Around this time of year, over a million teenagers make one big step towards the loss of illusion and the painful tolchok to the head known as adulthood. An event of pomp and circumstance celebrates 18 years of acceptable co-dependence and the process from being a helpless baby to a fully-fledged derelict with an alcohol addiction. Yes, high school graduation is a great day for all, full of joy and wonder and happiness but back in Baltimore high school graduation truly only means one thing, namely the beginning of Senor Week.
It’s a time-honored tradition whereupon a freshly-minted legal adult and a bunch of his buddies and partners I crime get houses and hotel rooms in Ocean City or, in our case, nearby Bethany, and spend a week getting properly twisted, a last hurrah to the freedom of adolescence. So it is with this in mind - and the fact that next year will be my 10-year-reunion so this is my last chance to wax philosophically about senior week before it gets creepy – I am going to take you all back to a simpler time, a better time, and give a little rundown of what transpired during my reckless experiment in booze, beach, and belige in the sleepy hamlet of Bethany Beach Delaware. Without further ado, I present to you Senior Week 1999
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I graduate and it’s a fun event and I’m happy and my parents are proud, so proud they’ve organized a party for me but since I’m an asshole teenager who don’t respect nothing I quickly thank everybody for coming, eat a quick bite, and pack my bag for the next week or 5 days or however long, it’s hard to know. Then dirty De(V)ito, a future writer for the infamous Wuts-Happening and a depraved individual such as myself, rolls up in his silver Saturn full of 30-packs of Busch Light and I wave goodbye at my confused patrons as I exit my own party as if I’m Paris Hilton making a paid cameo, although it’s before anybody knows who the fuck Paris Hilton is.
The second we’re on the highway De(V)ito pulls out a joint he rolled since he’s the master and we puff good and hard and each crack a beer for the drive since it’s going to be a few hours over the Bay Bridge and then Route 50 veering just North when the time comes to roll over the Ocean City Bay into North OC and then onto Coastal Highway up over the state line into Bethany en route to our hotel, en route to the rest of our lives.
We pull into our room at the Rusty Pelican or something like that, a rotten little working man's motel just outside the center of Bethany that I think has become a Holiday Inn Express, the cheapest we could find and check in with the foreign man behind the desk eyeing us funny and saying “No booze and no smoking”.
“Absolutely not sir, we’re respectable young men and contrary to our age group are here to unwind and relax by the beach.” After we pull the car around behind a dumpster so the view from the office is partially obstructed we unload the 
6 30-packs DeVito and I have brought, one for each day, and stash them under our little dresser. DeVito takes off quickly to the house where the Roland Park juniors are staying a little south but I take my surfboard out for a quick paddle, an hour or so to clear my head and think about my accomplishments and my failure before coming in to shower, grab a few beers, and take off down Coastal Highway on my old school Bad Boy Club skateboard with Black Fly wheels to meet up and get into some good old-fashioned healthy debauchery.
Of course by the time I arrive the Beirut is already set up, in a compartment under the house and DeVito is playing one on one versus Carey with their feet in the sand and as I get into the mix I come to the realization that there’s probably few things more pleasurable than playing Beirut with sand between your toes.
After the usually revelry and comedy DeVito and I and Kimbo, who was there despite being a Junior, make our way down the street a little to the beach house where the rest of our Gilman classmates had gotten a nice respectable 4-bedroom booze factory and we all toast to our graduation and our youth and secretly we’re all wondering what the fuck we’re going to do with ourselves but nobody dares say this out load for the sake of not disrupting the good vibrations.
Some Bryn Mawr junior who had also come up, as we weren’t really hanging out with the Bryn Mawr seniors at that time, throw on the new Red Hot Chili Peppers CD just like at the Post Prom late night a week or so before and just like then, and in general just like girls always tend to do, they keep on playing “Scar Tissue" and “The Other Side” over and over again and it’s a bittersweet indulgence in the fleeting innocence of young addiction.
