Brandi Graves

Every weekend is the same. Drinking cheap beer with bored people at the same house. We’re all talk. Every weekend we say, “Let’s go do something.” But we never do. We’ve exhausted every topic and dragged out every drama. Everybody knows everyone else’s business. We’ve redefined gossip out here on the island.

We’re always doing everything together. Carpooling, surfing, eating, fishing, watching TV, sleeping together. Everyone’s fucked someone who’s fucked someone else who’s fucked your roommate. And everybody knows all about it. We bring a new definition to the grapevine out here on the island.

We might as well be wearing leafs for clothes and blowing conches instead of texting. Why we even drive our cars anymore is beyond me. Everyone lives within swimming distance of each other on the canal. During the summer months, when the sun boils the water and we turn brown the way lobsters turn red, we air up a few tubes and we float the canals, never forgetting the floating cooler stocked full of Keystone. Sometimes I think we drink as much as we do because we hope someone will say something that will spark an idea or at least a fight. Sometimes I think we only drink so we can forget we’re bored and unimaginative.

Out here on the island, we’re always waiting for things to begin when they’ve already started. We don’t start drinking until 10 most nights, and don’t really go out until 12. Things usually wind down around 2 or 3 in the morning—at least that’s what we’ve concluded after reviewing the drunk-texts sent the night before. The most fun we have on the weekends is waking up hung over and piecing the previous night back together. Everyone calls each other and meets up at one house or another, still a little drunk from the night before. If one of us is missing, we call around until we figure out where they are, go over to whoever’s house they ended up passing out at, and rescue our fallen comrade. We bring a new definition to “The Walk of Shame” out here on the Island.

Once we’ve assembled and finished vomiting half digested beer and stomach bile, we collect what we remember;

“Do you remember deep-throating that cucumber?”

“He was all like, ‘I thought everyone was down to watch a movie, if I had known everyone was down to party, we could have just partied’- fucking moron.”

“When we were driving over to their house I saw this guy walking down the street barefoot with his hand down his pants so I stopped and realized who it was… I can’t believe I’ve had sex with that guy.”

“We stole your phone and hid it in the blender, sorry for forgetting about it when we decided to make margaritas.”

“Dude, you slapped him, grabbed his bottle of vodka and started chugging it in his face. Then you proceeded to vomit into the sink- or should I say around it. Please stop eating spaghetti before you drink.”

“We were all screaming for her to ‘suck that dick’, it was horrible. But hey, at least she got a free beer out of it.”

“Yeah man, you ripped one and he was like, ‘What the fuck, dude’ and you were like, ‘I’m sorry, I thought we were all adults here?”

“We found him passed out face down on the side of the house covered in his own vomit with sticker burrs stuck all over his clothes and in his hair”

Every week we break new ground, doing stupider shit than the week before. Maybe that’s why we drink, so we can let our subconscious reign free, show our true colors and blame it on the alcohol.

Whenever someone’s 21st birthday rolls around it’s always an event. The island’s gift to you on your 21st birthday is alcohol poisoning. I’m surprised no one’s died yet. Those of us who are old enough to go to the bars, or crafty enough to sneak in, always go to the same ones—the only three out here on the island. They’ve all got their own names fabricated by whoever was sober enough to remember them when someone blurted it out. “The Dirty Bird got me” never gets old out here on the island.

When the summer months start to fade into the fall we depend on bonfires out on the beach. The wooden pallets are collected and the mass texts are sent out;

“South Pac. 10:30. LETS FUCKING RAGE!”

Bonfires are always the same. Everyone rolls on out to the beach in their trucks and SUV’s. Bonfires sound like Warped Tour- there’s always five different trucks blasting five different types of music. As soon as you get tired of metal you just head over to the truck blaring country or rap or Dub Step or Skynard.

Without fail, the topic of rotisserie chicken always gets brought up at every bonfire. You’ll be talking to someone and realize your arm is burning hot so you rotate places with the person you’re talking to until your other arm gets hot. The people closest to the fire rotate with the people furthest from the fire all night. Everyone rotates like rotisserie chickens.

