When I was fourteen years old, my parents and sister went away for the weekend, leaving me home alone.

I think you know where this is going.

Cue the cheesy theme music.

About two weeks before they left, I told my friend Mark. Mark was one of my best friends at the time. He was one of those people who were always on the cusp of actually being popular. The in crowd knew him and would talk to him occasionally, and once in a while he was permitted to hang around with them.

Not so myself. At that point I think I stood about 5'10", and couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds. I wore terribly thick glasses, and had no noticeable fashion sense. I used to let my hair grow for great stretches at a time without a haircut. I guess I wanted long shaggy locks like the 'head bangers' at school, but my hair tended to grow outwards rather than down, giving me what my friends called the 'white man's afro'.

Add to that a certain amount of stupid arrogance, a penchant for math and science, and a wicked temper, and I'll just bet you can guess how many of the cool people hung around with me.

So anyway, I tell Mark and he gets this truly evil grin on his face. "Let's have a party," he says.

There are times in life when you are presented with something so obviously stupid and inconceivable that all you can do is grin back and say, "Okay!"

I forgot about the party for a while, until the weekend approached. My parents and sister were busy packing, as was the German exchange student staying with us. Mark hadn't forgotten at all.

"We still having the party?" he asked.

Shrug. "Yeah, sure." I proceeded to invite a few friends of mine. Darryl Mandryk, Andrea (the girl I had a small crush on) and a couple others.

Mark invited... well... everyone.

It was only seconds after my family had piled into the van and had left when the first party guest showed up.

Dave bounded through my front door, held up a bottle and a couple limes and yelled, "Tequila!"

In the next hour, we locked away most of the valuables and breakables (or so I thought). I also found time to drink somewhere between 8 and 13 tequila shooters.

You should glance back up the page here and remember how much I weighed.

Over the years since that night, bits of memory have emerged from the mass of fog I was in most of the night. I remember...

...staggering down the front walk to greet some guests and falling flat on my face in the grass.

...flopping down beside Dave on the couch, slapping him on the back and saying, 'How ya doin'?' after which he promptly vomited all over the carpet.

...speaking to the minister of my church on the phone. He had called because his daughter Becky had wanted to come to my party. 'What party?' I coyly replied. I'm going to hell.

...sitting on the floor of my parent's bathroom, where a guy I didn't know was wiping a passed out girl's face with a wet cloth and saying she would be fine once she regained consciousness.

...standing on the coffee table and staring over the mass of people that filled the living room. I waved my arms in the air and yelled, 'Get out!' until Melissa's flailing arm caught me in the groin and I fell over.

...lying groggily in my bed and someone leaning over me saying, 'Hey Phil. Joe kicked a hole in the wall.'

...staggering down the hallway, crying and apologizing to Jason's mother as the paramedics packed him up to take to the hospital.

When I finally awoke the next morning, I found Mark passed out on my floor, a small pool of vomit beside him. Very, very slowly, I made my way out of my room and took a look around.

• The living room was literally waist deep in crumpled paper. I have no idea where it all came from.
• Someone had squirted red food coloring all over the inside of the fridge.
• Someone had squirted green food coloring all over my parents' bathroom.
• Someone had thrown a full carton of apple juice at the wall above the basement stairs, where it dripped all down the wall.
• A downstairs window was broken. Outside we found the steam iron and a bottle of malt vinegar.
• The bathroom all the fragile stuff had been locked in was open. Nothing was broken fortunately.
• All my parent's liqueur had been drunk. Luckily the hard stuff wasn't found, but someone downed an entire bottle of Frangelico. Serves them right.
• There was indeed a large hole near the base of the wall outside my bedroom. About where a kick would have landed.

A couple people showed up at points during the day to help clean up, where I got some more of the stories of the evening.

Jason was in the hospital in an alcohol-induced coma. He hadn't woken up yet. It was too loud to use the phones at the house, so Darryl had ran a couple blocks home to call an ambulance. I'm glad he did. Apparently people had been carrying Jason to people's houses, ringing the doorbell and running away. Thankfully, no one had been home.

At one point Joe, the guy who kicked the hole in my wall, had our VCR under his arm and was heading towards the door. Someone stopped him. Thank you, whoever it was.

There were two or three separate drive-bys by the cops, where everyone would flood out the back door, and then flood back in five minutes later.

Mark suggested to me at one point that day that we lie to our parents and cover everything up.

I glanced at the hole. "And how will we explain that?"

He glanced at it. "Well, we could fix it and paint it up and..."

"Sure Mark. That'll work." I went back to shoveling up debris.

We did get the house back into a semblance of order, when my brain fell out the backside of my head again.

One of the popular folks asked me, "So, you having anyone over tonight?"

Oy.

"Sure!" I said, coolness dripping from every pimple. "Spread the word."

My inner voice of sanity was screaming, 'NO! NO! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!" in my head. But the cool voice of adolescent rationalization said, "Well, it can't get any worse, and you can stay sober this time."

