I. “Amnesia”
Sometimes, maybe because I like the smell of booze and so forth, I don’t shower as often as I should like. Friday was one of these days. Work blew ass, I had forgotten to eat or was too tired to eat. Maybe both. I came home in high spirits, anticipating a weekend wrought with peril and steeped in fine grain spirits.
I began drinking Heinekens immediately upon arriving home. But, The Roommate was gone. “It’s 8 o’clock. Where is he?” I thought. But the Heinekens kept changing the subject. They wanted to know how to get to my kidneys. And then, promptly, wanted to be shown the way out again.
I pulled out my typewriter thinking it would be a fine moment to lay some profanities down. The house was dark. Two sentences deep and the carriage broke down.
Fuck.
I started reading Cat’s Cradle. I texted my mom that I was crying because Vonnegut was showing me up. I wanted her to make it stop. She texted me back:
“What?”
Sigh. It’s annoying when you’re being miserable and misunderstood and pathetically unable to dedicate yourself to your passions and someone says, “What?” Repeating an emo moment siphons some of the whiney emphasis of the original statement.
“I’m gonna cut myself…*sniffles*”
“Hmm?”
“I’m gonna CUT myself.”
“Sorry, say again.”
“I’M TAKING THIS RAZOR TO TOWN!”
“Oh, well that’s nice. Have fun dearie.”
II. “Booze”
The Roommate is now home.
Shit.
I’m drunk.
He’s gonna want to go out.
He was at the gym.
I’d be jealous, but my liver is twice as strong as anyone’s biceps. I can tell. It’s always punching me on the insides.
“What’s up, buddy?” he said.
“Hey man.”
“Ready?”
I looked up from my very serious book. “Thought you already went. It was dark. Past 8… I figured you were gone.”
“I was at the gym,” he said. It was obvious.
“It’s 8, I thought you went at 7:30.” I immediately realized how stupid that sounded.
He spoke slowly, so I could understand, “I… did. It’s… 8:30 man.”
He was ready to go out extremely quickly. I stalled and finally got in the shower. I emerged a butterfly. I had shaved up, put on a crisp white French-cuff shirt, a tie that lightened my blazer’s heavy blue and pulled the off-browns from my shoes. The cufflinks even had little skulls.
On the drive down to this single’s party, I said again that I thought it was a bad idea. My sole argument was meat volume. Or more properly, meat proportion.
“I’m telling you man. It’s gonna be a sausage fest for sure.”
“Stop complaining,” he said.
I took offense, “Dude, it’s like ladies’ night at a bar. It’s a trick to get dudes out.”
“This is a party, not a bar.”
Failing to pound any commutative properties, I instead pounded the rest of my beer. The Roommate told me I set myself up for nights like this. It was my own fault I hadn’t eaten and was living on alcohol. I had warned him of my state, you see. But for the moment, I was all right.
This story is boring the shit out of me.
III. “The End.”
The rest of the night went as planned. There were mostly chumps, and the women were roughly 6.5s at the very best. One I had my eye on had her eye on a plate of food, so… she was basically topping the charts as “Girl Who Didn’t Cave In To Urges.” Still, she had a little gut. But it doesn’t matter because she left anyway.
Me and Roommate talked a big game about our Beer Pong talents, but then lost a lot. The party wound down and I only remember the following from the remainder of the night:
Some girls were standing around talking to him and me. They had my notepad and were scribbling in it. This pissed me off.
A rather hot chic grabbed the pad and started scribbling. This, on the contrary, was good.
Then, inexplicably, my Roommate started pulling me out of the house.
“What? Why? We’re having fun?” Weren’t we?? Chics are giving me their autographs. I have a blazer and beer goggles. My ego is illuminating the crowd.
“No, man. We’re going.”
I got in the car lighting a cigarette. A first for his car.
IV. “Penance”
I woke up the next morning and found him about to leave.
“Make me a burger,” I pointed downstairs.
“You burned a hole in my seats,” he said.
I stood silent and stupid with my shirt off and sheet-wrinkles all over me. I looked like a burn victim.
“Sorry, man.”
“That’s fucked up dude.”
I’m a menace.
V. “Other Things That Burn”
Later, I told him I was awesome, despite all that, because two girls wrote in my notepad, one claimed she “loved” me and wrote her phone number, signed [NAME] a.k.a. “Ruffles.” I remember that Ruffles referred to the shirt she was wearing. I had made it up. Its closest approximation, so far as I can remember, would be an avocado-colored female cut version of the Seinfeld ‘puffy shirt.’
He told me that I should not get excited. The lenses of my beer goggles had been ridiculously miscalibrated.
“Why’d you make me leave, though? The other one wasn’t bad.”
He stared at me.
“She was?”
“AND,” he started, “You were about to get cut.”
I screwed my face into a ‘whatchoo talkin’ bout’ look and said, “Whatchoo talkin’ bout?”
Nah, it was probably closer to a, “Huh?”
“You were trash talking Cubans, man. We were in south Miami. Pretty much every guy left at the party was Cuban.” It flashed in my head that the guys outnumbered girls last night. They could easily have outnumbered me even at the late hour. “They were getting closer, laughing less, and one of them said you’d better shut up, because he had a knife.”
I couldn’t believe I couldn’t remember this. Talking like that is bad. Very very bad. Knives don’t like jokes.
“I’m kidding man. You were talking shit, but they were just messing around.”
If there’s a point to this story, I missed it too. As for the pictures appearing herein, I didn’t take them. But they are mine now. The Internet has no RULES, people!
