I will never get married again, and for the most part try to discourage such activities.  Nonetheless, I am still a victim of my culture so part of me thinks people can live happily ever after.

And I really do like weddings.  Actually, weddings not so much – they’re usually boring, religious, and way too long.  What I really like are wedding receptions.  The ones with host bars, though I understand if finances are such that a no-host bar is necessary.  But there must be a bar.  Alcohol-free wedding receptions are bullshit.

Months ago I got a “save the date” notice from my friend Alex.  Alex and I went to law school together.  Alex was the youngest of our group of friends.  Most of us had taken a while to get through college – me due to five years of junior college whilst working, a couple other friends due to some time off to deal with their nasty drug habits – or had had other careers before deciding to go to law school.  Alex had gone directly from high school to university to law school without passing go.

Alex was not only young, but very sweet and innocent.  Turns out he was from Salt Lake City, Utah, which explained the innocence – of course he was one of those sheltered Mormon boys.  Only he wasn’t.  If he were, he wouldn’t have been quite so young because he would have taken a couple years off to do his mission.  Turns out young Alex was Jewish.  And Russian.  From Russia.  He had moved to the US as a young teen.  Alex was the kind of adorable that made everyone want to protect him.

Or corrupt him.  He didn’t drink, he said because he didn’t like the taste of alcohol.  I explained to him on several occasions that most of the rest of us don’t really like the taste of alcohol either, but we sure like what it does to us, so we buck up.  He didn’t care, perhaps because he saw how stupid we’d get when we were drunk.

I went through all my “starter” drinks in an effort to get him to drink.  Well, not all – I skipped the wine coolers, which had gone out of fashion in the decade since I began drinking, and didn’t bother with peppermint schnapps, which I didn’t expect Alex to be able to stomach if I still couldn’t after my overdose.  I bought him a Midori sour, which at this point in my drinking career is so cloyingly sweet it’s not worth it for me to drink.

I bought him Bailey’s on the rocks, which he said burned as it went down.  He finally settled on an alcoholic beverage he liked after a trip to Europe – beer and 7UP.  It just sounds horrible to me, and Alex didn’t like it enough to drink it when he wasn’t on vacation, so it must not have been all that good.

Because Alex didn’t drink, he always got screwed when a big group from law school would go out to dinner.  Inevitably, there were several bottles of wine consumed, with Alex drinking water, or if he was feeling wacky, a soda.  When the bill came, the people who had ordered appetizers and main courses and wine decided it should be split evenly.  Alex would have had just one course, and perhaps a salad, and no alcohol, so there was no way he should have had to pay as much as the rest of us.  Alex was too nice and polite to speak up, opting instead to not make a stink which could cause tension.

I had no such compunctions.  We were all in law school, for fuck’s sake, we could do some simple math.  When the particular large group went out, there was also often a shortage of money to the point that not only Alex but also the Ex and I often overpaid.  Somewhere out there, those cheap shits owe all of us money.

[To be continued.]

I swear.  True story.

  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •