How to Go On a Road Trip
Stagger to the hotel. Once inside your room, Rick asks, “Where’s John?” to which you drunkenly think, ‘John who?’ Realize you haven’t seen your momentarily forgotten friend since you first arrived at the party. The two of you should try to find him. John could be bleeding to death in a gutter somewhere. Somebody has to go looking for him, lest he become a headline in tomorrow’s paper: “Dartmouth freshman left for dead on the streets of New Haven.”
You and Rick fall asleep.
The next day the two of you wake up to find John, miraculously, shivering beneath a thin sheet on the floor of the room. Where the hell was he all night? Over breakfast you will learn that the word “miraculously” is far more apt than you would have imagined.
At the party last night, John was asked by the most attractive of the three girls—the other two disappeared soon after your arrival—to go for a walk through the courtyard. John accepted because he has always loved pretense. At the girl’s dorm room, her removing his shirt, him removing her blouse, she noticed a gold cross hanging from his neck on a gold chain. The girl explained that she was Jewish. She asked, “Can you take it off?”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
John considered how “as blue balls” would have sufficed. The sound of his Christian necklace crashing to the floor preceded decidedly less than Christian activity. Yes. John forsook his god for the sake of pussy. Afterwards, despite the haze of coital bliss, he managed to find the hotel, even though he had lost his room key. The concierge had a good laugh at his plight.
Around noon, the April day replete with May sun, you and Rick and John check out of the hotel and pick up the car. On this next half of the trip, according to the plan, you are heading to Williams College, where a childhood friend of John’s is expecting the three of you for, according to the plan, a night not to remember. You get lost while leaving New Haven. The crack vials crunching beneath the tires bare proof of why it is considered a dangerous town. Your Mapquest directions, one vital page of which you lost on the way down, are completely useless. Stupid Mapquest. At last you stumble on the route out of town.
The drive seems to take forever, due partly to your throbbing head. Wear sunglasses. Consider all the cures for a hangover. Smoke cigarettes. One day you will regret what happens next, but only with the justification that, after all, it was the privilege of being a college student who, at that point in your life, still lived in a world without consequences.
“I don’t know about y’all,” you say while driving the car, “but I could go for a beer.”
John says, “Me too.”
Rick says, “Me three.”
If a person is from a place without hailable taxis, they have driven drunk at some point in their life. Rick is from Oklahoma and you are from Mississippi and John is from Michigan. In those states “cab” is a type of wine. It therefore does not come as a surprise to you that at a liquor store somewhere between Yale University and Williams College you purchase a case of Bud Light with your falsified Texas drivers license in order to drink it while operating a moving vehicle. Why didn’t you think of this an hour ago?
All three of you finish your first beers while the liquor store is still visible in the rear-view mirror. Over the rest of the trip, something magical occurs, not just in the circuitry of your brains, sparking alive with the advent of hooch, but also in the circuitry of the car radio. You would have thought radio stations around Nowheresville, New England, would be in limited supply, but there behind the wheel of your Rent-a-Wreck, Ford POS, dozens of stations come through perfectly clear. Everything they play is amazing. Bonnie Tyler? You got it. Spin Doctors? Damn straight. Tina Turner? Uh-huh. Peter Cetera? Bet your ass.
On your arrival in Williamstown, MA, singing along to Alannah Myles’ “Black Velvet” at full volume, the three of you find a spot to park near the dorms. Empty beer cans fall clattering to the asphalt when you open the doors to get out of the car. It is four o’clock in the afternoon.
Tonight all of you will be sleeping in the dorm room of John’s friend. The square footage of said room equals roughly that of a shoe closet on a houseboat. In order to avoid thinking of sleeping ass-to-crotch tonight, Rick and you and John quickly accept the offer from John’s friend to hang out at his social house, the current iteration of what once was a fraternity. John’s friend plays on the football team, which means all the friends of John’s friend play on the football team, which means John’s friend’s friends are twice your size. Your next move should be obvious. Challenge residents of the house to a drinking game.