In honor of Beeker’s wedding yesterday, I’m re-posting this story, which was originally published on 11.16.2008. I’ve made a few improvements, but the content, and the spirit of Beeker, is intact. Enjoy. And congrats to Beeker and Beekerette.

A complete recap of last night’s debauchery is unnecessary to understand how the “Human Hurricane”, aka Beeker, came to leave me a text at 4:17PM today. It simply read, “I assume you made it home ok.”

While it’s not out of the ordinary for friends to be checking up on me after a night out, Beeker’s message struck me as the “pot calling the kettle black” after last night’s escapades. I’m guessing he roused himself from a restful slumber around 3:30 this afternoon and felt compelled to find out what the hell had happened.

Thankfully, I did make it home ok… arriving at 10:30 this morning after laying uncomfortably, in a state of fitful rest,  on Beeker’s couch last night. Obviously, Beeker hadn’t remembered that he had ordered me to sleep there: “Bigs! Bigs! Go to sleep on the couch! Go to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!”

It’s true, I have certainly had my fair share of black-out drunk evenings, a combination of dance-induced fatigue and too many Jack and Cokes. But I’m typically pretty mellow even in those cases. Beeker is not.

At around 1:45AM, Beeker, myself, three of Beeker’s doctor friends, and some guy who had a car, left Felt in Boston. The guy with the car, “Jimmy”, appeared to be sober enough to drive, as I peered at him through my J&C-colored glasses. And considering the prospect hailing a cab on a Friday night at 1:45A in Boston, I was confident in his ability to get us all back to Beeker’s in one piece.

Prior to Jimmy getting his vehicle out of the garage, Beeker had decided that he needed to urinate, badly… While the rest of the group was waiting outside the parking attendant’s shack, Beeker haphazardly ran across the street and disappeared down a dark alley.

When he hadn’t returned in two minutes, one of his colleagues asked me, “Do you think we should go look for him?”

I assured her that I’d seen him disappear down darker alleys in more dangerous places without a scratch on his head.

When Beeker returned, the six of us piled into Jimmy’s BMW. He slowly backed out of the parking space. Then he straightened the car towards the exit and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car jolted forward, projecting my head into the back of the passenger’s seat, and we burned rubber through the parking garage, wheels screeching and stomachs churning. I quickly amended my confidence in Jimmy getting us home safely.

Jimmy slammed on the breaks with enough time to skid towards the parking gate and not burst through it, preventing the inevitable high speed chase where Jimmy would have abandoned his BMW on Storrow Drive and left four physicians and myself still clinging for dear life as the BPD raised their assault rifles and unleashed the attack dogs.

Thankfully, the only issue we had at the parking gate was that Jimmy had somehow managed to lose the ticket, but the woman working the gate was nice enough to let us leave without paying another $30. My confidence in Jimmy was now completely shot. But the idea of finding another way home didn’t enter my mind. I looked over at Beeker and he was none the wiser. His eyes were rolled into the back of his head and he nodded off, despite his female doctor friend, Suzie, beginning to moan about how she might throw up.

Somehow, I still felt that “Jimmy” was doing us a major favor by getting us home, despite my trepidation at him trying to drag race with other vehicles along the way.

Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed. “Jimmy” burned rubber around Boston Common and down Boylston Street, as if we were shooting a scene for Tokyo Drift.  I frantically tried to find the seat belt, but with four of us jammed into the back seat, it was a hopeless endeavor. As I stared ahead, hoping to not see two headlights coming straight for us, it didn’t seem to me that we were even going in the right direction.

Jimmy whipped around a corner, saw the sign for the Kenmore T stop, jammed on the breaks, and wished us well. I was more than happy to have come to a stop and flung the door open like a POW fleeing a Vietnamese prison camp.

The T stops running in Boston at 12:30, but having survived the past three minutes, I was simply glad to have not become a quadriplegic. Beeker, having woken from his slumber, decided he would simply hail a cab, which, at 2AM, is as likely as finding a wad of $20 bills in your coat pocket.

But rather than standing on the sidewalk in front of Kenmore like any sane person, Beeker wandered into traffic and began screaming at cabs. Meanwhile, Suzie and her boyfriend discretely walked around the corner of the building so she could boot all over the pavement. As cab after cab whizzed by us with backseats full of drunken Bostonians, I was convinced  we’d get back to Beeker’s around 4:30AM, only after begging some lost out-of-towner to give us a ride; or someone in a conversion van who insisted on having us call him Uncle Bob.

With Suzie still puking, and her boyfriend pleading, “why do you always have to drink so much when we go out?”, Beeker spotted a potentially vacant cab…

He unleashed a cry of the banshee, “Bigs, get over here… get over here now! Bigs, there is a cab! Get over here NOW!”

I glanced at Suzie and her boyfriend and jogged over to the cab. Beeker screeched, “Get in! Get in NOW!… close the door!” I reluctantly climbed in and shut the door. Beeker barked his address to the cabbie and I asked, “Why did we leave Suzie and her boyfriend… I thought she lives right by you?”

Beeker’s eyes widened. He slurred, “What are you talking about?” I informed him that they had been right around the corner waiting with us.  He pathetically informed me that he hadn’t realized they were still there. It was painfully obvious that screaming at cabs had been his lone focus at the Kenmore T stop.

As we approached his house, I reached into my wallet and found it bone dry. I told Beeker that I had no cash to pay for the taxi, but he assured me that he was bankrolling our trip home: “Bigs, Bigs…I got it. Bigs. I got it. Bigs.”

When the cabbie dropped us off a block from Beeker’s house, I slid out the right back door and he the left.  Beeker began to walk around the front of the cab. I looked at him and asked, “Did you pay the guy?”

He looked at me curiously at the same instant the cabbie rolled down his window and demanded money in a thick Eastern European accent.

After forking over a couple of 20’s, Beeker took off in a dead sprint towards his house.  I slowly followed, owing to my completely full bladder. When I reached the the house, I could hear Beeker banging around in the kitchen, only to emerge with a bag of chips. His housemates were probably sitting up in bed hoping that whoever had just broke into the house only took the flat screen TV in the living room and didn’t come bursting through their doors. He added to the indiscretion by plopping down on the couch and blasting some movie at 125db.

He looked at me and screeched, “Bigs! Bigs! Go to sleep on the couch! Go to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!”

So I stumbled out of the bathroom and took his advice, curling up on the couch with the movie blaring so loud as to penetrate my inner soul… but I ended up falling asleep anyways… and he ended up passed out in his room at some point in time later.

To say that the “Human Hurricane” had been in rare form would be a mischaracterization of my friend Beeker. But to my benefit, the safest part of a hurricane is the eye, and that’s exactly where I found myself last night.