DWARVES IN MY MILK

Scenes from an American Bachelor Party--Part I (Catonsville)

My friend Tom is dying. 

I mean, sort of. 

He is marrying a perfectly fine, perfectly lovely young woman named Gina,  but everyone can see that Gina is slowly but with tremendous determination carving her man into a eunuch.  His friends certainly see it.  We gather together at parties, speaking quietly about Tom's new conservative haircut, his freshly pressed Polo shirts, his markedly decreased use of the word 'Fuck'.  We gather close, and we watch with growing horror as he undergoes his change. 

When the announcement of their engagement came, her friends cheered and applauded. 

We smiled wanly, hearing in the background the heavy tolling of the death knell.   We smiled wanly, and we did the only sane thing friends to such a man can do:  We held his bachelor party. 

****

Tom is making love to Big Bertha on the dance floor. 

He slips her cover off, which he keeps on the club head until his ball is teed up, and he steps back, lining up his shot.  He addresses the ball, waggling the tip of his Callaway "Big Bertha" driver, looking back and forth between the ball and the pin, judging distance.  Uncharacteristically for such a serious golfer, he speaks.

"No strip clubs tonight, okay, guys?  I promised Gina."

We stand there, dumbfounded and incredulous.   Tom, the Seducer, who could get a woman's phone number after three minutes of conversation.  Tom, the Perv, who had ogled millions of women, declaring his appreciation of each with the phrase, "I think I'm in love."  Tom, the Just, who saw beauty in every face, no matter how pierced, or fat, or mottled with errant hairs, and wanted to kiss them all.  Tom, the Uninhibited, who once approached a table of dining women on Mother's Day, of all things, and declared, "I have an enormous cock."  Tom, the Bold.  Tom, the Lascivious.  Tom, the Man's Man.

Tom, the Emasculated.

The twenty of us had suspected Gina had issued an ultimatum from Tom, demanding that he refrain from entertaining the dark art of erotic dance.  But for Tom to promise?  That boggled the mind.  We were crushed.  Whatever ember of hope remained that this would be a day for the storybooks was extinguished, and turned cold.   We stood silently on the cart path, stricken. 

"Well, shit, even Steve McQueen married Ali McGraw, I guess," said Wayne with heavy resignation.  He had traveled from Tennessee, and wanted to make the most of this day.  We all wanted to. 

"I just want a different bachelor party," said Tom.  "Just good friends, having a good time together."

He took his swing.  His ball traveled thirty yards and sliced into the woods.

****

The guts and shells of crab bodies were strewn across the table, the piles of lifeless husks marked by a dozen empty pitchers.  We had feasted upon five dozen very large steamed crabs, corn on the cob, and beer.  Everyone was full, sitting there on the deck at the crab house, overlooking the Bay, and ready to move on to the bars.  It was 7:15, and it was either do or die, get moving or watch as one by one men peeled off from the group, saddled with food coma.

I signaled the waitress.  "Can we get our check, please?"

"You all don't want dessert?" she chuckled.  I smiled in return.  "No, thanks.  Just the check."

"Actually, I might want dessert.  What've you got?"  This from Tom, who sat at the head of the table. 

"Well, we have chocolate cheesecake, pecan pie, peach cobbler, hot fudge sundae, chocolate mousse..."

"I'll have a hot fudge sundae!" exclaimed Tom.  "It's my bachelor party!" 

"Ooooooookay, one hot fudge sundae.  Anyone else?"

The 20 of us sat silently.  "You all sure?" she prodded us.  "The bachelor's going to eat alone?"

"Yeah, I'll have one, too," allowed Ben, Tom's best man.

"Anyone else?"

"Yeah, I'll have one, also," said Tony.  " Steve, you want one?"

"Yeah, what the hell."

"Okay, me, too..."

One by one, every man ordered a hot fudge sundae.  To a man.  Sadly, even me.

The waitress brought the sundaes a few minutes later, and, looking up from mine, I could see all twenty men intently eating their rather effeminate looking desserts.  I looked at Wayne.  "Let me see if I have this right," I began.  " No strip clubs, but there's a bunch of guys sitting here eating ice cream sundaes?"

Wayne laughed.  "Yep, that's about it.  A real throw-down, huh?"  Chocolate sauce dribbled down his chin.

I got up to go to the bathroom.  "Don't eat my sundae, Tom."

I pushed past tables and walked into the restaurant and then to the men's room.  I stood at a urinal and unzipped my fly.  A rather large man with what I can only describe as Lyle Alzado hair walked up to the urinal next to me.  He was tall and wore a black sleeveless t-shirt with a confederate flag on it.

