Throwing the bachelor party under the bus

Will E. SandersCreators Syndicate

October 4, 2012

I am on a party bus. A party bus is exactly what it sounds like. Take a normal bus, then take a party and add the two together. You have a party bus. Now add no seatbelts, a driver of questionable moral fiber and a baker’s dozen of drunken denizens out on the town for a bachelor party.

Destination: a predictably named strip joint.

I am in the back of the party bus sitting next to my best friend Dave, who is strangely and impeccably dressed in a suit. I have to admit that his suit is a very nice suit. People continue mistaking Dave as the groom-to-be because of this. He is not.

The groom is actually my other best friend Big Dan Brown. He is the guy on the bus with his pants down at the moment pondering a riddle that has plagued mankind since the dinosaurs: should I urinate out of the side of a fabricated short bus while traversing the busiest interstate in the United States?

Why not, right?

I am sitting in the back of the party bus next to Dave’s awesome suit and I realize how bad of a person I must sound like. I am one day removed from my honeymoon en route to a strip club aboard the U.S.S. Drinks Too Much. My (brand new) wife, Christine, understands this sort of male bonding time is needed amongst strong and strapping men like us. How better can we participate in random acts of sexism and indiscriminate bouts of dancing?

I am sitting in the back of the party bus, still next to Dave’s suit, and people are shouting at me to, “Write a column about this!!!”

“Stop yelling at me,” I say back to them, “and stop using so many exclamation points. I am considering it, but in order to make this reader-friendly I absolutely insist that Justin stop doing that.”

There is a stripper pole in the middle of the bus. I find this confusing. We are traveling along I-75 at speeds as high as 75 mph. Vast arrays of multi-colored lights are piercing through the party bus in all directions and distracting tired semi-drivers. There is a constant barrage of what I can only kindly refer to as music blasting out our eardrums. Dancing shouldn’t be encouraged in this environment, it should be highly discouraged.

I approach the pole, which is luring me with subtle temptation to spin myself around it a record-setting eight times in a row. I spin thusly, and with furious inhibition. Dave’s suit applauds. I again take my seat at the back of the party bus.

It is very hard to sit on a party bus without imagining what would happen if it crashed, and I am speaking of things besides instant death and decapitation. Or how easy it would be for a party bus to crash, and why party busses aren’t crashing all the time up and down our nation’s byways and highways.

At any moment, for instance, a fully grown man spinning himself on the stripper pole a record-setting eight times could fly off of it. Then, by no small stretch of physics, this fully grown and now midair individual could easily go flying through the black cloth partition, into the cab and onto the helpless (and hopefully sober) party bus driver. There would be no survivors.

I am pausing for the moment and being thankful that there are 13 heads that are still attached to their respective bodies on board the bus, at least for the time being.

When you are sitting in the back of a party bus it is easy to forget about the driver. Who he is, the type of driver he is and whether or not he is a maniacal psychopath; these sorts of perfectly normal thoughts. It is hard for me to believe someone is actually driving this roving contraption of lights, terrible music and unbridled debauchery.

It’s now time to disembark. Everyone is as giddy as children — really intoxicated children. What happens next, I imagine, isn’t fit for print. Besides, there is no reason to incriminate any of these guys any further.

That would be throwing them all under the party bus.

To contact Will E Sanders email him at wille@willesanders.com.