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And so April Puke was born. The basic idea, as you may have gathered, is to throw up a whole lot on April Fools' Day, but there is more to it than that. You must throw up in a group of men, and throw up loudly, turning what is normally an act of private shame into a public declaration of pride. The vomit, ideally, soars through the air in an arc and makes an impressive splash upon contact with the ground; some men now stand on ladders to achieve this effect. You should be drunk during April Puke, but you do not need to resort to chugging bottom-shelf swill to make yourself retch—common aids include ipecac, mustard water, the old-fashioned finger-in-the-throat, bloodroot herb, hair from an extremely old and sick goat, and the spines from a toxic cactus. After the act, April Pukers dance in their sick. They slip and slide and roll about in it. There is yelling, there is singing, there is hugging and sometimes kissing and even more, though Danny would rather I not go into all that. The point is to put out what is usually kept inside, to express what is unexpressed, to pour your American soul all over the street and let it mingle with the souls of other men.The April Puke celebrations—for that is what they are, celebrations—have been going on for over a decade, and though there is no April Puke website, no April Puke bylaws or newsletter or gospel, the tradition has spread from Dayton to Akron to Jacksonville to Mobile to Newark to Bridgeport. It's caught on in the in-between places, the lands where men are lost, searching, no longer the backbone of society but some other body part, like one of the less useful fingers. Puking with other men gives them something that bowling leagues and bathhouses gave their fathers and grandfathers: community, a sense of belonging, a space where they can simply live. On Facebook groups and beer review forums across the country these men share tips for turning puke fluorescent colors, stories of April Pukes gone past, and, sometimes, their darkest hopes and dreams and fears."I didn't know what I was doing," says Danny, who has spent his time lately writing a memoir/self-help book titled April Puke: A Mission, mentoring other men, and "just being, man." In fact, he didn't even know what he had until just before the third April Puke, the first official one, when his buddies called him up and asked him if he was going to hold another "puke party." That's when he realized how much he hungered for something, and that something was to spew all over a parking lot with his best friends.There's something else driving the April Puke craze, which is that April Fools' has become a joke. We can all remember the days when our mothers would spend all day coating with mayonnaise and then braising the traditional hams; back then we would frolic in the street in our pope hats and hear our fathers moaning the traditional dirges as they strolled down the street in their traditional masks. Then there would be the vigil in front of the bonfire, the all-night cat hunts, the hallucinations, the rap battles, the moments in the traditional cave when no one knew or asked whose hands were whose.Now? April Fools' is nothing but yet another occasion to exchange greeting cards and get fucked up, a commercialized celebration in a country that doesn't need another. What we need is a way back to what used to be. What we need is April Puke.The vomit, ideally, soars through the air in an arc and makes an impressive splash upon contact with the ground; some men now stand on ladders to achieve this effect.