"You guys having fun?" he asked slowly.

A strange question.  I looked up and smiled.  "Yeah, yeah we are.  It's our friend's bachelor party."

The man considered that.  "Well, we don't really like that sort of thing here."

I was confused.  "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean.  Faggot.  You and your friends get out of here."  He slurred some of it.

Me:  "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Him:  "You know what I'm talking about. "

He zipped up and left.  Bigots are required by law not to wash hands before returning to work. 

"Uh, you aren't going to believe what just happened," I said, returning to my seat. 

"Guy call you a faggot?" asked Wayne.  I looked at him.  "Yeah, how did...?"

"He and his buddy were sitting behind us.  His friend said only faggots eat ice cream sundaes.  He thought we were gay."

I pinched my face up.  "What?  What did you tell him?"

Tom:  "I told him we were gay, and it was my big coming out party.  The pink golf shirt helped.  Then they called us faggots and got up and left."

Everyone laughed. 

Tom looked at us and said, "Let's go get drunk and then go to a strip bar." 

We cheered.

****

It's 11:30, and Tom is singing "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor in front of the back bar at a tavern.  The place doesn't even have a dance floor.  The song being played is Journey's "Don't Stop Believing."  We are confused. 

"Maybe there was something to that gay thing after all," says Wayne. 

At the bar, Ben introduces himself to a beautiful, tall, tan brunette, and asks her if he could buy her a drink.  She laughs at him.  "Not if you were the last man on Earth, hon."  Ben is a quick wit, and shows it. 

"Honey, if I were the last man on Earth, you wouldn't even be allowed in line."

Tom does a spinning move to impress the bartendress, but succeeds only in stopping in a disjointed shamble against the wall, spilling half his beer.   "I love you guys!" he announces to the cigarette machine. 

Our friend Jeff is talking to one of the Jaegermeister girls who have been assigned to the bar for a promotion.  "So, what's your name, what's your story?" he asks her.

"I'm Trina, and this is Stacey, and we're here doing a Jaegermeister promotion."

"That's great, just great," says Jeff.  "Say, why don't you take off your top?"  Then, more conspiratorially, ignoring the amused but disgusted look on Trina's face, he says, "I really, really bring something to the party, baby."

Jeff will later go home with a woman who is roughly the same size and shape as a stack of oversized whitewall tires.

****

She is a tall woman, and blonde, with alabaster skin and eyes of blue.  Under different circumstances, I might have called her "statuesque," but "statuesque" is generally not an adjective associated with a woman who is basically dry humping a brass pole in front of a mirrored wall.  We are sitting at the bar at a strip club called The Ritz.  It is 1:30 a.m. and almost last call. 

"You know," observes Wayne, "if she didn't have that trashy look so common to carny folk, she could be a model." 

I nod in agreement, and look back at Tom.  Tom is being held up by three people in our little group of ten (the others having drifted off to greater adventures at different bars or having gone home), and his head is bobbing, but not to the music.

"Hey, if you turn your head a little and sorta squint, Tom looks just like a lobotomy recipient," I say to Wayne.  Ben, sitting to my right, elbows me  and I turn.

"Hey, man.  She's checking you out."

I look up at our dancer, the Beautiful Miss Tawny, and I see that she is laying on her back, looking through her spread legs, staring at me.  She sticks her pierced tongue out like Gene Simmons and glares at me with something like hate.

"Dude, she's pissed," says Wayne.

"Uh," I respond, and look again.   The Beautiful Miss Tawny is back on the brass, holding her upper body out at a 90 degree angle, her weight suspended by her legs, which are clamped around the pole.  She turns her head and glares at me again with that awful lizard tongue poking out, stabbing at me like a little dagger of hate.

"Whoa.  She is pissed." 

The Beautiful Miss Tawny's song (Toxic, by Britney Spears) has ended, and she is walking down the bar, crouching so that men can slip her a dollar tribute into the waist band of her G-string.  The whole time she makes her rounds, she looks at me.

"You better give her two," offers Ben, "or she's going to jam one of those Lucite heels right into your fucking neck, I swear to God."

The Beautiful Miss Tawny stands before me now, looking down, her angry face framed by her angry breasts.  She crouches down.

"Uhhhh, hi," I say helpfully, offering two dollars, folded long ways.

"I can rock your cock," she suggests, and puts her face close to mine.  "I can make your balls flap," she informs, and I see for the first time that her nostrils bear the unmistakable red rings of cocaine abuse.  It looks like she had a cold and had blown her nose with fine sandpaper.

