The Bison Speaks

Hello All. I am the 33rd Degree Bison. The most secretive and gamey of all Bison. I am pure of bloodline and spirit. My shaggy coat holds deeper secrets than most will ever know.

Also, I like beer.

Someone near and dear to me has posted the invitation to discuss my first encounter with this usually tasty beverage, though my first encounter was anything but.

I was something like 19 and at university in scenic Boston, MA. It was fall 2002 and my good friend Nate had just been informed that, due to his kind membership in the national guard, he had won an all-expenses paid trip to Iraq! Needless to say, we were all ecstatic for his amazing luck in being sent off to be shot at in foreign desert. His parents were going to be out of town for weekend so we decided to drive out to their house in central MA for a weekend of debauchery.

Our group of nine or so arrived at Nate's house as it began to snow on a cold friday night. It was a remarkable house, if only for the fact that accessing the "front" door required climbing some very akward steps and entering via a deck. It was not so much a split level structure as the product of some seismic upheaval which vomited a normal house out of the ground and caused all but 10" of the house to settle back above the Earth's loving embrace.

We all decided to hang out in Nate's basement which doubled as an entertainment room, ball python habitat and mud room (this is central Mass. after all). Everyone was getting blitzed on the usual godawful college drinks. This included, but was not limited too, anything made with vodka from a plastic bottle or Bacardi 151. Eventually all the "good" stuff ran out and we switched to beer. I was not a beer person and I protested until someone forced one upon me. I just had to shut up and do it. I was the big money winner with a shiny, cold bottle of Heineken!!!

I opened it, took a few sips, and promptly formed a lifelong aversion to this skunky, asstastic impostor of a beer. What flavor it did have was vile and tart and the aftertaste lingered longer than any awful flavor ought to. I took one for the team and kept on going.

Halfway through some kind Samaritan informed me that my then-girlfriend had been drinking like a fish and was now properly destroyed. A* was a small Taiwanese gal who had a genetic predisposition to being a lightweight and had consumed six mixed drinks in an hour and a half.

I would spend the next eight hours watching over her as she alternately got sick and passed out, making sure that she didn't end up dead, or at least poisoned. Seemingly everyone else was off getting laid, smoking up or turning the hot tub water a weird shade of light brown. The last bit works something like this: nude hippie-esque folk, plus hot tub, equals hippie tea. I saw only bits of the process, but the aftermath was both awe-inspiring and terrifying.

I finally passed out around 6 AM, my half-empty beer still next to my head as I crashed on someone's bedroom floor. We all woke up, had some steak and eggs, nursed varying degrees of hangovers and drove back to Boston. The girlfriend I, and my half-empty shitty beer, had watched over for eight hours would soon hook up with my good friend at a rave and start dating him. This lead to my exclusion from my social group and effectively the worst year of my adult life.

Heineiken was there for one of the worst nights of my life and I will never forgive it.

I didn't drink beer again for nearly two years.

Next installment: Techno Debauchery: Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the malts.