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Black House Chapter 3

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

3. The Starlight Motel

The motel had a bar and restaurant, a small round space next to the office. The bar was also round, and the tables were arranged in a circle. Marks was dizzy for a moment, standing just inside the door, letting his old eyes adjust to the gloom. The smell was familiar: Sawdust, grease, stale beer. The sounds were familiar: Old radio rock, the murmur of conversation, the clink of glassware. There were six cars in the restaurant’s parking lot, so Marks guessed this was where the old-timers and welfare check folks went to do their drinking. He knew exactly what kind of place it was, even though he knew he’d been sober for at least two years now, maybe longer.

He sat down at the bar. The bartender was an old man with a preposterous belly. It preceded him by at least two feet, Marks thought, somehow entering the future a second before the rest of him. Marks thought this was the situation for which anything accurately described as a truss had been created, and could only imagine the lower back pain the poor man lived with.

A coaster was tossed at him. “Huh?”

“A Coke,” he said.

The bartender snorted through the white hairs exploding from his nose, expressing his disapproval. He placed a glass in front of Marks and filled it using the hose.

“Thanks.”

This elicited another snort.

The place had seven other patrons. Five of them sat alone; in one corner there was a middle-aged couple, fat and red-faced, cackling and sitting close, drinking shots and beers. Marks thought they looked happy in their delirium, wet-mouthed and insensible but together. He had a feeling the evening would end with them screaming at each other in the parking lot, because something told him he’d seen that couple many times in his life.

Four of the others were old men, slumped in their seats, staring and silent.

The final customer was a young girl. Marks thought she looked like a kid, a teenager. She was dark-skinned, her hair a tangled mass of curls that had been pulled back in a messy, half-hearted arrangement, lopsided and whimsical on her head. She was wearing jeans and a pink halter top, and she was skinny and athletic-looking. Sitting at a booth, she was playing with her phone, a cheap older model. She stood out in the dark, sticky bar, the sort of place that people came to wait for death. She stared back at Marks for a few seconds until he looked away.

“You want a menu?”

The bartender sounded unhappy, as if asking the question somehow broke unspoken rules and treaties dating back to long before Marks had dared to enter the place. He held a menu halfway between them, and Marks reached out to take it.

“And you!” the bartender suddenly shouted, looking at the girl. “Order something or get the fuck out, yeah?”

The girl looked down at the table and bunched her jaw muscles, pretending not to hear. Marks studied her, the menu in his hand. He thought, good fortune soured if you kept it to himself. And he knew better than most that those old superstitions were usually more real than people thought.

“Hey, you want a burger?”

She looked up at him, surprised. They held each other’s gaze for a second, and then she nodded and looked away.

Marks handed the menu back. “Two burgers,” he said, pointing at the girl. “One for her.” When the bartender stood there looking back at him, menu held in one hand, Marks pulled out his wallet and laid a hundred on the bar and tapped it with his finger until the bartender’s eyes were dragged downward. There was a still moment, tense with inaction, and then the bartender snorted again, his white hairs fluffing in the breeze.

“Comin’ the fuck up,” he said.

Marks smiled at his back. Then he turned and offered the girl a thumb’s up. She stared back at him, something almost nearly a smile on her face, and then Marks felt silly, so he shrugged and contemplated his Coke, which offered every sign that it was flat and past its sell-by date. He kept staring at it, though, because otherwise he would stare at the bottles behind the bar, from the dusty top shelf where a single bottle of Glenlivet sat, sad and dejected, to the crowded bottom shelf, where Early Times ruled the day. He didn’t see his old brand, and for that he was at least somewhat grateful.

“Hey, old man.”

Marks paused and turned. The girl leaned against one of the old cars in the parking lot, a station wagon that had seen six-digit miles, its old wood paneling missing, scars of glue and screws left instead.

“If I’m old, what’s the guy behind the bar?”

“Dead.”

He nodded. “Got it.”

“Why’d you do that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a lucky day. I wanted to spread it.”

She nodded, chewing her lip and staring at him. “I ain’t … I’m not gonna … I’m not –”

He held up his hand. “Never thought you were. Just looked hungry.”

“Thanks.”

The next morning Marks woke up sweating, on the floor, wearing his suit and jacket, the stacks of currency like rocks in the lining. He stared up at the water stains and wondered at the noise until it resolved in his mind as pounding on the door.

He struggled to his feet, feeling like a stiff and bloated turtle, his back aching, his legs numb. He staggered to the door and opened it to find the girl, wearing the same clothes. She had two paper cups of coffee in her hands.

“Here,” she said, thrusting one towards him. “It’s free in the office every morning. They usually get donuts too, but those go fast.”

He reached out and took one of the cups. It was painfully hot, and he turned and placed it on the table in the sitting area, cursing. When he turned back, the girl was in the room, looking around.

“By the way of thanks for dinner last night,” she said. “And for not requesting a blow job in return.”

He grimaced. “You get that a lot?”

“Jesus yes,” she said, moving towards the little kitchenette. “The shit old fat guys think deserves a blow job range from not raping me to being polite to me. I was afraid a fucking hamburger would take me to a whole new fucking level of rapey grief.”

He blinked. “Jesus.” Then he blinked again, looking down at himself. “Fat?”

She peeled the lid off her coffee. “You know what’s jesus, old man? This fucking room. How long you stuck here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He eyed her warily. Homeless teenagers haunting cheap motels made him worry over his cash. He pushed his hands into his pockets, realized he was barefoot, and felt scratchy and foul-smelling.

She looked back at him, shifting her weight and smiling a little. “Divorce? She kick your ass out, cut up your cards? Lose your job?”

He smiled back, suddenly, without planning it. “I lost everything, a long time ago. This is a high-water mark for me. This is me on the way up.

She nodded, her face a mask of delighted surprise. “Aw, man, that is some sad sad shit right there. This is your come up? Talk about jesus. You’re havin’ some kind of world-record jesus moment.”

“I suppose I am. What’s your name?”

She hesitated. For some reason giving out her name suddenly felt like a step, an advance into intimacy. Then she took a deep breath, deciding that her choices had narrowed down, and the bar had lowered to the point where a man who bought her a meal without creeping on her was the best thing she’d seen in days.

“Dee,” she said. “Deandra, but call me Dee. What are you, anyway?” She eyed him, sipping coffee, the sunlight from the open door lighting her up auburn and cocoa. “Salesman? You got a I-didn’t-make-my-quota-oh-shit-I’m-fired thing going on.”

Marks shook his head, crossing over to the table and pulling the lid off his own coffee. It was light with cream. “I’m a … an investigator.”

“No shit? Like on TV.”

He shrugged, sipping the coffee tentatively. It was terrible, watery and bitter, but it was free. Or, he reminded himself after months and months of that silent math, not free, but already paid for. “Kind of, I guess, but I sort of concentrate on … strange stuff.”

“Ghost hunters?” she said immediately, excited. “Are you a fucking ghost hunter?”

Marks smiled, leaning back against one of the chairs and holding the scalding hot coffee in one hand. “Sometimes. Usually it’s not that easy to explain.”

She eyed him again, sipping. “And I can see that business is a-boomin’, huh?”

He gestured at her with his coffee. “I got a room. You got a room?”

She nodded and compressed her lips, but didn’t say anything, returning her wandering attention to the room. She suppressed a surge of emotion that she knew would have her crying. She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t a crier.

“I had a room,” she finally said. She looked back at him. “You really an investigator?”

Marks nodded, tensing.

She looked down into her cup of coffee. “I maybe got something to investigate.”

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Essays @ The No Pants Cocktail Hour

Photo by Dan Cristian P?dure?

NEW YEAR, same old podcast … with a slight twist. THE NO PANTS COCKTAIL HOUR has been going strong since 2018, through 65 episodes of me talking about … well, me. And my writing! I am still inordinately proud of this trailer I created for it long ago:

The No Pants Cocktail Hour

The No Pants Cocktail Hour is Jeff Somers’ podcast where he talks about … well, himself, mostly, and a short story he’s written. He discusses the story, has a cocktail, then reads the story with some music and sound effects. Grab a drink and join him! https://nopantscocktailhour.libsyn.com/

For 65 episodes the podcast has been focused on fiction (and alcohol), but this year I thought I’d mix it up a bit and spend 12 episodes talking about and reading nonfiction essays I’ve published over the years. To start with, I chose “You’re Eating Yourself, You Don’t Believe It,” an essay I published in Angry Thoreauan back in 2000.

It’s just me riffing on an incident from my college days, living in a windowless, subterranean, and possibly illegal apartment with my friends Ken and Jeof. Slowly going insane, one night we decided to make a horror film using a random VHS camera that had come into our possession. As with most of our projects at the time, what began with lofty ambition soon soured in Apocalypse Now-esque insanity and failure.

Now, if that isn’t a compelling hook for a podcast, I don’t know what is. Check it out! And remember: Whatever else might be true, I am very likely delicious.

Black House Chapter 2

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

2. The Past

The voice on the phone had said, “Can you come out?”

The voice was distant and scratchy. Marks had gotten good at plucking sounds from the noise that might be words; the cell phone was an old one, and the plan was the cheapest he could find, one that still charged by the minute. The sound quality was always awful. The ambient sounds of Washington Square Park weren’t helping; it was a humid, sunny day and everyone in the universe had come outside, including an elderly man who’d somehow wheeled a concert piano into one of the open spaces.

Marks frowned at the pigeons waddling around his feet. “To New Jersey?” he asked.

