Chapter Four
Night, Saturday, May 15th, 1999. "All Hell Breaks Loose."
We got back to the hotel shortly after sundown and everyone returned to their rooms to relax for a few minutes before we decided on our next move. Dan-O went back to his and Beef’s room to change out of his puke-soiled clothes, Faz, Rose, and Jer-Mac went back to their room so Faz and Rose could dip back into their Dr. Gonzo-esque drug collection, while Chad, Kev, and I went back to our room to put Chad to bed. Chad passed out seconds after we got him in there, while Kev and I cracked new beers and were deciding where to continue the day. After about 15 minutes, Chad suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, looking around the room like he’d heard an intruder. He then proceeded to get off the bed, sprint across the room to the door, exit into the hallway, and slam the door behind him. Kev and I sat there, looking at one another quizzically, waiting for him to come back in. A minute or two passed and there was no sign of Chad, so I got out of my chair and went to the door, opening it to look into the hallway. Nothing. He’s nowhere to be seen. I informed Kev that Chad had vanished, so we went to both Beef’s and Faz’s rooms to see if he’d gone there. Nope. Everyone else was gearing up to go back out (except for Jer-Mac, who had also passed out - presumably he wore himself out singing Coolio into a beer funnel), but Kev and I really thought we ought to find Chad first, so we asked everyone to wait a few minutes and started searching the hotel looking for him. No sign of him anywhere. After about 20 minutes, the rest of the group had assembled in the lobby with plans to go to Fells Point to get the evening phase started. Dan-O had changed into a ridiculous-looking blue and white striped suit, a fedora, and new sunglasses. We asked them to hang out for 5 minutes while we checked the room one more time for Chad. We took the elevator back up and were headed toward the room when we saw him. He was sitting in the hallway, with his back to the closed door to our room, wearing no pants.
Kev: What the hell are you doing? Why did you run out of the room?
Chad: A—holes ! Why did you lock me out?
EG: What? You have a key. Why did you run out of the room? And where the hell are your pants !?
Chad: My what?
EG: Your pants !
Chad: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
EG: You had pants on when you left the room. Your room key is probably in them.
- I unlock the door and we go back into the room –
Chad: I just had to take a leak and you jerkoffs locked me out.
Kev: What do you mean you had to take a leak? We’re in a hotel room, A##head, the bathroom is right there !
Chad: What?
EG: What the f--- happened to your pants?
Chad: What? I don’t know. I know I was in the lobby at one point.
EG: Did you have pants on?
Chad: Ummmmm, I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Kev: We’re kicked out.
A few minutes later, Chad was out cold again, so we forgot about his pants for the time being and went back to the lobby to reconvene with the group. We probably should have all gone to bed for the night at this point, but little did we know, things were about to get even more out of control….
We bounced around from bar to bar in Fells Point for a while before settling in somewhere – I couldn’t possibly remember the name of the place. Faz and Dan-O struck up a conversation with a couple of pretty nice looking females while Kev, Beef, Rose and I were crushing beers combatively, along with the occasional round of whiskey shots that Rose insisted on getting. We weren’t paying too much attention to what the other two were doing, but after a little while, Beef noticed he hadn’t seen Dan-O in a while. He walked over to Faz and asked him where Dan-O had gone and Faz told him he’d walked away about 20 minutes ago and hadn’t been seen since. Beef looked around the bar, in the men’s room, outside – no sign of him. As I was the other person there closest to Dan-O, Beef enlisted my help looking for him. To be honest, at this point, I was about sick of searching for busses, Chads, Dan-Os – I just wanted to sit down and drink, for the love of God. We left Kev and Rose at the bar and started a hard-target search for Dan, which proved fruitless until I heard the fateful words, spoken from a female bar patron to the bartender..
“Excuse me, someone’s been in one of the stalls in the women’s room for about a half-hour. People are knocking on the door, but she won’t come out.”
I knew immediately. My first thought was that he might be plugging the girl he was talking to earlier, but a quick jog to the other side of the room indicated that that lass was still there talking with her friend and Faz, who was working on the friend. I walked over.
EG: Excuse me, I’m a friend of Dan’s…the guy you were talking to earlier…
Girl: Yeah! Where did he go?
EG: That’s kind of why I’m here. We can’t find him and I think there’s a decent chance he’s passed out in a stall in the women’s room.
