All hail a proper bachelor party

January 24, 2010 12:36 am

RECENTLY, I JOINED a few other guys for a night of controlled--or is that oxymoronic?--debauchery. Debauchery lite: less alcohol, but same great time. A friend from work was getting married, but his wedding was taking place out of state. Most of us couldn't make it to the ceremony, but we still wanted to send him off properly, with an ad hoc and peripatetic bachelor party. Really more of a roving bachelor party/pub crawl hybrid. None of the tawdry and stereotypical features of the cliched bachelor party had been planned: no strippers, no limos sloshing with liquor; an implicit gentleman's agreement to avoid hurling. Our little outing was to be nothing more than some old-fashioned male-bonding--a few beers, some off-color jokes (which according to ancient guys'-night protocols were to be loudly howled at, funny or not), an excuse to speak in staccato, profane bursts about women, work, and whatnot. (We wanted to be moderate, not genteel.) Had any of the bars we patronized allowed smoking, I'm pretty sure big, smelly cigars would have been involved as well (thereby rendering the emesis clause--see above--null and void). In any case, that kind of evening.

Now it's an odd component of humanity that serious occasions, particularly holy ones, are often preceded by revel and excess. Think Mardi Gras: a giant blowout followed by (at least traditionally) sackcloth and ashes, fasting, and penance. Or consider how a riotous Saturday night leads inevitably to a headachy, churchy Sunday morning. So, similarly, the guys and I were out for a little fun before our friend joined his betrothed in holy wedlock. Now please don't misunderstand me. I don't mean to imply that matrimony is the sackcloth and ashes follow-up to bachelor party hijinks, but there is something disquieting about a supposedly joyous word created by conjoining the benign "wed" to the life-sentence clank of "lock."

I happened to be the elder statesman of our little celebratory coterie this particular evening. I'm roughly twice as old as the others actually, including the groom-to-be. Consequently, my head was swimming with elder-statesmanlike thoughts all evening as I sat there listening to the younger men chortle and howl. One rather chilling thought flitting through my mind was this: My great season of bachelor parties has passed. Guys my age are usually either long-married (wedlocked!) or divorced. Some, of course, continue to do both repeatedly. And even when men do head back to the altar for second, third, fourth nth attempts, bachelor parties don't repeat, and for good reason. Bachelor party "skills"--heavy drinking, all-night carousing, smoking cigars--prove remarkably unbeneficial to maintaining wedded harmony. An unpleasant surprise: Wedlock, despite all those death-do-us-part histrionics, can be unlocked.

So I sat there that evening, thinking all these middle-of-life, faintly morose, and most definitely pseudo-philosophical thoughts. (Note to any young men reading: This is why you don't invite old guys out. They're buzz-killers). However, I was not foolish or doddering enough to share such jumbled reflections with my youthful tablemates. There's nothing more nettlesome than a wizened old coot mumbling sentimental barroom nonsense. I remember being trapped by such Ancient barstool Mariners in my own youth.

And really, what could I tell them anyway? The great writers and poets have already weighed in on these topics. Keats (temporal things wither and only art lasts: "She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"); Kerouac, who tried to outrace time on Route 66; Housman, who remarked the heartbreaking evanescence of youth; even hoary Virgil who first uttered (probably from a barstool) the mundane, just-making-conversation quip "time flies."

Nonetheless, there were things I wanted to tell them: the distilled thoughts of my half-century. Especially the groom-to-be, as a sort of a pre-toast to his big day. I wanted to tell him that things--certainly this life thing--do go quickly. That youth is fleeting. That one day, much sooner than he can possibly realize, he'll be the elder statesman at some table. Because only on Grecian urns--well, maybe in iPhone photos, too--can youth be frozen. Because we're food for worms, lads. OK, busted: That was from "Dead Poets' Society." Good line, though.

Before calling it a night, we guys all did a shot together, a prenuptial toast. The shooters were Snake Bites: honeyed whiskey and lime juice. If there's a better toast to marriage than this, an amalgam of sweet and bitter--where, importantly, the sweet overpowers and tames the bitter--then I don't know what it is.

Rob Huffman lives in Spotsylvania County.