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Authors: Bert Kreischer

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (6 page)

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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Anyway, the point was that his apartment, just like his soul, was empty and literally right around the corner from where we lived, and even closer to the only spot in North Tampa where we knew we could get alcohol. So we got a case of Natural Light and rented
Pet Sematary
(figuring at the very least, we’d scare the girls onto our dicks). We bought two condoms from a gas station bathroom (conservative) and as we pulled up to the apartment, shit was on.

The Saint and I sat through roughly twenty-five minutes of
Pet Sematary
before I suggested we retreat to Jeff’s girlfriend’s makeshift hey-this-is-your-condo-too bedroom.

The rest was a car wreck. I’ll do my best not to leave out any details.

I laid her on the bed and in a matter of seconds I’d undressed her like she was covered in ticks. I still had all my clothes on—baseball hat, jacket, jeans, boots. I dropped my pants to my ankles and pulled out my condom. This was, it should be noted, the first time I’d ever tried to put on a condom, a feat I wish now I had practiced. Young men don’t often buy condoms and try them on in their rooms, just to see how they look, although maybe they should give it a try. I was too embarrassed at that point to buy condoms at a grocery store. Hence our stealthy purchase at the vending machine inside a gas station’s dirty bathroom.

I unwrapped the condom only to find, much to my surprise, that it was rolled up like a sock. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a fourfold? But my mom still did my laundry, so I said to myself, “This must be rolled up the way my mom rolls up my socks.” So I began
unrolling
the condom in my hands. When it reached a length that seemed suitable for someone with a great jumpshot, I stopped, then rolled it back up to a more reasonable, qualified-for-a-home-loan penis-sized length. Then I took the unsleeved condom, put it at the explosive end of my junk, and pulled it down. One problem, there was air trapped between my dick and the end of the condom, so as I pushed down, the condom inflated. I tried three or four times before I realized I was making balloon animals on my dick. Meanwhile, The Saint patiently waited for me to begin banging guts. I tried to squeeze the air out of the condom, but this only made things worse, more hilarious balloon animals. At first a giraffe, then a lion, always returning to a manatee. After a few futile attempts I realized this was a no-go. I stood and pulled my pants back up, walked out the door into the living room, and approached Jeff. I told him I needed to speak to him in private.

I took him into the kitchen, cracked another Natty Light, and told him my dilemma.

“I need the other condom.”

“You’re done already?”

“Long story.”

“You can’t be done already?”

“No, it was broken.”

“How was it broken?”

“Does it fucking matter? The gas station must have fucked it up; give me the other fucking condom, please.”

“But what am I gonna use?”

“Look, I have her naked in the other room and shit is going down as soon as I get back in there. Be a friend.”

A friend till the end, Jeff gave me the cool-guy-condom-handshake, which I now know to be the cool-guy-cocaine-handshake, and I retreated back to the room. I considered phrases like, “pinch the reservoir tip” and “unroll onto the shaft.” The Saint was still lying there, waiting for me. I took a seat, pants at ankles, and then did as instructed. I was ready to go. Putting on the condom even felt kind of good. I took position on top of The Saint, pressing my body against hers, and started.

And finished, almost immediately.

I was like a bull rider, six seconds and I was off. Now all I needed was Hartley to come in dressed as a clown to distract her so I could make a clean getaway from what was sure to be an awkward conversation, because I could tell by the look on her face that she hadn’t even begun. But I had no idea how awkward it was about to get. That was when she said seven words no man ever wants to hear.

“Are you going to put it in?”

I may not have the award-winning penis at the fair, but I didn’t think I had the sideshow penis. My penis was huge considering my 170-pound frame. Now, on a 240-pound body, it looks odd, like a squatter in the midst of a bustling city. But that is only because I have outgrown it. On my seventeen-year-old body it looked majestic. My confusion turned to panic when I looked down only to find that my dick was wedged between her butt cheeks and the bed.

I hadn’t lost my virginity to a person. I lost my virginity to a mattress.

