Maynard's Binge

Reader, meet Maynard, he’s the proud owner of a small-business with a house, wife, and 2.5 kids. Everything’s going well in his life, albeit he’s not financially secure enough to roll his cigars with hundred-dollar bills or have a full-time butler at his expense, but nonetheless life is steady and predictable for him. Quite frankly though, Maynard has grown tired of his humdrum life and wants a little stimulation. His mood has always been good, but not great so his two friends who want to party offer a suggestion that grabs Maynard’s attention and imagination.

They pull him in and tell him he needs to let loose and start drinking. Maynard, who was never a drinker, is uncertain about the idea at first, but his friends tell him about how great they feel when they’re drunk and how everyone’s your friend and how everyone is so much better off when they’re drunk. Maynard agrees he’ll go out with them.

They arrive at the bar just after 8 o’clock, and Maynard’s friends remember that they forgot to tell him something. They forgot to tell him that they are fresh out of cash and that he’ll need to pay for their tabs at the end of the night. Maynard protests and says he can’t afford to do that. His friends put their arms around him and tell him he can’t drink alone, that’s no fun; he needs people to drink with him in order to feel the boom of sudden happiness and ecstasy. Maynard protests once more and says he’ll just go home and continue living a good life, rather than a great life. Besides, he says, my budget is pretty tight, I only have thirty dollar to spend.

Just then a wealthy man who was about to enter the bar interrupted, he had overheard their conversation. He tells Maynard that there’s no way he has enough money to get himself and his friends drunk; he only has enough to get himself drunk. So the wealthy man says to Maynard’s friends, I can lend you the money needed to get drunk tonight, just tell me how much you need and don’t ask where the money comes from. The friends are originally hesitant, but the wealthy man insists he will only charge them an interest rate of just below 1%. The friends gladly agree to the deal and Maynard is happy because he’s off the hook for their tab. The friends take the money from the wealthy man and pat Maynard on the back with smiles on their face, they’re all so happy that they’ll be able to get drunk and feel better about everything.

They enter the bar and sit down. Immediately the bartender comes and asks what they would like. They all order a glass of scotch and put it on their tab. They drink their scotches slowly because it burns and they want to pace themselves otherwise they’ll never make it out alive. Roughly forty-five minutes later, after plenty of chatter about this and that, they finish their glasses and decide to have another. There’s not much of a buzz at this point because they have paced themselves very nicely, Maynard begins to wonder whether or not his friends were exaggerating how great getting drunk is. He does start to notice, however, as he takes his first sip of his new glass of scotch that it burns a little less. He can’t complain about that, and he is actually beginning to enjoy the taste to some extent.

As chatter about this and that grows into more exciting chatter involving secrets and funny stories, they begin having more fun and pay less attention to their drinking pace. They have begun to drink slightly faster now. They finish their drinks about ten minutes faster than their first glass and feeling a little buzzed, Maynard especially.

See, Maynard has never had more than three drinks in one sitting in his life because a fourth drink was always out of his budget. He was always very good with his money. His friends were not afraid to go over four drinks from time to time because it usually paid off for them in the end, but they generally kept a fairly tight budget- only taking risks here and there. But since they had a wealthy man at the bar that particular night with more money to lend them at a very low interest rate in the case they ran out of their already loaned money they were more than willing to drink until the bar closed down.

After the second glass was through, they holler to the bartender to bring them a third round. Instead of a sip, Maynard is feeling good so he takes a gulp. It burns more than usual, but he enjoys it. He goes back to sipping his scotch shortly after that though and the boys continue their banter about nothing of any significance. At this point, it’s surely becoming a cheery night for these fellas.

This is where Maynard reaches the fork in the road. He’s reached his budget limit of three drinks. He’s feeling very good, but not drunk. He knows from what his friends tell him that if he gets drunk life will be great for him, he’ll have an unlimited amount of friends coming in through the swinging bar doors, he’ll feel like he’s eight feet tall, and everything will be booming like the Jukebox in the corner. So at this proverbial fork in the road, Maynard decides to get a fourth drink, much to the applause of his friends who join in on the fourth round of scotch.

Maynard has now gone over budget, but he’s buzzed on the good times as a result so he throws all inhibition to the wind and drinks on. His friends on the other hand, while they are also buzzed, decide an easy way to repay the loans to the wealthy man. They decide they are going to take more money from the wealthy man at a reduced interest rate and lend that money out to drunken people for higher interest rates. This way they’ll be able to pay the man back in full while turning a profit for themselves so they can get drunk the next night after they collect their loans tomorrow morning.