“It’s not a foreign country, Mr. Marks.”

Marks did some math in his head, speculating on the cost of public transportation to the Garden State. He imagined it to be very expensive when compared to his finances. He also imagined it to be a very lengthy and involved trip, possibly requiring rations, a change of clothes due to crossing through different climates, and a passport.

“I will of course reimburse you for the expense.”

Marks still sat staring at the pigeons, thinking. He compared his poverty and need for money with his desire to not leave the city. There had been a time, he thought, when he’d left the city all the time. When he’d traveled. He couldn’t be sure, but his old apartment, when he’d had an apartment, had been filled with tiny objects, mementos, things that had the look and feel of souvenirs and keepsakes from various far-away locations. All of it gone, now.

Finally, money won out. “All right,” he said. “Give me the details.”

The voice spoke a name and address, which Marks wrote down on a small pad he’d purchased from the grocery a block away from his communal office space. Sixty-nine cents. He wrote on both sides of the paper in careful, tiny script that gave away his age. Then he closed the phone and stood up, feeling the cardboard inserts in his shoes sliding, sweaty, as he walked.

The office was populated at this time of day. He liked it when it was occupied: All younger people, busy, determined. None of them had money, but there was a difference in definition. For them, not having money meant they had roommates, it meant they went out to dive bars and ate dollar pizza and were impressed with their intestinal fortitude. For him, sloping down the other side of the divide, older, with a head full of gauze and a wobbliness in his balance he wasn’t sure was age-related, it was more literal: He was carrying around his net worth in a thick yellow envelope, one hundred and fourteen dollars and change. He paid his bills with prepaid cards bought at the pharmacy. He slept in the office when he could, when no one was working too late. When he couldn’t, he bought a coffee at the Luxe Diner and nodded off in a booth. The waitresses usually let him be for a few hours.

But in the afternoons, there was energy, all these partnerships and companies that couldn’t afford real offices. The communal space gave them the semblance of offices: A reception desk, a conference room. Everyone had magnetic badges that granted access. There were a few individuals, like Marks, but for the most part they were these well-dressed kids in tight groups, sitting in front of laptops and texting, texting, texting.

Marks hadn’t sprung for a private office, so he was in the bullpen. For his fifteen dollars a week he got Internet access, a beat up old desktop running an old version of everything, a hardline phone, and a chair.

His briefcase was where he’d left it. Inside the briefcase was a change of clothes: He owned two shirts, two pairs of pants, and two sets of underwear. His sports jacket was heavy. In the summer it weighed a ton and made him sweat. In the winter it was the only thing between him and the cold.

It had been like this for a while. He was beginning to think this was how he died: alone in this office, a vessel giving way, and the kids wouldn’t notice until he started to stink.

.

.o0o.

.

At the train station, he bought a coffee for one dollar and regretted the expense. The train cost two dollars and fifty cents, but he thought he would tell the client that he’d also needed a subway, ask for five dollars in expenses. In the chill air of the new car, he tried to think of another way he could earn a living since he wasn’t doing much living being Philip K. Marks.

It wasn’t a fruitful rumination. As often happened, his mind wandered. Fragmented memories: A newspaper office. A glowing computer screen, green text on a black background. Sitting in bars, drinking, compelled to by something outside of himself. T-shirts with messages on them. An empty house and singing.

When he snapped back to himself, he’d gone two stops too far and had to backtrack. At least it didn’t cost anything extra to transfer.

.

.o0o.

.

“Mrs. Wadell?”

“Mr. Marks,” the handsome woman said, smiling and offering her hand. Standing in the doorway, he had an immediate impression of warmth: She was past fifty, but not by much, and looked good. Toned, tanned, healthy. Her hair was salted and her face deeply lined, but she was strong and thin and had a good grip and strong, white teeth. Her eyes were a luscious brown, and her smile was very natural and well-worn, a woman who had smiled a lot in her life. “Please, come in. Thank you so much for coming all this way.”

Marks hesitated, suddenly feeling dirty and sweaty, and loathe to ruin what appeared to be an incredibly clean and tidy foyer. Finally, the danger of being perceived as rude came up behind him and pushed him forcefully through the door. Mrs. Wadell stepped aside to let him pass and then pulled the door shut.

“Come in!” she said cheerfully. “Follow me.”

He did, and she brought him into a cheerful, sunny living room. Wood paneling and a dark wall-to-wall carpet dated the space, but it was so clean and neat and obviously cared for he was frightened. Mrs. Wadell was, apparently, one of those incredibly competent women who took men like himself in hand and turned them out much improved, and he didn’t want to be improved. He was comfortable being broken.

He pushed a hand through his hair and resisted the urge to push his shirt tails more firmly inside his pants.

“A drink?” Mrs. Wadell asked brightly. “It’s early, of course, but I’m trying to train myself to enjoy life while I can.”

Marks shook his head. “No, thank you. I don’t drink. I don’t remember why.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Wadell said, momentarily nonplussed. She recovered very quickly. “Water, perhaps?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well,” she said, standing indecisively. Marks had the sense he’d forgotten the rules of polite society, had somehow given offense. Were you supposed to accept something when entering someone’s home? Was honor not satisfied?

Finally, she swept a hand at a comfortable-looking chair backed up to the large windows. “Please, sit. You found us okay?”

Marks nodded. “Yes, thank you.” The chair was as comfortable as it looked. Mrs. Wadell was, he thought, exactly as feared: A woman who knew how to do things like choose furniture and the precise width the curtains should be opened to allow in the optimal amount of sunlight. “You said you were concerned about your husband?”

Mrs. Wadell nodded and looked about to launch into an explanation. Marks rushed forward. “Do you mind telling me how you came across my name?”

If Mrs. Wadell was put off by his abrupt manner, she didn’t show it. She smiled. “One of my husband’s former business partners told me he had dealings with you, oh, years ago. When I … well, Mr. Marks, I’ve been asking anyone I can think of for help with Gerald. His old pal Wayne Hutton gave me your name, but all the information in his Rolodex was outdated.” She cocked her head, seeing an opportunity to finally complete the requirement of small talk. “Did you really once work for the Times?”

Marks shrugged. “I don’t remember, honestly.” He knew that coupled with his refusal of a drink, this comment would make up her mind about him, but he preferred that to continuing the conversation. He searched his fragmented memories for the name Hutton. For a moment he thought perhaps there was something, and then it was gone.

“Well,” Mrs. Wadell said after a moment, “I told him that Gerald had been to many doctors. He’d tried everything they suggested. I don’t know what’s worse: His health continuing to deteriorate without explanation, or his attitude.”

“His attitude?”

“Yes, well, Gerald doesn’t seem to believe he can get better. Oh, he does whatever’s suggested, by me or the doctor, but he doesn’t really seem to believe in any of it. It’s as if he knows something I don’t. And Mr. Marks, that isn’t how our marriage has been. We went through plenty of rough times. Not ten years ago we weren’t sure we would ever be able to retire. I used to joke I would be working at Wal Mart when I was ninety, and we would fight not because I meant it, but because he would get upset about the very idea.” She smiled. “But no matter how bad things got, we always talked it out. Always.”

Marks looked around. The room and the house were nice enough. “Money troubles?” he asked. The concept of having enough money to be in trouble about it suddenly seemed exotic and fascinating.

She leaned forward, eyes wide. “Oh! How rude. Mr. Marks, please do not worry over your fees and expenses! This was years ago. Gerald found work. Very good work, very well-paying, and we rebuilt our savings and more.”

Marks nodded absently. Words like savings and well-paying seemed like distant concepts, symbols for things he had no direct experience with. “Mrs. Wadell, perhaps you could walk me through why you asked me here? Your husband is ill, but you obviously have the resources to care for him. Did Mr.—” he searched for the name, already fading “—Hutton tell you what I … specialize in?”

Mrs. Wadell grew quiet, looking down at her lap and plucking at some invisible piece of fluff. “Gerald has been to every doctor we can think of. We have the money, now, thank goodness, and we’ve been everywhere. No one can figure it out. Tests come back inconclusive. The symptoms … shift.” She looked up, and her eyes were red. “Mr. Marks, my husband is dying and no one knows why. He himself seems to have given up.”

Marks swallowed. “This is not really my field, Mrs. Wadell. I’m sorry, but I focus on—”

“Yes, I know.” She held up a hand. “But my husband’s condition is strange. Please. Let me introduce you. Look into it. I will pay you for your time—in advance—even if it leads nowhere.”

Marks sighed. It would be nice to buy some new shoes, he thought. And he’d been honest with her. “Fine,” he said.

.

.o0o.

.

She led him down a hallway into a small bedroom, much too small for the immense bed that crowded it. No other furniture would fit. In contrast to the bright and cheerful rest of the house, the bedroom was gloomy and dark, and it took Marks a moment to realize that a human figure occupied the bed. He was an older man, dwarfed by the huge bed and sunk deeply into the soft mattress, as if the bed was swallowing him.

“Gerald, this is Mr. Marks. He’s here to ask a few questions, see if he can help us.”

Gerald turned his head slightly and peered at me with yellow eyes. He was a man greatly reduced; his hands and head were large, the rest of him wasted and drained. His skin looked thin and pale, and his hair, white as snow, had fallen out in patches.

When he spoke, Marks wished he hadn’t.

“Thank you, Beatrice,” he rumbled, the voice deep and impossible to ignore. It had once been a powerful boom, Marks suspected, but now it was a ruined bubbling wheeze.