Eventually my motelmate and I find our way back to the RPCS Juniors’ house where we play a few more latenight Beirut games and have a little puff with the young ‘uns celebrating our Senior Week with us and we pass out on couches and the first night’s over.
The next morning we wake up and grab fast food breakfasts and hang around the place until early afternoon when we head back to our motel to re-collect and drink from our private stash. A girl calls me, some random slore I’d lost my V-card to a few weeks before at a random graduation party on the sprawling lands of a RPCS hip hop party girl, and I tell her to come on up to my motel for a second round.
“I don’t have a car. Could you pick me up?”
I tell her I’m too drunk to drive and so she catches the OC drunk bus up from 35th street until it ends in the mid 100’s where she has to get a cab the rest of the way to our motel. She arrives and DeVito leaves and she and I fuck like monkeys on the bed until her friend, who had accompanied her but left us to our deed, opens the door and shrieks at the girl hopping up and down on my lap on the sleazy rotten motel bed. We laugh and decide to move into the shower where we play around a little more and it’s just what the doctor ordered. Then she asks if I could maybe drive her back down but I say no, I’m still too drunk so she shrugs and takes another 50 dollar cab to catch another ride on the OC 1 dollar bus back down to her place.
As soon as her cab is far enough away that I don’t have to worry about her seeing I’m fully functional and just didn’t want to drive her back down, I hop back onto my skateboard and roll down to the houses for another night of revelry. It starts off with a little Beirut at the RPCS junior house,
kicking it on the porch since it's summer time and the living is easy with a nice phatty blunt in my mouth and then it’s on to the Gilman seniors’ house for some Spinners and girls dancing while we guys make rude comments about each others’ mothers. At this point a girl who had just graduated from Garrison and about whom I harbor vicious longings kidnaps me and drives me in her early-90’s Jeep Cherokee, one of those boxy ones that everybody seemingly had back then, to the Garrison house. We party there and late-night I end up at the RPCS Seniors’ house, a group of girls who had fallen out of favor with most of the other Gilman guys but I consider acceptable and welcome drinking companions, and I end up falling asleep late-night on their couch into sweet intoxicated dreams.
The next night DeVito and myself and probably a few others make our way to Grotto Pizza, a delicious little shore treat where they put the tomato sauce on top of the mozzarella and the chicken fingers are just like Lunch-lady Dorine used to make them and it’s good piled on top of all the booze in our developing livers. I drive us to the Gilman guys’ house where we have a few drinks and play some Beirut and nobody goes to the beach because it’s been cloudy and rainy all week but for some reason Shields and I decide to go surfing – or maybe it was Black and I, I just borrowed Shields’ trunks? – not sure, impossible to fully remember a booze-filled depraved week from 9 years ago – but regardless I paddle out into ugly, choppy water in green trunks with elastic instead of laces holding them up and I’m pretty drunk, off-balance and certainly in no condition to physically exert myself and after getting wrecked for a half an hour and constantly fighting currents trying to take me to Rehomo I decide to give up on the surfing and get my head back into the drinking game.
That night the RPCS girls have another party and drinks will flow, maybe some blood will spill but certainly a crowd of derelicts are rolling on E-Bombs and a couple heads are playing around with GHB but I’m still a respectable American so I content myself to drink cheap watered-down weasel piss and smoke swaggy joints with my buddies and lament the fact that, despite all the heavy consumption I can’t seem to get myself properly intoxicated.
The next day I do something about that. I start drinking when I wake up at 10 and push it hard all day. Close to 5, about a 12-pack deep and not looking to stop anytime soon, I find myself at the RPCS juniors’ sandy-floored Beirut table playing some top-shelf ping-pong with the masters of the sport, long before all the west-coasters adopted it, misnamed it, and fucked it up with lame rules and inconsistent table sizes as if the only thing central to Beirut is ping pong balls and cups. That’s like saying the only thing you need to play basketball is a loop of some sort and a rubber ball and fuck such regulations as 10-foot tall hoops and 3-point lines. At some point it devolves into something similar but certainly not the same and when you go from the pros to the minor leagues it can be somewhat frustrating.
