Friday, August 21, 2009

Flash Forward: Reunion

By Pauly
New York City

This originally appeared on Tao of Pauly...

I glanced at an invite to my 15th college reunion in Atlanta. I almost tore it up into several hundred tiny little pieces but decided to open it up and see what was going on. I smirked at the "mEmory lane" gimmick. College was full of memories for sure, but sadly the friends of mine that I partied with the most were not the type of people to show up at these kinds of social functions.

I loathe reunions especially the people who love going to them and chatting my ear off about useless crap. The 5th reunion was to brag about how awesome of a job they landed. The 10th reunion was to show off their spouses and children. God knows what sort of bullshit I have to endure at this stage of my peers' lives.

Change100 was remotely interested in attending her 10th college reunion on the very same weekend. She might go if her friends made the journey. I asked Change100 if she would be interested in going to mine and she said she'd consider it if she didn't go to hers. Me? I have no desire to go to her 10th, let alone my 15th, so the point was moot. I dunno why I asked.

Anyway, if I did go to mine, here's how I pictured Homecoming Weekend...

* * * * *

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Flight on Wednesday night was delayed from LAX to ATL. Begrudgingly took early morning flight on Thursday and got stuck next to a crying baby for the entire flight. Popped a Xannie and read a copy of a book that a classmate wrote about 200 coal miners dying in China. Cab driver got lost and then we got stuck in traffic on the way to the hotel.

Met a fraternity brother for dinner. He announced that he was getting a divorce and asked me to score him coke. He proceeded to get drunk and make fun of mostly everyone we went to college with. We decided to go to one of the first events on the reunions schedule... Alumni Art Exhibit. The last thing I want to be is at an art opening with pretentious douchebags, but if there's any place to score good drugs all weekend, it will be with the art freaks.

Despite my numerous attempts by making the rounds at the party, I was unable to find any cocaine for my buddy, but I did manage to score a couple of painkillers from one of the caterers and one Adderall from the security guard. I got pestered to join Facebook and scoffed at everyone who asked me why I wasn't on there.

I got very depressed looking at the magnificent water colors painted from one of our fellow classmates. She was a quadriplegic exchange student from Botswana and used her thoughts rigged up to a computerized paint brush to paint compelling images of the civil war ravishing her home country. I realized that I was a talentless hack and offered to use the blood money I earned in poker to buy one of her paintings. It turned out that she had the best cocaine in the room, but she overcharged my fraternity brother because she thought all frat boys were assholes.

We decided to skip the classical concert in the new music hall and instead we went to strip clubs on Cheshire Bridge Road.... me, my soon-to-be divorced fraternity brother, and the quadriplegic exchange student from Botswana. One of the dancers went to our school but dropped out after freshman year when she got knocked up by a football player from Georgia Tech. She's got bigger boobs and lots of collagen injections since I saw her last, and she's been on the pole ever since. She asked me why I'm not on Facebook.

At 2am, I pulled a pubic hair off of my pecan waffle at Waffle House and wondered how the fuck did it get there as my buddy stumbled back from the bathroom where he puked his nads off and then snorted the rest of the quadriplegic exchange student from Botswana's blow.

* * * * *

Friday, September 25, 2009

I started drinking heavily at lunch with a handful of other college friends and fraternity brothers. Everyone asked me why I wasn't on Facebook and people spent more time on their iPhones than looking each other in the eye.

And everyone has changed drastically. Less hair. Bigger guts. A couple of kids. A few tattoos. One guy has a scar from being bit by a bear in Yellowstone in 2003. No one has any good drugs, which means everyone smokes my dope while we all wait for the quadriplegic exchange student from Botswana to score us more blow.

We wandered over to the Sustainable Food Fair because I'm convinced that was the best place to score drugs because where there's sustainable foods... there's hippies. I ate a peach cobbler and scored an ounce from a Spreadhead and snubbed one ex-girlfriend who absolutely tore my heart out of my body sophomore year. I also lied to one guy who used to live in my dorm. He wanted my cell phone number so we could have dinner before the 1994 Pre-Reunion Mixer. I gave him the wrong number.

