Miami Roadtrip

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A few years ago, a couple of my friends (we’ll call them Castro, X, Jay, and TheThird) and I decided to take a trip down to Miami for spring break. I hadn’t done anything for spring break in a couple of years, and the opportunity to leave Blacksburg for a place other than Northern Virginia was one I was willing to take advantage of. We decided that driving down to Miami would be the most cost effective. We figured the more money we saved on unimportant factors (of which included food, lodging, and transportation) the more we could spend on more important things (like booze). This idea typically works in most roadtrips, but usually not as well when you’re driving a CHEVY FUCKING TAHOE.

That’s right, for a trip in which we were to travel down half the east coast, we rented the only domestic vehicle on Earth that has the gas mileage of a WWII German tank.

The average fill-up for this bottomless gas dragon came out to be roughly $70, and the trip was going to take us 12 hours. TheThird was in charge of booking the vehicle, and was able to at least get us a deal on the actual rental cost, so we figured maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Since we didn’t want to get into the city in the middle of the night, we left Blacksburg late in the evening at around 12 am. We split our driving shifts according to the gas tank, where each person would pay for a full tank and drive the car until that tank was empty. All five of us took shifts driving, and that was just on the way down.

After the requisite pit stops where we gassed up, got food, and stole sunglasses, we finally made it to our room in sunny south Florida. Having not slept in nearly 24 hours, we were ready to hit south beach. From the moment we got onto Ocean Dr., southern Miami’s premier strip, it was as if there was a giant block party going on. There were plenty of beautiful women and fancy looking cars driving around and even more parked in front of posh little beach front restaurants.

After a few hours of just walking around and harassing the local women, Castro, X, and I came across a make-shift pimp who went by the clever street name of “Mike”. There seemed to be a crowd around him listening to him speak. I tried to figure out what he was saying, but he was talking so fast that he was almost beyond comprehension. I did manage to understand him bragging about how he made an average of one million dollars a year, and also remember him trying to justify that mathematically by going through his daily earnings as “pimp” and “hustler”. Despite the fact that his rambling was obviously rehearsed, his math still somehow managed to be wrong. I mean, really, how credible can you possibly be when you’re wearing a black bow with a red hat and matching shoes.

I looked in his hands and saw that he had a stack of passes for a place called “Royal Bar” that was located directly across the street. Yeah that’s right, Mike wasn’t a pimp, just a really shitty promoter.

He took a break from his babbling and mentioned something along the lines of “Tonight at Royal bar…top shelf all you can drink for $20.” Before he finished that sentence we were all already dodging traffic as we raced across the avenue. It was still relatively early by Miami standards (1:00am) so there weren’t too many people in line nor were that many people inside. We got in and immediately sought to get our moneys worth. And by “sought to get our moneys worth”, I mean “sought to get suicidally drunk”.

Now everybody has their own thoughts about open bars, Jay’s for example is “all you can drink does not mean drink all you can” which pretty much means limits are still limits no matter how much an open bar may cost you. Although this is probably the best mentality to follow, I happen to subscribe to a different philosophy. I go by the rule of 3. For every dollar you spend on getting into an open bar event, you should consume $3 worth of alcohol. Even though this means I should have drank $60 of liquor, within about an hour, Castro, X, and I consumed the bar’s entire supply of Hennessey and put a nice dent on the bar’s supply of Grey Goose.

I guess you could say we were kind of like chocoholics, but for like, alcohol instead. About an hour into the night, we spotted a few random girls who were posted up next to us. I approached one who I thought was cute and, in my best spanish accent, proceeded to tell her a little bit about myself. And by “a little bit about myself” I mean “that I was a stripper named Ramon”.

Girl: “So where are you from Ramon?”
Me: “From the jungles of the Dominican Republic.”

The fact that I was pretty drunk at this point masked most of the awfulness of my accent, but unfortunately I don’t remember whether she bought it or not. Why? Because, apparently this is where my memory decided to take the rest of the night off, and leave me to the wreckless endangerment of my purely drunken instincts.

***the rest of this story is stuff I cannot vividly remember, it is based on second hand information I got from the other people with me on the trip***

According to TheThird’s explanation and Jay’s photos, we left the bar several hours later and continued to walk around the city. It was roughly 4 in the morning. After walking nearly a dozen blocks, doing something that nearly broke my digital camera, and taking hits off random people’s hookas at a local Sheesha lounge, we stopped at a place called Joe’s Diner. We sat at a booth and I elevated to yet another quantum state in my drunken pseudo-consciousness. The waitress came by and, without asking, gave me a glass of water and the rest of the table a set of menus. Oh and by the way, these were easily the most ridiculously sized menus on Earth. X took a film clip of me struggling to read one of them, and judging by the clip, they looked like they had been published by the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t know whether to pick out a burger, check out the rise on my pharm. stocks, or give it to a bum as a blanket. “That was a menu,” says X as I stare at it with a blank face, “it wasn’t very convenient for those who were drunk.” As the short movie goes on, I apparently then went on to order “a big sandwich” and “some purple stuff” to drink. Neither of which, needless to say, were on the novelty sized menu.

Shortly thereafter I blacked out, bearing homage to the name of my college town.

But how bad was this? The group sitting in the booth across from us happened to be a bunch of med school students who took the liberty of giving me a free prognosis.

Dr. Smartass: “Hey uh, we’re med school students and uh…he doesn’t look good.”

They clearly didn’t know we were students from Blacksburg. But regardless of that fact, I had turned into a mass of dead weight, and after listening to the soon-to-be-dropouts my friends decided to carry me away into the backseat of the Tahoe.

Once they had reached the restaurant door, they happened to notice a police officer grappling with some guy in the street because he was drunk in public. Fearing I’d get thrown in jail for what would technically be the same charge, they cleverly made a wall amongst themselves and carried me away without getting caught. They would later go back into the restaurant for their orders.

I woke up the next morning to the blasting of Laffy Taffy on the radio. I had no idea where I was and began to think I had been kidnapped. I looked in the front cabin and saw TheThird was driving and Castro was in the passenger seat.

I had spent the night in the backseat of the Tahoe and I had no idea what had happened, but my huge headache gave me notice that drinking was involved. TheThird explained the whole night, and that was the end of day 1 in Miami.

udothedishes . . .