I've Got This Round: More Tales of Debauchery

I've Got This Round: More Tales of Debauchery

by Mamrie Hart
I've Got This Round: More Tales of Debauchery

I've Got This Round: More Tales of Debauchery

by Mamrie Hart

eBook

$4.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

A wild and hilarious journey through adulting, from actress and comedian Mamrie Hart—the New York Times bestselling author of You Deserve a Drink.

When Mamrie simultaneously enters her 30s and finds herself single for the first time since college, the world is suddenly full of possibilities. Emboldened by the cool confidence that comes with the end of one's 20s plus the newfound independence of an attachment-free lifestyle, Mamrie commits herself to living life with even more spirit, adventure, and heart than before. Mamrie dives into new experiences at full-tilt and seeks out once-in-a-lifetime opportunities (like meeting the Dixie Chicks), bucket-list goals (like visiting the Moulin Rouge), and madcap adventures (like going anchors-away on a Backstreet Boys cruise)—all while diving back into the dating world for the first time in a decade.
 
In I've Got This Round, readers will find the same shameless honesty and I'll-try-anything-once spirit they loved in Hart’s New York Times bestseller You Deserve a Drink. Mamrie doubles down on her strong female friendships, her willingness to engage in shenanigans, and her inimitable candor, taking the reader along for the ride.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780399576805
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/06/2018
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 17 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

About The Author
Mamrie Hart is an actress, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author who established a standout presence in the pop-culture zeitgeist with her hit YouTube channel, You Deserve a Drink. Reaching more than three million followers across her social media channels, and with more than eighty-four million views on YouTube, Mamrie’s influence as a creator earned her a coveted position on Variety’s annual list of Hollywood’s New Leaders 2016 and a spot on The Hollywood Reporter’s 2017 Digital Disrupters list. In 2016, Mamrie wrote, executive-produced, and starred-in Lionsgate’s feature-length comedy Dirty 30. Her other writing and acting credits include Camp Takota, a feature that outperformed Oscar-nominated films on iTunes’ top downloaded movies chart during the week leading up to the Academy Awards. Mamrie is from middle-of-nowhere North Carolina. She now lives in Los Angeles with her tiny hairless dog, Beanz.

Read an Excerpt

The Poc-oh-no's

A DISCLAIMER: Every good relationship I've had has started with honesty . . . and usually a long night of drinking and creating memories that could be used as future blackmail. But since they wouldn't let me duct-tape a fifth of tequila to every copy of this book, I'll just stick with being truthful instead. SO: This chapter, out of the entire book, is the longest. Most authors wouldn't do this. Most authors would kick off their book with a snack of a story. Something to whet the appetite. Like an amuse-bouche at a fancy restaurant or a mini Snickers in your car before Chili's. But that's not my style. I respect you too much to start you off with a quick bang. I wanted our first time to be slow and attentive and leave you satisfied. That said . . . let's get into some trouble, y'all!

Reader, if there's something you need to know about me, it's that I often get very obsessed with very dumb things, one of these things being comically large items. Nothing makes me happier than larger-than-life gags: giant whoopee cushions; water towers painted to look like food items; roadside attractions, like the world's largest ball of twine. This love for colossal crap started early, thanks to a creative local business in my hometown. Where I grew up, in Podunk, North Carolina, there were only a few businesses in town: some gas stations, a VHS rental/tanning bed salon hybrid, and, situated right by the town's only intersection, a silk-screening shop that took care of all your sports uniforms and fund-raiser T-shirt needs.

Now, I'm no marketing exec, but one would think that the best way to advertise this last business would be to put some jerseys in the window. Ya know, show the people driving by the best examples of your work. But not this place. Instead, they filled their window with a ginormous pair of bright orange granny panties, at least four feet wide, that read "Home of the Whopper" across the ass. It killed me, and still does. To this day, it's my go-to visual to make me laugh, like Peter Pan's happy thought to fly. Home of the Whopper. SMDH.

But despite all the oversize goods I've been around in my day, there has always been one giant thing I've yet to find. My comically large holy grail . . . no, but seriously, it is a grail, because I'm talking about a giant champagne glass.

Let me take you back. When I was just shoulder high to a titmouse, I saw a commercial for a romantic resort with a couple in a tub shaped like a massive champagne glass. I couldn't believe my freshly diagnosed nearsighted eyes! What a sight to behold. This couple was happier than an eighties Newport cigarette ad, heads cocked back, laughing as bubbles swirled all around them. I immediately fell in love with that scene and that tub. I know what you're thinking:

1)    WTF does "shoulder high to a titmouse" mean? Stay tuned for more confusing Southern colloquialisms!

