Part 2-The Legend of Fuzzynuts
Day 1, 12:58 p.m.
Burgers and dogs were up. That's how you start. We bought all kinds of good food, you start with the easiest stuff and open up the Doritos and snackies and start with burgers and dogs on the grill. The weather couldn't have been more....well, you get it at this point. The weather was good. I'm not going through a thesaurus to look for words that mean the same as perfect. Ideal, maybe? Nah, doesn't do it justice.
I settled into my seat next to the fire. I had a nice spot between the grill and the fire, and the woods that ran down a large hill began directly to my left. My friends sat with their food and drinks in a half circle. Trid, her friend, Emma, Slatz, Nails, Vixen, Kelley, and Lynn. We had a LOT of beer to go through, and we were up for the challenge. Slatz is famous for being a huge bully when it comes to drinking. When he gets his buzz on, he usually lets us have it, though always with a huge smile on his face. "Drink up you pussy." He laughed at me, even though I was on about my 5th beer of the 1st hour of drinking. He then got pretend serious. "Seriously, Vin, DRINK!" This prompted me to slug another beer, and another, and another. Nails laughed at the situation. (He laughs at EVERY situation.) I'm not sure I know another grown man who giggles as much as that silly motherfucker.
"What are you laughing at?" Slatz asked, now looking at Nails. "You drink too, pussy!" Nails can't drink beer quite as fast as the rest of us could. In fact, he's not really supposed to drink beer at all because of his stomach, so he broke out the vodka, and started pounding that instead. This prompted my sister Trid to crack open the Captain Morgan's, which is her drink of choice. She even dressed as Captain Morgan for Halloween one year. Now THAT is dedication to your drink. At any rate, the shit-show had officially begun. It was like a snowball. Nails hit the vodka, Trid opened the rum, and this made me and Slatz jealous so we started in on the hard shit too. Luckily, the rest of the girls stuck with the beer or who knows what would have happened.
I cooked some more burgers and some sausage on the grill, knowing that soon enough I would be incapable of cooking anything edible without burning my hands off or destroying the grill. I was still coherent enough to know that we needed some more food lining our bellies if we had any chance of seeing the sunset.
3:32 p.m.
The conversation ramped up around the fire. Something took hold of me and I got locked in as I ate my burger. I can't remember exactly what I was saying. It was almost like I had blacked out and suddenly became the funniest person on Earth...or I was just drunk. It did feel in a way like I was Frank the Tank during the debate scene at the end of Old School, where he owns the debate against the Ragin' Cajun and then snaps out of it and says, "What just happened?" This prompted Kelley to declare, "Vinny, you are by far our most quotable friend." I'll say pretty much anything to get a laugh, regardless of how inappropriate it is. I was in the middle of telling the story of Nails' near-death experience, (go to my archives and read the entry titled, My Friend's Brush With Death), and the craziest thing happened. This tiny little chipmunk appeared from the woods, walked right up to me, looked up, and pretty much said, "What's up?"
It stopped me dead in my tracks. Don't chipmunks usually run away at the first sign of being noticed by a group of humans? Not Fuzzynuts, which is what I quickly dubbed our new friend. I looked in his eyes for a what seemed like a long time. He was undeterred. "What's happening Fuzzynuts? You hungry bud?" Fuzzynuts nodded and pointed to my half eaten burger. I looked down at the now blurry looking cow meat that sat in silence on my plate. "Oh hell yeah Fuzzynuts, you gotta try some of this shit." My friends laughed and implored me to feed the poor little scavenger. "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I'M DOING!!" Apparently, they hadn't just heard my conversation with my new friend.
I broke off a piece of my burger and I laid it at my feet. Fuzzynuts cautiously but confidently approached. He grabbed the burger, stood up on his hind legs, and began to feast...right at the side of my sneaker. He packed his little mouth with a man-sized portion of burger. "Where's my beer motherfucker?" Fuzzynuts scolded. I shook my head smiling. "Dude, I'm drinking vodka right now, but I can grab you one if you want?" My friends were now confused. Was I really having a conversation with a wild rodent? I reached into the cooler, cracked a Bud Light, and placed it next to my furry friend. Fuzzynuts inspected the beer and decided it wasn't for him. "Suit yourself, Fuckface." I shrugged and took another blast of vodka. I placed another piece of burger on the ground, this time soaking it in beer. Apparently all the chipmunk needed was a mixer made of meat to drink with, because he gobbled up the beer soaked burger and ran back into the woods. "Great, now he's gonna bring that shit back to his family and his kids are gonna get drunk. Is it weird that I feel bad about that?"
