The Ono Oh-No

Well, folks…we got past FAU (still love writing that), and the injuries were few and far between. So let’s mark that one down as a double-win, shall we?

To quote Our Dark Lord himself, I was not disappointed with the Hoodoo we laid last week. But at the same time, I believe we still have something to prove. You see, the Football Gods are fickle, and they can spin Fate around on yo ass quicker than a napalmed jack-rabbit. We are on thin enough football ice this year as it is, and the last thing we want to see happen is for ill-fortune to befall our beloved Crimson Tide on account of our lackadaisical attitude towards this here Hoodoo, a’ight? So ladies and gentlemen, I once again implore you…GETCHO COTDANG MINDS RIGHT!

I’m not kidding you people. I need to see some confessions. I need to see some dares. I fear for our football future less’n you fine people rise up and take on the mantle of your forefathers on this here site we call RBR. How many tales of drunken debauchery have we spun across the pages of this site? How many stories of defecation gone horribly wrong have we read twixt these stories of Alabama football greatness? How many anonymous Mary Jane Hotcrotches have had their amorous exploits splayed here on these interwebz for all the world to see?

I’ll tell you what, people. Back when we Hoodoo’d to a standard, those championships were there for the taking. Pick ‘em like crabapples off the trees, we could. Notice how that particular well has run dry in the last year? Yep, you can’t deny it…so long as the Hoodoo fount slows to a trickle, we in the Crimson Tide nation will continue to endure these hardships. It’s all on you, people.

So with this notion in mind, I’d not be a leader if I didn’t get out front…you know, lead by example. So I’m going to put a tale on y’all today that will go down in history as one of the greatest and worst nights of my life. As a reformed whiskey-dranker and hell-raiser, I’ve come full circle: ashamed at the exploits of my duly checkered past, but as proud as a new papa at their recounting in my team’s hour of need. For if everything has some worth, surely the worth of embarrassment is that it is easily converted to the beauty of the Hoodoo that we do.

If you haven’t done anything embarrassing lately (as if, bammer), you have work to do. Run nekkid down the main street of your town, or take the Jack Daniels and Sriracha Challenge. Shave your eyebrows, or tell us ‘bout the time you had to use your mother-in-law’s sock for impromptu toilet paper (or worse). Because cotdangit, if it means something to you, you can’t sit still. Treat each Hoodoo like it has a life of its own, and e’rrthang will be a’ight, a’ight? And now, on with the Hoodoo…

So this one harks back to my college years at Spring Hill College, a small Jesuit university at which I matriculated during my formative years of young adulthood. Now, I use the term adulthood very loosely, because, as we college educated folk are well aware, there is nothing adult about one’s behavior in college. In fact, I looked at it as my last gasp, my last chance to act a fool without the ramifications that always seemed to entangle the older folks in my circle of acquaintance. Things like bills (gasp), a career (booo) and children (ee-gads man!) always seemed to intervene amongst those of elder generations, wringing the fun from their sour bodies and leaving them wrinkled and shriveled like raisins in the August sun.

No, ‘round about my junior year in college, I figured the sands were dropping through pinched waist of the hourglass at an ever increasing space, and I still had fool-cuttin’ to do. Now you white people may not understand that particular turn of phrase, and some may take me as a slasher or murderer of some sort. But alas, a fool-cutter is nothing like that…less violent, you see. Fool-cuttin’ is basically the way we have fun in the ‘hood. So if your big buddy rises with his Boone’s Farm Fuzzy Navel firmly ensconced in his tightly-wrapped fingers and begins to do an impromptu dougie in a public setting, one may say, “Mane, that boy cuttin’ a fool!”

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Enough with the linguistics. So with the knowledge that what was left of my childhood was quickly slipping through my fingers like warm, poorly-aimed Jell-O shots off of a co-ed’s chin, I knew I needed to make my remaining time in college count. And the best way I could cipher to embark upon said quest was by drinking and smoking myself into absolute oblivion…each and every dadgum night.

Fortunately for me, I had partners in crime for this extended suicide mission, a rowdy band of roustabouts and scalawags who were ready to engage in tomfoolery at a moment’s notice, a battalion consisting of some of the minutemen of depravity ever conjured  by the dark arts, if you will. A plan would be hatched, a phone call would be made, and four or five of us would pull together for a little fun.

