This time down the hall, Tori noticed that the walls were lined with the posters of lineups past. She became transfixed by vibrant posters calling out stellar acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Killers, the Cure, Shiny Toy Guns (a poster already in her collection), Queens of the Stone Age, etc. As much as she was admiring the artwork, she was taking notice of the posters’ firm affixation to the wall. Each one bolted in with one more screw than the one before. Bad Religion was nailed to the plaster; Hot Hot Heat was sealed tight; the Hives were…lacking any security whatsoever. Tori was by no means a vandal or a thief, but she had pinched a poster for the Ting Tings show from the Hot Tub dressing room and managed to stash it safely under her shirt before anyone had noticed its absence. Thinking going for broke was appropriate in this situation, she gave a quick push on the bottom of the frame to see if it could easily be loosed from the wall. Oh yes, yes it could. Tori nearly knocked it to the floor with a timid nudge and was working quickly to realign the print when Dougie and the Hot Tubs came barreling into the hall in a blitz of laughter.
“Girl, where you been? Giving head to one of the security guards? Or just taking care of yourself in one of the stairwells?” Dougie had doubled over laughing at his own jokes.
“Bitch, I was getting more beer. You can talk again when you do something productive.”
Tori was quite proud of herself for being this coherent after so so many beers.
“You know, if you keep being such a salty cunt I’m not taking you with us to hang out with the Ting Tings.”
Tori tried to look at her watch but had trouble placing the exact location of the big and little hands. She instead pulled out her phones and discovered that it was nearly 3am. Not that Tori had given any thought to the exact location of Jules and the chick, but she didn’t figure they’d be here this late hanging out. All the same, there had been many fruits to pick from in the abandoned dressing room of NP’sSH, so why not venture a visit?
As Dougie, the Hot Tubs and Tori rolled into the Ting Tings room, she was not at all surprised to see that….the Ting Tings were there. Shit. Who’d a thunk it? At this point, Tori had no sense of propriate and inappropriate, so she went right into the Ting Tings’ dressing room and made herself a vodka diet. While drinking it, she tried really hard to maintain a normal line of conversation, but somewhere between starstruck and drunk, Tori had nothing. She tried to ask questions about the album, the tour, the production, even that night’s show, but all that came out was “I danced too much tonight. Do you guys have another beer?”
Shortly after, Tori wandered out into the hall back towards that Hives poster which was still unaffixed to the wall. She lifted it from its mount and attempted to stuff it under her shirt. Big as her boobies were, there was no room for those luscious Swedes. She instead tucked the dapper lads’ poster under her arm and headed for the exit, her hopes high that Dougie was following her.
Mere steps from exiting the building, Tori realized she had to pee. Right now. She stopped, pondering a detour to the toilet, and turned back to the ladies’ room. As she was pulling the door open with the urgency of 18 beers trying to make their way out of a golf ball sized bladder, Tori was stopped dead in her tracks by a security guard.
“Hey!” the security guard barked. “You can’t take that!”
Tori looked down at the wonderful Hives poster she was attempting to abscond with.
“What? This?” She asked.
“Yeah. You can’t take that.”
Tori really wanted that poster. Should she run? Hide? Pee?
“Oh.” She said, door cracked, inviting her to the toilets. “I thought I could.”
Tori let the door to pee relief slam shut as she relinquished the night’s newest prized possession. She looked longingly at the poster- just for a second- before she scooted out the front door knowing that motion was necessary to keep from pissing her pants.
Once Tori had scooted down the escalator and was halfway across the street towards the car, she noticed Dougie was nowhere to be seen. God, Tori was quite sure she was going to pee herself. If….if she didn’t find somewhere to drop trou and water the plants. Scanning the territory, Tori was relieved to see that downtown was as dead as ever and there would be no one around to judge her if she could find some shrubbery willing to receive the products of her liquor soaked body. Hmm. Meter, meter, wall, sparsely dense bushes, car, car, WALL OF BUSH!
Tori raced across the street to the crook of a wall of bush that she ascertained would provide maximum relief with minimum exposure. She dropped her purse, gently removed her pilfered Ting tings poster (at least she made it out with something) and placed it on her bag, dropped her pants, pushed far back into the foliage and let loose the bevy of beer she’d consumed in the last six hours. It. Felt. Aaaaaamazing. When all had been released Tori picked up her bag and her poster and piqued her ears to determine where the unmistakable cackles of Dougie were echoing from.
As she managed to focus her vision- just for a moment- Tori saw Dougie careening across the street splashing beer all over himself from his half drank Tecate. Resituating herself, Tori walked up to Dougie as if she hadn’t just watered the property of the Staple’s Center with her va-gi-jay and made him think he was the mess of the group.
“Dougie! Last time I checked there is no such thing as eau de Corona. So what are you doing splashing that filth all over yourself?”
Dougie looked down at himself, apparently unaware until now that he was drenching himself in warm beer.
“Well, I had to make sure the car smelled like something other than your dirty snatch. I think I’m doing us both a favor.”
Tori wanted to come back with something, but she was far too impaired for that. Come to think of it, she was way too wrecked to drive. So was Dougie. She looked at her car- the last left before the hotel’s taxi area- and weighed the pros and cons of driving home.
Pro: no ticket or tow for leaving her car in a tow-away zone
Con: DUI’s are expensive
Pro: She would save on a cab now and in the morning
Con: She was far too tore up to be taking a mug shot that night
Pro: Money saved on cab could be parlayed into tomorrow’s concert ticket
Con: Dougie looked like he might ralph in the car
Pro: Dougie looked like he might ralph anyway and it would be easier to deal with him doing it in her car than trying to explain it to a cab driver
Con: Was it sleepy time yet?
