Our Lady of Perpetual Inebriation

I would drink anything for fun, but I wouldn't drink that.

I just can't do tequila any longer. My first time was a bad experience, and not a bad experience like a shitty AD&D group. There was no Rush, there were no Doritos, there was no one's hot mom baking us a casserole.

It was a Nat'l Guard drill and we were gearing up to train up at Cp. Ripley. We would get actual barracks, not the usual tin shacks, and that usually meant a large party of some sort. "Gearing up," indeed, meant taking orders for alcohol.

Having gone on these exercises with the Guardsmen before I knew what they drank: "None of that domestic pisswater you guys insist on," I groused. "I want to get drunk. Get me some hard alcohol." Out of equal parts economy and resentment, they turned up a large piss-golden bottle of tequila, instead. I don't remember the name; it's irrelevant, it was just cheap, shitty stuff.

I've since been informed by a friend who spent time drinking in Mexico that most of the stuff we can get up here in the States is half sugar anyway, though you'd never know it to taste it. The ratio tips more heavily toward agave, south of the border, and that's what makes a better tequila. It's possible to find good stuff at better stores, however, even if it's not as quality as what you could bring up through Customs.

So I drank this stuff. It seemed smooth and I built a tolerance for its flavor fairly quickly. With the exception of one pull had by one of my sgts., I drank the whole damn gallon jug. It was empty before I set it down. I tried to push some off on the tall, hot, skinny girl who'd recently joined our unit, but apparently she was a model of some sort and was concerned about what it might do to her figure. You know, her weight might hit triple digits or something. Anyway, no one had thought to bring any kind of snacks; the model had some celery she shared with me, but... really, when I'm drinking that much I don't care for vegetables. They have their place, but not next to a snifter, mug, or highball. Still, I had to have something else to absorb the alcohol, was my thinking...

When I woke up, I was extremely ill. I'd never been this ill before in my life, certainly not when I went drinking in Germany, straight out of high school and surrounded by people curious to see how much I could contain. I called over a medic and croaked that I thought I had the flu; he was preoccupied and told me to wait, and he ran off.

My sgt. came over to tell me to get the hell out of bed and get dressed, we were going to run around the obstacle course this morning. I told him I had the flu. He laughed and said we all felt like shit, but I had to get my ass out of bed. I told him the medic told me to stay in bed; I looked over at the medic in question and he'd completely forgotten about me, was off doing a dozen other errands. My sgt. really let fly with a string of blue language but, technically, you can't argue with anything a medic says, so he could only storm off with impotent rage and I went back to sleep.

Around noon I slowly drifted to consciousness again, and everything inside me had to come out one way or the other. I poured myself out of bed and trickled across the floor to the bathroom, where I proceeded to vomit roughly a gallon of undiluted tequila into a toilet. Seriously, it retained its color and translucence and everything. My German/Irish drinkin'-stomach preserved it as effectively as the glass jug had 14 hours before. After 10-20 minutes of vomitus and regurgitation I crawled back into the bunk and passed out again.

I have dim memories of everyone coming back from the training exercise, stopping by my bunk to laugh and deride. I woke up very solidly around 8pm and felt completely recovered, which led everyone else to believe I was bullshitting, but I can't help how I felt. All the tequila was out of me and I walked off to the commissary for dinner. Since then, I haven't been able to so much as catch a whiff of tequila without a profound nausea gripping my insides, and I can taste the musk of it in any drink or Chili's dinner.

However, really good tequila doesn't stink like that, nor does it taste like that; consequently, I have enjoyed some really good tequila on a few rare occasions. The exception that proves the rule...

Not a big fan myself. There's a sort of tradition for it, three times a year. Well, I guess it's not a tradition yet, since an entire year has yet to pass since deciding to make it a tradition. Even then, tequila was only chosen because we happened to be in a mexican restaurant. I suspect either a different liquor will be chosen, or the tradition will likely die off before actually becoming a tardition.

That being said, I will occasionally have a margarita. Shaken, not blended, of course.