Phil, if you're gonna spew, spew into this

Today's post was inspired by the ninja photography tactics of Chris from Surviving Myself, who shared with us (picture included) the joy he experiences laughing at drunk people while they hurl in public. (Actually, he used the word "ralph," which I agree is the funniest synonym for upping some chuck.)

Anyway, his post on puking made me think of my own favorite experience watching someone spew in a public place and since I know you guys like hearing stories about vomit, here we go:

Courtney is familiar with this tale, as I believe I've shared it with her every time we've ever driven through Alpharetta, Georgia and past the location where the events primarily transpired. It must have been summertime toward the end of my college years because I was at my parents' house and they were out of town. I got a call around 9 o'clock or so from a friend who was with some other guys I know at a bar in Alpharetta, about twenty minutes away. They had driven two hours from the town we went to school in in a car that had been "borrowed" from a campus community service organization. A girl they knew was working at the bar and supposedly promised to feed them free booze all night if they made the trip.

I'm not really a bar kind of guy. Actually, I pretty much hate going to noisy, smoky, crowded bars and usually avoid them if I can. However, I also make the effort from time to time to hang out with actual, physical human beings and this was one of those instances where, despite the exciting night I probably had planned of drinking alone in an empty house, I decided to take them up on the invite and broaden my horizons.

So I show up at the bar, find my friends and they find me a free beer. And then they promptly go off and find people more interesting than I to talk to. All except Paul, that is, who I was told had already downed somewhere north of seven Long Island iced teas. Paul is now sitting with his head down on the table of the booth we're both occupying and is no longer responsive (to those who know me, yep, that Paul). It's not long before Paul is returning all those drinks by, you guessed it, ralphing copiously onto the floor under the table.

I could have bailed at that point, seeing as the rest of the guys were nowhere to be found and Paul seemed to be working through his ordeal just fine on his own, but I'm a stand-up guy and I refuse to leave a fallen comrade behind. With vomit comes odor, though, so I grabbed Paul's near-empty pack of cigarettes and finished them off. I don't smoke, but I'll do what the situation calls for, and I was bored anyway sitting there babysitting a drunk.

Whether someone noticed the comatose guy who hadn't picked his head up off the table for most of an hour or the stench of stomach bile and regurgitated liquor finally fought its way through the cigarette smoke I couldn't say, but the manager came over and told me I had to get Paul out of there. Unsure if the manager or his minions knew of the mess that awaited them under the table, I wasted no time in finding the rest of my douchebag friends and hauling Paul outside.

No sooner had we hit the parking lot when Paul mounts a miraculous recovery (the guy did have lots of experience abusing his body with various substances, after all) and everyone decides now would be the perfect time to go visit the Pink Pony in Atlanta. I'm the only one who hasn't been forcing down free drinks all night, so I slide behind the wheel of the "borrowed" vehicle, in part because I felt like if I didn't someone else would. And also because there would be boobies.

So there's me driving four (pretty entertaining) drunk dudes down to one of the ATL's finer gentlemen's clubs. It was my first time in such an amoral establishment and it taught me a lot about human nature. For example, strippers don't like it when you take up space in their club and don't buy any lap dances. Actually, they really, really don't like it. And they don't get any less adamant about it either as the night progresses. I, for one, had already paid the twenty dollar cover to get in the place and certainly didn't feel the need to shell out any more just to see someone's C-section scar up close.

After we had seen (more than) our share of silicone enhanced products of child abuse, and tired of being yelled at by them, we left the Pink Pony and I drove us back to Alpharetta to my own (not borrowed) vehicle, where we parted ways. It was the first time I'd ever been berated by a stripper and been asked to leave a restaurant on the same night. Okay, so it was the only time for either of those things. I'm just not that punk.

Okay, so it was more a story that just happened to include public puking, but that's the jumping-off point of any good story.

(I apologize to any strippers who delivered their children naturally and had idyllic childhoods. All three of you.)