Girl: The women's room? Why would he be in-
EG: Don't bother, there's no good answer to the question you're asking. Look, we don’t have any females here with us that can go look for him. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.
Girl: Well, since I’m a Star Wars geek and you asked that way, OK….
EG: Bear in mind, you may have to find a way into the stall. I’m not certain it’s him in there, and I doubt people would be too keen on seeing a dude trying to climb into a stall in the ladies’ room….
She headed off to the bathroom and emerged about 10 minutes later.
Girl: Well, you were right, it’s him. But the stall is locked and he’s out cold.
Beef: Again…
EG: HAHA! Yeah, that’s the second time today.
Girl: You probably want to g-
Beef: We took a picture of my ### in his face this morning when he passed out at the track…
Girl: That’s lovely.
She brought us into the women’s room, explaining to the people on line what was going on so that our presence in the females’ rest room wouldn’t be reported. Beef threw a shoulder into the stall door and busted it open in about 9 seconds. It helps to have a Beef around, I would have had to crawl under the door and unlock it from the inside and wasn’t keen to wiggle around on a bathroom floor. Sure enough, Dan-O was passed out, kind of half on the toilet. Beef slapped him in the face and yelled at him to wake up. Dan-O came to and almost immediately croaked: “Oh man, I s—t my suit……” I almost died laughing, I just wasn't expecting those words, especially delivered in such a dismayed and pathetic tone. Apparently, he’d sat down on the toilet with his pants still on to take a dump, passed out, and full-on crapped right into his suit.
EG: What the hell do we do now? I guess we have to try to get him back to the hotel, but we can’t take him back on the Metro like this.
Girl: You can’t just leave him with a load of s---t in his pants!
EG: What exactly are we supposed to do about it? ("Checking my pockets") I don’t have any spare pants on me. In fact, our group is already collectively down one pair of pants already tonight. (Beef found this hilarious and now was laughing hysterically, which seemed to annoy her a little.)
Girl: Get his pants off and we’ll take his jacket and wrap it around his waist.
EG: That’s not a bad idea in theory, but I’m not taking his frigging pants and underwear off. Beef, you’re his best friend, you do it.
Beef: Keep dreaming.
Girl: Whatever, I’ll do it.
I don’t know what Dan-O did right in a previous life to get the karmic gift of having chosen this take-charge, incredibly altruistic young lady to chat up in the bar, but God bless her, she started ripping his pants and underwear off while he moaned and giggled. I averted my gaze so I could only hear what was going on and was instead looking at the group of women now gathering around to watch this. Thank God for Dan-O that this was before the cell-phone camera era.
Dan-O: He heh he.. yeah, baby…
Girl: Yeah, this is so hot, you have a load of #### in your pants. Help me out here, damn it ! Move your leg-
Dan-O: I s---t myself…
Girl: I’m painfully aware. (Struggles) For Christ’s sake, will you sit up? Move your leg over here, there… that’s better. Ugh, this is disgusting. You’re so lucky I’m a nurse – no, don’t do that ! You’re going to get your jacket in the s—t! Stop !
Beef and I were completely doubled over cracking up at this point, just listening to this. I couldn't take it, I was leaned up against the wall gasping for breath. That wasn’t helping matters as this poor girl was getting more and more irritated at the situation she’d found herself in, as well as at our apparent lack of concern. Eventually, though, by some small miracle, she managed to get his pants and underwear off and throw them away, get his jacket off and tie it around his waist.
Girl: There, you should at least be able to get him home now.
EG: I love you.
Girl: I’ll bet. You’re welcome.
EG: You’re an angel. Here (hands her $50) – please drink on me the rest of the night…
Girl: That’s not necessary, but thanks for the gesture.
EG: I insist. (shifts to mack daddy mode) Heyyyy, I was wondering if-
Beef: - [EG], not now. We have to get this a—hole back to the hotel.
EG: Yeah, true. OK, bye.
