The Dirtiest Bird

The man staring at me through the bathroom mirror in room 317 of the Cliff Lodge at Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort could have been my twin. He looked just like me. He had the same hair, the same rosy cheeks, and he was wearing half of the same fashionable tuxedo I had worn to my sister's wedding earlier that day.

But his eyes were different. His eyes looked nothing like mine. They were blood-shot red and as glassy as Lake Tahoe on a calm summer morning. Before I could ask him who he was and why he was staring at me as if his mind was racing with the same questions, he collapsed. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, his shoulders dipped toward his hips, and his skull catapulted backwards into the hotel tub as if there was an industrial strength magnet in his brain longing to find the metal drain at the bottom of the porcelain bath.

The splitting headache that greeted me the following morning was like nothing I had ever experienced. My vision was blurry. The sheets that had kept me warm through the night seemed as though they were sewn to my body. My pillow was an extension of my misery; the soft down feathers I felt with every toss and turn acted more like a hummingbird pecking at my eyeballs than the sea of comfort they were intended to provide.

My first emotion was relief that I was still alive. My next emotion was regret for the same reason.

I closed my eyes to dull the pain. When I opened them a few minutes later, they came to focus at the foot of my bed. There stood Steve Hamilton, staring at me with a grin as wide as the mountainous landscape outside the window.

"Have you sat up yet?" he asked sarcastically. Steve was a friend of my brother and sister from college. I knew him better than any of their other friends, enough not to be bothered by his sarcastic comments that would irritate me had they come from anyone else.

"No," I managed to mumble.

"Good. I'm not too late," he laughed. "Make sure I'm around when you do. It's the vertical that will get you."

'Oh God,' I thought. 'It gets worse?'

Steve turned his attention to my brother, just coming to life in the bed next to me.

“Mike, get up. You don’t want to miss this,” he said before turning his attention back to me. "So, that dance floor was pretty wild, huh?”

“I'm glad I'm too shy to dan..." I stopped myself from finishing that sentence. The memories were now slowly creeping in.

'There were laughs,' I thought. 'Laughs I hadn't requested. But what had caused them? Did I not get "a little bit softer now"? Was my "shout" out of sequence? No way. That wasn't it. I didn't interrupt my new brother-in-law and his mother's traditional first dance, did I? Nah, that doesn't sound like me. Why are images of a dirt hill ripping through my mind? Oh God....oh God no....why am I remembering ants?'

If my panicked expressions of remembrance were actors, then my face was a dramatic Broadway play. Steve and Michael were enjoying the show and couldn't contain their laughter when they realized I had solved the first clue of the "what the hell happened to me last night?" puzzle.

Recounting my unforgettable "African Ant Eater" dance that had caught the eyes of most reception goers put my sore neck into perspective. The violent, seizure like movements the dance required would certainly take its toll, even on a reasonably fit 16 year old body, for days to come. But judging from the looks and the laughs I was enduring that morning, my ego had sustained a much more serious injury that, at that moment, I figured would take weeks to heal. As more memories started to creep into my mind, I realized I had underestimated the rehabilitation my ego was set to undergo.

I wanted to laugh at myself but I couldn't. I was hurting in every sense of the word.

"So, Jamal, that was some Super Bowl last year, eh?" Michael continued in his quest to cure my short term memory loss.

"You're obviously going somewhere with that jackass," I snapped back. "Why don't you get there a little faster?"

"This way is more fun," Steve interjected.

My thoughts temporarily flashed back to room 317. The after party. I remembered walking into a crowded room but everything after that was a blur. How did I get there? I wanted to solve this mystery badly so I decided to retrace my steps back to my last memory - the dance floor.

I remember exiting stage left after what was, in my mind, a picture perfect reenactment of Patrick Dempsey's popularity enhancing performance from Can't Buy Me Love. Although an outdated movie and a ridiculous dance, I decided to entertain anyone willing to keep their eyes on my train wreck of an evening with an all left foot version that scarcely resembled the original.

The supportive laughs energized me. I was naïve.

