Never fear, we may let the scaffolds fall, a nineteen-year-old girl is playing with my balls.
“Your shot,” she says, handing me the wet Ping-Pong ball.
The game is beer pong. It’s played on a conventional table tennis surface, with ten cups lined up in an ascending triangle like bowling pins on opposing ends of the table. Each cup is filled halfway with beer, although I hear there’s a variety of the game involving a quarter-cup of beer played by people who aren’t binge drinkers. There are two players to a team, a turn involving each player getting one shot at the cups on the opposing end of the table. Beyond these basics, everyone seems to have their own individual rules. My rules tend to err on the side of drinking more. Every time you make a lob shot, an opposing player has to chug that cup. A bounce shot into the cup is a double bonus, meaning two cups must be consumed; however, a bounce shot can be legally blocked by the opposing team. This is a rarely attempted shot, reserved only for those nights when you find an opponent who’s already drunk, exceedingly chatty, easily distracted, or all of the above. First team to eliminate all ten cups wins the game.
An eleventh cup sits off to the side of the table. It’s filled with water, to rinse your balls. The theory is not only does the water keep your balls clean, it cuts down on the drag from the beer. Like many theories—creationism, compassionate conservatism, a woman’s sex drive peaking in her thirties—it’s total bullshit.
Tonight I’m playing the game with three young women. Two of the women are nineteen, the other is twenty. They’re dressed in matching black pants and white oxfords with black bow ties. I force myself to call them young women in the hopes of feeling a little less dirty-old-mannish about being twice their age and wanting to bone them. Plus, calling them girls would be to imply they contextually belong in the same discussion as my thirteen-year-old daughter.
“Score!” I say, sinking the ball into the tenth and final cup. “Game, set, and match, bitches!”
The other nineteen-year-old, my teammate’s twin sister, grabs the cup and lifts it to her lips. “Well, fuck me up the ass.”
I half-consider responding, That could be arranged, if only because her ass is very fuckable. Aside from a small chicken pox scar on my teammate’s forehead, the twins are identical: same plum-colored hair, same fuckable Goth asses.
Beth’s sudden appearance at the bottom of the staircase tempers my enthusiasm somewhat.
“Hank, what the hell are you doing?”
“Hi, honey,” I say, trying not to slur. “Just playin’ a li’l beer pong.”
“With the caterers?”
We hired them on the recommendation of Beth’s father. They had catered Dr. Burke’s office Christmas party the night before. About fifty of our friends are upstairs right now debating the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate, bitching about their jobs (or lack thereof), and trading pictures of their children. Which is why I’m down in the basement getting drunk with nineteen-year-olds.
I start toward the stairs. “You told them they were off the clock.”
“Yeah,” Beth says, glaring over my shoulder at the three caterers, especially the twenty-year-old, a petite blonde who looks a lot like a younger version of Beth. “That doesn’t mean they can go play drinking games with my husband.”
I try to walk alongside her up the stairs. “You need to lighten up.”
Beth makes sure to stay a couple steps ahead of me. “Sorry, Hank, but one of us has to be the responsible host.”
“Says the woman who broke into a private pool for some three-way skinny-dipping. Talk about mixed signals. The kids are at your mom’s house. Why don’t you relax and live a little?”
She stabs me with her eyes. “I am living a little. I just don’t need to pound twelve beers to do it.”
“Twelve beers?” I shake my head unapologetically. “I’ve had maybe ten or eleven, tops.”
My wife doesn’t acknowledge my response, walking up the rest of the stairs. I watch as she sinks into the mumbling crowd of low expectations and dead-end lives. I open a new bottle of Jim Beam.
Like most parties involving people in their late-thirties, this one loses its steam right around eleven-thirty. The ice buckets of cheap white wine now filled with room-temperature water. The brie solidified. Beth’s iPod Party Time playlist now on its third rotation. Our remaining few guests closing the night with their predictable excuses.
“The babysitter is going to cost me a fortune if I don’t get out of here,” Lisa says.
Lisa is our next-door neighbor. She’s a divorced single mother, with long legs and unusually perky breasts sprouting from her tall, stick-thin figure. She’s also a former Indianapolis Colts cheerleader. I was hoping to talk her into the hot tub with me and Beth tonight, holding on to that perpetual fantasy of all married men that one day, in a moment of weakness, curiosity, and one too many glasses of bad Riesling, my wife would dive face-first into another woman’s snatch while I tagged her from behind.
As if somehow sensing my descent into heterosexual ecstasy, my gay neighbors, Oscar and Marshall, chime in unison, “Great party, Hank.”
