NLW came over yesterday and we doused ourselves liberally with coconut suntan oil, sunbathed, and talked about sex. (And knitting, and spirituality, and travel, and relationships, and a host of other things. But somehow it seems more appropriate to talk about sex while covered in oil.) We had BLTs and cheesy poofs for lunch, followed by chocolate ice cream for dessert.

It was fun as hell. She’s got a great new hair cut – a cute long bob – and she went and lost at least twenty pounds and looks great (the bitch). Greater, now that she’s got herself some tan lines.

Last night was my Seventh Ray gig at Revelations. I thought it was going to be in the basement, so when I showed up a healthy half-hour late for sound check, I was a little disconcerted to find the basement stage empty. I ended up calling J’s cell phone to ask him where the hell the gig was. Turns out it was upstairs in a room I’d never even seen before.

The crowd was smaller than the last gig, but just as appreciative. Over half of them had already heard the CD at least once and they joined in on the chants. NLW came to see the show again, and C was there toward the end – it was her birthday, so I kissed her about five times after the performance was over while carolling, “Happy birthday!” J embarrassed her by making her come up on stage to have the birthday song sung to her. It was cute… but then, I was only a spectator. She may not have thought it was so damn cute. Tee-hee!

There was cake. Apparently, cake is a staple at J’s performances. I don’t really understand this, but I ate a piece anyway. This time it had frosting instead of whipped cream, and NLW kept her paws off it.

After much talking and chatting and schmoozing and networking and saying, “Thank you very much, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” I finally made my way through the milling crowd, out the damn door and down the stairs to my jeep. Where I had a damned cigarette already.

NLW and I ended up sitting on the sidewalk with adorable blue-eyed, braces-wearing Martou (the chef from Petit Paris) and L (one of the R girls) smoking cigarettes. Teenaged girls are so intense! L’s in love with a ninteen-year-old boy who has apparently made out with her but who is also, she says, a total asshole. I’m not entirely clear on the dynamics of their relationship, but they’re VERY complex. And intense. And painful. Or annoying. Or something. I’m not sure. But boys, as we all know, can be total assholes. Especially when they’re still teenagers.

L is Martou’s roommate and they live in J and Lu’s old apartment above the French restaurant. She goes to school and has two jobs. When I first met her, she was ten. She took me on tours around the farm while Bread and I were still thinking about buying it. She was really blonde and pudgy and she didn’t look like she was related to the rest of her brown-haired, willowy family. But now! Now she’s got an amazing, lithe body, a beautiful face, gorgeous long blonde hair, and she’s smart as hell.

World, consider yourself warned: she’s on her way. Look the hell out.

She already lives on her own! At fourteen! I guess this is the right town for it. If you’re gonna let your girls go off on their own at fourteen, it might as well be in Fairfield. Not that any parents could hold on to this child.

(The rest of this post is a long story about getting drunk, featuring people you don’t know. You probably shouldn’t read it.)

NLW and I broke away from the angst and went to find a cocktail. Martou was able to shepherd L back into the restaurant to, I assume, finish closing. We looked in the windows at Deja Vu but I was too afraid of the crowd to go in there. They were having – I shit you not – midget wrestling in there. Midget. Motherfucking. Wrestling, people! We ended up going to Red Rock. Gorgeous was bartending and was gorgeous, as always. AmmZon, who sat next to us, and I kept flirting with her. NLW said that if she still flirted with bartenders she’d flirt with Gorgeous too, but that she’d given up flirting with bartenders years ago. Heh!

AmmZon and NLW and I had great fun talking for a couple of hours. I originally met AmmZon through BoSe; they dated briefly and he brought her out to the farm for a BBQ when RP was in town. She’s tall and has really long, straight blond hair, a sweet face, and the softest skin you’ve ever felt – she informs me it’s a family trait, the incredibly soft skin – most importantly, she’s a massage therapist. And I’m going to hire her to give me a massage! And it will be wonderful!

I got drunk because Gorgeous kept bringing me drinks.

