2-18-05 Weddings In Purgatory 3

So this is my bachelor party? It’s just Jess and I sucking down Pabst, watching girls shove dollar bills up their twats. I yawn and make sure Jess notices it.

When you treat all of your friends like shit, only the worst, pathetic dregs stay with you. Through all this, Jess somehow became my best man. I use the term “best” loosely, as he’s my only man. Really, Jess should be my “okay” man, but even that would be pushing it.

“I don’t know...Harry Caray?” I say after Jess asks me to guess the inspiration for his new look

“Harry Caray? No, man, no. Run DMC,” he says

He’s got these monstrously huge glasses, bigger than the Buddy Holly glasses he wore a week ago, and a fur Gilligan hat. He’s always trying to be ahead of a trend, usually throwing himself full-force into it. He knows that for a month before the trend catches on he looks like an idiot, but once the trend catches on, he’s a bona fide genius, a veritable fashion prophet.

The strippers are being extra friendly to him, probably because they think he’s retarded. He folds a dollar bill lengthwise and tip his head backwards, over the bar on walkway, and sets the dollar bill on his nose. A small chested nymph comes from out of nowhere and bends over his face. She tries to cup her tiny dangling tits, but they’re too small, so it takes a little effort, but once she gets a handful she pushes them together, clamping the dollar bill, lifting it from Jess’s nose. Then she winks, snatches the bill from her non-existent cleavage, and walks away with a lusty gait.

“Her nipple brushed my cheek,” Jess informs me. I visualize myself doing the same move, my head bent backward, eyes closed, but when the girl bends over, something goes wrong and she falls on my head, breaking my neck, paralyzing me instantaneously.

I’m bored. Even watching Jess’s idiocy, which is usually quite entertaining, makes me yawn.
“
So, you getting the jitters yet?” he asks.

“No. Why should I?”

“It’s the end of your freedom, man!”

“That’s so fucking cliche, Jess, spare me. Please.”

“Hey, if you do get the jitters and you want out, let me know, dude. I’d love to rock that hot little body of hers.”

Nauseating flashes of Sofia getting it from behind by Harry Caray pollute my throbbing brain.
“
I’ve got a fucking headache,” I say aloud to nobody in particular.

Jess suggests we go out to the car and spark up. Once again, I have to explain that I don’t get high anymore.

He mimics me with a mocking nasally voice, “I don’t get high anymore. Gimme a break, man. You and Cleo used to get high all the time.”

He quickly realizes that he mentioned her name. “Sorry,” he says, bowing his head in an attempt to look solemn.

“Forget about it,” I say. And I say it nonchalantly like it’s so fucking easy: No sweat, forget about it. I have.

I’m such a liar.

I think about Cleo all the time. They’re sweet memories usually, but tonight, looking at all the vacant stares of the sorry men in this club, all I can think of is her body in that casket. At least it took death to make Cleo look like a corpse. These guys already have that look nailed down. They barely squeak into the definition of “living,” breathing in just enough oxygen to keep their cells alive, legs moving enough to get their fat asses plopped down on a barstool.

I wish they would’ve burned her. She looked fake, like a poorly sculpted figure from a wax museum. The make-up they used made her look garish and cheap. I think about her lips, about how I could see hints of the thick thread used to sew them shut. And when friends and relatives bent over and kissed her, it made me ill. That wasn’t her in there, I was sure of it. The real Cleo was somewhere waiting for me. And when I’d find her, she’d say something like, “what took you so long,” and we’d pick up where we left off.

I scan the club and see a few sad-faces of grown men jacking off with glasses of straight whiskey in hand, all alone. These seem like perfect suicide-candidates. Why couldn’t God take one of these losers instead? I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, I’m sure they’re praying to be hit by lightening everyday.

Jess just walks off to get a lap dance for me. I take a long sip of my beer. In the corner of my eye I calmly notice a total stranger charging at me with a brick. Big deal. He smashes my head in, and I slump forward over the bar and let the blood-matted hair ooze off my skull and into the cocktail glass of shithead at the stool next to me.

The shithead looks at me. “This place sure has some beautiful women.”

Without saying a word, I look at him and yawn.