This group was not limited to my brethren, but my sister-en as well. (Is that even a word? Reckon it is now). One female member was a former Ole Miss track athlete from Mobile whose dad was an attorney. She started at Oxford but had returned to her home town to finish out her college years at SHC. Let’s call her Rinny for the purposes of this particular tale. She was an attractive young woman, and considering she and I would often run 7, 8, 9, 10 miles a day, she was in great shape. Fantastic body. But alas, she and I were but mere friends, neither of us possesing anything but a friendly attraction to one another. We were great friends, and part of a larger group of friends who got into all kinds of trouble throughout our college years. (English majors are the real hell-raisers, people…I shit you not).

Sometimes we’d head down to Rinny’s parents’ place on Rabbit Creek, where there was an always-open (and fully-stocked) wet bar overlooking the quaint little river that empties into Mobile Bay. There’d be parties from time to time, but for the most part, we’d lay on the pier and drink, spark a joint when the parents were not at home. It was great fun, and gave me a glimpse into a life I’d never known. As I’ve detailed here many times before, I was not a son of privilege, and seeing how the other half lived fired my jets.

Well, one weekend, Rinny made a suggestion. “Let’s head to the house on Ono, we can party and go to the Flora Bama.”

Well, shit. Why hadn’t I heard about this Ono house before now? For those of you who don’t know about Ono Island, it is the playground of the exceptionally wealthy on the Redneck Riviera that is the Alabama Gulf Coast. Luminaries of all sorts, including our beloved Kenny “Snake” Stabler, have held domicile there at one time or another. It is the Malibu of Lower Alabama, to be sure. One mention of a trip to that oasis of wealth and coastal beauty had me compiling a guest list from amongst our little clan.

When all was said and done, our traveling party consisted of the following: your faithful narrator, Rinny, my friend Mook, a college compatriot who we’ll call J, and a Jesuit priest whose name shall be withheld, as he is still a professor at my beloved institutional of higher learning. For the purposes of this story, I’ll refer to him as Father Joe.

Father Joe was as cool as the other side of the pillow, a native New Orleanian who, despite his inherent vow of poverty, enjoyed the finer things in life…good food, good liquor, fine literature. He would cook for us at the priests’ residence for our finals presentations, and over the years, we had become good friends. He was a short, plump, Friar Tuck-kinda cat with rose tinted wire-framed glasses and a dark but receding hairline creeping back from his forehead. One of my favorite people of all time, a drama teacher and English department regular.

For my non-Catholic brethren, it is important to note at this point that the Catholic faith does not hold to the tee-totalling prohibition seemingly required by many others of the Christian faith. No, Catholics love to drink. There, I said it. I’m half Catholic, so it can’t be hate speech. The Catholic side of my family is plum eat up with functioning drunkards who ply their respective trades on the weekdays, and then unleash their inhibitions in drunken Irish-wake like stupors each weekend. Hell, Catholic folk love liquor so much they incorporated it into their dadgum service! It’s no wonder the Baptists all think they’re goin’ to hell.

Back to our tale. Rinny had gone ahead on over as an impromptu advanced scouting party, leaving the rest of us to make our way over to Baldwin County to get our grooves on. My chariot, an ’85 Chevy Nova, was selected for said trip, as the priest was carless, J’s brother was borrowing his car and Mook’s ride was in the shop.

Now that sounds harmless enough, right? Let me mention here that the Nova didn’t have air conditioning, and it had one window that rolled down about half way. In other words, a summertime junket across town could be brutal, let alone a two-county odyssey that would take us clear to the Alabama-Florida state line.

With this knowledge in our command, we prepared for the trip accordingly. Long rides in hot cars require lots of cold beverages. In this case, that bill was filled. In the extra-large deep sea fishing cooler we had ganked from Mook’s dad’s boat, we were able to cram the following: One finger-ring half gallon of Bacardi Limon rum, one quart of Evan Williams (the good shit, you know, black label and all), a quart of Montezuma tequila (if you’ve never had Montezuma, my advice would be NOOO! STOP! DON’T DRINK THAT SHIT!), a case of SouthPaw beer, a case of IceHouse beer and the ringer, the tour-de-force a 750 ml bottle of MadDog 20/20 in a lovely Kiwi-Lime vintage.

