Mullets and Mayhem

In my last semester of college, my fraternity threw a Valentine's Day party and we were all tasked with bringing dates. We would sometimes have dated parties, when our social chairman couldn’t drum up a decent sorority to party with. The concept of a dated party was fine for big events like the formal or the destination unknown party, but it seemed like a cop out to have them for the every day parties, because it denied us the chance to meet and party with new people. As I mentioned in the "Curse of the Irish" story, setups were common for dated parties, so my roommate set me up with a girl he knew. Although my date was pretty, we really didn’t hit it off that well. She left fairly early on, which was no big deal, since there were plenty of other guys not getting along with their blind dates, and we just hung out together instead.

During your average frat party, I would consume about fifteen beers. The beers available were generally cheap ones that could be purchased in quantity for less than five dollars a case. The beers that qualified were Olympia, whose slogan ("It’s the Water") I never really understood, Koch’s Golden Anniversary, which was oddly thick and tasted about like urine smelled, and Meister Brau, which was relatively inoffensive and drinkable. On very special occasions, we would drink Busch beer, which was considered premium in comparison, but was the least expensive of the "name" beers.

On this occasion, I probably had ten Meister Braus, plus several glasses of Valentine’s punch composed of cheap sparkling wine and rainbow sherbet. To top things off, I then guzzled at least half of a bottle of the sparkling wine that hadn’t been used for the punch. In addition, there were dishes full of those chalky candy valentine hearts with silly messages on them, throughout the house. I could never pass up candy of most kinds, so I was eating them all evening.

After the party ended, I was in the third-floor communal bathroom and got into a drunken shouting much with Mike, one of my frat buddies. Although there was no real animosity and we were just horsing around, the shouting match led to an actual fight where I ended up throwing him, fully clothed, into a shower stall and turning the water on him. Then when I stumbled into the hallway, I realized my roommate, Ollie, had locked me out of the room. There was a tie on the door as a signal that he had a girl in there. As I was standing in the hallway unable to get into my room, I was jumped by four more of my frat buddies. They claimed they were going to get even with me for throwing Mike in the shower, but I think that being drunk, they just wanted to beat up on someone. This was all in good fun, I suppose. Anyway, I tried valiantly to fight all of them off, but was not faring so well when Ollie opened the door to see what all the commotion was outside the room. I took the opportunity to run into my room, despite the fact that he had a girl with him in there.

As you can imagine, all the drinking and physical exertion before bed set the stage for the inevitable conclusion to this story. A couple hours later, I woke up feeling terribly sick. Disoriented, I immediately began puking in my bed. Fortunately, Ollie noticed this and carried me to the bathroom. I could not be persuaded to puke anywhere but the sink, however. Ollie noticed that the last thing that came up made a clanging noise in the sink, so he went to check it out to make sure I hadn't swallowed a quarter or something. As luck would have it, it turned out to be one of those candy hearts, completely intact. I must have swallowed one of them whole, like an aspirin, probably washing it down with the bottle of sparkling wine. Believe it or not, the message was still legible: "BE MINE."

The moral to this story is really a health warning. It seems to me that if my stomach acid was unable to dissolve the message written on the candy hearts or the candy hearts themselves for that matter, then it can be assumed that these candies probably are somewhat unsafe for human consumption.