My roommate lost control at the Rotator

This is the second in a series of stories about my college roommates. For the purposes of this story, I'll allow some anonymity and will refer to my roommate as "Elvis".

Elvis invited a couple of friends to visit for the weekend. That alone is a recipe for disaster. Gainesville is home to more than 50,000 college students and dozens (maybe hundreds) of bars. Every weekend is a party, and every decent bar is swarming with scantily-clad hotties and guys guzzling uber cheap beer. When people visited from out of town, the night often ended in a fog. Saturday and Sunday mornings inevitably led to a mumbled, "What happened last night?"

This particular evening, we gathered the troops and headed to our favorite bar - a place just outside of town called JD Penguins. The place was a real dive. For years, the bar's regulars were the kind of guys who bellied up to the bar at noon and stayed there till midnight. Real full-time drunks. But somehow in the early 90's hipsters stumbled upon the place and before long it was a true hipster hangout. They even hired a DJ who played things like Morrissey, the Flaming Lips, and Pavement.

This place had one major draw. It's probably the thing that drew the attention of the first college aged trendsetters who made the place popular. It had a giant rotating bar. The bar slowly spun - maybe one revolution every 15 minutes or so. The bartenders worked in the middle of the big circular bar, while the patrons sat around the circumference. Of course we never referred to the place as JD Penguins. It was always called "the Rotator."

So me and Elvis and the guys showed up at the Rotator ready to get shitfaced. The beer was cheap - I think it was $1.50 for a Sam Adams draft. It was affordable enough to down a couple 12 ounce beers for every rotation of the bar. That way, by the time you were done with one beer, you'd be near another Sam Adams tap just in time for a refill. After a few hours you were bombed.

It was right about this time that Elvis started feeling woozy. The 12+ beers and the rotation of the bar had gotten to him. He was wavering, almost like he was going to fall off his barstool. He put his head down on the bar and a minute later he suddenly sat up. He had that look on his face. You know the one. That look - like "I'm going to fucking puke all over this bar." But he didn't puke. Instead he wobbled toward the bathroom with that expression of shock and fear. He made it to the bathroom door and disappeared into a stall. No puke.

After a few minutes, Elvis stumbled back to the bar looking slightly refreshed with a goofy grin on his face. We assumed he had been in there tossing his cookies. He sat back down at the bar and ordered another beer. He assured us he was feeling much better. The night raged on and we made it home safely.

The next morning, everyone woke up feeling like balls. A couple of us exchanged the whole "man, what happened last night" thing. And then I remembered that Elvis hurled in the Rotator bathroom.

Me: "Dude, how are you feeling today? I can't believe you puked last night."
Elvis: "What? I didn't puke."
Me: "You totally did. You were in the bathroom for like five minutes last night."
Elvis: "Oh... at the Rotator?... I didn't vomit, man."
Me: "Dude we saw you get up looking all freaked out like you were about to puke - and you ran into the bathroom."
Elvis: "Alright. Here's the deal. I think I passed out at the bar for a minute. I must have lost control. Because I suddenly woke up sitting at the bar and I realized I had shit my pants. I ran to the bathroom to clean up."
All of us: "What the fuck are you talking about?!?"
Elvis: "Seriously. I shit my pants at the bar. I went into the bathroom and threw my underwear into the trashcan. I washed up and started drinking again."

How's that for dedication? Disgusting perhaps, but it shows dedication nonetheless.