MARKSAPALOZZA 2005
7-16-05 THIS POST'S CONTENT IS RATED:
Every year going back to before I was born my cousins on the Marks' side of the family have thrown a summer party. Up until the last five years or so the party has been for relatives and friends of my aunt and uncles, but now (with two college age sons) the party has turned into a chaotic drunken sprawl of frat kids and bikini chicks, kegs, drinking games, and general anarchic debauchary. . .
I haven't been to one of these (family reunion) parties in some years, but my family goes up to Boston every summer to chill, get drunk, swim, and play music for three days straight. The protocal is everyone piling into my old man's van (the van has changed over the years, but the general capacity stays the same). We take the 5 hour drive on the Friday before the main night. We leave from my parent's house in New Jersey-5 long hours later we get out, stretch, and then my mom puts us (the kids) to work helping set up for the main party, which is Saturday Night.
This year I invited TRACY to come with us and relax for a few days. We took the long ass ride up and got out exhausted. Amazingly this year, contrary to the norm, all of the work was pretty much done. I guess it helps when all the cousins are old enough to drive, buy supplies, and lift big things.
Tracy and I relaxed in a hammock, played ping-pong, shot pool, swam, napped, and played some volleyball. All the stuff ya generally do on a vacation in the middle of nowhere.
The real action didn't start till the two kegs were tapped. College aged kids had been arriving over the course of the day. My cousins are like "the popular kids" in their respective colleges, so the kids who went to school with them all have heard of these parties and know that they are legendary. My cousin Dan when to school in Maine, and the kids who went to school with him were all arriving. My other cousin Joel is in college in New Hampshire, so all of his fratbuddies and sorriety chicks were carpooling in, in droves.
Add that to all the highschool friends from Massachuctes and their younger brother Mike's friends this place was like a girls gone wild video. Little 21 year old bikini wearing chicks wandering all around with SOLO cups of beer, jumping on the trampoline (no lie- totally THE MAN SHOW comes to life).
I witnessed more beer games than I have ever thought possible. All these strange New England games that involve dice, and boxes of wine. Very odd shit, but these kids know how to have fun getting completley plastered beyond recognition.
Tracy and I decided to take a midnight swim. Turns out the keg party had the same idea. The pool was packed. Guys were chickenfighting with topless co-eds on their shoulders. People were diving into the shallow end, it was just mindless fun anarchy. . . until Barney dropped a glass.
I call this kid BARNEY because I don't know his name and he is the living incarnation of The Simpson's Barney character. For one, who on Earth doesn't know that it's generally not a smart idea to have glass near a pool? That was the whole point of kegs and SOLO cups! Barney decided that the SOLO cups just wern't big enough for his fat ass. He decided to bring a giant glass beer stein. He dropped the stein just outside the pool on the cement. The pool area was dark and now there was a giant mismosh of broken glass just beside the ladder in the shallow end.
At this point, I was drunk. But I was more sober than most of these "drink to excess" college kids and I was also the oldest person in the pool area. The house where all the parent's / aunts and uncles were chilling was a couple hundred yards away and past tent city (the area where all the kids pitched their tents).
I jumped out of the pool and tried to make order of this situation. I hate having to be an authority figure at a party, but there were no goddamn responsible adults here and no lights (other than the small amount of light filtering from the changing room). Only about five people realized that there was broken glass, and the rest of the drunken bimbos and himbos (80 or so of them) were clueless. I could just see some moron running right through the glass and me having to call an ambulance (nobody here was sober enough to drive someone to a hosipital), or worse someone not realizing they had cut a major vein and jumping back into the dark pool, quickly bleeding to death, or passing out and drowning.
I know this might read like I'm a square or a buzzkill or whatnot, but so be it.
Barney was standing there barfoot over his glass. The second I confronted him, he started making excuses. I coudn't get a word in edgewise with this kid. I finally had to say, "Listen, You are drunk, you can't think straight. I'm sober. Do you want to be responsible for one of these girls cutting their feet open and bleeding all over this place? Do you want this party to end because we have to make sure this girl gets to the hospital? No, then shut the fuck up and help me clean this shit."
I pulled a few of my drunken cousins aside and told them to run and get a flashlight / broom / and garbage pail. They shot off towards the house. Some jocks came running out of the changing room straight towards the glass. I grabbed them in mid stride and told them there was glass there, they can't go that way. A few seconds later some more clueless jocks came running out. They were playing this game called "Smack The Bag" were you line up, punch the bag from an opened box of wine, and then start chugging it while everyone else chants "smack the bag. . . smack the bag" and they keep hitting it while the guy chugs. I don't get it, but chugging wine is like chugging beer, but twice as strong.
