Tequila Reneé

Let me tell you a little story about a girl named...um...let's call her Renée. Don't confuse this girl with the lovely co-author of this blog, as everybody knows that Reneé puts her accent in the wrong place. And I don't mean Boston. I would never tell embarrassing stories about that Reneé, because I love her very much, but this other Renée is fair game.

Many of you who have met this other Renée may have also met Gin Renée, who is a strange and mysterious beast, rarely seen after her last triumphant outing. It was then that she somehow managed to simultaneously tell everybody my most intimate secrets while feeding a dog table scraps three feet from its owner and making loud "Shhhhh" noises at me while pointing at them as though they wouldn't know. Gin Renée is not particularly stealthy.

It may or may not have been on the same occasion that she asked, very seriously,

"Do you think Jesus spelled backwards is sausage?"

 I laughed, somewhat amused, but she was not to be deterred.

"No, no, see, God spelled backwards is Dog. And dogs eat sausage." 

I agreed that this made perfect sense and her impeccable logic could not be countered by my mere human intellect. It was easily 20 minutes later when from across the room I heard the saddest voice I've ever heard say quietly,

"Oh. Nevermind. I looked it up, and it's not 'sausage', it's 'sesuj'."

My heart broke for poor Gin Renée that night, but I don't think it hit her as hard as I thought, because moments later she was asking me,

"Do you think the guy who invented the toothbrush also invented fiber optics? Because they look the same."

And so it was that I somehow fell in love with Gin Renée and the fantastic world in which she lived. But that's nothing. I hear the last time she picked up some 17-year-old, tattooed, born-again Christian at a Wendy's drive-thru. So, you know, everything's relative.

Anyway, I thought I'd seen everything that the world of alcohol had to offer my dear friend Renée, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

Last Sunday, before leaving Michigan City bright and early the next morning (seriously, we were on the road by 5am), we went out to dinner with my mom and my sister. Renée had a couple of margaritas with my mom and nothing seemed particularly amiss as we rode back to the hotel in the back of my mom's car, though Renée was quieter than usual. I figured she was tired. It was only as we stepped out and said our goodbyes that I felt Renée clinging to my arm for dear life and heard her whisper, "I can barely stand up."

This was the night I would finally meet Tequila Renée, an altogether different creature from the Gin Renée we all know and love. Tequila Renée is wild and almost literally can't stop talking. She can't walk, stand, or really even lie on a bed without assistance. But it's the talking that has to be heard to be believed.

I tried to record her to play back for her later, but after 15 minutes of recording literally non-stop rambling on her part, my phone ran out of space and it seems to have corrupted the recording. I was trying not to sully the sample, so I mostly gave her a few non-commital grunts of agreement now and then just to assure her I was still listening as she continued on her merry verbal way.

The only thing I was able to get down on paper during the whole ordeal before she finally fell asleep was the following exchange, which came pretty much out of nowhere:

"Don't get stabbed like Tupac."

"Didn't he get shot?"

"Yeah."

"So don't get stabbed from afar by bullets?"

"Yeah, and don't wear a band-aid on your head like Tupac."

"You mean a bandana?"

"Yeah. Who wears the band-aid? 50 Cent?"