2)    What kind of child fantasizes about going to what is clearly a lovers' resort?

THIS one. I was a weird child who wanted to be an adult by about age eight. While other kids were decorating their Barbie Dreamhouse or out in the yard playing hide-and-seek, I had a different routine. I would sit at my dining room table, ordering "Vodka Vavooms" from an invisible waiter, which was really just cran-grape in a martini glass. Then I'd take that 'tini to the roof of my dilapidated barn, imagining it was a sexy rooftop bar, drinking, and puffing away on a small twig as if it was a Capri cigarette.

This is all especially strange because neither of my parents ever drank or smoked while I was growing up. Despite this, I was basically a four-two Samantha Jones in the making, and so naturally, when I saw that commercial, I felt I had to go. I even asked to visit the resort as a birthday gift, which looking back is amazing-a kid begging her mom to take her to a place that is obviously made for people to have lots of sex? She said no and, I'm assuming, started researching youth-size chastity belts.

Now, twenty-five years later (ouch), I found myself wondering if I had just imagined this commercial as a kid. That is, until one night when I was at a bar, socializing with friends scrolling through my Instagram feed. There, in a pic drenched in likes, was a shot of my friend Alan, down on one knee, proposing to his girlfriend, in front of the very champagne tub from my memory!

It existed! Hallelujah! I was elated. Obviously for my friend finding true happiness in another human but also because this meant that I had not made up this place in my li'l horny brain and that it was still open for business.

In no time, I was texting Alan:

Congrats on the engagement yada yada yada where on Earth is that champagne glass?!

Thanks Mame-dog. It's in the Poconos, at a resort called Cove Haven. It's amazing, you gotta go!

Cove Haven, huh? It sounded like a short-lived Days of Our Lives spin-off. But then he sent the website. I clicked the link and scrolled through, mouth agape like a preteen boy seeing his first nudie mag. It was glorious. Not only were there elaborately themed suites, but there were multiple bars, performances every night, laser tag, archery, you name it. There was so much adrenaline coursing through my veins that I momentarily blacked out, and when I came to, I had a Visa in my hands and booked a champagne suite for Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, one month away. MLK had a dream, and so did I. A dream to have my own dreams atop the circular bed that was prominently featured on the resort's home page.

I knew the perfect person to take with me: my dear friend and former camp counselor buddy, Hayley. Now, those of you who read my first book might remember Hayley from a few chapters, particularly the one where we ate mushrooms and I kept accidentally setting my faux fur coat on fire with my cigarettes at a Flaming Lips concert. Long story short: I was so out of my gourd that night that I thought the greatest way to ring in midnight would be to pour all our bottles of bubbly into a tub and hop in before it struck twelve. Glamorous in theory, but in reality, it was just a girl tripping balls while sitting in four inches of cold AndrŽ. Not my finest moment.

But this would be so full circle. This wouldn't be a couple of idiots in their early twenties sitting in a birdbath of grocery store champs! This would be two idiots in their early thirties lounging in a giant bubble bath champagne glass! So I texted her with my plan.

Fuck yeah, Mamie!!! she texted back. I need this soooo bad. And she did. Hayley is a mom and a wife, and her husband had just been through a major health scare. In other words, Mama needed a weekend of debauchery out of North Carolina. I knew she'd be the perfect copilot, too. Hayley should be illegal in most states, 'cause that woman is a firecracker. Seriously, I consider myself to be an exuberant, charismatic person, but Hayley makes me look like a baked potato with a wig on.

The plan was in motion. I would fly out from LA and meet her at the closest airport to Cove Haven, in lovely Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, before heading to our luxurious weekend of love.

Three weeks later and there I am, waiting for Hayley in the arrivals area, happy that my weed gummies passed as gummy vitamins through security despite them being skunky as hell. But that wasn't the only thing skunky at baggage claim. "Mamie Rocket!!!!" Hayley screamed from across the room. She was rocking a new hairdo of shaved dark sides and a bleached-out coif on top, like an edgy PepŽ Le Pew. She started barreling toward me, and I say "barreling" because she had clearly drank about a barrel of whiskey on her Detroit layover.

We embraced like I was a soldier coming home from war, Hayley lifting me off the ground and spinning me in 360s.

"Are you ready for the weirdest weekend ever?" I asked.

We piled into our rental, which might as well just have been a go-kart with a car shell on top of it. I can't remember the exact make or model, but something makes me think it was called a Dust? Which was fitting because every time there was a breeze, it felt as though the car was levitating. We were literal Dust in the Wind, and I was terrified. But there was no time to worry about being blown off the road in this wind sock of a car. I had my ride and my ride-or-die chick beside me, and we were about to undergo Operation: Acquire Alcohol.

