Your First Experience Waking Up After A College Night Out

Buzzy Robinson6 years ago

It’s a brisk Saturday morning in late September of 2016. The birds are shining, the sun is chirping, and you are as hungover as a human person is capable of being while still remaining medically alive.

You’re an 18-year-old high school senior visiting his buddy at a University in New York for the weekend because he heard that you were interested in applying there yourself and invited you up. You are exactly one day into a three-day visit, and already things are off to an eventful start.

You have just woken up — inexplicably pantsless — on a damp and unfamiliar leather couch that smells vaguely like stale booze, fresh puke, and premarital sexual intercourse. Nice.

Your face hurts because you slept with your right cheek planted firmly in a pile of Snyder’s of Hanover pretzel sticks. The roof of your mouth feels like sandpaper — probably from the eating of the aforementioned pretzel sticks. Your fingertips smell like Marlboro Reds and your private parts are a bit sore and slightly inflamed (which you will Google once you find your phone).

You sit up and take stock of your immediate surroundings. It doesn’t take long for you to surmise that you are inside of a fraternity house. You hope that this is your friend’s fraternity house.

A framed composite photo on the wall assuages your aching brain of this temporary concern. The gilded picture on the wall reads “The Kappa Alpha Society.” Yup, this is the right house. At least you woke up in the right house. Good. Small victories.

A sea of crushed plastic cups and dented beer cans veil the fraternity’s scuffed floors from wall to wood-paneled wall like a glistening cloud of wet garbage. You think that this is tight.

You try standing up, but the sudden burst effort causes your eyeballs to start throbbing. You sit back down and reassess your life choices. The warm sunlight streaming through the room’s floor-to-ceiling French windows feels good on your face but is offensive to your aching hungover retinas.

You try to stand up again and are successful this time, confirming that your legs do in fact still work.

Half walking, half stumbling, you navigate the intermittent heaps of slick plastic that cover the living room floor and make your way towards the front door and out onto the porch to relieve yourself. You prefer urinating off of the porch because the bathrooms in the house are most likely a biohazard. Plus you could use the fresh air.

A group of prospective students and their parents are being led by an annoyingly energetic campus tour guide. The tour group sees you pissing off of the fraternity house’s front porch. You continue peeing.

The parents are visibly disgusted with you. The students seem mildly amused. You don’t care because you don’t even go to this school. Not yet, at least..