15 and still standing
Physicians are a strange category of humans altogether. They are called doctors. They heal. A lot depends on how well they do their work: a person’s well-being, health, issues of pain, life and death. They carry a huge burden of responsibility. They have oaths like priests. They can be called upon anytime under most conditions.
It is not easy to get to where they are. Once they were quite ordinary. They were young. They were typical students, carefree, unfettered, played sports, played music, did art, did the usual things; once, until they decided to be doctors. And then their world became a strict cycle of consistent and disciplined study. Which never stops because the field of medicine is growing all the time in pace with the latest technology for keeping people alive, healthy, and well.
This can not come without personal cost. And so they go by a persistent, recurring and chronic worry in the depths of their psyche. They worry they’ve missed out on too many things, through childhood, through their teens, through adulthood. Imagine: Their first day in Boracay and what do they do? Discuss a technical paper which needed to be written. And it might have been titled WTF 2000 but wasn’t. That paper would not be till later.
But it is early evening now in Boracay, one of the country’s most popular beach-destinations. Surely seven young doctors require no additional excuse for walking into a barroom along the beach. They do not waste time searching for the best. They walk into the first that looks interesting. This one having a name which is a mix of 2 fruits, Coconut and Mango. They enter into a hallway with bronze plaques on the wall. The plaques have names and a designation of the year. They hang in ascending order all the way to last year. The current year is still to be.
The seven go over the menu, the usual drinks: wines, vodka, tequila, rhum, beers. They start there until someone thinks of ordering the house specialty: 15 and still standing. Hmm. Interesting name. How does it go? They order one to find out.
The waiter comes with a round tray holding a neat circle of 15 single-shot-drinks and a menu card describing the component ingredients of each drink going by pop-culture names. The names give clue to the ascending order of alcohol dosage going into every shot, names like, Don’t try this at home.
The names are a challenge for the macho in every man. Much more so if the young man feels he might have missed out a little on life. And if the names sound dangerous, the seven are used to dangerous names often stated in the Latin, names of chemical cocktails that at certain dosages become wonder cures but at others become deadly poison.
And what can go wrong? After the first round nobody thinks to ask. The mathematics was much more elemental. Seven people, seven orders, each having 15 shots; And after everything, seven names etched in bronze and then hung in the hallway for posterity. What can make better sense?
They go through the shots in their prescribed order, just like the disciplined doctors that they were. “We are paying for the experience!” someone opines through the evening chatter. And then the topics of talk for the rest of the night follow after the universal order. Start with talk of work. Segue into travel and places visited. From here, go every which way. But always, there must be the small inflection of common experiences, memories, the past. You can always tell the evening has cranked one notch when the party starts talking politics, God, and the purpose of life. We are not too far from talk of food. But the penultimate topic is always the universal signal for every drunken night’s inevitable end: talk of crap, human excrement, bleep.
The last few are controversial topics which always challenge the strength of the bonds of friendship. They are gourmet topics which go well with the illusion of heightened awareness coming from brilliant minds befuddled by the natural toxicity of alcohol and God only knows what else. Abortus, the penultimate drink, has a milky dirty white precipitate circulating inside it. The menu card does not describe what it is. It is a house secret. And the evening has come to this. But it will not end without one of the seven leaning back from his seat into a free fall to the floor. The bar tender comes quickly to his aid. He calls in the waitress and addresses the table with professional authority saying: “Don’t worry she’s a nurse!”
The six look at each other and burst into collective laughter. Soon, they wobble to the hallway holding up between them their fallen friend. They stop at the hallway to contemplate the blank space on the wall where this year’s 15 and still standing list will be immortalized.
