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| Although basically no straight man will wear a piece of drapey fabric when you call it a sarong or a sari or a negligee, the numbers shoot up dramatically when you call it a toga. As it happened, I was invited to a toga party at a very prominent realtor's house Friday night by Laura, of struck-by-lightning fame. Amazingly, when I was contemplating going, it was for what would be my first time ever in a toga. Now, I know what you're thinking: "But Ryan," you say, "didn't you go to college?" Well, yes. But Animal House be damned, toga parties just weren't that popular. I suppose that being a 2000 year old tradition, wearing a toga can't exactly be called original, but I have to question the fact that nearly every party at Vandy was "Pimps and 'Ho's"-themed. Well, that's not quite accurate. Sometimes it was a variant. Thugs and 'Ho's, Gangstas and 'Hoes, Bankers and 'Ho's, Frat Boys and 'Ho's -- you get the picture. The 'Ho part was pretty constant. Clearly these themes were imagined by guys who don't masturbate enough.
So this was to be my first toga party.
"So do I use a sheet?" I ask Laura.
"No - just get some fabric from Wal-Mart; it's cheaper that way and it looks better."
So I agree. So I go over to Laura's and we head over to Wal-Mart. The clerk in the fabric section looks profoundly bored, which isn't surprising because the fabric section long ago won the battle for the title of "most boring department in a store." The rest of the departments stopped competing, it's so boring. But I slip into the fabric section like Chris Farley into a McDonald's, and not 15 seconds later I'm purring, "Ooh, is this poplin?" So we go back and forth, Laura and I, over what to wear. She goes for bright purple rayon, I vote white twill. Twill wins out! (I am buying, after all.)
Now, I've done some toga research before all this, naturally, but when it comes time to dress in my toga I decide against wearing a tunic underneath (which is what the Romans wore), in favor of wearing skintight white boxer-briefs. To my knowledge they no longer make tunics, which is what the Romans wore under their togas, but they certainly still make nakedness, which is what the Romans wore under their tunics! So I'm going as faux nude. It turns out, however, that although the Romans apparently walked around in these things all day without so much as velcro, sustaining a toga when you have basically no body contours, in the 21st century is a tougher proposition! The Cliff's Notes version of the conversation that ensued reads as follows:
Laura: "That looks terrible. What are you doing wrong?"
Ryan: "I don't know. I'm doing my best."
Laura: "How does it look that bad? I don't understand."
Ryan: "This is a disaster. Where's the strychnine?"
Laura: "No, no, it looks good now. Really. Let's go drink."
So off we go. Now, I'm stone sober, but it's raining pretty hard, and I'm wearing bulky sandals that kind of impede my ability to, say, use the gas and brake pedals competently. So I'm pulling onto the bypass when it strikes me what scene would confront a cop who pulled me over for, say, sandal-induced erratic driving: a toga-wearing white male who turns out on pat-down to be essentially naked, with twigs in his hair (laurels, you dig?). Even absent any moving violations, I'm pretty sure that's the thing that would make at least the news, and probably COPS. So I drive very carefully to Laura's house.
It's worth mentioning at this point that my public decency is being preserved by no more than a dozen strategically placed staples. There are staples, industrial staples, that would fasten cloth pretty well. I assume. These were the kind of staples designed to imbue a few pages of onionskin with a hint of stucktogetherness. So as I walked into the party, naturally, I felt them starting to come loose. Immediately I set eyes on a cuuuuuute guy in a purple toga by the name of Daniel. He and his brother (in my mortification I forget both their names, and have to refer to them for a while as "the cute one" and "the not-cute one" until I get that straight) shake hands with me, and I'm introduced to their mother, who promptly observes that my toga's falling down and offers to pin it. This is bad. The fact that, as she begins to pin, and I stammer apologies, I notice that essentially everyone else is either wearing clothes underneath his toga or in lieu of same, is worse. Had I had a drink at this point, I could have slugged it and prayed for the alcohol to take effect quickly. Had that drink been beer in a bottle, I could have busted the bottle on the wall, tripped myself on my toga, and spared myself and my family further shame by offing myself. But as it was I had to gasp when she started to safety-pin directly in front of my crotch, and then laugh when I thought to myself, "Just close your eyes and think of England."
The host, whom I'll call JA, was exceptionally generous after I got my costume in order. He told me to have whatever I liked. I was tempted by some Glenlivet single-malt scotch, but Laura's brother Drew kept saying,
"Getcrownandcokemancrownandcokesgoodshitmangetcrownandcoke." Which was pretty convincing. So I pour myself a good 5 oz, and drink up.
It's not that I don't remember anything after that. It's more that nothing interesting happened save that I sabotaged Daniel's night by telling the girls he was hitting on where I went to college, and that I drank with Drew. At some point JA, profoundly drunk, asks what I want to drink. Having had two big-gulp sized Crown and cokes, I say, "water." he gives me water. 5 mins later he asks me what I want to drink, and I ask for water again, please. I get some red drink with a lot of vodka. So I look at Drew and lean over and say, "MAKE SURE I GET BACK TO YOUR PARENTS' HOUSE" and make sure he nods, then bottoms-up.
The other interesting thing to happen is that one of the non-Drew, non-young, male partgoers
tells me repeatedly for about 15 minutes about how hot I am. I don't
think he meant to go on and on as much as he kept forgetting what he'd
just said, and expressing the same sentiment 40 or 50 times, each time
as though the first.
After another drink, true to his word, Drew gave me the nod to leave. Now, Drew's a cute guy, and I got along with him very well. But to say that Drew has been tested by interested gay guys is to do an injustice to understatement. More gay guys have been lost in pursuit of Drew than sailors and swimmers have met gasping deaths at sea. Essentially all of Laura's friends are gay; essentially all of those have crushed on Drew; he's obviously cool with gay people; he's slept with none of them. I'm willing to stipulate he's straight. I talk to him for another four hours, then drive home sober, though still entogaed, because the toga is warmer than the shirt I'd worn earlier. Funny looks at the McDonald's drive-thru, I'll tell you.
So the next night I'm out with Laura, on my way to do some Christmas shopping when my friend John calls. We've been trying to come up with some way to send off our friend Brooks, who's joining the military and shipping off in two weeks. We'd thought of strippers, but what does John suggest instead? A toga party. Must be something in the water.
