One Shade of Gale

DAY 1

I had never been to a bachelor party before. But I had been drinking like a fish for three weeks by coincidence, so I was feeling physically prepared. I was definitely talking about playoffs. If you can get hung over in Germany, you’re doing something right. The beer there is engineered to keep you hydrated and refreshed all day, all night.

My friend Jason had decided to marry his college girlfriend after about 5 years of dating- two of those years were during college, where he would lock himself in his room and have phone sex and eat hot dogs, while we were outside humping the doorknob and watching “King of Queens.” The bachelor party was definitely probably going to be hopefully something similar to the exact opposite of that.

Dewey Beach, Delaware is the destination for all Washington D.C. and Maryland party-goers during the summer. With a year-round population of 300, the town swells to 30,000 on the weekends. And it’s a special type of person too that comes to Dewey. I told a girl celebrating her 26^th birthday there that she was too old and needed to go home, or go home with me. Then her fat friend, “The Enforcer,” rolled up and bounced me out in the middle of me spitting my unusual game.

Dewey Beach has six bars and three restaurants. By restaurants I mean one place serves cheesesteaks, one place serves pizza, and one place has crabs. By bars I mean you don’t wear shoes out to the bars, because the bar floor is covered in sand, beer, people, and other fluids. And you don’t drive anywhere.

Dewey Beach is the place where 50 kids rent a house for one night for a birthday party, and they get matching pink tank tops with check boxes printed on the back next to the names of all six bars, and roam the streets together, checking the bars off each other’s list. I think you only get a check mark if you can leave the bar on your steam, and of your own free will – two things I often have trouble with.

We went with 6 other guys, and everyone had their own bed, which makes your imagination run wild with possibilities that generally never become realities. One of the guys was married, but you definitely wouldn’t have known that during the weekend. He was usually the first guy to break the ice with girls each night, which was actually helpful. Note: Bring one married guy to every bachelor party from now on. We filled the fridge with cases, put our picnic table in the front yard, flanked it with some tiki torches, and went to work at hollering at every girl that walked by.

Our usual topic of conversation was to ask if they had read 50 Shades of Gray. I come here to tell you that every girl has read 50 Shades of Gray, and if she hasn’t, she is a guy, and is still lying. This is a brave new world where girls like to get spanked and choked and go to trashy bars and get trashy with trashy dudes, or at least read about it and dream about it.

Every night we would pregame with about 10-15 Bud Lights each, depending on how well we were playing at Baseball, and then we would all roll out together, where I would abandon the bachelor as quickly as possible, and strike my claims. The 49er in me is strong when fueled by Bud Light.

When I was in Germany last month, all I wanted to do was booty dance – also known as bumping and grinding, or freaking. It’s just about my favorite thing in the world to do, and I had a lot of trouble with the European girls. To me, it seemed like I couldn’t just roll up to any old bitty – in fact, I was literally shooed away by a few of them. One of them even roared at me like a dragon.

Coming home to America, it’s like saddling up in the basement again. Right off the bat, the biggest girl in the bar walked up to me. I admit, I was probably giving her the ojos locos as I like to call them.

“My friend dared me to make out with you,” she whispered really loudly in my mouth.

This reminded me of a line I heard in college, where a girl leaned and told me she’d never made out with a dude with a beard before.

Who am I to deny a pleasant young lass her dreams coming true on a magical evening by the beach?

I think this was the moment that tipped off to the rest of the bachelor party that I was not fucking around this weekend. The rest of them were chasing the top-notch talent, and I’ve had enough of that bullshit.

My new bubbly buddy tried desperately for me to write down her phone number, but my number one rule on vacation is no phones. They usually get destroyed in the ocean, or you end up calling chicks that you probably shouldn’t call.

She disappeared, and I found a nice Asian girl. We had a great time dancing – all the bars have live bands that only play 90’s cover songs; it’s Disneyland for our generation – but of course, I lost her once she started telling me how drunk she was, and how she really shouldn’t go home with me. It’s not that I’m gun shy; it’s just that I like the thrill of the hunt too much.

I also met an amazing Black girl. The last time I had danced with a black chick, I was in Memphis in the midst of a crazy “living on a futon and living off of Miller High-Life” bender looking every bit of my 230 lbs., and rocking a beard that made me look like I should be noodling on a History Channel show. That Memphis Belle gave me about 30 seconds before she made me go dance with a big white girl in an orange T-Shirt. She was curious at first, but that seems to be all I can summon out of most chicks.

This new girl was so sweet – she listened to my lament about how I’m never going to bang a black chick. She showed me how to lean with it and rock with it; the trick is you gotta go a little slower sometimes. She even taught me how to grab a handful of black booty; the trick there is to have bigger hands. And at the end, she assured me that one day, I would lay with an Ebony queen. Just not with her. I guess I was going home alone.

Luckily, we had a new guest when I arrived at home. Steve had gotten through a back door of the house that we didn’t even know we had, desperately trying to find his real house. He knew which street he lived on, and was going door to door asking people (from inside their homes) if he lived there. Unfortunately, the cops came and decided that Steve’s bed was going to be the drunk tank for the evening. He was a nice guy though, for the time I got to spend with him.

DAY 2

After a grueling 6 hour round of golf (two people were playing for the first time), we got back to work. We spent the afternoon drinking three bottles of whiskey- Oban, Glenmorangie, and Johnny Walker Blue Label. I highly recommend the Oban in particular; I even more highly recommend drinking Bud Lights in between glasses of primo hootch. It gives the whole operation an air of disrespectful classiness, like button-up tanktops and astroturf flip-flops.