There are few things I know about Pennsylvania besides the fact that the scenery can get real monotonous as you are driving through the state. But here are a couple of nuggets I know that will hopefully help you in bar trivia one day:

1)    Bret Michaels, the lead singer of Poison and the person whose scalp might be detachable-he's been hiding it under a bandana for thirty years-is from there.

2)    Steelers fans are intense.

3)    Buttloads of Amish people.

4)    The alcohol laws are crazy strict.

That last fact was the only thing that mattered to me in that moment. In Pennsylvania, you have to buy your beer and wine from restaurants and liquor from a sanctioned store. We were tired and jetlagged, and the thought of having to seek out different storefronts for booze made me want to drive into downtown Scranton and quietly pull brown bags of Mad Dog out of sleeping bums' hands. But rather than die by the hand of a vagrant's shiv that night, I called the resort and put it on speaker.

"Cove Haven, this is Barbara, how can I help you?" The woman's voice was so calming, so relaxed. Meanwhile, I responded with the fervor of a woman who'd just been locked up in Thailand for drug trafficking and was allotted ten seconds on the phone with her lawyer. There was no time for punctuation.

"Hi my name is Mamrie Hart and I am checking into a champagne suite tonight I'm on the way there from the Wilkes-Barre Airport and so we won't get there till eleven and I need to know if I can buy wine to be put in the room before it's too late and also what time does the bar close?"

"Slow down, Miss Hart," she replied sweetly. It was a bold move to assume I was single, considering where I was staying for the weekend. Perhaps the desperation to get liquored up in my voice gave it away? "The bar is open till one a.m. And yes, we'd be happy to do that for you. Would you like red or white?"

"Umm, I guess a bottle of each? No. Make it two bottles of red and one white? Wait, no. Two of each . . . and a bottle of champagne."

"Let me get this right-you want two bottles of white, two bottles of red, and one bottle of champagne?" I looked at Hayley, who was doing "bring it home" hand signals like a damn third base coach.

I could sense the judgment in Barb's voice, so I combatted it with my ultimate weapon: my Southern charm. "Five bottles total would be wonderful, Barbara. And thank you in advance for your warm hospitality and impeccable customer service. Looking forward to seeing you shortly." I am 90 percent sure she had her hand pressed to her chest from being so flattered before hanging up the phone.

Hayley and I spent the next hour catching up on life as I drove through the light snowfall. The farther we drove, the more we realized that we were in the middle of nowhere, passing town after town of abandoned businesses and sketchy gas stations.

"Is that it?" I asked, pointing to a massive red heart-shaped sign in the distance. We pulled up closer and, sure enough, the sign read "Cove Haven." "What do you think the next-door neighbors think of this place?" Hayley said, nodding toward the yard across the street covered in broken lawn tools and a rusted-out kids' bouncy horse.

I turned into the gate. The driveway was so dark, it could've been surrounded by water, or a rainforest, or a single-file line of escaped convicts, and we would've had no idea. After what seemed like forever, we pulled up to the check-in center, which from the outside had all the glamour of a senior center, and ran in as fast as we could out of the cold. Who knew that Pennsylvania would be so freezing in January?!

The interior was not much of an improvement. We walked on the old-school carpeting, past the fake champagne tub filled with packing peanuts, to meet the sweet, smiling face of Barbara. "Welcome to Cove Haven!" she said as we strutted in. "You two are the last guests to check in. We're fully booked this weekend." I was taken aback. I didn't realize that so many people still even came to this place. Were they here ironically? Maybe the word had gotten out among Brooklyn hipsters about this frozen-in-time novelty just a few hours away from NYC.

We grabbed the keys to our suite from Barb and hightailed it up the road. As we passed one drab brick building after the next, I started to get nervous. There was not a soul in sight, despite Barb saying they were fully booked. Finally, Hayley broke the tension. "Mamie, be honest with me, is this an extremely complicated murder plot? 'Cause you could've just killed me at home, in that case. I sleep very hard."

"Oh come on," I said, trying to keep the faith. "I'm sure everyone is just passed out from making sweet, sweet love all day long." I forced a smile as we continued driving through what looked like a desolate community college, with row after row of redbrick, ranch-style buildings that looked to be from the seventies. Finally, we spotted our building number and pulled in without saying a word. An abandoned shed with police tape lay on its side in front of us.

What the fuck have I gotten us into? I thought. I've taken my friend away from her adorable daughter and husband, promising a ridiculous adventure, and this is where we're staying? This place was just plain creepy. And this is coming from someone who understands middle-of-nowhere weirdness-after all, I hail from an area that is the home of Andy Griffith and has a huge OxyContin problem. The Land of Opie and Opiates!

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews