Sixpoint Hop Obama Ale

5.2% ABV from a growler

Any one who is a drinker and also a cell phone owner has at one time or another also been a drunken cell phone loser. To steal a line from a friend, I am a professional cell phone loser. I thought I was too old for this shit, mature enough to–even wasted–hang onto my possessions and my dignity. But apparently not. For you see, I lost another cell phone Friday night. In fact, I think with over a decade of cell phone usage, I’ve only been able to hang onto one phone until I was finally done with it and actually ready to purchase a new one.

So here I present an ode to cell phones I’ve lost over the years. All while I had over-the-limit BACs of course. But I’ll claim that might be coincidence rather than causation. You can decide for yourself.

I came into cell phone ownership kinda late I guess, not getting my first device til late-2000. That was back when phones were well-made and could actually last forever. Not the plastic pieces of shit they produce nowadays. Back then you actually hung onto a phone for a long time both because they weren’t pumping out new, exciting models every week and forcing you to keep up with the Joneses and also because why would one need to keep getting a new phone every year if their current one still worked? That first phone lasted me until May of 2003 when I attended a friend’s wedding in Philadelphia which I was the best man in. The ill-fitting tuxedo pants I wore–aren’t all rental tuxedo pants ill-fitting what with that elastic cincher in the waistband–had the loosest, deepest pockets and every time I sat down my phone and wallet would shoot from them like a fat kid on a Slip N Slide. Of course, by the time I got drunk and got into a cab to head to the after-party, I was no longer closely monitoring my pocket situation. When I got to the bar the phone was gone, and in it the phone number of a girl I was to meet up with that night. This would start a longstanding tradition of continually meeting girls and having their numbers only listed in my phone when I lose it, thus causing me to have no chance of setting up potentially exciting late-night rendezvouses. Amazingly, returning to New York the next day, I finally got a hold of the cabbie whose taxi I lost my phone in and he remarkably went to a FedEx and mailed it back to me. Good Samaritan of the century.

Unfortunately, this little incident wouldn’t teach me a lesson. To reverse a famous maxim: A genius learns from others’ mistakes. A smart man learns from his own. An idiot keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over again. I must be an idiot.

Cell number two I lost while drinking hard on a Friday night. There is no interesting story surrounding that. Saturday morning I headed to Best Buy to pick out a new phone where a salesman that looked and behaved like a happy-go-lucky Al Sharpton helped me out. Luckily I was past the rebate time of two years so I got a $350 phone for free. I headed to an all-Indian Halloween bash that night where I drank some spiked “witch’s brew” punch that musta really effed me up cause I don’t recall anything after midnight. I awoke the next day with nothing in my pants pockets save matchbooks from like fifteen different bars over a several miles radius in midtown. I borrowed my roommate’s phone to call the chick who hosted the party, to see if maybe I left my phone at her pad. She answered the phone with great truculence. “Uh…hey, Rita, did I happen to leave my phone at your apartment?” She paused for an interminable amount of time before asking me if I recalled what happened the previous night. Nope. She told me I had thrown an hors d’oeuvres tray out of her highrise apartment’s window and into the courtyard. And then several male guests had to forcibly remove me from the party. *CLICK* Burned bridge. I marched back to the same Best Buy I’d been just twenty-four hours earlier. I went up to Al Sharpton. “Do you remember me?” “Sure do.” “Do you remember that phone I bought yesterday?” “Sure do.” “I’ll take another one.” This time I paid the full $350 being that I’d only owned my previous phone for a day and there is no rebate offer on owning a phone for only a day.

Phone number four was an absolute beauty, the most expensive and cherished phone I’d ever bought in my life. I had it from May 2005 til my 27th birthday in February of 2006. That night I got shitcanned on the Lower East Side which lead to the absolute worst hook-up of my life with some Hell’s Kitchen hood rat. The day I tell that story in full I will cause 75% of my readers to vomit, 80% to quit speaking to me, and 100% of females to ignore me for the rest of time. I think the girl may have stolen the phone from me as I awoke the next morning to find her gone and my phone too. I was so ashamed that I didn’t leave the house for quite a while after that and next bought a real cheapy piece of crap cell to replenish the filched one. A few days after I bought the new phone, the first friend listed in my cell’s directory got a call. Some Latino kids claiming they’d found my cell in a 7-11 parking lot in White Plains. They wanted a reward of $500 for it. I told them several sexual acts they could do to themselves.

Phone number five–the aforementioned cheapy–actually lasted until I was done with it. I hated that fucking phone. Why did I never lose that one?!

And phone number six was my most recent one. My second favorite device I’ve ever had.

Again, my friends and I were drinking on the lower east side. Trouble always happens when I leave the numbered streets and drink below Houston. I don’t think I was drunk but then again, pre-barring before heading out, a friend and I had split an entire Whole Foods growler of Hop Obama. The second election-themed special release beer I’ve had this year, I’d been looking to try it for a while. To quote the brewery, “In keeping with the Illinois senator’s unifying theme, the ‘Hop Obama’ is an indefinable ale that doesn’t adhere to traditional style guidelines.” It poured a gorgeous rich amber color. It was darker than I expected and tons more bitter too. Nice hops came through as well. Tasted more like a bitter or even a weak IPA than the amber ale it is listed as. Overall, I enjoyed it the more I indulged in it, though it wasn’t quite as drinkable as you would think a 5.2% beer to be. If ‘Bam is elected I’m assuming Sixpoint will make this a regular release. That would be nice.

As I said, though we drank til 4 AM I don’t believe I was that wasted. In fact, I had met two girls that night and gotten both’s e-mail addresses. I don’t get phone numbers because I actually hate talking on the phone. And, drinking with an out-of-town friend on Friday, leaving him for a one-night stand was simply not in the cards. I recall getting the second girl’s info around 3:30 but by the time my friends and I had hailed a cab around 3:45, my phone was gone. I still don’t know where it went.

From 3:45 til 5 AM as we ate greasy food and played hockey on XBox, we called my phone, then again all day Saturday and Sunday. I was actually blown away that my phone was still ringing. I was so pissed at myself, my stupidity, that I decided to flagellate myself by buying a cheap phone next time, like one of those plastic disposable ones the gangsters on “The Wire” use. However, I refuse to buy the new one until my lost phone has quit ringing, thus signally the batteries are dead and thus no one will ever be able to locate me.

Amazingly, all day today my countless friends have called my phone countless times. And it continues to ring. Some sixty hours after I lost it and around seventy hours after I charged it last. I don’t think I knew a phone could stay charged so long.

I’d finally given up hope, fully planning on buying a new phone tonight, when just an hour ago, with the battery power surely in the red, some guy in Queens finally answered my phone. Worried about the battery cutting him off, he quickly gave his cell phone number and address. And in just a few minutes I will train out to Astoria to meet with him. What a nice guy. And another lesson not learned by The Vice Blogger. Goddamn I’m a lucky son of a bitch.

B