Now, writers often talk about how story ideas come to them, and then more or less write themselves. I've had numerous of these experiences myself. This post was not one of them - this one was nagged out of me. So, you may be asking, "what was the point?" You may continue to ask that.
| | |
| Reflections on the Drive Home from the MallI have had a headache since about 2 pm today. Still, I decided to get a haircut after work because my head was beginning to look like my head felt: namely, vaguely bulging and structurally unsound. Now, I have always wanted floppy Disney-prince style hair that I could part in the middle and that would kind of shimmer, you know. But that wasn't in the cards. Literally every time I go for a haircut I am told "Your hair is so thick!" Now, taking that literally would seem to suggest that I had a lot of hair-crowding. That my head was a kind of hair Calcutta. I suspect that what they really mean, but aren't well educated enough to say, is, "Your hairs are so thick!" because really, I have terrible boar-like hair. In frontier days natives would have singled me out for scalping because of the scouring capacity that just radiates from my head-quills. So it doesn't flop. It doesn't have the Disney shimmer, either. My hair is of a kind of color that makes midwestern farmers want to plant corn in my scalp. I'd kill to be a natural blond. I have a thing for blonds, and it would go with my narcissism. Anyway, so I decide to go to the mall, stop at Wal-Mart first to get toothpaste and motor oil, and while I'm there I spend about 40 minutes on the phone with a phone sex operator. But I don't like to talk on the phone while I drive, so I say goodbye, go, get my haircut, and I wander around the mall a little bit, with my "I'm a prick" attitude going, wondering vaguely at what point acting like a prick becomes being a prick. And I see girls and give them: no recognition, because it's so much easier for girls to get the cute guys, etc, there being so many more straight than gay boys, and I like to punish them for this. Now, the irony is that I could have basically any girl, because their defenses go down as soon as they find out you're gay, and every girl loves a tortured soul. I'm surprised more straight guys don't fake it. It would take a pretty good actor, I guess.
As much shit as I give myself for being a bad driver, the annoying things I do (like severely underestimating how much time I have to turn) are at least acute annoying things. But on the way back I had to deal with one of those chronically annoying things, the slow driver. I call this thing reflections on the drive home from the mall because it took me so long to get from there to here. Anyway, the Hot Springs Village, a retirement community, is between my home and anything interesting, so I have to put up with slow drivers pretty much all the time.
You know how Tolstoy said, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way?" Well, the HSV version is, "All good drivers are alike; none of them lives in the Village." The standard explanation for why older drivers are so slow is that they're compensating for slower reflexes. I think that they're actually just already fractionally dead. They've slipped one foot into the hot bath of the netherworld, and they're waiting to get acclimated, all while at the greatest possible risk of ramming their boat-cars into whole families of people with decades instead of months to live. Fuck me and my metaphors. Anyway, my uncle, who is a pharmacist, refers to people from the Hot Springs Village as "HSV positive," which is so funny I still almost choke. I thought on the way home of calling it HoSpice Village, because it's basically a cheap place to die, albeit one with a lot of golf courses. But I digress, because the car I was stuck behind was a model no person from the Village would drive. Sporty etc.
Market economics would suggest that the car was manufactured to be capable of going more than 25 miles per hour, but this is wild speculation. I have seen nurses carry premature babies faster than this fuckjob was driving. I finally came to the conclusion that the driver must be a drug trafficker with a life sentence's worth of Peruvian white in the trunk, and who therefore drives as if every street in Hot Springs were a school zone. So finally I whip around her just as we got to a turn that would have bottled me in behind her for the entire duration of my drive home. This manuever was highly dangerous and illegal, but the risk to my life was much less than waiting to get stuck behind her, in which case I would have had to stop in the middle of the highway and wait for her to advance far enough to give me room to floor the gas pedal, remove my seatbelt, and End It by driving into a bridge abutment. And she made just that turn! Behind me! She's probably passing my house about now.
So that was 20 minutes out of my day. I expect this double-dip to keep nags at bay for a while. Especially bay nags. I know too much for my own good. Horse jokes.
My headache is gone!
Oh, the phone sex operator was my friend Danny, btw. Ha ha. Fools.
| | |
| I get a lot of flak for not updating more often than I do, but my goal here is quality, not quantity. I could recount the whole period of my weekend, which contained a lot of misadventures, underage drinking, near-alcohol poisoning, and bare asses (absolutely perfect bare asses, too). But I deserve to have to focus on the end of the trip, which was scary and touching in a very meaningful way.
I went camping with my friend John and his cousins Curtis and Aaron. I confess I don't exactly understand how Curtis and John and Aaron are all related, but I think they'd all be kosher to date each other, if God were that benevolent and I could watch. Anyway, Aaron joined us the second night, along with two friends of his, C------- and Justin. I'm not blanking out C--------'s name for privacy purposes; I just don't remember it. I kept hearing it and then immediately forgetting it. What can I say - he's a forgettable person. Douchebag.
Anyway, the whole ostensible point of this camping trip was to climb Forked Mountain, which is one of the only interesting mountains in the Ouachitas. The thing's a huge vertical slab of sandstone, and I would say it's shaped like a shark's tooth, but what it's really shaped like is a dog's molar, with two humps, one smaller than the other. The base of the mountain is littered with hunks of sandstone ranging from the basketball-sized to the Volkswagen-sized, but the top of it is reassuringly solid, for the most part.
Now, to interject here, I'm a complete chickenshit as regards heights. My older cousins used to take me on the Hot Springs Mountain Tower and hang me over the bannister on the stairs to the top - really terrifying stuff. I'm trying to remember whether they asked me beforehand whether I had to pee. It would have been wise, because I definitely would have sprayed some motherfuckers if I hadn't been on E. Anyway, my previous experience climbing Forked Mountain featured, in one very hairy near-vertical spot, the following plea:
"Me: John, here's the deal. I will hang here like this. You, Curtis, and Aaron climb to the top, climb back down to the truck, drive to within cellphone range of civilization, and call me a helicopter. I will pay whatever it takes."
So naturally I was somewhat hesistant to go that same way again, when it was clear to me there were easier ways to be found. My uncle Eddie, for example, still climbs the mountain every year, and he's pushing 60. So I tell them I'll meet them at the top, and set out on my way. There is, in fact, an embarassingly easy way up, and I get to the top in less than 10 minutes, winded but triumphant. It was like 10 more minutes before anybody else got there.