If you overlook their seven Chihuahuas, Oscar and Marshall are pretty damn cool. They get inappropriately drunk on craft beer and enjoy football and basketball as much as any guy with a properly oriented penis—plus they harbor my same burning hatred for Roy and Bonnie.
Roy and Bonnie, or “R&B” as we call them, are a retired empty-nester couple on our cul-de-sac who think being older than fucking dirt and not having kids entitles them to never pay any taxes that go toward public schooling. It’s a notion I’d concede if they were willing to refund the government every cent of social security they’ve collected over the last ten years.
R&B also think that Homeowners Association dues are more a suggestion than a mandate and have convinced enough neighbors to follow suit. Thanks to them and their brain-dead lemmings, the street lights in our neighborhood haven’t been lit for three years because we don’t have money to pay the electrical bill. Meanwhile, every school referendum has been met by an R&B remonstrance ensuring underfunded schools and plummeting enrollments to go with our dark streets.
I think Bonnie might be paranoid schizophrenic. Two or three mornings a week she comes outside in a faded aqua bathrobe. With an eye patch on her left eye, a surgical mask fastened snugly over her mouth, and a feather duster in her right hand, she proceeds to dust the boxwoods lining her front porch for a good fifteen to twenty minutes.
I’ve attempted to talk to Bonnie and even to Roy, her pathetically enabling wallflower of a husband, but they’re just too far gone. They once tried to have Sasha and the twins arrested for trespassing when they took three steps into their front yard to retrieve an errant kickball. If not consciously malicious, R&B are two of the more accidentally evil people I know.
“Got to get up early for church,” Hatch says. “You know how it is, Hank.”
“No, I don’t,” I say.
Elias Hatcher has to get up early…for fucking church? When the hell did everyone become such goddamn squares?
“Come on, buddy. Five minutes.” I grab Hatch by the elbow. “Just give me that.”
He starts to unfasten his trench coat before the word “buddy” is hardly out of my mouth. “Okay,” he says.
I catch Beth leering at me one last time from across the room. “Keep your coat on. Let’s go outside and get some fresh air.”
“Suit yourself,” Hatch says. “But I’ll give you five minutes under one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Turn this shitty music off.”
In all fairness, Beth’s playlist isn’t that horrible. It just happens to be playing Owl City’s “Fireflies” at the moment, quite possibly the most insipid song written in the last twenty years. And given that with the exception of maybe the Black Keys, post-grunge rock and roll is the vinyl track housing of music, that’s saying something.
“Houses of the Holy maybe?”
“Perfect,” Hatch replies.
I queue up the CD. Hatch and I love this Led Zeppelin album above all others. Well, actually, Hatch does. I think it’s a tie between House of the Holy and Led Zeppelin II, the latter being Zeppelin’s loudest and therefore best album. At the very least, we don’t worship Led Zeppelin IV just because everyone says we’re supposed to.
“That better?” I ask.
“Go to the next track,” Hatch says before stepping outside. “We need to chill out with some ‘Rain Song.’”
We walk out onto the back porch, a patchwork of loose bricks and crumbling mortar. Jimmy Page’s guitar and Robert Plant’s vocals echo across the backyard from the outdoor speakers mounted on the back of my house. I have a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks in my left, a now half-empty bottle of bourbon in my right. I take a sip of the bourbon, inhaling the aroma. My nose burns a little. Just for a second, as the charred oak smell curls up my nose and down my throat, I miss being a smoker.
“Still drinking Beam, Hank?”
It’s been at least fifteen years since Hatch started calling me Hank and stopped calling me Fitzy. I guess joining the Navy and more than a decade of sobriety made him put away childish things. He’s gone from being my constant enabler to my constant rock: critical without being judgmental, supportive without being pandering, fun without being drunk. In other words, boring.
“What’s it to you, lightweight?” I like to make fun of his sobriety, only because it detracts from the more pathetic reality that I still drink Beam because it reminds me of high school.
“Just figured you would have upgraded after all these years to maybe a small-batch bourbon or single malt.”
“Oh yeah?” I shake my head. “And I just figured I wouldn’t get lectured on my alcohol choices by a guy who’s been sober since the Clinton administration.”
“I’m just fucking with you, Hank.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Then chill out.”
“Sorry,” I say. “How long is Claire going to be out of town?”
“Another week or so.”
“She still with US Airways?”
“Did you really bring me out here to talk about Claire?” Hatch hands back my glass of bourbon but holds on to the bottle.
I take a swallow as opposed to a sip. Exhaling, I let the caramelly bourbon warm my insides. “Somebody called me ‘sir’ today.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Beth and I went to the mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping for the kids. We were walking through the front doors at Macy’s, and some teenage girls were trailing behind us. I opened the door for Beth, and then I held the door open for the teenagers. One of the girls turned and looked at me, and I swear she was about to wink.”
