The last thing I remember is seeing Jeff Schmuck. I thought it was kind of cool. Like damn, that’s Schmuck right there. Huh. Then I turned back to the double G&T that Mr. Bishop had placed in my hand, and everything goes black.

Apparently I later bowled my glass across the Embassy Suites parking lot, and was pleased with its destruction but I can’t say for certain. The next concrete memory I have is blinking awake on an uncomfortable bed in a strange, bright room. I tried to take stock of the situation and stumbled towards the front desk to ask the nurses exactly what the fuck was going on.

“You are at Denver CARES, sir. Please step away from the desk,” they explained. This didn’t make sense to me. I’m not from around here, I said. I have literally no idea what’s going on. “Do you need to go to solitary, sir?” No, I didn’t. I just needed to find out what the fuck happened to me. I was confused, had no phone, no wallet and none of the possessions I had begun the evening with. I got a phonebook from a dude who looked uncomfortably like Ted Kaczynski, and found the number for our hotel.

By some stroke of good fortune I managed to get through to our room and tried to explain my situation to Bishop. I think I’m at the hospital, I said. Or maybe jail, I don’t understand. Laughter ensues from the room on the other end of the line. Then one of the other patients behind me set the record straight: dude, you’re in detox.

The Stalinist front desk operators made it abundantly clear that I wasn’t going anywhere until my “sober time” at 2:30 in the afternoon. So for the rest of the day I slept, stressed out and got to know the assortment of alcoholics, heroin addicts and other productive members of society that had, in their own way, ended up in detox. There was a guy with a cataract and track marks who was wearing a blanket as a shirt, and a Mexican dude who slept sitting upright and swore loudly in Spanish through his sleep.

When they finally called my name for discharge, I was brought into a room where an intense black lady and I filled out paperwork. She told me I needed to chill out or else she would send me down the street to jail. I couldn’t tell what was un-chill about me signing papers and answering questions about my sexual history, but she wasn’t having any of it. She looked me in the eye and said “you know you blew a .24 when they brought you in here?!” I just stared at her dumbstruck, and giggled.

The funniest part to me was that I had been admitted and processed entirely under my brother’s name, because his ID was the first thing in my wallet. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there and I knew that explaining that my name wasn’t Dan or that I was 20, not 23, was going to open up a world of hurt for me. So I kept my mouth shut and forged a signature or two.I think that might make me a criminal, but the net result is that as far as the Denver health authority is concerned, it was Dan Turner who was picked up off some street at 2 o’clock in the morning approaching comatose levels of intoxication. Sorry, bro.

They told me my SIA cherry would get popped at some point, but goddamn. I just got fucking railed.