T came in at one point and showed us the ticket he’d just received for urinating in the alley. “This is the first ticket I’ve ever gotten that I’m proud of!” he exclaimed. There was some clamoring for a live re-enactment, but apparently he was more sober than the rest of the bar and tastefully declined. I saw Mary & Jesus; Mary was wearing an outrageously low-cut yellow dress that only a woman as utterly bodacious as herself could possibly pull off. I saw a few more people I recognized, but it’s clear that I’m old and out of the loop because the vast majority of the creatures in there were fresh meat to me. I made the bartender take his shirt off so I could see his ink – he was wearing a black wife beater and the edges of his tatt could be seen on his shoulderblades, and most people like to show off their ink anyway. Plus I’m looking a lot at stylized patterns for my plan for the rest of my lower back. Plus he was young and slender and cute and willing to take his fucking shirt off for drunk women, so what the fuck.

NLW went home eventually, and AmmZon and I closed the bar. After the crowd was gone we helped Gorgeous and the tattooed bartender bus all the tables, while the remaining crowd of about six people had an hysterical, screaming fit over AmmZon’s friend’s revelation that he did not go down on women, ever. AmmZon asked Mary if Jesus “did his duty,” and Mary went off: “Oh fuck YEAH he does! If he wants anything back, you better believe he fuckin’ does!” When word of the topic got to Jesus, he went up to the bewildered boy and said, in his fabulous Latin accent, “What, you having problems? What do you need to know, I’ll tell you all about it! You just open the house and you’ll find the key, it’s right there, man! You got to eat the pussy, man.” It was obnoxious and totally fucking hysterical, all these people running around cleaning the bar and screaming, YOU HAVE GOT TO LEARN TO EAT THE PUSSY! Bewildered Boy definitely took a beating; every man and woman in the place told him that he either needed to learn to go down on women or give up ever deserving a blowjob again, or admit that he was gay (“not that there’s anything wrong with that!”). Watching Jesus pat him on the back with drunken, fatherly reassurance was a fucking RIOT. I blew my voice out with all the screaming and laughing I did, and the bar got cleaned in a hurry.

AmmZon, Bewildered Boy, and I went next door to Torino’s. AmmZon was starving. We ordered a medium pizza and spent a loud, drunken time telling everyone who would listen – namely the boys in the booth next to us, whom AmmZon had gone to preschool with – that Bewildered Boy wouldn’t perform oral sex. I can’t even guesstimate how many times the word “pussy” was screamed from our general direction. The three of us were all solidly drunk and disorderly, and so was the large table across the room. AmmZon ended up having a few hysterical moments of posturing with these two guys; somehow our tables had caught each other’s attention and suddenly AmmZon and this guy were facing off in the middle of the restaurant, threatening to kill each other, hackles up and growling obscenities at each other… and then suddenly they were smiling and saying, “Oh, nice to meet you,” and going back to their tables.

AmmZon’s six feet tall and farm-raised. She could pretty much take most of the men in the world at one-on-one. Seeing her explode out of her booth and head at someone, snarling, is a treasure – I was laughing so hard!

The language in Torino’s at 2:30 in the morning is atrocious – all these drunk twenty-somethings screaming, “I’ll fuck you in the face! I’ll fuck your face off!” across the dining room to gales of drunken laughter is an experience, to say the least. Exausted twenty-five-year-old waitresses stood at the prep area and waited for us to finish our food already and get the fuck out of their stations so they could clean up and go home, and all we did was hork down pizza and scream obscenities. At one point I looked up from my slice of pizza to see that AmmZon had some buff little boy in front of her with his shirt off, posing into the mirror on the wall behind our booth. Blondes, especially Amazon blondes, apparently do have more fun! We were all so drunk and sodisorderly, and I probably needed that pizza more than I knew. Remembering now how crass I was I feel a little bit of that cringe-inducing drunkard’s remorse. As in, Oh my God, did I really scream ‘pussy’ at the top of my lungs repeatedly in a restaurant last night!?!

Eventually I wrote a check for the pizza and we went back to Red Rock. I helped sort the tip jar into $25 piles of singles, and $10 rows of quarters, and eventually Gorgeous and her tattooed, wife beater-wearing co-bartender were done for the night.

