My Best Man (14 page)

I imagine her with a loaded gun pointed at her crotch. “Do shoot it like a gun?”

“Sort of. Well, not really,” she yells. “I mean, you won’t a bang or anything.”

“Are you doing it now?” “Are you ready?” she asks, as if I have anything to do with “Maybe I should take a hit off the bong first,” I joke. “Good idea, babe, but hurry. I’m freezing lying on this

“Just get it over with,” I tell her. “I don’t need drugs for this.“i

“I do,” she says. “Fire up that bong and pass it through door.”

I laugh and grab the bong off the hallway floor. There’s still left in the bowl, so I open the door a crack and slide it in on floor, followed by the lighter.

“Grazie!” she yells. I hear the bubbling of the water in chamber, followed by silence, followed by exhalation. “OK, Harry, here we go. Medicine time for Muffle!”

“I’m ready.” I keep thinking about the vaginal monikers

invented by the straight guys in my college dorm: hairy carport, love taco, Cindy’s trap door. But girls always seem to give it feminine names or liken it to a flower. Georgia O’Keefe made it downright glorious. What in the hell is going on behind that bath room door?

“Ahhhh!” Amity screams. Then she starts singing in a high pitched voice:

When you see Libby Libby Libby on your table table table, you better pet her, pet her, pet her, while you’re able able able!

“Is it over?” I ask.

“It will be in a couple days, darling’. But at the moment it’s like a Jane Fonda workout. I feel the burn!”

The next week, the day before she’s to leave on her trip with Wade, I say, “Don’t go. Let’s buzz down to Padre Island and cross the border to Mexico.” Padre Island is off the gulf coast of southern Texas, where college students spend their spring break burning through their parents’ money by drinking cases of Jack Daniel’s Whiskey and puking it over the sides of chartered “booze cruise” barges. It’s also a favorite junket of Dallas-based flight attendants, just a nonstop flight from Dallas to Brownsville, the gateway city, and we can be down there in just over an hour.

“Harry,” Amity says, “I thought you were supposed to be working a three-day trip tomorrow?”

I was. But yesterday I signed it over to a flight attendant who wanted the hours. I don’t mind her going out with someone besides me, but Wade ? I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but he doesn’t even make her laugh. “I’m not working this week. Let’s go to Padre. We’ll bake and drink Margaritas.”

“What about Wade and his blue green algae?” Amity wonders, doing her doe-eyed look.

“Tell him you’re in search of a blue green cocktail instead.”

We wear sufficient clothing for the flight down, but pack nothing but swimsuits and the boxer shorts Amity lifted from Troy, since it’s now full-on summer and we’re into minimalist attire. Our flight down to Brownsville is staffed by a woman with clownish makeup. Amity whispers, “Barnum and Bailey, y’all.” The attendant also has the longest, biggest hair I’ve seen in Texas yet. I check to see if her name tag says, “Rapunzel.” In contrast, our flight’s also a woman, has hair shorn so severely that we’re able to see her. scalp. “Well I guess those two even themselves out,” Amity says,

brushing the crumbs off her seat cushion before sitting down. “What do you mean?”

“The captain and Rapunzel are lovers. They think knows, but it’s a common fact.”

I buckle my seat belt. “That hair has got to be heavy. At some point it’s going to snap her neck.”

“Good, she’s senior to us. We’ll both move up a number the seniority list.” Amity checks her own hair’s reflection in little purse mirror she carries. “Harry, promise if my hair ever that big, you’ll write me a note.”

We order two glasses of champagne from the woman with colossal coif, and when she brings them, we inspect them for hair All clear, we sip them and snack on the little bags of dr) nuts with MSG glaze, while flipping through the in-flight to check out the Slut of the Month, a girl Amity claims has more abortions than there are Osmond children.

As the jet turns to make its final approach to the runway Brownsville, Amity states, “My parents have a second home on the island.”

I’m surprised she didn’t mention it before. “Are they now?”

“I don’t know,” she says, looking out the window to the lush farmland of the Rio Grande Valley as it grows closer and closer.

My parents have a home in Colorado, and I can’t imagine going to Aspen and not staying in the family house even though I’d have to sneak us in with my extra key. “You don’t want to stay with them?”

