the ol' college try

So, says the storyteller, sitting on a chair on the back porch, a tumbler of Irish whiskey in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time my cousin and I went on a pub crawl one frozen December night in Fargo after I graduated college?

It was 2007. I was 22, and a newly-minted college graduate. And I do mean new: I'd been handed my diploma only two hours earlier. It was bitterly cold. December isn't even the coldest month in North Dakota, but that night was a frozen hell. My grandparents and my eldest cousin B had graciously driven eight hours from northwestern Illinois to be at my graduation ceremony. Along the way, they'd had a flat tire. It was the dark of night, somewhere in the vicinity of Wahpeton, one of the loneliest stretches of Interstate 29. The wind was howling. Snow caked the landscape and filled the air. It was easily -30 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind was something corrosive, like acid. Any exposed skin was instantaneously stung by the icy blast, and then numbed, deadened. Changing that tire was an exercise in the same kind of agony that's buggered everyone from Neanderthal man to the Donner Party. Grandpa could only stand to be outside the car for a few seconds at a time. Dad and Mom (who were themselves driving up from their home in Wyoming, and had joined my grandparents in their mutual trek along I-29) stood outside in the midst of Valhalla and changed the tire. They spent the remaining hour to Fargo trying to prevent their hands from turning black and falling off. My cousin B is tough. He's a Marine, for crying out loud—that should tell you something right there. He's four years older than I am, lean as a rail, every ounce of him either muscle or bone or sprung steel. Gimlet eyes, square jaw, warrior's courage. Even he said he'd never been anywhere so cold in his life. He couldn't figure out how I stood being up there for three winters straight.

Not even that, however, could stop me from having myself a drink on graduation night. The ceremony went well. I didn't trip leaving the stage. I waved modestly to Mom and Pop, sitting in the stands, misty-eyed. I found them in the lobby after it was all over. I shook hands with some of my classmates, and humbly accepted the congratulations of my proud parents and grandparents. We all (somehow) made our way through the blizzard to our cars parked outside the Fargodome, and got back to the Radisson Hotel.

Then we had a celebratory dinner. B and I each had a tall glass of the Michelob Amber Bock, and without even realizing it, the night's drinking had commenced. The folks and grand-folks hit the hay after dinner, leaving B and myself at the hotel bar for what we assured them would be "just a few drinks." He had a Heineken. In complete defiance of the weather, I had a Corona. With lime. That's how I roll.
Blizzard, you can go take a running jump, I thought to myself.
"So, you know anybody in town who might like to come out?" B asked me.
I did, as a matter of fact. Brad and Arthur, two fellows I'd had the privilege to share some general education classes with, and who I'd been bumming around with ever since. (Without them, I'd have spent most of my college career sober.) I couldn't think of a better pair of drinking buddies, so I gave 'em a ring and before long they were coming in, shaking the cold out of their coats.

It seemed only natural, after B & A had had their opening beers, to transition into shots. This is where my memory starts to get fuzzy. Only starts, mind you. There were three drinking establishments that we hit, all situated along Broadway in midtown Fargo. Well, there were three drinking establishments that we hit, at the time of this particular slice of debauchery at least: Dempsey's Irish Pub, Rooters, and the Old Broadway. These varied in style and patronage from dive bar to as-hip-as-North-Dakota-can-possibly-get, which ain't much.

We hit Dempsey's first. Good crowd. Standing room only. The joint's only about as wide as a walk-in closet, but somehow we fought our way to the bar and got some beers. The night was in full swing. Smoke filled the air. (Yes, real cigarette smoke; you can still smoke in bars in ND. Quaint, right?) The yells of happy drunken people, most of them in our age bracket, resounded up and down the long, low room, drowning out the jukebox. Up at the bar, teams of four were challenging the "Shot Ski," an old wooden ski slotted with four round holes. Four friends would simultaneously lift the ski and tilt it, each thereby imbibing the shots thoughtfully inserted into the aforementioned holes by the willing staff. My single greatest regret about that night is that B, Brad, Arthur and I didn't try it.

