The saying goes, “Youth is wasted on the young”. I disagree. Mostly because I feel like I’ve never actually grown up. The life of an adult compared to a child is strikingly similar yet we, as adults, choose to distance ourselves from the “irresponsible” and “immature” actions of those who are younger. We put restrictions on them to ensure they know their place and we tell them stories that begin with “when I was your age” and end with “you’ll understand when you’re older”. But in truth, we’re pretty much equals.
As a child, your bike is a status symbol and a crucial means of transport. As an adult, your bike is now a car. As a child, money holds wondrous power and allure. As an adult, the same is true. Children play dress up and pretend to be older, adults play dress up and pretend to be younger. Children are required to be in school, adults required to be in work, both creating elaborate ruses to escape each. I think the only real difference is that as a child, you have something to look forward to. As an adult, something to look back on. Hence, I have decided to never really grow up or mature as a person.
Thankfully, I’ve surrounded myself with likeminded individuals and we’ve all taken an unspoken pact in which we vow to never allow anyone else to advance to a societal level where others could confuse us as adults. In short, some of my oldest friends in the world are a bunch of assholes.
This isn’t an insult. In fact, we consider it a compliment. We’ve all “grown up” to be successful people in life and we have important professional titles like CEO, JD, MA, and MBA. But when we all get together we earn the collective title of S.O.B. and wear it like a badge of honor.
Except for me, each of these guys have stayed around the Philadelphia area, refusing to come to NYC to visit because if they did, the Mets and Giants would be much too close for comfort. It’s like they are on house arrest and the suburbs of Philadelphia are their front porch…an ironic comparison that will one day prove to be legally true should we continue to carry on the way we’ve done the past 15 years.
In order to keep our impressive streak of debauchery intact, each summer for the past five years we’ve made it a point to go on a trip together and essentially take our act on the road. We’ve gone to extremes like Niagara Falls and Myrtle Beach but most times we stay rather local, choosing to simply destroy cities where no one would notice the destruction. Our next trip might be to Fallujah.
One summer, I believe three years ago, we decided to visit a place so foul and disgusting that even we were appalled at the degradation and depravity that ensued. Ocean City, Maryland. If Maryland were a person, Ocean City is its vaginal herpes…an embarrassing reminder of nights spent irresponsibly. Some people compare these types of places to Hell, but I don’t want to insult Hell. If someone died and was given the choice of two doors, one leading to Hell and one to Ocean City, Maryland, any sane person would not only choose the door that led to Hell, they’d lock it on the other side.
We arrived in Ocean City at mid-day and checked in at the luxurious accommodations of “The Thunderbird Motel”. The best way to describe the Thunderbird Motel, or “T-Bird” as we’d eventually call it, would be an amalgamation of the most demented minds of World War II. Adolf Hitler was the interior decorator credited for the concrete bunker ambiance and Josef Stalin was responsible for security, implementing a strict policy where no more than three people could gather in a room at a time.
The décor we could live with because we’d eventually destroy it but the security policy was so tight we half-expected to see a searchlight propped in the corner of the parking lot beside a barbed-wire-laced guard tower. We immediately attempted to break the rules and all gathered for celebratory beers in my room but before we cracked the first one the phone rang and we were ordered to disperse at once. It turns out there were agents stationed on each floor of the open aired motel, armed with binoculars and walkie-talkies that would radio back to the main office when rules were being violated. I shit you not.
The only logical way of dealing with such oppression is to get inordinately wasted as quickly as possible and let the euphoric high carry you off to a better place. So we did. We partied all night at Seacrets, a beach-themed outdoor bar with a play-on-words name that probably required the collective brainstorming of all high school graduates from Maryland, i.e. four people. When done, we rode the bus home in small groups, each stopping along the way for private adventures that would be regaled back at the T-Bird over Jäger-bombs, our drink of choice that weekend.
When the night “ended”, I found myself sitting in my room watching highlights from that day’s Phillies game with my friend, inhaling chicken nuggets from McDonalds. After a few minutes my friend looked over and noticed that I had polished off an entire 20-piece already and was throwing away my unused napkins.
“Jesus Christ dude, did your fat freckled ass already down all of those nuggets?”