I skipped the new Psychology Building Dedication even though I was conflicted. I'm sure I could have found some head shrinker to write me a script for Adderall, but opted to go drink with a different group of fraternity brothers instead. Too many pictures of their kids and not enough pitchers of beer, so I ditched them and headed to the Mixer. Some of the hot Tri Delts got fat after they had kids. A few of the girls from the southern sorority were total MILFS, while a few ugly chicks all of a sudden turned smoking hot. Everyone asked me why I wasn't on Facebook.

After being bombarded with pro-breeding propaganda, I decided that every time a classmate tells me a story about their kid, I quickly return with the story about French poker players visiting a brothel in Budapest. They usually left me alone after that point.

We ran into someone who used to date one of my roommates. She was one of those uber-rich Southern daddy's girls who never worked a day in her life. She was with her fiancee, who was a raging drunk bigot from New Orleans who admitted that he "was happy to see those colored folks drown after Katrina." He was also being an aggressive asshole to my buddy for no reason. While our classmate stepped away for a second to interject in a different conversation, I got up in her fiancee's face and said, "Your wife to be sucks great cock. She had a lot of practice after blowing 75% of the guys in my fraternity. A few of them were brothers too."

He started a fight, but luckily, one of my fraternity brothers is a former CIA agent who is well trained in close quarters hand-to-hand combat and put the guy in a sleeper hold before we could even react. We decided to leave the lame Mixer and went to strip clubs on Cheshire Bridge Road. A tweaker puked on himself in the parking lot of Waffle House and the waitress remembered me from the night before when I left her a $5 tip on a $8 meal. The waitress asked me why I wasn't on Facebook because she wanted to send me a friend request.

* * * * * *

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Spirit Day! That's what they called homecoming and I couldn't wait for the day to end before it even began. I was full of spirit all right and was reminded why I bolted after college ended. After drinking for two-non-stop days trying to relive old glory days, I was hungover to all hell. I ate the rest of my Vicodin and gobbled the Adderall just to be able to get out of bed.

I skipped the 5K run through Lullwater Park. Running? Are you serious? When I was a senior at Emory, we used to ingest psychedelics and wander around the park at night. We often thought about rescuing the primates from the Yerkes Center adjacent to the park, but were afraid because that's where the government does secret testing.

Instead, we crashed the Sorority Life's 50th Anniversary luncheon. My soon-to-be-divorced buddy is convinced he'd pick up a couple of college chicks because he drives a Mercedes and has a country club membership (although he's about to lose the house in Alpharetta in the divorce). I got recognized by one student who's a huge fan of Tao of Poker and she tells me her online screen name is PokerPeachy on PokerStars. She aspires to be the next Vanessa Rousso and I wish her the best of luck and tell her to go to law school instead of becoming a professional poker player. She asked me why I wasn't on Facebook.

I felt like a pedophile wandering around the Sorority lodges in search of intoxicants, but I scored some more weed. I got a few wives of my fraternity brothers stoned because by the third day of this reunion they were bored shitless, sweating balls, and hungover to all hell.

Spirit Day included a snoozer of a tailgate party for a soccer game with music by the Indigo Girls. Since Emory does not have a football team (um, what kind of educational institution in the south does not have a football team? That's right... my college) we gathered on the main field to get drunk on cheap wine before a soccer game against NYU. We're all wasted and stumbled into the stadium. My buddy Armando is Brazilian and he tries to get all of us to chant Brazilian soccer hooligan songs. We fuck it up, but it's funny to see middle-aged soccer moms and guys with beerguts and iPhones singing in Portuguese.

I skip out on the dinner and we decide to go right to the strip clubs on Cheshire Bridge Road. While sitting in Waffle House at 2am, my fraternity brother decided that he was going to get back together with his wife because he got rolled by a stripper in the VIP room. He has two bloody nostrils and lost the keys to his Mercedes and the rest of his dignity.

Me? I got indigestion, a dozen solid tweets out of the weekend, a half-baked post for Tao of Pauly, and 1,073 friend requests on Facebook.


Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.

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