Our story begins, as so many stories fail to, in scenic Cambridge, Massachusetts, as our hero is making his way home on his mostly broken bicycle from an evening of drinking with an old college friend . It should be noted at this point that "drinking" doesn't necessarily imply that I was nearly drunk enough to justify any of what follows; I'd had just barely enough to notice it and was really quite sober, relatively speaking. As they're fond of doing, though, the several $1 pints of Natural Ice I'd forced myself to ingest earlier had quickly run the gauntlet of my gastrointestinal system and liver, taken up residence in my bladder, and were clamoring pretty hard to get out, if you get my drift. Since it was a nontrivial distance home and I'm pretty sure they'd revoke my security clearance at work for another public urination citation, I figured the Middle East (the hipster bar, not the war-torn region) was as good a place to use a legitimate bathroom as any, since it was around midnight and nothing but bars were open anyway. Once I'd got that all taken care of, my alcoholics' sensibilities convinced me that it'd be unethical to use their bathroom without at least having a quick drink for the road, and being nothing if not ethical, I did just that.

It was a Wednesday night, so the place was pretty dead. Not really in the mood for human interaction anyway, that suited me just fine and I settled in to prop up the bar, nurse my Pabst Blue Ribbon, and enjoy the Pixies album the bartender had playing for a bit. My mind was wandering, which is a nice way of saying I was thinking about naked ladies, so I didn't notice the girl two stools down motioning me over right away. It did register eventually though (I'm not a COMPLETE homo), and random conversation with strangers is usually at least interesting so I wandered over. The major flaw in that plan was pretty obvious from the outset though, as she was either too drunk or too stupid (my money's on some magical combination of the two) to really form complete thoughts, understand language very well, or do any of that other good stuff that usually falls under the heading of "conversation". She was less deterred by this than I was though, and managed to bravely overcome it by draping various parts of herself over me and more or less trying to cram her tongue down my throat. My standards had recently plummeted and she did have a fairly nice pair of legs (the less said about the rest the better, honestly), so I chucked out that "pride" thing I'm always lugging around and more or less went along with the whole disaster. Last call mercifully rolled around before too long, which prompted her to ask me if we were going to my place, which as even I know is drunk-chick for "please fill me with your evil seed at the earliest opportunity, good sir". I was in uncharted territory at this point; nobody had ever really tried to bed me within an hour of meeting me before (for reasons that are pretty understandable, really) and I was a little bit taken aback. Being a horny, sexually frustrated, and at the time violently self-loathing 22-year-old male though, it seemed like it might be a fairly harmless way to get me out of the whole emo trip I was on, so after a good six or seven milliseconds of thinking about it I gave her a hesitantly emphatic affirmative on that.

The walk from the Middle East to my apartment is about ten blocks. About half a block in I was starting to have some mild misgivings about the whole thing, as she kept falling on either the ground or random pedestrians (who were understandably unhappy about the whole thing, and I don't know the etiquette for what to say to someone when the drunk chick you've just picked up stumbles into them so it got a bit awkward at times) about an average of every ten steps. She was about my height and I'm a sissy girly man, so scooping her up every two minutes or so was turning into a real workout. Still, as I said before, this was uncharted territory; I had no idea how to tactfully get out of the whole deal at this point, so I figured I'd just try to drag her home and get it over with as quickly as possible. Healthy, right?

After proceeding in this manner for about two days' subjective time, we finally wound up at my apartment somehow. We got upstairs to my room after some more balance issues (I live in a third-floor walkup with steep stairs; it wasn't pretty) and I sighed and began to undress. She somehow managed to slur out that she needed to use the bathroom, so I steered her in that direction while I sat in my room and tried to remember which STDs were curable and which weren't. After about ten minutes of that (I couldn't remember if herpes was or wasn't; anyone want to help?) there was a deafening crash from the bathroom. Knocking got no response, so I peeked in the door and found her lying on the floor with her skirt and drawers around her ankles. My first thought, obviously, was "fuck, how am I going to get rid of a body this late at night?", but after it turned out she was just unconscious I got around to noticing some other minor details of the scene. Most noteworthy was the bathroom sink, which had somehow gotten detached from its wallmount during whatever happened on her trip from the toilet to the ground and was now lying next to her on the floor. The sink was in one piece but most of the plumbing hadn't fared too well; the drain line was shot and didn't look fixable without spare parts. Since I'd been living in the place for all of a week and the other guy there was a pretty well-organized friend-of-a-friend who I didn't know well, I wasn't incredibly happy about the way the evening was developing. It seemed like I at least had a legitimate "out" now though; in a flash of inspiration I woke her up and told her I was calling her a cab and that she couldn't stay anymore. The flash of inspiration was pretty short-lived, however, as she flatly refused to leave.