Now the latter was a bad decision from the get-go, and I knew that. It looked like anti-freeze, ethylene-glycol in its purest form. But sitting on that shelf, that bright green elixir called to me from beneath its clear glass covering, the light glimmering off of it in pearlescent fashion (that should have been my first clue…never drink anything pearlescent). I’d never had it, but it was probably just like Boone’s Farm, with which I’d had plenty of experience.

(Sidebar: B-Rad served Boone’s Farm Strawberry Daquiri and Fuzzy Navel varieties at his first wedding to the girl with the three inch pecker. He had other, like, real liquor and stuff, but as a tribute to the ‘hood, he said he just had to have some BF in the mix. Secondary sidebar: at his second wedding, B-Rad wore a white tuxedo, carried a shillelagh and strutted down the aisle to “So Fresh and So Clean” by Outkast. B-rad weddings are a lot of fun, y’all are all invited to the next one.)

Moving on, combined with the half-ounce of weed I had in the pocket of my cargo shorts, and the bottle of various prescription pills I had scraped from my mama’s chiffarobe (Hoodoo for a later time, friends), we had quite the formidable array of intoxicants in hand. To say the least. We were outfitted like Hunter S. Thompson and Doc Gonzo at a Big Lebowski convention, and we were prepared to consume it all in the name of debauchery.

Knowing the ride to Ono would be sweltering, I prepared for the journey by hydrating. With SouthPaw. Made a nice rum and Sprite for the road. Now I have since recoiled from these dastardly acts, and look upon them as the folly of youth. That is a source of Hoodoo in and of itself, as I am ashamed that I have allowed myself to operate a motor vehicle while under the influence.

That penance offered, I’ll just say that by the time we’d covered the 50-some-odd miles of asphalt between Mobile and Gulf Shores, I was lit up like the mffkn Fourth of July. I had stopped at the T (where one turns on to the beach boulevard) to let someone else take the reins, feeling the heady spell of the liquor casting over me. It was mid-afternoon, but my head was already swimming. We received a call from Rinny stating that despite her best efforts, her parents would be chaperoning the evening, as they had caught wind of our plan from Rinny’s brother and didn’t want to see anything untowards happen on their property. (See, this right here is what we call foreshadowing people…that’s a term we English majors like to use to make you think we’re smarter than you and shit).

With this knowledge in hand, we all decided the right thing to do would be to stop before crossing the bridge to Ono and tank up. Not with gas, don’t be ridiculous. With alcohol. Father Joe was all for it, as he had not anticipated parental involvement. After all, questions could be asked, suppositions formed. Why would a priest be involved in a drinking party with the youth? It was unseemly at best.

Father Joe spoke up in that New Orleans drawl of his, half Swamp and half New York City. “Hey OWB, why don’t you pour me a bourbon and coke…I’m gonna need one.”

We had stopped at the gas station near the state line to top off, but I really needed to release a little hydraulic pressure, aka take a piss.

“Help yourself, Il Papa, cooler’s full.” When I came back out, he was staring down into the cooler as if he’d opened an ancient wooden chest containing some type‘a Indiana Jones-style bullshit. I approached him, and he pointed a stubby finger towards the cooler, in particular towards the glass vile of electric green that was glimmering from beneath the ice.

“The hell is that?” he asked.

“MadDog, mane, you never had any?” I said like an old pro, even though that liquid had never passed mine own lips.

“No, and I don’t think I want any. That doesn’t look natural.”

And he was right. It was indeed the color of the radioactive material one sees on The Simpsons.

“Don’t be a pussy,” I told him, “It ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

“No thanks.” He was a wise, wise man (see, more foreshadowing…this OWB cat knows what he’s doing).

We arrived at Chez Rinny and were immediately greeted by her parents. By this time, I had about six beers, a couple rum drinks and a shot of tequila coursing through my system, not to mention the j we had smoked back at the state line before crossing the bridge. I was feelin’ right…loose, you know, as if nothing I said or did could come out wrong.

Her mom offered the traditional hugs, her father his usual handshake. He quickly walked back to his blender, where he was making margaritas. “You fellas want a ‘rita?” he asked over the ping-ping-pinging of Jimmy-Damn-Buffet and his monotonous steel drums.

