it all gets hazy; I go to the hot tub to drown but I am at that magical too-drunk stage where one loses their energy and just gets sleepy and ready to pass the fuck out. Aaron and I go back up to the room by means of the elevator, but when the door opens our other friend BigDoucheBag is standing there. He says, “You guys gotta chill out, there are cops all over this floor. They’re responding to a noise complaint about us.” I stick my head out of the elevator and, sure enough, three cops are walking down the hallway to our room. I am so drunk I can barely walk. I had already blacked out on the elevator ride. “What should I do?” I ask. He shrugs and says, “My advice to you would be to go downstairs and wait.”

So we go downstairs but I am too tired. I fall asleep in a deck chair by the pool. I am woken up by a hotel employee at 8:30 in the morning. I’m still drunk. He says, “I think you better get to bed.” Good call.

I go back to the room and sleep. I wake up at about noon and realize our room is a complete fucking disaster area. It looks like the three of us just dumped the contents of our suitcase on the floor, if our suitcases only contained alcohol and food. There are peanuts everywhere; and I mean everywhere. In the bed, in the bathroom, all over the floor, in the hallway. More floor space is occupied by beer cans than actual carpet. Dwayne is passed out in his bed holding an empty fifth. The fridge and balcony doors are still broken, and all the blankets and linens have been thrown off all the beds.

The kicker is one of the sofa cushions lying in a puddle of beer two feet wide and an inch deep. The whole place looks like the stereotypical “morning-after” scene of a frat party in one of those crappy teen movies. Except this is real life, and we have to clean it up. Okay, we have to leave the room for two hours so the maid can clean it up. Same thing.

Today is Monday, the last day of our trip, and Dwayne decides we need to get trashed, fucked-up hardcore. The plan is White Russians and screwdrivers til we puke. File the end of that sentence under “obvious foreshadowing”. Dwayne, Jacob, Jordan and I get a couple 21 year-olds to buy us Kahlua and two fifths of vodka. The two hoes from last night left today, but, fortunately there are many more hoes arriving today from all over the country.

Project Blackout begins, and after a couple mixed drinks we go to McDonald’s. There appear to be several latino gangs circling around the drive-thru, so we eat quickly and go back to the hotel. At that point it seems appropriate that Dwayne and I break off from the group and go in search of the elusive skank-ass hoe. We find a couple in the hot tub; they are not too talkative, but Dwayne is aggressive, offering to bring them hand-mixed Screwdrivers. We go back to the room to procure the beverages, but when we get back the girls have left. Dwayne is clearly disappointed, but at least we get to double-fist screwdrivers.

Dwayne exits the hot tub to find more chicks, leaving me alone. I strike up a conversation with the only person in the hot tub, or, within a 500 yard radius, it seems. Unfortunately, he has a penis and testicles and facial hair. Out of generosity I give him one of my screwdrivers.

Soon two girls join us in the hot tub. They are both about fourteen years old; one is fat and pretty ugly, and the other looks like she might be hot in a couple years, after she develops breasts. We start up a conversation, and soon the fat one invites me and the other guy back to her room. I look around and realize my friends have all deserted me, plus I don’t have a room key or a cell phone on me. So it’s go with the jailbait girls or sit alone in the hot tub all night. Jail bait girls win by a narrow margin.

On the way to fatty’s room I talk to the “hotter” girl. She’s nice, and she seems pretty interested in me, which is cool yet kind of weird. We get to fatty’s floor and the guy and fatty walk down the hall to her room, but the other girl stays behind. All of a sudden out of nowhere she asks me to come to her room. With her. Alone.

Now, I don’t have very high standards for women, this has been established by the events of last night, when I tried to hook up with a pale sixteen year-old. Some would say Aaron’s adage “If it bleeds, it breeds”, works here too. But not me. I just couldn’t see myself hooking up with this girl who is barely out of puberty. It would just be too weird, and I doubt if I could look myself in the mirror again without thinking “YOU SICK FUCK YOU DEFLOWERED A GIRL BORN IN 1991! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU BURN IN HELL.” And so on. Seriously, this girl is too young to have remembered the Oklahoma City bombing, and I just can’t follow through. Which sucks because I don’t get a lot of ass. But sometimes, as my dad says whenever we catch a 3-inch fish in my lake, “you just have to let the small ones go”.

So I make up some bullshit story about needing to meet my parents for dinner and book it. Unfortunately, remember I have nowhere to go. I figure I’ll go back to my hotel room and try to break down the door. As luck would have it, I get back to the room just as Dwayne is returning. He sees me, opens the door, then says, “dude, I have six girls coming back here soon, you gotta be out of here.” I’m still a little shocked from my “Lolita” incident, so I just nod and call Aaron. Aaron has met a girl that he says is his soul mate, and her, himself and the rest of our crew is going to the club in fifteen. Aaron says meet me in the lobby then. Can do. I put on my only clean shirt--which isn’t really club attire, I think it was a Planet Hollywood shirt—spray too much cologne all over myself, and make another drink.

