The Literary Girlfriend: Drunk at a Party

“Why are men horny all the time?” Danielle asked me in front of five other women.

We were in a side room at Jerome’s house during the Halloween party, and Danielle was the only one in the room (other than me) who wasn’t wearing some kind of slutty costume.  There was a slutty vampire, a slutty nurse, a slutty cat, a slutty cow girl, and a slutty police officer.  Danielle could have gone slut mode for Halloween and would have looked great, but instead she was Jane Austen, in a Victorian (I think) dress carrying my copies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma.  With her hair up and thick black glasses on, Danielle looked like a cute librarian giving a book talk.  In fact, she looked classy.  I was proud that Danielle was my girlfriend.  I was always proud when I had a girlfriend, but this was the first time I had been proud that a particular woman was my girlfriend.

Jerome’s house was a three story monolith 15 miles out of city limits where property was cheap and commuters willing to drive an hour each way could buy a few acres of land and design dream houses.  A bunch of people in costumes stood and talked in a large open kitchen.  A bunch of people in costumes danced in a living room darkened with strobe lights.  Kids in costumes ran around outside in a vast backyard (but the swimming pool was blocked because it was too cold).  A smaller room had a large screen TV with a football game on.  A game room with a pool table, a ping-pong table, and a foosball table was upstairs, along with a bunch of unused bedrooms that stored cool stuff like guitars, swords, guns, and collectibles from all over the world.

Jerome, the host, was a few years older, single, and was an engineer of some kind talking about starting his own company.  I made decent money for a guy out of college, but this guy was off the charts.  I was lucky to be in his social circle.  I only knew him because of Kirk, who introduced me to everybody he networked with.  The other guests at the party were my acquaintances; they knew my name, occasionally talked to me on the phone, and personally invited me to all the get-togethers, but without Kirk, I wouldn’t have met any of them.  I’m known as a pleasant guy, but I need an outgoing guy like Kirk to make me social.  Even though I was quiet, I had short outbursts of humor, I’d bring stuff, and would help out around the parties.  I might not have been social, but I could be friendly and useful.

I was concerned about how Danielle would react to Jerome.  He was a few inches taller than me and could talk smooth.  I knew Danielle was using me to pay her bills (that might not have been the only reason, but it was a big one), and I was okay with that.  If that’s what Danielle wanted, I was a guy who could pay bills on a month-to-month basis, but Jerome was the kind of guy who could make bills go away for a long time.  Even back then, I knew jealousy and paranoia weren’t good qualities in a boyfriend, but I also knew to be aware of what Jerome (or other guys) might say to Danielle.

After about 30 minutes of introducing Danielle and explaining my paper mache Frankenstein’s monster mask, I was talked out and sleepy and content to watch a football game in a side room with a large TV.  A couple other quiet guys were there staring blankly, and one guy wearing a pirate’s eye patch was screaming because he actually cared about the game.

Danielle wandered from room to room talking to women and popping up where I could see her every few minutes.  She brought me an iced soda (she knew I didn’t want anything alcohol-related) in a glass and kept me refilled every 15 minutes or so (even though I didn’t ask her to).  I didn’t know what brand it was, but cola had never tasted that good before.  I usually nursed my drinks in public, but I drained a few glasses, and Danielle kept bringing me refills between her conversations.  Most of the time she talked to other women, but one guy tried to talk to her, offering his hand to shake, but she pointed at me, and the guy’s shoulders sank and he wandered off.  I was proud.

The “Why are men horny?” question came as I had been checking up on Danielle.  Danielle’s question wasn’t rhetorical in nature.  She was asking me as an expert, and her audience eye-balled me because they expected an answer too.  The first response I thought of was, “You just have that effect on men,” but I figured that would come across as vulgar rather than complimentary.  My mind was fuzzy, and maybe because I wasn’t used to being up that late, but I wasn’t  stupid.

“I like sex,” Danielle explained to her female costumed friends while I tried to gather my thoughts.  “But I can do without it for a while.  But guys, it’s non-stop.  Why is that?”

