Bacardi Gras
This saturday I attended Mardi Gras in St. Louis down in the Soulard neighborhood. We all woke up around 9 o clock to start drinking a little, and then headed down to the party around 2 o clock. Though I carried around a milk jug of rum and coke, I remained sober to be sure I could remember all of the details from the day. To set the story up I took a cab to the area with friends Tony, Pete, Scott, Pops, and Megan. We were walking down the street, headed to a party held by a guy Tony knew from college, and stopped in the street to look up at a house with three second floor windows. Out of each window there were at least two girls hanging out flashing the crowd while drunk men and women threw beads up to them. This is when Tony turned to me and said, "Alright here's the party we are going to." We went inside and I made sure to make a mental note of everything that happened. However, my friend Scott wrote a blog that perfectly captured our Mardi Gras experience. With his permission I am posting it to this blog. It tells the story of our friend, Pete, who just drank way too much.
My Mardi Gras Experience (the Pete part)
Alright, Pete was one of my favorite people at Mardi Gras this year. He got fucking hammered before we even arrived at the scene. Since we had to split up the group into two separate cabs, I first saw Pete down there from the second floor window while standing next to some flashers. Pete seriously looked like a little kid at Disneyland who had just woken up from a nap. It was hilarious to watch him wandering around with this glazed look in his eyes. And members of our group kept having to yell, "Pete, come on." If he had gotten lost, God bless his little soul, I am afraid we might not have ever heard from him again. Anyway, once he got up into a window next to some flashers, that was it. We couldn't fucking pry him away. We ended up leaving the party and Pete was still at the window. What he didn't seem to understand though, was that no one wanted to see him. We went down to the street and watched the mayhem unfold as Pete kept agitating the crowd but remaining in the window. I know people were launching at him at least the following: ice, dirty snowballs, beer cans, broken bead necklaces, and a beer bottle. This last one caused the entire party to be shut down by the cops simply because Pete was agitating the crowd so much. My good man, Tony, rescued Pete from himself, and craftily hid Pete under his own ski cap as he made his way back down to the street. Oh yeah, in his haste, Pete left his milk-jug of beer open on the window sill, which he would later return to retrieve and subsequently consume. So we ended up going back to the same place later after the party resumed (meaning after the cops left). Here Pete kept wanting to go back to the window even though he continued to get pelted with flying debris. He literally had welts on his face from where he had been struck. We finally got hungry around 6pm and went to get some pizza. On the way back to the party, Pete walked straight through a lower-calf deep puddle of frozen slush without flinching. Obviously he was oblivious to pain by this point. Of course, he lacked common sense as well because he dropped his pizza slice onto the fucking disgusting snow in this alleyway and picked it up and ate it. It was the most extreme thing I saw all day, hands down. So, of course, when we arrived back at the party, Pete went back to the window. Goddammit, Pete. Now it was getting annoying. We left him and caught a taxi back. I told Taylor the whole day, "Pete is going to get his ass beaten before the day is over." I swear, we weren't in the cab for five minutes before Pete called to say that he had just gotten punched in the face and his nose was bleeding everywhere. When asked why, Pete replied, "No reason, he just punched me in the face."
"So, he just walked up to you and punched you."
"Basically, yeah."
"You didn't say anything at all to provoke him?"
"Well, I said,'Why you gotta act like such a fucking idiot.'"
"Well, that's probably why he punched you."
"But that's not a good reason!"
Oh Pete.
*(Editor's Note - For the people who know Natty well, this was one of those scenes were Natty would have laughed so hard at the drunken idiots he wouldn't have been able to breathe. We really did stand in the street, amongst 100 drunken men, and watch them throw anything they could find at Pete. Once Tony smuggled Pete past the cops, past the angry mob, and finally to safety, I noticed he had welps on his face where he had been hit with the beads. The lesson learned: Don't get in the way of drunk men trying to see young girls topless.)
*(As a side note: The creepiest part of the day was looking down at old men with telephoto lenses, digital cameras, and disposable cameras trying to capture girls flashing the crowd. A close second was finding out that the girls flashing the crowd from the party we were attending had boyfriends at the party, who were standing behind them laughing at all the guys getting to see their girlfriend's breasts.)
This will either be my last Mardi Gras, or the first of many many to come. All I need is a girlfriend to pimp out and a telephoto lense.