We rounded up Kev and Rose from the bar, where they had done about 6 shots of Jack each while all this was going on. The girl went back to her friend and Faz, who opted to stick around (surprise) while the rest of us dragged Dan-O back to the hotel. Kev almost had an aneurysm laughing while I relayed to him what was going on - I could barely get the words out, I was still laughing so hard. We got Dan-O outside and started the long trek back to the hotel, but every time the wind blew, it moved the jacket tied around his waist, giving all of Baltimore repeated free views of his tackle. Kev, and especially Rose, were feeling the effects of the whiskey shots now, and were so far gone at this point that they were no help whatsoever. Rose was running around doing spin kicks on street signs and changing the letters on ground-level bar marquees/chalkboards to display various vulgar and childish messages. I remember he changed one bar's sign by breaking open the glass door the covered the plastic letters on their lit-up marquee and changed to it read "Faz is an ###hole," hoping Faz would see it on his way back to the hotel (he didn't.) Beef and I dragged Dan-O down the street, looking constantly for cops, as Rose was getting more and more manic. It was then that I realized that not only was his famously short temper not a rumor, but he also got hyper-aggressive when drunk. I suppose that should have come as no surprise.
Eventually, we got back to the hotel after a long (really long, dragging Dan-O along) walk. As we arrived, Dan-O started mumbling something about going into the pool to wake up. That naturally triggered a bunch of lines from “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” – “If I put you into the pool right now, you’d sink like a GD stone. You took too much maaaaan, you took too much too much….” – but Dan-O was undeterred. Beef and I were just so happy to see him ambulatory and moving without our assistance that we followed him to the indoor pool. Dan-O jumped in with his t-shirt on and using his suit jacket as a bathing suit and started floating around, while I tried my best not to fall over and to remember my lifeguard training in case it was needed. Just then, I heard Kev say: “Yo, are those Chad’s pants over there?” We walked to one of the lounge chairs around the pool, where a pair of cargo shorts was balled up. We found a wallet in one of the pockets, and sure enough – they were Chad’s. As we guessed it, he must have pulled them off, intending to go in the pool himself, but then bailed on the idea and went back to the room in his underwear. I made some remark about how just that night, we had 2 of our group of 8 walking around our hotel lobby with no pants on. It was meant to be a joke, but it unfortunately triggered what happened next…
Next thing I heard was Rose yelling: “Two out of eight isn’t enough, let’s make it three!” I turned around and he had stripped completely naked and proceeded to do a cannonball into the pool. I turned to Beef and told him it was time to fish Dan-O out – I was done with this and was ready to hit the sack and reset. Regrettably, just about then, Kev said something about Rose at least not being in the LOBBY naked (as there was no one else in the pool at midnight.) This, I guess was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Rose yelled out: “What? You think I won’t go into the lobby naked?” Before anyone could even react, Rose climbed out of the shallow end of the pool and took off to streak the lobby.
Now, we had to get Dan-O out of the pool before we could even go see what the result of this was, so we missed the beginning of what happened next. Apparently, there were two guys about our age with their girlfriends in the lobby when Rose lasered in nude. They were also Preakness revelers, presumably, and had had a few beverages themselves. One of them sealed everyone’s fate by taking offense to Rose’s naked form and made some comment to him, advising him to put some clothes on. Whether this comment was innocuous, menacing, or somewhere in between, I’ll never know, but it set Rose off. Rose flew at him and started wrestling him, right there in the lobby of the Radisson, with no clothes on. The guy’s buddy tried to intervene, and that’s when we walked into the lobby - just in time to see Rose do a Van Damme-esque roundhouse kick, bollocks flopping about, and flatten the guy with a perfectly placed kick to the jaw. The other guy had gotten up and was attempting to fight back, but having little success. I thought back to the “pork chop” comment for a moment and was overjoyed that he’d not chosen to beat my ###, this guy was an absolute destroyer. For about 5 seconds we stood there in shock, watching Rose kick the crap out of 2 guys at once while completely naked, and then the cops arrived. The manager had called the police and unfortunately, there must have been cops right outside the hotel. 4 uniformed officers flew across the lobby and tackled Rose. He, not knowing (or maybe not caring) that these were policemen, was still fighting back and even holding his own. The rest of us just stood there dumbfounded, not knowing what to do. Dan-O was soaking wet, with a suit jacket tied around his waist and wearing no pants or underwear, Beef, Kev and I were drunk to the point of incontinence, and this guy we were with was naked and fighting four cops. I literally had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do, so I just continued to stand there, as did the rest of our group, as they subdued and got handcuffs on Rose and took him out of the hotel, dripping wet and in his birthday suit.
We stood there for a few more moments in shock after they took him away, and then slowly made our way to the elevators and back to our rooms and passed out. As I laid on the bed, I thought I had seen absolutely everything....
