From Behind The Camera 2: A Shakeshift Personal Story

I remember once in 2007 I had become so drunk at Fetishcon that I was incapable of walking in a straight line and had to crawl down a hallway in order to reach my hotel room.

On the evening of the Fetishcon Sunday night gala ball, it’s the final night of the convention and there’s this HUGE party in the main convention area where everyone gathers (still dressed in fetish finery, but usually more subdued than the previous three nights.)  The music is great, the performance artists are all trying to outdo one another, and there’s more emphasis on the photo-taking because everyone is leaving Monday morning and so there’s a certain amount of languid (and bittersweet) permeating the floor as many people won’t see their friends again until next year.

A friend of mine had just introduced me to the mojito mai grande the night before.  It’s different than a regular mojito in that they use two types of rum, use three different types of mint, and the cane sugar syrup is fermented for at least three months and infused with herbs.  The mojito mai grande is as far above the mojito in the evolutionary charts as themodern human being is above a caveman.  They both walk upright.  They both can scratch themselves when they itch, but that’s about where the similarities end.  The mojito mai grande is the superior version they serve in Florida, and once you’ve had it you can’t really go back to a regular mojito afterwards.  You don’t care that they’ll knock you on your ass.  You don’t care that they cost about twice as much as a regular mojito.  You just keep drinking them and drinking them until either the bartender cuts you off or your bar tab can’t possibly be paid up in full by any one human being.

So, I had about TWENTY of these while I was in Florida, most of which were consumed by

me starting at about 12 noon on Sunday and going all the way until 2am bar close.  To say that I was shit-faced is doing a great disservice to everyone who has been shit-faced at a convention party.  I was so far gone that at one point I mistook a man for a woman and asked she was wearing such an ugly tie with such a pretty blouse.

Anyway, I was drinking poolside on Sunday night.  I had about 8-10 drinks in me by that point so I was completely bombed.  At one point a friend of mine had offered me “Caribbean tire rum” from a dirty old bottle.  For those of you who don’t know, there are plenty of bootleggers from the West Indies who make their own rum by stealing sugarcane at night from all the sugarcane fields, and fermenting it with molasses, ascorbic acid, and by mixing it with activators such as yeast or pul marde’.  They usually make this bootleg rum incredibly sweet and fruity, to cover up the fact that it tastes like complete ass and to hide the fact that it’s made by boiling the sugarcane and other ingredients over a fire, usually by using the hollowed-insides of a truck tire.  Yes, I said a fucking truck tire.  Truck tires used as a makeshift caudron can retain a lot of fluid, they can be heated to high temperatures without melting, and it’s fairly inconspicuous if la polizia come by… considering that there are rotten old truck tires everywhere in Jamaica discarded on the sides of the road.

Anyway, so my friend offered me a drink of this nasty concoction that looked like ladled toilet water from a prison camp in Costa Rica.  I was so drunk at this point I no longer cared, and I took a swig without even thinking.  It tasted like death and battery acid infused with the nuance of several lemon slices and about ten pounds of sugar.  It was purely foul, followed by an aftertaste so sweet that it would kill a diabetic.  That being said, I had about four or five more swigs, just to cement my stupidity and to make sure it was a matter of public record that I no longer cared about the burden of human consciousness this drunken, wobbly Sunday night.

I’m walking back towards my hotel room an hour later, trying to stay upright at 3 a.m. (my roommate for the year, Ester Amoral, was off doing other things) and I find myself dropping onto the floor after exiting the elevator, unsure of how my once-trusty legs had failed me after abusing my liver with the power of alcohol for the last fifteen hours nonstop.  Determined to reach my room at the far end of the hallway, I try to stand up but my gyro-stabilizer in my brain has left me a nasty letter saying that it wasn’t coming back to work until I was sober.  Okay, crawling it is.  I start to crawl at a hefty pace down the hallway, singing a dirty sailor song bawdily as I’m crawling on my hands and knees.

And then one of my eyes goes dark.

I stop, unsure of myself.  I blink several times, trying to clear the issue.  Nope.  My right eye

has gone completely dark, even with the eyelid wide open.  There are no blurs, no fuzziness, nothing at all except inky (and total) darkness.  A guy walks by me (dressed like a sexy pirate) and I mumble out loud “I’ve gone blind in one eye.” And he looks at me and peers down and says, “Oh yeah, your right eye is all milky white, I can barely even see the pupil.”  So I do what every rational person does in a situation like this, I curse for about thirty or forty straight minutes while flopping around on the floor like a cuttlefish on the deck of a fishing boat.  I flop this way across the carpet, and then the other way.  I throw in a string of venomous curses for no apparent reason.  I bump into a wall, and then another, and finally after a while a nice couple (dressed like sexy nuns) helps me to my feet and brings me down to my room.  They even make sure I’m safely inside before leaving.

Somehow, in defiance of all logic, I manage to pee into the toilet, and I even smell the acrid scent of fresh urea as I’m doing so and a few seconds later I am regurgitating $200 worth of alcohol into the toilet as well.  I am living proof that some people just can’t be trusted to hold their liquor.  Somewhere after vomiting but before divine inspiration I lose all consciousness and pass out on the floor at the foot of my bed.

In the morning, I wake up, and it’s about 12:30 in the afternoon.  I can now see out of both eyes (albeit one of them rather dimly) and I thank god that the blindness wasn’t temporary.  I feel like a new man.  Nine hours of sleep and the purging of my stomach seems to have saved me.  That, and the two giant bottles of mineral water I drank sometime during the night (their empty plastic carcasses are right next to me.)

I thank myself for surviving the night.  I thank myself for being one step ahead of the game. I thank myself for all of my good fortune.

I look over at the clock.  It says 12:49pm in bright red numerals.

I look over at my airline ticket.  My ticket says my flight back to Richmond leaves on Monday at 12:45pm.  Non-refundable.

Fuck.

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