If you hit someone in the real world with a whiskey bottle, like they do in all of the old western movies, you will hurt them so badly that they may be killed. Regardless, they are not coming back to this fight or probably another one for a week. The bottle doesn't break, the head does. I know. I saw it on MythBusters™ on television, so it has to be true. Every one of the movies that I have seen that included the knocking out of someone by use of a bar bottle should have included death. This could be said about the prolonged fist-fights of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone and all other heroes who have their own plastic figures for sale online because they are now so old that the originals are no longer carried in the stores. The point is simple. What happens in movies, and what the human can withstand in real life are not the same. I wish that I could say that I have been a teetotaler all of my life. I do. If you have read some of my stories, you know that I have not been one until the last few years of my life, and that not because of choice or 12-step program but because of medication for epilepsy. I recognize that I have many flaws and one of them is a drive for completion. Some would say excess, but I think that is limiting. Excess means that you do too much of something. I say completion because I want to finish something. Think of cleaning your plate, doing all of your homework, meticulously taking care of your yard or drinking all of the alcohol there is available or will be sold to you. My tendency was a one or all approach. One drink, or all of the drinks. This is not an advocacy or confession, it is a declaration for the purpose of context. Some early career Olympic bouts that are a part of my fighting history but don't count as a part of my professional record include downing a six-pack of The Champagne of Beers™ when I was 16 in about an hour. There was the uncounted number of shots of green-bottle Jack Daniels when I was 14 years old at camp. That included a 2-day hangover. I do not consider those real bottle bouts, they were more like sparring matches with bruises. Thinking back on my history of professional consumption, it was all before I was 28 years old. Many people have their "We were so drunk that time that we…" stories. I have a scrapbook of those myself, many of them occurred within the five-year period before I was legally able to drink. I want to sweep those a way as bad training for an even worse sport from which I am happy to have retired. I lost my first bottle fight with of fifth of gin in Minneapolis. For some reason, I had decided that gin and tonic was my drink. On a theater field trip in college, (I was a theater major for about an hour and a half until I determined I had no talent or willingness to starve for my art), we went to Minneapolis to watch a lot of theater. We watched theater and we were unsupervised. Somehow, I made a decision to meet up with some of the crew, but I would make certain I was "primed" for the meal. Probably it had to do with money. When you are in college, tailgating is synonymous with not buying expensive drinks for yourself at the bars. I believe this had something to do with that. I was playing a drinking game with a couple, Celeste and Perry. For some reason, of their design or mine, I lost every round until the bottle was gone. That is truly about the last sequential memory I have. There were events of me wandering downtown Minneapolis late at night with people in the absolutely frigid air. I remember kissing woman/women that I knew/did not know, (as hard to clarify now as it was then). Of course, there were multiple occasions of getting sick. I hope that I had some food at a diner. I cannot confirm this. The next day we got on the bus and rode it back to Lincoln, Nebraska. It was awful. I was hungover. I was drunk. I was sick. I was awake. I was exhausted. The thing of all sense memory was that I stank of gin. No one within 50 feet would have doubted that I had slept in a dumpster for the past week and sat on the corner asking for loose change during the day to buy a bottle. This would not have been so bad if, like most bad hangovers, it lasted a day and went away. For three days my body sweat gin. My mouth tasted like gin. People said that I smelled like gin. When I finally shed the last molecules out of my body of gin and had been cleared by doctors of my gin-concussion, I stopped getting in the ring with bottles of gin for life. The idea that there would be premium brands of Tequila was beyond conception when I was 21 years old. There was Jose Quervo and then there was whatever other bottle of non-tequila alcohol on the shelf next to it. No one drank tequila for flavor, let alone with the anticipation of developing a palette for bad, good and best. Tequila was for shots, taken with salt and lime. There was the appropriate shaking of the head and closing of the eyes after consuming because it tasted like sh*t, and then you would throw back some beer to wash the taste out of your mouth. The idea of "premium tequilas" is just another demonstration of the stupidity of the American consumer. You may think that this comes from my own bitter experience from thirty years ago. Possibly. I do hold a grudge. This may be in part because I cannot even smell a whiff of tequila without a gag reflex. If that had passed over thirty years, then so would have my grudge. Alas, both remain. "Let's do tequila shots!" I am not the only person who has heard the battle cry of the inebriated. I understand that Jagermeister could be the liquor of choice to replace tequila at this time, but in my time, there was just one guaranteed stupid choice everyone cheered for and that was tequila. The problem with tequila is that you can survive a few minor skirmishes with only some cuts and bruises, a strong headache and a taste similar to cat litter mixed with turpentine in your mouth and throat. These early non-terminal conflicts created