“All right,” she said, hesitating just a moment. “Don’t strain yourself, dear.”

She stepped out of the room soundlessly, closing the door behind her. Marks stood awkwardly for a moment, looking around the dim space. It smelled like cleaning supplies and something sweet and sticky, like cough syrup. There was no place to sit because there was so little floorspace left.

“Your wife is concerned about you, Mr. Wadell.”

He snorted a laugh. “Mr. Marks, I don’t know exactly who you are or what you do, but please don’t be insulted. There is nothing for you here. You are—she is—wasting your time.”

Marks nodded. This was, more or less, what he thought as well, but he’d made it all the way out there, he felt he owed it to the very nice woman to at least ask a few questions. “Your wife said it’s been difficult to diagnose your affliction?”

Wadell laughed, and dissolved into harsh coughs that made the bed shake beneath him. Marks waited them out, standing still, watching.

“Get out, Mr. Marks. There’s no healing me. And you would ruin everything if you could. Go out there and tell Bea that I was congenial and answered all your questions. Tell her you’ll do some digging, ask around. Bill her what you want. We have the scratch.” He barked another laugh. “We’ve got the money, Mr. Marks! That’s for sure. More flooding in all the time. Go on now. Leave me to my dying.”

Marks took one last look around the room. Then he stepped closer to the bed, leaning down over the shriveled old man, studying him carefully as the oversize head glared up at him. “Well, Mr. Wadell, here’s the thing: You’re not my client, your wife is.”

He turned and walked out of the room, leaving behind an outraged sputtering that melted into another round of painful-sounding coughs.

Back in the tidy living room, Mrs. Wadell crossed from the windows where she’d been staring out at the street. “What do you think, Mr. Marks? Please don’t say anything comforting. I’ve had all the comfort I can suffer.”

Marks nodded. “Where does your husband keep his private records, papers and such?”

.

.o0o.

.

With a single email printout folded up and slid into his jacket pocket, Marks stepped out into the street and the heat settled down on his shoulders. The house had been cool and pleasant, not overly frigid, but pleasant. He’d gotten used to it. It was amazing, he thought, how it took years to get used to being hot and sweaty, to being always uncomfortable, but mere minutes to get used to luxury. A few hours in the air conditioning and now he was miserable to be without it.

The trip back to New York yawned in front of him like infinity, an infinity spent on trains and buses, crowded, hot, unhappy. In his pocket were two crisp hundred-dollar bills, a retainer from Mrs. Wadell, more than he should have accepted but when she’d opened her wallet and the green money had bristled like a flower opening he’d lost his mind, momentarily. He told himself she would get value for the money. And now he struggled: A cab back to the city would be forty, fifty dollars. A fortune. But he had so little luxury in his life, and sitting in an air-conditioned back seat for an hour instead of the horrors of the transit system was tempting.

In the end he walked the half mile to the train station. His two-hundred dollar days were few and far between, and as he paid his fare he felt virtuous.

.

.o0o.

.

Marks was always surprised how few spouses of either sex knew the complete financial story of their marriage. There were always blind spots. He supposed some of it was willful ignorance—no one wanted to know everything about their wife or husband, not really—and some of it was misplaced trust. He’d learned, somewhere along the way, that a huge proportion of mysteries involving marriages could be solved quite easily by acquiring some bank statements. The Wadell’s marriage proved to be one of them. Mrs. Wadell sent him bank statements going back to their more impoverished years, and he noted several dozen entries for a company called Passus, Inc. over the years.

He went to work researching the company, and found nothing more than a single address and the most basic paperwork filed with the city. Instinct told him he’d found something at least worth looking into, and that Mrs. Wadell had been wasting her time seeking medical advice.

The address on the printout led him to an office building on Fifth Avenue that was the embodiment of unfriendliness. The moment he walked into its ice-cold lobby, the security staff was in motion, and by the time he arrived at the desk, which seemed to be several miles from the entrance in this massive, open space, they had already done a quick background check and determined there was no possible way he might have any legitimate business.

As he was being politely but firmly walked back to the door, he tried to profit as much as he could. He noted the name of the security firm on their green jackets. He noted there was no corporate logo on the walls. He noted how delightfully cold it was. He noted they knew his name, based on a single use by one of them that was almost certainly a mistake.

Back out in the humid air of the street, he took a moment to compose himself. He had no records any more, no address book or Rolodex, and often found he couldn’t remember the name or contact information for someone, even though he could picture them and knew what they could provide to him. It was frustrating, but sometimes, randomly, his brain would serve up a memory that was useful and coherent. This time, it served up the face and name and phone number of Stuart MacKenzie. He couldn’t precisely recall who Stuart was, but he knew something about him immediately: MacKenzie was a rich man who owed him a favor.

.

.o0o.

.

MacKenzie met him at a corner deli that was humid and dirty inside. Marks entered hungry and wondering what, precisely, he’d done to be owed a favor from a man who worked on Madison Avenue; his memory was spotty. His appetite became spotty as well as he smelled the heavy vegetable scent of the place and felt the thick, spongy atmosphere, imagining all sorts of pathogens and egg pods floating in the air, hair growing on everything.

His dream of MacKenzie buying him lunch died, and he sat glumly, waiting.

MacKenzie himself was a big, broad red-haired man who seemed perpetually out of breath. He entered bustling and managed to bustle while sitting, fidgeting and blowing breath out of his nose to express various emotions. He sat down with a curt nod at Marks, ordered tea, and didn’t offer to get Marks anything, which under the circumstances Marks was happy about. He spent one more moment trying to remember why this man owed him a favor, and then gave up. He decided that the universe had been so hard on him for so long, it was okay to accept blind luck.

“What can I do for you, Phil?” MacKenzie said, looking at his watch. Marks noted it was a cheap model, and that MacKenzie was missing a button on his suit jacket, although it was an expensive piece of fabric. “I’m really busy.”

Marks hesitated. Then he decided he had no choice but to take some chances: He had no resources, and Mrs. Wadell’s two hundred dollars was weighing on him. “Mac, I need you to make an appointment at a place called Passus, Inc.

MacKenzie leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, making his suit suddenly seem tight and ill-fitting. “Okay, why would I do that?”

Marks leaned forward, figuring it was his only psychological advantage. “Because they’ve been sending money to my client’s husband, and their building is an unmarked mystery box, and I can’t pass for money.”

MacKenzie blew air out his nose again. “So I make an appointment, and then what?”

“I go in as you. All I need is the credit check.”

MacKenzie accepted his iced tea with ill grace, then sat staring at Marks unhappily. Then he pointed at him. “And after this we’re square, right?”

Marks nodded. “After this we’re square.” He wondered if he’d made a good deal.

Whatever financial troubles MacKenzie was experiencing, he encountered no trouble making an appointment with Passus, Inc. The girl he spoke to on the phone was courteous and slotted him for the next day at three in the afternoon. MacKenzie reported they’d asked very basic biographical questions, and it hadn’t struck him as anything more ominous than making a doctor’s appointment.

Sitting in the empty shared office in the dark, craving a drink and afraid to move for fear that motion would simply result in him sitting at a bar somewhere, a hole he might never climb out of, Marks wondered if he’d miscalculated, if they were onto him. It was too easy. Then he worried that he’d never pass for MacKenzie who, even in apparent decline, had more money on his back and on his fingers than Marks himself typically saw in a year.

The next day he woke up with the searing sun as it invaded the conference room, hot and clear like boiled water, the building’s air conditioning fifteen minutes from kicking on. Sweaty and gritty, he washed up in the kitchenette, splashing water and scrubbing down. Then he inspected his suit and feebly tried to improve it, smoothing out the wrinkles and shaking it out, as if the stale humid air of the office would somehow revive it. He went into the restroom out in the hall and dressed, trying to take care and approximate success and a diet that wasn’t more or less 90% junk food. He was depressed surveying the results; the man in the mirror was thin and loose-skinned and looked very much like he cut his thinning hair himself. This was the end result no matter what: Dissolution and the Slow Fade. No blaze of glory, no heroics. Just a little less of you every day until there wasn’t enough left to get you out of bed in the morning.

After a moment, he reached into his pocket and extracted the cash left from his payday. Grabbing his briefcase he went and lived a normal life for three hours.

He bought himself breakfast at a diner: Eggs and toast and bacon and coffee and butter and ketchup. It was more food than he’d eaten at one time in years, and afterwards, forcing himself to finish his fourth cup of light, sweet coffee, he felt bloated and stupid.

He bought himself a haircut and a shave at an old-school barbers, a Belorussian man named Boris who kept up a professional stream of small talk and anecdotes as he hovered over Marks, snipping and shaving and measuring.

He bought himself a new dress shirt, hoping it would offset the shabbiness of his suit. The total cost of his splurges was sixty-three dollars, leaving him with a bit more than a hundred left. He felt better, and decided to continue by strolling through the park and having some lunch before heading back downtown to MacKenzie’s appointment. He hoped that by larding up on food and grooming he would pass, however briefly, as normal. All he wanted was more information to go on.

When he returned to the Fifth Avenue address, he found a different team of security professionals, and instead of being run off his name was checked against a list and he was issued a visitor badge and instructed to head up to the fifth floor, where he was greeted by an efficient young man dressed in what Marks imagined the phrase “business casual” meant. He was tall and thin and scrubbed, youthful and cheerful.

“Mr. MacKenzie!” he boomed. “I am the Interviewer—we deprecate names here—and I will be conducting our interview today. Please, follow me.”

