Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations
Like all great American sports, Beer Me is a simple game with simple rules that becomes more nuanced and awe-inspiring when played by men and women pure of heart and single-minded in purpose. Just look at Major League Beer Me's first Hall of Fame player, Justin "Sleazy" Elliott, a competitor in either the catcher or diver position who, in his final outing, led one patron to repeatedly (slurringly) refer to him as this sport's Whitey Ford. And that's saying a lot, because Whitey Ford is, like, dead and shit.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Beer Me, for the uninitiated, is a sport invented in New Orleans by a lovable group of, well, let's call them "degenerates" for old time's sake. It is played at a pool at least six feet in depth and involves three positions:
A pitcher (offensive)
A catcher (offensive)
A diver (defensive)
The catcher must wear an Iron Man mask. You can buy yours from wherever; we got ours at that one dollar store on the other side of St. Claude at, like, Way Too Fucking Early in the Morning after drinking all night that first night in town. I woke up with a start at 7 AM and Dani and I decided we needed breakfast sandwiches, but Dani passed out by the pool before she could fulfill her promise to walk with me. So I came back about forty minutes later with sandwiches and found her with the distinct imprint of the poolside concrete embedded in her face. A mid-morning nap later, we were marching around directionlessly, because how else should you walk when you don't know where you're going and don't particularly care?
We found ourselves at a Dollar Store and there was a lady in line behind us and she was with a little girl. The lady was on her phone with the girl's mother. She was buying a chess set. She hollered in the phone, "Can you believe this dummy says she wants to learn to play chess?"
The little girl saw that I was buying an Iron Man mask and took this to mean that we were friends, because I'm infantile. I pointed to the chess set and asked, "Do you know how to play this?"
"No."
"Do you know how to play checkers?"
"Yes."
"It's like that, kind of. You'll learn. It's easy."
The lady looked at me the way anyone would look at a man, clearly drunk at 10 in the morning, purchasing an Iron Man mask, giving passive aggressive tips on parenting. Ah well. Spring is pregnant, and I will be a father in January, so I have to practice somehow.
(Did I not mention that LiveJournal? Do you even care? "Where have you been?" you may be saying. "Who are you to come in here with your cigars and brandy?" I don't know, LiveJournal. I don't know.)
Anyhoo!
Here's how Beer Me is played:
* The pitcher stands at one end of the pool with a can of beer, preferably something cheap like Budweiser since, if you do this right, you're going to be playing it for five hours solid and you'll need a lot of beer.
* On the other end of the pool are the catcher and the diver. The catcher stands across from the pitcher and wears an Iron Man Mask. The diver stands perpendicular to the catcher, to the pitcher's right, and wears a diving mask.
* The catcher, as the master of ceremonies, begins the action by calling for "No chubs!" to which everyone in the pool area must confirm that there are no chubs. In this context "chubs" refers to detritus in the pool (such as pool floaties and beach balls and junk), though in the original inception of the rule it was, in fact, to confirm that no one involved had a boner.
* Upon confirmation of No Chubs, the countdown begins. Anyone can begin the countdown. This is to prevent drunken Beer Me players from dragging the proceedings out with their Incredibly Clever Banter. If you play this game all day long, you will have many times where, when somebody begins the countdown, they are clearly saying, "Shut up, you drunk assholes."
* 5! 4! 3! 2! 1!
* The catcher yells "Beer Me!" and the pitcher throws the beer. The catcher must then try to catch the beer in mid-air before hitting the water.
* Once the catcher hits the water, and the beer has not been caught, the diver may then enter the water to retrieve the beer for themselves. The beer is "live" until either the catcher or the diver finds it and hold it up for inspection.
* True purists will insist that the diver, because of the advantage of having a diving mask, must enter the water backwards like a scuba diver, like in "Jaws." The only player to consistently perform this maneuver, Chris "The Mountain" Alonzo, failed to retrieve a single beer in the diver position.
And that's how Beer Me is played! Simple right?
There is much to master, though. The relationship between the pitcher and catcher is key. In a true Beer Me tournament, one can only drink by playing Beer Me. This will lead some to make desperate choices, such as casually announcing, "I need a beer. Who wants to pitch to me?" This is foolhardy. The selection of a pitcher is must be made with some precision and grace. For who, really, wants to go scrambling in the water for their beer when they're thirsty? You need someone in tune with you, someone who knows your rhythms and when to pitch to you and how high.
