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.
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