At this point, Dwayne, who has been chugging Kahlua since he got back, throws me out of the room suddenly. I feel like a rowdy drunk getting tossed out of a bar, except I’m not the rowdy one. I land on my face on the hallway carpet. I go back in the room, saying “I’m just getting my drink,” and am promptly thrown out again. This time I hit the opposite hallway wall, and look up to see that four of the six girls Dwayne was raving about have made it down. These girls are an interesting mix- they are all decently hot, but they each have one flaw. They are all like tragic heroes, the Achilles’ and Hamlet’s of South Padre. One girl has nice legs and a nice face but teeth like a British dentist. Another girl is pretty good-looking but has a loud, raucous voice like Fran Drescher. And so on. Before I even really get a chance to say anything they disappear into Dwayne’s room and he shuts the door. I am still without a room key, so I can do nothing but go down to the lobby and wait for Aaron.

Aaron and his girl and the rest of our group arrive, and we all get in a cab and head to the club. There is a thong contest there, and we all try to squeeze onto the bar mitzvah-sized dance floor for a close look. It’s a bunch of girls shaking their asses, which is good, but I decide I’d rather have a closer experience with our better halves. I walk around and at the bar who do I see but Dwayne, surrounded by the four girls from before. He is buying them shots, despite the fact that this is the United States and he is not 21 and he also does not have a fake ID. I approach him but he seems reluctant to part with any of his four girls, so I decide to just keep moving.

Then I approach a table with three decent-looking girls and start up a conversation. I don’t really remember what was said, who the fuck cares anyway, the point is they said do you wanna dance. But they had to use the bathroom first. So I stand outside the bathroom for a couple of minutes, but I am then distracted by some noise behind me. I turn around to locate the source of this noise, only to find that it is no other than Dwayne getting escorted out of the club by a policeman.

However, this is no ordinary policeman. He is wearing a blue shirt and hat that say “Constable” on them. Now, a Constable is generally known as a law enforcement officer from the Middle Ages, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t wear a shirt and hat advertising his rank. So that probably precludes the possibility that the man arresting Dwayne is a time traveler from the past. The only thing I can think of is that this man is a constable just like there are twenty producers on any given television show- most of them aren’t actually producers, but it sounds cool saying you’re a producer. So anyone who works on a show asks to be a producer, and what the hell, as long as the network doesn’t have to pay a bigger salary, they don’t care. Same idea with the constable. He is just a regular, lowly police officer who has been put on the shitty beat of having to deal with drunken teenagers on Spring Break. This guy is just one level above mall security. He advertises himself as “Spring Break security”, which is closer to his true title, and he gets laughed at. But “constable” commands respect. Just say it to yourself. Constable. You can’t help but shudder in fear. Dwayne must have been terrified. You get arrested by a policemen, you spend the night in jail, get a ticket. But you live. You get arrested by a constable, then what happens? The stocks? Torture? Death by Catapult? As Dwayne was escorted out, I could see him as Mel Gibson in “Braveheart”, being disemboweled by the vicious constable, who, grinning a sweaty, sick grin, would say, “I guess this will teach you to drink underage, eh?!”

Case and point, as I saw Dwayne being forced out of the club, I was fairly sure that was the last time I would see him. I silently waved goodbye, told the rest of the guys what had happened, and then I remembered, oh crap, I was supposed to dance with those girls. They were long gone. I look for them on the dance floor, though I could barely remember what they looked like. No dice. I look out the window of the club to see them outside, getting in to a cab. One of them sees me and waves.

Well, nuts to that. My night sucks from here, so it’s time to take you directly into Dwayne’s eye-view. After Dwayne was kicked out of the club, luckily for him the girls followed. They decided to go to a bar. Dwayne orders shots again, but he is kicked out of the bar for being underage, again. How these girls are still with him I don’t know, but somehow they make it back to the hotel, Dwayne staggeringly drunk with four girls surrounding him. They decide to go back to Dwayne’s room. On the way up the elevator Dwayne blacks out, and when he comes to he is all alone in the elevator, which has stopped at his floor.

Dwayne doesn’t feel so good. He retreats to his room and starts puking in the toilet. A little while later Aaron, I and the rest come back. We see Dwayne with his head in the toilet, not looking happy. He has a long night ahead of him, as he will be puking until about five am, when we finally all go to bed. Dwayne spends the night not sleeping much, with his head next to a garbage can just in case the alcohol wants to visit him again.

The whole time Dwayne was muttering about the Constable, and how he was screwed by this faux authority figure. And of course the next morning he gets a hangover nearly equivocal to being drawn and quartered.

So on Tuesday we leave South Padre Island maybe forever, leaving in our wake several promiscuous young girls, a couple of coke-addled sixteen year-old guys heading down the path to destruction, and of course the famous Constable, who will not be soon forgotten.

The Constable has left a mark on me, and likely Dwayne, that has shaped how I look at all law enforcement officials. Never again—in a situation of public drunkenness, driving under the influence, possession of controlled substances, or any other drug-and-alcohol lawbreaking I might be caught for-will I have respect for anyone the way I had respect for the Constable. The man has arrested my heart and thrown away the keys. If there was a constable in every city I would never, ever break the law, for any reason. The last thing I need is a red-hot poker stuffed up my anal cavity, or whatever kind of sick medieval torture this sick bastard uses. The next time I get an MIP I will put out my hands and say “Cuff me, copper!”, knowing full well that, here in America, barbaric torture is reserved for only our most devious political prisoners.