My Mardi Gras Experience (the Pete part)
Alright, Pete was one of my favorite people at Mardi Gras this year. He got fucking hammered before we even arrived at the scene. Since we had to split up the group into two separate cabs, I first saw Pete down there from the second floor window while standing next to some flashers. Pete seriously looked like a little kid at Disneyland who had just woken up from a nap. It was hilarious to watch him wandering around with this glazed look in his eyes. And members of our group kept having to yell, "Pete, come on." If he had gotten lost, God bless his little soul, I am afraid we might not have ever heard from him again. Anyway, once he got up into a window next to some flashers, that was it. We couldn't fucking pry him away. We ended up leaving the party and Pete was still at the window. What he didn't seem to understand though, was that no one wanted to see him. We went down to the street and watched the mayhem unfold as Pete kept agitating the crowd but remaining in the window. I know people were launching at him at least the following: ice, dirty snowballs, beer cans, broken bead necklaces, and a beer bottle. This last one caused the entire party to be shut down by the cops simply because Pete was agitating the crowd so much. My good man, Tony, rescued Pete from himself, and craftily hid Pete under his own ski cap as he made his way back down to the street. Oh yeah, in his haste, Pete left his milk-jug of beer open on the window sill, which he would later return to retrieve and subsequently consume. So we ended up going back to the same place later after the party resumed (meaning after the cops left). Here Pete kept wanting to go back to the window even though he continued to get pelted with flying debris. He literally had welts on his face from where he had been struck. We finally got hungry around 6pm and went to get some pizza. On the way back to the party, Pete walked straight through a lower-calf deep puddle of frozen slush without flinching. Obviously he was oblivious to pain by this point. Of course, he lacked common sense as well because he dropped his pizza slice onto the fucking disgusting snow in this alleyway and picked it up and ate it. It was the most extreme thing I saw all day, hands down. So, of course, when we arrived back at the party, Pete went back to the window. Goddammit, Pete. Now it was getting annoying. We left him and caught a taxi back. I told Taylor the whole day, "Pete is going to get his ass beaten before the day is over." I swear, we weren't in the cab for five minutes before Pete called to say that he had just gotten punched in the face and his nose was bleeding everywhere. When asked why, Pete replied, "No reason, he just punched me in the face."
"So, he just walked up to you and punched you."
"Basically, yeah."
"You didn't say anything at all to provoke him?"
"Well, I said,'Why you gotta act like such a fucking idiot.'"
"Well, that's probably why he punched you."
"But that's not a good reason!"
Oh Pete.
*(Editor's Note - For the people who know Natty well, this was one of those scenes were Natty would have laughed so hard at the drunken idiots he wouldn't have been able to breathe. We really did stand in the street, amongst 100 drunken men, and watch them throw anything they could find at Pete. Once Tony smuggled Pete past the cops, past the angry mob, and finally to safety, I noticed he had welps on his face where he had been hit with the beads. The lesson learned: Don't get in the way of drunk men trying to see young girls topless.)
*(As a side note: The creepiest part of the day was looking down at old men with telephoto lenses, digital cameras, and disposable cameras trying to capture girls flashing the crowd. A close second was finding out that the girls flashing the crowd from the party we were attending had boyfriends at the party, who were standing behind them laughing at all the guys getting to see their girlfriend's breasts.)
This will either be my last Mardi Gras, or the first of many many to come. All I need is a girlfriend to pimp out and a telephoto lense.
posted by HAL 9000 at 4:33 PM
4 Comments:
Funny, that's not how I remember the day at all. I remember getting there bright in early, eating some gumbo, watching people in masks juggle flaming knives and ride unicycles, enjoying a parade, and sipping on a virgin rum and coke. It was a very tasteful day. Then, as the afternoon progressed, there was a playful jolt with some gent who had slipped and did not take too kindly to me helping him off the dangerous ice. Also, that pizza might have been the most delicious scum covered food ever eaten.
I thought this was a sports blog, not your own personal journal.
Apparently it’s never too early to start recapping Mardi Gras revelry, and let me tell you, I’ve been waiting all year for such bacchanalian posts to resume. I mean, throwing beer cans at people, flashing boobs, face punches resulting in bloody noses, jugs of rum and coke – life doesn’t get any sweeter than this my friends. Forget ramblings about current events in the sports world and polls about who’s gay, I’m glad to see that an author on this blog finally has the courage to write about things we actually care about. This story about Pete is so human, so endearing. We all know a “Pete” in our lives who has touched us much the way he touched Mr. Monk. And by the way, there is not a better descriptive for an author to use than “fucking.” It’s such a versatile and underutilized word, only true genius can fully appreciate how much it adds to the English language. When I was reading about the failure of Pete’s running mates to pry him away from the window, the significance of this futility would have been totally lost on me without the proper phrasing. Knowing that the boys couldn’t “fucking pry” Pete away from the window, it was almost like I too was there with Pete, enduring the bead pelting from the Mardi Gras goers as we tried in vain to make him abandon his post at the window. Bless you Mr. Monk, bless you.
thank you joe b. it's refreshing to have readers simply enjoy posts and comment, or even not enjoy posts and keep it to themselves. Packersfan seems to have missed the "Blog about all things extraordinary" description. And Dr. Dunkenstein has just been waiting way too long to fit the word bacchanalian into a conversation.
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