Similarly, one must be aware of heir surroundings when it comes to dealing with the diver. What made Sleazy Elliott such a great diver was his ability to catch the pitcher off-guard and be aware of the beer at all times. Watching him in the water was like watching Dennis Rodman go after a rebound. The guy just always knew where it was going.
Holy crap, Dennis Rodman is probably, like, the greatest Beer Me player in the universe. Consider his raw athleticism, defensive acumen and crippling alcoholism and, I tell you what, I would NOT want to be catching in a pool with that guy. No sir.
(Historical sidenote amidst digression: the only player to specifically request chubs, to even invite them to be thrown to provide additional confusion, was Eric "Alan" "Motolove" Scott. He not only survived the ordeal, but he caught the beer in mid-air.)
Anyway, it's a completely thrilling game, and there really is nothing like that first round of Beer Me in the morning, echoing gently off the other houses in the Waterfront District while everyone tries to shake off their hangovers and recount whatever-in-the-hell-it-was that happened last night.
Wow, the French Quarter is so confusing when you're that drunk!
Of course, there is more to life than Beer Me, which is hard to remember when you're in the middle of a heated tournament, and whether it's eating the best food you've ever tasted or imbibing the frozen coffee drink that saves your life, it is best to indulge. Beer Me is a sport for gormandizers, life-embracers, fools and charlatans. Of course, sometimes such life-embracing will lead Beer Me players to stick all the furniture in the pool, or break bottles, or get lost and ask to be driven home at the break of dawn. Major League Beer Me does not endorse these actions and, through their community outreach program, encourages anyone participating in them to sheepishly apologize to Junebug as soon as he gets back from brunch.
Gently laying in bed, reading the New Yorker out loud.
Sweet, gentle talk by the pool because everyone else is in bed or still out. Escorted home because of Running on Empty. Wearing feather boas, which give in to the night breeze.
Some Beer Me players, those who have a true love of the game and the people who play it, will spend as much time as possible in the Beer Me court, even by themselves, even very very late at night when there isn't a single other sound, even perhaps naked in the water. Holding the sides of the pool and trying to hear his own heart beat. Wishing it didn't have to end.
How many times everyone pulled me aside and broke hours and hours of joking by saying, with total sincerity, "Seriously, dude, you're gonna be a great dad." And how much that means, and how much it will mean when the baby is here, and everyone who said it is in the cities they live in, hundreds and hundreds of miles away.
All the Aunts and Uncles.
There is no score in Beer Me. You know you have won Beer Me when you're wasted.
There are no teams in Beer Me. Everybody's on your team, because you love them. Unless they're the diver, but they can be your pitcher on the very next play.
Beer Me ends when you have to go home, and when you are lying in your own bed later, worried about this dizziness you cannot get rid of (organ failure? panic attack? dehydration?) Beer Me may occur to you to be a cause of this spinning, this sick yellow feeling in your blood, but it passes and your wife will speak in gentle tones and remind you that you don't party like this anymore, and maybe your body is just not used to this level of abuse. This panic when you're passing out and you think, "What if I don't wake up, or what if when I do there is something seriously wrong with me?"
That's when, after the second or third shower, you stagger out into the living room and find the Beer Me mask and laugh gently to yourself, because it was not pretty and it was not exactly what you had in mind, but it was still full of so much love. And hopefully Beer Me leagues pop up all over the country, but the one true Major League Beer Me tournament, you hope, will keep being held year after year.
Wherever you have three friends you have Beer Me.
Something odd. That moment when we were trying to remember something, trying to recall the details, so we pulled out the laptop and looked it up on LiveJournal. And I've lied in pretty much every one of these entries, just like I'm lying now, or just exaggerating but definitely omitting things that are (as ever) not my story to tell, and years from now this is what I will remember what happened because it's what I wrote down. I will forget, you will forget. A sudden new respect for words and pictures, one that I never really had because youth lasts forever and all, but it is all slipping away, being stored somewhere else. It has been ten years since this, twelve years since that. If Ocean was an actual, rather than figurative, child it would be in fifth grade.
Of course, a lot of the fun is in fighting over the details. Slapping our knees remembering the brilliant shows we put on. The funniest people on earth.
