The Day I Shut Off The Ocean

While I am not famous, I have lived a pretty fucked up life. I was born twenty-eight years ago on January 21st, and while I may have not lived twenty-eight Motley Crue years - I certainly have seen a lot more whacked shit than the average person. Having so many fucked up stories, it’s long been my intention to write my autobiography at some point, but such a project would be really, really ambitious; in fact too ambitious for a hack writer like me. So rather than attempting anything so noble; I would rather regale my readers with some of highlights and lowlights from this strange trip in my new series, John’s True Hollywood Stories.

My first story happened sometime in the spring of 2000, when I went with my friends, Mike and Juan, down to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to "surf" (bear in mind...I don't know, nor have I learned how to surf). We arrived early in the afternoon, and as soon as we got there, we hit the beach and started DRINKING HEAVILY. As the evening rolled in we decided to hit a local club to continue DRINKING HEAVILY. We left the club three sheets to the wind, but decided to stop at the liquor store on the way back to the hotel to grab another case of beer and a fifth of vodka - just for good measure. Upon return to the hotel - we continued to DRINK HEAVILY. We sat by the pool with our vodka, beer, and only a fraction of our brains still functioning; when two strippery looking girls walked past in the courtyard.

“Hey, what’s up ladies?” I asked.

Very candidly, they explain they were going to meet some drug dealer up in a hotel room to buy some five-dollar ecstasy.

“Shit, I want some five-dollar X!”

“We’ll go up and get it for you - just wait here.”

I hand them ten bucks and they wander off to another part of the hotel. We continue drinking and get REALLY, REALLY, WASTED.

“Dude, those chicks just scammed you.” Juan says to me, “They ain’t coming back. We’re going to bed.”

“Yeah, I’ll just give them a few more minutes.”

Not ten seconds after my friends go into the hotel room, the two hoes show up with the drugs. Excited that my ten bucks had not been squandered, I wolf down both pills.

“Hey, do you want to go in the hot tub with us?” one of the strippers asks.

Needless to say, the answer was “yes”. At the hot tub, the girls strip down to their t-backs, and we all get in. Now, let me again reiterate that I am WASTED – not like the “Oh, I’ve had a few too many drinks wasted….” – I’m talking about HAMMERED, BLITZED, ladies and gentlemen: MY GOOSE WAS COOKED. It was only then, while sitting in the hot tub with the topless hoes that the E starts working on me.

Then one of the two fine upstanding young ladies asks me, “Hey, do you want to see our pussies?”

So, I’m sitting there with two muffs in my face, when my brain becomes disconnected from reality, and have no idea what’s going on anymore. I just intuitively knew I needed to get back to my hotel room and pass out before my obituary would read:

John (Name Withheld), 24, Queens, NY - drown in a hot tub while attempting to softserve to two Florida strippers.

To the ladies disappointment; I stumble out of the hot tub, and venture back my hotel room. After I had mistakenly walked into a few other people’s hotel rooms, I eventually make it back to my room where I find my friends asleep in both beds. I lie down on the floor and pass out. Sometime during that night, while sleeping I am awakened by the sound of porcelain clanking around in the bathroom. I open my eyes, I can see that the bathroom door is open from the light shining out of it, but I can’t actually see in. I am thinking to myself: What the fuck is going on in there, and why is someone fucking with the toilet? I think for a minute that maybe I should investigate what was going on, but I never bothered to get up and quickly lapse back into unconsciousness.

The next morning I wake up, feeling like an economy-sized can of smashed assholes. My friends are already awake and seem to be a little bit testy, so I ask what the problem is.

“Dude, you kept us up all fucking night!” Juan bitched.

“What do you mean I kept you up all night? I crashed out on the floor and you guys were already sleeping when I came in!”

“No, dude – you sat in the bathroom for hours last night taking the toilet apart!”

I was like, “What?! I remember being asleep on the floor and I could hear someone else fucking around in the bathroom, but it wasn’t me. I was wondering what was going on in there too.”

“No - that was you, man! I tried to stop you a bunch of times but you wouldn’t.” Mike added, “Look John - you did this….”

He opens the bathroom door and there was the toilet; completely dismantled, laying in pieces all over the floor. The tank had been pulled off, that ball thing was pulled out, pieces of rubber and chains litter the floor. So I start thinking about it, why do I remember someone else taking the toilet apart? I thought about it for a while, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks:

I had an out of body experience.

The next day, I managed to put together what my drug addled mind was doing: Our hotel is right on the beach and I can hear the sound of the ocean. In Queens, my toilet at my apartment was always getting stuck and running at night. The noise would keep me awake at night, so I would have to get out of bed to fuck around with it to shut it off. In my whacked out state: the tides sounded like my toilet running. I was so off-my-block that I start thinking I was in Queens, and went fumbling around in the bathroom attempting to silence the sound of water running, but I couldn’t. The Atlantic has been running for 4.5 billion years - there’s no way a toilet in a cheap motel in Cocoa Beach was going to stop it! Ok, that makes a little bit of sense, but why did I hear someone else playing amateur plumber in the bathroom while I was lying on the floor? Yes folks, my goose was so cooked that I had actually watched myself dismantle the toilet from out of my body. Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up.

That was the day I tried to shut the ocean off.

Drugs are bad, ok?