a sense of unwarranted courage that in my case led to my tequila bottle fight demise. Similar to other encounters, this bottle fight began with the simple loudly declared suggestion of one of our group, "Let's do tequila shots!" Unknown to me, I had chosen the "red pill" offered in the hand of Morpheus from The Matrix™ life choices that either the "blue pill" would have led me to a safe exit whereas the "red pill," now taken, would lead into a spiraling surreal world. (For context reference to this description, either read "Alice in Wonderland," or watch "The Matrix). Having taken the "red pill" I continued with tequila shots until the bottles, (memory is shaky, but it was at least 5), were gone. Our group had grown and shrunk several times. It wasn't just the call of "Let's do tequila shots!" How boring. We played drinking games for shots. Darts for shots. How many shots you could hold in your mouth at one time before having to swallow. Sometimes we used the required lemons or limes and salt. Other times no fruit. Sometimes no salt. Always no common sense. Of course, no matter what you were doing, once the shot was finished, the shot glass was turned upside down and slammed against the bar from which all drink had been served. There is something satisfying about the thunk sound, with the added benefit of signaling the bartender to pour more shots. I have had a single occasion of waking up in a hedge in my life. This occasion followed the "red pill" choice. I left out a small detail, the loose and fluctuating band of travelers with me had been made up of my fraternity brothers from Phi Kappa Tau. The hedge was in front of our fraternity house. Other fraternity brothers from years past as well as our current group had been found in conditions similar to mine in this hedge. It might as well have been declared an aid station or a MASH triage unit. I am not certain how I got there, under my own power or others or how long I had been there. As is my tendency to do, I took personal inventory: 1. Alive? Yes 2. Damaged? Heavily 3. Dressed? Yes, although, missing a shoe. 4. Did I vomit? Yes, frequently and violently. 5. Am I likely to vomit now? Spin the wheel, odds are not in favor of the player. 6. Can I move? Yes, but crawling is the only guaranteed method of survival.
The remainder of the day and part of the next morning it took gallons of water, a bottle of Tylenol™, sleep and surviving the mocking of my fraternity brothers for my antics for the night before to recover. No more tequila for me, ever. Can't even smell it without PTSD flash backs to the hedges, the smell of vomit and the inability to stand upright. Jezynowka needs just a little explanation as to what it is before I can tell you how I lost at Polish Polka with this one. Jeynowka is a Polish blackberry brandy with a strong kick to it. Now you know my opponent, and I would call that brandy and me "friends," still, even though we don't travel in the same circles or send each other Christmas cards. We were introduced by a guy who worked for me named Rich who played the concertina in a polka band on the weekends. As middle-school teachers are pestered to come watch the basketball games of their students or parents are yelled at by their children to watch the child jump from the diving board, Rich wanted me to come watch the polka band. He promised if I came with some friends, he would buy the first round of Jeynowka for us. I finally agreed that I would gather some friends and we would come. Friday night came and three couples agreed to go after dinner to this little bar in South Omaha, the original melting pot of immigrants, and visit the polka show for three or four songs and then cut out. The pub's sign was a faded white plastic square within even more faded letters in a font that attempted European scroll, but was unreadable. Running across the length of the bottom of the sign was a similar plastic sign for "Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer." The beer distributor who had clearly bought the sign for the pub some many years ago. The door was diamond stained glass in a criss-cross pattern with alternating patterns of gold, red, green and clear. Alternating glass diamonds is an overstatement. The proper term is random. I was trying to think of ways to offset the general dismay and discouragement of my friends as we were entering after having seen the sign, saw the door and hearing a strong sound of concertina lead, "Oom-Pah-Pah" music emanating from the bar. Nothing came to me. We pushed the door to go in. As we stepped through the door, we were visually struck by a number of overwhelming things. To the right, IMMEDIATELY TO THE RIGHT, so close to the right that the door almost bumped the concertina when Rich extended, was the band stage. The band stage could not have been bigger than 3x3. It fit a drummer, a guitarist, a bass player and the concertina player. The bar was in fire-marshal violation blocking the front door, and we hadn’t made it two feet into the bar yet. Immediately in front of the band were the whirling dervishes of polka dancers. They were wearing big white blouses and black swinging skirts with hand stitched small flowers near the bottom of the skirts. The men were wearing white shirts and dark vests and everyone was swinging and clapping directly in front of us so that we were backed against the door and the wall. I felt like a Scooby-doo monster wall would spin at any moment and take us to another place. You could see past the dancers to a stacked set of tables and chairs that looked like the entire group had been bought at a church yard sale. Laminated table tops and folding chairs crowded together. At the very back was a bar that ran the entire length of the room. The song ended. Rich spoke into the microphone introducing our group, ordering from the microphone the promised brandy and asking for the audience to make room for us as they sat down for drinks and break. He asked this in a stro