To be honest, I was kind of dreading it. I hadn't seen Billy in probably more than a year -- we kept making plans to hang out, have a beer, catch up, but they kept getting derailed. Given that he'd named me one of his groomsmen, I figured we'd need to sit down at least once before the thing, but apparently his job was crazy, too, so we'd had to just leave it that we'd see each other at the bachelor party.
I was pretty worried about that, too. I'd only ever been involved with one bachelor party, which I'd "thrown" for Joel when his best man punked out. We ended up going out for dinner with his wife-to-be at a Mexican place near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The waitress gave me her phone number, which felt like a lot of responsibility, and then we went to go see some movies on a factory roof. Pleasant enough, but pretty tame. So when Bobby sent out the email, I suggested we go see a show. It was all I knew how to do.
"Have you ever heard of him going to a rock concert?" Bobby replied. Chris said, "My guess is that Billy would prefer the strippers." I was overruled. And I'd never been to a strip club. What if I didn't like it -- what if it was really depressing and I didn't like any of the girls? What if the girls could tell I was frightened and they got angry? With some trepidation, I got the name of a place from Joel -- he'd actually treated his no-show best man to a rager when that guy'd gotten married. "It's nice," Joel said. "The girls are young, blond, Brighton Beach types." Bobby made a reservation at a steakhouse down by the seaport where Billy works, and we all went out to dinner there first. We ordered a steak-for-four platter that brought a whole pile of sizzling, hissing cow to our table. I don't think I've ever eaten that much meat! Well, probably. I don't know. We drank a bunch of Jameson, neat. And after dinner we smoked cigars out on some benches on Water St.
I guess I'm not supposed to say what happened at the strip joint? Don't know how this works. Nobody did anything bad. It was actually really nice -- they've really figured out a bunch of subtle things that make a titty bar an order of magnitude better than, you know, a regular drinking place you go to with dudes. The temperature is just so, the waitresses were extra sweet and friendly, and, you know, asses and titties everywhere. And the girls are soaked in this perfume that should be nauseating, but is somehow not. That's not to say there weren't some creepy components to the experience: A couple of fat guys sitting across the T-shaped catwalk from us were monopolizing several of the dancers at once, slipping them hundreds and hundreds of sweaty dollars to buy their way up the lap dance hierarchy to allowed-to-touch-a-stripper's-lower-back. Chris overheard a snippet of conversation in the bathroom that sort of captures up the vibe that these dudes were putting out:
Guy 1: Man, I just spent $400 on lap dances. Sometimes I think I should just go find myself a girlfriend.Yeah, so we got a whole bunch of lap dances. That's pretty much the point, I think. Some of the girls were really good and really gave the impression that they liked you, but some weren't / didn't. I'm not going to lie, though -- at the end of the night, I was in Toki Wartooth-mode and was kind of fantasizing about coming back. It was a little weird. "How long does this last?" I asked Chris. "About a day," he said. He was right.
Guy 2: Yeah, but, man -- pussy: It's nothing but trouble.
There was a really intense dude sitting at the head of the catwalk who looked a lot like Michael Musto. He was putting singles in practically every dancer's thong. I pointed him out to Bobby. "That's probably not Michael Musto," he said.
The next morning I got up and emptied six Amstel Lights out of my butt into the toilet. That evening there was a rehearsal for the wedding up at St. Mary's in Harlem. Billy's wife-to-be, Sarah, is the daughter of the rector -- the church is their house, really, so there's no way they weren't having the ceremony there. Sarah's dad, Earl, is incredibly friendly (and a dead ringer for Father Damien Karras). His requests for the ceremony were simple and few: That we say "and also with you" and "amen" at the right moments, and stand or sit as the proceedings called for it. No problem. Then we drank beer out in the courtyard.
The wedding went off the next day without a hitch -- except that Billy and Sarah's dog, Job, who'd been tasked with carrying the ring-basket down the aisle got predictably distracted by the assembled well-wishers and shrugged off his duty about half way through. There were some religious-y parts of the ceremony, Rev. Earl being, you know, a priest, but they were tempered by another church officiant giving a little speech, intended to assuage the fears of the less spiritual guests, to the effect that marriage is for sex and that religion is all about fucking. At the beginning of the wedding, Earl asked Chris to ring the church bell. "Ring it three times three, with a pause in between, and then nine times slowly." Chris initially balked, afraid he'd fuck it up and expose himself as a sloptard in the hands of an angry god, but after some coaxing, he rang it with gusto, pulling down with all his might like some kind of louche hunchback.
On Saturday after the wedding I headed back into the office. We all worked on Sunday, too.
On Sunday night, Matthew and I took a walk around the neighborhood to scrounge up food. The heat was stifling, but suffering it felt good. We got some Cuban sandwiches at Cafe Havana on 8th Ave. and went back up to the office. When I bit into mine, I managed to stab a sharp piece of the bread into the soft, tendon-y stuff under my tongue. It hurt like a motherfucker, and I must have cut something open down there, because within minutes all these little nubbins under my tongue swelled up, pushing my tongue up towards the roof my mouth. When I went to look at the affair in the bathroom mirror, it looked like a small, sublingual udder. Rattled and stinging, I sat back down at my desk and kept going.
We managed to finish almost everything we wanted to for Monday, but I'm still getting used to the feeling of having a life again. The air conditioner in the office broke at some point timed to coincide with the uncannily early June heatwave. Sweat.
The heat wave broke today after work, an angry, pre-storm wind throwing trash and leaves through the air across 4th Ave. I snuck in the door just ahead of the downpour.
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