“I guess you still got it, Hank.”
I wave him off with my glass of Beam. “Wait, I’m not finished. I smiled back at her, and she said to me, ‘Thank you…sir.’”
“So?”
“So, Hatch? She called me ‘sir.’ I’m not a sir. I’m not even a mister. I’m a Hank. I’m a Fitzy.”
“Fitzy,” Hatch says. “When’s the last time anyone called you by—”
“The point is I was fucking despondent. Beth noticed, asked me what was wrong, and said I looked like I was going to pass out.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘That girl might as well have just punched me in the nuts.’”
“Man,” Hatch says, shaking his head. “I don’t envy Beth.”
“Why do you say that?”
Hatch points the bottle of Beam at me. “Because for the next ten years you’re going to be one shitty fucking husband.”
“When did you get to be so insightful?”
“When I stopped depending on brewed hops and distilled corn for insight,” Hatch says, patting me on the back. “But speaking of shitty fucking husbands, how’s your mother doing?”
I try not to grimace. “She’s fine.”
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around how Debbie ended up marrying a Mormon.”
I take another sip of Beam. “He’s actually not that bad.”
“Plus that daughter of his is one fine piece of ass.”
“Lay off Lila. That’s my stepsister you’re talking about.”
“Oh, it’s ‘Lila’ now?”
“It’s always been Lila. She hates being called Delilah.”
“Of course she hates it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Let’s see, a hot half-Armenian Mormon in her late thirties, who likes to drink, and isn’t married.”
“She’s not even dating at the moment.”
“Exactly!” Hatch says. “That’s total LDA right there.”
“Okay, now you’ve officially lost me.”
“What I’m saying is, your stepsister is not a Latter-Day Saint. She’s a Latter-Day Ain’t.”
“I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t be dense, Hank. If she’s LDS, she’s dyed-in-the-wool. No caffeine, no swearing, no sex, Jesus talked to the Indians, beam me up to the planet Kolob, all that crazy shit.”
“And if she’s LDA?”
“Then she’s probably one freaky-ass slut.”
“Fuck you, Hatch.”
“You remember Maeve, right?”
“Sure,” I say. “You dated her before you enlisted.”
“We didn’t date so much as screw each other’s brains out.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me Maeve is Mormon?”
“Born and raised.”
“And she’s a Latter-Day Ain’t?”
“Well, not anymore. Thirty days after I was deployed, she got married to a Mormon named Babe, proceeded to squeeze out four kids in three years, and I suspect she’s not living in Salt Lake City for the beachside vistas.”
“Babe?”
“It’s his nickname,” Hatch says. “He’s the youngest of six Abrahams. His grandfather is called Senior, his dad is called Junior, and his four brothers are Abraham, Abe, and Bram.”
“So he’s Babe, literally the baby Abe?”
“Awesome, right?”
“If by ‘awesome’ you mean the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. But I mourn your loss.”
“You and me both.” Hatch looks up to the sky and rubs his chin, his face practically glowing in the winter night.
“Cat got your tongue?”
“Just remembering some good times,” Hatch says. “Maeve loved her sex two ways, dirty and filthy-stinking dirty.”
“And on that note…” I offer my glass to Hatch. “How about a refill?”
Hatch unscrews the cap off the bottle, tilts the bottle down toward my empty glass. “No more ice?”
“Nah,” I say. “At this point water would just be getting in the way of my buzz.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, as I was saying about Maeve.”
“Your Mormon girlfriend who was into weird sex.”
“I didn’t say weird.” Hatch screws the cap back on the bottle of bourbon. “I said dirty.”
I take another sip of Beam and fight off another compulsion to smoke a cigarette. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you stationed in Thailand?”
“Technically I was stationed in Hawaii, but we went to Thailand all the time.”
“Lila is moving to Hawaii,” I say.
“Oh really?” Hatch says. I can hear the change in his voice, that detached tone he uses when he’s not genuinely listening to you—the one where all he wants is for you to stop talking just so he can tell a better a story.
“What did I just say, Hatch?”
“Huh?”
“Exactly,” I say. “Back to Thailand. If I recall, that place pretty much cornered the market in dirty and filth-stinking dirty. Isn’t that the place where pimps used to sell you two girls and a beer for how much?”
“‘Two-girl, one-beer…ten-dallah,’” Hatch says in his best offensive Asian voice.
“So much for inflation,” I say. “And that’s also where you met a prostitute in Bangkok who stuffed her vagina with colored Ping-Pong balls and could eject each individual color upon request?”
