Did Chris Blackout or is He Pretending to Not Remember?

RETARDED

The Blackout Butterfly Effect

By Barry Weiss · August 6, 2026 · 10 min read

Three guys, mid-twenties, half a million bonus, and our parents are still paying our rent.

Bonkers, I know, but this is the lifestyle we lived in 2017. $500K+, fifty-five-hour work weeks that we describe as seventy because anything under seventy is weak. Dates Tuesday (the opener), Friday (the closer), Sunday afternoon (pipeline maintenance), hard partying Thursday and Saturday. Weekend Warriors. The limitless budget and lack of any real responsibility outside of a dozen Excel spreadsheets allowed us to be the most preposterous crew in the most fun city in the world.

The cast: me, Jason, Chris.

Jason and Chris played D3 lacrosse at a small (read: fake) college with no real football program. So they adopted mine, Michigan. They bought the gear, they learned the team, heck they even followed recruiting.

Every fall we did a neutral site trip in September, an SEC trip in November, and a Michigan trip in October. As we approached 30, hooking up with undergrads seemed a bit creepy, so we would occasionally pay for a few women to come in tow. Yes, this is how certain dudes always have so many hoes around. This trip I had a girlfriend, Chelsea, who graduated Michigan three years after me who was begging to come with her sorority sisters Olivia and Brittany.

We board. Jason and I are across from each other in aisle seats with the four girls next to us in the middle and window. Chris behind Jason and the most mid-Western, Michigan native, 55-year-old stranger probably named Don, who definitely mows his own lawn. As soon as we hit 30,000 feet, Jason flags the stewardess with a hundred-dollar bill the way you used to flag a yellow NYC taxi.

"What's the deal with cocktails?"

"They're six dollars."

"Six dollars?" He handed her his Amex.

"Okay. We need every small bottle of whiskey and vodka you have on this plane."

Jason was not asking for a round of drinks. He was asking for all the drinks. The stewardess looked at the card then at Jason. Don: "This is the craziest thing I have ever seen on a plane."

"Sorry. I need every bottle of whiskey, vodka, tequila and rum."

She took the card, rolled her eyes and started handing out tiny alcohol bottles to us, which we redistributed to our respective rows. Don, having registered the situation, was offered two shooters of Jack Daniels.

About an hour later, Chris — who has, since I’ve known him, been a quick and passionate “tongue getter” — was sucking face with said grad student. He had fed her four tequilas, which is what passes in his mind for chivalry. Heads were turning. Jason and I are full on cackling. Most of the plane pretended very hard not to see it. From a row back, Don now considerably less Midwest, said, audibly, with a kind of grudging admiration:

"Now this is the craziest thing I've seen on a plane."

As a returning alumni to Ann Arbor you arrive Friday afternoon buzzed from the plane and remember, all at once, what it felt like to be twenty-one in this exact zip code. The recognition is borderline erotic. The Friday night before a Saturday home game is when the trip actually happens. Saturday is just hangover tailgating and football. Sunday is travel. Friday is the show.

We had dinner at a steakhouse, just the three of us. The girls were already out. The plan was to meet at Skeeps.

Scorekeepers, known by everyone as Skeeps, is a sports bar in Ann Arbor that should have been condemned long ago. A stage doubles as the dance floor with a balcony above. The bar sits in the middle. There's a railed-off pit between the bar and the dance floor. We always posted up at that railing.

We walked up at eleven-thirty. Naturally, the line was around the block. The line at Skeeps on a home-game Friday is its own ecosystem. The men in line are jabronis. The girls are in short dresses and shoes that had been chosen with no input whatsoever from the weather forecast. It was forty degrees outside. You could see the goosebumps on their pale hamstrings shivering in formation, arms crossed, waiting their hour long turn for the privilege of paying eight dollars to have some underage kid spill beer on you.

We walk past all of this to the front of the line and collect my girlfriend, Olivia and Brittany who were waiting like peasants halfway through a Soviet bread line.

"How much," I said to the bouncer, "to get three guys and four girls in right now."

"Can't do that. Line's too long."

I handed him three hundred dollars and we all walked in.

Skeeps was a zoo. Crowded to the point of immobility. The bartender situation, as always, was untenable. Six bartenders, four hundred customers. Jason scanned the bar once and identified the tallest bartender, a kid his height, maybe six-four, on the theory — which Jason holds with conviction— that a tall bartender allows him to make eye contact across the crowd, which gets you better service. This is not how bartending works, but Jason believes it, and Jason has the bravado to walk behind the bar.