Pro: all the cons are long forgotten and the keys are already in my hand
And the pros have it!
Tori auto started the car, something she did more for fancy than function, and pushed Dougie’s ass into the passenger side. She hurried around to the driver’s seat, eager to lock the passenger window and avoid an encore performance of “That’s Not My Name” from a man who thought karaoke was best performed eight beers in. While Tori would agree with his principles of hammered howling most of the time, it was closing in on 4am and she thought the cops downtown might be a bit suspicious of that kind of recital.
Tori channeled the drunk driving lessons of Clemmy from Reno: 911! And kept her hands at 10 and 2, stayed within three miles of the speed limit, made complete stops and did her best to ignore the face prints Dougie was making on his window. Ok, she was actually pretty amused and distracted by that, but she did her best to keep her eyes on the road.
Lucky for the both of them, Dougie’s new digs were within spitting distance of downtown and it only took them 10 minutes to get back to his house, haphazardly park the car and start drinking again. Tori was pretty sure Dougie slurred something about being quiet because his roommate was home, but he went right into the kitchen and started shouting back to her in the living room, so she dismissed the need for discretion. Oh, and she was drunk, so she really didn’t care anyway.
Tori plopped on the couch, took command of the clicker and prepared to abuse the house’s cable TV for all she could get before passing out. She went right to Bravo hoping for Project Runway but struck out. Cake Boss, Ace of Cakes, Top Chef and King of the Hill were also absent from the program guide so she scanned over to the cartoon channels hopeful that if she found something good Dougie would be too drunk to care that she had turned his cable box to Nickelodeon. Sure enough, Phineas and Ferb were on and Tori was going to enjoy it until her drunk friend’s hand/eye coordination superseded her own and he was able to wrestle the remote from her.
Coming from the kitchen holding two mugs full of gin and tonic, Dougie was all shits and giggles until he saw cartoons invading his living room. Letting the mugs drop heavily onto the table, he put his hands on his hips, made his best angry face and started gesturing wildly towards the triangle shaped heads on the screen.
“Girl, what have I told you about cartoons in my house? If they aren’t wearing a banana suit singing ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ I don’t wanna see it!”
Tori sulked a bit. Not really. She was amused by his anger at cartoons.
“But it’s Phineas and Ferb!”
“What the fuck is a Ferb?”
She waited for the little English sidekick to reappear on the screen.
“That! See, he’s Phineas’s limey little helper.”
As she pointed to and identified Ferb, Tori was quite sure she didn’t know which of these characters was which, but was sure that Dougie would turn it off before the program could correct her.
Sho’nuf, Dougie went right for the remote, bit Tori’s arm like a rabid pitbull, and got her to release the remote.
“You cock!” Tori released herself from the body hold of Dougie and took a quick swig of a 4/5 gin, 1/5 tonic. She then dipped a couple fingers into the alcohol solution and rubbed it on the bite. “You’re a shitty bartender and you need to get your teeth cleaned. You have any limes?”
“I do and you can go get one yourself. They on top of the fridge.”
Making her way to the kitchen, Tori did a quick turn to give Dougie a much deserved one finger salute. As she was about to cross under the archway to the kitchen, Dougie started howling with laughter.
“What now?” she thought, trying to resist the urge to stop and indulge him. Of course, even sober Tori had a short attention span and the inability to move on without asking questions. Just that one sip of gin and (tonic) would have relieved a theretofore sober person of their ability to ask questions later.
Stopping just before the kitchen, Tori spun on her heel and faced a hooting, teary eyed Dougie.
“What now Dougie?”
“Girl. Girl! What did you do to your back?”
Tori chased the source of Dougie’s amusement much as a dog would chase it’s tail; searching in vain for a visual explanation of his amusement.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dougie. What’s so funny?”
“Girl,” Dougie was positively choking with laughter, “lift up the back of your shirt. It looks like you just got felt up by Wolverine.”
Confused, Tori lifted up her shirt and saw giant red streaks running from her butt cheeks well up her back. They were deep, bleeding gashes left from the Staples Center port-a-potty.
“Son of a bitch!” Tori exclaimed, less concerned about her skin and more bothered by the fact that she may have bloodied up her shirt. “I must have gotten that when-“
Tori stopped short of fessing up to dropping trou in the parking lot but could tell see Dougie reading her face like a large type book, trying to decipher her expression and figure out what she was hiding.
“Must have gotten it when what?” he needled.
Tori knew damn well the story of her scraped ass would become the cherry on top of tonight’s story when she retold it myriad times in the weeks to come, she just didn’t know if she could give Dougie the satisfaction of prying it from her now.
“I must have gotten that when…”
Dougie was literally on the edge of his seat, wild with excitement to hear what happened.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, I took a piss in the parking lot across from Club Nokia. I guess those bushes were just a touch more dangerous than I anticipated.”
Dougie started laughing so hard he went and fell off the couch. Rolling on the floor, beating his fists on the couch he managed to slip out “Ch-ch-child I could have told you the bush is dangerous! That’s why I only-“
“Go after dick.” Tori finished Dougie’s thought and left him thrashing on the floor while she went searching for something to soften the gin in her drink. Stopping short of the fridge, Tori had the good sense to sneak her phone around the corner and take video of Dougie’s laughing/ wheezing/ feet flailing fit.
“That sure is gonna’ shut him up tomorrow.” She smiled and let the camera roll until he laughed himself tired and started drinking again.