We’re going to get very drunk and meet men. You two wanna come?” Please say no.
“Sounds like fun,” Marc says. “But we’re going to watch ‘L and O.’”
Thank God.
Sam giggles. “Is that the new name? Like SNL and KFC?”
“It’s all about acronyms now, you know,” Marc says. “If you’re nice, Sessy Bear, maybe afterwards we’ll get an ice cream from DQ.”
“Is it normal that someone could be such a geek?” Sam asks me, playfully patting Biggy Bear on his behind.
“You’re the geek,” says her attachment.
For the second time today, I think I’m going to throw up.
After they disappear behind a thankfully closed door, I decide to prepare the instruments of our intoxication while I wait for Nat.
I take out the vodka and two shot glasses. She’ll be here any second. I might as well pour while I wait.
Yay! I’m going out tonight! Although I’ve never been to Orgasm, I’ve heard many detailed descriptions from Natalie. “It’s the place to be seen,” she once explained after I had lied about having too much work to do to go. As if I ever brought work home. They certainly aren’t paying me enough for that. Paying me enough, period.
“Anyone who’s anyone goes there,” she said. I was slightly surprised that people besides the prom queen on TV movies actually used that expression.
Whatever. Tonight I’ll be seen. If Natalie ever gets to my house, that is. Nat, where are you?
Jeremy, where are you? Long, Dutch legs come to mind.
I might as well get started and have mine. Drink, that is. Not long legs. All fantasy should be based on some degree of truth; what’s the use of yearning for something that can absolutely never happen?
Ouch. That burns. The drink, that is, not the truth (although that, too, can jolt a girl if she lets it).
Damn slut and her damn Dutch navel ring.
Now Nat’s shot is just sitting there, all alone, like the last lonely chocolate chip cookie in the box.
So I down it just as the downstairs buzzer rings. “I found something to wear,” Nat’s voice flows up through the intercom. “Come downstairs.”
See? If I hadn’t had those shots, they would have gone to waste.
3
Orgasming
“HI, HON! SHALL WE WALK?” Natalie asks, slinging her arm through mine.
“Of course we should. It’ll only take us eight minutes.”
“Which way is it?”
Silly Natalie. It’s not that I’m a walking compass or anything, but I pass the bar at least twice a day. So does Natalie. True, Boston’s not the easiest city to navigate; streets tend to inexplicably change names from Court to State, from Winter to Summer, and then disappear altogether. I’m no stranger to getting lost-induced panic attacks (I will never find my way home, I will end up in a bad neighborhood, I will get robbed and killed and no one will notice until months later when they find my decomposed body still strapped to my ten-year-old Toyota in the river—for the love of God, why don’t I have a cell phone like everyone else?), but Back Bay is pretty much a grid.
“Tonight I can have three shots,” she says.
Sobriety is not Nat’s concern. She is a self-admitted obsessive calorie counter. She carries a yellow spiral notebook with a picture of grapes on the cover, a purple felt pen, and a highlighter everywhere she goes. She writes down everything she eats. She even highlights her “boo-boos” (her word choice, not mine).
“You know,” she continues, “one shot of vodka has sixty-two calories.”
No, I don’t know. Or care. This week, anyway. One hundred and twenty-four calories down. Six zillion to go.
Today, Natalie does not in fact look fat. She looks exactly the same as she always does—very, very skinny and very, very tall. Well, not very, very tall, but tall compared to me (everyone is tall compared to me, since I measure about three inches over five feet). Natalie is probably only five foot six, but standing next to me I tend to think of Michael Jordan.
Actually, she looks more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that Nat has brown hair. Though she’d never admit it, according to Sam, Natalie paid a visit to Dr. Harvey Gold, one of Boston’s top nose-job specialists, as a combined high school graduation/birthday present from her parents (Nat, that is, not Buffy). The first time I was at her house in Beacon Hill, I examined every photograph, searching for a before-picture. Of the thirty-five frames prominently featured throughout the huge house, not one featured her before the age of eighteen. Suspicious?
And she dresses just like Buffy (sort of). Her Dolce and Gabbana black tube top and tight red pants must have cost more than my month’s rent. Luckily, she’s the type of person who can pull that outfit off—financially and aesthetically. As for myself, I tend to camouflage instead of highlight.
Nat volunteers at various mental-health clinics. One day she plans on doing her master’s degree in psych. One day mentally disturbed people might go to her for help. Scary. Even the remote possibility that she actually gets in to one of these programs terrifies me.
Eight minutes later, as promised, we arrive to find twenty fidgeting people lined up by the door, huddled under the metallic silhouette of a woman’s head thrown back in complete orgasmic abandon.
Natalie walks to the front. “George!” she squeals to the intimidating six-foot, very bald bouncer whose wraparound sunglasses remind me of the Terminator.
“Hey, sexy,” he says. Kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss.
“George, I want you to meet Jackie. She’s one of my best friends.”
“Hi,” I say meekly, and into the bar we walk.
“How’s the sky?” Natalie says, raising her head. That’s her code phrase for “Do I have snot in my nose?”
“Clear,” I answer.
“And the street?” That’s the code for “Do I have anything in my teeth?” What could possibly be in her teeth escapes me, considering I’m pretty sure she doesn’t eat. Her smile gleams the way I’m sure capped teeth should.
“Clean. Me?” I ask just in case. I go for the two-in-one: I smile and tilt my head simultaneously.
On our left is the coat check. I’m thankful that this late September weather has allowed me to get away without wearing any kind of overclothes. (I need to expose as much as I can get away with right from the start; Nat, on the other hand, could wear a burlap sack and still leave ’em panting.) On our right is the dance floor. Some scantily clad women—good God, do I look like that?—are gyrating to a thumping song I am having difficulty deciphering: boom, boom, boom slut,