So we chill on top of the mountain for a while. John takes a couple of years off all of our lives by dancing around on the edge of a 500 foot cliff, turning he head to look around, and doing things that would make your average person lose his balance in, say, a parking lot. But eventually we decide to head down, because Curtis has to be back at his church to give a sermon, and Aaron has to mark the road to camp so his mother and stepfather can find the place and drop off a replacement tire.
So we start back down, Curtis leading, me second, C------ douchebag behind me, others in some order I'm not sure of. It's smooth sailing for a while, and then we reach an intersection of two rock faces that traces down the edge of the mountain at a pretty steep slope. I am not, I have to say, paying much attention at this point, so I brace myself to go down. It's kind of like a very steep crab-walk situation. Some ass friction is involved to keep onesself from slipping. So I start down, very wary because it looks to me at this point that they're attempting to go down the same way they went up (which is to say, the suicidal way). But I'm making it, and doing ok. Until C------- slips and slides on his ass into me, so we both go slipping down the side of the mountain for a while. We don't actually go that far, but we're both desperate to stop, because the angle is such that if we didn't stop soon, we'd have stopped about 200 feet down the mountain, in somewhat poorer condition than before we slipped. So, minus a few square inches of skin, and trying to do the physics of what just happened in my head, I say, "This is insanity. There has to be an easier way down."
So I climb over the rock face to what looks like a shallower slope, and start down. It worked on the way up, right?
Well, about 45 minutes later, after I'd been lost for 30 minutes, it struck me that the error I had made was in not realizing that Forked Mountain has only one top, which is easy to find, but a couple of hundred million square feet of forested, treacherous bottom. And that my goal was not "get off the mountain," but "get back to Curtis' truck." Which is a considerably smaller target, for those who aren't good at math.
They say if you're lost in the woods, you should sit down and wait to be rescued. "They" are obviously females. I don't know any man who wouldn't make at least a half-assed effort to find his way again. That's not to say that choosing to try to find my own way back to the truck wasn't stupid, just probably inevitable. But I've learned that doing a stupid thing is a stupid thing, even if you're a smart person. So I start trying to hike/climb (VW boulders, remember) in the direction I think John's truck is. Every once in a while I yell "Marco" to see if I'm even on the right side of the mountain. It's after about 30 minutes of no response that I start to really panic. In another stupid move, I've brought no water. There is a creek at the bottom of the mountain (if, that is, I'm on the southern side of it), but to get to it I'd have to walk in exactly the opposite direction of where they'd be, if they were looking for me. But "thirsty" becomes a whole different kind of thirst when it seems your next drink will not come for hours, if not days. I'm covered with sweat, but I'm quite conscious that it gets cold starting at about 6 o'clock. And finally, I am comprehensively exhausted. Trying to make good time in the direction I think I need to go, while remaining vigilent about the ankle-snapping gaps between rocks (sometimes invisible beneath leaves and pine needles), is taxing the little energy I've gotten from food in the last three days.
At some point, after reflecting on what personal flaws of mine have gotten me into this mess, and wondering how many people I'm going to inconvenience in the process of getting out of it, I hear somebody yelling. I have just found an old logging road, and it's a real question whether to respond or keep going in this direction. The person yelling is yelling from uphill, and whether I can actually make it to him is in serious doubt. But I decide that if somebody is looking for me, and risking getting lost himself, I have to try, so I yell back. After a couple of rounds of this I see it's John. John is good not only to have looked for me, but, having found me, for asking me questions about things he assumes I know about ("does a snake hang on after he bites, or let go?"), so I won't feel quite so embarassed. Honestly, I'm too exhausted to be embarassed, but I note that he's made the effort, and I'm thankful for it even then.
We get back on the road and I start vomiting. At first nothing comes up. My thinking is a little fuzzy, but dry heaving like this terrifies me. Eventually I do cough up breakfast, and am amazed, even then, that there's any left. I have an encylopedic knowledge of a lot of shit, including a lot of medical shit, and at this point I'm concerned that, despite the fact that it's only 70 degrees or so outside, I'm suffering from heat stroke. I feel more or less like I'm going to die, or at least pass out. My vision swims. It turns out, about as I had expected, that someone has drunk the water bottle I left at the truck. I vomit some more. John and I had collected Aaron, but Curtis is still in the woods looking for me. I'm kind of like a videocamera nobody's watching the feed from. Shit happens, but it doesn't really affect me.
After a lot of yelling from John and Aaron, Curtis shows up. They tell me that the other two had decided some time ago to walk back to camp. I am not really affected by the news. I am affected when, on the way back, I see that they've put logs and other obstructions across the road to slow our way. This is, to say the least, distressing to me.
When we get back to camp, having picked up Justin and douchebag (Justin was actually the bigger douchebag, but if C----- hadn't slid into me I might never have gotten into the whole mess) on the way, I am again distressed to see that, while I want nothing in the world so much as something wet, Justin and douchebag grab the last two sodas without so much as looking back at anyone else. The rest of us scavenge half-full water bottles from around camp. I drink slowly, so as not to throw up or anything. Curtis is obviously pissed about something, and I realize that, because he stayed to look for me, he's going to be late to his sermon if he makes it at all (he says, when I apologize, that it's not me he's pissed at, but at C----- and Justin, for leaving instead of helping look, and for drinking everything when we got back, despite having the least need of it; I suspect that having missed his sermon and knowing he was going to get bawled out for it is a big piece, too, though). John and I went to put rocks and sticks at the end of the road, as Aaron had promised he'd do, and we met Aaron's parents as we were doing it. If they hadn't gotten lost on the way, they'd have passed the road and been lost for hours (as, indeed, Aaron and I had gotten lost the night before - there are dozens of roads, and they all look the same). So, for me, with no way to notify anyone, Curtis was willing to miss his sermon and Aaron was willing to let his mother and stepfather get lost in the national forest. All three of them, Curtis, Aaron, and John, could easily have gotten lost themselves. How can you repay such people?
