Sunday Funday Turned Into Hell

Nicole and I go out on Sunday nights to watch football and hear one of our favorite bands, Acoustic Mayhem, play at one of the local joints right down the road from the house.  Last Sunday was no exception.  Both of us went our separate ways in the afternoon for family dinners and decided to meet back up around 9.  I picked her up at her place and off we went.

When we got to the bar, the band was just starting and we took our usual spot near the back of the bar.  There were only maybe 20 people in the entire place and nobody we knew besides the band and the bartenders.  Sweet, that makes for a nice low key time.  With only $40 between the two of us to spend, we knew things weren't getting out of control, like they sometimes do there.

We sat around listening to music and watching the game, just chillin and talking about Brian and other things that are going on in our lives.  At about 10:30 the band took a break and made their way around the room, chatting everyone up and having a good time.  Tom, the lead singer came to us and apologized to Nicole for not being there last weekend for her birthday and asked what she wanted him to play as her birthday song.  They settled on a song and he moved on to other people in the bar.  By this point she was two beers in and I was one Smirnoff Vanilla and coke in. 

At 11:30 I had drank two vanilla and cokes and a cherry bomb.  Not unusual for me, after the drinking I did over the weekend, I didn't even have a buzz, so we had another cherry bomb.  I think Nicole had 4 beers and two shots by this time.  We checked our tab and it was $32.  Nicole left to run home and get more cash since it was early and we were still wanting to hang out while I sat and updated my football picks and talked to Tom some more.  Truth be told, even though he's married, I totally have a crush on him.  Dark hair and blue eyes in combination with a man who plays guitar and sings totally melts me....

Oh hell, I got distracted there for a minute.....  Nicole had to come back to get her house key after she got all the way home, so it was probably 12:30 by the time she got back in the bar.  Some of the bartenders from another bar right down the street had come in and I was talking with them.  Nicole sat back down and ordered us another shot & drink.  We took the shot and then Tara, one of the bartenders that we were talking with introduced Nicole to her friend Denver, who wanted to get to know Nicole.  I sat with them and talked for a bit, then went around to the other side of the bar to talk to some guys playing pool.  When the band was done, I grabbed my drink and headed up toward the front to talk to the band and my dude Lance that I had called to come up and hang out.

Nicole and Denver called me back to where they were to do another shot.  I declined seeing as it was Rumplemintz and Jack Daniels.  Yuck.  I don't drink brown liquor.  It makes me a violent drunk.  They had their shot and I turned back to my people I was talking to.  This is where things get fuzzy...

I remember one guy having like 10 shots in front of us and everyone trying to get me to do one.  Seeing again that they were brown, I declined.  After that, my head is blank.  What you'll read below are what we've gathered of other people's versions of the night.

I woke up Monday morning to my mom screaming at me on the other end of the phone that I was late to work to find two of the tires on my car severely damaged and no recollection of getting home.  What.The.Fuck?

One of my tires was popped, so I set out to put the spare tire on, failing at it because the jack for my car was retarded.   A policeman stopped by and changed it for me and I was off to work, being extra cautious because the back rim was bent up as well.  What the hell had happened?  I looked at my phone and saw 8 missed calls from Nicole at 4:45 in the morning.  I quickly call her back.

When Nicole answered the phone she sounded dead.  I asked her what happened and she gave me a simple "I don't know" and burst into tears.  Her last recollection of the night was talking to Denver at the bar and then waking up in the police station handcuffed to a bench.  What.The.Fuck?  My sister picked her up from the police station at almost 5am when she called her to tell her she had been arrested and had no idea why.  Melinda went in and the cops told her "Good luck with that" and pointed to Nicole.  Melinda asked Nicole what happened and Nicole had no clue.  My sister took the citations from her and read them off.  OVI, refusal to blow after previous OVI, driving in marked lanes, no operators license and resisting arrest.  WTF?
The most shocking out of these is the resisting arrest charge.  Nicole is scared to death of police.  Not that anyone likes the police, but it's some weird phobia of hers.

I text Lance, who didn't even drink while he was up there with us to see what the hell was going on, telling him I think we were roofied.  He texted me back and said "Did someone bail Nicole out of jail?"  I asked how he knew Nicole was in jail.  He said "I talked to the cops.  How do you think your car got in the driveway?"  Apparently Nicole called me as she was getting pulled over and Lance talked to her.  She was being pulled over right down the street from my house and he knew she didn't have a driver's license, so he ran down there to keep my car from getting towed.  When he got there, Nicole was kicking the windows of the cop car and screaming at the police.  They asked Lance to try and calm her down, but since she doesn't like Lance, he figured that would be a bad idea and asked them to let him drive my car back to the house since it was so close.  They were reluctant, but let him.  Apparently he decided he wasn't driving home that late and stayed at my house.

Nothing made any sense to me at that point.  Three drinks and three shots in 5 hours isn't likely to even give me a buzz, let alone make me blackout, especially after a weekend of binge drinking and a positively huge meal at 6:30.  Why was Nicole driving my car?  I would have never given her the keys if I felt she was that fucked up.  Where are my memories of all this?

