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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Twenty-Three
July 1st
A systematic destruction of my senses was well under way. I mainly drank beer; that is, when I wasn’t drinking tequila shots and there wasn’t that thing that Jean made in the blender. I think it had berries and chocolate chips. And something crunchy? Maybe Granola? Or glass? Quite a few last remnant shards of previously intact shot glasses were littered around the sink. I think that I saw Kerran and his friend Billy slamming them against the sink somewhere around 3am. But if that was around 3am, didn’t I have the blender drinker earlier? Maybe I’m mixing the two memories. Blending them. Making a memory cocktail.
Towards dawn, I was puking in the third floor toilet and, on the stairs, a bald married guy was trying to seduce Nell. No one tries to seduce anyone anymore. You know what? Nevermind. That happened at a whole other party. That was not then, that was much much later.
This was the party where I didn’t puke. This is the party where Jean puked. And she puked in grand style, on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th tiers of the backyard; near the speaker in the living room; and, bless her heart, 4.73 inches from the toilet in the 2nd floor bathroom. No points for being close. But, that happened later, towards dawn, when Nell wasn’t on the stairs with the married bartender because this wasn’t that party.
When, before the party started, it was just mainly the roommates and the close personal people of the roommates, Sam, Dani, Livia and two of the Jenns did a few let’s-get-things-rolling tequila shots. But that didn’t so much get things rolling as get-things-lurching so that just as the party really started, I was chugging water in the hope of diluting the tequila and the beer and that nice vodka drink that Brenna had so helpfully made me. She called it a Serial Killer. Later she walked around with a pitcher of them, then she added more alcohol and renamed it; it became a Mass Murderer; after that, she added Cointreau and made it bitter and called it an Anti-Christ. “It’ll cause you your own personal internal Apocalypse,” she promised.
All of these drinks, so helpfully and apocalyptically effective that even as I sit here, trying to write down what I remember of the night, the room lurches to the tenth place on the Richter Scale.
Rick showed up mid-party (mid-party being judged narratively, rather than chronologically). I don’t know if Brenna had invited him, but there he was in khaki shorts and a tucked-in izod shirt, his face completely impassive and expressionless. The idea that she’d invited him didn’t make much sense considering that she’d also invited Gaff. Could she think that, sometime in the last 4 weeks, he’d gotten over her and that they were now buddies? I’d say that this was an act of cruelty, a move deliberately made to hurt him, but I think that she really does like him and knows that he’s not really a games person. Why would she game him if he wasn’t going to game back? Isn’t that what we’d said,
“Fuck hurting people?”
And why was everyone acting so calm when we were experiencing what must be the biggest earthquake in Washington D.C. history. I held onto a sofa arm for dear life, hoping that the house would hold up. It had always seemed like such a sturdy house.
Then everyone was dancing and, in the very center, Bella and I...then Bella, Dani and I with our arms around each other...then Jean, Kerran and I...then, finally...all of the roommates not really dancing so much as jumping or pogoing or slamming into each other.
To round that shell’s elaborate whorl, the room lurched further and Jim, Brenna’s boyfriend previous to Rick, appeared. He stood in a corner talking to Spider, who is a friend of his, and then stood talking to Nell in a corner and it momentarily caught me that maybe he was trying to make Bren jealous. But then I didn’t think anything about him as the spinning room and the strange roaring sea sound of all the music and talking mixed with the damp creaking clicks of party shoes on the beer soaked wood of the now-at-sea-level living room floor.
After the initial surprise of seeing Jim, I lost track of him. Dani was sitting next to me and had her arms around me and was pawing at me and Bella, who was standing not ten feet away, kept failing to try and not look over at us. I saw her fail at this over and over and felt uncomfortable. Was I gaming her? If I’d told Dani to stop, well, then she’d get angry that I was ashamed of her or didn’t want our relationship, or was gaming her and that I was worried...once more...about Bella and not about her.
Meanwhile, in another part of the party, Jim had moved into the backyard where Gaff and Brenna were kissing and nuzzling (which most people at parties and bars just ignore) on one of the stairs going up to the carport.
But Jim didn’t ignore it and didn’t think it was cute. He walked, with his shoulders bunched, up to Gaff, who’s about a foot taller than he is, and hit him in the head with one of the dozens of fairly small bendable plastic planters that were scat-tered randomly around the backyard. Gaff barely even seemed to notice, but then Jim started yelling.
“You fucking bitch. You told me you didn’t want to date anyone right now. That’s what you said, ‘Not anyone.’”
I couldn’t believe he was concerned about something like this right in the middle of an earthquake, but he wasn’t the only one. Everyone dutifully gathered in a circle around the participants in the time-honored tradition of these things. I myself couldn’t resist and holding the walls for balance was able to negotiate my way to the backyard to get a view, the whole time hoping that one of those wide terrible people-swallowing earthquake chasms wasn’t opening in front of me the way they did in earthquake TV shows and movies.
Jim had really worked himself up and kept slapping at Gaff try-ing to get him to stand and fight him. “Come on, asshole! You think this is OK? Do you? She liked me. She told me that she liked me” Yawn. Do people always say the same shit?
Gaff to his credit wasn’t to be baited. He stayed seated and kept repeating, “I think you should calm down,” to Jim, who was red-faced and seemed completely unlikely to be calming down anytime soon.
Then, since he couldn’t get Gaff to react, he stepped forward towards Brenna and everyone knew the body language: he was going to hit her. He was going to punch her right in the smacker. He was going to knock her lights out. She knew it too, but didn’t crouch or cover her face; she just stared at him and her mouth crinkled in a smile of pure acidic contempt. In reaction to that his whole face became purple and he pulled his arm back like the hammer on a gun cocking back, but Rick, who no one was watching jumped between them and Jim hit Rick instead.
Kerran, Teddy and Billy grabbed Jim’s arms and pushed him to the ground then pulled him right back up again and walked him to the front of the house where I hope they were literal in their idea of what throwing someone out of the house looks like.
Brenna, Nell and three of the four Jenns had Rick in the kitchen sitting at our breakfast table and were applying ice to his face and getting him drinks and talking to him in admiring soft cooing tones.
Everyone who passed by wanted to talk to him.
“Good job, Rick. That’s showing him.”
“You’re the man, Rick.”
“You really stood up to that asshole, Rick.”
I didn’t have my camera to record any of this, but between the water, the violence, and some spongy cake bits that were on a plate sitting in the living room, I had sobered up and realized that I should have had my camera. This party, a party like this one, might never take place again and should have been more fully captured for posterior, er, I mean posterity.
Back downstairs, camera in hand, I tried to force everyone onto the front stairs. I managed to herd a few, but only a few. Ker-ran was among them and he kept shouting that I was an asshole and all of the photos feature him sitting and giving me the fin-ger. Not that it mattered since I was still too drunk to really be taking photos and I think they’ll turn out full of lurches and streaks and blurs, which will be exactly what I saw through the viewfinder.
Somewhere near dawn, I went to bed. Dani came up with me and we did what we do and she did what she does and then she, not wanting to give the party up, went back down to it. And I could hear it, sounding like the sea, as I, lurching, drifted off.
An hour or so later she came back. She undressed and sat on the edge of the bed while the sun came up and I didn’t wake so much as slip out of sleep and thought that I was dreaming about her bright white body perched on the foot of my bed.
“You know I really like you?” I said to her and noticed that it was getting light out.
“I know,” she said.
“I just didn’t know if you knew,” I said.
She knew what I’d said and what it meant I couldn’t and didn’t say so why did I say anything at all?
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
