Skull and Boners

“I hope I can survive this.”

Yes, that was my one thought. Strolling through the arches, past the dormitories (avoiding the rain of Coors Light cans – a present to any passers by from the future leaders of the world) and all through the gardens. I doubt myself sometimes, believe it or not; I have never taken acid, but the world is full of enough prismatic ecstasy to drive one to burnout status if viewed through the right set of eyes. The evening was, potentially, the tipping point. I had clawed my way through the dive bars and the coffee shops in search of the ultimate unreality and somehow the lessons learned along the way led me to Yale. To fucking Yale. If there was any sense to be made, I wasn’t the craftsman to make it.

And there it was, a calamity to behold. I’ve seen plenty of well-dressed people in my life, but the thing most bothersome was the lack of consciousness. In front of me lay a field, a common area, canopied by a higher caliber of rent-a-tent and the kind of catering suited to only the finest of foreign dignitaries. Without exaggeration I claim that this was the sort of party that a young Bond, James Bond, would casually crash. Everything imagined before me, made terribly real.

So I turned it on. After all, how could I possibly tackle this sober?

I led with the hips and made my way to the refreshments. Now generally I have one default line for every bartender I meet; “your cheapest whiskey, on the rocks.” Nine times out of ten it will open up more doors than a skeleton key. See, your bartender types are usually at least two tax brackets below their customers, especially at functions such as this. If the bartender is male, they’ll give you their version of “the eye”, the one that says “I hear ya, buddy”, or “FUCK YEAH DUDE”, depending on their particular demeanor. If the bartender is female, you’ll still get that same eye, but theirs will be saying “I am slightly afraid that you would be bad for me, let’s fuck”. That, or “eww”. Either way, if they’re female, you can always just insult your way into their stank and save some money in the process by ordering this way.

On this particular evening, my bartender was male, Eastern European, late twenties and probably wearing an ed hardy design as an undershirt because he simply doesn’t fucking know any better. I understand this type of man and I understood this man. We had the previous “eye”, the one that tells of shared portions of our pasts, and I immediately knew that, in this setting at least, I could trust him. We got to talking and within minutes my hunch paid off. I revealed my entire farce to him, the fact that I had snuck in uninvited, the fact that all I wanted to do was ruin a few marriages of convenience and get black out drunk and the fact that I despised the rich just as much as I envied them. His sympathy was complete and my trap was set. So was my tab.

He poured my drink, I took it with much favor and turned to survey the lands.

Now the secret to blending in anywhere is operating under the complete assumption that you have every right to be there. Mentally speaking, the split needs to be roughly 85/15 persona to person. It is a party trick of sorts, but don’t think the ruse is limited to just that. Much of the world operates under the same kind of social dynamic with the occasional bit of fine tuning. Generally, concealment can be accomplished by simply staying alert to your surroundings and part of this is staying alert to the opportunities of those surroundings. Even the act of observation itself can open doors…and so on this night I simply stay put.

Luck – it strikes just when you need it, if you’re open to it. From the far end of the field, a woman was stumbling. She was flush in the face, laughing quietly to herself, clutching a pair of silver pumps in her left hand (NY&CO. at best) and an open cell phone in her left. It was more of a controlled fall that brought her next to me, the bar being a fortunate level on which to avoid total collapse. I lifted my drink to my mouth and paused, nose in glass, to grunt out a throaty “heh” before sipping. I almost hate myself at times like this. In this moment I am standing, one hand feeling the stirrings of an erection in my pocket, reeling at the possibilities, the sheer vastness of possibility that this little lamb could bring me and I stop myself at launch for just a moment; not to gauge the morality of my actions for I know squarely in what camp those lie, but for the impressive spiritual gore they imply.

Fuck it – I need something to confess on Sunday, right? Right?

Right.

A few degrees to my left, I slurred out the tendrils; “Fucking Yale.”
“No shit. Every year, without fail, I end up here.”
“End up where exactly, at Yale or at the brink of unconsciousness?”
She laughs, just lightly enough for comfort.
“Either way I always end up feeling like shit the next day.”
“Then why keep coming? Some kind of weird ivy-league masochism thing?”
“Maybe on hubby’s part, definitely not mine.”
(OH GOD SHE ACTUALLY USED THE WORD HUBBY?!? PEOPLE DO THAT??!?)
“So is this little scene your passive-aggressive attempt at spite?”
“Maybe.”