"Flatly refused to leave" is an understatement. She denied breaking the sink, got angry at me for the mere suggestion that she'd broken the sink, and insisted we stop arguing about it and get going on some godawful sex act or other. Mind that she hadn't been that attractive to begin with and by this point I was thoroughly horrified, so I wasn't really happy with that idea. It should be restated for the record at this point that I'm a fucking MIT graduate student. I know about as much about trying to get a drunk chick who's just destroyed my sink and wants to bed me out of my house at three in the morning than Keith Richards knows about quantum field theory, which is to say not very much and pass the drugs, please. I spent the better part of the next hour trying various combinations of cajoling and bodily dragging and eventually managed to get her out on the street, but she still wouldn't let me call her a cab. She told me she'd just walk home, thank you very much (well, it wasn't that articulate, but you get the general idea), and as I was pretty annoyed by this point (I had to work in the morning) I told her to enjoy the walk and I'd catch her later (a figure of speech, really, but that's probably obvious by now). I went upstairs to survey the damage with my housemate, who had woken up in all the commotion and was mildly curious as to why the bathroom was broken. He was a remarkably good sport about it, all things considered, and told me not to worry about it until morning. I told him an abbreviated story of what had happened and he was pretty amused, and then I immediately started feeling guilty about letting a too-drunk-to-walk girl try to walk home through the not-incredibly-great neighborhoods of north Cambridge. I can only blame my Catholic upbringing for that one, and it's just one more reason I'll have my revenge on my arch-nemesis the Pope someday, but in any case I eventually went down to look for her and see if she'd even made it out of the immediate vicinity.

Sure enough, I found her lying in a bush about half a block away. Repeating my offer to call her a cab didn't make her very happy, and I wound up dragging her back to my place, figuring she'd get picked up on vagrancy if she slept in the bush (again, why is that my problem? I don't understand myself sometimes, honestly...). I got her upstairs and into my bed (logic at this point would've dictated I dump her on the couch, but I wasn't thinking very clearly by this point in the evening, thank you very motherfucking much), hoping she'd just pass out and that'd be the end of it. She turned out to be more cunning than I'd given her credit for though, as within fifteen minutes of that she'd managed to quietly remove all her clothing and drape herself on top of me. I wasn't, to put it mildly, happy with this new development, but I was also pretty tired and not really in the mood to fight it. I managed to meet her halfway and placate her with some admittedly halfassed making out, figuring it was cringe-inducing but wouldn't kill me and at least I wasn't going to get the clap that way, and she eventually fell asleep while I laid awake and tried to figure out how I was going to get her out as quickly and wordlessly as possible in the morning.

I don't know what I was really expecting the morning after, but continued denials of breaking the sink definitely wasn't that high on the list. Using the undersexed prick's best friend, biting sarcasm, I asked her who broke the sink if she didn't. Unfortunately, she wasn't the type of person who understood sarcasm, or even really english that well when you got down to it, so my rapier wit was lost on her and she just kept repeating that she hadn't done it. Eventually I just agreed, said I was sorry for ever doubting her, and managed to get her dressed and out of the house so I could wash all my sheets, enjoy six or eight relaxing showers, and try to take enough Xanax to erase the memory of the last twelve hours in lieu of going to work.

Again, I'm not some damn Christian; I'm not even going to imply that there's a moral to this story other than "if you're going to pick up drunk chicks, at least try to make sure they're mildly attractive" (if she'd had any redeeming qualities whatsoever the whole thing might've been somewhat forgivable, but she managed to hide them well if she did). I hope you were mildly amused by the whole thing though; I certainly was once I'd thoroughly bleached my bedding, washed myself repeatedly, and confirmed that I didn't have crabs. Better luck next time, I guess?

-bryan