I will try very hard to find out.
| | |
| It has come to my attention that someone (the offending party) has been
spreading a version of events quite different from mine, or from the
actual version of what happened. I would normally be content not
to talk about it, but as it took place in front of maybe 60 or 70
people, I figure it's not really a private matter anyway, and I'm tired
of the IMs from people who think they have the story straight. I'll
start at the beginning:
I got off work at 5 and starting thinking about my plans for the
weekend, this time with a lot more philosophy about life and death
(specifically, how much I valued a night in Little Rock as opposed to
the risk of explosive rending death on the interstate) than such
thinking usually requires. I start making phone calls, to David
to see if he and his bf are going to be in LR for the night (on
weekends they sometimes come to Hot Springs), and to other people in
and around The Rock.
Finally I call Brent, subject of a previous weblog entry under the name
"Randy." Brent's former boyfriend, who was "Trey" in the earlier
post, but whom I will here call "Jared," is a former friend of
mine. The fact that he's a former friend instead of a friend is
partially my fault - I mouthed off to him one night and he refused to
accept my repeated and sincere apologies. Note, because it's
funny given Friday's events, that he told me I was a "bad drinker." But
I'm getting ahead of myself. Brent and I started talking online
in maybe February, and it was through him, in a sense, that I met
"Jared." By "in a sense" I mean that Jared IMed me threatening to
"fuck me up" for talking to Brent, his ex. When Jared later walked into
Jester's, my bar (essentially), instead of having him thrown out I sat
down beside him and said, "Jared, I presume?" with a big smile on my
face, because doing things like that amuses me from time to time.
Oh, so back to the narrative. I called Brent, whom I've never met
in person, and said, "I know you've got a very busy social schedule and
all, but I'll be in Little Rock tonight in case you were thinking of
going." It turned out that he was on his way to Little Rock with
some friends. Sweet! So I told him I'd see him later at the
Factory.
9:20ish
I got to Little Rock, parked at my friend David's apartment, and tried
to call him (he was already out with his boyfriend). He didn't
answer, and I 1. didn't quite remember how to get to the Factory and 2.
didn't want to have to drive back thence anyway, so I called a cab.
Time elapses. This wild-looking guy with long white hair walks up
from the opposite side of the building, and asks if I called a cab. I
said that I did, and start to walk back. He then asks, "can I borrow
your cell phone?" to which I guess the only polite response is
"yes," so I handed him my phone, with some raised eyebrows. He makes a
call, I ask him where he wants me, in the cab. He says, "get in
the back." I start to get in the back and he says, "It smells
like gas back there because there was a leaking gas can in it, but I
threw it out." So I force a laugh, while in fact mortified at the
fact that, after taking so much time picking out
complementarily-smelling personal care products, I am going to end up
at the Factory smelling like a truck stop. The driver pretty much
completes the nightmare by spraying some atrocious cherry-scented air
freshener liberally throughout the car. Turns out that the
cab-driver 1. with absolute disregard for his own and others' safety
and the conservation of his brake pads, sees nothing wrong with gunning
the engine after a stoplight even though it's apparent he's going to
have to, in this case, slam on his brakes at the next one, 2. went to
Stonybrook School for Boys and Harvard, where he got a BA in
Mathematics before a family tragedy led him to go on a 20-year drug
binge, and 3. works at the Salvation Army, despite having a deeply felt
and eloquently expressed hatred of most Christians. Anyway, he
drops me off around 10, which I hate, but I'm trying to catch David
before he goes home for the night, which is usually pretty early.
10:00
It turns out that, even getting there at 10, I've missed him. I
reconcile myself to this, get a drink from the bar, and start sending
text messages.
11ish
My friend J and her friends show up, some of whom I've met before and
whose names I'm surprised to find I remember. We hang out for a
while, I try to harangue her into letting me buy her a beer, she
agrees. I like walking around with her because she's cute as a
button, really. Very Hillary Swankesque in that she'd make a very
cute boy.
11:30ish
I call Brent to make sure he's still planning on putting in an
appearance, and about that time Jeremy (I think is his name; my brother
would kill me for not remembering), who played basketball with my
little brother, bumps into me, absolutely DESTROYED.
he rubs my ass a little bit, and then stumbles over into the next
room. I go back to the bar to get my third and final drink for
the night (the gasoline fumes upset my stomach considerably and, as I
hadn't eaten anything since noon, the drinks weren't sitting too well),
but with an eye toward finding Jeremy again to prevent him from
doing something (read: someone) he'll regret. He and my brother weren't
that close, but I still feel protective of the kid, who is 18, 19
max. So I start looking for him. At some point I see Brent, at
the bar, so I go up to him and ask, "Hey Brent, have you seen a blond
kid about this tall in a white button-up shirt?" He starts to turn
around and ask how I know his name and then goes, "Ryan!" and so we
hug, and I talk to him for a bit (he hadn't seen Jeremy). BC, the
Channel 4 weather guy, is there, much cuter than he looks on TV, but
he's not having any effect on Brent, because Brent is in a different
media market and doesn't recognize him.
Anyway, Brent had to get back to his friends or something to he pinches
my nipple and walks into the lounge. I continue my search for Jeremy,
and when it takes me back into the lounge I see that someone is holding
Brent back and that furthermore Jared is there, also surrounded by some
people. I ask Brent if he's ok, he says yes. Jeremy isn't there,
so I go back into the other room, essentially giving up (the kid wants
to get wasted, he can take responsibility for his actions). I had
actually thrown half of my drink away when I started looking for
Jeremy, and I'm sobering up quickly (a trait I share with my brother,
who can go from smashed off his ass to stone sober in two hours).
This time I see Brent on the dance floor, and he invites me to dance
with him. I am a lot of things, but a dancer I'm not. Nonetheless
I step up to join him, because we haven't really had a chance to talk,
and because he's the cutest guy in the bar, and it's very flattering.
So I step up (the dance floor at the Factory is raised about 8 inches
off the ground) and join him. He puts up with my lame dancing
gamely, starting to do some really advanced ass-shaking stuff which he
then says, "oh, you probably can't keep up with that," in a
good-natured way, and laughs. So we're talking, and manage to
have a very good conversation, especially seeing as we're both gyrating
in the middle of a lot of other people and where the music's pretty
loud.
What set him off I have no idea, but I barely have time to register
that Jared is now surging through the dance floor before he has shoved
me back away from Brent and starts screaming "fucking bitch, i'm gonna
beat the fucking shit out of you." This is all that Jared says
for the rest of the night, to an extent suggestive that, say, all other
words and phrases were copyrighted, and he wished to avoid paying
royalties to use them. A kind of berzerko leitmotif for the
evening, hereinafter "FBIGBFSY." So a bouncer comes and gets Brent,
which I would italicize if I knew how, and I'm thinking, "what the
fuck?" so I go after them. Jared is still yelling at me, and my
attitude is: bemusement. I don't get in fights. Even if I were in
a fight, I think I'd just laugh at the thought I was in a fight, which
is not a good strategy from an evolutionary standpoint, I admit.
