My Drunken Bicentennial Tale

We were young then, and stupid...

[The following events are true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Ok, well, they weren’t really innocent, per se, but you get the meaning…]

In preparation for America’s Bicentennial in 1976, I and a group of my best Beeville buddies made a pact that we'd all consume a full case of beer during the 24 hours of July 4. Even better, we'd do it on the beach at Port Aransas, in a set of sand dunes we all knew as Little Beeville.

In preparation for this fiesta fandango, we not only bought ourselves each a full case of Miller Light beer - which was relatively new to the market in those days - we also brought three kegs of beer with us, which we buried with ice in the sand. That was for visitors, which turned out to be a bunch of folks.

Also in preparation, on the night of July 3 that year, a group of us drove around Beeville and took down 4 of the city limits signs. Those, we mounted atop the dunes when we arrived at Port A so literally everybody would know where to find us. Not a single one of us stopped to think that that would include the local Port A police and Aransas County sheriff, a huge guy with a deep Texas voice (sounded a lot like Big Tex at the Texas State Fair) whose name I forget now.

After someone reported the signs, the sheriff showed up about mid-day on July 4 and confiscated them. But, after checking our IDs to ensure we were all at least 18 (the legal drinking limit at the time), and because we all swore we had no idea at all where those damn signs had come from, he didn't cart any of us off to jail.

After that, the rest of the day is just a blur to me.

The next clear memory I have is waking up the next morning in the back seat of a strange car in the parking lot of an apartment complex I did not recognize. Turns out that I had passed out in that car immediately upon consuming my 24th and final beer around midnight on the 4th. That car belonged to the sister of one of my buddies - we’ll call him Bobby Don - who lived in an apartment in Corpus. He had somehow driven back there without killing both of us.

Having no idea where in the hell I was and little way to find out, I had to wait until the complex's office opened at 10 a.m. so I could ask the manager. After she told me, I searched my memory to figure out who I knew that lived in Corpus, and realized it was Bobby Don. The manager gave me his apartment number and, when I knocked on the door, he was shocked as hell to see me standing there.

"Dave!," he says, bleary-eyed and still half drunk, "what the hell are you doing here?"

"I was gonna ask you that question," I replied, adding that I'd just woken up in the back seat of his sister's car.

"What's her car doing here?" he asked, having no memory of having driven us to Corpus the previous night. “Say, that’s her keys over on the couch,” he added, looking around.

"I have no idea how the car got here - I just know I was in it," I said, then asked: "You got any beer in the fridge?"

About two hours and three beers later, we were back at Little Beeville, placating Bobby Don’s angry sister and helping dig up and load the kegs so we could return them and get our deposits back.

That is a 100% true story.

P.S.: I swear we were gonna re-mount those city limit signs when we got back to Beeville.