I couldn't think of anyway to stop these kids from lacerating themselves because they sure as hell weren't listening. It was dark, I too was barefoot and now I was working on pure adrenaline. I ran around the far side of the pool where my cousins in the days prior to the party were in the middle of building a jacuzzi (but it never got completed). The platform for the jacuzzi was about 8x6' and made of wood.
I deadlifted it and carried it the length of the pool. I accredit this feat of strength to booze and adrenaline. I dropped the wood over the glass. I stood on the planks of the jacuzzi platform and said to the crowd.
"Let me get your attention!" I tried to yell over the music, I turned to my cousins and yelled for them to turn the radio off, when they did I started yelling again. "There is glass over here. Don't walk on these planks, don't come around this side of the pool."
While I was saying this my brother BRETT , who was tanked out of his mind, was standing on the planks behind me jumping up and down and shoeing me in the ass with his foot, and then some bikini chicks jumped onto the jacuzzi planks and started jumping as well. Brett is like the fucken pied piper of drunks. I made them kill the music again, and then said that there is glass in the pool, unless you want to have to deal with ambulances and stitches the pool party is over. I got my cousins to lead them out of the pool area and all 80 something of them just went back over to the kegs and their dice games as though they didn't know the pool existed. By then I felt sober. All the adrenaline had fried my drunk and from dead lifting that platform I was feeling completely shot. We soon retired to our bedroom.
In the morning the breakfast tents were set up and people were wandering around with donuts, bagels and coffee. The rumors going around were worse than Access Hollywood. Some kids were caught fucking between the tents, some kids were caught fucking on the trampoline. All different shades of scandal.
This day was the big party day, Saturday, so after the crazyness that happened the first night I could only imagine what this night, THE FOUR KEG NIGHT, would bring. Fortunately the day went beautifully. Lots of Volleyball, lots of amazing food, and great music from the live band "No Fear" they are made up of my Uncles, Cousins, my Dad, and a bunch of my Uncle's friends. They call themselves NO FEAR because they will play pretty much anything. We had a good old drunken time.
The next morning more rumors of the night before floated, including a kid walking in on about five couples having sex while drunkenly looking for Joel, as well as a legendary food fight that happened in the kitchen at around four in the morning covering every surface (including the ceiling) with an inch of slop left over from the previous night's feast.
I slept in most of Sunday until about a half hour before we were to leave. We packed-up the van and hit the road. After about an hour we decided to stop in Connecticut for lunch. We haven't gone to a McDonald's as a family in at least fifteen years so we parked and went in. This was very odd for a McDonald's, and it was, to me, a total mind fuck. Every person working in this McDonald's (I shit you not) were hot blonde white chicks. I've never seen that before in my life. Only in Connecticut I guess. Weird shit happens when you travel away from the cities. McDonald's becoming homogeneously Arian is one of them. I find the "McFitness" stuff hilarious. There were pamphlets in there from Oprah's Personal trainer about how to loose weight, as well as big endorsements from Destiny's Child. As if any of these people ever eat McDonald's. Can you really see Oprah's Personal Trainer advising her to eat her meals at Mickey D's? Give me a fucking break.
After we left fast food hell we hit the highway and the van started sounding very strange. It was making a weird sputtering sound. We pulled off an exit and into a little bodega mart. Apparently we were now in the part of Connecticut were the poor people and the minorities live. The van glided into the parking lot and was rendered officially DOA. . .
After an exhausting weekend, just what we needed. We were stranded in who the fuck knows where, hundreds of miles away from home. Everyone in the group with day jobs had work in the morning, and Tracy had a doctors appointment so we had to get home at all costs.
I pulled out my cell phone and the batteries were dead. I then found out that everyone in the vehicle had cell phones including my mom and dad. This blew my mind for a minute but I had to regain composure and deal with the situation, because this place we were parked was not safe and it was time to try to figure out a way the hell out of there.
We borrowed a phone book from the bodega and started calling car lots. Being a Sunday night in summertime there weren't many places avaliable. We located a car rental place and a taxi cab company. My mom's phone had weak signal so she ended up connecting with AAA about 5 times before she finally could explain to them the situation.
We then split up into two groups. One group of my brother, sister (who had a fever), and my sister's boyfriend stayed with the van so it could get towed to a local lot. My parents, Tracy and myself got a cab to an Avis rental about 45 minutes away. We rented two cars, drove them to where the van had been towed, picked up the other group stripped the van and emptied it into the two cars and drove back to Jersey. A ten hour trip. . . vacations rule.
Just another day in the life of an Art Juggernaut.
-Cojo