So I go outside and the bouncer's telling Brent to leave. I say, "that
guy just assailed me, it wasn't Brent's fault." Bouncer says, "you two
shut up and leave, or you're both going to be on the concrete." I
reply, "excellent. I'm calling the police, then; I'm sure the ABC
will look kindly on an assault charge's being filed." The Bouncer
has told us that we can't stand in front of the bar, and I have ignored
him, but Brent's walking off. Cognizant that I can't both talk to
the police and chase Brent down (and that, as I was just calling the
police to cause the Factory trouble, it wasn't worth my time), I tell
the dispatcher that I'd been assaulted at a bar, but that I'd thought
of a better way too handle it, and run off after Brent. I get
about halfway to the parking lot when I hear "FBIGBFSY!!!"
accompanied by what sounds like running. I can't actually say
that Jared was running, because I didn't turn around (not taking the
threat too seriously), but he kept screaming. Then I hear what
definitely is running, and by the time it sounds about 20 feet behind
me I turn around and see Bobby, the guy who had held Brent in check
earlier, expertly escorting Jared to the ground. I have heard
accounts of this that says that Bobby was starting to beat Jared up,
but that isn't the case. Bobby's back was to The Factory, and
Brent and I were the only people (besides Jared) who could see anything
he was doing, which was hold Scott's arms fighting to keep him on the
ground. Jared's very elflike and fragile-looking, so any actual beating
would have been apparent afterward. I walk over and say very
calmly (remember, "detached bemusement"), "Jared, you need to just
chill. There's no reason for this." He screams at me, with more
hate than I've ever seen in a human being, "WHY ARE YOU HERE!!?!"
I don't know on what level this question is meant - whether he means
here, at this point in his life, here in Little Rock, here in the
parking lot, or what, so I just shrug and said, "I like the Factory."
Now Bouncer walks up, and though Jared was clearly subhumanly berzerk,
Bouncer is also displaying a really formidable amount of anger, which
is understandable: here he'd thrown out the wrong two people, and
argued with them about it, to boot. So he tells Bobby to let him
(Jared) up and says, "YOU" pointing to Jared, "GET IN YOUR CAR AND
LEAVE." Jared starts screaming again, this time about how Brent's
supposedly drunk and underage, and Bouncer keeps yelling, "GET IN YOUR
CAR NOW." Finally Bouncer tires of this, and escorts Jared to his
car, Jared all the while screaming back at us. For a while
Bouncer stands by Jared's car, appearing to pin the door shut, while
Jared screams some more. Brent, I have to say, was not making
matters any better by yelling back to him stuff like "the dick wasn't
that good, anyway." At some point the yelling turns on Jared's
part to piteous weeping, and I remember that I haven't tabbed out, so
the bar still had my debit card and driver's license. I tell
Brent goodbye and walk back into the Factory just as Jared is driving
off. I tell the other bouncer, who had stayed at the door, "I was
involved in this," pointing with my thumb, "I'm just going back in to
tab out." He nods. I tab out, say some goodbyes, come back out,
and this time Bouncer is back. Unsure how directional his anger
at the situation was, I held up my hands surrender-like as I walked out
and said, "I just had to tab out." He said to me, "Listen, you
and your friends can come back in now if you want. He (Jared) was
so calm when he came up to me, I had no idea." I tell him that it
was he-said, he-said, and that he wasn't a mindreader, and wasn't to be
blamed for it. We shook hands and he said something to the effect
that we didn't have to worry, Jared wasn't going to be back in there
again,* and I told him thanks and left.
Brent had invited me to go to Backstreet with them, but I had forgotten
that there was an ATM at Backstreet and, not having enough cash for the
cab ride back (from Backstreet, that is, which is much farther from
David's apartment), I declined.
Brent told me later how the rest of the night had gone (at least,
according to him, but this behavior would not surprise me in the least):
They left for Backstreet, parked, and Jared pulled up beside
them.
Decker, the driver, asked Brent if he wanted to reverse out of there
and leave. Jared got out and stood in back of the car, trying to stop
Brent and his friends from pulling out. They got out of the
car. Jared started screaming, "Kill me, kill me, I want to die!"
and then hit Brent or something, at which point Bobby stepped in the
way. Jared threatened Bobby that he had a gun in his truck, which makes
me suspect he was less than genuine about his desire to die, as he
could have popped off a round in an industrial parking lot somewhere,
and Ended It easily. Instead, Brent and Co. drove off and Jared
chased them around LR for 30 minutes or so, the chase ending only when
Decker drove through a red light and Jared was unwilling to (a rare
sane decision). They went back to Backstreet and, according to
Brent, Jared also went, and just stayed in the parking lot all
night.
This is all second-hand, but Brent has a lot more credibility with me
at this point seeing as how he has, unlike Jared 1. never assaulted me
and 2. never shown me any behavior that would lead me to suggest he
begin lithium treatments.
So there you have it. I had maybe one drink in me when this took
place, so if you've heard Jared's side of things, I ask that you
consider that the only way he could excuse his behavior would be to
invoke alcohol, which should cast serious doubt on his ability to
recall the events in question, as he was either profoundly drunk or
profoundly emotionally disturbed. My credentials sanity-wise are
impeccable, and there are, as I said, dozens of witnesses to most of
the events of the evening.
*Someone has told me since that Brent is also banned from the Factory,
per the owner's orders, based on Jared's side of the story. I'll take
care of this the next time I'm in town.
| | |
| For a long time now I've felt this tugging feeling
that,
translated, comes out something like "hie thee to a gay mecca before
you're old and unfuckable." The opportunity for same came two
weeks ago when I had to accompany my boss to a conference in Washington
DC,
maybe the city most recommended to me by friends and elders.
Going into the whole thing, I was pumped. Nothing but plusses: 1.
I get to travel on the company dime, 2. I'm free evenings. So I pack
all my best fuck-me clothes after
doing a little fuck-me shopping, including a new linen shirt that gives
me
stirrings, if you know what I mean, just looking at it, and a couple of
pairs of perfectly distressed 1970-era jeans that belonged to my father
and were my one reward for cleaning out my obsessive-compulsive
grandmother's attic (the 30 year old cancelled checks were not as satisfying somehow).
