December 28, 2002
Today is the day to have out with the new, in with the old
Zulkey.com will be going on a short break, further into the depths of the Midwest to the great state of Iowa, but will return Thursday, January 2. But that doesn't mean I'm leaving you high and dry, though, kids. Two things:
1-Another assignment! Give me your New Year's resolutions. Okay, not yours, but the ones you'd like to make for other people. I.e. "I resolve for Trent Lott to stop showing up at public appearances while intoxicated," or "I resolve for my little sister to stop being so lame." And so on. You'll have fun, promise.You'll have fun, promise
2-MORE bad New Year's Eve stories! Just what you need to get you in the mood for 2003. Enjoy!
Worst New Year's Eve Ever: Part II
From Stan Delahoyde (who, rumor has it, is related to somebody who has something to do with this.):
It was December 31st in my hometown in Western Nebraska a few years ago, and I was looking forward to a really great New Year’s Eve with my girlfriend. We were going to a special party out at the Country Club. Just being with her was fantastic enough, but to get into the Country Club for ANY reason was almost too much to believe.
In those days, the town didn’t allow liquor to be sold “by the drink”—that may still be true—I don’t know. For the ordinary person, that meant either drinking beer, or going to one of several places that sold glasses containing just the mix, such as 7-Up, and you brought your own alcohol to put in it. It was just a way around the law; everybody knew it, and they all looked the other way, pretending it didn’t happen. For the wealthy of the community, however, there was the sophisticated, private, fancy-dancy Country Club. They could get soused there any hour of the day and late into the night, with their drinks prepared by a spiffy, white-coated bartender.
Once in a great while the Club was opened to riff-raff such as us. It was also often used for high school graduation parties and the like, since it was definitely the classiest place in town. Even though we couldn’t yet legally drink, we all thought just being in the place was enough for a lifetime of memories. What a thrill it would be!
I had my only suit freshly pressed and dry-cleaned, my everyday shoes polished for the first time that year, a corsage ordered, and my hopes up for a great way to end one year and start the next. The Club was located in a very secluded area, so there was great potential for after-party activities, if you get my drift.
My girl and I had talked about the big night for weeks, and several times by phone the 31st. She was as excited as I was and even bought a new dress at Monique’s Nebraska Fashion Boutique and Bonnet Emporium just for the occasion. Things were really looking great!
That’s when I got another phone call. This time it was my boss at the Broadway Food Locker and Appliance City Ltd. As far as I know, we weren’t actually “limited” in any way and “city” was a bit of a misnomer, since our showroom was probably no more than about 25-by-35 feet, if that. We earned a little extra money renting out a small space for a metal rack loaded with brochures touting local bargains, area sites of interest to tourists, and others that were just printed advertising for almost anything you can imagine. One very colorful brochure promised spine-tingling excitement when “Bill and His Bald Eagle” put on their annual show over the weekend; another said there was a co-ed chug-a-lug contest coming up next month at the Buddy Bar; for family fun, tours were offered daily, except Sundays and holidays, at the cheese factory; and for the intellectual crowd, there was the announcement that the Sugar Beet Awareness lecture series was to begin a week from Thursday.
I’d worked at the BFL and ACL for a couple of years, after school and summers, and I was now the Assistant Manager. Even though the boss and I were the only ones there, I was pretty impressed with my title and never admitted I didn’t have anybody to manage, unless someone specifically asked about the other employees. Aside from washing the windows, sweeping the floors and polishing the Amana appliances and the futuristic “Radar Ranges”, I mainly referred customers to the boss so he could sell them whatever it was they came into the store for. He didn’t trust my sales ability as yet.
Another thing I did was dip chickens. No plucking, just dipping. We sold a lot of fresh chickens—fryers I think they were called; whole chickens with all the feathers removed. Many people would order a certain number, then have us put them directly into the lockers they rented in our freezer area. Before we could do that, they had to have a thin coating of ice applied—that helped to preserve them or something. Once the birds had been chilled to the proper temperature, my job was to grab their legs and quickly dunk them into a big tank of water we had in a small room just off the showroom floor. As soon as they hit the water, they became encased in ice. Then they were wrapped in paper and put back into the locker plant until it was time for their owners to have a big chicken dinner.
George—my boss—apologized profusely over the phone, but he said it was urgent that I work that night. New Year’s Eve! What could be so important that he would ruin my life? He said he’d just gotten a huge order for chickens and they had to be quick frozen and on their way to an important civic function in the neighboring state of Wyoming as soon as possible. I decided they must only grow cows in Wyoming—no chickens.
Since I was the only chicken dipper he had, the fate of the store was in my hands. Turned out George was on the verge of going out of business and this sale would take us out of the red and into the black in one fell swoop. It would also take me out of the good graces of my number one heartthrob and out of the back seat of my Ford, where I had hoped to wind up that night.
But if I was anything, I was a faithful and dependable employee and a pretty darned good chicken dipper, if I do say so myself. I had no choice—duty called. And so did I. I couldn’t face her in person. Needless to say my girlfriend was almost speechless when I told her there would be no party, no Country Club, and no Happy New, or old, Year—just a miserable night alone for both of us, thinking of what might have been. In fact, speechless is what she was from that time forward. It was the end of a beautiful romance.
