“Damn, dude, it looks like you’ve lost a bunch of weight,” Dylan observes, in the kitchen one evening, as I shuffle inside and flop into a chair. “What’s your secret?”
“Mmm…let’s call it the Ramen And Overtime Diet,” I improvise with a laugh.
Maybe the job just has me frazzled beyond belief. With the help situation a fiery aircraft hurtling toward the ground, those of us who haven’t parachuted to safety are working upwards of sixty hours a week. But it’s always difficult to turn down this abundant overtime. Although this makes it somewhat miraculous I’m stitching together any social life at all, and as a result often have nothing more to spend this money on than slamming quick tropical cocktails at the bar.
“No shit,” he nods approvingly, adds, “I might need to try that.”
“Yeah, but you really need to work about…eighty hours a week. For it to truly take hold,” I advise.
Fretting about appearances was never our strong suit, however, so this is pure happenstance for me, and nothing comes of it from him. One tangible, irrefutable offshoot of all this work, however, is that management have turned into a collective batch of dickheads in granting personal hours lately, i.e. slashing these from every schedule. With this in mind, I suddenly understand that there’s no way whatsoever I’m going to get an entire weekend off for this planned Chicago trip.
This leads to a philosophical debate, wondering if I should proceed anyway, then feign some mystery illness at the last minute to miss a few days of work. Or else engage in a blood drawing, eyeball scratching dustup with these individuals. The problem is, I have already given Millie the approximate cash needed to buy my ticket. She has not yet booked our flights, however, and with the holidays looming, I’m thinking it wiser to save my battles for these upcoming months instead, and eat this one. Another not insignificant consideration is pondering…am I really into Millie’s sister all that much, anyway? No, I am not.
Therefore, over a few buzzer shot phone calls, this eleventh hour change is enacted, right before she books seats on the plane. The original plan has Millie and some goofy friend of hers, Christine, Marvin and me flying out to visit Lily. Instead, Dylan will take my place — assuming everyone involved can make it to the airport in one piece, that is.
The evening of their departure, Robby and I are sipping beer at Millie’s place, as he keeps a firm grip on the TV remote and idly flips through the channels. Dylan seems nervous, which is understandable considering he doesn’t know any of these people considerably well, while Marvin is amped up, and especially proud of these brand new black boots he’s purchased for the occasion. Owing to the complexities involved with tiny vehicles and too much luggage, they’ve decided that two cars are required, that Millie and Christine will lead, with Marvin and Dylan to follow. I’ve driven Dylan here, so he doesn’t have to even worry about his truck possibly being towed, and as everyone waits on Christine to arrive, Millie continues fiddling with last minute details, continuing to pack while she alternately primps in the downstairs bathroom mirror. Finally, Christine barges through the front door, bold and confident, heavy on the makeup and dressed as if for a night of downtown clubbing.
“Your tits are sagging,” Robby croaks, albeit without so much as glancing up from the television.
“Are they?” Christine gasps, frowning as she freezes in her tracks and grabs them, her bravura in this instant shot.
Now that she’s here, however, and Millie’s ready, these four shove off with a wave. Robby and I are stuck manning the phone lines, which is no small consideration in that, even though every roomie here possesses a cell, they also maintain the old school landline, making their household setup the equivalent of our apartment on steroids. And these digits sizzle with activity to match, too, whatever the device. Nonetheless, we don’t exactly expect a scant fifteen minutes to pass before it’s Millie herself dialing the number here.
“We lost Marvin and Dylan,” she explains. Christine has pulled off, so they can wait and see if these dudes materialize. In the meantime they’re asking me what I think they should do.
“Just keep going to the airport,” I say, “they’ll find you there.”
“Yeah, but…,” Millie starts to protest. And yet unable to complete this thought or come up with anything better, hangs up agreeing to do just this. Expecting to reunite alongside the highway seems a highly unlikely proposition, and time is one thing they are not at a luxury to spare.
So they continue onward, but upon arrival at the airport, Millie continues calling here asking if we’ve heard anything. Wondering where those two went, counting down the minutes until their plane is set to leave. And then, when the situation appears at its bleakest, we find ourselves confronting possibly the most inexplicable development yet: Marvin and Dylan arriving back here at Millie’s place.