Lance and I texted some more and I was even more disturbed.  He told me that Nicole and I got into a fight in the parking lot and I was walking home.  Two of our friends that were leaving convinced me to get into the truck with them and they dropped me off at home, where Lance met me.  I asked him if I just went in the house and passed out.   He said after sex I did.  What?  I had sex?  Lance asked me if I was joking.  I told him no.  I asked if I was passed out and he fucked me.  I got an "umm, no, I can show you evidence you were an active participant.  Besides, I've got morals and wouldn't do that to you."  Holy Fuck.  I asked why he didn't stay, he said he did.

After this, I posted a message on Facebook asking who knew what happened last night.  I get a message from Chad, one of the bartenders, saying he knew everything that happened until he left so I texted him.  He confirmed that Nicole and I were fighting and I said I was walking home.  Then he said that another guy was trying to get the keys away from Nicole and she was screaming at him, so he offered to take her home or call a cab.  She wasn't having any of that after what happened with him the week before and tore off out of the parking lot almost hitting the first guy that was trying to take the keys.  Between the bar and where she got pulled over, we don't know what happened to the car.  It looks like she curbed it, but she would have had to have gone left of center, all the way up onto a curb because both the front and back drivers side tires were busted up.

Nicole spends pretty much all of Monday throwing up and crying.  I feel like I've been hit by a bus.  I drive over to her house at lunch because I have no cigarettes and strangely enough, all of the cash I had was gone.  We sit in her garage trying to pull pieces of the night together, but don't come up with anything else.  This will be her 3rd OVI, so she's going to jail without the understanding of just how she got as intoxicated as she was and why nobody took her home.  I start looking on line for information on roofies and the side effects of the drug.  Holy fuck, that's exactly what happened, I think as I read over the side effects of Rohypnol.  It starts with the first phase of feeling buzzed, then moves to periods of blackout with full consciousness lasting anywhere from 1-5 hours, causing some people to become extremely violent.

Nicole and I try to think of who could have done this to us.  We weren't really around anyone all night, keeping to ourselves, besides when the other bartenders came in.  There's no way it was one of them.  They weren't even close to our drinks.  Other than them, we couldn't think of anyone who was even close enough to do it.  WTF?  I tell Nicole to pee in a cup just in case there's any evidence left and call her lawyer.

That night when I get home I call my neighbor Tim to check out my car.  Of course he asks me what happened, so I tell him.  He can't believe that Nicole would ever act like that and we go over the car to try and figure out what to do.  Rims for a Sebring are super expensive and hard as hell to find used.  Nobody has one, so basically I'm fucked and am going to have to buy two $300 rims and a tire.  Fuck...

I go down to April's house to hang out and vent and they can't believe what happened.  Just then, my mom pulls into my driveway unannounced.  Great.....  All I need right now is her up in my business....  I walk back down to the house to see what she wants.  Apparently she wants custody of my kids because she doesn't think they're well taken care of.  What the fuck ever....  I explain to her that her taking them would only be a catalyst for me to fall further into a hole because then I wouldn't have any reason to come home at all and probably wouldn't.  Yeah, my life sucks right now.  I'm so far behind in bills that every week something is getting turned off, but I can't get a second job because of circumstances I'd rather not talk about.  In a nutshell I tell her to fuck off and she leaves.

I call it a night early.  I can't stand that fact that one of my best friends could be going to jail for quite awhile because of all this and can't sleep.  Tuesday comes all too quickly and I really don't feel any better.  Hungover is the best word I can use to describe it, but even that's not even quite it.  I muddle through the day knowing my car won't make it out to pickup Little E and finally give in and ask my mom to borrow her car.  She agrees and I leave to get him.  When I get home, my friend Donovan goes and gets my car because now it has two flat tires.  Fuck.  Tim sees them drop the car off and comes down.  He manages to pound one of the rims back into place and fixes the donut tire so I can get to work this morning.

I found a tire for the rim Tim pounded out last night.  Hopefully enough air stays in the tire to get me back to my side of town to get it put on.  Then we'll switch the donut to the back tire and try to pound that one out.  It's the best I can do right now in the financial situation I'm in.  I'm lucky to have good people around to help me out.

On my way to work this morning, I got an interesting piece of information that might just patch this whole thing together.  Monday night my sister's ex-boyfriend was sitting at the bar where all of this happened.  He overheard Chad telling a guy at the bar that the previous Sunday night he drove a girl named Nicole and her roommate Melinda home and fucked them both.  Hearing the names Nicole and Melinda together, the ex knew it was more than a coincidence and called my sister yesterday to ask her about it.  Melinda told him that indeed Chad did drive them home because they went from zero to shitfaced in a matter of minutes.  They got back to the house and they told Chad he could sleep on the couch.  Nicole woke up to him in her bed.  When she kicked him out apparently he went into Melinda's room and tried to sleep there.  When they woke up in the morning he was gone.

It dawned on me.  He was testing the roofies out last weekend, seeing how far he could get with either of them playing the nice guy taking them home.  This weekend would have been the exact same thing, except for the fact that Nicole went into her violent rage and he backed off.  Either that or he was scared off by one of the other guys.  If someone else who saw all of that in the parking lot would come forward, I'd like to talk to them.  I'm sure I'll see someone out & about soon and we'll see what happens.....

For now, Nicole has a good lawyer and my car is slowly but surely getting fixed.  I've never had this happen to me before and hope to God it never happens again.  My trust has completely been broken though, if you can't trust your bartender, who can you trust?