You try to quantify how much you actually drank. At 11:45 PM, you swore there was someone drinking all your vodka. At 4 AM, while cozying up to the door jam on some stranger's cold bathroom floor, you realize that bastard taking all the vodka was you.

Let's see... two cans of Pabst before I came to the party. I bought the bottle of Absolut on Valencia. There was the screwdriver, another screwdriver, vodka and coke, and another vodka and coke. I poured them heavy; about half the bottle was missing.

Now, a freshman year film strip on alcohol, drugs and drinking:

[Narrator]

This is your liver. Alcohol is broken down, or metabolized, here at approximately one ounce every hour.

You see a little cartoon liver with a big sledge hammer smashing little blocks of alcohol as fast as he can. He's sweating. He's laboring hard to keep up with the workload.

[Narrator]

Drinking too much can cause an unsteady walk, slurred speech, vomiting, and in severe cases, loss of consciousness.

(It can also make you do Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions, exchange shirts with women in the bathroom, smoke weed, and eat McDonald's hamburgers.)

As I remember the part about passing out, I turn myself onto my side with my back to the door. This way I don't aspirate on my own vomit and people won't keep slamming my head with the door.

"Oh, I'm sorry," they say and leave.

I don't want anyone around me. I feel really sick and I want to leave immediately. After several bouts of vomiting into the stranger's toilet and blowing my nose into the palm of my hand, I think it's a good idea if I start to coax my Little Liver Man to work harder.

I make him promises. I promise him I will definitely not drink tomorrow. In fact, swear I'll never poison my body, never make my poor little man work so hard again. I tell him he's doing a great job, but he needs to speed it up, just this one time.

This will never happen again.

[Narrator]

Regular use of alcohol can negatively impact one's family life, study, work, and health. It can also cause ulcers, memory loss, and liver disease, such as cirrhosis.

Little Liver Man spins with cuckoo birds above his head and falls down. A cartoon grave marker falls from the sky and drives him into the cartoon earth. Little Liver Man is dead.

When I wake up, it's completely dark in the bathroom. There isn't any music. No Thump, Thump, Thump. No footsteps coming from the long Victorian hallway either. I get up carefully and I open the door. Nobody. I'm the last man at the party. It looks like even the hosts are asleep.

Then, out on the front porch, I see Owen. He must live here. He's in a good mood sitting with a young women who has a piercing like mine. She jokes about the piercing, tells me I've got some food or something on my chin, and I give her some fake laugh.

But, I like Owen. I shake his hand goodbye and thank him for the party.

I'm not quite sure where I am. Luckily, the house party was near the top of a hill. As I go around the corner I can see the blazing red Safeway sign down in the Castro. It shines like the Northern Star. Down the hill is a U.S. mint where they make collectible coins. I pass by the mint and think about how I could scale the fence, how I could defy their security, sneak in and rob it. Growing up I always thought about robbing banks and diamond stores like Tom Shane's. In college, Erik Johnson and I broke into every building on campus. We once ate three heaping bowls of nachos as we played with Merlo Field's electronic scoreboard at three in the morning.

My cowboy boots go clop, clop, clop.

And I'm shivering.

Someone put a pink scarf around my neck while I was passed out. It's long and it smells like a floral scented, albeit slightly used, Maxi pad, with hints of social smoking. I swing it once around my neck, then I tie it around my bald head like a turban.

It keeps me a bit warmer on the sobering walk home.