Last Friday Night

I recently had a Friday night like that song. You know the one. No, not Rebecca Black. Katy Perry. "There's a stranger in my bed. There's a pounding in my head. I smell like a mini-bar. Think the city towed my car." And so on and so forth...

It started out innocently enough. This guy, let's call him A, asked me to meet him for a drink. Well, one drink turned into 17. We were downing shit I hadn't ever expected to drink again after high school: whiskey and cokes, Long Island iced teas, Irish car bombs. It was out of control. I think our bar tab was like $90. At some point I realize neither of us is in any condition to drive. But I still want to get him to come home with me. So I start texting my friend and harassing her to come hang out with us. I figure she can give us a ride, or at least help me brainstorm a way to get him back to my lair.

So she arrives and is pretty instantly fed up with our drunken shenanigans. Turns out we weren't nearly as funny as we thought we were to sober people. So while A is in the bathroom, my friend whispers to me that when he gets back, she's going to announce she's bringing me home and that if he would also like a ride to my house, then jump on in. Brilliant. And he totally fell for it.

So she drops us off at my house and I realize I've forgotten my keys. No big deal, there is a spare one hidden in the garden. Except that while I'm stumbling through the backyard, knocking over garden gnomes and stepping on tomato plants, my dog is inside barking his head off. (I had always wondered if my dog would react to an intruder in our yard, so this came as something of a relief and a welcome surprise. For a second.) Then I realized he was going to wake up my roommate and I would be caught bringing a boy home. In the year I had lived there, no one had ever brought a random home. I was about to be busted as the house slut.

As I'm turning over stones in the garden trying to remember where the key is hidden while simultaneously trying to get the dog to shut up by yelling "It's me, you fucking idiot!" A decides this would be an opportune time to pee in our raspberry bushes. "What are you doing?! We have toilets inside!" I yelled just as my roommate opened the back door to see what the shit was going on. She said later that she was confused to see a burglar in the backyard start waving and walking toward her. We stood there awkwardly in the kitchen, with me not introducing anyone. I apologized profusely, grabbed A and ran to my room.

Skip over the good parts...

The next day, feeling like a total asshole, I apologized some more to my roommate for waking her up. Then I started to tell her the story of how I met this guy and the crazy night I had. "Wait," she said. "You mean that guy last night? That wasn't S?"

S was the last guy I dated. We had stopped dating, oh, about 24 hours before I had started dating A. Not overlap exactly, but... pretty close. In her sleepy confusion in the dark, my roommate had mistaken the new guy for the old guy. In a momentary panic, I racked my brain, trying to remember if she had addressed A as S the night before. I couldn't be sure, but I didn't think so. Whew. That was close.