Marks followed the kid through an unmanned reception desk and into a maze of cubicles beyond, ushering him into one of the identical spaces, where Marks sat just inches away from The Interviewer as he settled himself in front of a laptop. There was no decoration in the cube, and as far as Marks could tell, no one else in the office.

“Okay, Mr. MacKenzie, I reviewed your pertinent details earlier and I do believe your current financial difficulties, health, and age make you an ideal candidate!” The Interviewer twisted around awkwardly to grin at Marks. “I’m very glad you were put in touch. I just have a few questions, and then we’ll need to set up the lab appointments and get your banking details.”

Marks kept himself very still. He had not been on a job interview in a very long time, and he felt a creeping paralysis coming over him, a debilitating fear that his face wasn’t obeying his commands, that the words he heard himself saying weren’t the same that everyone else heard.

“Okay, everything looks right, Mr. MacKenzie. Don’t worry, your financial troubles will be going away presently. We’ll just need you to get through the physical exam, the labs, and you can start earning.” He looked at me, smiling. “The whole process takes about two weeks.” He studied Marks’ face and tilted his head, misinterpreting the expression he found. “Don’t worry, just hold out against those creditors a few more weeks and everything comes together!”

Marks nodded and managed a tight, off-kilter smile. He was confused; Mac was apparently not nearly as well-off as Marks had assumed, yet this was apparently exactly what Passus was looking for. He scrambled for a question that might get him more information without giving the game away.

“How—how does it work? Exactly.”

The Interviewer smiled. “Sure, there’ll be an orientation once you sign the NDA and the other contracts. But don’t worry: Once you sign and you’re processed, you don’t have to lift a finger, or do anything.” He shrugged. “Except suffer, of course.”

The Interviewer’s smile was bright and easygoing. Marks blinked at it like it was a sun lamp. He ran the word suffer through a few internal algorithms and decided that questioning it would be a tactical error, so he forced a smile on his face and nodded.

“Great! I’ll take you through to our medical team. You did clear your morning, didn’t you?”

.

.o0o.

.

Marks walked around, feeling depleted. They’d taken a lot of blood, all very professional. The tubes they’d filled had been marked with odd, esoteric words. Filament. Limnal. Rotundity. They wanted urine samples, and after he’d filled a cup they plied him with water until he felt loose and unmoored, eager for more. They insisted he stand inside a circle chalked on the floor, and what he took for humming he was convinced by the end to be chanting, a specific circular invocation each of the men and women were almost constantly reciting.

Somehow, he felt as if they’d taken much more than just a little blood, a little urine, a little saliva carried from his mouth via tasteless, neutral swabbings. He felt unsettled, unbalanced, and he walked despite a leaden sense of exhaustion, carrying his jacket and briefcase like weights around himself, pulling him down. He sat down on a park bench, feeling overheated, and listened to someone playing the sousaphone very, very badly as he tried to figure what he’d gotten himself into. MacKenzie was not as rich as Marks had assumed—he realized that in his current state of financial distress anyone who wasn’t living on hot dogs and borrowed air-conditioning would seem like a socialite—yet Passus had been overjoyed to sign him up. And had then exhibited zero interest in his financials, but a deep interest in his physical state and identity.

He couldn’t sleep. He wandered all night, missing the window when he could slip back into the office and bunk down for the night, after the cleaning people had left but before the security guards locked everything down. He walked until he was in a trance, and then he sat down on a bench in Washington Square Park, and fell asleep.

Marks was awakened by the insistent squawking of his cheap phone. Bleary, he startled up and almost fell off the bench. For one moment he stared around blindly, uncertain of his whereabouts. Fragments of a dream clung to him, a man dressed in black pursuing him, a bartender asking him if he was all right.

Dumb, he fumbled for the vibrating piece of plastic and put it to his ear.

“Phil?”

It was MacKenzie. His voice had an element of fear and desperation to it that pinged Marks’ own alarms, leaving him standing rigid, gripping the phone tightly.

“Phil, what did you do? What’s happening?”

Marks blinked around the twilit park. A little before sunrise, he thought. “What’s happening, Mac?”

“I’m rich, for one thing,” Mac said, panting. “There’s a deposit … from Passus. It’s … substantial.”

“Oh,” Marks said, his brain stiff. “Oh.”

“And I’m sick,” Mac said, his voice taking on a rough edge of panic. “I went to bed and I was fine, Phil. Fine. I woke up not feeling right, and I’m sick. Like, really sick.”

Marks shivered and began to pace back and forth. “What does that mean?”

“Oh, shit,” Mac said, his voice suddenly going molten and phlegmy. He dissolved into coughs. “Phil, I don’t know. I woke up hot and dry and bloated , and my skin is all … wrong. What happened? What’s happening?”

Marks worked his mouth but had no words.

“I gotta go, Phil. I’m heading for the hospital. Call me later, okay?”

Marks nodded, dumb. There was an awkward amount of silence, and then Mac clicked off. Marks stood for a moment, the phone still held to his ear, staring at the brightening park.

.

.o0o.

.

“Mr. Marks?”

Marks tried a smile, realized midway that it wasn’t working, and nodded, squinting. The result was mysterious to him: He had no idea what his facial expression might be conveying.

“Mrs. Wadell,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She was as neat and tidy and cool as Marks felt wrinkled and hot and unsettled. Her hair was pinned up perfectly, and she wore a simple skirt and blouse with effortless ease. The house behind her, however, smelled of medicine and sickness, uncirculated air that was becoming heavier with microbes and coughed-up mucous molecules, damp and sour.

“Of course not, Mr. Marks,” she said, stepping aside. “You have some news on my … well, what’s the word? Case? Issue?”

I pushed my way past her and didn’t answer. I didn’t wait for further invitation; I kept walking. The air got denser as I approached the bedroom in the read of the house. She didn’t start to murmur protests until I was through the door.

Mr. Wadell hadn’t moved or changed in any perceptible way. He was still just a lump on the bed that was slightly heavier than the sheets and blankets. His eyes, though, yellow and swollen, leaped to Marks the moment he entered the room, alive and clear.

Marks stopped, feeling sweaty and vague. He took a deep breath.

“I think I just killed a man.”

Wadell gave no overt reaction. “You stupid bastard,” he hissed, his overlarge hands gripping the top of the blanket. “What did you do?”

Marks shifted his weight. “I signed up under an assumed name.”

“Fucking hell, the name’s all that matters,” Wadell hissed. The moment of anger seemed to exhaust him, and he sank even more deeply into the bed that was slowly consuming him. “It’s all right,” he said, weak and soft, as Mrs. Wadell entered the room in a state of constrained, restrained alarm. “Mr. Marks and I just have something to discuss.”

She looked at Marks, indecisive, then smiled, patting her chest. “Very well.”

“Is this what you do, Mr. Marks? Wander the world making trouble for people? Barging into voluntary and private situations and make a mess of things?”

Marks shrugged. He felt like he had no way of answering the question. “What can I do? Will he die?”

Wadell didn’t answer right away. “No. But depending on what he’s taking away from the client, it’s going to be ugly. It’s a painful way to live, Mr. Marks. You’re sick. All the time. Worse some days. It takes a toll, I won’t pretend it doesn’t. Carrying someone else’s cancer, someone else’s cirrhosis, someone else’s Parkinson’s. It wears you down. They switch you out before you die, but … sometimes I wish they didn’t.”

Marks closed his eyes. “The ultimate health care plan.”

“Fuck you. The compensation’s fair.”

“Is it?”

“Fuck you again. I made my choices. Whoever you just fucked over didn’t.”

Marks turned to go, then hesitated. Without looking back, he said “And your wife? She’s okay with your choices?”

Wadell didn’t respond right away. When he did his voice was soft and weak. “She’s cashing the checks, ain’t she?”

.

.o0o.

.

Once again, Marks had washed up, brushed his jacket, and wore his new shirt, which hadn’t been laundered but was still in better condition than anything else he owned. He stepped into the office quickly, and ignored the extended hand of the bland, handsome man behind the desk.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr—” Marks said.

“You can simply call me The Broker—we do not like to use names here.” Bland Man said in a booming, hollow voice. “Of course. Our freelancers are our lifeblood. What can I do for you, Mr. MacKenzie?”

Marks looked around. The office was large but generic. The furniture wasn’t special or custom: Just a metal desk and a standard chair, a lamp and a mid-range computer. No phone, no credenza or wet bar or decoration. It smelled neutral. It was as if The Broker and the whole organization was making an effort to leave no mark. Although he assumed the young Interviewer and The Broker could not be the sole employees, the whole floor was quiet and felt still and unused.

“My name’s not MacKenzie. In fact, I went through your whole process under an assumed name, and now a man is suffering without knowing why.”

The Broker’s smile fell away. His face flushed, and for a second Marks felt his adrenaline dumping, as if he could sense or smell a fight in the air, somehow. “That is … disappointing. What is your name, then?”

Marks couldn’t resist a smile. “I don’t like to use names, either.”

The Broker sat very still and silent for a moment. Then he leaned back and propped his chin up on one finger. “We must set this right. Your Mr. MacKenzie must be in some distress.”

Marks nodded. “He seemed to be, yes.”

The Broker leaned forward. “Our clients pay us to remove from them pain and suffering. To deliver to them health and happiness. It is impossible—impossible—to reverse these actions. The solution is simple: You must take his contract. This deception is your responsibility.”