"That's very...uh, interesting," I say, slipping the two dollars into her G-string.

"Let me show you something I learned in 'Nam!" she yells, and proceeds to insert three-quarters of my longneck beer into her mouth and throat.  As she tilts her head back, I take a second to marvel not only at her ability to drink most of my beer like that, but also at the fact that society not only tolerates bachelor parties and the behavior they entail, but actively encourages it.  This is how we send our menfolk into marriage.  With one last glimpse of a nude woman simulating fellatio on a bottle of domestic beer.

"God Bless America," says Ben. 

"You going to finish that?" asks Wayne as the Beautiful Miss Tawny sets the bottle down on the bar, leaving beer and backwash at the bottom.

"Jus' gooooood freenz, havin' a goooood time t'gether," adds Tom, the lobotomy patient, to no one in particular.            

                  

Dead Bodies I Have Known

When I woke up this morning and dragged myself, hungover, out of my bed, I stood and stretched and walked to the sink to begin the day-long process of peeling layer after layer of caked-on mouth-plaster through the palliative application of smoothing water and sandpapery Pringles.  And I stopped, staring at the floor, because there was a dead body in my bathroom. 

Well, okay, not really.  But for the wholly disoriented thirty seconds I stood there in my boxers and t-shirt, head pounding in dehydrated pain, I was mostly convinced that I was boggling at a dead person.  And, frankly, nothing helps to sharpen and focus the mind in the morning like seeing a dead body in your bathroom.  You stand perfectly still, hands splayed, mouth slightly ajar, and you instantly reduce thirty-five years of your life into the single, repeated phrase what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?!  But then the body groans and moves a little, and your heart begins to pump again, and your life slowly returns.

My friend, Tom and I had been drinking the night before, celebrating nothing in particular with a coterie of like-minded friends.  I am a reasonable drinker, for the most part, and can usually recognize my limitations.  My limitation stared me in the face seconds after I downed a shot that contained mostly vodka and some citrus flavoring and saw the face of God.  It was 11:45.  I called it a night and walked the two blocks to my house.

Apparently my friend Tom crossed the line between moderation and excess, boldly crossed the line, bought a house across the line, and in the process lost his keys.  Having no key hidden under the mat, no neighbor to call on, no bed to call his own, he did the sensible thing and took the key under my mat, entered my house, and crawled to the floor of my master bathroom to pass out, making sure he was near a toilet.  He was wearing a softball jersey and his pants were unbuttoned.  He was embracing my bath mat.

This is not the first time this has happened to me, finding a body in my house.

Seven years ago, I was living alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise apartment complex just outside of D.C.  It was a simple place, a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room and a small kitchen.  It cost me more in rent than my mortgage for my two bedroom house in Baltimore does now.  Such is the D.C. market.

I had a beach house with friends that summer, and spent most weekends at the shore, away from the congestion and the traffic, baking my pale flesh, drinking fruity drinks, forgetting my weekday lawyerly existence.  One Sunday night I returned home from the beach, dropped my bag in the small foyer, and collapsed on the couch.  I think I had watched two full episodes of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and was staring on my third when I got up to get a drink of water.  When I walked around the corner, I saw two legs clad in work boots and green pants sticking out of my kitchen.  Someone was laying on the floor of my kitchen and I could see his legs.

I froze.  I froze because I was unable to move, even though a panicked voice in my head was telling me, there's someone laying down in your kitchen, it's a body, it must be a dead body, it's a dead body in your kitchen and the person who killed him is still in here, hiding, run.  I couldn't run, I couldn't turn and go to the phone, I could do nothing.  I just stared at the legs and felt gripping paralyzing fear.

I must have stood that way for at least two minutes, because I could hear that Rob Petrie had successfully avoided the pesky ottoman and was now talking convivially with his co-writers Sally and Buddy about the hilarious shopping habits of Buddy's wife, Pickles.  The legs didn't move.  The fear and panic ebbed enough for me to move, and I walked so very cautiously toward the kitchen.  I grabbed a brass candleholder off a shelf for protection, and I turned the corner and looked in my kitchen.

It was a maintenance man.  Wearing a pair of green pants and a khaki shirt, a maintenance man was laying next to the louvered doors of the laundry closet.  His eyes were closed.  I didn't see blood.  I didn't know if he was dead.