The night roles onward, Maynard and his friends discontinue ordering glasses of scotch on the rocks and start ordering shots. Maynard’s friends give out loans to drunk people, and those drunk people tell their drunk friends that two drunk guys at the bar are giving out loans, so the drunk friends of the drunks who first received loans from Maynard’s drunk friends go up to Maynard’s drunk friends and get loans for themselves because they can’t afford to get more drunk at that moment in time. So as Maynard and his friend’s are getting drunker, the people around them are also getting drunker rather than going home after a few drinks as they usually would. As the people around them are getting drunker, they keep going to Maynard’s friends and asking for more loans after spending the other monies lent to them earlier in the night. Maynard’s friends keep running out of money so they keep going back to the wealthy guy who lends them more money at a below 1% interest rate. At this point in time, Maynard’s friends have loaned out enough to have turned a massive profit. Although they won’t get their loaned money, plus interest, back until the next morning they know they will have enough left over money after paying the wealthy guy back to drink for the rest of the night at a very heavy rate and still have money left over to get drunk the next night!

While Maynard’s friends are doing business and downing shots, Maynard is on the dance floor having the time of his life. In between songs he runs over to the bar and orders another shot. He downs it and then goes back to dancing and having the time of his life. In his head he thinks, Everything IS better when you’re drunk. I’m never going to stop drinking. As the Isley Brother’s big hit “Shout” plays and Maynard is in the middle of the crowded dance floor jumping up and down each time they yell “Shout!” he notices the room is beginning to spin. He looks over through the crowd and see’s his friends are beginning to feel the effects of too much drinking as well. One of them is face down on the bar, while the other is only minutes away from being in the same state.

Maynard rushes over as best he can, considering the room is spinning every which way for him, and gets them both up. They stumble ever so slowly down the sidewalk back to their apartments, occasionally stopping to vomit in a nearby trashcan or flower pot. They all have realized at this point that they had far too much to drink and their body was now crashing.

They all make it home and pass out in their beds. The following morning, they all wake up to terrible headaches and the feeling of sickness in their stomachs. For Maynard, the room is still spinning along with a bad headache and a bad stomach. He vomits after trying to drink a glass of water and then returns to bed. He thinks to himself, my friends didn’t tell me about this part. I went from the happiest I’ve ever been the worst I’ve ever felt. Upon lying back down in his bed, he sees his pants next to the bed and decides to check to see if he saved his receipt. He finds the receipt in his pant pocket and pulls it out. He drops the receipt on the floor because he can’t believe the amount of money his tab added up to, it is over $100. He thinks about the night, unable to remember much of it, and vaguely recalls buying several people shots on top of the shots he was buying for himself. He was feeling so good that he wanted other people to feel just as good so he bought them drinks as well.

Just as Maynard was pulling his receipt out of his pocket, his friends in the neighboring apartment heard a loud knock on their door. They both stumble to the door and open it to see the wealthy man standing there with a smile on his face. He asks for his money, plus interest, back. He reminds them that they borrowed a total of $1,000 each. They are unable to pay at the moment, so they call all of the numbers of the people they loaned money out to at the bar to have them pay their loans back, plus interest. They find out with almost all of the calls that the people who they had given loans too were really drunk and just wanted some more to drink. They were so drunk that they were unable to realize there was no way they could pay back their loans.

Before getting back to the wealthy man, the friends check their pockets and look at their total tab and realize they too had each spent well over $100 for themselves alone. They realized everything was going to collapse at this point. They owed money that they could not pay, they needed help.

They ran over to Maynard’s apartment, at which point Maynard was still worrying about the massive overdrafts he had incurred, and knocked on his door. Maynard was by far the wealthiest of the three because he owned a business and he was always very frugal with his money. The friends plead with him to bail them out and give them money so they can payback the wealthy man. Maynard resists at first, but then realizes he was equally to blame as any of his friends for the hangover they all had and the negative dollars in their accounts. So Maynard agrees to pay.

Maynard, however, cannot necessarily afford to pay to bail his friends out with his own money; he doesn’t have enough. So he goes to his business and takes $2,120 out the business account that goes towards paying his employees ($1,000 for each friend and $120 for himself to pay the seventy dollars that took him over budget and the overdraft fees). He gives his friends the money and then reluctantly notifies his employees that he will have to temporarily cut their pay in order to bail out himself and his reckless friends.

Maynard quickly realizes that had he not tried to make his life better through quick and temporary fixes like binge drinking and been patient with his natural life, he never would have gotten into this mess. But it’s too late for that now and his employees are enraged, they had nothing to do with Maynard or his friends going out and getting drunk so they don’t see why their pay must be cut.
Maynard simply replies,

It wasn’t because of drinking, if anything, it was because we didn’t drink enough.

At which point he pulls a bottle of scotch from his desk and pours another shot for himself. And what’s worse, the employees believed him when he said it. They fell for his lie that it has nothing to do with his selfish want to make his life boom, and that it had everything to do with him and his friends slowing down their drinking at the end of the night, so the solution to the problem is that he is going to drink more.