If it’s life’s biggest moments that define you, then this one defined me as a loser. I didn’t think about what to do next, I simply acted. It was my only option. So, even though I was already finished, I stuck it inside her. Truth be told, it wasn’t really better than the mattress. I can’t say I enjoyed it. But still, I pounded away dutifully, knowing full well that the treaty had already been signed. She did her best to make a show of enjoying it. When I figured she was done, I pretended to be done, too. I walked out of that bedroom and into the bathroom a failed man. I’ll never forget looking myself in the mirror that night in the bathroom and shaking my head.

*   *   *

We left that night and I dropped everyone off. As I merged onto the interstate to get back home, I scanned the radio for a song that would put the evening’s events in perspective. What I found was Ice T’s “Colors.” I tried as I pulled onto the interstate to raise my fist through the sunroof in victory, but the action just didn’t fit the feelings. So I drove home in silence, past my curfew, and lied to my parents about the night’s events, knowing full well they would prefer it that way.

The Saint and I dated for a couple months after that, before she started sleeping with my buddy Jeff. I didn’t need to ask but somehow knew he was much better at sex than I was. I didn’t have sex again until college, but by the time I did it again, I had learned some tricks of the trade. Most importantly, masturbate furiously before having sex with a stranger. You’ve got to unload your gun before you put it in the car to go hunting. Unload it. I did just that—twice—and I lasted so long, I wonder now if she thought I was gay. I ended up dating that girl for five years until she, too, decided to sleep with Jeff. (By now I figured he must be amazing.) And even now, years later, I have shared that awkward moment people call sex—I call humiliation—with only six people.

Seven, if you count mattresses.

 

4.

I Am The Machine

 

I grew up in the beauty of the Cold War, when we knew who our enemies were and it wasn’t racist to hate them. So, I knew very little about the Soviet Union growing up other than that Russians were cold, unpleasant people who rarely smiled—mostly because their clothes were gray and uncomfortable. Their women had moles and their men drinking problems. They had bad haircuts and were still losing their minds over Jordache jeans while we Americans were outgrowing our Guess. They were our equals athletically only because they were taken from their parents at a young age by a government they hated and fed steroids, while simultaneously killing their retarded. They would cheat on the playing field if they could, because they were evil, but they never cheated in the workplace, which is why they were economically inferior to us. We on the other hand were strong and fashionable. We were fair, honest, openhearted, and loved our “mentally challenged.”

I believed all of this wholeheartedly until the wall fell. Then I joined in with the rest of the world in applauding the Russians, like they were a cousin who had finally come out of the closet. In time they would catch up to speed with us, like the rest of the world, but for now they had a lot of growing up to do. And like most Americans, I didn’t think of Russia much at all after that—that is, until my (first) junior year of college.

I was living in a tenured teacher’s house who had taken a sabbatical after what he called “trumped-up charges of statutory rape, cocaine dealing, and kidnapping” when I accidentally signed up for a Russian language class. I walked into the first session of the noon class sincerely thinking it was Spanish, and the first thing I noticed, the teacher was hot. Smoking hot.

As the other students began to take notes, I closed my eyes in the back of the room hoping to nod off, dreaming that I was living in an apartment in Pamplona above a preschool. That’s when I heard the room in unison clearing their throats. I opened my eyes, looked up and noticed the hot teacher was writing a new alphabet on the chalkboard. I leaned over to the kid next to me and whispered, “When did Spanish get a new alphabet?” He chuckled and got back to notes. I leaned in closer and repeated myself more intently. He looked at me a bit confused. “This isn’t Spanish, this is Russian.”

And with that I was up, like I just noticed an Adam’s apple on a first date.
Who the fuck wants to learn a dead language?
I thought to myself. We beat them, they should learn our language, not vice versa. I looked around at the room and saw what I believed to be a bunch of blacksmiths, excited to learn a dead trade, and I was prepared to politely make an exit when the hot teacher stopped me.

“Are you leaving?”

I smiled and explained my mistake to her and the class and got a huge laugh. Not what I was looking for, but I took it and excused myself.

