The Average American Marriage (18 page)

chapter forty

Kid's Birthday Party

T
he entire time Holly and I eat dinner at Villa Piacere, she sits there checking Facebook to see who's going to be at her friend's birthday party. She looks up maybe twice, but she never stops talking. She says, “I thought this party was going to suck, but Joel Revoredo is going and it looks like he's bringing Anthony Iannucelli. They're fun. And Tim Lavalley is going. Oh wait, though, I think he quit drinking. Lame. Whatever. Ooh, Josh Thorpe. This actually looks like it might be pretty fun.” I notice that all the names Holly mentions are guys.

As I get the bill, I say, “Seems that way.”

She says, “Don't be a dick.”

I say, “I'm not. I can't wait to meet all your friends.”

She says, “You'll like them, I bet.”

There is no way on this planet that I could possibly like them unless their parents just gave them guy's names but they're all actually chicks who look like Holly and have the same desire to fuck me in the same filthy manner. I've been curious about what her parents said about me since we ran into them in the mall. I say, “Hey, what did your parents say about meeting me?”

She says, “We didn't talk about it.”

I assume this is a lie, but maybe not. Maybe they have the kind of relationship where the parents don't ask too many questions and she doesn't volunteer too much information. I say, “Okay. Just curious.”

She says, “Oh, and Phil Dimp is going. This should be pretty fun. You ready to go?”

I say, “Just need to get my credit card back.”

On the way to the party I listen as she keeps thinking of people who are going and reading me comments they're all making about the party. The most interesting of these is offered by a guy named Dan Carmine. Dan's comment reads, “Somebody better suck my fucking dick this time. I got snubbed at your birthday party last year. Hahaha.”

Although Holly assures me this is a joke, I imagine a party full of twenty-year-old girls sucking random guys' dicks in every room. I had no such parties when I was twenty.

We pull up to the house, which is unmistakable because it's the only house on the street with a dozen or so drunken, screaming kids in the front yard. I fully expect to run into another set of parents who are closer in age to me than to the kids at the party. I say, “Are this girl's parents home?”

Holly says, “No. They're out of town.”

I say, “Oh,” and we get out of the car and head in.

Once inside, it's clear I'm the oldest person at the party by a solid twelve to fifteen years. I get a few stares from guys and girls. The girls are trying to figure out why I'm there and the guys are sizing me up. I put a hand on Holly's lower back to establish that I'm with her, and this seems to allay some of the concerns these kids appear to have about my presence.

Holly runs into some kid she knows and says, “Where's Katrina?”

The kid says, “Out back, I think. Smoking.”

Holly says, “Cool,” and we make our way through the kitchen to the backyard where another dozen or so kids are huddled around a keg smoking weed out of a pipe. Holly spots Katrina and makes a beeline for her, saying, “Katrina! Happy b-day! You did it!” I follow her to the group and wait to be introduced, but that never comes, because Holly and Katrina are too busy hugging one another and saying how much they've missed one another since the last time they hung out a month ago. I introduce myself to Katrina and say, “Thanks for having me out to your party. Happy birthday. Great house, by the way.”

She says, “I guess. It's the one I grew up in. Thanks for coming, though. You smoke?”

I wonder what the mortgage is as Katrina offers me the pipe. I say, “Sure,” take the pipe and look forward to feeling a little less uneasy in this strange party, which I know I'm far too old to be attending. I inhale as deeply as possible and launch into a coughing fit. A guy standing to my right pats me on the back and says, “You all right, man?”

I manage to cough out, “Yeah, I'll be fine.”

Another guy taps me a beer from the keg and says, “Here, dude.”

I take a sip and start to feel the weed kicking in. The party immediately begins to feel more fun. I look at Holly. She's whispering something to Katrina. I lean in to her ear and say exactly what I'm thinking: “You're fucking beautiful.” I kiss her on the cheek. She laughs and says, “I'm going to go inside for a second. You cool out here?”

I feel like I am. I feel like these people, these kids, are my friends. I say, “Yeah, I'll be out here.”

