“What are you fucking part timers doing up there?”  Our friend yelled, trying to insight the three or four people that had been lounging in the loft for the last hour. It was 10pm and all eleven of my companions had been drinking heavily since noon. The kind of drinking that demands regularly dosed stimulants to maintain; followed by more drinking to level off. Like the balancing act of a fat kid on a teeter totter. An act I was well acquainted with but had managed to avoid for the better part of a year. 327 days to be exact.

I was in a cabin, on a remote ski hill, out of cell range, the lone sober man of twelve. The few of my friends that had seen fit to question my desire to attend, were all now hammered and taking turns punching each other in the face, while wearing some kind of inflatable boxing glove. This water wing for your fist was designed to prevent visible bruising but did nothing for the neck trauma that I was sure they would all feel in the morning. Pain with no lasting marks to explain in the workplace seemed to be the theme of the night; it was only a matter of time before they broke out a sack of oranges.  Upon arrival that day we sat down and had a look at some video taken the night before, in it they were dressed in various shades of cross-dress and taking turns shooting one another with a pellet gun. Not a moment of that night went by without my silent thanks ringing out to whatever god had broken that gun the night before.

         Later I stood with one of my closest friends, a man I have been family-tight with for as long as I can remember, we met at six years old. He was dressed in what looked like a furry set of sumo underwear. Responding to my praise of his outfit he explained that he had made them the night before by tearing the head off a large stuffed dog. He then tore off the ears and removed the stuffing, turning them into a pair of short shorts that left little to the imagination. Standing around the pool table we talked about my decision to come there for the night. I told him that my preparedness owed a lot to a message he had sent me a month earlier. He had written, asking the obvious question “Why in gods name are you coming to a bachelor party when you have spent the last five years of your life losing jobs, personal relationships and self worth as a direct result of drinking?”

         It was a valid question and had the important effect of snapping me out of the head space I had fallen into before I came up that mountain, one of problem solving, detailed and systematic planning to make the trip a possibility for me. While all of the panning of contingencies proved to be invaluable, what I had compromised in my zealous preparation was a chance to take a step back and be honest with myself about my motives for going at all. In the end I came to a place I described to him as he swayed suggestively in front of me, doing a little dance to draw attention to his furry pelvis.

         “What I realized after you sent me that Facebook message was that I had spent the last four years completely unavailable for these kind of affairs. This kind of closeness that comes from being around my friends as they destroy themselves is something that I lost ever since I admitted to them that I had a problem with alcohol and still continued to drink (they are all so far in my corner that they wanted to be supportive, not knowing how to do so). In the past had I been invited at all to this (I would not have), I would have done one of two things, drank and tried to hide it, resulting in miserable. Or abstained and held on, white knuckled –more miserable. In short, the main reason I had decided to go to this bachelor party was because this was the first time in a very long time that I had felt able to show up as a real person, fully there and able to have a good time.”

         This was the crowd that I used to roll with, back before the fallout of my using became undeniable. About seven years ago in a time known to the ones that were there and still talk about as “the rock star years”. Not that any of us were professional, or even pursuing our dreams at that point, but it was a time of drugs and breasts. A time where, as the evening went on, one could count on some nudity, not because things were going to get sexual (that wasn’t the point) but because we were all hot and well aware of the fact. This party on the mountain was signifying the end of an era, one of the last of us was getting married, one of the least eligible of us was getting married for that matter and we were all there with the same sense of urgency. We all knew that we had been getting too old for this for years now.

         I walked into the living room of the cabin to see it filled with semi clothed men squewed at odd angles on the furniture. The coffee table was covered in empties, layers of filth and other more incriminating things. Half eaten racks of ribs lay wastefully on plates around the room; things were falling further and further into a scene from Fear and Loathing. I sat, sinking into the conversation at a midway point and realized that all six of the men there were discussing the merits of home birth.

         This was too much. My brain was not nearly addled enough to deal with this violent juxtaposition. I stood back up and turned away, being around booze and drugs was one thing but seeing my friends make a seamless transition from Greco Roman wrestling in a pile of pork ribs, spilt beer and cocaine residue, to holding back tears as they shared birthing stories, this was unacceptable. It was time for me to go to bed. As I walked out the front door and down the short deck to the other cabin I heard the sound of the bachelor being thrown off the deck into a snow bank again. Congratulations Pat.