What does every Canadian girl do when they turn 21? Well, for me at least it was a trip to the United States. My aunt had friends who lived in Portland, and I was invited to go spend the weekend with them. He was significantly older than me, but a trusted friend of the family and so it was assumed that I would be in good hands. Not sure that assumption turned out to be accurate.

The first night I was there, he invited all his friends over. We started with drinks at home and decided we’d go out for dinner and hit a few clubs. Dinner was relatively calm, despite the fact that I was single, 21 years old, and hanging out with 3 men who were much older than me. I was in heaven!

I felt like I owned the world, and could do anything. 

Once dinner was over, we headed to some of the clubs in Portland. Now, being from an extremely small town in redneck Alberta, I had not had a lot of exposure to the world. We went into a bar, and I immediately realized I was out of my league. I had no idea what I was looking at. Naive, I looked around and saw a club full of men dressed as women. I had never seen anything like it in my life, not even on TV. I was so out of the loop, and I was several drinks in at that point. 

It took about five minutes before I started asking questions. I pulled my friend aside and started pointing. I was in shock. Why were men dressed in ball gowns and wearing stilettos? My initial outburst included the phrase, quite loudly, ‘That’s not a woman!’

I was immediately asked to leave the bar.

At this point, the guys realized I was out of my comfort zone, and probably a little too drunk to attempt anything else in public, so we went home. Home included a drinking game. I prided myself in my drinking abilities and bragged that I would drink them all under the table. It turned out, I was pretty good at it, and I succeeded. 

In the wee hours of the morning, I opened my eyes, and tried to figure out where the hell I was. My head pounding, in a strange place, and unsure of where the bathroom was, I stood up and stepped in puke. Immediately horrified that I had thrown up on his carpet, I found cleaning supplies and cleaned it up as best as I could.

I then moved around the apartment trying to piece together the rest of the events of the night. 

As the rest of the guys started waking up, I began to remember what had happened the night before, and I came to the fast realization that the puke I had cleaned up off the floor wasn’t mine. That was a first! I’d never cleaned up someone else’s throw-up before. I was disgusted and mortified that I thought it could have been mine. 

The rest of that day was a slow-moving one, and there were a lot of laughs at my expense thanks to my actions at the drag club and cleaning up someone else’s mess. But there was pride in their voices too as they recognized my ability to hold my own with a bunch of rowdy men. I spent the rest of the weekend recovering from that night and patting myself on the back for the amount of debauchery I could handle. 

That birthday set me up for a lifetime of birthdays in which I was determined to get as drunk as possible at every one of them. I blamed it on being Irish, or a special birthday, or because I was celebrating.

Not once did it ever occur to me that I could have a sober birthday.

It wasn’t until I was in my late 30’s that I experienced a morning after my birthday that I could fully and completely remember.