Around 7 I turn from the table after knocking down a good 6 or so beers in less that 45 minutes from playing one-on-one 10-cup and get to the bathroom door in time to volume boot a frozen rope of bile and stomach liner like it’s a crossbow dart aimed almost perfectly into the toilet and somehow I avoid making a mess.
That night the Gilman seniors hold a party at their house and they turn a dining room table into a Beirut table as it is regulation, though a little sloppy, and outside people are playing flip cup and finally I feel like I’m getting the good drunk I’d been chasing all week.
I pose for pictures with friends as I finally remembered my camera, strange cross-sections like one of Shields, a girl whose younger sister I had been previously dating, me, and the girl’s friend who was the fore-mentioned co-ed I’d been secretly pining for when she kidnapped me to go to the Garrison house.
The next thing I remember I’m waking up on a couch in the living room, alone and in silence, and Bee-nut flicks of the light and tells me the party’s over. Apparently I’d been sitting out on their patio where the flip-cup was happening, started throwing up over their fence into some bushes, and passed out. The cops came and some helpful friends dragged me inside so I could pass out on the couch and so I ended up missing most of the party, passing out at 11 just as things had been heating up. This drunk thing is like a goddamned slingshot, how would I figure it out? If you drink too little it’s just not as fun and if you drink too much you miss it completely. I would spend the rest of my life chasing that perfect drunk, occasionally hitting it but probably more than often overshooting the bullseye.
From this point it’s a final mixture of confusion and booze. A few more parties – who knows if the party ever really ends? – and bittersweet reminiscences and conversations, 
the deep substance-addled ones that are embarrassing but at the same time enlightening and make you feel awkward but at the same time closer to whomever you been conversing. Friends are tired, painful hangovers and all and draping themselves in American Flags or blankets. A few’d been rolling for a good 3 or 4 days straight and are hitting the low cycle where the dopamine’s all gone and certainly suicide isn’t far from the realm of agreeable possibilities. Yet through all of this it is innocent, it is fun and brighter than the great chase would become.
We certainly didn’t realize it, as few youth ever do, but it certainly was some of the freest, most nostalgic moments of our lives. Not the best time, mind you, because certainly I love my life a little more every day as I continue heading in the direction I’ve always known I’ve wanted. But back then things were a bit easier, confusing but at the same time very exciting, as if everything just meant more and was new and fresh and every party was something different, every girl was something mysterious and hangovers didn’t exist and the great spit was a cause celebre that everybody looked forward to, that night in “rare form” that was so legendary to us mixed adolescents.
The final day the sun comes out and DeVito and myself and a young man who would become the legendary DJ Hoff walk around the Bethany boardwalk, getting food and taking in the tourist scene. Hoff and DeVito would stay in the hotel for another day but I have to get back, see my family and save some money and all that jazz.
On the ride home I don’t think about the fact that high school was officially over. That from that point forward everything becomes a lot more difficult, a lot more real, a lot more scary though also a lot more exhilarating. I didn’t think about my good friends I’d rarely see once I made my great crossing to California nor did I think about how much I’d miss my hometown, my family and my room.
I thought about the fact that my parents were leaving in 2 days to go to a B and B for some romantic reason and I would have to continue the great party. I thought about calling whoever I’d have to call up and having a blow out. And most importantly I thought about how I’d procure a Beirut table and where I’d set it up in my parents’ house. Because at that time in your life, what’s more important than a proper Beirut setup? Nothing.
Baltimore decided to get a VIP table right next to the DJ booth. The difference between this night and any other is that Samantha Ronson was spinning at the club. Sitting next to her was the fire starter herself Lindsay Lohan. While Samantha was killing, Lilo was sitting down texting god knows who, and ripping grits. She was kind of lame and Samantha looks like a guy.
elgium style Handsome Devil Pale Ale, the copper colored Crimson Red Ale, and the pre-prohibition style 
the creamy Bullfinch British Pale Ale, 
