Red, White, and Booze

Disclaimer: The names of the people in this story have been changed to protect their secret identities.

You have to admit, people can be pretty narcissistic. They could go on bouts and bouts of getting wasted again and again just to try and lose control of themselves only to wake up the next morning and be amazed at themselves. "I did what?" Yeah, there's a shock on their faces, but you know they can't wait to hear the rest of the stories. "I actually forgot I did that!" But the sound of their voice alone tells you, they're proud of what they did . . . and forgot.

"I was talking to a tomato!" I could only give Chay a grin. More often, when I get the "allergies," I remember the entire night's highlights and, well, the lowlights too. That would be because I would then have to stop drinking and dilute the alcohol in my blood lest our drinking session instead turns into an ER episode. I then went on to tell Chay what happened, as I remembered them, the night before.

It started with the "new" drink. It was in a green bottle, not soju, and came in quarter-liter packaging. I think it was gin. I am not allergic to alcohol per se (thank God!), but certain nights just are, well, weird. So yeah, I can remember nights by the kind of drink we had then. Don't ask me dates nor special occasions. "Do you remember Ika's birthday last year?" I only would if I'm pretty close with the person, otherwise it would just be one of those nights to me. Forgive my drunkenness, really. "You remember that night we had ______ (name of drink)?" I would readily say I do. It's a gift; let it go. So it was the green night, as we now call it. "How do we drink that?" We started being concerned on how we drink new products when once we saw some Koreans down by a service station convenient store drinking sangria with bananas for pulutan. It's not that we think they were being weird or anything (we welcome that around here), it's just that we thought maybe that's how it's really done in some other part of the world. Who knows really, right? If we decide to be original and drink beer with banana cue, how are we to know if it must be how they also do it in a town in Liechtenstein? In the case of the green drink, well, it was just gin. We can handle that. We decided on lemon soda for our chaser.

It would seem there had been many bottles of green gin that night. It's like this, like when once you reach that certain level of intoxication, all else either become slower or faster from thereon. I'm rooting on the latter being what transpired that night, only a little faster than usual. There were four of us then. All I remember was one bottle after another then another then Lyla crossing the street as fast she could, pissed it would seem, and hurrying home. A guy friend somehow found himself with the remaining three of us, already drunk, and ended up going home with En-en, leaving her bag behind. The next coming days would, of course, find us interrogating her on what happened, perhaps something worth leaving her bag behind for. She said she was only very drunk. So there remained only Chay and me. "You were crying!" I laughed the moment I remembered what happened. "Whatever were you crying for?" I had to stop when her face started to took on her pikon look. Then, almost in exact synchronicity, "The pictures!" Lyla was our official photographer and kept a site where she posts our pictures. Usually, we would be excited to see our pictures after our nights, but this time it was different. En-en was shaking her head. "Let's blame the drinks." Lyla and I only looked at her, as though to say, Duh, what else? These are not us. Chay said it, "We're ugly in these pictures!" We laughed at that. They were pictures of how the green gin took on various forms using humans, us. Lyla got pissed. En-en got horny. Chay got dramatic. And I turned into a tomato.