By Erin and Mel, advertising execs, drinking buddies
Erin: We have a group of six girlfriends who all live in different areas, and once a year we get together and have a girls’ weekend. One year we went to the Iowa vs. Iowa State game in Ames. We started tailgating at 4 AM.
Mel: I wouldn’t say we started tailgating then. It was more a bender from the day before that never stopped.
Erin: Yeah, the gates open at 6 AM to tailgate in the parking lot and the line forms before then, so we went to bed the night before for a few hours and woke up at 4 AM to get in line to tailgate.
Mel: And then we pretty much blacked out.
Erin: I have some memories of the game. When it was over, we were way too drunk to drive and we had lost our designated driver, so we just hop in the back of this big pickup truck being driven by hillbillies and yell, “Take us to Fox Lounge!”
Mel: We were not invited.
Erin: But they took us to Fox Lounge. And after this point, neither of us has any memories. The next day we’re slowly waking up and Mel goes into the bathroom and she comes back out and she looks a little disturbed. But that passes and she opens the window curtains and is sipping coffee in her robe—it almost looks like a Folgers commercial—and she says, “What a gorgeous day. Does anyone want to go to the continental breakfast downstairs? Hmm? Oh, also, girls, one of us took a giant shit in the bathtub.” I mean, it just came out casually, like, “Oh, one more thing—somebody shit on the ground last night.”
Mel: Well, I was still trying to figure out if I had done it or not. I was nervous of revealing it if I had done it, so I wanted to butter everyone up and get them started for a great day before I shared “I might have shit in the bathtub.”
Erin: So of course everyone rushes into the bathroom and investigates. It was huuuge.
Mel: And sweaty.
Erin: So now we start our police case: “Which of us shit in the tub?” I should add at this point a guy was in our room and had spent the night. But us girls were all so much more drunk than him that we didn’t even consider him a suspect.
Mel: We had no postgame memories, but we knew Erin always takes a bunch of pictures when we are out. So we grabbed her camera and started looking through the photos for clues. And we immediately thought, It’s our friend Stacy, because we see evidence that at Fox Lounge she had pissed herself.
Erin: Two separate photos of Stacy pissing herself! We concluded, “Well, of course it’s Stacy. She clearly had no control of her bowels yesterday.” But as we go through more and more pictures, we’re seeing photos that incriminate all of us. In the next one, Mel has a giant bag of ice on her head.
Mel: I tried to do a handstand on the dance floor.
Erin: Yeah, she tried to do a handstand on the dance floor and pretty much concussed herself, and rather than kick her out of the bar the Fox Lounge just told her to wear some ice on her head.
Mel: There was another picture, this one of us bowling. We must have gone bowling at some point. Erin had a giant, I mean giant, bruise on her entire arm. I don’t know if she got hit by a bowling ball or what.
Erin: The last photo was of Mel in the trunk of a car wearing an oven mitt. I guess we were so drunk the bowling alley wouldn’t let us even leave by ourselves. They made the teenage cashier drive us home. Mel rode in the trunk.
Mel: Ryan, the guy staying with us, volunteered that he remembers going to the bathroom and feeling disoriented, but he didn’t think he would shit in a tub. Then Erin started adding crazy stuff—like that she was so drunk she hallucinated.
Erin: I said, “Ladies, normally I would keep this to myself, but last night I woke up and I saw a blond ghost in this room. Maybe the blond ghost did it?”
Mel: At this point we concluded that there was no clear offender. So we decided to inspect assholes.
Erin: The thing is, there was no toilet paper in the bathroom for some reason, so we knew whoever did it must have a dirty butt hole. None of us wanted to clean up, so we figured this was the fairest way to choose.
Mel: But at that point, Ryan decided he’d do the gentlemanly thing and clean it up rather than making us girls inspect our butt holes. Again, there was no toilet paper, so he disposed of it with hotel cards—cutting it up and throwing it out in pieces.
Erin: Almost like cutting a sushi roll.
Mel: Plus—and I don’t know why he did this—but he actually threw it in the trash rather than put it in the toilet and flush it away. I think we were all still drunk and not thinking clearly.
Erin: Five years after the incident, we still hadn’t solved the mystery of who shit in the tub. Anyways, Ryan heard we were going to tell the story in the Blackout Diaries and flew to Chicago from New York for the show to surprise us. He stood up at the end of the story and says, “Ladies and gentleman, I am the mystery shitter!” v