The One Thing You Can't Replace

I'm Irish, I keep things very bottled up, and I don't drink. Which is not what you're supposed to do when you're Irish? I don't drink, I used to drink and then I drank too much and I had to stop.

That surprises a lot of audiences, because I don't look like someone who used to do anything. I look like I was just sitting in a room, in a chair eating saltines for like 28 years and then I walked right out here. Now I myself I quit drinking, because I used to drink too much and then I would blackout and I would ruin parties.

So I would hear stories about myself.

Here is a story I once heard about me. I guess I was 20 and I was at a party at someone's house and I blacked out drinking. And someone came out of one of the rooms at this party holding like an old antique bottle with some liquid in it. And they said hey, is this whiskey or a perfume? And apparently I grabbed it, drank all of it and said, it's perfume... and it was.

Another story I heard about myself, this one happened in high school. We had this teacher in high school whose kid went to our high school. His name was Mr. Mc
Namara and his son Jake Mc
Namara went to our high school. He was a sophomore, when I was a senior. So he was two years behind me. And Mr. Mc
Namara was an as*h*le and one weekend he and his wife decided to leave town, which you should never do, if you are as*h*le. And Jake Mc
Namara decided to throw a party at the teacher's house.

Hurray! And everyone around town heard about it and we all got up individually and thought "okay, let's go over there and destroy the place." I walked into this party. Everyone I had ever met was there and everyone was drinking like it was the end of the world. People were drinking like it was the civil war and a doctor was coming to saw our legs off. It was totally unsupervised. We were like dogs without horses, we were running wild.

I walked down, I walked down to the basement.
They had a pool table in the basement. One dude took a running start and threw his body onto the pool table and broke it in half. Another kid found out which room was Mr. Mc
Namara's and went upstairs and took a sh*t on his computer.

So the party was going great.

I'm standing in the basement, and I'm holding a red cup; you see in movies. And I'm standing there and I'm holding a red cup and I'm starting to black out and I guess someone said like "something, something police" and in a brilliant moment of word association, I yelled: "f*ck da police! f*ck da police!" And everyone else joined in.

A 100 drunk white children yelling “f*ck da police”. With the confidence of guys who have already been to jail and aren't afraid of it anymore, you know that like, "I'll serve my nickel, you come and take me!" confidence. But white children. The reason someone had said something, something police was because the police were there. So a Chicago police officer walked down the stairs and got to the bottom in the basement and looked out over a sea of drunk toddlers yelling; "f*ck da police!" in his face, but he was almost impressed.

He was like wow, and then he leaned into his walkie-talkie and went "get the paddywagon." And my friend John, who is now a father, this man now has a baby, he grabbed a 40, smashed it on the ground, and yelled "Scatter!" And everyone ran into different directions.

We all ran in different directions. It was like that scene in Ratatouille when the humans come in the kitchen and all the rats go in different ways. We all ran in different directions. I ran into the laundry room and I jumped up on the washing machine and I crawled out through a window into the backyard and now I'm running through the backyard and there was this big chain link fence and I thought "I've never climbed a fence that high before." And then I woke up at home.

On Monday, I went to school because that's what we did back then. And I'm walking into the school building and who do I see but Jake Mc
Namara. And he says to me hey, were you at my party on Saturday and I said no, you know, like a liar. And he said things got really outta hand. Someone broke the pool table. Someone took a sh*t on my dad's computer. But the worst thing, he says; the worst thing is that someone stole these old antique photos of my grandmother and my parents are freaking out about it. And I had that thought that only blackout drunks and Steve Urkel can have.

Did I do that? I figured no. I wouldn't have done that. But I was never sure, until two years later, relax. I'm playing video games with this kid named Alex that we also went to high school with. Two years later, we've graduated by now. We're playing video games for a couple hours, and then Alex says to me, hey, come here I want to show you something and he takes me into his bedroom and then he takes me into a side room off of his bedroom. Never a good thing to have.

He shows me a tiny room that is covered wall to wall in stolen antique photos from different people's parties over the years. And I said why? Why do you do this? And Alex said, because it's the one thing you can't replace. That's the end of that story, but how f*cked up is that right? That's crazy.

So I don't drink anymore.