Finding Dempsey's a little packed and smoky for our taste, we ventured out into the dark, slippery streets, back into the chill wind, to sample another venue. I remember there being no shortage of other people out walking around that night, even despite the blasphemous weather. We walked and walked and walked, down to the southern boundary of Fargo nightlife, the Old Broadway. Colloquially known as the "Slut Factory," the OB was eastern North Dakota's number-one producer of freak-dancing blondes. The production line was running at full capacity that night. Blinded by strobes, deafened by insidious music, wowed by beer brands we didn't recognize, elbowing our way past members of both sexes, all clamped tightly together on the tiny dance floor, we made our way to the back corner. Flippant to the last, we sat down and ordered some Jell-O shooters. This was my first and (so far) only experience with Jell-O shots of any kind. I was too far gone by this point to remember much of anything about them. I must've found them rather forgettable, even with a BAC of 0.2%. Attempts at conversation proved futile, what with people like Usher and Ludacris exploding from the sound system. Brad's Lutheran sensibilities, admirably ingrained even after two pitchers and six shots, were offended by the number of wannabe lesbians out on the floor.

With that in mind, we adjourned to our final stop: Rooters, right in between Dempsey's and the OB, on the east side of Broadway. This place must've been around since the pioneer days. It looked exactly like one of those enormous saloon halls from the movies: a wide room with a high ceiling, and a bar a mile long. Excuse me, I mean two wide rooms with high ceilings, and bars a mile long. This was what kind of freaked me out. It was as if two bars were built right next to each other, and the proprietor's minds were connected by some strange psionic link, causing them to make their respective establishments exact mirror images of each other. And then, after discovering this salient fact, both owners just said "screw it" and knocked out the wall between the two bars, rendering them two connected rooms displaying bilateral symmetry. The bar in the southernmost room was on the south side; the bar in the northern room was on the north side. Both rooms had their mirrors, bar stools, tables, and even lights in exactly the same place, only diametrically opposed to each other. And in case you're wondering, no, I was not seeing double. We picked a table in the southernmost room after deciding the atmosphere in the northernmost wasn't quite right. (It's anyone's guess as to how we decided that.) We sat down, ordered up a few more pitchers, and just sat and talked as best we could over the noise of hundreds. I caught up with B, and he and Brad and I had some entertaining discussions about life, the universe and everything, booze-fueled. Arthur, bless him, who had remained Brad's designated driver by some Herculean effort, indulgently sat and listened to the doggerel we spouted for hours on end. It was a fine, relaxing cap to an end-all evening.

At something approaching 2:00 a.m., we staggered out of Rooters and turned our steps to the Radisson. We slithered over slush piles and ice puddles, wantonly weaving through the now-empty street. B and I took fond leave of Brad and Arthur in the lobby, called for the elevator, entered our shared room, and promptly passed out. Little did either of us realize that we would be woken up at 5:30 to go drive home. I'd rather not remember anything about that morning. I remember B raising an emphatic fist and bringing it down with all his might upon the shrieking alarm clock; I remember Mom and Dad finally jolting us out of bed at six with a thunderous knock; I remember trying to pack my clothes into my suitcase, still drunk, wondering how in the world I was going to drive my car 13 hours back home; I remember saying goodbye to Gramp and Gran and ashen-faced B in the freezing hotel parking complex in the snowy gray light of dawn; I remember the hangover kicking in somewhere between Main and 13th Avenue; I remember begging my mother to kill me and hurl my abused corpse into the icy Red River; I remember my sweet, sympathetic mother buying me some hot chocolate at the gas station; and I remember slowly, ever so slowly reviving as I downed the scalding beverage and cranked up the radio in my Ford Taurus, as our little two-car convoy clambered onto I-29 and headed south, bound for Wyoming.

It was a good night: fun, booze-filled, freezing-ass cold, and it made for some rather fond memories. B and I agreed (via e-mail, much later) that we would make it a tradition. We'd visit every one of our remaining five cousins when they graduated college and treat them to something similar. My cousin Dirk and my brother H both graduate in the spring of 2011. Oh boy, won't that be interesting...