16 Real People Confess Their Drunkest Near-Death Experience
1. When Jose Cuervo takes the wheel.
“The night of my college graduation, I polished off most of a bottle of Jose Cuervo solo only to, apparently, drive home afterwards (my car was parked on our front lawn the next morning). I really don’t know how the fuck I’m still alive.”
— Simon, 25
2. When you get drunk for the first time and almost drown.
“The first and only time I’ve ever blacked out also happened to be the first time I got drunk. I was 15, and I had three beers and two slugs of Popov. I woke up at 4am floating face-down on a giant blow-up flamingo in my neighbor’s pool, dangerously close to falling off. Holla at god for not letting me drown that night!”
— Dalia, 19
3. When a virgin goes to a strip club.
“On my 21st birthday, my older brother took me to a strip club. I’m pretty shy and don’t drink much, and in fact, I was a virgin at the time. I got so nervous when I walked in that I must’ve downed five double Red Bull vodkas in under an hour. I blacked in to a crotchless-thong-clad stripper shaking me awake with her boobs, and my brother half-asleep in the corner with two more trying to keep him awake. Fun fact: he ended up dating one of the strippers, and I ended up violently booting outside until, god knows how, he got her number.”
— Jackson, 23
4. When you wake up in a stranger’s kitty pool and don’t remember shit.
“Once, I woke up, in handcuffs, in a kitty pool on the roof of a stranger’s apartment building. I can’t give you any other details.”
— Olin, 26
5. When you throw up on your cab driver.
“Ummm…I once got so fucked up on Malibu—you know, the shit you can drink like liquid candy…till you can’t—that I started projectile vomiting onto the back of the cab driver’s head/the passenger’s seat of his car. The cabbie was so grossed out that he, too, started to vomit. It was a fucking mess. There we were, me and my cabbie, vomiting uncontrollably—Bridesmaids style. I’d rather not disclose how much I had to ask my parents to loan me in order to compensate the cabbie for my repulsive belligerence.”
— Tasha, 21
6. When you wake up naked on a water tower.
“Beer before liquor, never been sicker…….a fifth of Belvedere before lot of beer, you’re 150% NOT IN THE CLEAR. You are, however, profusely thanking god for making you a skinny white girl when you wake up to the police shaking your half-naked ass awake on a water tower at 6am (don’t ask, I don’t know the answer) and never get in trouble.”
— Haley, 23
7. When your cool cousin takes you to your first club.
“For my high school graduation present, my parents sent me to London to visit my older cousin who lives there. I’d never really gotten drunk before, and I was hyped because Isabel (cousin) is pretty wild. The first club she took me to, I got so drunk on gin and tonics that I ran away from her, fled the club, and tried to get in a cab with a middle-aged couple, screaming at the bouncers not to let Isabel follow me, because I didn’t know her and I wanted to ‘do me.’ (I remember none of this, due to the fact that I had blacked the fuck out at this point.) Isabel managed to convince the bouncers that she was not, in fact, trying to kidnap me, and it took her and two friends to wheel me back to her apartment, where I threw up literally the whole night. The next day, I was so mortified that I ended up taking an earlier flight back. I always knew I was fucking crazy, but jesus.”
— Libby, 21
8. When you decide Xanax, wine, and Six Flags definitely mix.
“Ohhhhh Xany wine, how you fuck me up. How you fuck me up to the point that I once fell asleep on roller coaster ride when I decided it was a great idea to drink way too much of you in the car to Six Flags.”
— Nat, 24
9. When you’re drunk enough to try to steal your rival’s boyfriend.
“This girl I hated in college once kicked me so hard IN THE TITS (???) that I thew up when she caught me making out with her sort-of boyfriend while I was brown-out drunk on Absolut and Percocet.”