He found the tall bartender and handed him a wad of cash so large that the bartender gave him a hug, then he flagged a busboy.

Sixty seconds later, the bartender walked us across the room to our usual railing spot. This is not a bar that does table service, but we had table service. The bartender placed a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Kettle One on the railing. The busboy placed a box of 24 bottles of Coors Light on a makeshift table of crates he quickly spun up.

The night proceeded in the usual, sloppy way. My girlfriend and Brittany tapped out at 1am. Jason and I closed the bar down at 2am. Chris was no longer with us. We weren't worried. We texted him to come meet us at NYPD.

NYPD — New York Pizza Depot — is open until three. The line was, predictably, around the corner. Jason and I cut it. We walked the line offering free pizza to anyone we deemed sufficiently attractive or sufficiently normal-looking in exchange for letting us go ahead. They don’t teach you this in school but people will reliably trade their place in a pizza line for a few slices of pizza, and most people accepted our offer.

Jason and I sat down with our boxes of pizza passing out slices to the peasants we owed. Chris was still missing.

Jason started laughing so hard he was tearing up and lost the coordination to chew.

"Dude. I have to tell you about Olivia. At one point tonight," he said, "we found ourselves upstairs on that third floor, I gave the busboy fifty bucks, and he opened the janitor’s closet, and Olivia not only blew me but also ate my ass."

Olivia, twenty-four, Michigan, sorority, decent job in marketing, at some point in the last couple hours, initiated a specific sequence of decisions that ended in giving my friend Jason a blowjob/rimjob in this janitorial closet.

Almost as soon as he finished the story Chris walked in.

He sat down and picked up a slice from our pie. He took a bite and with the easy contentment of a man who just hit a line drive single and was trotting around first base, said: "I just closed the bar making out with Olivia."

Jason could not contain it. His eyes were bulging out of his head with excitement as he said with the biggest shit-eating (no pun intended) grin that has ever been seen:

"Chris, about thirty minutes ago Olivia blew me and ate out my asshole in the janitor's closet."

Never has a human face changed colors the way Chris' face changed color at NYPD. He was already pale even for an Irish guy. But this was bleached printer paper as all the blood in his entire body immediately evacuated.

He stood up and without saying a word walked out of NYPD.

We didn't see him again that trip. We texted, we called, nothing. He missed the game. He’d beelined it to the hotel, packed his bags and headed to DTW where he waited for the first 6 am flight back to New York and was, by the noon kickoff the next day, already back in Manhattan.

We didn’t hear from Chris for six days. When he finally joins us for dinner, before some Thursday night football at Ainsworth, our favorite NYC sports bar, he claims to have zero memory of the trip. He then tells us about his Tuesday date; a tall, blonde, Irish, a former swimmer at Denison College who now worked some back-office job at Morgan Stanley.

Six weeks later, Katie and Chris started attending mass every Sunday morning.

Six months later, they were engaged. Pre that moment at NYPD he was the biggest partier bachelor ever. Post that moment he’s a Catholic soccer dad.

So what happened? Well, there’s a few possible explanations—and then there’s the one that’s correct.

Chris claims, plausibly, that he was blackout drunk and has no idea what we’re talking about. No one can argue he wasn’t wasted, but it seems like too simple an explanation. Jason, who’s ass Chris effectively ate, thinks he’s BSing and using the blackout as reputational cover. Also possible, but Chris isn’t a liar at heart. My theory is more complex, which is that Chris, in an act of psycho-evolutionary desperation, genuinely had no choice but to self-induce a state of amnesia.

In other words, he psyoped himself. Deleted it. Scrubbed the entire Michigan trip from his hard drive. The plane rides, the grad student he had made out with at thirty thousand feet, Friday night steakhouse, the line at Skeeps, Olivia, NYPD, all of it. Gone. Zapped by the neuralyzer from Men in Black.

Personally, I think he’s telling the truth when he says he has zero memory of the trip. I think he will die not knowing that on a Friday night in Ann Arbor, in a janitorial closet on the third floor of a sports bar, a girl he was about to make out with on the dance floor downstairs ate another man's ass in exchange for his fifty-dollar bribe to a busboy. I think he will die not knowing that his entire blessed life: Katie, the kids, the Sunday morning Mass, is the direct downstream consequence of his soul’s memory of the taste of Jason’s ass. I think there are some lies so big they might as well be truths.