It’s always great trying to find a place to pee at bonfires. You’ll get a friend to accompany you to the dunes if you’re really modest, but the drunker everyone gets, the closer you pee to the crowd. Before you know it, you’re pissing on the tire of the someone-who’s-fucked-someone-else-who’s-fucked-your-roommate’s tire a car or two away from the crowd.

The things you see when you’re moderately sober, pissing up in the dunes, is ridiculous. The drunkest are already making out against parked cars. It’s always fun catching someone puking their guts out, all doubled over with one hand holding onto the bumper of a car for stability. It’s even funnier when you catch the same person throwing up three times in one night. That’s what happens when we’re feeling classy and decide to splurge on a keg of Shiner. Only us dumbasses out here on the island would think a keg of Shiner was a good idea.

Sure, we have our fair share of idiotic moments out here on the island, but we do manage to slip in a little romance here and there. You wouldn’t think it possible, what with all of our meaningless sex and drunken hook ups, but everyone admittedly needs some level of intimacy from time to time. The necessity for passion occasionally radiates from the flames into our hearts at bonfires. Nothing quite compares to the rush of half drunkenly gazing out across the flames and catching someone’s eye. Such an occurrence is rare, but it does happen. The heat from the fire makes your insides warm and your cheeks glow. One can’t help but look gorgeous in the luster of the flames. You’re never sure if it’s the caffeine in your Four-Loko, or just the thrill of someone new approaching, but when you see those eyes wrapping around the perimeter of the fire, the sand glittering pink as the wind carries it to sea, you can’t help but let your heart leap. It’s hard not to think you’ve fallen in love at a bonfire, but when the Sailor Jerry’s jack-hammer hangover pops your eye balls out of their sockets, it’s plain to see bonfires are just an escape from our regular 40 watt artificially lit lives.

In the winter months we always talk about getting a group of us together and road tripping up to Colorado or New Mexico for a ski trip, just to get off the island. But we’re all too broke and full of shit to follow through. We would never admit it, but our island is our vacation every day. The winter sunsets of purple ribbons doused with blue cotton candy clouds are enough to justify the outrageous rent. Some people head back home over winter break but the majority of us stay. We fill our time with more alcohol and talk about the summer when we were tan and happy and really living. The winter months are great for reminiscing on your back patio, downing a bottle of rum with your roommates as the sun floats down the canal;

“Remember when we were throwing back a few and she stood up and was like, ‘C’mon Fuckers, lets go jump off of some shit’ And he was all like, ‘What? Why?’ And I’ll never forget it—she stomped her foot and threw her hands up and was nearly screaming, ‘Because! This is all there is and I’ll be damned if I don’t go jump off of something that doesn’t shock me back to life! Now let’s go jump off the pier before it’s too late!’ and we all piled in his obnoxious SUV, drove down to the pier, and wouldn’t you know it, everyone jumped except for her.”

“Nah man, I got one better. We were over at their house high as balls and someone thought it’d be a good idea for all of us to climb up on the roof and jump off into the canal. The only thing is, the first guy that went to jump forgot about the balcony below and ended up clipping his foot on the railing. The stupid fuck nearly died. And then he ripped his shit up on the barnacles trying to climb out of the canal instead of using the ladder right next to him! I’m glad that douche moved to Maryland or wherever.”

“The best was when we were all over at that one house and what’s-his-face’s little sister was there and we got her retarded drunk. Dude, she ended up making out with like five of the guys there and tried to go down on one of them right there in the middle of the living room- with everyone watching and everything! She would have done it too if her brother hadn’t stopped her. I kind of wish he’d have been taking a piss or something when it all was happening, that shit would have been funny.”

