Rather thirsty after a day of hiking through the City (and up the six flights to my walk-up apartment), we downed these drinks pretty quickly. Sadly, the experiment didn't really live up to expectation and 1/2 and hour later we had to go back to the drawing board -- interrupting our transcendental experience of watching the cinematic masterpiece "Jeepers Creepers."

Round 2 Ingredients:

In retrospect, the bananas were not the smartest move, but in our quickly detiorating sense of reality, we blamed the blandness on "Jeepers Creepers." That truck-driving monster sucked the guts out of the main character and the flavor out of our diaquaries. What a dick. To fix things we switched over to the horror classic, "Final Destination."

As the pints of pulpy blue goodness disappeared down our throats and sat, empty, the sad layer of sugar congealing to the sides of the glass, we were momentarily sated. And ridiculously hungry. You know, the kind of hungry I mean, too. Like when you see that Applebees commercial with "Fever" playing and you're actually aroused by the food. From Applebees. Guck.

The only solution to our famished state seemed obvious: Burritos. (You may have noticed my affinity for burritos when you read this article). Amazingly, it only took three of us on two cell phones to place our order. Apparently the people at Burritoville aren't accustomed to the dialog that is birthed by a few rounds of Everclear. They kept repeating in surprisingly perfect English, "No, sir, we don't make you run for the border. That's Taco Bell...no, yes, it's quite funny that Taco Bell gives you the runs...No, I'd never thought of that...Sir, do you want to place your order now?...No, I will not be delivering it...No, you can't pay extra to have me deliver it...Blonde...Yes, it's natural...Sir, either place your order or I'm going to hang up..."

We finally got our burrito buddy to jot down our order and then promptly forgot that we'd placed it.

Instead, we focused on our cell phones. Beautiful machinery, cell phones. They fold. They beep. They ring. We made a friend of ours in Boston's ring when we dialed him on speakerphone. Apparently (as he's since recounted to us), he was sleeping. Also, apparently, it was around 11 pm when we called him (what a loser -- passed out at 11 on a Saturday night -- clearly we were the pinnacle of cool with our Everclear experiment). How three hours had passed since round one eludes me, but the next day we did check the cell phone outgoing calls and, yes, it was 11pm.

After his choice words for us -- phrases that involved instructions as to what he'd prefer we'd do instead of talking to him, dirty deeds, carnal deeds, to ourselves -- blending time dawned for the third time of the evening.

To be perfectly honest, all of the proceeding events are pieced together after-the-fact, because we simply blacked out around this time. In my mind, it replays itself at ten times the speed, much like a Charlie Chaplin movie. Here it goes:

Round 3 ingredients (or, basically, everything in the fridge that looked remotely fruity):

And then the buzzer rang. At first we thought it was a scam -- somone trying to get into the building by pretending to be a delivery person. "Delivery. Burritoville," the stranger claimed via the intercom. We were not to be fooled. We sent Trav, clad only in his boxers and a beanie, down to check -- that alone should scare off any potential threat. Indeed, we were skeptical about even letting him back in the apartment.

During his absence, Al and I took the opportunity to do Trav the favor of randomly programming the alarms on his phone to beep the first tuesday of every month at 1pm and remind him to "get his groove back." We also cleverly switched the language to Spanish. No doubt he is grateful to this day.

After a few minutes of us peering covertly through the door-crack, Trav bounded up the stairs followed by an unknown man disguised in a Burritoville hat and carrying what appeared to be a paper bag with a receipt stapled to it. While we didn't "accost" him, we did insist on verifying his indentity by calling Burritoville and asking if they had indeed sent a delivery man to us. We confirmed his name. We confirmed the bill.

In the end, all seemed on the up and up and you can see Travis in the beanie counting the money for the burritoes in one of the pix on the left. Not sure how the beanie got from Al to Trav. And then that final pic is what was left of the burritos the next morning...on the couch pillow. I can't show you where else it ended up, but suffice it to say, all three of us woke up with cheese between our butt cheeks (no idea), and with a new carpet of rice covering the living room floor.

Incidentally, these fine quality photos were taken with my Sprint camera-phone made by Sanyo...how did I ever live without it when spontaneity hits?

It's been a little while since that night, and I now realize that we all lost a little more than our innocence to the bottle of Everclear we downed. To this day, I haven't opened any of the other bottles of Everclear that sit in my liquor cabinet. Al and Trav insist they want to repeat the night, but, oddly enough, it never transpires. I guess I'll just have to have kids and teach them to carry on the family tradition.