“She was a very skilled woman, Hank.”
“I can’t imagine Maeve being any dirtier than Ms. Ping-Pong Pussy.”
“Ms. Ping-Pong Pussy wasn’t addicted to butt sex like Maeve.”
“Excuse me?”
“Maeve put the A in LDA. I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s a Mormon thing. But that girl loved her some anal.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“And I’m not just talking your standard ramming the penis up the poop shoot.”
“I think I get the picture.”
“I mean any foreign object that was within a ten yard radius of her asshole. Anal beads, fists, large vegetables…”
“I got it, Hatch.”
“In fact, she was fairly ambivalent about her vagina. It got to where she didn’t even let me go down on her because she’d much rather have me lick her asshole.”
“And on that note,” I say, throwing back yet another glass of bourbon, “you can show yourself out.”
Hatch tries to muffle a laugh. He pats me on the back again as he turns to leave. “Good talk, Hank.”
It’s been almost an hour since Hatch left, my whiskey my only companion. The winter cold is starting to seep through my overcoat. My bourbon glass raised to my mouth with one hand, the bottle of Beam in the other, I can’t see where I’m going and trip over an old tree root I’ve tripped over a hundred times before.
An old black walnut tree canopies our porch, its limbs as stark and judgmental as the look on Beth’s face tonight, its roots as dangerous as her distrust in me. My childhood home in Clematis Gardens had a black walnut tree much like this one. It stood near the back of our property, fighting for space with ash saplings along an old farmer’s fence line.
When I was five years old, Dad put an aluminum swing set under that black walnut tree. He ordered it out of the Sears catalog, back when Sears actually printed catalogs and I viewed the toy section in their Christmas edition as the most sacred tome on Earth. Dad and Uncle Mitch put the swing set together. It was painted blue with diagonal green and white stripes on the bars. The directions said, Assembly time approximately sixty minutes. It took them four hours to build it. I used to have a picture of Uncle Mitch pushing me on the swing, my face plastered with this fake grin. Pretending as always to trust him. Pretending as always to love him.
The swing set teased me with illusions of childhood, my naïve bare feet bruised and cut by the jagged walnut shells that littered the ground. It was a vicious cycle, my feet building up just enough calluses through the summer only to go soft and vulnerable over the winter months. Later, in college—in a botany class I took as an elective because the teacher was a smoking hot peroxide blonde with fake tits who quit her job as a weather girl in the eighties to get a doctorate in plants—I found out black walnut trees were poisonous. They give off a toxin that causes certain plants to exhibit symptoms such as—and I can still remember watching the teacher’s walnut-hard calves as she wrote this on the chalkboard—“foliar yellowing, wilting, and eventual death.”
The music stops, right in the middle of “The Ocean” of all places.
“What the fuck?” I say to no one. “That’s the last song!”
“Oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch!” Beth shouts from inside the house.
Jessie James’s “Wanted” starts up on the outdoor speakers.
“Come on, Beth. You cut Zeppelin off for this?”
“No…” my wife says. “For this.”
She steps out of the shadows into the flickering light of the Tiki torches rimming our back porch. She’s wearing a multilayered silk skirt fastened low on her hips. She is topless, save for two small, golden teacup-like pasties.
My belly dancer has returned.
Beth starts dancing, shimmying her hips in rhythm with the song. She grabs the glass of bourbon from my hand, finishes it off with one swallow.
“Speaking of panties,” I say, “are you wearing anything under that skirt?”
Still dancing, she hands the glass back to me, pushing it into my chest. “What do you think?”
“So, I’m forgiven?” I say, backing up as my wife advances.
“No,” Beth says. “But fortunately for you, I’m too horny to think about it.”
“Can I at least say I’m sorry?”
“Apologizing won’t make me any more or less horny.”
“Well, I’m still sorry.”
“Just shut up, Hank.” Beth continues to push me backward, steering me toward the chaise lounge, just a few feet away under the black walnut tree. In a few seconds, she will push me down on to the chaise. She will straddle me, take me inside her, and then pleasure herself while I watch. It’s her favorite move. It’s in my top two or three as well, trailing only reverse cowboy and early-morning spoon sex. There’s a good chance I’m too drunk to have an orgasm. There’s a better chance she doesn’t give a shit.
“Uh oh…” I say, my words trailing off like a word balloon in a comic book as my heel catches on a black walnut root. I stumble backward, tripping over myself.
“Hank!” Beth shouts.
She lunges for me, but it’s too late. My bourbon glass shatters. The last thing I see before I black out is that my feet are suspended in the air above me. The last thing I hear is my wife’s scream punctuated by the blood-wet thud of the back of my head hitting our brick porch.