However, the chickens turned out perfectly, and it’s conceivable I may have set several chicken dipping records. It was my dipping swan song, because I was off to college not long after and never saw George again. What happened to my girlfriend I don’t really know. I DO know that that New Year’s Eve was the most horrible one of both of our lives, or at least it was mine. If it weren’t for the fact that I did myself so proud as a chicken dipper that night it would probably be hard to think of it at all in a positive light.
From Ben Brown:
When I was in college, I dated a girl who was very tall, very red-headed, very tied to the mafia, and very addicted to anything that can be snorted up the nose. This includes but is not limited to: cocaine, heroin and ketamine. We will call this girl Marie, even though that is not her real name.
For New Years of 1997, Ray, a High School friend of mine -- short, fat, unwashed and unhealthy -- threw a party at his parents house. This house was not glamorous in any way. His parents raised exotic parrots for a pet shop, so the entire house was filled with bird crap. On the chips? Bird crap. In the dip? Bird crap. While making cookies, Ray's mom carried two baby parrots in her arms, feeding them some sort of nutritious bird gunk from bottles. In the cookies? Bird crap.
A lot of my high school friends came to the party. Old friends. Good friends.
Friends who had never even heard of ketamine, let alone watched large quantities
of it being snorted up someone's nose. Friends who did not know about K-holes.
Friends who were unaquainted with any addictive
substance other than Mountain Dew.
You know who else came to the party? Marie came to the party. Why did she come to the party? Because I wanted to show off my hot girlfriend.
Marie came to my friends humble, bird crap encrusted house wearing 6 inch leopard print platform boots, a leather miniskirt, and a ruffly fur coat thing that came down to just below her nipples. She looked, in other words, like a transexual prostitute.
Things were alright for a little while. Marie sat in a corner and drank whiskey out of a brown paper bag. We were 19 years old. Marie drank whiskey like a champ. Her hair came loose. At one point, her coat slipped up and she gave my horny, virginal high school friends a peep of one of the nicest breasts I've ever had the opportunity to watch someone snort coke off of. And then, she got up and went to the bathroom.
You know what happens when people drink a bunch of whiskey and then snort
a whole bunch of coke? I mean, besides getting really fucked up? What happens
is, they leave lots of blow all over everything. All over their face. All
over the back of the toilet. They leave shit all over themselves, and then
they start bleeding from the nose. And then they
come stumbling out of the bathroom in their 6 inch leopard print platform
boots and scream at you across the party, "Hey, come and look at these
naked polaroids my girlfriend took of me!" If you're really lucky, they'll
do this just at the point in the party where the video tape of the marching
band that all the nice kids you went to high school with are
in ends and the room gets quiet and mom and dad come walking down the stairs
with party hats and non-alcoholic champaign for everyone.
These poor people would have been less shocked were her head to explode and pudding to pour out of her neck.
I was, to say the least, a little bit embarassed. I turned to a friend of mine and whispered, "She's really very nice if you get to know her."
Every teen movie has one of these scenes. The scenes where the music stops and the camera goes into slow motion and you know that, just when you thought things had gotten as bad as they were going to get, they are going to get a little worse. This is that scene:
We're all sitting in the basement. Marie has just come out of the bathroom, a thick trail of coke and blood leaking from her right nostril. Ray's mom and dad are carrying bottles of champaign. And on Ray's mother's shoulder is a baby parrot with a retail value of something like $700.
The parrot takes wing. Slow motion. The parrot flies across the room. No
music. The parrot flies towards Marie. This is where it gets really bad. Marie
sees the parrot flying towards her. Her eyes go wide. She takes a step back,
stumbling and delirious. She shakes her head and screams, spraying drool and
blood in a wide arc around her. And then, Marie, my girlfriend, the girl who
I invited to this humble suburban home,
she takes her tiny little leopard print purse (matches the boots!) and swings
at the parrot. Swings like a pro. Swings like a goddamned Williams sister.
The purse hits the parrot and, to her credit, she's got follow through. The
parrot takes a 90 degree turn and flies, head down, towards the sliding glass
door, hits it with a thud and falls to the ground.
There is a another stunned silence.
And then, I collect Marie and I put her in my car, and we drive away from that party as fast as possible and I never ever went back to another one of Ray's parties.
Not that I missed the bird crap or anything.
From Jen
Simon:
The winter of 2001 I went to New York to find an
apartment and a job. I was sort of dating this guy in
Boston at the time. What does this mean? Well, we had
been friends for about 7 years and that summer we were
both in our hometown so we ended up dating. We had a
lot of fun, but on the pretext that our relationship
would end after the summer and we had both moved on to
"real life" and different cities. (yes, we had both
just graduated from college and yes, we're from the
Midwest). At any rate, we never really broke up and I
became progressively more annoyed/less enthralled/sick
of him. But I never got around to telling him this.
So at his insistence, I went to Boston on the 28th to
celebrate the New Year with him. He spend two days
trying to lounge naked, cook naked, read aloud naked
and wanting to be held while naked. I spent two days
feigning to be sick and/or tired and/or disinterested.
Finally on New Years's Eve, we got ready to go out.
He was new to the city and didn't know where to go and
didn't have a lot of friends, so it was just us and
another couple. We ended up going to a pseudo-goth
club where I got good and drunk before I saw him
kissing another girl. Then, he tearfully apologized
in the basement of the club at which point I told him
I had been dating someone in NY. We got into a
screaming match at 2 in the morning about how I didn't
want him to touch me, about how we had never said 'I
love you to each other' and about god knows what else.
We're finally friends again, but it was a pretty
shitty night.