Marks stiffened. He’d known this. He’d told himself this as recently as moments ago, when he was riding the elevators up, accompanied by two security guards who remained suspicious that The Broker would wish to see him despite Marks’ insistence and the confirming phone call from the desk, the two of them eager to toss him back out on the street like their comrades had.

But he dreaded the idea. Cold and viscous, the dread filled him as the idea was verbalized. He swallowed. “What … what will I –”

“The term is twenty years,” The Broker said. “The afflictions will vary.”

Marks closed his eyes. Afflictions was a terrible word. It was generic, and when it came to endless suffering, generic was terrible. It was wide-open. He had no choice in the short-term: To allow MacKenzie to suffer was impossible. He had to start by having the contract transferred, and then he would be able to figure out what to do next.

He looked at The Broker. “How do we do this?”

The Broker brightened, opening a drawer. “I have the paperwork here.”

.

.o0o.

.

“Jesus.”

MacKenzie didn’t look at Marks. He was wrapped in a plush-looking terrycloth robe, but was sweaty and gaunt, unshaven and hollow-eyed.

“It’s faded a bit,” he said as Marks stepped into his apartment. “I’m feeling better.”

Marks didn’t say anything. He thought Mac looked awful.

The apartment wasn’t what he expected, until he remembered that Mac had passed the initial screening at Passus because he wasn’t nearly as rich as Marks remembered. The place was nice enough, and felt luxurious to Marks, but was another generic space: Builder’s beige, the smell of fresh paint, fluorescent lighting. They stood awkwardly in the tiny foyer, but Mac made no move to lead Marks further in. In the next room, Marks could see boxes piled up on a card table.

“Listen, Mac, I did something. I didn’t mean to, and I’m here to make it right.”

Mac nodded, then exploded into a coughing fit, hunching over, red-faced and swollen. He held up one hand to forestall intervention. Marks startled, then settled back on his heels, watching anxiously. When the fit passed, MacKenzie spent a few moments doubled over, gasping, then finally straightened up.

“All right, Phil,” he said, his voice wet and ragged. “Tell me.”

Marks told him. MacKenzie listened, stone-faced, occasionally biting back more coughing.

“So rich assholes pay me to take their diseases,” he finally said, wonderingly. “That’s fucking brilliant, in a way.”

Marks wrung his hands, shifting his weight. “I’m sorry, Mac. If I’d known—”

Mac laughed, a barking, harsh noise that cut Marks off.

Marks sobered. He reached into his jacket and extracted the papers the Broker had given him. He swallowed. “I’m prepared to make this right, Mac. These are transfer papers. I’ll take on your account. Your afflictions.” He wondered what it would be like. He appreciated the twist: He would finally have money, but he would suffer for it. But hadn’t he been suffering for nothing for a long time already?

Mac stared at the papers, then looked at Marks. “Jesus Christ, Phil, no.”

“No?”

Mac swallowed more coughs. “Did you see the zeros? The money? I ride this for a year or two, I’ll be set. All of it, set right.”

Marks thought of Mr. Wadell, faded and shrunken. “Mac, I don’t think—”

“You want it?” Mac said, peering owlishly at Marks. “Huh? You saw the zeros, you regret not taking the slot. Jesus, Phil I know you’re broke. I know you’re basically on the street. Get your own contract.”

Marks stared. “Mac, I don’t think you understand—”

Mac gestured at the door, weaving on his feet and looking faint. “I gotta lie down, Phil,” he said, sounding distant. “Get out. Take your fucking papers. Get your own contract.”

Marks hesitated, uncertain. Mac’s face took on a bloated red expression of meanness.

“Fine. A payoff, right? You fucking slug. You fucking grifter. You realize you fucked up, and here you are trying to stick your head under my skin. Fine, you want a payday.”

Mac stormed off, his breath loud and damp, leaving Marks standing awkwardly in his foyer. A moment later, he returned with a shoebox in his hand. He handed it to Marks.

“Take it,” he snarled. “My emergency fund, which I was just about to tap into. All I had left. Five grand. Take it and call it a fee or whatever, and go get your own contract, if that isn’t enough.”

Marks remembered weighing the box in his hands, then lifting the lid and peering inside, stunned at the bills. Real money. Actual money. He remembered looking at MacKenzie, who stood there flushed with fever, eyes reddened and weeping, breathing shallowly, mouth open. He looked awful, and after a moment Marks turned and slowly walked to the door. Opening it, he listened to Mac’s labored breathing and thought about how the apartment already smelled like disease, like something invisible burning, being depleted.

He turned in time for the door to slam in his face. He stood for a moment, listening to the low, subconscious buzz of ambient noise. Then he became aware of his own body: The lack of pain, the ease of his breathing, the steady beat of his heart. He took a deep breath and turned away from the door, smiling. Five thousand dollars. He remembered thinking he would go sleep indoors for a few days, see what happened.

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Black House Chapter 1

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

This novel features my recurring character Philip K. Marks, who has popped up in a bunch of short stories I’ve published (“Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” in Crimes by Moonlight edited by Charlaine Harris; “A Meek and Thankful Heart” in Buzzy Magazine; “Three Cups of Tea” in Hanzai Japan; “Howling on for More” in Black Denim Lit; “Supply and Demand” in No Bars and a Dead Battery; and tangentially in “Zilla, 2015” in The Lascaux Review). I thought he deserved a novel.

There’s an episode of The No Pants Cocktail Hour about this one, and a playable text adventure version of the book, if you’re so interested. Enjoy!

1. The Starlight Motel

Motel life was a step up. Thirty-five precious dollars a day, but he’d come into a windfall and it was wonderful to have hot water on demand and privacy again. If only for a little while. If only until the money ran out.

He was fascinated by the economy of the space. The little kitchenette was old and greasy, but in just four feet of space they’d packed everything one could need: A tiny fridge, a hot plate, a sink, some cabinets. The bathroom was enough space for one person at a time. The sitting area was by the window, a pair of old, stinking armchairs and a battered wooden table. The bed. He thought it best to not think about the bed, since he certainly wouldn’t be sleeping in it.

He thought about an entire life played out in the room. Breakfast, dinner, nights in front of the ancient cathode-ray television, the digital converter on top like even more ancient rabbit ears, the slowly shrinking choices of lives in an age when everything was increments and nothing was free. He thought about the question of how small things could get—how small could your whole world be and still support your life. The room was probably three hundred square feet, he thought. It still felt big to him; he’d been stealing time in his communal office, sleeping on the floor, scraping by. Now he had a room to himself. It felt like luxury, even if the sheet on the bed gave him the heroic heebie jeebies, imagining the germ civilizations they contained.

How much smaller could it be? He tried to imagine the smallest possible space that would be livable, workable. He mentally sectioned off the room and crammed everything into it, imagining a smaller bed, no sitting area. A hundred square feet? Fifty? He thought his life was something of an experiment to discover just how little space was needed to survive in. He saw himself in a box, hunched over, compressed, squeezed down to the essentials. And then the larger question of what the word essentials meant, really. What was essential? He’d found that things formerly thought of as essential could be jettisoned and done without. The longer he lived the more he came to believe that this process could be continued infinitely, in the same way you could cut something in half infinitely, down to the quantum state, and always have something left over, no matter how tiny.

He sat in one of the ancient chairs by the window, just to experience the novelty of having someplace to sit, a place dedicated to sitting. He had no use for a television; it had been so long he didn’t know what sort of shows were on the air these days. He thought about the little clock radio, finding some music, but didn’t want to stand up. Just sitting was entertainment, the stillness, the peace and quiet. A roof over his head.

He took the shoebox from his bag and opened it to look at the currency inside, more than five thousand dollars, a fortune. It had been easy money, really; a job that had left few scars and cost him few sleepless nights for a change. Good fortune felt odd and unreal to him. He kept opening the box and checking to see if the money had dissolved, turned to dust, the ink smeared off.

He sat and considered hiding places. The problem with a rented space was there were no secrets, or if there were they weren’t your secrets. He imagined cleaning crews unscrewing heating grates, flipping mattresses, moving pictures and mirrors from the walls as a matter of course every day.

In the end, the money stayed with him. He spent some studious time picking at the lining of his relatively new, if inexpensive, jacket, and slipped the money inside in discrete stacks, holding back just five hundred to keep on him at all times. Then he sewed the lining back using the tiny little kit he carried with him, doing a terrible job. But he felt better, because he would sleep in the jacket and not have to worry. He wasn’t used to good fortune, not that he could remember.

He put the five hundred-dollar bills into his wallet, then pulled out a wrinkled, oft-folded old business card. It had been cheaply printed to begin with on light stock, and much of it had faded and worn away, leaving just his name, PHILIP K. MARKS, and the word PRIVATE. Everything else was just a blur of old ink. Five thousand dollars, he thought. As usual, it wasn’t enough, would never be enough, not considering what he’d done to earn it.

He’d started a new ritual of remembering. Things slid so easily into the gray mass that was his past. He tried to pause once a day and remember. He paused now, and remembered how he’d gotten his five thousand dollars.