During the course of this exchange the bartender had brought her a drink. She had said nothing about an order, made no indication that she wanted anything and barely even looked him in the eye. Remarkable – she had been here before, many, many times.

I watched for a moment as she stirred her drink with a finger. This was the point where the birdie, lobbed extraordinarily high by a seemingly final statement on her part, was taking it’s sweet time making it’s arc and the possibility of returning the volley seemed to grow ever unlikely. I was almost out – with an urgent arm I swung.

“I don’t get the impression that you’re here for the same reasons as everyone else.”

Not my best work, but open ended enough to at least force further discussion. Hey, sometimes you’ve got to play dirty with these things.

“Hell no. I don’t even know most of the people here and I’ve been coming ever since I married prince charming over there” – she nodded as a half-thought in the direction of a well dressed former-bro in his early thirties chatting up a platinum blonde waitress working this particular catering gig for a little extra weed money (sorry, honey, that peace frog tramp stamp speaks volumes that even your little blacks and whites can’t silence.)
“I went to Fairfield for Christ’s sake.”

Lot of good all that degree’s doin’ you now, sweetheart.

“Fairfield?” I perked up from lighting a cigarette. “So you’re in finance?”
“I was. Interning at the Hartford when I met Jakob.”
I didn’t hear her particularly enunciating a “k” when she said his name, but when I put the name with the face…well…he just looked like he’d be the type to throw a “k” in there. He’d make damn sure that “k” was in there.

I won’t drag on with some sort of court reported transcript here, so to summate, I learned the following about Moira;
-She was 31.
-Jakob was in politics somewhere in the Boston area. Nothing of any real importance, a chair on some board or something, but a position unobtrusive enough to allow Jakob to make his real money through slum development and compartmentalization of the poor and undesirables.
-She had grown tired and bored with a career that no longer held any importance compared to the vast sums being pulled in by Jakob’s various wheelings and dealings and so had abandoned her dreams of being a shoulder-padded power-luncher in favor of exploring her neglected artistic side which, as she was beginning to discover, wasn’t ever really there to be neglected in the first place.

Of course I understood and could totally relate to all of this having roughly sixty dollars and some change with another twenty in Boost Mobile airtime to my name and a legitimate concern over where in the hell I was going to end up sleeping tonight. Of course.

I grew tired of the exchange and made moves as I saw fit. I moved us to a far table in the rear corner of the lawn – just out of sight enough to make conversation more palatable, freer if you will, but just close enough to keep one eye on the “action”, as it were. The volume was increasing but the DJ’s EQ remained constant. Alcohol and trace amounts of prescription drugs were starting to show their effects on the crowd. Jackets found their way to chairs and heels began to pile on pocketbooks.

We sat facing each other, drinks on the table, mine nearly gone and hers mysteriously refreshed (how did I miss that? Something isn’t right here…) I ignored the red flags waving and kept on keeping on.
“Please, life in an ivory tower can’t be all bad. Beats working for a living, right?”
I stung in just the right places, salving the wound with just the right angle of smirk.
She responded, slightly more vulnerable than before.
“Look where you are, boy, what would anybody know about that?”
“Well it isn’t as if these degrees are easy to get. Vast chunks of time gone, sunk into figuring out ways to ask and answer at least one question that hasn’t been thought of before. Not exactly an easy task to accomplish.”
“Ahh yes, but the question remains.”
“What question would that be?”
“Who do these questions really matter to?”
I couldn’t tell if she would realize when she sobered up just how on point she had been.

And this is the point where my plans many times go awry. I broke in with every intention to destroy and to operate under such a goal is to assume the absolute worst in everyone and everything. Doing so makes the whole ordeal that much more humorous, so much less emotionally taxing, so much better to relate to friends and confidants after the fact. But here I was, chatting away with a woman who an hour ago had been nothing more than a social scam-artist’s target and now had actually begun to hold something resembling interest to me. I had to watch myself, lest I developed an affection.

