Super Bowl time is a special time of year. For me it ranks right up there, just behind Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, my birthday, all 52 new comic Wednesdays, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Groundhog Day, Wrestlemania, Yankees opening day, The State of the Union Address, MLK Day, and the entire month of Ramadan. Oh, and Hellen Keller’s birthday. After all those though, I look forward to the Super Bowl the most.
This is the story of my favorite Super Bowl memory. In fact, it took place last year, right here on campus. Two athletic squads faced each other in a game of sports, and I called up all my friends to invite them to my apartment to watch the big event on my big 20” screen TV with 1.5 surround sound. By the tone of their voicemails, I was sure I was in for a great night. I put on the jersey of my favorite football team (the only one that plays on ice), the Phoenix Coyotes.
I started out by decorating the apartment. I strung up the only thing I could find that wasn’t covered in feces: a single roll of toilet paper. C’est la vie! Next I began preparing all the snacks. I mean, what’s an athletically themed celebration without tasty victuals? I ordered five primo pizzas, bought a jar of peanut butter, some saltine crackers, two boxes of Chips Ahoy, and Quaker Breakfast Bars. As Skeeter’s younger brother on Nickelodeon’s “Doug” would say, “Yum yum, eat ‘em up!” I had planned in advance for my parents to FedEx me a thirty-pack of delicious, slow brewed, Busch pilsner beer. I promised I would reimburse them for the shipping costs, but in reality, I had told quite a white lie. Anything for friendship!
I waited for a bit and began to watch the opening fraction of the game. Many large burly men tossed an oval playing device to one another on a chalk-lined meadow. Everyone seemed to trip over the man with the ball, which constantly slowed down the game. Those big clumsies! Still, my friends weren’t there yet.
Oh well, I could pass the time quite easily with my American-brewed lager beer and jar of Skippy peanut butter. Choosy moms choose Jiff, but I wasn’t a mom just yet. So I ate peanut butter by the fistful and observed the sporting spectacle some more in my favorite armchair. The bubbles in the beer tickled my nose (and my hiney much later).
My back hurt from sitting upright for more than five minutes, so I decided it was a good idea to lie down on my couch and start on that pizza I had ordered. Well, there was no use in making that peanut butter feel neglected, so I lovingly dipped all eight slices of pizza in the jar and consumed them with much voracity. I noticed all the empty cans around me. “Did I drink all those?” I asked out loud. “I must have,” I replied to myself, not finding this exchange to be sad in the least.
Considering I had changed my ’87 Buick Skylark’s power steering fluid the day before, I had a funnel just lying around. “Why let that go to waste?” I queried myself. Figuring all the hydraulic fluids had evaporated in less than twenty-four hours, I didn’t bother washing out the funnel. “Oh what the heck,” I said as I poured in a fresh Busch and cheered on whichever team was on the offensive at the moment. I was worried my yelling might disturb my neighbors, but that concern passed as I watched twelve ounces of beer and one ounce of motor oil residue disappear down my throat in three seconds. “Not too fucking bad!” I exclaimed, breaking my two-year long streak of not cussing. My previous cuss-word happened to be “doodybomb,” for those keeping score.
My friends had still not arrived. The floor was becoming more and more littered with aluminum cans, and I was starting to feel a little too confined in my jeans. “I can always slip them back on when my friends arrive,” I convinced myself. Deciding it wasn’t fun to simply drink alone, I shed my denim pantaloons and made up a fun drinking game. Every time a team scored a touchdown, I would take another sip of beer—now from my fourteenth can—and place my most sensitive of man-parts on the face of the player who scored said touchdown. It was a very entertaining diversion, and it really augmented my experience as I watched two titanic teams clash on my sixty-fifth favorite day of the year.
Suddenly, however, I began to feel light-headed. I guess all the excitement was starting to catch up with me. It was probably not a good idea to drink another full strength beer like Busch, so I was happy to find a Michelob Ultra in the back of my fridge. I cracked that bad boy open and sipped doggedly from it. I found it harder and harder to focus on the game. It began to look less and less like a football game, and more and more like I had been watching a documentary on the Founding Fathers. Alcohol can do that. “What… the… fudge?” I managed to bleat out before I lost consciousness. Still, just before I remembered no more, I felt an itch in my posterior and then a sudden moment of pain like a blunt trauma wound in that same area. Then, nothing.
I woke up some time later, obviously coming down from a sugar-high. I should have known better than to let my blood-glucose level get so drastic. I sat up and felt a sudden relief in my bum-bum. I examined the Michelob Ultra bottle on the couch next to me, and it smelled kind of funny. “It must have gotten skunked when I fell asleep,” I thought. Rubbing my eyes I walked to the bathroom, but on the way I noticed the calendar on my wall. “Holy shit,” I yelled. “I was passed out for a while. It’s the day after President’s Day! Oh well, better ask my professors for any work I missed.” Strangely, my friends never expressed any concern for me. Whatever, Super Bowl rules!