Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A Very Special St. Aubyn Tribute

I leave tomorrow evening to head back up to North Dakota for the St. Aubyn/Murphy nuptials, which is sure to be one gigantic shitshow of a weekend. In honor of the occasion, I thought I would pay tribute here to one of the craziest kids I know, by chronicling some of the more ridiculous drinking shenanigans he had back in his heyday.


--The time he was too drunk at an after-party to drive, so he responsibly called a cab...and had the cabbie drop him off at his car which was still downtown at the bar, and then drove home.

--The time freshman year that an annoying girl kept inviting herself out with us, and she had a crush on St. Aubyn, so he said quote "I'll shoot her down and make her cry tonight, and then she'll leave us alone." Yeah, he made out with her for like 6 hours that night.

--The time he projectile vomited clear across the dorm room, by simply pulling back his homemade curtain over his bed, letting loose, closing his curtain and calmly going back to sleep. I got out of there seconds before I lost the contents of my own stomach and it turned into the lardass scene from Stand By Me.

--The time we were at Green Mill, and he was telling a story, and emphatically threw his arm in the air for dramatic effect...and shattered the light bulb above the table, bringing down a storm of broken glass into our drinks. And just in case that wasn't enough, as we're getting our table cleaned off, he was explaining to our server how it happened, and thrust his arm in the air again....and stuck his finger in the open socket and mildly electrocuted himself. We were only like 2 drinks in at this point. Even when he's sober he's a circus act.

--The time he and I got roofied...seriously. We were at Gilly's, and he was on only his 7th drink, and I was on my 5th, when all of a sudden he fell off his barstool. And just laid there. I grabbed him, and volunteered to take him home, since I didn't feel like getting hammered that night. The last thing I remember is deciding I wanted Taco Bell. All of a sudden it's the next morning, I'm still fully clothed, shoes and all, on the couch. I go down to my car and it looks like the Taco Bell kitchen exploded in the passenger seat. Cheese, meat, lettuce, EVERYWHERE. To this day neither one of us knows what happened. I guarantee that our drinks were really supposed to go to the slutty-looking 19-year-old chicks with the fake i.d.'s, those bartenders at Gilly's are sketchy like that. I made St. Aubyn clean out my car.

--During the 2005 spring break in Louisville, we were talking with some rando who looked Asian. St. Aubyn and I were smack in the middle of our "Zoolander is the funniest movie ever!" phase. After talking for a while and building up a decent conversation, he asks her where she is from. She replies "Malaysia." St. Aubyn looks back at me, his face lights up like he just won the lotto, and he turns back to her and does some little karate move with his hands, and screams at her, "You must KILL THE PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA!" Needless to say, that was the end of that conversation.

--At Chelsey and Mike's wedding a couple years ago, there was an, um, interesting mix of us shitheads who drink way too much, and Chelsey's friends from Bible Camp who can dance sober. St. Aubyn enjoys a few dances with this girl, and she seems to be enjoying herself. I believe he may even have received a compliment from her on his dancing abilities. After a song finishes, he makes a comment about how he needs another beer. Disappointed, she asks, "Ohhh...you mean you're drinking right now?" St. Aubyn's reply, combined with a completely incredulous look on his face:

"Are you crazy? I'm fuckin' CRUSHED right now!!!"

They didn't dance again after that.

--After one night at the bar, St. Aubyn goes to some after party with some buddies. He has no idea whose house it is. He promptly passes out, and when he wakes up a couple hours later, everyone he knows is gone. So he begins walking home. He doesn't really remember much after that, but one of our buddies (Timmy B maybe?), on his way home, spots him in front of the Ralph Engelstad Arena, playing on a snow hill by himself. At 4 a.m. In the bitter cold. For Christmas that year, my mom wanted to get him a pair of snowpants.

