There is nothing like a good vomit story. Are you having a bad day? Did the rain ruin your hair? Did you accidentally watch a video of a pile of rats devouring some garbage? A well-executed vomit story can turn that frown right upside down, into a grimace of revulsion.
OK fine I'll start. My favorite vomit story in recent memory took place on New Year's Eve in the year of our lord 2009. I was with some close friends from high school at a bar in Greenpoint, at which not only was there a terrific dance party, but UNLIMITED CHAMPAGNE. It was the best party ever! So we're dancing and dancing and flinging back free champagne with the abandon of coked-up Kennedy heirs, and everything is going just splendidly.
My friend, we'll call her Tess, was wearing this stupid-ass Christmas sweatshirt she'd found in her closet or maybe balled up on the floor of the bus, and I'd been giving her a hard time about it all evening. Tess was notorious among us for throwing up in weird and inopportune places (on a BART train, at the top of a Ferris wheel), and when we saw her eyes begin to glaze, we knew what was coming.
What we did not anticipate was that she was going to empty the contents of her stomach not only all over the grinning snowmen that adorned her Christmas sweater, but all over the dead center of the entire dance floor. I was rather occupied with laughing hysterically, but if memory serves, I think she also managed to make her way to a darkened corner and continue her performance there, next to a couple who'd previously been enjoying an intimate makeout session. All of this occurred mere moments before the stroke of midnight.
I can't speak for everyone else, but if ringing in the new year standing in quiet horror next to someone else's barf isn't an ominous harbinger for the year to come, I don't know what is. The sweatshirt was summarily balled up and returned to the garbage heap from which it came, and Tess was poured into a cab. The rest of us inexplicably piled into a limo headed for a warehouse party in Bushwick, where another friend would wind up with a cracked rib after his girlfriend tried to jump on him from an elevated platform, but that's a story for another blog post.
Anyway. I love that vom story, but it still isn't half as good as this delightful anecdote from a few weeks ago, in which a loaded ad exec arrived to lunch at Bergdorf Goodman's restaurant and proceeded to hurl all over a cluster of mortified customers, including one woman who was forced to mop up the mess from her Burberry jacket with napkins.
And that got us thinking: Man, bartenders must really see some shit, huh? So we found a few longtime veterans of the game, and asked them to tell us their favorite—or at least, most memorable—war stories from behind the bar. There's only a few, because no one needs more than three vom stories in one sitting, but I assure you they are winners.
Also please feel free to submit your own bar horror stories in the comments. Thank you, and enjoy your lunch.