“No,” she says. “If they’re there, they’ll only make us crazy. We didn’t bring any nice clothes, and they’ll want to drag us to the Yacht Club and make us play bridge all day while sipping Manhattans.”

“Sounds awful,” I admit.

“We’re not even going to call them,” she states.

“I understand,” I answer. But I don’t believe her parents have a home on Padre Island. What is this thing with her family? Does she even have a family?

Amity takes off her sunglasses and holds my hand. Her eyes sparkle as she changes her entire chemistry to address me. “Let’s not talk about my family. This is going to be a wonderful two days together, Harry. Just you and me. We don’t need anyone else, do we?”

“No, we don’t.”

“Power nap!” she barks without a segue, breaking regulations by reclining her seat fully before landing. In seconds she’s out cold. The jet’s gear drops with a thud, and the engines whine while we line up with the runway. We come roaring in and touch down with a hard bounce as if we’ve been shot out of the sky and the pilots deploy the thrust reversers with full force, as if the runway were the length of a Band-Aid. The shrill noise is deafening as the reverse thrust slows the aircraft. We’re still moving at a good clip when the captain steers the jet onto a taxiway as if she’s making a left turn through a yellow stoplight. Everyone on board is thrown against the right side of his seat. And Amity sleeps through all of it.

As the pilots shut down the engines at the gate, I lean over to gently wake her. Just as I’m about to touch her shoulder, she pops up like a piece of toast from a toaster. “Let’s go!”

“Ahhh!” I jolt, slamming back against my own armrest. “God, Amity! Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” she asks, grabbing her tote.

I approach the rental desk to rent a cheap car. After handing over my credit card, the agent informs me my authorization has been denied. I make a lame joke and hand her another card. Denied again. Fuck. These card people are closing in on me. I’ve got to get these payments out. It’s just that even my minimum payments are too high now for me to have any money to live. I’m afraid try my third and last card, and luckily I don’t have to when Amity dives in and saves the day, happily producing her credit card to agent. “Sorry,” I tell her, embarrassed. I’ll pay you back as soon as we get home.” “Don’t worry about it, Harry,” she smiles, fully sincere. “We’re a team.”

We find a reasonable hotel next to the ocean. Amity checks us in, and we head immediately for the beach.

The almost tepid ocean is like a Kansas horizon right before tornado, but the charcoal darkness of the water is sliced with of rolling white waves. The patches of sky are the same brilliant blues of any Caribbean horizon and strung together with high cumulus clouds looking like giant popcorn floating by. We dig toes into the warm sand. Let the sun soak into our skin. Walk with our feet in the water. Snack on chips. Flip through magazines.

In the late afternoon, after we’re tanned and warmed and talked out, we grab the rental car and head across the border to Matamoros, Mexico.

We stroll through the dusty dirt streets of Mexico, dressed in our boxer shorts and short sleeved button downs. We’re energized

by the brass of the mariachi music floating out of a nearby bar as we inspect ashtrays, rugs, velvet paintings, and maracas laid out on the brilliant blankets of the street vendors. When I offer to buy Amity a pair of maracas, she tells me she already has a pair, then shakes her titties. I laugh, and so do the local men on the street, while their wives scold them and usher them back into the shops or on their way.

We decide we’re hungry for local flavor of a more edible character, so we dine in a restaurant that looks like something from the Hollywood of the 1940’s. Large round tables with white starched tablecloths and napkins, big red velvet chairs, a huge dance floor in the middle of the restaurant, and a large live orchestra that plays while we eat.

There is something special about this day, this evening, this dinner. Amity’s hair is curly, full, and gorgeous, and her ears are adorned with gold hoop earrings, and this combination makes her look almost like a Latin Grace Kelly. And though she’s wearing only a starched white men’s shortsleeved dress shirt, boxer shorts, and little leather slip-on shoes, she’s glamorous beyond words. She leaves the top two buttons of her shirt open, and the string of pearls around her neck spills into her freckled cleavage.

And tonight she looks at me as if I’m the finest man in the world. And I completely forget that I’ve seen her look at Bart this way. And Troy. And Hunt. And probably Wade. And Miguel Arturo. And while she gazes at me with magic in her eyes, I can’t help but notice the waiters appraise my status. Nice score, amigo, their faces tell me. And the bass player in the band nods his approval. And the couple at the next table, who are only mildly enjoying them selves, seem to look at Amity and me with melancholy envy. Man, this is it. The thing that everyone is looking for. I feel like the one guy in the room who every other guy wants to be.

