Breaking & Entering

Day drinking rarely leads to anything prosperous or productive. This day was to be no different. You know those days where you wake up, and the sun is shining, and you're like 'I would like to go out and have a drink today, enjoy the sunshine?' But then one drink leads into 1200? Derek and I had randomly hooked up through the years. We had been best friends for years and years, had even lived together for awhile, but never took that fateful leap into a relationship. As he described it best, "If I would drink and light myself on fire and then run down the street, I would look behind me, and there you would be, lighting yourself on fire and trying to catch up to me." We had been friends for years, since Enterprise, and I had known his roommate Mikey since college. We met up during the afternoon, and I caught him during a recent breakup from his girlfriend, a weak moment for him, and we hung out for the rest of the day. Some of his fraternity brothers had joined us at their house, and we left for 2nd Street. There was a point when I was at Legends, a local sports bar, where I had two glasses of house chardonnay in my hands, and someone had ordered me a third glass, where I looked at Derek like 'I can't do this any more hoss.' Derek and Mikey took me outside and got a cab for the 1/8 block to my house (I was that bad that I couldn't even walk. Someone called my name from down the street. To this day I still don't know who it was, but Mikey shoved my head into the cab, and we went to my apartment). When the cab dropped us off, I told Derek and Mikey that all they had to do was pop the screen to my window off. I had done it a million times before. I often left my windows open for this reason. So Mikey popped off the window screen, and Derek jumped in...and then a woman screamed into the darkness. The details are fuzzy, but this is what Derek and Mikey rehashed to me: we broke into the wrong apartment (they all look alike in my defense). The lady turned on the lights, told Derek that she had kids sleeping in the other room and asked what he was doing in her apartment, and then opened the door to find Mikey holding her screen window and me passed out in her bushes. I know that not all stories can be as whimsical and dreamlike as that, but if we learned anything from this story it is that you should sleep with your windows closed.