Usually, this would be the point of the afternoon/evening where I wake up the next day bruised and bloodied- and something nearby has been peed on. But something kept me in the game. Something kept the lights on upstairs. Perhaps it was a miracle. Perhaps it was the tolerance that I learned from ancient German sages the week before. Or perhaps it was the call of the siren I would soon meet.

Bottle and Cork in Dewey Beach, Delaware is the best bar in town, and probably the world, because of three things: the drinks, the floor, and the Jam Session. They have crazy slushy machines for the girls, and buckets of beers for the dudes. Most of the drinks, along with a lot of other stuff, end up on the floor, so by osmosis, you get even more drunk standing in booze. (Don’t wear shoes to this place.) But Jam Session brings it all home. Jam Session is Dewey Beach at its finest.

During Jam Session, you get a bunch of cover bands that become rock stars. They play your favorite Blink 182 and Third Eye Blind songs, and they only play the best parts of each song, which is also most likely the only part of the song you can sing along to. 60 minutes, 60 songs, 60 drinks. The energy at these bars is unlike anything I’ve felt. And then I felt the siren.

I have noticed that, in my brief time in the game, I am attracted to larger girls, and they tend to reciprocate this attraction. Sometimes they accost me on the street, other times it is I that is the accoster. Sometimes I’m chasing them around the bar, other times they are chasing me through a McDonald’s. But the thrill of hunting big game is something of which I cannot get enough.

This girl wasn’t that big; she was just well-fed and didn’t like exercise. She was dressed in the outfit that all these kinds of girls like to wear – the one where your big ass titties are hanging out. She also wearing the gold glasses that look like window blinds (I found out later that those were her night shades; she wears the silver ones during the day). I was smitten. I swear the dance floor parted like the Red Sea and it was only me and her. I ditched the bachelor party again and went in for the thrill.

I ended up dancing with this girl for about an hour, during which she and I spent a lot of time touching each other’s things. We basically went through a whole relationship in a night – started out real sloppy and loose, tightened it up into something very loving and supportive and gentle, then got nasty, and then we were both tired of each other. We left the dance floor, and I started throwing ice cubes into her bra. She asked me why I didn’t live closer to her, so I decided to walk her home and wrap it up.

Of course, all of a sudden she decided she was too classy for that, so I told her I had to go home and jerk off. But before we parted ways, she gave me her number. To be more precise, she gave me her card. To be even more precise, she gave me the opposite of a business card, unless this was her business.

Looking back, I should have known better. I’ve met this kind of girl before; I was just blinded by the boobies and the bling. I knew a girl in college who wore a necklace with her name on it. My assumption was that when you were on top of her and you forgot her name, you could just look down and get right back in the game. It’s almost thoughtful. My girl this night had her name on her cell phone home screen. It was definitely helpful. It was the first time where the girl forgot my name, and I remembered hers.

I took her card, and went home, hopeful that maybe I could tug and rally, and catch a late break in the evening at closing time. I was also hopeful that maybe I could call her tomorrow and pick up where I left off. Then I got back to the house and was hopeful that I wouldn’t die.

We had another new friend this evening, who also wanted to stay at our place, and had brought a kitchen knife to prove he belonged. We all walked away slowly, and waited outside for the cops to magically appear, which happens a lot in Dewey. It was amazing how quickly the cops showed up put this guy’s pussy to the pavement, with the good ol’ knee to the neck for effect.

I explained to the cops that he was just a drunk kid chopping onions on our picnic table (we had been grilling earlier and hadn’t totally cleaned up) but their standing operating procedure is just to bust heads and fill up the paddy wagon. Dewey Beach had its first murder in its history earlier this summer, and the cops were already on high alert in general, as they are in all party towns. In fact, in the summers, they just hire any old kid in the nearby county who couldn’t cut it as a lifeguard or a water ice salesman and give them a badge and a gun. I’m just amazed that no one wanted to arrest me the whole weekend.

DAY 3

We finally made it to the beach on Day 3. It was nice, water was warm, big waves and stuff. As it turns out, it’s not a priority for most of our generation at Dewey Beach. So we left and went out drinking again.

My plan was to hunt down my little chickadee from the previous night, but after a text message conversation with her that went along like two kids humping a swinging kitchen door from either side –

Me: What are you up to tonight?

Her: Hammered u

Me: Perfect

Her: I’m awesome

Me: I’m in the lighthouses

Her: I’m in the wabes

- I decided to carry on without her.

That night - I’ll be honest - I didn’t have it. I tried to go after the upper echelon hos, and they were not impressed. Maybe three days and 100 Bud Lights had run me ragged, but I was not feeling the love. I think maybe the lights were too bright in the bar, or maybe the bar was too nice in general, but my classic move of “sneak up behind you or front of you and just start grinding” just wasn’t playing.

So I left and went to another bar. Really I went outside and just started stumbling around. I was drawn by the twang in the air. I’m not sure what happened, but the next thing I know, I was in a hoedown. In the midst of all the club rap and gangdam pop was small underground Fight Club-style operation where tens of old people were all do-si-doing the night away. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the south is everywhere. There was a live band, heel tapping, and square dancing, and I think a guy was blowing on an empty moonshine jug.

My memory is a little hazy at this point, but I’m pretty sure everyone in there thought I was the coolest person in the world. I was grabbing every old lady in sight to boogie down with me. I had all the divorcees in the house going “Yee Haw!” The midnight cowboy had his swagger back.

I returned to the first bar with that killer vigor and slayed for the rest of the evening. Everyone was so happy to have me dance with them. Grateful types were in abundance opening their warmth to me. Other observers may tell a different story, but I know what I saw, and what I felt, and it was definitely large happy women. But, slowly, surely, the night wore down, and I had to leave the bar and put a bow on the weekend. 

So I jumped in the ocean and fingered a homeless Mexican until the sun came up and I got hungry.