Morning has broken, and apparently so have I. "Pull down your pants," flirts my doctor, squatting to eye level with my special place, my secret garden, my milkweed.
"Buy me a drink and tell me that you love me," I mutter to myself, duly dropping trou in the interest of medical science and a good time.
And while his antiseptic hands fiddle around with my dangle-y bits, my mind races around clinical terms in the PDR like an ant might a candy bar, pulling up all kinds of pointless polysyllabic sweetness to cure my precious ache. Do I have prostate cancer? Will I be able to have children? Omigod! Am I pregnant? That's it. I'm birthing a baby in my sinus cavity.
"I don't see what this has to do with your sinuses," smirks the doctor. "You don't know where my sinuses have been," I smirk back.
Whatever the case or the potential diagnosis, there's been some something in my something as of late, and I expect that there will be pills involved in dealing with that something. At least there had better be. Even if there aren't, I decide, at least I got felt up and insurance paid for it. Yeah, I fucked the system.
"I know it may seem scary," he pulls on my left testicle, "but it's actually quite normal," adding something about the word "ejaculate" (but with a soft second "a," creating my favorite noun ever) and its violent force.
"Pull on the right one," I climax. Ew. I hate when that happens.
After a couple of hours of watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse and witnessing Mr. Reubens and Cowboy Curtis camping and talking about how they like their wieners ("I thought you were bringing the buns!"), my mind is full of thematic ejaculates. Clearly, penile performance is today's secret theme, and I am positively puckered at the prospect.
Likewise puckered, but in an altogether different kind of frontal way, is Jessica Bryce Young, my copy editor, who I've drafted to accompany me on my column-friendly orgasmatron. We're going to see The Magnetic Fields tonight at Rollins College, and we're neither clinically depressed nor sporting trust-funded thrift garb. We don't belong here.
"I just saw a coffin outside of the chapel," wisps an undergrad floating outside the Annie Russell Theatre. "And it totally freaked me out."
OK, maybe we do. By virtue of the fact that I'm a chronic smoker of death sticks who feels the need to look indie-cool outside, I'm locked out of the venue as the show starts and forced to enter through the box office door, or, as they call it, the latecomers' entrance.
Latecomers! Geddit? Oh.
Aussie opener Darren Hanlon only fuels my pubic fire, because he's carry-in-your-back-pocket cute and because he sings a whole song about bicycle kickstands and their cultural significance. Naturally I'm telling gross kickstand jokes in my head while crashing my thematic bike into an oncoming thematic bus, because that's what I do.
But what exactly does droopy renaissance-man Pat Greene do? He's here, and he's talking about some sort of Freemason-y cult meeting in which "field trips" to historical piles of soil provide ironic significance to grown men with nothing to do.
"Billy's stopped listening," offers Jessica by way of assistance. "Will there be refreshments?"
"Well, not the kind he would want," Pat smugs, invoking my alcoholism and spilling it over my head.
Moreover, will there be penises, specifically historical penises of ironic significance? No? Well then, I can't hear you. Go away.
By the time Stephin Merritt has rolled his last Magnetic eye and Fielded his last sigh, we are suitably drained of our imaginary diet pills and in search of sustenance that doesn't involve gay, anti-romantic metaphor. We figure that here, in the land of beaded clutches and disposable children – that being Winter Park – boutique eating (for the sake of watching people) might be fun.
"I won't go in anywhere where I see facelifts," JBY injects, all hair blowing in a Park Avenue shopping stroll. "Omigod! You're Winter Parker Posey!" I make myself laugh and probably nobody else.
After too many stretch marks and permanently raised eyebrows, we decide on some fishy Italian fare from Allegria, mostly because I'm not really going to eat anyway. It's reasonably abandoned, too, and we're not sure why. For a minute, anyway.
"I'm so sick of this house thing!" slurs a menopausal divorcee to her similarly bereft friend. The two of them are apparently on something of a girls' night out, during which they will justify their puny moneyed existences. And they're very loud. "So about the house. We got Silgranit. S-I-L-granit. And you gotta seal it. You gotta remember to seal it … We'll have two glasssssssses, not a bottllle. She's drivvvvfffing."
Plates rattle and glass bends, while Jessica and I attempt our own conversational justification – something involving Ritalin and Darvocet being turned into more convenient dissolve-on-the-tongue strips and the unsubtle irreverence of our host publication.
"I've haaaad it allll!" the slurs from the nearby table continue. "Well, I saw this curio in a catalog with wood etching from alllll the way at the top to the bottom," clinks the other one, completing the demolition-track figure eight of their futile waltz. "It was in a catalog, and the guy said, 'Do you want it? It's yours.' So he brought it right to the boat."
Tired of biting our seafood tongues, Jess and I decide to play our own drunken banter game. "I've got craaaabss," Jessica raises her voice and her wineglass, repeating some gems. "I've been to Greece. I've been to Oregon. I've got a social disease. Have you ever been to you?"
"I am so sick of this blood in my semen thing!" I talk over her. "Just put copper on it. It'll bring the countertop right out," she continues.
"I am sooooo sick of this scarf-and-barf thing!" I conclude, pushing my chair out and running to the bathroom. There I'll look down at my beloved jewels and realize that when you start your day with a professional handjob, inevitably it's all downhill from there. I've had it all.