Anyway, I love you guys, is all. Let history always remember the first ever Major League Beer Me tournament in New Orleans 2010, and all the participants and spectators (Junebug, Sleazy, Eric, Chris, Truckee, Florian, Cathy, Nettie, Pat, John, Laura, Devon, Sara and Dani.) May we forever stand like Andrew Jackson's statue in the quarter: oddly askew, but that's what makes it so goddamned perfect.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Beer Me, for the uninitiated, is a sport invented in New Orleans by a lovable group of, well, let's call them "degenerates" for old time's sake. It is played at a pool at least six feet in depth and involves three positions:
A pitcher (offensive)
A catcher (offensive)
A diver (defensive)
The catcher must wear an Iron Man mask. You can buy yours from wherever; we got ours at that one dollar store on the other side of St. Claude at, like, Way Too Fucking Early in the Morning after drinking all night that first night in town. I woke up with a start at 7 AM and Dani and I decided we needed breakfast sandwiches, but Dani passed out by the pool before she could fulfill her promise to walk with me. So I came back about forty minutes later with sandwiches and found her with the distinct imprint of the poolside concrete embedded in her face. A mid-morning nap later, we were marching around directionlessly, because how else should you walk when you don't know where you're going and don't particularly care?
We found ourselves at a Dollar Store and there was a lady in line behind us and she was with a little girl. The lady was on her phone with the girl's mother. She was buying a chess set. She hollered in the phone, "Can you believe this dummy says she wants to learn to play chess?"
The little girl saw that I was buying an Iron Man mask and took this to mean that we were friends, because I'm infantile. I pointed to the chess set and asked, "Do you know how to play this?"
"No."
"Do you know how to play checkers?"
"Yes."
"It's like that, kind of. You'll learn. It's easy."
The lady looked at me the way anyone would look at a man, clearly drunk at 10 in the morning, purchasing an Iron Man mask, giving passive aggressive tips on parenting. Ah well. Spring is pregnant, and I will be a father in January, so I have to practice somehow.
(Did I not mention that LiveJournal? Do you even care? "Where have you been?" you may be saying. "Who are you to come in here with your cigars and brandy?" I don't know, LiveJournal. I don't know.)
Anyhoo!
Here's how Beer Me is played:
* The pitcher stands at one end of the pool with a can of beer, preferably something cheap like Budweiser since, if you do this right, you're going to be playing it for five hours solid and you'll need a lot of beer.
* On the other end of the pool are the catcher and the diver. The catcher stands across from the pitcher and wears an Iron Man Mask. The diver stands perpendicular to the catcher, to the pitcher's right, and wears a diving mask.
* The catcher, as the master of ceremonies, begins the action by calling for "No chubs!" to which everyone in the pool area must confirm that there are no chubs. In this context "chubs" refers to detritus in the pool (such as pool floaties and beach balls and junk), though in the original inception of the rule it was, in fact, to confirm that no one involved had a boner.
* Upon confirmation of No Chubs, the countdown begins. Anyone can begin the countdown. This is to prevent drunken Beer Me players from dragging the proceedings out with their Incredibly Clever Banter. If you play this game all day long, you will have many times where, when somebody begins the countdown, they are clearly saying, "Shut up, you drunk assholes."
* 5! 4! 3! 2! 1!
* The catcher yells "Beer Me!" and the pitcher throws the beer. The catcher must then try to catch the beer in mid-air before hitting the water.
* Once the catcher hits the water, and the beer has not been caught, the diver may then enter the water to retrieve the beer for themselves. The beer is "live" until either the catcher or the diver finds it and hold it up for inspection.
* True purists will insist that the diver, because of the advantage of having a diving mask, must enter the water backwards like a scuba diver, like in "Jaws." The only player to consistently perform this maneuver, Chris "The Mountain" Alonzo, failed to retrieve a single beer in the diver position.
And that's how Beer Me is played! Simple right?
There is much to master, though. The relationship between the pitcher and catcher is key. In a true Beer Me tournament, one can only drink by playing Beer Me. This will lead some to make desperate choices, such as casually announcing, "I need a beer. Who wants to pitch to me?" This is foolhardy. The selection of a pitcher is must be made with some precision and grace. For who, really, wants to go scrambling in the water for their beer when they're thirsty? You need someone in tune with you, someone who knows your rhythms and when to pitch to you and how high.
Similarly, one must be aware of heir surroundings when it comes to dealing with the diver. What made Sleazy Elliott such a great diver was his ability to catch the pitcher off-guard and be aware of the beer at all times. Watching him in the water was like watching Dennis Rodman go after a rebound. The guy just always knew where it was going.