I grabbed my fourth beer from the ignorant bartender and followed the wedding party to the deck for a celebratory cigar and champagne toast. Mike and I played hot potato with a bottle of Mumm’s before I noticed a commotion coming from the side of the deck. The groomsmen had magically turned into Chippendales with a slight wardrobe adjustment and were headed upstairs to continue the celebration. My head was swimming in alcohol at this point, so the answer to the question “is following these maniacs upstairs a good idea?” was an emphatic “yes!”

“It’s too bad your night ended a little early,” Mike said to me as he sat up from his bed. “You got the party started all right, but you were about 3 hours shy of seeing it finish.”

“I got the party started?”

Mike and Steve looked at each other and with a slight we’re-on-the-same-page nod of the head, declared in unison while fighting through uncontrollable laughter, “Let’s get this party started!!!”

‘Those laughs,’ I thought. ‘Those goddamn laughs. I remember those. They were from last night. But there were more of them…and they were louder. What the hell happened to me?!’

“Here’s another hint,” Steve said as he noticed the play on my face was back from intermission. “Think…whiskey.”

My mind immediately transported me back to room 317. The after party. I was standing next to my sister Jeannie, her friend Sarah, and some random stranger with only a bottle of whiskey and awkward silences between us. I passed the bottle to Jeannie. She took a pull. At least I thought she took a pull. (To any 16 year old wedding crashers out there reading my blog: if you plug the top of the bottle with your tongue when you tilt it back, you can fool a lot of people). She passed the bottle to the stranger. He took a pull. The stranger passed me the bottle. I took a pull. Unfortunately, this game had more rounds than a heavyweight title fight.

Remembering how much whiskey you drank the night before almost always kick starts your gag reflex, but remembering what the whiskey made you do can have the same effect.

“You there yet, Dirty Bird?” Steve asked.

“Oh please no. I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. I didn’t.”

“You did.”

The Dirty Bird was a touchdown celebration dance popularized by Jamal Anderson of the Atlanta Falcons. As you take a wide stance and shift your weight from side to side, you bring your right fist down to chest level and then swing your arm out as if you’re elbowing someone. Then, while still bouncing your weight from your left foot to your right foot, you repeat the arm motion with your left arm. When the second motion is complete, you move both elbows up and down while jumping up and down as if you were mimicking a chicken.

The Dirty Bird is best saved for the football field.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty of course, but I didn’t realize this at the time. So I hopped up onto the bed in room 317, bottle of whiskey in one hand, pride in the other, and got everyone’s attention.

“Excuse me. EXCUSE ME. Thank you. My name is Thomas Stuyvesant. Some of you might not know me but I am the brother of the bride. Now…..let’s get this party started!!”

Had I been able to see straight, I may have noticed my sister’s eyes nearly pop out of their sockets and taken the less than subtle hint that I should get off the bed, put the bottle down, and lay low for awhile. Instead, I seized the opportunity to let everyone know that I watch Sportscenter. So I danced the Dirty Bird. It was the Dirtiest of Birds, and it was legendary.

“Oh shit. Do you think anyone will remember?” I asked sheepishly.

“We remember,” Mike said. “And I spent half the night running around with a bowtie on my forehead.”

“You gotta own this, Dirty Bird,” Steve said.

I knew this story wasn’t going anywhere. And 11 years later, it hasn’t. But I’ve finally come to grips with what happened that night. I guess, more than anything, I’m thankful that I didn’t lose patience and choose to unveil the Dirty Bird while the happy couple were exchanging vows. It happened in room 317, where it was supposed to happen.

You know, I wish I could say that that was the end of my animal-themed wedding dances, but then I’d be lying to you and I don’t want to do that. The Mattecheck wedding saw the African Ant Eater dance. The O’Connell wedding saw the Worm. The Corcoran wedding saw the Rottweiler (okay, so I made that last one up).

In spite of, or maybe because of, my youthful foolishness, I did learn a lot of things that Memorial Day weekend in 1999. I learned that sixteen years isn’t quite enough emotional or physical preparation for as much alcohol as I drank that night. I learned that dances you see in 80’s movies should either stay in the 80’s or in the movies. I learned that the Chippendales look is not a good look for anybody. And I learned that if you’re going to make an ass of yourself at your sister’s wedding, you might as well go for a touchdown.