“Hey Bob—I’m having a lesbian dinner party tonight. You should come over.”
My friend Anna is house-sitting for some aging hippies from church. Right now they’re biking through Europe, with an extended stay in Amsterdam. Gee, I wonder why.
Like all hippies, they have an obnoxious belief in the worth of animals, and are paying Anna far too much money to stay in their house and take their dog for a walk twice a day, and make sure the dog has attention. The dog’s name is Mr. Bliss. I hate these hippies.
Of course, Anna is a college girl, and has invited pretty much everyone and their mother to stay and party at the house for the next month or so. She figures that the hippies won’t care about any messes, and plans on doing some chanting and burning some incense to restore the karma before their return.
Friday night, she threw a small, intimate, lesbian dinner party. I thought it could be a fun way to end the workweek, despite the proximity of the words ‘intimate’ and ‘lesbian’. Anna has some “free-spirited” friends, and they’re always a blast. In small doses, at least.
I show up, and find the term lesbian is not what it used to be. Apparently, Anna uses the term ‘lesbian’ to denote bisexuals, as the dinner party consisted Anna, her new boy, Mary, and her Tom, and me. Two ‘real’ lesbians didn’t show up, which caused a few cocked eyebrows and snide comments, but it was ok. Lesbians are kind of scary. But yeah. I thought it would be lesbians, and mostly singles, but nope. I was the only person sans date there, and you don’t get much more single than me.
Mary and Tom are lovely, insane, rocking people. Between the two of them, they’ve been in every major hardxcore thrashcore band in the tri-county area, and they’re pretty damn good. If you’re into that sort of thing, that is. The two have been dating for eons, and even say things like “When we get married...” though the sentence usually ends along the lines of “When we get married, we’re totally going to name our kids after you, Bob. All of them. Even if they’re girls.”
Now, Anna has not been housesitting by herself. One of her friends is staying with her. And, it just so happens that the two of them are dating, or at least doing something along the lines of dating. She never used the term ‘boyfriend’ but he is staying at house, since he has graduated from college and is looking for a job. He’s a classically trained bassist and she’s training to be a pianist—yeah, that’s got to be some hardcore petting and fingering between the two of them.
I walk in, and greet her new boy, who’s chopping and dicing some tomatoes for the organic pizza they’re making. (I guess we’re all a little bit hippie tonight.) I startle him, and cause him to knock over the bag of sunflower seeds he was munching on. My nickname for him the rest of the night was ‘Onan.’
‘Onan’ has the exact profile of my ex, the one regular readers of this blog know far too much about. He’s a bit taller, a bit tanner, and his hair is short and doesn’t make the same “Screech-esque” style as the ex. I didn’t notice the resemblance until we sat for dinner, when it knocked the breath out of me. I guess I’m not as over him as I thought I was.
Before dinner, he mostly worked on the pizza while Anna, Mary and I sliced fruit for smoothies. Onan even cooks, just like the ex. Tom had to work and came just as we were about to sit down to eat. Mary added a few drops of vodka, and by a few drops, I mean “one-one thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one thousand, four-one thousand, five-one thousand and one to grow on,” and this was some pretty expensive vodka, not some $9.99 plastic jug the size of your head. This was quality, and there was a fair amount of it.
Tom finally arrived and we sat down to eat. I had spent the afternoon reading a biography of Dorothy Parker, and must have been channeling her before and during the meal, as I was wittier than the most superlative metaphor. We were all musicans/artists/writers/etc, and we exchanged stories about performances and concerts; it was like a Gertrude Stein soiree (except we had no real lesbians.)
Throughout dinner, I just-so-happened to extend my feet out repeatedly near Onan’s, in hopes that he would nudge me and then we would play footsie or something. I didn’t expect to have anything come out of it, especially since he’s sort of kind of dating or something my best friend, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a boy, and even longer since clandestine footsie. Every time his foot bumped mine, he glanced and me and smiled, but afterwards always tucked his feet underneath his chair. Bastard.
By the time Onan started cutting the last piece of pizza in half as not to take the last piece, everyone else had finished their smoothies, and were drinking gin and juice, and had their mind on their money and their money on their minds.
Now, other people get vivacious when they drink, but I don’t. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t drink usually. I tend to become sullen and quiet. Everyone else started comparing drunken and pot-filled stories: the time Tom was so drunk he let his friend tattoo his band name into his arm, Onan huddled under a bar table, pinching everyone who walked past, Mary giving an impromptu speech at high school graduation, Anna getting white-girl dreadlocks. I’ve never been drunk before, nor have I smoked, but if I had, I’d probably just sit around like a bump on a log in the corner and cry. The few times I’ve been in the room while people were smoking pot, I’ve always ended up leaving the room in tears for no apparent reason, and I tend to become sullen when I drink. Not only am I the worst college student, I am the worst gay I know.
To his credit, Onan tried keeping me into the conversation, complimenting my choice of dinner music (the Books), making eye contact while laughing in hopes that it would catch. I did laugh, but mostly because everyone else was doing it. I am a sheep.
I spent the next hour or so playing with the stereo and admiring the hippie art (not). There are only so many watercolor tye-dye sunsets that a house should be allowed to have. The others were meandering about the house, still comparing stories but now reenacting them. It was you expected college kids to do while drunk.
By one o’clock, I had had enough. Anna and Onan were making out on the stairs (which looked terribly uncomfortable) while Mary and Tom got into the hippies’ closet and were frantically dressing and undressing. They ran around the house singing “People all over the world, join hands, start a love train” and “C’mon people now, smile on your brother” while Anna and Onan kept making out at the top of the stairs. (The railing partially blocked them, but it was apparent what they were doing.) I quietly slipped out the back door and went home to write a whiny blog post.
Because really, at the end of the day, that’s all I feel comfortable doing.
