I told someone the other day that this is one of the funniest and best, and perhaps my favorite, of stories from my young adulthood and I was saving it for a blog post some day. But, y'know, no time like the present. Especially since the turning of the year seems to have morphed me into one of those old people who reminisce about things that happened twenty or forty years ago and think other people ought to be fascinated. Ahem.
My ex-husband and I had this friend, R. R is deceased now--which will probably come as no surprise to you if you make it to the end of this blog entry--so I feel no compunction to change any identifying details. R's parents were working in Saudi Arabia for an oil company, leaving their house in Massachusetts under the watch of R and his brother and sister. I should say, under the watch of R's sister, because you can just imagine what two drunken idiot boys in their early 20s would have done to that house in the woods without her screaming at them all the time. Anyway. I realize that much of my suppositions of the character of Possibly Irish Danny are based on my memories of R: a good-hearted, friendly, well-meaning, not stupid but not overly bright young guy who, if he is in trouble, is in trouble solely due to an inability to conceive of the consequences of his actions before he performs them. (I have no idea if this is actually true of P I D, of course, but from my eavesdropping on him, I've come to see him as an R-like figure.)
So, R had a little bit of a crush on me. I knew this if for no other reason than (what's the statute of limitations on drug crimes again?) when R would go to Saudi to visit his parents once or twice a year, on his way home through Asia he would pick up, um, souvenirs for his friends of the illegal variety, and he always made sure to bring me back a lump of this sticky sweet resin-y hash that was the only form of THC I enjoyed, and make sure that everyone knew that's for Andrea, don't touch it. But R kept his crush under control, me being the longtime girlfriend of one of his very closest friends.
Well, one Fourth of July, R had a cookout/party at his parents' house, which, as I mentioned, was in the woods, though off a very major highway. My ex and I arrived probably around 2 or 3 pm and R was already extremely intoxicated on apparently a broad and wide variety of substances. I should also mention that I was, at our arrival, the only person there as yet who had a vagina, R's sister having thrown up her hands and vacated, our friends D and K having not yet arrived, and the rest of the bunch of drunken loser stoners who *were* there already not being able to obtain any female companionship on any kind of a regular basis.
My ex and I were chatting with a couple guys we knew and then I walked about twenty feet away from them to get a drink or some food. My ex's back was, at this point, to me. R wandered intoxicatedly up to me and, completely mutely, reached out and did what he'd probably wanted to do for the past three years: grabbed one of my boobs. I reached up and removed his hand, said very calmly but firmly (as you would speak to a misbehaving child) "R, don't ever do that again," and kicked him in the nuts. The friends who were facing us and saw the whole thing fell out laughing, cheering, hooting, and applauding, while my ex was like, "What??!!?? What'd I miss?!? What'd I miss???" R looked at me in great confusion and befuddlement, still completely mute, then walked out into the road/drive and promptly passed out, whereupon four or five guys had to drag all 275 pounds of him into the house.
But that's not even the funniest part. The funniest part was, like I said, R was a very close friend of my ex and he was at our apartment all the time, like once a week or more. For the next solid year, every single time he stepped foot into my house and I was there, he would start apologizing profusely. (Not that he remembered any of what he'd done, but he'd been apprised, to his great embarrassment.) And every time he did, I'd tell him it was okay, until after so many months of apologies I just couldn't take it anymore, and told him if he said he was sorry one more time, I wasn't going to merely knee him in the balls, I was going to remove them with one of my kitchen knives. He stopped. (You people think I'm sweet and cute and little but, especially in those days, people believed me when I threatened to assault them. They weren't particularly afraid, but they believed me.)
Okay, we'll end my little nostalgia-fest right here. Feel free to chime in with any stories of your own misspent youth you'd care to share.
xoxo
3 comments:
I dated a Playboy model once. (35th anniversary issue, very nice). She was a drunken mess most of the time, meaning it was much more wine than roses, but there's definitely something to be said for bedding a pinup once or twice in your life. (Rocked my frat cred, that's for sure). So, anyway, one night I got so hammered I couldn't, if you know what I mean, but I still took her up to a friend's dorm room upstairs from the party, on the third floor, anyway, just in case. While we were in the bed trying not to fall out of it, there was a crashing noise by the window as two of my equally drunken buddies clambered their way in in hopes of seeing something worthwhile. (Remember, we're up on the third floor). They had scaled a drain pipe from the second floor room below us in order to do it, and "SHHHHH, THEY'LL HEAR YOU" was one of the more memorable quotes I recall from the episode. They really were as trashed as we were. Well, I had to appreciate the effort, though it seemed just a tiny bit disrespectful to my girl, (for my part, I just thought it was hysterically funny), so I figured I ought to shoo the party crashers out into the hallway so my party girl could get some clothes back on. Some while later when we got back down to the party (like I said, I was too drunk to, so what else was there to do) the first guy through the window apologized profusely to her and suggested he deserved a firm slap in the face for it, but, no, she knew he was a nice guy at heart, and she said she wouldn't, and it was all ok. Then the second guy, quite clearly the instigator and not really all that contrite or so much of a nice guy at heart, came up behind and started insisting that she slap him in the face, too. No, she said, she really didn't want to. Oh, he insisted. Like half a dozen times. So, to shut him up, and to the roaring approval of everyone at the party, she swung a roundhouse right at him that left an imprint of her fingers on the side of his face for the rest of the night, and a bit of bruising still in the morning. Hysterical. We laughed so hard, we all fell over--even the people who weren't as drunk as I was.
So the final part of the story was the next morning when, in my hung over (possible) regret for having laughed so hard while all my friends treated her like a human party favor, I approached her in the mail room to try to think of something appropriate to say. Before I could find the words, she instead begged *me* to forgive *her*, since all my friends were just drinking and having a good time, and she really regretted spoiling the party when she really should have just rolled with it.
If it wasn't for the alcoholism, (not sure, hers or mine), I think I should have kept that girl...
I could tell what little I remember of a surrealistic drunken ramble around southerly parts of New York, but as far as I can remember it did not include overtures to anyone of the opposite sex...or same sex, if it comes to that.
There was also, much earlier, a party at which my friends set me up with female company. We got along quite well and frustrated the hell out of our friends by lying on a bed in deep conversation, whilst a growing audience rooted for sex, sex, sex.
(Had they all gone away we probably would have.)
After you guys' stories, I think I'm becoming insulted that none of my drunken friends or fellow partygoers ever tried to watch me have sex.
Um, as far as I know. Maybe they were just better at it.
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