The Philadelphia Story (pt. 2 )

I went downstairs and waited outside in the cold, which eased my nausea. At that point, the cold was still something of a novelty. My friend (who I think I'll call 'Chilly Willie', because that was his fraternity name. Yeah, that's right--I was in a fraternity. What of it? Yeah, you may have heard of it. It's called Alpha Alpha Alpha. It's a roadside assistance fraternity) soon arrived and we went back upstairs and then downstairs, and then the same cycle another time or two, before Chilly had finally finished gathering the stores (or whatever the fuck it was he was doing), and we were off.

The others were waiting in a strip club somewhere, a place called Delilah's something-or-other. It seemed like a very long trip to get there, but it might have been that the cab was hot and stuffy and reeked of booze. More accurately, the cabby reeked of booze, He also chattered on and giggled quietly to himself in the front of the cab. It took me most of the ride to recognize the possibility that he was talking hands-free on a cell phone, but I never did find out for sure. Nonetheless, we eventually bounced our way through narrow, grimy streets and into the parking lot of a huge, black and pink building, the size of a small warehouse.

About what went on inside the club, I will tell you only that the place was enormous and well-stocked with legitimate talent, far and away the finest gentlemen's establishment I've had the opportunity to frequent along my varied travels. There really were a lot of attractive women working there. Plus, if you asked the right people... $5 blowjobs. 'Nuff sed. Honestly, I was just hanging back most of the night, drinking club soda and leering, still too nauseous to move around much. At some point, I did work up the strength to do a few shots and get a couple dances, but it was all rather tame. Still... man, I do love me some dark meat.

Ours was a small group: just Chilly, Chilly's brother, two of their cousins, their sister's boyfriend, and me. I'd spent a bunch of time with Chilly's brother back in Rochester my last semester when he started going to business school there. He's a good guy with, from what I can tell, two dominant moods: focused to the point of being oblivious to everything else, and giggly. Tonight he was giggly (though most of the weekend he was so busy shuttling people and goods around that he generally stuck to his focused mode). Chilly's cousins I'd met once or twice, and I like them both very much, as well. The sister's boyfriend I was meeting for the first time, and he, like the goddamn rest of them, struck me as an all around swell guy, the kind of guy who, if it was my sister, I'd be glad to have him marry her. Not that I'm particular about who I'd let marry my sister. Still, you get the point.

Really, all the people I met this weekend were nice. A couple I couldn't quite read as well as I like to read people, but there was never anything verging on unpleasantness. I should say, though, that I don't like when people talk about their jobs. Maybe there are interesting stories from their jobs that are okay, but I don't give a fuck about the day-to-day—hell, year-to-year—specifics. There was one guy, not included in the bachelor party (and I hate saying this, because he was a nice guy) who kept telling me stories that were like, "So, meanwhile, the head of IT files a triple-J 6-14 and CCs it to the operations manager, and meanwhile, we're down in manufacturing, scratchin' our asses and wonderin' what the hell happened to the order. Meanwhile, we gotta halt production in our Newark facility until the damn H-29 F-Q is on my desk and ready to be stamped and faxed out to Albany." Which is not a very good story. But people love talking about their jobs. The worst is sitting with two people talking to each other about their jobs, which are in different fields but have enough overlap for them to be genuinely curious about the ways in which their respective industries interconnect. Tedious beyond description. But anyway, this really has nothing to do with anything. Just something that had been on my mind.

Another thing that's been on my mind is that the Jewish expression most people would recognize is "oy vey," a cry of weary, miserable complaint. There's food for thought in there, maybe. I know I'm gonna try to learn from it.

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(Coming soon! Part three of our story, in which I pad out a story about eating sandwiches into a thirty page treatise on my neuroses. Until then, this is Tom Sparkleman wishing all of you a very merry goodnight and a joyous tomorrow. Bye.)