“YEAH, SHORE I DO!” I wasn’t sure why I was shouting, and based on the looks I garnered from my compatriots, they weren’t sure either. Volume has always been a problem for me, and when I get on that ole liquor train, things just progress from bad to worse. I’m a reserved fella by most accounts (why are y’all laughing?...rude), but when I get good and liquored up, I’m Albert Einstein, Ronald Reagan, Al Green and Napoleon shouted through a fkn bullhorn. I know err-mffkn-thang, and I know it at a high volume. I get on my own nerves, if that tells you anything. Good thing is, even though I get on my own nerves when I’m blowed, I’m too blowed to notice…or care.

I gulped down that first margarita like a thirsty man chugs a canteen. Slammed the empty glass down on the bar so hard that it slipped on the condensation around the bottom, sailing off the bar and onto the floor. “NOTHER ONE.”

Everyone looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“PLEASE.”

Mook asked me if I wanted a smoke, and I mean, “HELL YEAH I WANT A SMOKE MANE, YOU GOT ONE!” He slipped me out the back door onto the deck overlooking the beautiful Perdido Sound.

“Dude, you gotta tone it down, we just got here.” Mook was right. The day was young. And I was already about 85 years old worth of drunk.

“NAH NAH NAH MAN, I’M GOOD.”

Mook convinced me to help him get the cooler out of the Nova, thinking it would keep me occupied for a while. It did…or rather, the contents of the cooler did. We hauled it down onto the pier, where we sat on some benches framed-up out of found driftwood (very coastal), sipping away as the sun began to set. By this time, my pitch count had crept up to about a half a case of beer, several rum drinks, several tequila shots, and two margaritas courtesy of Rinny’s pops. It was getting ugly.

When it became clear we wouldn’t be making the trip to the Flora-Bama because, as I heard through the fog, “Rinny’s drunk ass friend had overdone it,” the cooler came up missing. I mean, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked in the car, in the boat tied to the pier, in the storage area around the stilts upon which the house was built. I was madder’n a poked nest of ground hornets, and I stormed into the kitchen looking for drinkee. All I found the fridge was half empty box of Franzia wine, so I sallied up to the spigot, mouth agape, and let that free flood flow right into me ole cake-hole.

Rinny walked in mid-stream and said, “What the fuhhhhh…”

I WOULD have been embarrassed, if I had not been so utterly and totally trounced.

I attempted to defend myself, and in said defense I offered the following rhetorical excellence: “Glarglefuss said poan atcha ‘ide in da coola.” (“Father Joe said some of y’all hid my cooler,” for those who don’t speak Drunk.)

She rolled her eyes. “Are you okay? How much have you had?

“Eebee? Ahdoan-no, sun lok pipteen, sun lok tinny, ahdoan-no.” Translation: “ME? I don’t know, something like fifteen, something like twenty (drinks, obviously), I don’t know.”

She rolled her eyes again. That made twice in five minutes.

I went huntin’ for Mook, thinking he was the snake that had slithered off with mine cooler. When I found him, I slobbered and said, “Ipty-u mah coola!” )Translation: You gimme my cooler.)

He shook his head. That should have been a sure sign that I was over the edge. When Mook shakes his head at you, you know you have done gone one step too far over the line, bruh-man.

He brushed me off and I found my precious after a little searching, someone had put it in the trunk of Rinny’s Volkswagon. I freed it from captivity, and extended the spirit of emancipation to several more of the SouthPaws shotgunned in unceremonious fashion (like a boss, to use the parlance of our times). I grabbed what was left of the tequila…and that green MadDog, just for good measure. No such thing as being TOO prepared, after all.

I hobbled out towards the pier again, where I was intercepted by Rinny and J. Figuring my level of stupor wouldn’t blend well with close proximity to water, she elbow-wrestled me in the other direction do-si-do style, up the steps to the grandiose back porch which opened like a soaring cathedral into the night sky. We sat and I talked, or did something that I thought was talking. Rinny was bragging on ya boy and his way with words. I was touched, truly touched. So deeply, in fact, that in celebration, I lifted that god-awful green liquor to my lips and let it crawl down my throat like the thick syrupy high-fructose corn syrup imbibed monstrosity that it was. Drained it. The. Whole. Damn. Bottle.

It took about five minutes for the effect to begin to settle in. I think I now know why one sees so many users of this particular brand of hooch reclining in the streets. Seriously, I could have laid out spread-eagle in the middle of I-10 and not given it a second thought.

At that point, I must have started sliding out of the white slatted rocker into which I’d pourn myself minutes before, because J hooked me under my arms, as if catching me. All I could hear was “blurple-blurple-blurp …get him in the bathroom.”