“What the hell are you guys doing here?” I ask with a laugh.
Apparently Marvin had needed to make a last minute pit stop at his mom’s house, and thought he’d cleared this with everyone, that the girls understood. But either they forgot or just failed to see that the guys had turned off. Marvin kept going, figuring they would loop back to his mom’s place to wait. Neither of them has Millie’s number, and after concluding that these girls weren’t returning, Marvin suggested they drive back here. Dylan meanwhile, though capable of taking charge in certain situations, particularly if he’s more familiar with the individuals involved, treads a little more lightly otherwise.
Responding with impressive swiftness, and a resolve I’ve never seen before, Robby tosses me the remote as he tells these two, “come on, let’s go. I’ll take you,” and transfers the luggage into his car, floors it to the airport, where they just squeak through the checkpoint at virtually the last second.
“I have to say, I thought there was no way in hell we were gonna make it there on time,” Dylan will tell me, upon his return, “and also let me say for the record I don’t see myself ever getting into a car with that Robby again. That dude is a fucking maniac! But I have to admit, he came through. I mean it took him doing a hundred, and constantly switching lanes and shit, but yeah, he pulled it off — oh! And at one point he even got off on the wrong exit, so what does he do, he goes flying back down it in reverse, then takes off again, hauling ass down the interstate. That’s when I said to myself, oh my god, we are going to fucking die…”
Nothing all that remarkable will happen during their two and a half days in Chi-town, apart from Dylan getting his first in depth glimpse of the Lily phenomenon. Far more significant is what happens immediately upon their return. Since they are now a car short at the airport, Millie arranges for still some other new friend, Miranda, to drive out and scoop half of them up. Miranda, it will turn out, is a tall, blue eyed blonde, easy on the eyes, with an infectious laugh and an impressive body for a chick of that stature. Or any chick, really. And after everyone arrives at Millie’s apartment, she admires Dylan as he walks to Marvin’s car and they drive away.
“Damn, girl! You gotta hook me up!” she tells Millie.
Not that he knows anything about this just yet, of course, will only learn such a day or so later. Otherwise, shortly after his return, I receive a full debriefing of their limited, though quite hellish adventures. And the top of his list is an extended rant, venting about Lily.
“Man, that chick is a cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunt!” he declares, right off the bat, which already finds me laughing my head off. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know a couple of you guys have banged her, and it’s a piece o’ ass and all — but Jesus, I don’t know! I don’t know how you guys did it!”
“Small doses,” I deadpan, “that’s the key there.”
“Well, I have no doubt about that. But yeah, so anyway, first off she keeps it freezing ass cold in her apartment the whole time. I mean FREEZING ass cold. And to top it off, she says she doesn’t have any extra blankets, so every night it’s me and Marvin crashing on the floor, sharing this one blanket, she’s like, eh, I guess you guys can have this one blanket to share.”
“Why does this not surprise me. That sounds about right,” I say.
“Yeah and so every now and then, you know, I wasn’t about to touch the fuckin thermostat, but Millie would try to sneak over and bump it up a degree or two. Well, of course, once Lily finds out about this, she goes absolutely fucking ballistic, dude, so then those two are at each other’s throats. That’s pretty much all they did the entire weekend, it’s those two screaming at each other, and I’m sitting there thinking, oh my god, what the fuck did I get into here. Oh,” he laughs, “and get this, it wasn’t just the blanket, it was the towels, too.”
“The towels?”
“Yeah,” he laughs some more, briefly closing his eyes as he shakes his head, “Lily kept telling us she only had one towel to spare. That first night we got there she’s like, I don’t have any extra towels, so you and Marvin gotta share one. I’m like, fuck that, I just won’t shower. I’m telling ya, man, it was really something else…”
“Oh I’m sure. But how did Marvin take all this?”
“Eh, you know him, he was pretty cool, he’s laid back about everything, so we just kept looking at each other like, are you fucking kidding me, dude? Although I have to say, even after spending a little more time with the guy…I still can’t figure out what makes him tick. I can’t really say I’ve seen the man behind the curtain.”
“I’m not sure there is a man behind the curtain,” I tell him.