5:44 p.m.
Well as you might imagine, the alcohol began to flow even faster and with the fierceness of Tyson in his prime. We elected to start playing some camping/drinking games. Slatz and Emma brought up the drinking game formerly known as Baggo. The night gets a little foggy after that. We cooked up some steak tips for dinner and continued to drink unnecessary amounts of hard alcohol. I chose the word unnecessary because when it comes right down to it, does anything good really happen when people get THAT drunk? Especially with a large campfire going? There was that rock that I mentioned in part 1, and at several points throughout the weekend, I stumbled over it, mostly in the direction of the raging inferno that we called a campfire. At one point I thought I was going in...to the point where everyone jumped up and reached for me. Being the physical specimen that I am with the dexterity of a surgeon and the agility of an NFL running back, I regained my feet while gracefully stepping through the fire, barely singing my leg hair and not spilling a sip of my vodka.
"Holy shit guy!" Nails said, clearly rattled. My sister just shook her head. Slatz gave one, "Ha." I had escaped a certain hospital trip. Had I wound up in the fire, I would have surely been in trouble. I was drunk enough where it would have been hard enough to get to my feet if I hadn't been on fire. In addition to that, nobody was sober enough to get my ass out of the fire before I got burned pretty bad. It was all moot; however, since my athleticism saved me. My cockiness, however, burned me. Literally. I leaned over the fire to talk shit to my fallen enemy, and a flame reached up and whipped me in the face, singing my nose hairs. Beer muscles even come into play when you try to brawl with a fire, apparently. Feeling pretty good about myself, I started to run around camp like a maniac. I approached one of the Baggo boards and apparently thought it was made of solid oak and not plywood, because I tried using it as a springboard. It snapped under my feet as if it was a paper bag. I stopped in my tracks and looked around at the shocked faces of my friends.
"Nice job dick." Slatz said. "That thing cost $20 bucks."
"Well it was only worth about $3, look how flimsy it is."
"Was." Trid rubbed it in.
"Well at least now I can throw it in the fire." And I did. It went up in a blaze of immense glory and triumph. It was if I had destroyed the board subconsciously on purpose, so I could engulf it in flames.
I began flexing over the fire, and just then, out of the corner of my eye, at the edge of the forest in front of the now setting sun, was the silhouette of Fuzzynuts. It was the largest shadow ever cast by his species. There he stood. Defiant. Brave. Hungry. I was frozen as we made eye contact. I mouthed to myself an amazed, "What the fuck??" My friend's bitching about the piece of shit game faded and the world went away. Fuzzynuts exuded something indescribable. He was like the Perseus of the chipmunk world. Half God, half rodent. "Friend or foe?" I asked him. Fuzzynuts just stared at me. I reached for the knife utensil hanging from the grill....slowly. I held it in front of me as my adversary rose up on his hind legs even taller. "FRIEND OR FOE!!"
"What the fuck is he doing?" Kelley asked nobody in particular.
That's the way I remembered it anyway. I was later told that the chipmunk came back and I gave him a steak tip and that was pretty much it. Look at this picture. This was no Demigod...just a chipmunk. But to those of us in the forest that weekend, high in the Green Mountains, he was much more than that.
Fuzzynuts was only the beginning. We ventured into our 8th strait hour of mostly drinking hard liquor. Who would pass out first? Would anyone fire vomit all over the campsite? How would it workout in the tent which housed myself, Nails, Vixen, and Kelley? How many bad decisions would be made? Could we match the drinking intensity of day 1? What would replace Baggo for fun for the remainder of our stay? Would we escape the woods with our dignity intact and our lean-to not in a pile of smoldering ashes? Would our friend Merph make a surprise appearance all the way from his then home in Miami, Florida? Would this trip be the beginning of the end of my marriage? Find out in the thrilling conclusion of In Between Insane and Insecure-Part 3, The Origin of Penguin Face.
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