“Nawmgood, doe worree.” (I’m good, don’t worry.) That phrase was immediately followed by a volley of puke that missed the toilet by, oh hell, I don’t know, four feet and about 180 degree. Puke everywhere. Dripping down the walls, swelling out on the tile floor in increasing volume. Now I’m a big ole boy, I’ll admit. J did his best to keep me up out of that vile swampus that had filled the bathroom, holding me up off the wet floor by my elbows. But a man can only do what a man can do. Eventually, he succumbed to gravity, and I succumbed to the vomit-covered bathroom floor.

I’m not really sure what happened next. At least, I’m not aware of any particular chronology or synchronicity. But I do know the following events transpired: Rinny popped in again some time later with J and asked me if I needed to go to the hospital; I remember never wanting to leave the chilled embrace of that cold tile floor, as it felt so good against my damp, clammy face; Father Joe praying some liturgy or another over my soon-to-be-fallen corpse; I puked several (maybe 10) more times until I was literally dry-heaving; another threatened hospital run from Rinny and J who said I must have had alcohol poison.

“Naw nut qual pwosin, eyes ruffie!” I proclaimed. (It’s not alcohol poisoned, I was ruffie’d.)

No one seemed willing to entertain the product of my investigatorial prowess, as somewhere between hours three and six of my tenure on the bathroom floor, I determined in my haze that certainly my alcohol tolerance was not at issue, but rather someone had wanted a big ole Vitamin D injection (if you know what I mean) from your narrator and had thusly resorted to nefarious mickey-slippin’ plots against me.

While many of the events of that night are indeed lodged in the fog of passed time, one detail I cannot erase from my mind is the taste of that horrid, heinous green devil-nectar as it came back up. It was horrible going down, like a Robitussen and Jager shot with a chaser of tropical Febreze. On the way up, it tasted like that…plus puke. It burned my mouth, stained my tongue green and made me feel altogether violated by the FDA for allowing such a malignant substance to be available on grocery store shelves the nation over. Someone should file a class-action, folks…seriously (Glen, can you work on that for us?).

This went on throughout the remainder of the night. I simply could not get up. It could have been hours, or it could have been days that I was on the floor of that Ono Island bathroom. Until, that is, the next morning, when Rinny’s pops opened the bathroom door for his morning constitution.

“Good God, what in the name of…”

There was really nothing I could say at that point…I mean literally, I still was not able to speak coherently. But that sure as hell didn’t stop me from trying.

“Ah doan-o buh ah thanka gah roofie” (I don’t know but I think I got ruffie’d).

Seeing that my rhetoric had fallen on deaf ears, I then decided my best course of action was to fake unconsciousness, which basically involved me being still and closing one eye while squinting through the other to see when he was gone.

I could hear his voice thundering though the house, shouting for Rinny to get her “drunk ass friend off his cotdamn bathroom floor.” She escorted me upstairs to a bed in the loft, where I spent many more hours in absolutely dark with an ice pack on my head, hoping the devil who had done this to me had enjoyed himself/ herself.

Late in the afternoon, I staggered downstairs to the smell of bacon and eggs, which sent me back to the bathroom to throw-up. Rinny’s dad cackled, knocked on the door and asked me if I wanted mine fried over-medium. Barf volley number 28. I guess I deserved that. At least my aim had improved, as I hit the toilet bowl dead on.

But that was not the greatest indignity of the day. Given my behavior the night before, I was not invited to remain for another night, despite my still less-than-optimal condition. I had to ride home it that damn AC-less four-door toaster box of a car. An hour long drive, at that. So Mook took the keys and pointed the Nova back west, while I hugged myself as closely to the stream of fresh air coming in that one half-rolled-down window like a dadgum golden retriever on his first truck-bed ride in months.

Word to the wise, if one plans of being hung-over, plan also on securing a vehicle with an air conditioner for the ride home. That Alabama summer can be just plain ole nasty. One of the many lessons life has imparted upon me, and it is my duty to pass it on to you faithful readers.

And never, I mean never…ever-ever-ever-ever-ever, drank the green MadDog. You can trust the sage advice from ya boy OWB, as you know I wouldn’t run you aground this far into the game. After all, I’m countin’ on all of y’all to Hoodoo us to a cotdang Natty this year.

Roll Tide.