Luck, or the devil or whoever was with me. She had finished her drink and was fishing around in her pocketbook. She pulled out a flask and held it over her drink, obscuring both from all eyes but mine with the curve of her torso. It coughed and sputtered out a sip’s worth of vodka/gin/tequila/something clear into her glass.

“Shit”, she spat.
“All out?”
“Bone dry.”
“I was wondering why your glass was a bottomless pit.”
“Shut up and walk me to my car.”
“But your husb-”
“He’s fine.”

I looked over to where Jakob had been standing and watched as the door that he and the waitress had been previously obscuring shut and lock.

Roger that shit, Jakob.

She stood up and pulled me after her. We made our way past the gate and onto the street. Dragging me along with one hand, she pulled out a set of keys with the other and clicked open the trunk to a black 7-series parallel parked on Whalley Ave. Now underneath the trunk lid of every respectable BMW is a factory installed tool kit – the cars are meant to be owner maintained to a certain degree and this is one of the many reasons why BMW always has been and continues to be the ultimate driving machine. It was the latch on this kit that she undid to reveal yes, the toolkit, but also a bottle of pills and a pint of Smirnoff. Clever.

“I assume this means that Jakob isn’t the handy type?”
“Oh he’s handy, alright, just ask that waitress.”

Clever, again.

She unlocked the doors and beckoned me inside. Of course I went. Of course.

We seated ourselves and she turned the key in the ignition halfway. The radio came to life and Mute Math began to croon. Remember that affection that I talked about earlier? Yeah, that shit came to a halt right quick. Within seconds my mind had dismissed her into an easily indexed category and my safety zone re-established itself, albeit temporarily.

She opened the pint and took a pull clearly in excess of what was needed to wash down her double-helping of Klonopin.

I snatched the pint from her hands and drained half in one swig. I knew exactly what was going to happen and was going to make damn sure I was fucked when it hit. Or so I thought.

A few words exchanged, the necessary precursor to what we both knew was going to inevitably happen.
“I remember the first time I heard this so-”
I grabbed her by the face and shut her the fuck up. I don’t care about Mute Math, all I care about is licking your esophagus clean.

We kissed, and from there it progressed. God bless the germans for making the 7-series so roomy – God bless the germans for making it and the rich for buying it.

I devolve sometimes. I devolve into a beast made of a thousand cocks and hatreds. I held her down by the neck, releasing the pent up whore in her. She moaned, writhed, smeared fluids all over woodgrain and leather and overall went batshit fucking insane. Ten minutes, literally ten minutes earlier she had been at least somewhat composed, somewhat coherent, but now it became clear that this was not the first time she had mixed substance tonight. She’d been on a bender since long before I got there, probably since Jakob held her knee on the car ride over and told her to “have fun tonight.” I had thought I was in control, but now it became clear that she had designs of her own.

She squirmed on top, clutching my hipbones like handlebars and slamming herself into oblivion. It was then that she truly lost it.

“MAKE ME A MOMMY YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE MAKE ME A MOMMY.”

WHOA, BRO, WHAT THE FUCK DUDE.

Was she really this nuts?

“What the fuck are you saying?”
“Fuck me, fill me, I want him to see the look on his face when it looks nothing like him.”

Fuck me, she’s talking about a baby. She wants me to impregnate her. FUCK.

How does one politely exit from a situation like this? If one is to write a gentleman’s guide to the gentleman’s guide, they a) don’t get into situations like this and b) find a tactful way out of them that leaves all parties involved unscathed.

“Fuck it”, I thought to myself, “Donnybrook’s all about the grimy-side of class anyway.”

She had me at near climax when I wriggled my way out from underneath her. It was too much – I was already there, it was already happening. I tumbled out of the passenger side and had just enough time to close the door before completely losing it, covering the handle and window with my own mighty ejaculate.

It was then that I heard him calling; “Moira? Moira where the fuck are you!”

It was Jakob. Cue the Benny Hill theme.

I sprinted like Prefon-fucking-taine, around the corner, down the street, into the parking garage and into the safety/sanity of my own vehicle. I rolled down the window, lit a cigarette, inhaled, then exhaled fully.

In this time and in this place, there was only one thing that I could possibly think of.

“I really hope Jakob doesn’t open the door first.”