4 Times People Had to Party to Survive

4 Mark Wahlberg

Though he might now primarily be known for his acting career and being the face in that one meme from The Happening, Mark Wahlberg, or Marky Mark, was a bona fide rock star back in the day. He was living a blessed life full of Funky Bunches, Calvin Klein ads and blinding old Vietnamese men. When an opportunity to go party at the Toronto Film Festival presented itself, he canceled his earlier plans, bailing on a flight he’d already booked for the next morning from Boston to L.A.

That night that Wahlberg chose to follow the party was September 10, 2001. The next morning was September 11, 2001. The plane he was supposed to be riding on, from Boston to Los Angeles, well, let’s just say it made a very famous emergency landing, where the emergency was due to the fact that it never really “landed.” Missing a flight due to your desire to keep the party going is not usually the high point of anyone’s life, but for Wahlberg, it was the only reason that his life didn’t end right there. No matter how confident he is that he could have stopped it.

3 Clifton Vial

If you’re venturing out into unfriendly territory, especially during less than ideal weather, double-especially in somewhere as remote as Alaska, you should probably bring some supplies. If there’s a good chance you might get stuck somewhere with less-than-frequent road traffic and shelters few and far between, some water, a firesteel or survival lighter, and at least a little bit of food would be a wise use of trunk space. Or, you know, you could just toss a 12-pack of Coors Light in there and let the good times roll.

A man named Clifton Vial, while driving through a brutal winter storm near Nome, Alaska, ended up with a stuck car equipped with the latter. He had decided to drive out on the roads to, and I am not joking here, see how bad the roads were. They were bad. (I’m starting to think the cans in the back might not have been the first interaction with alcohol he’d had that night.) When his car got lodged in a snow bank where it, and he, remained for three days, he turned to the 12 Silver Bullets in his trunk for sustenance. The temperature-sensitive mountains on those cans must have been blue as hell. Not a bad idea, given that any beer drinker can tell you that Coors Light is basically water anyways.

2 Moe Berg

The amount of alcohol involved in this story isn’t as well documented, but instead, we’re looking at one of the most fateful parties from World War II. This was a dinner party where the guest of honor was famous physicist Werner Heisenberg, who at the time was hard at work trying to make the Nazis a working atom bomb. And you thought your employment history looked bad on a resume. The guest we’re talking about, however, was a man named Moe Berg, who was a major league baseball catcher, a polyglot and an American spy. I understand Babe Ruth hit more dingers, but this dude deserves more fame for just how much he fucking ruled.

Berg’s mission that night was to attend the party with the explicit purpose of cozying up to — and I assume, boozing it up with — Heisenberg himself in order to figure out how close to an A-Bomb the Axis powers were. Berg turned on the charm and ended up walking his new best friend, the Nazi physicist, back to Heisenberg’s hotel. It was on this walk that Berg deduced they weren’t having much luck, hopefully when Heisenberg drunkenly wailed something like, “Why is making an atom bomb so hardddddddd??” 

He was probably doubly relieved, first because of the no-nuke thing, but secondly because if he’d figured out that they were making good progress, his job was to assassinate the man. If you think getting caught between bases is a pickle, try getting out of World War II Europe after killing the Nazi’s best bomb guy.

1 People with Antifreeze Poisoning

If you’re upset that the last one didn’t involve enough alcohol for your tastes, here’s one that’s all alcohol, no party. It’s also maybe the only case in which the alcohol itself, devoid of any stroke of luck or surrounding circumstances, saves lives. If someone finds themselves in a situation where they’ve ingested antifreeze or another substance containing ethylene glycol, a drink even more dangerous than rail tequila, alcohol can be used to save their life. 

The ethanol from your liquor of choice competes with the ethylene glycol, and your liver processes the booze instead of the toxins. In one case, doctors even piped whiskey straight into a patient’s stomach after he accidentally drank brake fluid. Of course, don’t read this and think if you accidentally chug some car juice, you can head for the liquor cabinet instead of the hospital and sleep it off. Anytime you drink poison, it’s best to have a doctor involved. And if you think this whole thing sounds straight out of an episode of House, you wouldn’t be too far off.