The plan is for my boss to pick
me up and drive me to the airport so that we don't both have to pay to
park and for gas, etc. She arrives, I load my stuff. The
drive goes uneventfully, but she expresses some concern that her
"empty" light
is turned on. I reply that the Toyota
engineers probably have some
absurd tolerance built in to their gas gauges, as opposed to US
automakers, who I think set the empty light to come on
contemporaneously with the car's sputtering and lurching for fuel,
perhaps as an aid to deaf drivers who cannot hear this process.
We get to the airport with no problem.
When we pull up, the curbside check-in guy informs us that our flight
has been delayed by at least an hour, and that we'll have to check our
own bags inside. When we get there we are informed by the gate
worker that in fact we will be delayed not by one hour, but by three.
JM takes this very well, and I also take it very well, because I
am not listening, and don't hear her at first. Before I am able to
comprehend what has happened, JM's composure has earned us both an
upgrade to first class for the Atlanta-DC leg of our flight.
While the legroom
for such a short flight matters to me not a whit, the prospect of
seeing how much free booze I can down is palliative, so I buy a book
from the bookstore before we go through security, and sit down to read
it, preparing for the mounting hours. By paragraph two I am
disgusted by the childlike writing, and stop to read the blurbs on the
book jacket. Words like "fiction with a conservative bent" and "one of
the best
writers in Christian fiction" basically explain things. After a
lot of soul-searching I decide to return the book, which is a huge
hassle because I've lost my receipt, and the fact that I am almost
kneecapped by TSA screeners on my way back through
security (as I am not holding my boarding pass) is a pretty good harbinger of things to come.
When I finally get settled in at the gate JM and I are paged. We are informed (it is 5:15) that the only
way we'll get to DC before 11 p.m.
is by taking a commuter plane to Cincinnati, and flying on from there.
Further, there will be no first class upgrade, as everyone on this
model of plane (which is a Sam's Club brand I am not familiar with,
which is kind of bowel-loosening as far as things to scrimp on go)
flies crammed in like a dick in a condom, without status distinction.
Amazingly we make it to Cincinnati
intact, and the Cincinnati airport
is remarkable only for looking basically like a big carpeted K-mart
planes try not to crash into. After a brief (I would estimate the
time I spent in line was about 50 seconds) fling with my one true love,
who worked behind the counter at the airport McDonald's, we decamp to Washington, again
flying condom-class.
Washington: Zero hour
I shower, pour myself into my jeans, and after
some minor transportation difficulties meet my friends HP and BB (not
their real initials) and start a wandering, backtracking path to DC's
gay district. When the rainbow flags and handholding male couples
reached a critical mass I see "Club Chaos," which I remember from a
list of
DC gay clubs. Chaos is the name, but "Club Mild Amusement" would
fit the atmosphere better, and "Club Disappointment" my feelings about
the whole situation. I am getting a lot of stares there, so I go up to
one of the starers, explain that my friends and I aren't digging the
drag
show, and can he suggest somewhere there might be a younger crowd with
more dancing. DC is a very cosmopolitan city, and he gives me a
very cosmopolitan answer, which is to say that I don't understand what
he says because he's a foreigner. But it has two syllables, and he
points with his thumb, which is enough for us.
So we leave and walk in that direction, to find
that we've already been where we were pointed. This time along, though,
BB says, "there's music coming from there" and points to a blue door on
the second floor of a building. A youngish, cutish guy climbs the
stairwell and goes in, so I figure, "worth a shot." All I can say is,
this was the right decision. Quickly I lock eyes with my One True
Love of Club Cobalt, who looks like a younger version of John Peter
Lewis, only cute.
We make eyes at each other a couple of times, and finally he
arranges to be where I can bump into him, and we say hi. I talk
to him for a while and there's a lot of neck baring on his part and a
lot of leaning in on mine, but the fact is that I'm three Long Islands
into the night, and I have some reason to doubt that, as he's obviously
a bottom, I can follow through on the contract it's clear I can seal
with a tilt of my head and a "wanna see the Pentagon from my hotel?"
In the first thing I regret about my trip to DC, I tell him, "I've got
to use the head" and walk away, and then take a really long time
getting back to where I'd left him, by which time he's at the bottom of
his G and T and has his head on some marine's shoulder. On my way
back I pass this guy who looks like a really hot version of Anthony
Michael Hall (another three-namer) and reach back and grab his ass as I
pass by (it is fan-tastic). He reaches out and holds my hand, and I
just look back with this really arrogant "riiiiight" look on my face.
If I'd met him in Hot Springs I would
probably have been salivating over
him, but I'm batting .1000 at this point in DC and I decide to hold out
for something better. BB informs me that HP isn't doing so well
(I had asked
him earlier in the night, "She's keeping up with me, are you sure she's
all right?" to
which he replied, "She gets tipsy easily, but it takes a lot to get her drunk." Point, Ryan.) and we leave.
Aircraft carrier groups have to
make numerous resupply stops
on their trips across the globe, but our stops walking back to the
metro were
less about obtaining than depositing – specifically, we stop so HP can
deposit refreshments and gastric juices at McDonald's and the front
steps of the Indonesian Embassy (I encouraged her to puke on the back
wall of the metro stop, citing still-glistening precedent from an
earlier passenger, but she was all
deposited-out at that point, I guess.)
They graciously invite me to stay at their apartment, as the last train
to my neck of town has run, and I accept.
Day 2
I wake up only moderately hung over, my shirt much less spectacular
now. How people wore linen before steam irons I cannot guess - I think that linen is considered so luxurious
not because it’s expensive or comfortable, but because it suggests you must be
able to pay someone to do your laundry. After talking for a while and declining
breakfast, I say goodbye and leave.
A word about my hotel: I'm staying at the Crystal City
Doubletree, but on night one when I ask the cab driver to drop me at
the nearest metro stop he drops me at the Pentagon City station, after
explaining that it isn't his area and his company is technically
forbidden to operate there. I have enough Metro experience at
this point to know that there are two adjacent Metro stops, Pentagon
City and Crystal City.