She turned, put her hands on her hips, and looked me in the eye.

“Uh… I…” I stammered.  “It’s biology,” I finally said.  “It, you know, all accumulates and always comes back, so to speak.  It never stops.   If we don’t do anything about it, it makes us, um, well, it has to get dealt with one way or another.”

“What does that mean?” the woman in the slutty nurse costume asked.

“It means he beats off all the time,” Danielle said with her cheese-eating grin.

The women cackled loudly enough to make me cringe.  When enough women get together, their giddy squealing can hurt a guy’s ears.  Here, I had just provided a tasteful (maybe), scientific (not really) answer to Danielle’s inappropriate question, and they mocked me.  Even in my annoyed state, I thought it was ironic that in a room full of slutty costumes, the woman in the Victorian garb was the vulgar one.

I shook my head and returned to watch the football game in Jerome’s living room.  My eyelids were starting to get heavy, and I was thinking about closing them for a minute or two.

Just as I sat down, Kirk started talking to me.  He was semi-drunk on the couch because his girlfriend Linda wore a Supergirl costume with a skirt all the way to her knees and a shirt that went all the way to her neck.  Even Danielle’s Victorian dress displayed more cleavage.  Kirk wasn’t going to get any that night, so he figured he might as well drink.

“What’s with all the noise in there?” he asked.

“Drunk women,” I said.

He nodded.  “Cool Frankenstein mask.”

“Thanks, but it’s the Frankenstein monster, not Frankenstein.  Frankenstein created the monster, and that’s why the technical term is Frankenstein’s monster.”

Kirk looked at me like I was a dick and said, “Cool mask.”

We watched football for 10 minutes, and I got sleepier and groggier.  I tried to shake my head clear a couple times and thought about going to the bathroom or taking a walk outside (but not doing both at the same time).  The song “Monster Mash” was playing in the other room for the fourth time when Danielle rushed in, grabbed my hand, and started to pull me up.

“I wanna dance,” she said.

Still groggy, I resisted.  “I don’t like to dance,” I said.  She should have known that.

“C’mon!  Have some fun!  You’re not having fun!”  She continued to pull, and I continued to resist.

“I’m watching football.” I was annoyed because I was having fun even though she didn’t know it.  I’ve never liked it when people told me I’m not having fun.  I liked to be my own judge of whether or not I was having fun.

“Dance with me!”  She was almost pleading.

“I said I don’t feel like it,” I stated.

Danielle stopped pulling, and her eyes narrowed. Then she threw my hand down back on my lap.

“Fine!  Be an asshole!”

And she stormed out of the living room.  People in other rooms peeked inside to see who the asshole was.  Danielle had not used her quiet voice.

I was embarrassed.  I knew I should have danced with her.  I knew it.  But I just couldn’t get myself to do it.  My eyelids felt heavy, and my mind was slow, and “Monster Mash” was getting on my nerves, and Kirk, who didn’t know the difference between Frankenstein and the Frankenstein’s monster, was looking at me like I was the idiot in the room.  I drank my soda.  I guessed that since Danielle had just called me an asshole, she wasn’t going to bring me another one.

I glanced at Kirk, but now he pretended to have not seen the uncomfortable exchange.  Still, he said, with his eyes directed toward the television, “You should have danced with her.”

“I pay all her bills,” I said.

He lifted his beer and said, “I hear that.”  Then he burped.

A few minutes later Kirk said, “You know, she’s gonna start dancing without you.”

Ugh, I thought.  Kirk was right.  Danielle was drinking, there was loud music, I had just pissed her off in front of people, she hadn’t done anything crazy for a while, and there were a bunch of guys who would love to dance with her, guys that would love to get really close to a cute chick in thick glasses and get a feel for what was under that Victorian dress.  Anger started to well up in me.  I’d been stupid, and now she was probably going to start dancing crazy with another guy when I was the one who paid all her bills.  That pissed me off, and the anger gave me my strength and I pushed myself up from the couch to find out what kind of mess my girlfriend was going to cause.

I didn’t know what I was about to walk into.

*****

To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: The Party Scene.

And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.