--One semester, a bunch of us took the Personal Marketing class, probably one of the easiest A's at UND. One of our "assignments" was to learn how to eat a professional dinner at Sanders, in case we ran into one on a job interview: learning about different silverware, how to order and taste wine, etc. etc. Before the dinner, we were encouraged to try as many different wines as possible, so we diversified our tastes. Big, BIG mistake. Turning us loose in a classy restaurant with a free pass to drink as much as we want is the equivalent of making Jason Voorhees a camp counselor at Crystal Lake and telling him to go nuts. So, true to form, we get hammered. After the dinner ends, our crew stays and polishes off a few more bottles of wine, then get some beers after that. As we're stumbling out the door, St. Aubyn decides he wants to "thank our professor for such a special night." The prof is still there, bullshitting with a couple of the 40 year olds in the class (who stuck around to get career advice from him. They're actually taking the class because they're in-between jobs and having trouble getting re-hired, and the mortgage payments are piling up; we're taking it because class lets out at least an hour early every Wednesday night, and there's no homework.)

Weisser, Deuce and I try to tell him that it wouldn't be a good idea to try and talk to our professor with his BAC rivaling his GPA, but St. Aubyn won't hear it. He will not be denied. So he shuffles over and patiently waits his turn to speak, wobbling and swaying just over the prof's shoulder, practically breathing in his ear. After awhile he gets bored with waiting, looks across the restaurant at us, a good 40 feet away, and yells loud enough for us to hear, "Ahhhh screw it!!!" Our prof nearly jumps out of his shoes he yelled so loud. St. Aubyn strolls away, unaware of any wrongdoing, as we sprint out the door to keep from being associated with him. And "ahhh screw it" enters our Hall of Fame of legendary phrases.


--Last October, while at The Outhouse, St. Aubyn enticed a stripper onto his lap. Somehow she stayed there for over an hour, without St. Aubyn giving her a single dollar. When she finally left, we asked him what the hell he said to keep her there without buying a dance. His answer, "I told her that my girlfriend just died, and I was just looking to enjoy someone's company, and I couldn't imagine a more beautiful girl to talk to." While we broke up laughing, he produced a 20 dollar bill....which he stole from her g-string while she sat there.

--Lastly, my personal favorite: one night freshman year, St. Aubyn leaves a party at Ike & Jake's early, having hit his drinking ceiling. One of St. Aubyn's staples when drunk is to take a sit-down shower before he goes to bed, which is exactly what it sounds like. In his mind, it combines the greatest aspects of both a shower and a bath. However, on this night, he is a little too drunk to be partaking in one of his favorite activities. He promptly passes out, covering the drain in the process. I'm still at the party, so the first people on the scene are our suitemates, after the first little bit of overflowed water starts trickling into their room. They pound on the bathroom door, to no avail. St. Aubyn, due to the shape of the shower and placement of the drain, is in no personal danger, but he's not waking up anytime soon, and the water is continuing to spill out at an increasingly alarming rate.

Finally they go get the RA, and he uses the master key to unlock the bathroom, and they haul St. Aubyn out of there, butt-ass naked in all his glory. By this time water has made its way into every room in our wing.....except, by some act of God that we surely didn't deserve, there is not a single drop in our room. So now it's around 2 a.m. and everyone in a 12-room radius is squeeging out their rooms and drying out their possessions. There are giant fans blowing everywhere in an attempt to dry out the hallway. St. Aubyn is sitting in a towel in his bed, having not made any kind of effort to help out with the cleanup of Walsh Hall's version of Hurricane Katrina (I would make a George Bush joke here, but I don't give a shit about politics.)

So eventually our RA comes in to our room and sarcastically asks, "So, are you feeling any better?" And St. Aubyn, who had been fighting a courageous battle to keep from passing out again, answers, "Yeah, in fact....I'm gonna go back to the party." And that kid, bless his heart, gets dressed, walks right past the incredulous stares of everyone cleaning up in the hallway, and walks back to Ike & Jake's house and calmly cracks another beer before telling us what he remembers of the story (I picked up the rest the next day.) Luckily it was somewhat late in the school year, because the first black kids who integrated into white schools in the 1950's received better treatment than St. Aubyn and I got from our fellow residents the rest the semester.





So that concludes our list. I hope it doesn't jeopardize my status as Best Man this weekend. If there's any that I missed, feel free to add them.