Assuming that the cab driver had just gotten it
wrong, I decided to get off at the Crystal
City stop on the yellow line, assuming that I could see my hotel from there. Well. The Arlington, VA
Doubletree can be called the Crystal City Doubletree in the same sense it can be called the Manhattan Doubletree or the Moscow Doubletree, which is to say only with the most brazen indifference to being branded an outrageous liar.
About an hour of being lost elapses. I am too proud, wrinkled, stinking
and pissed to call a cab, and finally see my hotel. It is not so
much a luxury hotel as a housing project with a luxury slip cover, but
I'm not paying for it so I can deal. The reason I bring this up
is that, while a luxury hotel would have a grand promenaded entrance,
or at least an entrance at lobby level, or, say, even multiple
entrances, this hotel has only one, and when I enter wearing what are
obviously clothes I have slept in I have to thread my way through a
dozen or so of the maybe 30 attendees of the conference we're helping
put on. Disquietingly, some of them end up following me as far as
the elevator, and indeed getting on the elevator with me, my only
option for avoiding scrutiny being at that point some eye-gouging, but
I figure enduring the shame is somehow more droll.
Day 3
Work goes fine. I decide to go out for the night on my own,
my experience being lost the day before, in a completely different part
of the city from where I intend to go out, functioning to delude me
into thinking I can navigate Dupont Circle
despite having been there only once 1. with people who were themselves
lost and 2. drunk. But if I've been hearing one consistent thing
when I mention going out in DC, it's that it's impossible to get really
lost, because the streets are laid out on a grid.
So I get off the Metro at Dupont Circle about 10,
intending to find a coffee shop or bookstore, to transition into a bar or
series of bars as the night progresses. Roughly an hour later, I find
myself at the White House, which even while I am mortally exhausted I find impossible to believe is in the gay
district. I have Google Maps open now, and Google tells me that
Dupont circle is a mere 7 blocks from the White House. What is
important to realize is that my arrival at the White House was merely
the culmination of a lot of really involved backtracking and
faux-stealthy obliqueness, all conducted in a manic zig-zag of the type
soldiers and battleships use to avoid artillery fire. I call my boss to
ask
exactly how far is Dupont Circle from the White House, and I laugh out
loud when she says, "Well, you wouldn't want to walk it," as though I
were really contemplating a late-night visit to the sleeping President,
rather than a desperate attempt to get to a gay bar from Pennsylvania
Avenue without being mugged or perforated by drug dealers (the idea of
asking a Secret Service agent vanishes real quickly). She tells
me, at least, that DuPont
Circle is on 19th Street (or was it 17th?). So I figure I'll
find the nearest numbered
street and walk from there. The first numbered street I run into turns out to be 15th Street
– not bad! Only four blocks! So I think, "Well, Ryan, you just
have to walk in one direction, see if the number increases or
decreases, and then orient yourself accordingly. So I walk down
the block to the next street which, and here I almost lost it, IS
ANOTHER FUCKING 15TH STREET! 15TH STREET
NORTHWEST!!! Now, my mathematics are very poor,
but I know there are at least 70 or 80, and possibly as many as an infinite number of positive integers, so the fact that
the DC authorities reuse numbers is grand-mal seizure material. As I come
to grips with the two 15th streets thing, as is the general drift of
the night, it turns out that I am going the wrong way, adding two blocks to my journey.
Finally – FINALLY – I look up in the sky, and like
the fag bat-signal or
something, I see a giant square with an equal sign inside it. The
equal sign stands for "This building = the Human Rights Campaign
headquarters," which is, for the homosexually challenged
readers, the most respected gay rights organization. Moreover,
there is movement inside! Fags about! Surely one of them must
know where there's a gay bar! I am briefly distracted by a
smoking hot intern I'm too far away to hail without scaring off, and a
bicyclist who looks
like Andrew Sullivan with a ponytail. But somebody comes out of
the
building and I ask, "Excuse me, I'm a tourist here, and I just got back
from the White House, and I was wondering if you could tell me where
JR's is." He directs me a couple of blocks in one direction and looks
for a second like he might accompany me, but heads instead, I assume,
to some nice townhouse with a china collection and cats. I thank
him pathetically and make my way to JR's.
Now, cerebrally I recognize that gay guys find me attractive.
After so long in the long-haired, pathetic glassesed wilderness this is
very nice, like a Calcutta bootblack's
widow winning the lottery on some charity trip to Grand Forks
or some
shit. Still, it's a little jarring sometimes. So when I
walk in to JR's it's clear that the crowd is somewhat older, and when
push my way through to see if there's somewhere, amongst the hundreds
of people, where I might be
able to physically raise a glass and drink, should I buy one, I am
tracked as intently and completely as incoming MIRVs by NORAD.
The guys at Cobalt had been very good looking, so this kind of
desperate attention is pretty confusing to me. Surely the Washington
folks see better pretty regularly. I end up, after declining
three drinks people try to buy for me (because my stomach was upset
after all the hiking, not because I have any compunctions about
accepting free drinks), talking to a really cute guy named Ryan (a
trend with Ryans) who works at the Pentagon.
It is only after I settle down and start talking to someone that I
start paying enough attention to realize that Monday nights at JR's
must be showtunes montage nights, because there are six or seven TVs
hanging from the ceiling showing clips from shows I mostly just don't
know, like Victor/Victoria and whatever show it is where they sing "Sit
Down You're Rocking the Boat," but also clips from Moulin Rouge and
Chicago. I have never especially objected to gay stereotypes –
after all, what's gaydar but stereotyping? -- but the showtunes theme
was pretty amusing to begin with. Anyway, so I'm talking to Ryan
when the whole bar goes silent. It had gone silent in, if I may indulge
a
little arrogance, a little bubble around me when I made my first
circuit through the bar, collar popped and I'm-a-prick expression at
full blast, but this was an entirely different kind of silence. This
was "hospital waiting room when the doctor walks in" silence. I
look around for a circle forming around a collapsed or, perhaps, naked
person, but instead see that everyone is looking up, at the TVs.
Now, I have never seen the movie 'Evita,' but somehow, like
salmon know to swim upstream to spawn, I recognize this is the "Don't
Cry for Me,
Argentina" scene, and at some unspoken signal (well, actually, at the
appropriate point musically, but you know how these things go) sing "It
won't be easy, you'll think it's strange..." The fact that
nearly every person in the bar is singing along makes JR's maybe the
gayest place on the planet just then, and I'm pretty sure the fact that
I'm singing in falsetto makes me close to the gayest person alive
at that point in time.