I bent over, looking at him, and couldn't tell if he was breathing.  I checked his pulse on his neck with my middle finger.  He was alive.  I darted to the living room, picked up the phone and called 911.  I told the 911 operator that a maintenance man had collapsed in my kitchen, and I didn't know from what.  I gave them my address and the operator told me to sit tight and not move him.  I then called the front desk--the complex had a 24 hour concierge--and told them a maintenance man was unconscious in my apartment, and EMTs are on the way.

"That's gotta be Manny," the concierge said, and explained that they had been trying to call him on his radio all day.  I asked what he might have been doing in my apartment, and she told me that they were doing a routine changing of air conditioning filters and checking to make sure dryer vents were clear.  She had no idea why he might be unconscious, and then told me that she would call the manager and someone would come up to my apartment.

In 10 minutes, the EMTs arrived.  I stayed in my living room while the EMTs worked on him, talking with the apartment manager.  He awkwardly told me that several days before I moved in, a woman had killed herself in a different apartment in my building.  I'm not sure why that story was relevant, but it seemed to bring him a kind of well-what-can-you-do? comfort.  The EMTs took Manny, and I stayed up all night with my windows open, unable to sleep and afraid that a gas leak was what laid Manny low, and would get me, too. 

I later learned that Manny was diabetic, and had slipped into diabetic shock while checking my dryer vent.  He was kept in the hospital for a few days, and the next time I thought about him was when he and I shared an elevator together.  It was about a month after his collapse, and I recognized him when I stepped into the elevator.  Having never seen me, he didn't know me.  I asked how he was, and he said he was fine, thanks for asking.  I didn't tell him that it was my apartment he'd been found in.  I didn't see the point, and I didn't want any awkwardness.  No need to embarrass the guy.  So I told him I was glad he was feeling better, and he thanked me, and I went to my apartment and I never saw him again.

I didn't take nearly the same steps to avoid embarrassment on Tom's part.  Shortly before writing this entry, I e-mailed to several mutual friends photos of Tom laying on my bat room floor, clutching the bathroom mat.  I made sure I got several shots of his face.  They are valuable.

The Story So Far, or Sorry I Skipped The Sixties, Hippies

A re-print of a response to a thread on Fark.com that inquired, "What's the long story on why Fark does not accept links from Ananova (an internet-based news site)?"  I gave the questioner what he wanted.

***

First, before all, there was the Big Bang.  Stars formed thereafter, and then, planetary systems.  One such planet, out of eleventy billion billion was a small, insignificant planet that would, billions of years later, be called Earth.

The Earth cooled.  Molten masses cooled to form land masses, and soon, gases formed by the cooling molten masses formed base elements such as oxygen and hydrogen.  Water followed.

In time the Earth, lifeless, formed oceans that rose over the cooled masses. Billions of years later, these would form continents.  But for now they were, it is believed, a single land mass.

Through a complex interconnectedness of chemistry and physics, molecules formed.  Thereafter came amino acids.

In time, when the planet had cooled sufficiently, amino acids began merging to form the building blocks of that which we call life.

Single celled creatures arose. In eleventy million years they formed multi-celled organisms.  An abundance of life, mostly plant in nature, began spreading across the planet.  Soon, evolutionary forces created animal life.

Simple animals at first.  Little worms and plankton and such and such. Then came fish and other aquatic creatures.  In time, an unheralded creature whose unknown name will never be known, crawled from the water and settled in  muck. Over time, similar creatures evolved. Soon--over millions of years--other creatures dotted the landscape.  Dogs and pigs and such and such.  Over there, in the fields, some dinosaurs were gallivanting around.  Then a Big Rock came and killed all of them.  Back to square three.

Then, life evolved again, and smaller creatures that had survived the desolation brought by the Big Rock changed and grew.  Then came more dogs and pigs and such and such.

Then came the monkeys.  Soon, monkeys evolved into larger creatures that walked erect.  Their brain capacity grew.  In time, and with help from the Monolith, they learned to fashion bones into tools.  This still occurs in parts of Alabama.

Monkeys evolved into men, and men--who were largely nomadic in nature--began to gather together.  In time, an unheralded monkey-man, whose unknown name is lost to the sands of time, learned to generate fire from the rubbing of sticks.

Monkey-man became the species of man.  Men formed communities, gathering for hunt and shelter.  Over tens of thousands of years they formed societies, complete with unwritten rules derived by genetic necessity.

In the era of unrecorded history, man achieved miracles.  He invented oral traditions and from those oral traditions came lessons that became law.  Soon, man began writing down what he had learned, and history was born.

