Off in a lonely corner at River North’s Brehon Pub two Saturdays ago a guy in baggy jeans and a T-shirt twiddled away at a Golden Tee arcade game. “See that guy over there?” Michael Burke asked me. “He’s our target audience.”
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They recommend, before it’s too late, expensive trips to the Virgin Islands, Prague, Puerto Rico, Quebec, New York, Georgia, Munich, Key West, Cannes, Barcelona, Thailand, Los Angeles, Belize, the Cayman Islands, and Rhode Island for resorts and sex festivals and sports events. They provide handy checklists with directives like “order a Zima at a biker bar,” “get a lap dance wearing Umbros,” “shit in the woods,” “ride a Harley,” “hang-glide,” “share a hot tub with women who are topless, bottomless, or both,” “take home a hot bartender,” “be the water guy at a wet T-shirt contest,” “make sweet love to a woman ten years older than you, a.k.a. ‘bang a cougar,’” and “drink a Redheaded Slut, then go home with one.”
So get off your fat ass, bro-heim. Pull your dick out of the damn video game and stick it in some sweet honey in Rio de Janeiro! Go spend Saint Patrick’s Day puking in Dublin! Run with the bulls in Pamplona! Get the clap in Vegas! Because someday real soon you will be married to some ballbuster obsessed with housewares who makes you do yard work and shop for khakis in strip malls and perform other lame, soul-crushing duties for the rest of your life. You will get up at 5 AM to toil away in some cube in hopes of someday, maybe if you’re lucky, getting a window. You will drive a minivan because you will have a screaming brat (or hopefully more!) who constantly wants to go to Disneyland, and you will teach him how to play baseball if he’s a boy or give her money to shop with if she’s a girl. And so on and so forth until you die. Because that’s life. That’s just the way it works.
“Oh, you missed our chapter on snuggling,” Michael said. That was a joke. But in all seriousness he asked, “Should there be a book like this for women?”
After about eight shots in a row I realized I was smashed. We started playing Drink or Dare, which turned into Dare but Drink Anyway. My roommate plucked hairs from a friend’s bikini line, then had my former intern lick almond butter off her foot. In turn, he had a friend get naked and make an outfit out of toilet paper. Three more of us took our clothes off and followed suit.