She heads inside and I introduce myself to everyone standing around the keg. They're all fellow CSUN students or friends of friends of CSUN students. Some of them know Holly, some don't. They ask me how I met Holly and I tell them. One of the guys who introduced himself to me as Zip says, “Fucking pimp, bro. I hope when I'm an old dude I can pull a piece of ass that hot.” I take this as a compliment.

Zip and I discuss various things with input from some of the others, such as the nature of reality, the possibility of a microchip being implanted in your brain that will give you the ability to achieve instantaneous orgasm, and what is the strangest kind of pornography that each of us has seen. I perceive this conversation to have taken place over the course of at least an hour. I look at my phone and see that only fifteen minutes have passed since Holly and I got out of my car when we pulled up to the party.

A girl standing around the keg named Jill or Joan says, “So, you and Holly are cool together.” This is not a question. It's some kind of strange approval, or at least that's how I'm hearing it.

I say, “Thanks.”

She says, “Thanks,” in the exact same inflection I did. I can't tell if my confusion is from me being high or from her being high. It doesn't matter. Jill or Joan says, “So, this might be like too depressing or offensive or something, but I'm going to ask it anyway.”

I say, “Okay.”

She says, “What's the worst thing about being old?”

I'm not offended in the least by this question. Maybe because I'm high, I approach the answer with the most earnest evaluation I can muster. I say, “You really want to know?”

Everyone around the keg has turned their attention toward me, toward the next words that I will speak, toward the prophecy about to be delivered by the wise old sage who's wandered into their celebration of youth. I say, “Realizing your potential is gone—that's pretty bad. But the worst thing is being okay with that. At some point you're going to wake up and you'll have a job that you don't like, but it won't be like other jobs you've had that you don't like. You can't quit this one and move on to another one, because now you're married and you have kids and you have bills. And you'll tell yourself that it's just temporary, that even though you're married with kids you still have time to get around to doing whatever it is that you wanted to do when you were young. But then the job stops sucking as much, and not because it gets better, but because you just stop caring. You get used to the routine. You give in. You realize that your life will never get better and you tell yourself that what you ended up with isn't so bad. It's not good, but it's not bad. This is it. This is what it's going to be until you can retire. And maybe you'll get to go on a cruise or something once the kids leave the house, but whatever you thought you'd be doing when you were young . . . you realize one day that you'll never do that thing, and then you eventually become okay with that. That's the worst thing about being old.”

I take a drink of my beer as Zip says, “Fuck, bro. That's some hardcore shit.”

I say, “Yes, Zip, that is indeed some hardcore shit,” and pat him on the back.

We all smoke a little more and talk a little more about things that aren't as important or depressing. Eventually, I notice that Holly still isn't back. I say, “Katrina, where's the bathroom?”

She says, “There are some inside, or you can just piss out here on a tree or something if you want. And if you have to, like, shit, just don't do it in the upstairs bathroom that's attached to my parents' bedroom. My dad got super-pissed last time because somebody streaked his toilet.”

I say, “Okay. Thanks,” and head inside, partially because I do have to piss and partially because I want to find Holly and kiss her and rub her shoulders. As I think this, I tell myself to remember that I should definitely get a prescription for marijuana.

Once inside, I ask around if anyone has seen Holly. Someone says they saw her out on the front lawn with some other people, so I stop in the nearest bathroom, take a piss while looking down at Katy Perry on the cover of an
Entertainment Weekly
lying next to the toilet, then head out front. Holly is standing with a few other people. They're all laughing and having a good time, and whatever hesitation I had about coming to this party with her is gone. No one seems to care that I'm older than everyone, and I'm with the hottest chick at the party, so fuck them if they do.

I move up next to Holly and say, “Hey.”

She says, “Hey.”

