Girl Drink Drunk
Sorry, I can't think of anything hilarious this week but this is interesting and a little weird.

Several years ago I had a few friends that were younger than me (sort of a band of younger brothers of my actual friends) obviously at 18 it would be socially suicidal to go to parties with them but we did occasionally hang out, which is when I found out about someone who (I think) was named Timmo.

At every party they had Timmo would turn up with two bottles of vodka. Everyone would stand watching with reverential awe (the same reverential awe they used when telling me this story) as he sat down at a table in the middle of the room. He would spend a moment looking at the bottles, sizing them up like an old enemy. Quickly he would open the first one and, in the hushed silence, down half of it. No pausing for breath, no burping, no sudden explosion of vomit. Just whoomph gone. Somone would tell him when thirty minutes had gone by and he would sit down again, eyeing up the bottle ruefully and then quaff the remaining half. At the half way point he would appear slightly drunk, but not too drunk to be able to pick up the second bottle exactly 30 minutes later and knock off another half of that. Nor again, another 30 minutes later when he finished off his supply to a round of applause. Afterwards there would be slight stumbling, but not the coma that everyone would expect. This would happen at each and every party and did so for nearly a year before I was told the story.

My first reaction to it was one of awe and a sizable chunk of jealousy. Vodka was my drink. I was known for be being able to put away decent amounts of it. At 18 this is still a good thing and here I was being made to look unmanly by a kid. Worse still I was being told the story by people who looked up to me as 'cool' (ahhh those were the days) and I felt like a bit of a disappointment. Anyhow with jealously at the forefront of my mind I, obviously, instantly proclaimed he was cheating. Told them that what was in the bottles was water and not vodka and at the next party they should check. The bottles would be open already. They did. They weren't. He allowed the friend to check the bottle was unopen and then open it for him, increasing his kudos and at the same time embarass the friend for having doubted his legend. This did not go down well with the friend, which he told me in no uncertain terms.

I pondered on this for a long time with two major thoughts running through my head. The most important was a memory of a rather cool biology teacher once telling me that drinking so much was impossible. The fact he had actually given me was that nobody could drink a bottle of vodka in under 45 minutes without dying. The alcohol poisoning it would result in would be too acute for the body to cope. Despite being armed with this fact I still had doubts (obviously; it seemed this kid had managed this amazing feat without cheating). It wasn't helped by the fact I was currently reading Stephen King's IT wherein a character does exactly the same thing by snorting lemon juice. The pain this causes confuses the body long enough to get the alcohol into his system without it noticing. Stupid I know but enough to make me doubt what I knew, especially with the evidence involved.

And then, from nowhere, common sense ran out the winner and I knew the answer. When the next party was on the horizon I told the friend to wait until Timmo was distracted and then run his finger over the top of the bottle and see if he could figure out the answer. He duly did so and felt a small dent directly in the middle. Catching on quickly he turned the bottle upside down and saw the contents start to drip from the cap. Timmo turned round just in time, a look of horror crossing his face, as the friend opened the bottle himself and downed half of it, much to the amazement of everyone around.



The dimple in the cap was where Timmo stabbed the bottle with the syringe. He would painstakingly remove nearly all of the vodka from both bottles before either syringing water back into them or holding them under the tap for hours. The bit I could never understand was why he would do this at all? He sacrificed hours of his time, the chance of drinking actual alcohol at the party and went on to have to bore himself stupid by acting drunk for the entire night when he was in fact stone cold sober. Either way he became a bit of a social pariah for quite a few years afterwards and no one ever really trusted him again. I'd like to say I felt sorry for him but to lie and cheat all of your friends for an entire year just to look cool? No chance.
( Gleeballs is mostly made out of chocolate and hate., Sat 19 Nov 2005, 10:21, Reply)