Amity, in between bites of lobster and sips of beer, stops and holds my hand and bathes me with her eyes, but doesn’t even try

to add language to the moment before she gently releases my fingers and returns to the food. Maybe there hasn’t been language invented yet for two people like us in a situation like this.

While the orchestra plays, a Mexican gentleman with a large, old-fashioned camera goes table to table. He stops and raises his camera to capture us. Amity leans over, I hold a bottle of beer in my right hand and put my left arm around her, and she puts both her hands under the table on my leg, where she slides one hand inside my boxer shorts and moves it upward until it almost touches my dick. We look into the camera. Flash.t Her hand is gone.

We look at each other and burst with laughter. “You almost touched my lobster,” I tell her.

After dinner we move onto the dance floor and shake it out with the band to some killer merengue. We’re a little drunk on margadtas, beer, and most definitely, each other. We don’t even notice that everyone else is dressed formally until the maitre d’ comes onto the dance floor to inform us there is no dancing in underwear. We laugh, dance back to our seats, feed each other dessert, and pay the check both of us contributing, me using my little stash of cash.

We hold hands on the return drive to Padre, and once back, Amity says, “Let’s take a romantic walk on the beach.” The moon , is full enough that we can see the sand below our toes and the waves rolling in beyond the shore. We stroll, holding our shoes in one hand, each other in the other, while the warm wind washes over the sea and onto our faces. I look down and in the moonlight see little creatures running at our feet. Crabs? Wait. What’s that one with the curled tail? A scorpion? A scorpion! “Amity, there’re scorpions on the beach!”

“Where?” she screams.

“There!” I say, pointing to the creature with the erectile little tail.

“Run!”

We break hands and run toward the hotel, dodging crabs and scorpions and anything else our imaginations might give form. We get to the door, and Amity says, “Hurry!” as I try to get the key into the lock. We fly into the room and fall onto the bed, laughing. She pulls herself up to me and says, “I love you, Harry Ford.” And before I can answer she slides down my body, pulling off my boxers as she descends.

This is a strange moment for a gay guy, believe me. It’s as if all my life I’ve eaten Almond Joys, and for the first time I’m about to sink into a Mounds. It’s just so much softer and smoother, and though it’s supposed to be sweet, I’m not sure I’ll taste the sugar in it and I’ll definitely be missing the nuts.

But as if she senses my apprehension, she doesn’t make me take a bite at all, but bites it herself, so to speak. It doesn’t matter that my dick isn’t hard in the beginning, she makes it hard. And forget that I called her a Mounds she’s a fucking Payday, with more nuts than any guy. And I’m losing my mind, because the one thing I’ve always heard that women have in common is that they can’t give head. I’ve heard wrong; Amity is far beyond even any gay man. She sucks me as if she’s dying of thirst, and I’m the only source for a thousand miles, as if she’s desperate for my release. I’m rolling all over the bed, sometimes pushing her off because it’s so intense, and she’s following me, hungrily reconnecting, begging me to give it up, moaning, whining, totally in need.

When I come, I scream like a sixteen year old getting his first hummer, and she screams too, her mouth full. Then she swallows. And then we both collapse as if we’ve been shot.

We lie there for several minutes, both of us catching our breath. I feel guilty all of a sudden. I should do something for her, right? If not, I’m just like JT, the car salesman. But what will I do? I’ve never flicked the switch on Cindy’s trap door. I wouldn’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’d be the amateur of all time. “So?” I say halfheartedly, my dick starting to soften. “What about you?”

/“IIU UUIII,

“Don’t worry,” she answers, exhaling. “I already did. We together.”

I’m so relieved I take her wet hand and hold it. I hear her rustle against the pillow as she turns to me. I turn mine and into her eyes.

“Just hold my hand,” she says delicately, “and I’ll be happy.” And she soon is sleeping without nightmares.

s Amity pulls the BMW up to the house, we both see the official-looking piece of paper taped to the front door. Never mind that I’m not poor white trash. I have put ninety cents’ worth of gas in my VW because that was the sum of change in my ashtray, and I have lived on convenience store hot dogs after I blew my measly paycheck while at college. I know what that piece of paper is.