Cody awoke in a hazy, painful stupor. He reached for his glasses and took in the wreckage that was once his living room. Littered across the floor were empty bottles of Genesee Cream Ale, malt liquor, and Mr. Boston vodka. One of the light fixtures on the ceiling had blown out, and the couch inexplicably had a hammer driven through its cushioning.
This was the aftermath. Cody and his friends had played with fire and they’d been burned—burned by the righteous fires of Donald Trump’s glowing mane and Hillary Clinton’s blood-red pantsuit of vengeance.
That’s right—sweet and naïve Cody had dared to believe that his brain and liver could survive a drinking game for the first Presidential debate of the 2016 election.
It had seemed simple enough: take a sip of beer every time either candidate mentioned ISIS, take a shot whenever Hillary attempted to make a joke, finish your drink if Donald made any reference to a wall, and so on. It had seemed simple, but they’d been so wrong.
Right out of the gate, the four friends had already killed a bottle of malt liquor after Hillary opened with her first lie: That it was good to be with Donald Trump. From then on, any time the candidates told the slightest white lie, Cody and his friends would chug liquor to the point of nausea. They drank a lot of goddamn liquor.
As Cody stumbled into the kitchen, snippets and flashbacks of the previous night’s insanity came back to him. He remembered standing on his coffee table and screaming, “Down with NAFTA!” as he pulled the stopper of a bottle of Mr. Boston and drained the contents of the plastic vessel into his gullet. He remembered Erin’s furious screech of anguish at hearing that Hillary had released her entire plan to defeat ISIS on the Internet, and how she’d driven a nail through the Internet router to stop the Chinese from selling Cody’s Wi-Fi password to ISIS. He even recalled, with great shame, that it had been he who had cheered on Hillary’s mockery of Donald’s climate change denial and tried to plunge the hammer into his couch to stop it from leaking oil into Chesapeake Bay.
Without meaning to, they had gone through $200-worth of alcohol in a single night, and there was only one person to blame: Lester mother-flipping Holt. Cody and his friends had added a fun twist to the game where they had to take two deep swigs of beer each time a candidate exceeded their time limit for a question. Holt had punished them for this foolishness all night. By the fiftieth minute of the debate, Carter and Allan had taken to spewing profanities and vague insults about Holt’s massive forehead, and about who could land the larger aircraft on top of it.
Cody shuffled into the bathroom, looked into the unforgiving waters of his toilet bowl, and spewed his guts into it. He didn’t throw up for Donald. He didn’t throw up for Hillary. He threw up for America.
