The morning started soft boiled and hungover. My friend Steve Rogers and I were feeling the remnants of last nights drinking binge. After a couple of bong hits, and much needed caffeine, Steve and I began a city wide search for a missing beer keg that had an appointment to be filled at a local liquor store. “The early the better,” the clerk said when I called. “It is New Years Eve and I'm going to be busy as hell.” I understood that he meant business, and if we wanted to get the keg back at a reasonable time, we'd have to drop it off as early as possible.
Steve and I had planned everything out last night. We even made a To Do list with a timetable on bar napkins, in order to be prepared for what promised to be a crazy New Years Eve party at our friend Alex Graham's house.
It took Steve and I nearly three and a half hours to track down and recover his missing keg, which was three hours longer than we had anticipated. Since he had lent it to his brother three months ago, the keg has made the rounds and had in fact had already been promised to someone for the night. Of course since it was the property of Steve Rogers and had been branded as such, when we finally tracked it town on the back porch of some friend of a friends third cousin by divorce, neither of us thought twice about cutting a hand-sized whole in the screen in order to unlock the door and retrieve the keg.
By 9:30 the party was really swinging and there were so many people at Alex's house, that it was easy to lose track of who was there and who wasn't. Because of this, Alex pulled me aside and told me about a party he had been invited to down the street. “We need to go there, they have the best parties. Don't tell anyone we're leaving. I'm going to grab another beer, meet me on the front porch and we'll sneak away.”
Alex and I arrived to find an exotic costume party. The inside of the house was like a psychedelic love-in, with different colored lights in all the rooms. The backyard was decorated like a Tikki bar. Half-naked people, faces painted, were sitting in the hot tub, sipping cocktails. The gorgeous hostess of the party was dressed in a sexy Cat Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer style) outfit strolling around with a platter of Jello shots.
While Alex and I were pillaging beers from one of the coolers on the patio, the host of the party, who was dressed as an unknown superhero, came up to us. “You guys need to come with me out to the garage.” We followed the man in tights, because well it was his house and we didn't want to be rude. When we got to the garage we found ourselves apart of a circle of five. There was Austin Powers, The Penguin (Burgess Meredith from the Batman TV series style), and what we learned was Bongman.
Neither Alex nor I knew what to say to these three beyond “hey, what's up?”. Luckily, we didn't have to, because The Penguin pulled a velvet pouch from the inside breast pocket of his jacket. “This here, is the stuff I've been telling you about.” Austin Powers and Bongman looked on excitedly as The Penguin pulled out a plastic baggy with weed in it. When he caught me looking at him quizzically, he said, “I got this at Cannabis Cup. I was a judge again this year. This is the most amazing weed you'll ever smoke.”
Bongman pulled a brand new glass bong out from one of the cabinets. “This has never been used, I bought yesterday especially for this amazing weed.” Alex and I grinned at one another, both wondering how the hell we ended up in this moment.
“At what point did you realize that the ground we were standing on was gone and we had fallen down the rabbit hole.”
“When Austin Powers passed me the pipe. When I inhaled I stopped falling. When I exhaled, the falling resumed.”
"You know, The Penguin is a good guy, the people of Gotham just never understood him."
After a few go rounds of The Penguin's magic bud, which was indeed the best bud either Alex or I had ever smoked, it was hard to remember what to take seriously and who not to poke in the stomach to see if they were real. We thanked Bongman, The Penguin, and Austin Powers for their time and hospitality and dashed past the other guests, back to the familiar. Alex and I left the house floating in a Technicolor dream haze, laughing in a way that we hadn't since the days of Saturday morning cartoons.
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