My bachelor’s party

My bachelor party was a complete shitshow.

By poetic coincidence, my best man was going through a divorce while things were ramping up toward my wedding. When I arrived at his place for the party, I found him sitting on the living room floor. On the floor, because, you see, there wasn’t any furniture.

His wife had come while he was at work and cleaned out the house. Like, thoroughly cleaned it out. No furniture. No glasses in the kitchen. No curtains. She left his clothes, still folded, in the place where the dresser used to be. In the closet, his clothes were on the floor – she’d taken the hangers. The booze he’d stocked up for the party? All gone. Except for one empty bottle, left in the otherwise barren fridge. She took the mustard, even. Barren.

He sat on the floor, shell-shocked and stunned. Occasionally he’d answer a question in monotone grunts.

The other guys arrived, and some of them brought a couple six-packs of beer. We all sat on the floor in the living room, occasionally tossing bottle caps at an empty bottle in the center of the room. If it hit, it’d make a ‘ting!’ noise, and we’d all give a Monty Python ‘yaaaaay.’

At one point, one of us found a deck of cards in a pile of random stuff she’d decided she didn’t want and had thrown into a corner of the dining room. We threw cards at the target bottle for a while, until another friend made a discovery:

She’d taken all the Hearts, leaving only the spades, clubs, and diamonds.

Best man started weeping.

I’d managed to drink two beers, we’d told a few half-hearted stories and largely spent the night trying to convince the best man he was better off this way. Most of the guys left, and I stayed until the wee hours of the morning with a best man wailing ‘don’t do it, man, it isn’t worth it!’

Good times.