The earliest civilizations established the remarkable.  In the thick jungles of South America, natives built ziggurats and stone shelters.  They would later serve as the rebel base in "Star Wars."

In North Africa, a people known as Egyptians built mighty pyramids.  They were built by Jews, who served as slaves, and whose troubles were really only just beginning.

In greater Africa, tribes formed that would spend thousands of years battling over scarce resources.  Then they would battle the Belgians and the British and the French for their freedom.  When they got it, they would go right back to battling each other until they were largely laid low by a tiny virus.

In Asia, a mighty people would arise as great warriors and poets.  They eventually would make houses out of paper and offer three-item express carry-out for $4.95 (fried rice extra).

In Europe--where we shall dwell--a bland people arose.   Nomadic at first, they created villages and hamlets towns and then cities.   They brought great civilizations, and painful dancing moves.

First, there were the Greeks.  They invented a flawed concept, democracy, and a perfect one, butt sex.

Then there were the Gauls.  They invented and, over centuries, perfected, the art of surrender.  They consoled their losses in battle by grooming small, hated creatures called poodles.

Then there were the Romans.  They invented roads and aqueducts and arched constructs and a republican form of government and sanitation and atriums and perfected irrigation.  In time, their empire, savaged by invading hordes, would be reduced to inhabiting a land that looked like a boot.  After that, their achievements were reduced to one, Sophia Lauren.

Then there were the Celts.  They invented mead and, some historians claim, saved civilization through the preservation of history and the reproduction of scrolls and tablets into the form we now call a book.  They indeed saved civilization, but not for that reason.  They saved civilization because they invented mead.

Over time a great plague came, then a time of great darkness and desperation. Serf's up.  Then a renaissance, bringing velvet and oil-based art showing naked men and women and statues without arms but with perfectly crafted breasts and penises.  And life was good.

So good, in fact, that soon the Europeans wanted to see if there were breasts and penises in other lands.  They sent a man named Christopher Columbus to find India.  He went the wrong way and found North America.  The people who lived there were nevertheless called Indians  by the settlers, an early example of the magnanimity the people who would eventually settle there showed to different cultures.

After Columbus came the colonists.  The Spanish sent gold seekers, who would settle in South America and in greater Los Angeles.  The Gauls, having changed their name to the French under new management, settled in Canada to catch beaver and play on the ice.  The English got the rest.

The English colonists--on who we will dwell--formed "states" based on religious and political principles.  Georgia was founded as a Catholic state, but would later change its religion to NASCAR.  Massachusetts formed based on religious freedom and then, showing a level of rationality and practicality that would later hallmark the Big Dig, burned little girls as witches.  New York was founded as New Amsterdam, but then beat up Holland and called its mother names, and then became New York.

Over time these colonists became restless.  They didn't like being told what to do by a large, faceless foreign government, so they threw off the yoke of their oppression and fought two wars of independence, becoming the United States. Although it was the United States and only a part of the Americas, the citizens called themselves Americans, another example of the magnanimity the people there showed to different cultures.

Over one-hundred and fifty years later, the Americans became restless.  They didn't like being told what to do by a large, faceless domestic government.  But this time they invented television.

The invention of television spawned the invention of enormous machines called computers.  In time these were refined by a tribe called the Japanese, and then perfected by a tribe called Nerds.

These computers promised an age of advancement and enlightenment.  They promised answers to difficult scientific questions, and a revolutionary advancement in business.  They served as backdrop in a show called "Star Trek."

Soon a man named Al Gore was born, became an important governor of the people, and, bringing to bear all of his expertise as the son of a politician and a Tennessean, invented the internet.

The internet promised a greater age of information and a quantum leap forward in human knowledge.  What it delivered was a greater age of pornography and pop-up ads.

And then one glorious January morning a man named Drew Curtis--the equal of a Columbus, in many respects--used the internet to disseminate great knowledge to those throughout the land: he presented a large nut-sacked squirrel.  Like a golden calf, it drew others.  Soon, people from all over the land began submitting news items and funny stories.  Flame-wars ensued.  And sometimes, peace.  It was a site called Fark.

Many of the stories posted to Fark were soon misappropriated by a lesser news source called Ananova, which was created by fugitive Nazis and other ne'er-do-wells.  Drew Curtis inserted spikes and false stories into his site to detect misappropriation by Ananova.  And they were detected.  So Drew attempted satisfaction from the Ananova proprietors.  But none came.

Exercising sage wisdom and cold revenge, Drew cut Ananova off from Fark, and left it to wither and die in a sea of its own urine.

And that, my son, is the long story.