Day 4
Ryan had told me, before he had to leave to make it to work the next day (how many tardies do you get before they send you to Leavenworth?)
that the following night was 80s night at Cobalt. Seeing as how I
am more stuck in the 80s than any non-me person I know, this was
definitely a color-me-there type situation. Collar popped, topsiders,
uptight, I left. But GC, one of my co-workers, wanted to have a drink
at the bar with me before I went out. I decided a Jaeger shot
would be good, mostly because Jaeger's a respectably masculine drink,
and I hoped I could get finished with it quickly enough to make the
shuttle to the metro stop.
So the bartendress brings out my drink, and it's in this lovely tall
double-shot glass with a tiny handle on the side. My friend John
had commissioned me to steal something while I was in DC, and as he's
my number one drinking buddy, I decide this would be a good item.
So with this in mind I bolt it down and then very slowly, subtly,
take the glass beneath the table and set it on the seat of a
high-backed chair. I put my hands back on the table, so it looked
all aboveboard. The bartendress comes over, very smoothly reaches under
the table, retrieves my glass, and asks, like I'm some kind of
criminal, if I'd like another. Pissed now, I say "yes," a
decision that ruins at
least 48 hours, and possibly all the remaining hours, of my life.
This time, when she brings the glass out, I let it sit there.
What are you going to do, bartendress? Take away my full drink?
So I ask her for the check. She brings it back, keeps
watching me. But we both know she can't watch forever, and when she
goes to help someone else, I slug down the Jaeger, ask GC to pocket the
glass, and head out to the
worst night of my life.
I don't know that then, of course. It starts out
with that I missed the shuttle. Because I've had, at this point, four
Jaeger shots, I'm not much bothered, and and pass the time walking to
the Metro stop by singing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" to myself, and
to the sneakier of the passersby, who don't just announce themselves or
make themselves visible in such a way as to shut me up. I decide
to get cash for the cab home now, because I see an ATM on the way,
because I can't remember if there's one at Cobalt and I'm not completely
committed to going home with somebody else. So I take my cash, leave. Hop on the Metro.
A note on the Metro: Vagrancy didn't seem a big problem in DC
generally, and I hadn't seen anyone on the subway I could identify as
homeless, which was a surprise to me. With some alcohol in my
system I realized why: homeless people, like all other decent people,
like to piss in an actual toilet, and the Metro has no bathrooms.
To say that I really really have to piss is an understatement: my
need for a real military-grade piss was all-encompassing.
Finally I can wait no longer and get off at Chinatown,
which looks pretty damned seedy after my previous night wandering down K Street. It's respectable enough to have a CVS,
but seedy enough that the CVS
sign is still red (the nice ones all
have white signs, for some reason). I go in, 11:30ish, see, in a
panic, no public restroom. I barge into the rear office, ask for the
restroom, am told I'll have to ask
the manager. Everyone there looks managerial but ironically it is
the one person wearing no CVS-garb
that I
am directed to. "Sir," I say, "I freely admit that I'm a tourist.
But it was not explained to me that there are no bathrooms on the
Metro, and I've been riding it a long time, and I'm in an emergency
situation here." "What do
you need to do?" "Pee," I say, like a child. "Go on." It
turns out the restroom is kept from public view from good reason, and
its biohazard status is really mind-boggling considering that this CVS
contains, besides an embarrassment of condoms, a pharmacy. Still,
the release I find there is the high point of my night – maybe even my
whole trip. Certainly things went downhill afterward.
I had no trouble finding Cobalt again this time, and while
I'd gotten to JR's
about 11:00, it was past midnight when I walked into Cobalt, and the place was clearly packed. As I walked into the bar I felt that tingling
sensation you get when you know you’ve done something really stupid and the
knowledge just hasn’t trickled through your central nervous system yet. When I tried to start a tab, it became clear
what that stupid thing was: a little drunk, I had left my check card in the ATM
oh, say, 5 miles away at that point. So
here, in one of the best gay clubs in one of the gayest cities in the nation, a
place filled with hot guys I have risked mugging/serious personal injury to get
back to, I am left with just enough money to take a cab back to my hotel. I am trying to think of some way to make this
funny in retrospect, but if the traffic had been heavier I might have tried to
End It right then and there. I’ve heard
a lot about cabbies in Manhattan,
but never been there, and my understanding is that they come from basically all
over the world. None of DC’s cab drivers
come from the United States,
but they all appear to come from some single place, possibly India,
possibly Pakistan,
because they all speak X-i/istani to their dispatchers, which caused me every
time I rode in a cab to say, “Excuse me?”
thinking they were talking to me.
On the plus side, they did all treat me like cargo, rather than like an
acquaintance, which is a very good quality in a cabbie. When I
got back to the ATM I found that, while I was probably the only person to pass
by that bank branch after 11 that night, the ATM had taken the precaution of
eating my ATM card when I didn’t withdraw it, effectively ruining my life. After that it was just depressing:
trying to arrange to pay my hotel bill, borrowing money from my boss for the
trip home, spending hours in airport shops knowing I had money but being unable
to buy anything. Trying to come up with a cruel enough analogy for what had
happened the night before (I finally decided it was like, while starving, being
served a hamburger, chewing it, and then having a mangy vagrant reach into your
mouth, withdraw the bolus before you could swallow, and scrape off your tongue
afterward. And then spit on you.)
The rest of the trip wasn’t very interesting. I got to the
Little Rock Airport, had to wait three hours for the airport shuttle to Hot
Springs to leave. Got in, had to endure
the fact that the driver kept his left turn signal on for at least 3 miles on
the interstate. Finally we get to Hot
Springs, but he refuses to drop me off at my house,
even though I’m his only passenger, but instead drops me off in the middle of Hot
Springs, which is about 20 minutes away from where I
live. I walked to Arlington
Park, which was close, and sat by
the hot spring-fed pool because the cement retaining wall was warm (it was a
little chilly at 8:20 at night, which
was when he dropped me off). Some old
woman came by, saw all the coins in the pool, and tried to play off the fact
that she was trying to reach in and fish some out (the water is near-boiling, so
she stopped pretty quickly, but it was sad nonetheless). It was another 30 minutes before I could get
someone to pick me up. Good times. | | |
|
