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SECOND CHANCE
article by smutty finkelstein
Isn’t it funny how the goals for getting fucked up change as you get older? Back when I was a kid, all I wanted was to get completely fucked out of my mind. If all the beer was gone and there wasn’t any weed left, fuck it, me and the fellas would hit the garage to huff paint fumes. These days, unless it’s a blowout, getting so fucked up that I forget my knees is something that sounds stupid to me. Jesus, I don’t even ever do real drugs anymore. But back in the old days, it didn’t matter how it happened, all I knew was that I needed to get totally wasted, brah.
And that’s how I started drinking Mad Dog.
Don’t pretend like your lips have never touched the Dog. You know you used to lap that shit up too. It’s not something I’m proud of either, but back when I was 16 a Friday night couldn’t get any better than when all my best friends would huddle around a couple Mad Dogs for a sweet curb chill. We’d toss back that heinous liquor, get way too emotional, and maybe even puke highlighter fluid all over each other. Sometimes a few girls would show up to pound the Dog too, and then me and the boys would race each other to win the prettiest girl before the Dog hit her too hard and she got such a case of double-vision that she thought kissing one of us would constitute a gangbang.
Those were sad, dark days.
I know this Second Chance column has so far only been about movies and records, but some asshole from Loco Nunca convinced me to down two Mad Dogs this weekend, and I have to say, it was too weird of an offer to pass up. Since this column has gone back to reinvestigate entertainment, I figure it should also take a timewarp back to what once entertained me the most– shitty candy-flavored wine.
However, I wasn’t gonna embark on this strange journey alone, so thank fucking Christ the Loco Nunca team agreed to venture back into the darkness with me. Five of us entered in, and we each bought two bottles and threw them into a bag so that we could choose our flavors randomly. We had two Red Bananas, two Orange Jubilees, two Red Grape Wines, a Blue Raspberry, and a Sour Apple. But do the flavors even matter? I wasn’t sure. Back when I was a teenager I drank over 1,000 bottles of the stuff. Could it really be that bad only four years later?
Oh yes, it can. This shit is fucking terrible.
From the first moment we lifted the bottles to our lips, all of us were grimacing. The Red Banana, which I started off with, tastes like Bozo The Clown bottled his violent cotton-candied diarrhea. On first taste, it seems passable, too sugary maybe, but nothing too harsh on the buds. Then the aftertaste of acidy burn kicks in and it’s fucking vicious. I now know what fruit tastes like in hell. All of us curious, we passed around our bottles to see which one was the worst. The Sour Apple is the villain. It’s like a cake of shit on the tongue, and it lingers even worse. The Blue Raspberry, which I bought because it has a bling bling medallion around the bottle’s neck, tastes exactly like an evil snow cone. Even the Orange Jubilee, which was my favorite back in the day, tastes like orange got raped by unhappiness. “Oh fuck,” my friend said on his first taste of the Red Grape Wine. “Now I know why homeless people are so sad.”
As we struggled at our bottles, I found my body rejecting the horrible decision I was making. My throat would close up in an attempt to shut off the intake of this vile fluid, and I had to literally force myself to swallow more of this ill liquor. The possibility of puking arrived immediately, and remained a constant throughout the night. The goal was for all of us to finish off two bottles of the shit, but it quickly became apparent that not all of us were going to make it. A Mad Dog night is a lot like going off to war.
Here’s the thing about Mad Dog: it’s not the booze that hits you, it’s the awfulness of it. Check the bottle. One of its ingredients is “natural colors.” What the fuck does that even mean? Did they decide that unnatural colors (whatever the hell those are) would be too much? A human body is not meant to ingest Mad Dog, and so yours gets very angry at you really quickly when you keep forcing it down. I quite vividly remember feeling like I was bleeding from my eyes halfway through my first bottle. Again, I didn’t feel like I was drunk, but I felt like I very well could die.