Dylan has barely gotten his feet on solid ground here again in town before a pair of interesting developments unfurl, both only just ever so slightly — or not even — his doing. Much like the lesson I learned in breaking down and actually calling Brooke, it seems that the signposts we receive, over and over again, are pointing in the opposite direction: retreat, retreat, retreat. Paradoxically, it almost seems that the less effort we are exerting, the better this seems to work out for us. And so right around the same time, Millie not only calls him to say her friend Miranda is interested. I’ve still not seen Miranda, but she sounds pretty hot, and winds up precisely as advertised. But also, without having even asked Tamika himself, by that roundabout chain of events, mentioning an interest in her, as I passed it along to Tamika who gave me her number to hand to him, he now officially begins his quote unquote foray into the African bush. Dylan calls her, and they agree on a night to go out together.
This last development is brutally short lived, yet extremely memorable nonetheless. What turns out as their lone actual date has many peaks and valleys, ranging from an okay dinner, to a movie he considers an abysmal slog though she is fanatical about — the disparity so large it’s one of those seemingly minor details that you intuit probably says a great deal concerning incompatibility — to her nonetheless unexpectedly fucking him anyway, back at her apartment, and his spending the night there.
“Eh, it was alright,” he says with a shrug, when I’m asking him for a recap, “although, I have to say, that is one hairy, hairy chick. Do you think all black women are like that? That’s my first one. I was wondering if that was, like, a genetic thing.”
“That’s a good question,” I admit.
This all goes up in flames mere days later, when she is demanding out of the blue that he drop everything and go out with her again this very night. With Tamika having liked this rare Led Zeppelin CD that he was playing in his truck, he had let her borrow it, and she is now threatening to smash the thing into pieces unless he comes over this instant. I happen to be around for this development, an insanely hot day that finds us sweating in the apartment to a degree that even the tropical cocktails can’t seem to assuage, even while shirtless.
Mostly as a means of attempting to stay occupied and forget about this sweltering heat, I’ve gotten on this kick, coincidentally enough, considering this subsequent Zeppelin development, of sorting out my entire vinyl collection on the living room floor. Dylan, apart from the batshit Tamika phone call, has idly observed from the couch, sipping his drink and throwing on the occasional platter or two for our listening pleasure.
Meanwhile, Helena has of course received an earful herself about this incident, and rings me up to compare notes. Thanks to our nifty ancient landline with caller ID setup, I can readily see who this is, and deem it worthy of answering. After which she decides to swing by.
As for Helena and me, these past four months or so have proven mighty chaotic and uneven, if occasionally action packed, but would we have truly expected any less? And this is arriving at that verdict from two separate angles. Aside from pondering just how unlikely we were to reconnect in the first place, after nearly five years apart. First off, people on my side are somehow continually surprised to discover that she’s kind of strange and more than a little bit wild. A 100% awesome person, don’t get me wrong, but still — my reaction to this is basically telling people, “so wait, you thought I would land this really hot chick that was totally normal? Does that sound like a realistic scenario to you?” But then approaching this topic from the other side, my take on this is, not just to her but to any woman, I would summarize as: you thought that dating me would prove a little more average and predictable and streamlined than this? Really? If so, hate to say it, but that’s on you.
Maybe an hour after we get off the phone, Helena shows up here. She has ventured forth with this peace offering of the Zeppelin disk, having swung over there to get it. Apologizing for her bonkers friend, though explaining that this is exactly why she doesn’t like to play matchmaker. Even though I’m thinking, well, no, you didn’t want to play matchmaker for Tamika, because you knew this would happen.
Either way, though, she now stands before us, extending this olive branch of the compact disc to Dylan. Regarding us shirtless hillbillies, with the coffee table shoved aside and album collection scattered around the floor, windows open and fans on, sipping our tropical drinks but complaining about the heat anyway, because we don’t like to use the air conditioning. A weird smirk on her face, eyes darting back and forth between the two of us, as though wondering, what the fuck is going on around this place?
And I guess we have been on a decent little roll here. But the funny thing about this is, looking back on this summer, we haven’t even really gotten started yet.
In other news: order the complete novel from my official site and save a few bucks, on the exact same versions, versus what the big mean corporate ogres at Amazon are charging:
Well-Behaved Monsters paperback
Thanks and have a great week!
