The One Where LB Gets Drunk

There are some things which are never whispered in the same breath; high heels and champagne, whiskey and orange juice, and if you know us personally, LB and inebriation.

I hear you protesting from your seats already. What? LB drunk, and you weren't there to witness? That’s tantamount to phenomenal rarities like the blue moon, Singapore’s Olympic medal, mutes winning the spelling bee or a live telecast for the Paralympics – because you don’t know if it’s classified under sports or comedy. Not that it never happens, but even in our years as friends, I can count the number of times he’s been that drunk with one hand and several amputated fingers.

LB has for years been my sheath of madness. Like all functional relationships, we have a set of responsibilities to adhere to and getting drunk has always been my monopolized domain. Even through our overseas chronicles, he has always disciplined himself from alcohol and I always wondered how anyone could voluntarily stop after 2 glasses.

Last night was a climax of sorts for him. For weeks now, LB has been religiously subscribing to my partying regiment and this was after a sabbatical of months, where he had abstain from my tease of decadence and contented to just tickle himself with my stories.

It was that night out with Atila that brought him back into the fray of madness and it’s been a steady culmination of alcohol, women, pick-ups, triumphs and falls, and it all imploded into an intemperate affair with 3 bottles of vodka and Red Bull.

It all started as a night out with Adrian and a group of guys whom a couple of them I knew way back when I was still devoted to one woman and they were the boyfriends of the ex girlfriend’s best friends. Fast forward 4 years later, we are the ex boyfriend club, a collective being of sour experiences.

It started with two bottles and then Shou added another to the cornucopian backdrop of towering buckets of ice and jugs of mixers, and I knew that this was going to another night of liver bashing - but who needs a liver when you have Pierre Png. By the time LB joined us, we were already through the first bottle, but he came with that much vigour to drink that I thought I had to be pissed drunk to be imagining stuff.

Somewhere in between, he got generous with the gulps and it came too quick and too strong, that before I even knew it, he was prancing all over the club chatting up random strangers. Or as he says,

“I am invincible.”

What was hilarious was that I have never, since Atila showed me that it was possible to speed date in a club, seen anyone of my friends, asystematically hit on THAT many women and fail that many times and still take it like water off a ducks back.

He was running all over like Richard Simmons on E, minus the spandex, a wildfire through the sea of foreign petals and he was just that entertaining that I simply fuelled it by pointing out random women to him.

Me: “That one. I bet she’s pinoy.”

And he would walk up to chat her up, and be subsequently rejected.

Me: “There that one, she’s waiting to be picked up.”

And he would repeat the cycle of introduction and eventual rejection. And I was having the ball of my time because he was just that fearless and I was just randomly pointing at any woman who had a decent cleavage.

By the time he pin-balled his way through the bevy of skirts on the dance floor, with a numerical chat up performance that would pedestal him to the awesomeness of Atila, he finally turned to me,

LB: “I don’t think anyone has been rejected more times than me.”
Me: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
LB: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

If I thought LB’s streak of perceived invincibility ended when the lights came on, I was wrong. He only needed some poker cards and an LCD screen to qualify as a walking Facebook. Yes, he was that much of a social utility. When we got out of the club, he was shaking hands with so many random strangers that I wondered if he was running an election.

Then we headed to Xiu’s place to continuing drinking, which was crazy because I knew I was bloated from all the prior drinking and LB was shit house drunk.

In the cab,

Me: “Call the girls, what’s the address?”
Shou: “I got no phone.”
LB: “Huuwhy dich I drink so much ah?”
Me: “Do you know the place?”
Shou: “Call the girls.”
LB: “Huuwhy dich chew let mii drink so much? I’m going to die man, I’m going to die, I feel like sssshit.”

Me: [making a call] “D, pass the phone to Xiu.”
LB: “Arrrrgggghhh, I feel like shit..”
Me: “Xiu, what’s the address?”
LB: “Dude, I am sooo drunk. I am never this drunk. “

When we finally got to her place and after managing to coax LB out of the cab, he broke out into a mini concert of his drunk rendition of Eternal Flame with Shou and this was along the private housing estate at 5.30 am in the morning. (Hilarious. And I have it on video.)

He collapsed onto the sofa almost immediately and woke up groggy an hour later and started gagging.

Xiu: “LB, don’t you ever puke in the house. Go outside!”

I was watching all this from the corner of my eye, while D poked away at me to get me up to help LB. I obviously knew that he was going to mess up the place with his puke, so I did the only rational thing, I pretended to sleep.

D: “Oh my gawd. Wake up!! He is puking!!”

I peered through the window to see him spewing in the middle of the front porch, I ran through the list of responsibilities in my head that included cleaning up the spew, then decided to go back to pretending to sleep.

D: “LB!! You are making a trail!! Stop walking and vomiting!!”

When we finally left her house at noon, LB was still tipsy.

LB: “Dude, I puked my bile out. I have never fucking been so drunk before. I cannot go home like this. If my mum sees me looking like this, she is going to disown me.”
Me: “What the fuck are you talking about. I need to pee.”
LB: “Dude, I really thought that I was invincible.”

Then we took shelter at the bus stop and he sprawled over the bench.

LB: “Dude, my mum is going to disown me if she sees me like that, I swear."