Another thing— Mad Dog will turn you into a retard. Most booze will, but with Mad Dog it’s an instantaneous effect. It’s not exactly drunkenness, it’s just a weird feeling that creeps up your spine and turns you into an awful caricature of your drunken self. It’s vaguely like how you’re always dumber when your high off schwag than you are on ‘dro. For instance, I went inside at one point to have a semi-heavy conversation for 10 minutes with someone who wasn’t riding the Mad Dog train, and when I walked back out the front porch had turned into an idiot convention. Seriously. Somehow they had turned the Top Gun theme into “Highway Cougar Danger Zone” and kept singing it at top volume between giggles. I still have absolutely no fucking idea how they got to that, and I don’t want to know. Such is the sad state of affairs for your friends when they start getting wasted on Mad Dog.
At this point, people started opting out of the Mad Dog game. Drinking two bottles was the stated intention, but by the end of bottle #1 two people made themselves to puke so that they couldn’t be forced to drink any more. Yawni, who is an Asian that didn’t drink in high school, was rolling through her first bottle very slowly, but she learned a good lesson from the pukers. Instead of trying to hang tough with the competition, she simply downed three-fourths of her bottle in one gulp and puked violently. And when I say violently, I mean it. The vom poured from her like it was being exorcised, drenching the ground below her in odd fluorescent colors. “It burns to puke Mad Dog out your nose,” she told us afterwards. And I believe her. The shit is just as terrible coming up as it is to force down.
But I would not be denied, and neither would Hunter. We finished our first bottles and quickly took to our seconds. As awful as the first bottle is to struggle through, the second one goes down unnervingly easily. Of course, by that point you feel so fucking crazy that tipping over cars seems like a suitable idea, but whatevs. And as for drunkenness, that shit kicks in quick on the second bottle. Half of it has to be the sugar rush, but if you stop and add up the alcohol content, it’s also a lot of booze that you’re drinking. A lot of foul smelling, terrible fucking booze. And it’s not a good drunk that you’re left with. Not at all. I found myself becoming vaguely angry at everyone around me to such a serious extent that I started planning to stab anyone who pissed me off in the throat with my pen. Mad Dog is not a friendly beverage in the least.
As Hunter and I rocketed through our second bottles, puking started seeming like a genius idea. I certainly didn’t want to fall asleep with a belly full of Mad Dog, but my competitive spirit drove me to keep drinking. At this point, it must be noted, Hunter and I were awful drunks. We were walking in sad sputters and were jabbering like we had been possessed by inconsiderately verbose demons. We became a dual act of vaudevillian unpleasantness. At some point, Hunter got so stumbly that he knocked over his bottle and shattered it. I now believe that he did this on purpose, and I don’t blame him in the least. However, I could not be stopped, and so I finished my second Mad Dog, and then downed some of a third for reasons that I will never be able to explain.
And that’s when shit got really raw.
After two and a half Mad Dogs, I turned into a bumbling fool. It felt like my brain was exploding, but that wasn’t stopping me. I ran wild through the backyard. My friends would try to talk to me, but I would constantly stop them to say, “I don’t know if anyone else thinks this is funny, but I just farted right now.” I did that three times. Honestly, I ceased to be a human and became a hippopotamus. I don’t know if you know anything about hippos, but they are stumbling and stupid and constantly furious because their entire life is a surprise since they’re too dumb to remember that they exist. That’s exactly what I became: a fucking hippo. It was a very despairing memory come the next morning.
Oh yes, let’s talk about the morning after. I’m a man who loves his booze, but I have never had a hangover like I did after this Mad Dog night. For starters, I had stripped entirely naked before falling asleep on the couch, and then threw all the covers off of me somewhere in the middle of the night (I remember cursing at them as I tossed them across the room) and so I struck a very unsightly figure when my friends came into the living room the next morning. And let’s make this clear, I wasn’t hungover—I was fucking drunk. At 11:30 in the morning, I was still wasted. And that was after a solid seven hours of sleep. I should have puked, but I didn’t, and you better believe I paid for it the next day. I didn’t even feel like a person until after the sun had fallen.
Look, I did this experiment for the sake of science, but you should never touch a Mad Dog again. I know I never will. That bad booze has its time and place, and it’s when you’re too young to know any better. If you’ve over the age of 20, Mad Dog isn’t for you. I revisited it, and it was a night that will always haunt me. Don’t make the same mistake. This shit doesn’t deserve any second chances. No sir.
Ewww, I feel sick from just bringing up all these memories of it. Cabin boy, fetch me a bucket! I think I’m gonna retch!
