JeremyOswald.com

Above: Craig Bido catches some shuteye

A couple of weeks ago, Craig Bido (Bee-doe) attended a wedding of someone who was from Oil City, Pennsylvania.  Bido and I crossed paths around 2:30 a.m. in the stairwell of the Arlington Hotel in Oil City, where the wedding reception was held.

You see, my family gathers every few years at a “castle,” which is really some old mansion now run by Christian Retreat Ministries or something.  The Castle is in the hills above Oil City, Pennsylvania, where my dad grew up.  Last time I was in Oil City was more than 10 years ago.  I remember it well since I was in college and my brothers and I were forced to stay in a room with uncomfortable bunk beds and no air conditioning.  When my father asked if we’d like to head to the family reunion this year, we said yes, but we’d definitely like to stay in a the hotel in Oil City, the Arlington Hotel.

The Arlington was originally a Holiday Inn.  When my father was growing up, Oil City was a boomin’ town with a number of oil companies, including Quaker State and Pennzoil, all claiming Oil City as their headquarters.  After most of the oil was pumped from the Earth there, the companies moved to Texas.  Subsequently, the town diminished in size by more than half of the 25,000 person population into its current size of about 11,000 people.  I suppose the Holiday Inn couldn’t support a hotel in a depressed town that size with no real major highway running anywhere close, so the Arlington owners took it over.

I was happy to stay at the Arlington, and on the Saturday night of the reunion, my parents, Josh, Deidra and I went back to Kate’s Bar at the Arlington.  Kate’s was fantastic, just what a small town Midwest bar should be;  pool tables, darts, more AC/DC than I knew existed, NASCAR promotions everywhere, and $6 Bud Light Pitchers.  We made ourselves at home at Kate’s and in doing so, doubled the bar’s clientele.  As time passed and more people started funneling into the bar, Josh made the very astute observation that there were a lot of really hot girls in the hotel, and not just “hot for Oil City.”  We were eventually able to ascertain that there was a wedding reception at the hotel for someone who grew up in Oil City but now no longer lives there, and the wedding was the reason for the staggering surge in hot drunk girls in Oil City.

Once Kate’s Bar became sufficiently crowded with enough drunk souls to make the place feel like a party, Josh, Deidra and I decided to drink until closing time.  We then left Kate’s and took the elevator to our floor.  The Arlington owners had clearly not updated the Elevator since the black gold rush, and I decided to take a picture of the outdated elevator.

While the above picture admittedly sucks, it proves that “everything happens for a reason.”  Because I took this picture, I didn’t get off on my floor and took the elevator to the wrong floor.  And because I got off on the wrong floor, I decided to take the stairs down one level, being that even my semi-inebriated legs could move significantly faster than the outdated elevator.  And because I took the stairs, I ran across Bido, a groomsman who apparently lost his way back to his room and decided that the stairwell of the Arlington was as good a place as any to get some shuteye.

Bido probably thought the tile floor and concrete wall were nice and cool

I didn’t try to talk to the guy, and instead snapped a couple of pictures.  Feeling Bido’s pain, I decided someone should get him back to his room.  I decided I’d find someone from the wedding party who knew the groomsman, and soon came upon two girls crying in their bridesmaid dresses, having one of those “We’re-drunk-at-a-wedding-living-our-most-precious-moments-I-love-you-we’ll-be-friends-forever” heart to hearts.  I happily interrupted them and proudly showed them the pictures I had taken and asked if they knew the guy in the photos.  They identified him as Criag Bido, so I escorted them to Craig Bido and we woke him from his alcohol induced slumber.  The girls helped him back to his room and I went to bed, but not before recalling my adventure to Josh and Deidra.  And finishing a Coors Light given to me by a friendly drunk wedding attendee who had just hit McDonald’s and an ice chest.

Villa Italia has whatever you’re looking for…

The next day, I saw the girls at Villa Italia, one of only a couple restaurants in town.  The girls thanked me for alerting them to Bido’s situation, noting that Bido’s fiancée was super pissed off when they took him back to his room.  I responded that she would’ve been much more agitated had the guy woken up in the stairwell and stumbled in sometime the next morning.  Then I showed the pictures of Bido to the girls and their parents and we all had a great laugh at Bido’s expense.