When the going gets weird,
the weird turn pro.
- Raoul Duke
I did not want to fuck Barney Grossman. He and his wife were older. Nadine was attractive in that oedipal way all young men get over yearning to suckle by fantasizing sex with their best friends' mothers. But I was on to her and we both knew she'd eventually have to test me. Her prurient scheme began to unravel even though my lust was as pure and natural as tornadoes and mass lemming suicide. Was she really saying what she was saying? Was that gleam in Barney's eye more than just the onset of a sneeze I could only hope would blow an artery in his brain and leave me with both women to myself?
We had walked right into their trap and now there was no escape without setting things on fire. The bait had been political maneuvering my wife could not resist. Office politics of the basest, most vile form. All along their plan had been to wear down our keen mental defenses. We smoked their weed. We drank their booze. We ate their fattening appetizers. And now my nubile but callow wife was in the clutches of a mind-saturating cosmo stupor. She was having trouble balancing her head above her shoulders. She could no longer tell right from wrong, good from evil, and the licentious bisexual advances inherent in an offer to paint her nipples with a two-dollar Walgreen's lipstick known as "Midnight Rum Runner".
The unfledged husband internalizes a strong sense of ownership for his woman. To bag his mate he has had to suppress all of his inbred rough edges. He has endured shoe-shopping trips, chick flicks, and having the channel switched to the home improvement station on third and goal. He is the alpha male. He would not share her with any man. Yet, in a grotesque sort of way that can only be described as reprehensible, he may imagine enjoying the sight of his hard-won spouse having sex with another woman, but only if she promises not to like it as much as him, and only if she promises never to mention he ignores his feminine side in bed.
I watched Nadine work on my wife. The innuendo. The double, nay, even triple entendre. The subtle advances that became jokes.
Was it too hot in that fully air conditioned living room? Should we take off some of our excess clothing? Hah hah. You mean you've never HAD two men at once?
Had I heard that or had my short-term memory been so obliterated I'd only imagined Nadine performing the labyrinthine topological exercise of taking off her bra without removing her shirt? It must have happened because I found myself unable to tear my gaze from her erect nipples.
There was a full second of total lunar silence while a drop of spit edged from the corner of my mouth to my chin. But this bastardization of human congress was not for me. Not this night, especially if the entry fee was to have to bear the permanent psychological scars of seeing Barney Grossman naked and aroused. These people were savages whose sex life was as exciting as a coffee mug full of breadsticks and I was hating myself for having missed it the moment we agreed to come to this so-called dinner party.
"Dear, you must be tired. We should leave," I said, looking at my watch.
I could see Barney stifle his sense of alarm and outrage. Surely his carotid artery would burst in shame now that I had uncovered his satanic scheme to lure us into their sterile overused bedchambers.
But I had underestimated their resolve. They could not let us escape before they had penetrated my poor stoned wife with every proboscidean latex implement hidden in that ghastly suburban tract home. They were wild beasts, incapable of controlling their bodily lust. They would have to switch to plan "b" and we hadn't even had dinner yet.
I heard my wife ask, "Honey, is something wrong?"
Oh, something was wrong. Something was very wrong and she had been rendered incapable of exercizing common self-preservation.
Or perhaps, horrific as it was for me to imagine, she was in on the scheme.
It was the part of the movie where James Bond reveals to the villain that he has been fully aware of his treachery all along. He is not stupid. He is Bond and he is full of secret weapons.
I stood and pronounced, "I am on to you bastards. You won't get away with this." As I did the violence of my mighty lunge knocked over the coffee table. A floating candle Nadine had placed to induce a hyper-sexual mood fell to the carpet in a blaze of paraffin like napalm from an Air Force bomber. Though treated with space-age flame retardants, the Grossman's carpet began to smoulder, sending up a cloud of noxious fumes that would most certainly trip the alarm and bring sensible firemen to our rescue.
"This is why we never go out," my wife exclaimed while Barney threw himself on to the flames like a soldier protecting his foxhole buddies from a live grenade.
"What is wrong with you?" my new bride screamed in my face.
"These people--these people," I said trying to formulate the words that would make my wife less angry I had discovered the only reason her boss had invited us over was to watch her have sex with his wife, and then to take her himself.
"These people want to deflower us," I said.
Barney rolled onto his back coughing, his chest covered in black soot.
"Are you CRAZY?" said my wife, her eyes wild.
Of course I was crazy, but in an absolutely clarifying way. My head was full of intoxicants yet I was perfectly capable of rendering life-altering decisions.
Barney began to laugh. Nadine joined him.
"This is my BOSS," said my wife. Actually she said, "Smish iths mayie BOTHSE," but I had ravaged her so many times when she was drunk that I had refined decoding her senseless psychobabble to an art form. "I could get fired."
Barney assured her she wouldn't be fired. He went to his room to change into a shirt without a hole burned in it and to pull the molten polyester from his chest hairs.
Nadine said, "Well, wasn't that exciting?"
We cleaned up the mess I had made, Barney came back, and we sat down for dinner. They did their best to keep me comfortable within my own skin, but kept out a sharp eye for any lingering hallucinations.
My wife got drunker and kept apologizing for my inappropriate behavior, and they kept accepting and refusing her offers to pay them for the ruined living room carpeting.
Later, they handed me a camcorder, dressed her as a siamese cat, and fucked her like banshees.
We don't talk about it.