AmmZon and I went over to Gorgeous’s. The three of us sat and talked in Gorgeous’s front living room for a couple hours, until Gorgeous started fading hard. Then AmmZon and I took our leave, Gorgeous went to bed, and I didn’t get home until dawn.

Dawn!

I slept damn near all day. I got up to eat, to hydrate, to sunbathe (my priorities, even when hung over, remain unchanged), but I did not go to C’s to install Filemaker for her, nor did I do a single, solitary, useful goddamned thing all day.

Now it’s nearly ten and while I’ve seen Bread, I literally haven’t spoken to him at all. I can hear him downstairs playing video games. I might go check in with him on my way to liberating a Bomb Pop from the freezer. (I’m really into Bomb Pops lately. They have Disney/Pixar characters on the box, and they’re purple, blue, and white. Oh, and they’re frozen, of course, and full of sugar. I love them. Bomb Pops!) On the other hand, why start now?

We went to the shitty Mexican restaurant because it has booze and a smoking section. I ordered two bean tostadas, only they call them chalupas there. The food’s utterly mediocre.

My mother-in-law was having lunch with her boss, my lawyer, at the table next to the one at which we were seated. My lawyer leaned over and asked Joe, “So, how’s work going on the Courthouse?”

“That’s not Brett,” I told Wally. “That’s my other boyfriend.” Then I went to the bathroom, where I met Misty and hugged the hell out of her because she’s so hot.

Brett and Jimbo are remodelling a space in the court house this week, turning it into a storeroom. They were the first people to see the court house’s real ceiling in over sixty years. Apparently it’s hand-painted and gorgeous, hidden by not one but two drop-ceilings.

When I got back to the table I said, “I could have an affair with you and no one would even know. They’d all think you were Brett.”

Joe rolled his eyes. We didn’t need to have the we-really-don’t-look-anything-alike conversation again; I’ve had it a million times with each of them. I bet there are several people wandering around the area who have no idea I haven’t been with Joe in eight years; when they see me out with Brett they probably think it’s the same guy.

Other than having red beards and being male, they really don’t look anything alike. I just spent ten minutes looking for a picture I have of them side by side, but I can’t find it. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

(Note: I found the pic. Here it is.)

Lunch itself was okay. I was having a panic attack, which sucked, and Joe’s depressed (or enraged, alternating), which sucks, so we made fine company. We crack ourselves the hell up, actually.

We chatted, we ate. Steve came and sat at our table to smoke a cigarette (Misty and Blaze were seated in non-smoking.). The waiter, bringing another drink, playfully called Joe something in Spanish that he said meant, “someone who robs your house out of spite and shits on the floor.” Even after Steve and I razzed him about it, he swore it was a real word.

Two guys I vaguely recognized, sitting in the booth behind us, invited us to their 4th of July blowout. Apparently they routinely buy a couple thousand dollars worth of fireworks and take them apart and reconfigure them into a big display, and they buy kegs of Amish beer from John’s Grocery to serve at the party. They mentioned maybe having some mushrooms lying around, too. (Not that I can do that shit anymore, but still. The thought is nice.) Brett probably won’t want to go, of course, but I love shit that explodes and I can always take Joe since no one can tell them apart. The fireworks guys asked me to bring all my cute single girlfriends and it’s a shame I don’t actually know any.

Pulling into the 1-Stop parking lot, Joe asked, “Have you downloaded that Nazz song, yet?”

“No,” I replied. “I found it, but I didn’t download it.”

“Come on, what the fuck! You’ve gotta listen to it!”

“I’m sure I’ve heard it. I used to have all the Nazz albums on vinyl—”

“I know that!” he retorted. “But when you listen to it knowing that I like it, it’s gonna kill you. DEAD. IT WILL KILL YOU DEAD. No panic or anything.”

By now I’m cracking up, giggling really hard. “That’s probably just what I need! Death by Nazz, knowing that you like it!”

He’s laughing too. He said, “Mush, come here, you cutie,” and as I leaned into his chest, laughing hard, he gave me a hug.

I don’t have a lot of old friends, but the ones I do have really rock.