I put my arm around her and lean down to kiss her. She's slightly hesitant but still kisses me. The kiss is bad. It's just a little peck on the lips. I wonder if it's because she doesn't want to be associated with me in front of her friends. I wonder if that's why she left me by the keg and disappeared for so long. Fuck that. I look at her and lean back in, forcing an open-mouth kiss with tongue. She obliges, but she doesn't seem comfortable, and I notice a strange taste in her mouth. It's something I find vaguely familiar. The taste is like a smell I know but can't quite place. I pull back from her and taste the inside of my mouth. She watches me intently. She says, “You okay?”

I say, “Yeah. You taste kind of weird. What is that?”

She says, “What's what?”

Then it hits me. My mind rushes back to a night when I was with my old girlfriend Casey and she was on the pill. After I blew a load in her pussy, she asked me to go down on her. I just licked her clit and tried my best to stay away from the hole I'd dumped my semen in, but some got in my mouth. And it definitely tasted exactly like the inside of Holly's mouth.

I look at Holly, and I can feel my head getting hot. My scalp feels like it's fucking melting. She can tell I've figured it out. I feel sick to my stomach. Not only did she suck some guy's dick at a party I gave her a ride to, but she let me lick his cum out of her mouth. I want to kill everyone at this party, starting with Holly. I don't know what to do. I don't know if I should make a scene right here, just start yelling at her right in front of everyone, or if I should play it cool. But I don't want to be the crazy old dude who went insane at a college party, and as hard as it is to tamp down my boiling, venomous rage, I say, “Nothing,” and put my arm back around her like everything's cool.

We stay at the party for another few hours. I spend my time staring at every guy there like I'm going to rip his balls off and shove them up his asshole, in the hope that one of them will reveal himself. By the time we get back in my car, however, I've gained no conclusive information regarding the identity of the recipient of Holly's clandestine blowjob.

I wait for her to put her seatbelt on, then I say, “So. You sucked some guy's cock at this party.”

She doesn't even try to deny it. With no apparent guilt, she says, “I'm sorry,” as though I've offended her by even bringing it up.

I say, “You're sorry? I brought you to this party. I'm your fucking ride. And you sucked some other guy's dick.”

She says, “Yeah. So what? I'm going home with you. Doesn't that count for anything?”

I say, “What? I mean, we never talked about being exclusive, but I guess I just assumed that, even if you were fucking other guys, you'd have the courtesy to do it more discreetly than fifteen feet away from me at a party I'm also attending.”

She says, “First of all, I didn't fuck him. And I don't even like the guy, so chill out.”

I say, “Then why'd you suck his dick?”

She says, “I owed him.”

I say, “Wait. What?”

She says, “Do we really have to get into this?”

I say, “How can we not get into it? I tasted another guy's fucking cum in your mouth. I'd say we're about as into it as we can fucking get. I mean, I bought you a fucking MacBook.”

She says, “I tried to stop you from kissing me.”

I say, “That was very considerate. Now, please tell me what the hell you're talking about,
owing
this guy.”

She says, “He used to deal me weed and I'd give him blowjobs. He floated me the last time, and I said I'd get him back the next time I saw him. I didn't know he was going to be at the party and he decided to collect.”

I look at her. She's so hot that, for a split second, I can almost rationalize this. For a measurement of time that's almost imperceptible, I tell myself that if I don't get over this I'll never fuck her again. I can almost agree with her logic. I can almost see some value in the fact that she honored her bargain with this guy. Then reality takes hold again. I say, “I'm assuming this wasn't a one-time thing, then. You'll have to suck his dick again?”

She says, “No. I just get weed from my roommate now.”

I say, “Do you get other things from other guys for blowjobs?”

And that's the line that puts it over the edge. She says, “Hey, I never said I was your girlfriend or anything. I can fuck anyone I want or suck any dick I want. We're not a couple.”

I know this before she says it, but the impact of actually hearing her say it is difficult to withstand. She continues: “I don't know what you think is going on between us, but it's just fucking. I mean, I like hanging out with you and everything, and I like sex. I just don't let my emotions get involved in the sex part of things. So the guys I fuck, I fuck them because it's fun, and the guys I hang out with, I hang out with because they're fun. There's only a few guys that I do both with, and you're one of them. So if that's not enough for you, then I don't know what to tell you.”