I have never spent an evening of more intense paranoia. I would fearfully duck from room to room waiting for something bad to happen. I spent about a half hour at the back door, trying to keep Joe and his buddies from coming in again. I got a little support from a couple people and they did leave. Whew.

It was a lot tamer. No new holes, no crazy damage. Eventually, more people than I could watch over did start pouring in and I darted next door to get my neighbor, who came over and kicked everyone out.

At which point I whispered to the really cool people that they could come back in an hour or so when things had died down.

Sigh.

About ten of the cool girls did come back and sat chatting in my living room for an hour or so. I would have been thrilled by this -- all the coolest hotties in MY living room! -- but I was so sick from stress and my hangover that I just lay on the couch miserably and waited for them to leave.

I slept on the couch that night -- my bedroom still smelled of Mark's Friday night exuberance. The doorbell rang at about 2 a.m.

I stalked over to see who it was, fully intending not even to open it.

It was the cops. Oh lord.

I sat on the couch, vaguely answering questions while one of them stalked through my house collecting evidence. There wasn't much to find -- this evening had been much neater -- so eventually they both left.

The odd thing was that they left me there. Didn't take me anywhere, just left this kid alone in the house that he had so obviously destroyed. Odd.

Okay. Sunday. Mark unloaded the whole story to his folks, and they got the RCMP to find my folks, who packed up as fast as they could and came home.

Where I told them everything. Like there was any other choice at that point.

My mom is the disciplinarian in the family. She's the one who gets mad and yells and screams. She was beyond mad. Mom rocketed all the way across into total shock.

It was Dad who exploded.

I can count on one hand the number of times my father has truly blown up, and still have fingers left over. That right there was the thing that hurt most of all.

I'm really lucky with the folks I have. I didn't get smacked around the room, although I surely deserved it. I did disappoint them pretty badly. After all, my sister was the bad one in the family.

Final tally:

• A lot of things were stolen. My sister's pearl necklace. A lot of assorted jewelry. My father had two ceremonial swords that had been given to him and his father in the army. They were gone. A couple thousand dollars worth of stuff overall.
• Property damage was around a thousand or so.
• The real horror was in Anja's room. Anja was the German exchange student. Someone had REALLY gone nuts in there, tearing up photos and traveler's checks, trashing her stuff. I can't even imagine the horror stories she took home.
• My room was mostly untouched, something that really rankled my sister. This was probably due to the fact that I was passed out in there a good chunk of the weekend.
• Jason came out of the coma a couple days later. He's just fine.
• I was 'grounded indefinitely'. Pretty lenient, all things concerned.

Jason's mother's boyfriend was a lawyer. He came over and sat Mark and I down, along with a couple other guys from the neighborhood and we summarized everything we could remember of the weekend. We also compiled a list of names of everyone at the party, which the police then added to, on the basis of 'If this person was there, so were these people'.

This letter, once completed and all names removed, was mailed to every person on our list. About 130 kids in total. Over the next few nights, we got a LOT of parents calling us saying, 'Thanks for the letter, but my son/daughter wasn't at a party this weekend.' 'Sorry, but they were identified as being there.' There were a lot of people grounded that week.

Around Wednesday night, after all the damage was cleaned up and all the cops and lawyers were gone and everything was settling back to normal, the doorbell rings. It was the cops from late Saturday night.

Apparently, they had just come back on shift and had taken it upon themselves to 'let my folks know what happened on the weekend', obviously not having taken the time to check the main files on the incident. They presented my father with their impressive find: an empty vodka bottle and a stained knife someone had been using to 'hot-knife' on our stove.

They asked him, "Do you know what happened here on the weekend?"

My father looked at them like they were nuts.

My grounding lasted effectively for about three months. Normally, I was a pretty quiet kid at home, and didn't get into any trouble, so I was let off easy. My sister took a lot longer to forgive me.

The oddest thing that happened as a result of that night was that damned letter. A copy was sent to the junior high school I attended, when it ended up in the school system files. For years, when guidance counselors across the city got word of some dumb kid planning a party while his folks were away, this letter would come out of the files and be given to them.

An abridged version appeared in a special newspaper supplement that Christmas, as a warning to parents that this sort of thing happened all the time. I've been told it was republished a few times since then.

Over the years when I would tell this story to people, there was always someone who would recognize the story, point a finger, and say, "That was YOUR party? Wow!"

So, how was my own popularity affected by this little drama? Well, for a week, I was the center of attention as everyone kept asking me, "Are you grounded? What happened? My parents would have KILLED me!"

After that, it was years of hearty claps on the back and shouts of, "So Phil! Gonna have another party?" I got heartily sick of that one.

But everything settled back down to pretty much what it was before. The only thing that really stuck with me as the years passed was that stupid hole that Joe kicked in the wall across from my room. My parents didn't repaint that wall for YEARS.

I got the point.

Wow. You were really, REALLY stupid.

What were those comic strips again?

Talk about something else dumb.

Take me home, big fella