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We All Survived Another Year

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-sitting-on-the-floor-3419732/

Man, 2023 certainly was a year, in the sense that as far as I can tell time passed and I grew older. Every December I have the same experience: I am amazed and slightly alarmed to realize that so much time has slipped past. For the most part, I don’t pay much attention to time. I measure my days in terms of finished stories, completed freelance assignments, and the volume of liquor bottles in my recycling, not hours or days. Looking back, 2023 was a pretty good year. I

  • Sold two short stories
  • Published two short stories (I Am the Grass and The Little Birds)
  • Released two Avery Cates novellas and the latest Cates novel
  • Wrote approximately 5,000 freelance articles, which paid for the
  • approximately 5,000 bottles of whiskey I drank
  • Produced 12 podcast episodes
  • Published a slightly tarnished novel here on the wee blog
  • Judged some writing contests
  • Reviewed a bunch of books
  • Did a bunch of house projects that somehow didn’t end with the house on fire or me trapped under something heavy
  • Published 52 issues of Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives (52!)
  • Launched Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook and convinced some of y’all to pay me money for it (thank you)
  • Released not one but two albums of music from The Levon Sobieski Domination that no one asked for or appreciated
  • Continued to champion the footnote as both a literary device and a joke machine
  • Fed and clothed myself for 365 days straight. If you knew me you’d be impressed

I mean, put into bulleted list form that seems impressive. And honestly, any year that ends with the bills paid, the glass full, and the cats purring is a good year, so unless I am jinxing myself and next seven days are gonna be rough, I think we can put 2023 into the books as a perfectly cromulent year. I hope it was for you, too.

So, onto 2024. A couple of bits of business:

  • The Serial Novel. So I guess posting a novel here a chapter at a time is a thing, now, so if you enjoyed reading Collections (and Designated Survivor and Detained before that), know that the 2024 serialized novel will be Black House. I’ve done a podcast about this one, and released a text adventure based on it, so it’s not exactly an unknown quantity. But if you’ve been curious about it, you can read the whole thing next year one chapter a week. Here’s the not final, totally-might-change cover I’m playing with:
  • The No Pants Cocktail Hour Goes Nonfiction. I’ve been producing my self-centered podcast for more than 5 years , which is a lot of short stories and book chapters to read and discuss. In 2024 we’re going to experiment a little and cover 12 essays I’ve published over the course of my career. Some of these were promotional in nature, some were just gigs I got paid for, but I thought this would be an interesting vein to mine for a while. Maybe in 2025 we’ll do freelance work, or go back to fiction. Who knows! Here’s what we do know: I will be making a tipsy ass of myself at least 12 more times in 2024, and you should come along for the ride.

Otherwise, nothing much will change, I don’t think. Hilarious social media posts on various platforms? Check. Jokes about pantslessness in each and every post, article, and patent application I write? Yup. The endless struggle for attention that occasionally inspires drenching existential dread? Sure, why not.

Happy New Year, y’all!

American Wedding Confidential #5: Touch Me I’m Sick

Photo by Miriam Salgado: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pouring-drinks-10733402/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

Weddings are ridiculous affairs. Putting aside the obvious hilarity of two people in this day and age claiming to not only know themselves well enough to make a reasonable lifetime commitment but also to know a completely different person well enough to bet the ranch on, there’s also the issue of the sheer gluttonous spectacle of it all. The Wedding business is huge, weddings are incredibly expensive…and why? So you can invite a bunch of mean-spirited relatives, greedy ravenous friends you haven’t spoken to in a few years, and all of their anonymous and bottomless girlfriends, boyfriends, domestic partners, wives, husbands, and who knows what else, and then stuff them senseless? I don’t mind getting filled to the brim with watered liquor, rubber chicken and stuffed mushrooms three or four times a year, but ask me if it’s necessary.

And you cant blame us, the lowing stampeding herd of guests you’ve invited. The human race isn’t very complex: put a feed in front of us and most of us are like Boggies, we eat until were swallowed by an unexpected cloud of unconsciousness and rushed to the hospital. You resent the fact that you spend $20,000 just so I can draw a face on my beer gut and dance shirtless on a table while eating clams and chugging champagne (all the while being cheered on by everyone except my sobbing, red-faced date)? Then stop inviting me.

Ahem.

Earlier this year I was once again asked to pull out the old forest green suit and cut a rug at a wedding, this time being a rent-a-date for my friend Laura, who lives in South Carolina now and whom I don’t see nearly often enough, mostly due to my failure to travel south. A childhood friend of hers was getting hitched over in Staten Island and as is often the case with our lost generation, she needed a date. After exhausting her other options, she settled for me.

I’m well known in the wedding business now, and upon learning that I was to attend the reception hall hired three extra security people and restocked the bar. Such is my power.

Laura warned me that there was going to be no expense spared at this soirée, so I broke down and invested in a haircut a week before the festivities, to show my good faith in looking my best for my date. Of course, this was one of Italo the Barber’s (who has been cutting my hair since I was four with a maintenance of style and skill you’ve got to respect) $9 specials, which is to say: invariably a disaster. So I showed up at Laura’s house shined up like a new penny, except for my hair, which seemed to be prepared for a different experience altogether (possibly a rectal exam, possibly a murder attempt – who knows what my hair was thinking?).

Laura didn’t notice, however, as she was recovering from a bout of stomach virus so disastrous she’d been on IV fluids just the day before, which is to say she was still too busy vomiting to notice whether I looked good or not. I suggested that perhaps she was too ill to attend, but as she delicately locked herself into the bathroom she waved me off and insisted that everything was fine. I shrugged and went outside to spread plastic drop cloths over my car’s upholstery, just in case.

The wedding revived Laura somewhat, what with the brisk fresh air and the spirited drive over (I think my driving is spirited because so many people are moved to pray whilst in the car with me) and she greeted old friends enthusiastically, and finally took notice of my disastrous haircut. She politely ignored it, and me, for the rest of the ceremony, which was pretty long and dull as weddings go, and involved an odd spot wherein the bride and groom wandered off somewhere else entirely and left us all standing there in silence, wondering what the hell was going on. I imagine the couple got quite a hoot out of that, the bastards.

The reception, however, was Laura’s undoing, as you might expect: it’s hard to be at a well-catered reception and not eat until you pass out, and Laura continued to help herself to treats despite the mounting evidence that she shouldn’t. I was driving, and so only had one drink, which actually does nothing to improve my surly and combative nature. Upon our arrival we discovered that a nefarious couple had taken two seats at our table, meaning that we wouldn’t be able to sit with Laura’s brother and sister and their respective dates, with whom we had forged a strong bond over stiff drinks and appetizers during the cocktail hour. We wanted the couple to go sit at their own table, but nobody wanted a scene. We men stood around with our hands in our pockets, unsure of what to do, while Laura stalked off and caused a scene anyway. The offending couple were sentenced to a less prominent table and glared at me all night. They could tell I was an instigator, and blamed me. In truth, we men sort of avoided looking at the other couple and hoped to god a fight didn’t break out – I didn’t need the memory of Laura standing over me, defending my honor, while I bled and whined. I have enough of those sorts of memories.

I’m a lover, not a fighter.

The reception was pretty typical, and except for an hallucinogenic moment in the middle when the band played hard-rock versions of “Play That Funky Music” and “Devil Went Down to Georgia” back to back (twenty minutes of my life I’d certainly like to have back) the only thing which marked the evening was the fact that Laura’s Brother’s girlfriend kept disappearing for long stretches of time. She would just wander off and leave the poor guy sitting at the table alone, staring into space. In-between daring her stomach virus to attack, Laura and I noticed her talking to various men during the evening, and I wondered if tragedy was rearing its ugly head. The thought brought joy to my heart, and I prepared for drama and angst gladly. Little did I know the only drama and angst I was going to get was courtesy Laura’s wayward gastrointestinal system.

At one point, Laura and I snuck out to have a cadged cigarette or two, standing by the bathrooms in the lobby and gossiping about her brother. It was nice; I don’t see Laura much, and it occurred to me that maybe the ultimate purpose of Weddings in my life is simply to get together with people I don’t normally see. Standing in the lobby with Laura, this seemed likely, and I wondered, privately, if I would ever figure out a way to make money off of my skills as a rent-a-date. I didn’t mention this to Laura, knowing how easily I am misinterpreted these days.

By the time the Venetian room was opened up, I could smell disaster in the air but Laura couldn’t resist, and an hour later we were leaving, a slightly green Laura bravely staying awake for the whole ride to make sure I didn’t wander into the wrong direction entirely, which I almost managed despite her efforts. Driving for me, especially when I’m wearing tight, uncomfortable shoes, is a very Zen experience. I just sort of pick a car and follow it, and hope it knows where it’s going. This works better than you might imagine. As I dropped Laura off at home and sped away, I thought that if nothing else I learned that sometimes you just have to lay off the seafood.

American Wedding Confidential #4: It’s My Scene, Man, and It Freaks Me Out!

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-black-long-sleeve-holding-champagne-glass-3775172/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

THE best types of weddings to get invited to, the uninhibited bachelor soon realizes, is one where you’re no longer very close with the person or persons inviting you. Obviously some remnant of affection or intimacy or whatever remains to get you invited in the first place, but if his first response to the invitation is surprise, the enterprising bachelor knows he’s onto something.

When my friend Deidre (not her real name) invited me to her wedding, it was perfect. I was not close enough to be intimately involved with the plans, had met the groom once (and that in a crowded smoky place where I was pretty sure he would never remember me from) and knew only a limited number of her other close friends. The reason this was exciting was simple: weddings are filled with drunken, relaxed women in tight, revealing but uncomfortable clothes who have been whipped up into a mating frenzy by the sheer romance and primal proceative mood of the ceremony. After a few too many glasses of white wine and just the right number of love songs, any man with no perceivable limps or skin diseases starts to look attractive, as long as he seems like marriage-material.

