A gato viejo, ratón tierno
Man Man played the Seventh Street Entry the other night. I haven’t been to a show where I have screamed so much since the 2005 Pizza Luce Block Party. I lost my voice screaming for Har Mar to take off his pants. I’m not proud of that, but — okay, yes I am.
The Keathlys and I went to Whiteys in the early evening so that I could lay down a good bed of food for the booze that Zach was probably going to trick me into drinking. I had a delicious pulled pork bbq sammich, Lisa had roast beef, Stan had tuna. They dropped me off at Block E. I got cash out of the ATM while homeless guys and thugs hassled each other over thirty cents and room to lean.
I checked in at the ticket counter and waved my id around. I couldn’t remember having been to a show since Gay Beast. Zach finally called and wanted to meet me across the street. We met, he bought me a Jameson to go with my Guinness, and I knew that it was going to be a night.
Fort Wilson Riot was amazing. The bass player was doing some kind of beat boxing, and the singer was all kinds of hot.
Somewhere about the time that I was too drunk to be able to tell that the second opener was not just a CD put on random, Zach and I ran into a woman that he apparently knew in some way or another. We harrassed her a bit (I was feeling my oats for once) and followed her to her table. Wait, there are tables in the Entry? In any case, we chatted with her and her friend for a bit before somehow my receding hairline got mentioned. Of course, there was no mention of the fact that Zach’s hair is so thin and translucent that he sometimes gets called Powder and in fact a movie was once made starring him. A pedophile directed it. Wait. No, that was Powder. I’m not even drunk right now.
“Ugh, you had to bring up my hairline,” I said, rolling my eyes. Each hair that falls from the front of my head is collected, named, numbered, and buried in a mass grave in the backyard. It takes hours each day. I used to be worried about the Nothing erasing all of my hair until I climbed to the roof and shouted “MOONCHILD!” into the raging storm.
“Well, they say that male pattern baldness is a sigh of increased testosterone levels,” one of the girls said.
“I am known for the size of my balls,” I said. I have never heard the Entry go completely silent before, but it did then. Fortunately for Zach and I, Man Man started only moments later. Either that or I blacked out from my own shame.
I was already screaming and pogoing in the crowd, or I would have been floating the band in a sea of my tears. Man Man put on one of those shows where afterwards you feel like you just took the biggest shit of your life and now you are going to implode because the only thing remaining inside of you is the hard vacuum of space. Maybe that’s not right, it was like being pumped full of man goo until it streams out of your mouth and nose and tear ducts. I am now pregnant with the bastard child of a room full of moustaches.
“Man man! Man man! Man! Man! Man! Man! Man! Man! Man! Man! Man!” we shouted. We also screamed obscenities and inhuman unspeakable horrors — the language of the elder gods unconsciously sprang forth from our lips as our tongues twisted into shapes from forgotten nightmares.
“Play it all AGAIN! AGAIN!” Zach frothed. The band did several encores. I’m fairly sure that the entire crowd sang along to the end of Ice Dogs, even as the men in white filed off the stage.
“This ship will sail, and this heart won’t die… This ship will sail, and this heart won’t die…”
I don’t know if my ears or their instruments were carrying on a ringing drone, but it didn’t stop for days.
On our way out, we saw the women again, and despite my shame (or perhaps because I found out that Jameson and cokes are delicious and I had plenty of reason to just drink the shit out of my own heartbreak, so why the fuck not? I mean, you’re only in college once, why not plaster yourself to the walls and wake up the next day on your boss’s floor in your clothes smelling like antifreeze) I said hello and asked what they were up to then. Fortunately Zach is reasonably functional even when he is rubbery from keeping up with his employee’s booze-swilling antics (really, jesus christ, he led the way), so he was able to close the deal and get us some company at the after bar, which turned out to be a packed out CC Club. Zach bought a pitcher as the patio closed, so we huddled in a corner and I somehow conned Sarah out of her phone number.
I knew full well that I would either call within five minutes of not seeing her and then each five minutes after until finally an order of protection was drawn up, or I would never quite get up the nerve at all.
We carried on to Little T’s, which I think qualifies as the complete hipster tour.
Zach drew a naked woman on the table in crayon.
“Don’t you think her waist is kind of small?” Sarah asked.
“IT’S ART!” Zach declared petulantly. They argued a bit more until I reached over the table to edit his drawing. Lines over the top, lines at the bottom, the breasts became eyes, some ears, and it was the face of a dog, with Zach’s neat triangular bush as the nose. Really, it was a hideous dog. A terrible dog.
I’m not sure why, but then I drew both a cut and an uncut penis. I also wrote down everyone’s name. There had been some suspicion that I wouldn’t be able to remember anyone’s name, much less my own. I wrote my own, with an arrow pointing at me. I was starting to have my own doubts.
A lot of the night is a blur.
“It’s not like you’re thirty or anything,” Sarah stated. I paused, my mouth agape. I could not lie. I have, but I don’t.
“I’m…” I said, trailing off. My insides were a missile silo and the launch codes had come in.
“What?” she looked at me, shocked.
Seconds dragged out into hours as two men punched in the codes and reached into their shirts to pull out keys hanging with their dog tags. The keys went into locks and the men looked at each other grimly.
“On a three count,” said the first.
“On go?” asked the other.
“We’ve rehearsed this! It’s on one!”
“Okay, three, two, turn on one.”
“Yes. No, let’s do it on ‘go.’”
“Okay. The other way is stupid.”
“Three, two, one, GO.”
“I’m thirty… one,” I stated. My face grew a little red. I had honestly almost forgotten a year.
“I would have said twenty-seven,” she said. The polite guess was twenty four just six months ago.
We offered to walk them back to their car.
“We’ll walk you back to the car,” said Zach.
“Uhhh…” they replied.
“Seriously, we’ll walk you back to your car,” I said.
“You can walk us back to the car,” they replied. Zach and I walked them back
together.
For the record, I ride a luck dragon to work.
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