“I nearly died laughing that night we had that shot contest and she took like 7 shots, all within an hour of each other. When we got back to his house she announced she had to pee and shut herself in the bathroom with the lights off. She was in there for like ten minutes so I poked my head in and there she was, passed out sitting up right on the can with her pretty little dress all cinched up under her arms. A few minutes later I heard her come out of the bathroom and open the backdoor, so I darted around the corner and she was all cross eyed like, ‘Are we going?’ and I was like, ‘Hey man, what’s that bulge under your dress?’ She goes, ‘uh, nothing…’ shut the door and ran up stairs when I heard him go, ‘What the fuck? Why are you trying to smuggle toilet paper in your underwear?!’ I mean, we steal toilet paper from Stripes all the time but from a friend’s house? Man, what a night.”

“Did ya’ll ever hear about the guys who got their asses handed to them at Mardi Gras? Yeah, they were a bunch of guys, you know, a bunch of white guys in New Orleans. So anyway, they’re hammered and everything, and this group of black guys walks by and one of them bumps into one of the white guys, and the white guy— he’s fucking out of his mind drunk—he turns around to the black guy and goes, “Fucking nig,” and of course the guy turns around and just deck’s the shit out of him. So it turns into this all out brawl, like straight up out of a bar fight scene in those old Wild West movies. Anyways, the black guys beat the shit out of all the white guys and the best part, the guy who started it all, the one who called them nigs, his face got stomped into the ground. He ended up in the hospital with Mardi Gras beads embedded in his cheek. No joke, it was fucking great.”

The best part about winter break is all the extra free time we use to mess with each other. We don’t have a name for it, maybe re-gifting garbage, but whatever you call it, it’s a great way to kill time. After Christmas, everyone out here on the island throws away their Christmas trees at this city collection spot, along with a bunch of big garbage items, like chairs and couches and stuff like that. Anyway, we’ve all got it in our heads that it’s a great idea to pick up a bunch of the random trash and Christmas trees people toss out and we “re-gift” the junk, dumping it in whoever’s yard is closest, or whoever is more annoying. This always leads to retaliation by way of flour bombing cars, breaking into houses and throwing slices of cheese high up on walls, sticking slices of bologna on walls behind pictures, putting DVDs into the wrong cases, writing “Fuck” and drawing penises on anything and everything possible, changing people’s home page on their computer a gay porn website, you know, harmless stuff. The anarchy goes on until the sun starts to yawn and before we know it, it’s spring and our time is passed in the ocean or at school or out drinking as usual.

Spring break is the time to amp up our already chaotic life styles. No one leaves the island all week, not even to visit home. The causeway is backed up all the way to the mainland and it takes over an hour just to get over the bridge, or ‘O.T.B.’ as we like to say. The Thursday before Spring Break is unleashed we all pool our money and stock up on beer and liquor—prices go up anytime tourists flock to our island. We spend the week out on our white sand beaches, gathered along the designated path for tourists to follow so as to not get their two wheel drive cars lodged in the sand. We’re the only people out there who aren’t wearing sunscreen, not because we want to get tan, but because our bronzed bodies are immune to the sun by now. Our area is crowded with games, footballs flying overhead, washers and PVC-can. Most people don’t know what PVC-can is until they’ve lived out here on the island. It’s simple really, just two PVC pipes stabbed into the ground with an empty crumpled up beer can balanced on the top. You play by trying to knock the can opposite of you down with another empty crushed can. If you knock it down the other team has to drink, if they knock yours down, you’ve got to drink. Beer bongs are continually in the air, saluting the sky in thanks for giving us such a beautiful day. The trucks we crowd around spew different music, like they do at bonfires, and we rotate like rotisserie chickens around the music, baking in the sun.

Spring break is the time when we realize how lucky we are. We live mere seconds from the most beautiful beaches in Texas, the beaches that people from all over the United States flock to, just for a day or two. And we get to wake up every day and see the ocean and smell the salt and feel the suns warmth. Every. Single. Day. We would never admit it, but when we all drunkenly run out to the crisp blue water, the blistering white sand kicking up beneath our feet, the salty wind kissing our cheeks—that’s when our hearts flood with gratitude. With the ocean spraying our skin and the sun beaming down on us, we know in that moment that this island doesn’t belong to us—but rather, we belong; Out Here On The Island.