“Marriage Material” is a tricky term which means, basically, that there is no reason the poor slob couldn’t be goaded into exchanging vows should a relationship blossom and the idea of living with him and bearing his children not bring images of prescription drugs dancing into the poor gal’s head. Not all men fall into this category, for a variety of reasons: the limps and skin diseases mentioned above, an existing marriage, baleful personality, halitosis, and an alarmingly long list of character defects that range from a wandering dick to an inability to stand up to her father. The exact prerequisites of “Marriage-Material” vary from girl to girl, and are difficult to pin down, but every lean and hungry bachelor knows that he has to look it to have any chance of being the real Best Man of the reception.

There are two ways to acquire this mysterious veneer.

The first is to do whatever is necessary to appear honestly distressed at your single status, to achieve a delicate balance of machismo and sensitivity, to try and project the sort of manly sadness stemming from your loneliness that will set women’s hearts a-pounding and knees a-melting and make you look like the third-rate Chris O’Donnel sensitive hunk you know you could be.

The other, more attractive to the lazy amongst us bachelors, is simply to show up with a good Trophy Date and not tell anyone she’s your platonic friend or your best friend’s sister or your cousin Ruth. Because the one true law of “Marriage Material” is that if some other woman is willing to appear in public as your girlfriend, you must be it.

I asked my gorgeous friend and confidant Simone [REDACTED] to be my trophy date for this one, for a variety of reasons: she can drink like a sailor, she’s a good choice of people to talk to for hours and hours, and she’s good-looking enough to blind when the mood takes her to wear skintight black evening dresses. Also, since Simone regards my own libido as an amusing if unimportant detail of my existence, there was no chance of me losing sight of my real objectives and getting distracted. She was perfect for Trophy Date status.

I was ready. With the lovely Ms. [REDACTED] on my arm and my own dashing lack of any discernible deformities, I knew I had Marriage-Material stamped on my forehead.

And then, we got lost.

And I mean, lost. We got lost on the way to the ceremony, although not too badly, and managed to sneak in with only a deafening-amount of squeaking hinges and muffled giggles. Then we got lost on the way to the reception, in a big way. Well, in all honesty I should say that I got lost. Simone just sort of sat in the front seat staring out the window in a saintly display of tolerance. But then Simone’s known me for years now and if she hasn’t come to terms with my general incompetence by now then she never will.

Being lost in New Jersey, however, means never being too far away from a major highway, and we did make it to the last half hour of the cocktail hour after being on the road for almost four hours. We were starving, and all the food had been gnawed down to the bones by the other guests, who resembled army-ants or piranhas in their greasy-lipped frenzy. I settled for a stiff cocktail and some sushi, while Simone trembled and wept because all the good foods had been devoured. I held her gently in my arms as she cried, forlorn at the lost hors devours.

At the actual reception, we were both so burned from the ride down that it took many glasses of liquor before we felt relaxed enough to enjoy ourselves, and by then I suppose I had lost my appetite for meaningless romantic entanglements with booze-flushed floozies in the coat room. Besides, my pickings were slim: the women at our table (the official “old friends we don’t know what to do with” table) were vague little sorority moppets more interested in discussing the details of every wedding they’d ever seen, heard of, or imagined in their narrow lives, and none of the other women were drinking enough. So I settled in, talked to Simone, snuck out with her to watch Game 4 of the World Series on the Hotel Lounge TV, and eventually got shit-faced enough to dance.

And there my careful veneer of Marriage-Material vanished, like ice on a July afternoon.

Dancing is not a male activity. Men who dance well are not men (although men who avoid dancing are cowards) and so most of us flail about with an unseemly awkward motion, endangering our friends and dates and ruining our cool exteriors. In self-defense, most sensible men have adopted a sedate white-man’s overbite type of dancing that is neither exciting nor embarrassing, it is simply dull. Not me. In my self-defense, I get as goofy as I can, dancing as if I were in a Bill Murray movie. I make my dancing into a big joke. This is fine if you’re dancing in front of good friends who already don’t respect you, but in front of strangers…sometimes it is a mistake. I am the Elaine Bennis of Male Pattern Dancing.

It didn’t matter, really; we had a good time and made it up to our room after several hours of dancing had sweated all the alcohol out of my body. Luckily, I was too tired to be humiliated and hit the sheets immediately upon entering the room. Simone unfortunately changed into frumpy sweatpants and a T-shirt, and the next day I happily drank coffee, clogged the tub drain, and ate a complimentary breakfast of greasy sausages and buttery eggs…

…and promptly got lost on the way home. Simone, tired of all this bullshit finally took charge and directed me home. As I dropped her off I considered the whole night to have been a rousing success, even if I had wasted a great Trophy Date opportunity. Oh well, one thing I know in this crazy life: there is always another wedding waiting for me.

American Wedding Confidential #3: It’s a Family Affair

Photo by Stephanie Lima: https://www.pexels.com/photo/women-having-fun-at-a-wedding-16026430/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

THE hardest part about attending my cousin’s wedding was finding a suitable fake name for her so I could eventually write about the event. Being from your prototypical Irish-catholic family, I have several thousand cousins, not to mention hundreds other less-defined relations, plus the weird hangers-on who aren’t even related to me but who are always at these family functions. Finding a name that no other member of my clan was currently using, so as to avoid the usual libel threats my family throws at me on a daily basis, was the most difficult and research-intensive task I’ve had to perform recently. After months of deep thought and careful searching through the bars and taverns of the tri-state area (the best source of Irish-catholic wisdom in the country) I’ve come up with a winner: I’ll call my cousin Smilla. I do happen to have a three-month old second-cousin Smilla, but she’s too young to have been the subject of this essay, so it’s okay.

I asked my gorgeous friend Elizabeth to be my date at this event, which was partly due to the deep and abiding friendship we have developed over the years and partly due to the fact that Elizabeth can cause car wrecks when wearing certain dresses. Attending family weddings is like going to a high school reunion for me: it’s a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a while who are dying to dig into the steaming pile of gossip I represent. Naturally, you want to make a big impression in these situations, and Elizabeth also kept everyone’s eyes off me and my sadly neglected physique. Little did I know that the evening would be a slow, tortuous dance of humiliations.

Elizabeth drove us to the combination chapel and reception hall somewhere in the uncharted wilderness of New Jerseys strip mall hell, and we arrived in time to glad hand a few Aunts and Uncles (some of whom attempted to glad-hand Elizabeth, causing a few early shouting matches) and take our seats to watch the ceremony. Smilla was marrying a Jewish man who looked vaguely Italian and so the ceremony was a mix of catholic and Jewish. Having been to a few weddings, I can tell you now that both sides of that coin are equally boring. Elizabeth slipped a stiletto heel off of her graceful foot to jab me in the side with every time my snoring threatened to become an embarrassment.

When the wedding huddle broke up, we had some time to wander the halls during the cocktail hour while they readied the reception hall. We found ourselves trapped, along with my Mother and Brother, with the craziest of my Crazy Uncles, who relaxed in a plush chair with a scotch on the rocks telling us about Jesus, who apparently spoke to him on an almost constant basis. Every time my Crazy Uncles eyes fell on me, I was afraid he was going to denounce me as a witch. At the first break in my Crazy Uncles nearly-seamless soliloquy I grabbed Elizabeth and demanded that we go outside for a cigarette. My Brother, no fool, tagged along despite the fact that cigarettes make him turn green.

Humiliation #1: Freed from insane relatives, the three of us prowled the corridors curiously and were having such an enjoyable conversation that we were late getting to the reception hall. The Wedding Party was gathered at the doors, ready to make their big entrance, and Smilla spied the three of us waiting politely to sneak in after them. My cousin insisted we sneak in before the wedding party, and we burst into the room amidst cheers and music meant for the bride and groom. I stopped to grin and wave like a superstar, until Elizabeth manhandled me to a nearby table, which, I must admit, I kind of enjoyed.

Humiliation #2: The table we’d found ourselves sitting at wasn’t the table we were supposed to be sitting at, but rather one of the kids’ tables. It was Elizabeth, me, and several ten-year-olds who were rather belligerent towards us. Often I had to use violence to defend myself. The fact that several of my aunts and uncles no longer speak to me can be directly traced to my actions, words, and attitudes at this table.

Humiliation #3: After the pandemonium had settled down a little, I went to the bar for a much-needed stiff drink, whereupon I was promptly carded. At my own cousin’s wedding. I have always been cursed with a cherubic and innocent face, which is why I get away with copping free drinks and cheap feels from my friends on a constant basis, but this was too much. I took our drinks, grabbed Elizabeth, and once again demanded we go out for a cigarette.

When we returned from prowling the halls once again, my family in general had boozed itself into a frenzy, with fights, romances, and general silliness breaking out all around us in record numbers. The groom, well-oiled with liquor through the evening, was hoisted up on a chair along with his bride and a handkerchief for what appeared to be some sort of traditional religious nonsense, and promptly fell off the chair. They hoisted him up again, and he fell off again, killing several people. One of my uncles is a cop, though, so it was all made right in the end.

Finally, Elizabeth’s friendship had been strained enough and we made our way through the EMS workers, police, and wounded to say good night to the bride and groom. The bride eyed us with the traditional catholic-matron marriage eye and thanked me for coming, the groom thought my name was Steve and seemed to be still standing only because he was too drunk to fall down.

In the car, with the wind screaming past us and Elizabeth’s perfume in the car, I pondered the horror of the family wedding and decided that it was definitely better to be a rent-a-date than the relation. As a rent-a-date I can get really drunk and make a pig of myself at both the buffet and the bridesmaids receiving line, and my mother never has to hear about it.