(burp) “I don’t even remember eating them. I blacked out and when I woke up, they were gone. They are so fucking delicious. I could eat a million chicken nuggets. I would literally have sex with a chicken nugget in hopes of creating more chicken nuggets to raise as a family in order to eat the eventual chicken nugget grandchildren. That is how much I love them.”
I really loved chicken nuggets.
“You’re fucking disgusting, Carney.”
“Maybe, but I could eat like a hundred more of these.”
“There is no way you could eat a hundred.”
“I could eat 60.”
“Wanna bet?”
And just like that, shit got real.
The only good thing about the T-Bird was that it was located directly across the street from an all-night McDonalds. Good for us, bad for the employees of that McDonalds. Little did they know that their establishment would be the setting for such horror and I am fairly confident that a SWAT team is still standing by in case any of us show our faces there ever again.
The parameters of our bet made complete sense at the time we made it. I would have to buy the 60 nuggets myself and if I won, I would be reimbursed. And apparently, that was more than enough incentive for me.
I was also not allowed to drink anything other than water when consuming the nuggets, but in order to get that water, I’d have to convince a hot girl to buy it for me. (The descriptive term ‘hot’ was later dropped to just ‘girl’ because not many hot girls hang out in McDonalds at 2 AM)
I had been in competitions similar to this before, once accepting my roommate’s challenge to consume an entire gallon of milk in one hour. (The results of that incident are classified.) But the nuggets seemed a breeze to me. I had already eaten 20 and they were confirmed as “counting” after a vehement debate which included shoving and called into question both of our mother’s femininity. And after those 20, I was still rather hungry. This would be a piece of cake. (Which would have also been good.)
So I began to eat. And, cocky in my bravado, I dipped each nugget in honey mustard sauce as well. With each bite, my legend around the McDonalds grew. My friend was screaming in my ear that I’d never do it and, when we were approached, he informed them that I was the professional eater and Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Champion, Joey Chestnut. About 10 nuggets in, I was signing autographs. (Not that anyone had asked me to.)
After a short while, a small crowd gathered around the table and my friend and I tickled them with tales of previous conquests – the goat eating competition in Scotland, my title of “Lobster King of Maine” and my success as a testicle eater in Morocco. (That last one was my friend’s inclusion) All-in-all, things were going well. I had downed a total of 40 nuggets and had just purchased the final 20 piece, confident of victory, eternal glory and my $25 back.
That’s when things went wrong.
Without warning, a canister of BBQ sauce exploded on the window behind me and was being licked up erotically in long tongue strokes.
Our friends had found us.
They had also found another person named “Pete”, who was either strung out or homeless or both, and abducted adopted him for the night. They crammed into the seats around us and severely impacted my concentration. And as I popped the 47th nugget in my mouth, I knew I was done for.
I burst from the seats and fell on the floor, scrambling to get to my feet and crawling towards the bathroom to the screams and delights of my friends, one them armed with a Flip Video Camera. After a few yards, I was thrown into a garbage can and pushed into the wall but was able to fight through their attempts to keep me from the toilet. Barreling through the stall door I “purged” the contents of my stomach while others around me provided the score to the movie by chanting, “nuuuuuuggets!…nuuuuuuggets!….nuuuuggets!”
To my utter horror though, the contents of my stomach were red and I was completely convinced I was vomiting blood. A thought enthusiastically supported by my friends who assured me I was about to die from nugget poisoning, and not from the fact we’d been drinking red colored Jägermeister all evening.
It wasn’t until the next morning, head pounding, $25 poorer and covered in chicken nugget boxes supplied by my friends, that I realized I had experienced a very special moment the night before – the meeting of my child self and my adult self. The child wanting to eat 60 nuggets…the adult resisting. And yeah, sure, it could’ve been the hours of binge drinking mixed with large quantities of processed meat, but I like to think it was something larger. I think it was the moment my two identities collided and battled for control of my life. When my childish ways looked the real world responsibilities of adulthood squarely in the face and said, “No sir!”. An epic struggle of time vs. humanity in which a man is only as strong as his dreams, and his dreams are only as weak as the man.
Yup…I’m sure that was it. Or it could’ve been the Jäger.
