It's one of those crazy nights you have when you're 22 or 23.

You and your best friend RJ are drinking straight from a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi Hearty Burgundy, and watching the Tom Waits video, "Big Time." The two of you are dating roommates, two college girls without much sense, except for fun. By the time you get to the part where Waits is playing a strip club barker and snarls, "We got seven X's – girls without skin," the Rossi is mostly gone.

RJ drank the lion's share, so you tell him, "Don't get too fucked up to fuck, my brother." Not that he listens. He can't. He can only hear Tom Waits.

One of the girls, Tara, is sober, so she drives you all in Meridee's car over to a friend's house, where there's a sort-of party going on. The party is, three couples, too much booze, and a second-floor apartment with too little furniture. Fake wood paneling and carpet made from fibers itchy when they were new, and now so worn out you can feel them through your shoes. It's the kind of sort-of party where you wonder if you'll end up sleeping with your own girlfriend or one of the other girls, or if anyone at all is going to stay sober enough to get laid.

Somebody produces a bottle of Bacardi Black. Someone else rolls a joint. The host has on the ten-minute version of "Freebird," but right now it sounds pretty good, and not too loud – the cops were here not long ago.

It's a good time, but not as good as last week. You and RJ, over at The Girls' apartment as usual, playing some Harry Connick loud and with the windows open. A sax player, on a smoke break from his gig next door at the Jambalaya, joins in from the alley below. So all of you go down and slow dance to semi-live music in the Humboldt County fog and mist. Nope, you can't beat (or even plan) a scene like that – but tonight's party is just as fun in a different way.

RJ doesn't want anyone to know he needs to throw up, so he decides to step outside. He puts Tara's size-four jacket on his 6'4", Greek God frame – upside down – and stumbles out the door, the seams stretching and the fringe all helter-skelter. He tells you the next morning that on his way back in, he opened the wrong door and walked in on someone who shouldn't have been shopping at Frederick's of Hollywood, but apparently had been, anyway. He also tells you it's a good thing he'd already been sick.

This, of course, is the same night he earned the nickname "Coma Boy."

It's the night Tara throws her back out, falling backwards in a chair on accident. Later she tries to throw it back in, by slamming herself against a wall on purpose. There's a riding crop involved somehow, but you really don't want to know the details. Turns out the sore back was actually cracked ribs, but by then enough time had passed that it almost seemed funny. Well, funny in that I-guess-you-had-to-be-there kind of way.

The hangover was hellacious. The memories, useless. And yet. . .

As I sit here with a Citron Martini, I'd kill for a copy of "Big Time," and a night to play five years worth of catch-up with RJ, with his bride and mine. But I'll pass on the Carlo Rossi, thank you.

In some small ways, it's better to be a grown up.