Holy crap, Dennis Rodman is probably, like, the greatest Beer Me player in the universe. Consider his raw athleticism, defensive acumen and crippling alcoholism and, I tell you what, I would NOT want to be catching in a pool with that guy. No sir.
(Historical sidenote amidst digression: the only player to specifically request chubs, to even invite them to be thrown to provide additional confusion, was Eric "Alan" "Motolove" Scott. He not only survived the ordeal, but he caught the beer in mid-air.)
Anyway, it's a completely thrilling game, and there really is nothing like that first round of Beer Me in the morning, echoing gently off the other houses in the Waterfront District while everyone tries to shake off their hangovers and recount whatever-in-the-hell-it-was that happened last night.
Wow, the French Quarter is so confusing when you're that drunk!
Of course, there is more to life than Beer Me, which is hard to remember when you're in the middle of a heated tournament, and whether it's eating the best food you've ever tasted or imbibing the frozen coffee drink that saves your life, it is best to indulge. Beer Me is a sport for gormandizers, life-embracers, fools and charlatans. Of course, sometimes such life-embracing will lead Beer Me players to stick all the furniture in the pool, or break bottles, or get lost and ask to be driven home at the break of dawn. Major League Beer Me does not endorse these actions and, through their community outreach program, encourages anyone participating in them to sheepishly apologize to Junebug as soon as he gets back from brunch.
Gently laying in bed, reading the New Yorker out loud.
Sweet, gentle talk by the pool because everyone else is in bed or still out. Escorted home because of Running on Empty. Wearing feather boas, which give in to the night breeze.
Some Beer Me players, those who have a true love of the game and the people who play it, will spend as much time as possible in the Beer Me court, even by themselves, even very very late at night when there isn't a single other sound, even perhaps naked in the water. Holding the sides of the pool and trying to hear his own heart beat. Wishing it didn't have to end.
How many times everyone pulled me aside and broke hours and hours of joking by saying, with total sincerity, "Seriously, dude, you're gonna be a great dad." And how much that means, and how much it will mean when the baby is here, and everyone who said it is in the cities they live in, hundreds and hundreds of miles away.
All the Aunts and Uncles.
There is no score in Beer Me. You know you have won Beer Me when you're wasted.
There are no teams in Beer Me. Everybody's on your team, because you love them. Unless they're the diver, but they can be your pitcher on the very next play.
Beer Me ends when you have to go home, and when you are lying in your own bed later, worried about this dizziness you cannot get rid of (organ failure? panic attack? dehydration?) Beer Me may occur to you to be a cause of this spinning, this sick yellow feeling in your blood, but it passes and your wife will speak in gentle tones and remind you that you don't party like this anymore, and maybe your body is just not used to this level of abuse. This panic when you're passing out and you think, "What if I don't wake up, or what if when I do there is something seriously wrong with me?"
That's when, after the second or third shower, you stagger out into the living room and find the Beer Me mask and laugh gently to yourself, because it was not pretty and it was not exactly what you had in mind, but it was still full of so much love. And hopefully Beer Me leagues pop up all over the country, but the one true Major League Beer Me tournament, you hope, will keep being held year after year.
Wherever you have three friends you have Beer Me.
Something odd. That moment when we were trying to remember something, trying to recall the details, so we pulled out the laptop and looked it up on LiveJournal. And I've lied in pretty much every one of these entries, just like I'm lying now, or just exaggerating but definitely omitting things that are (as ever) not my story to tell, and years from now this is what I will remember what happened because it's what I wrote down. I will forget, you will forget. A sudden new respect for words and pictures, one that I never really had because youth lasts forever and all, but it is all slipping away, being stored somewhere else. It has been ten years since this, twelve years since that. If Ocean was an actual, rather than figurative, child it would be in fifth grade.
Of course, a lot of the fun is in fighting over the details. Slapping our knees remembering the brilliant shows we put on. The funniest people on earth.
Anyway, I love you guys, is all. Let history always remember the first ever Major League Beer Me tournament in New Orleans 2010, and all the participants and spectators (Junebug, Sleazy, Eric, Chris, Truckee, Florian, Cathy, Nettie, Pat, John, Laura, Devon, Sara and Dani.) May we forever stand like Andrew Jackson's statue in the quarter: oddly askew, but that's what makes it so goddamned perfect.