Before I could get out the door, she cut me off and kindly asked if I would stay. I usually didn’t even sit in on classes I was enrolled in, let alone ones I planned on dropping, so her request challenged my hard-earned slacker value system. But her wholesome looks and Midwestern charm prevailed, and so I decided to stay for just that one class.

At the end, she pulled me aside and explained her conundrum: Without me, they didn’t have the minimum number of students required to keep the class going. It would have to be canceled. The students who wanted to take Russian wouldn’t be able to. She told me if I decided to stay onboard, she guaranteed that I would get no less than a C.

A shocking offer, I’m sure, to anyone that attended a serious four-year university. But this was FSU and while I can’t speak for everyone, this was not the first proposition of the kind I’d received. Regardless, it was an interesting orgy of feelings to have fornicating in my head. For a second, I remembered my uncle telling me that Russia after the wall would be like the Wild West. Americans with a subtle knowledge of the fundamentals of business would be able to swing over there, open up McDonald’s and ATMs and make millions. I had at best that subtle knowledge, and what better way to make my millions than by conquering a foreign land. And I presumably would have had to
attend
and
sleep through
the Spanish class I had planned on
attending
and
sleeping through
—so I sat in on her Russian 1 class just enough to hold up my end of the bargain, and at the end of the semester I got my C.

The next semester, we all signed up for Russian 2 with the exact same teacher, and guess who got another C? Why not? I had taken Russian 1; it seemed like the reasonable thing to do. There were a number of times she tried to get me to really focus—to show me what I was missing by not taking her class seriously. But I would always retreat from what seemed like the insurmountable task of learning, and I was perfectly comfortable cruising through and getting my C’s. I’m not proud of it in hindsight, especially as a father of two daughters who I hope will take advantage of all that college has to offer (except, obviously, for the designer drugs and virginity-saving anal sex). But I was twenty-two and had just discovered mushrooms and disc golf. Academics weren’t my first priority.

By the end of Russian 4, she was teaching the entire class in Russian, and I was sitting in attendance feeling lost, like an immigrant at the DMV. All my dreams at that time were in Russian, which made dreaming especially terrifying, because I didn’t speak the language any better than I did four semesters earlier. Russian men constantly shouting at me while I shouted back, “I don’t know what you are saying!” I figured my happy hour of guaranteed C’s was reaching last call, when our beautiful teacher asked if we wanted to go to Russia to study abroad and get a minor.

Get a minor
was a tad bit misleading. After a few awkward conversations with some classmates, I realized she was speaking academically. I hadn’t even declared a major, and here I was with the prospect of getting a minor in a language I couldn’t even speak, read, or write. It sounded too good to be true.

When I attended the mandatory informational meeting for the study abroad program, I locked eyes with my teacher, one of four adults presiding over the meeting, and saw a shocked look on her face, like that of an adulterer confronted at church. Afterward, she pulled me aside.

“What are you doing here?”

“Going to Russia?”

“This is for serious Russian language students.”

“I’m taking Russian 4,” I reminded her.

“Bert, we both know you can’t speak Russian.”

“So I can’t go?”

“Are you serious?”

“Honestly, I told my dad about it and he really wants me to go.” (This was true. My dad will shock you at times with what he green-lights: speed, edible marijuana, and Russia to name a few.)

“I’ll have to talk to the head of the Russian Department.”

I nodded. What did I have to lose?

A week later after class, she asked me to come with her to her office. She sat me down and a man I had never met before sat across from me. He looked like the Marlboro man. He was tall, with blond hair, and had the air of a secret agent. He was the kind of guy you meet and automatically assume has a fat cock and knows how to use it. (Hopefully that’s not just me.) Just like in a spy thriller, he whispered something to me in what I was now familiar enough with to know was Russian. After four semesters of the language, I may not have been able to speak it, but I was definitely proficient in knowing when other people were. I smiled and nodded, darting my eyes from my teacher to the man and back to my teacher. He said it again only to receive the same blank stare, like I was waiting for my pupils to fall from my eyes. He looked at my teacher and shook his head.

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
8.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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