American Wedding Confidential #2: Going Stag In the Age of Couplehood

Photo by RDNE Stock project: https://www.pexels.com/photo/whiskey-glass-held-by-a-vip-passenger-5778514/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

All I can say is, never attend a wedding as a freewheeling bachelor. Never never never. Families abhor bachelors, and the rutting-fevered atmosphere of the pagan marriage ceremony brings this sentiment out in spades. It gets ugly.

My friend Madge was getting married and had scheduled her wedding very inconveniently for my rent-a-date purposes; every woman who owed me a favor or who might conceivably enjoy dressing up and drinking watery drinks with me for several hours was otherwise engaged, usually with a sudden vacation to some exotic port. If I’d been a less secure individual it might have seemed like all my friends were avoiding my wedding invite, but of course, that couldn’t be. So, in a moment of whimsical affection for my friend Madge I doomed myself by deciding that what the hell, I’ll go alone.

I don’t know what, exactly, I imagined the wedding reception would be like. I guess I had some disco-fueled sex fantasy involving available and drunkenly wanton bridesmaids (forgetting in my fever that Madge had no friends who could accurately be described as drunkenly wanton) and me ending up the evening like Sammy Davis Jr. with the band, tie undone, microphone and cocktail in hand, calling everybody “baby” and singing Barbara Streisand’s People Who Need People while the bride and groom slow danced. This was never, ever going to happen, not even for a second. If you believe in alternate universes, there was never even an alternate universe where that was a slight possibility. Frankly, I didn’t take a lot of different things into consideration: a) the awesome instinct to match-make in the modern Catholic female, b) the sheer horror uncoupled bachelors inspire in the hearts of Catholic matrons, c) how uncomfortable suits make me (so binding).

Still, for whatever reason I somehow convinced myself that attending Madge’s union ceremony as Solamente Jeff was a good idea. I even went out and bought a new suit for the occasion, because I was feeling lucky. Under the fascist-shopping guidance of the infamous and gorgeous Elizabeth [REDACTED], I picked out a dignified dark-green number that artfully accentuated my beer gut and brought out the somber color of the bags under my eyes. In a shopping mood, I also went in search of an odd and unique wedding gift. I didn’t want to give in to conformist tradition and buy Madge something she actually wanted; I’m an artist, after all, and had to find something symbolic and beautiful but patently useless.

I won’t tell you what I bought, though I will say that I succeeded. While Madge will protest her undying affection for my gift because it came from me (and thus will likely be worth money some day), I doubt it has ever seen light of her living room. I should also mention that my choice of gift was ungainly and large, and I packed into an even larger box, wrapped it garishly, and brought it with me to the wedding, I suppose so I could set it on the seat next to me and not feel so lonely.

.o0o.

The wedding itself was normal: the groom had the glassy-eyed stare of muscle relaxants, Madge was a vision in white and guarded by security professionals so no one would have opportunity to smudge her makeup. In the middle of the ceremony, she put the ring on the wrong finger, couldn’t get it off to fix the mistake, and dissolved into giggles while the groom, completely numb from sedatives, stared at her in mute horror. Or something like that; my memory gets a little fuzzy these days. I lurked in the background trying not to absorb any of the holiness going on around me. The two families could sense that I was a wolf among the flock and they steered clear, leaving empty seats around me for a two pew radius.

At the reception, I lugged my absolutely huge present around with me like the Ancient Mariner with his pet albatross until a very Italian woman took pity on me and told me where I could put it down safely. She then had me sit with her family, introducing me to her beautiful daughters with a degree of pity that instantly made me bitter and resentful. I spent a great deal of the cocktail hour smoking cigarettes, muttering to myself.

When we were all seated for the ridiculously intricate introduction and bridal Awards Ceremony, I spent a few quality moments trying to figure out the demographics of my table. Wedding veterans will tell you: every table tells a story, baby. There’s always the Single Friends table, the Obligatory Co-Workers table, the Never-Talked-To Childhood Friends table. I was none of those, and I slowly came to realize, to my horror, that I was seated at that nightmare scenario known as the Dateless table.

Without warning, I’d been bitten by the despised monster and been transformed into one of The Dateless.

I had also been carefully placed next to Madge’s colorful cousin who had a sunny personality, a bountiful bosom, and a complete lack of attraction either to or for yours truly. I’m not saying that Madge was trying to match us up, but I am saying that she figured she’d seat us together and see what happens, because, as I was learning, nature abhors a bachelor and the wise women of our tribes will always try and find you the sort of happiness they have found, the sort of happiness which results in a 113% divorce rate in this country. The sunny and bountiful cousin, however, also had something akin to a attention deficit disorder, resulting in her dashing around the reception like a lemur spooked from the brush, which was doing nothing to attract me.

Defeated, I left the reception at the appropriate time. The bride and groom were liquored up and weary and had no energy to pity me as I exited alone, determined to never attend another wedding dateless. Or to wear that suit ever again.

American Wedding Confidential #1: My Weekend with Carla

Photo by Rene Asmussen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/groom-being-held-by-his-best-men-12919222/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

I showed up at Carla’s around 2:30pm, shaved, showered, and pressed into uncomfortable shoes, which I do not wear for just anybody. I also smelled good, which anyone who knows me well will attest is not such a common occurrence. I was buffed, shined, and ready to boogie. As I stepped into Carla’s apartment it became obvious that she was not: the place was littered with underwear, recently purchased shoes, and trash. Carla was in the throes of typical chick-like lateness, rushing about applying last-minute makeup, brushing her lustrous hair, and vacuuming herself into rubber underwear, all, I presumed, for my benefit (hubba hubba).

I tried to make myself at home, but any time I tried to leave the living room I encountered a pile of underwear and Carla, screeching that I couldn’t go in there. Eventually I found that I was only welcome to sit in an uncomfortable chair in the shadowed area of the living room, and there I stayed.

Carla finally emerged ready to go, and I witnessed the first of many transformations for My Wedding Date, this one from Crazy Girl to Normal Girl. In her nice dress and with her hair combed, she appeared almost normal. We got into her chariot and off we were to pick up her friend Dorothy in Englewood. Here I grew worried as Carla seemed to have little idea where her friend lived, and seemed content to just drive around in circles and hum to herself. Adding to my desperation was the fact that Carla kept one finger mashed on the “lock” button all this time, so I could not give in to my urge to leap from the moving vehicle. We were saved by the sight of Dorothy waving at us from her front porch.

We got out and Dorothy told us to beware of snipers; apparently some local outpatient had been shooting at her trees just moments before. Carla seemed interested in this story, and I began to think her friend would have a calming effect on her, when Carla suddenly noticed that the dress Dorothy was wearing was strikingly similar to her own, and a cat-fight broke out on the front lawn. I was able to save Dorothy only by pointing out to Carla that since the offending dress was now stained green and red with grass and blood it no longer resembled her own. I carried the unconscious Dorothy gently to the car and we were off.

At the wedding, Carla developed an unseemly fascination with the bald head of the man seated in front of us, which was actually a good thing, as it kept her relatively quiet throughout the ceremony, except when she loudly informed me that I would be blasted by lightning for my sins and the several times she asked me if I was interested in any of her girlfriends, all of whom, she asserted, had “big bazooms”. With the aid of several burly ushers I was able to rush her from the church before being identified.

We arrived triumphantly at the hotel for the reception, and Carla lost little time digging into the rum supply, double-fisting it for most of the evening. Her transformation from Normal Girl to Drunk Girl was seamless, as was her almost unnoticed transformation from Drunk Girl to DANCING QUEEN. I’d had no idea I was the official nonthreatening male guest of the DANCING QUEEN, but my education was quick and brutal. She danced the Twist, which is to say she danced the Twist to every song that the band played, often by herself on the dance floor with the hot spotlight following, once with a dozen tuxedoed men clapping time and hooting.

As the hour grew late, I was pulled aside by Wedding Officials and asked to remove her from the dance floor so that the older couples could safely dance without fear of being smacked or trampled by the rampaging DANCING QUEEN. I donned my fatigues (I was “going commando” at the wedding anyway) and hustled her off to the bar, where she loudly berated the bartender for trying to give her her drinks in plastic cups instead of glasses. As he hustled off to take care of this, she leaned over and breathed into my ear.

“My rubber underwear has cut off my circulation,” she said, “I think my feet are numb.”

Around one in the morning we all admitted weariness and retired to the room we had rented for the evening. Here Carla instructed me to strip and lay down in the tub, but I refused, knowing better, and wrapped myself up in a bolt of fabric in order to protect myself from Carla and from the corrosive cold of the air conditioner, which the other denizens of the room had insisted on activating. We implored Carla to change out of her dress and remove her rubber underwear, fearing permanent brain damage from the lack of circulation, but Carla became irrational at this point and seemed to feel threatened by this piece of good advice, curling up defensively on the couch and growling at anyone who came near her, accusing several of her friends of attempted sodomy. In a bizarre moment, her friends made up a taunting song which included the words “finger” and “crack”, and sang it over and over again until poor Carla wept. At this point I fell asleep, and so cannot detail Carla’s undoubtedly agonizing transformation from Drunk Girl to Hungover Girl.

In the morning Carla announced several times that she felt like a “whore” but still refused to change clothes, planning instead to hang around the lobby of the hotel in the hopes of getting into another wedding reception, and at yet another rum supply. I enlisted several of her big-bosomed friends to help me force her into the car, wherein she grew grim and drove me home in silence, complaining that her underwear was up around her neck.