— Poppy, 22
10. When whiskey leaves you for dead in the woods.
“When I was getting ‘initiated’ into the lacrosse team as a college freshman, I almost died in the woods. The point of initiation is for the older guys to get the youngins belligerently drunk, and being the hardo I pretended to be, I took the challenge further than I had to. I don’t know how much I drank, but it was at least a fifth of whiskey and several 40s. So they get you fucked up, right, take you to the woods a couple miles away from school, and leave you there, blindfolded, to make it back to campus. Long story short, I didn’t make it back. I woke up around 5am to a few of the older guys shaking me awake on the side of the road in pool of my own piss—luckily, they found me before campus security or the police did, or else they would’ve been in a shit ton of trouble. You can probably imagine that ‘Pisser’ became the nickname that followed me for the next four years.”
— Ernesto, 23
11. When you’re on a bachelor’s bender in Ibiza.
“At my best friend’s week-long bachelor party in Ibiza, I took molly for the fourth ‘night’ in a row at 6am, while very much drunk and coked-out. My heart started beating not only super fast, but at a crazy, irregular pace, which was really fucking freaky. ‘Conor, dude, you’re 26…this is not a good look,’ I thought, seemingly mid-heart attack (but also having a low-key good time, considering I was rolling fucking face), as a group of Spanish teenage girls frantically called an ambulance to the beach—where I’d wandered, naked, to go for a little death swim—to take me to the hospital. Chill, Conor. Super chill.”
— Conor, 27
12. When you decide the best chaser for Absinthe is shrooms.
“When I visited Amsterdam during my junior year abroad in Europe, I decided it was a good idea to trip on shrooms for the first time while already drunk on fucking Absinthe. All I remember is being curled up in a pile of vomit in the terrace of my hotel room, furiously gripping the beanie I had on, because I’d convinced myself my head would fall off it I took it off.”
— Whittier, 23
13. When you celebrate passing the Series 79 by giving a homeless man $100.
“The Series 79 is one of several exams I had to pass in order to start my job on Wall Street. It was the first one I took, so the day I found out I passed it, I obviously got extremely turnt. I started taking tequila shots at noon and didn’t stop till I blacked-in in the depths of Central Park, where, apparently, I’d escaped from my buddies to smoke a blunt with a homeless man. He was kind enough to lead me out of the park and help me find a cab—I gave him the only cash I had in my wallet, an 100 dollar bill, as a ‘thank you—I probably wouldn’t’ve made it out otherwise.’ He definitely deserved it.”
— Paulina, 24
14. When you break into the president’s house.
“I had to go on probation and a year-long alcohol therapy program in college after breaking into the president’s house while gin-drunk and almost breaking my fucking neck when I decided to jump off his second-floor terrace into the bushes. I no longer drink.”
— Lucas, 26
15. When you’re stranded in the Middle East without hard alcohol.
“I was traveling in the Middle East (Jordan), which is a weird place to almost die of alcohol…but, there I am, stuck sleeping on this pull out bed with my friend, so we start drinking all this beer so we can black out and actually fall asleep. We have no liquor and we realize we’re going have to drink way too much beer, so we pop some Ambien as well and shotgun a few more beers with it. Then things go black. But this was in the era of flip cams, and what we found on that camera the next morning was horrifying. There’s footage of me fucking around on the edge of the apartment building and I actually trip and almost fall off the building down five stories, but luckily catch myself. That’s not even the weirdest thing on the camera, but it was definitely a moment of flirting with death without even being conscious of it.”
— Dimitri, 28
16. When you have your first glass of wine at 30,000 feet in the air.
“Ever gotten WAY too fucked up on an international flight? I have! I was on may way to study abroad in Barcelona when I had my first drink—ever. I was 19, living near school still with my Mormon parents whom I’d never been away from for more than a night and who’d, obviously, never let me taste alcohol before. I wasted no time christening myself into a ‘European’ lifestyle—when the flight attendant offered me a glass of wine, I was stoked—and one glass turned into five. Doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re thousands of feet in the air and weigh 110 pounds, five will do it. I woke up to the co-pilot banging on the bathroom door, where I’d fallen asleep on the toilet. The next six hours were easily the most miserable six hours of my life. I spent my first 24 hours in Spain in bed with what science would deem a near-death hangover.”
— Cassie, 21