Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child

by Bert Kreischer

  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.

  “You weren’t kidding, he really can’t speak a word of Russian.”

  “I told you so,” said my teacher.

  The man, who I would later learn was the head of the Russian Department, leaned across the table and made me a blunt offer. “You can go, but you have to promise to never take another Russian class ever again.”

  I considered his offer, looked at my teacher, smiled, and said, “Deal.”

  * * *

  A few months later, we were on a plane headed to the motherland. I was in the back with an open seat next to me, drinking heavily and fantasizing, as most men do, about all the sex and possibilities that lay ahead of me the second we touched down. The girl in the sundress on a bike that I’d meet on the street, the small village she would live in on the outskirts of the city, our nights in her family’s onion field, sitting on top of a Yugo watching the stars, falling in love. How her family’s neighbors would beg me to stay and become their mayor, how I would end up living there, telling the villagers stories of my exploits as the starting pitcher for the New York Yankees. How I had invented the car wash, explaining what a car wash was, then opening a line of very successful car washes all over the country called Bert’s Squirts. We would marry, have children, and spend our summers in the small village where I met her and our winters on the Caspian Sea listening to The Smiths.

  I had always assumed my teacher understood me, so when she sat in the seat next to me, in the midst my daydream, in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, and asked if she could show me something, my heart started racing. The sex was starting now, I realized as she started unbuttoning her jeans. I almost began drooling, when she did something very unexpected: she pulled out a fanny pack filled with money.

  “I’m freaking out about this,” she said. “The department gave me ten grand in cash and told me I need to sneak it into Russia.”

  “For what?”

  “The mob.”

  The mob, I thought. Why would we have to pay off the Italians to visit Russia?

  As it turns out, the Russian mob had risen up after the fall and had taken over Russia and made it a business to routinely shake down foreigners. A group of our size, from a state school, was as tantalizing as a brand-new pair of Jordache jeans must have sounded ten years earlier. So the head of our Russian Department (the guy with the fat cock) saw to it that we’d hire two younger mafiosos to chaperone us around St. Petersburg. We offered a good price, and they were going to accommodate by sending two dudes to shadow our every move and make sure that no one laid more than a casual eye on us.

  “And that,” she said, “is how you do business in Russia.”

  She had learned about this arrangement at the airport, and she was as nervous about the prospect of having gangsters live with us as she was about having to smuggle their payoff into the country.

  My teacher by now was a sort of friend, and I felt empathetic for her plight. I, on the other hand, was bubbling. I had always envied guys like Frank Sinatra, Tupac, Snoop, and Dre. They were artists who were just as comfortable hanging out with entertainers as they were with gangsters. In some parallel universe I fancied myself like them, and now I was going to get a chance to meet actual real-life gangsters. She told me not to tell anyone, went back to her seat, and left me spinning wildly with ideas of what was to come. As I drank myself over the Atlantic, through Prague and into St. Petersburg, I made a resolution: Fuck the dumb chick in the village of morons, I was about to get in real tight with the Russian mafia!

  * * *

  I was too drunk to notice Igor when we deplaned in St. Petersburg. It was only when we checked into our hotel that I realized who he was. The head of the Russian department was there, not only to welcome us to Russia, but to introduce us to our “tour guides,” who would be following us around the city. He said they spoke little English and asked us not to engage with, bother, or talk to them. I, on the other hand, had already decided they were going to be my best friends.

  I spent the rest of the orientation sizing up Igor. He actually seemed pretty normal, and he smiled more than I thought a gangster should. Igor looked like he might have been beat up a lot as a kid. He was maybe a bit rougher than an American of his age, rocking greasy jet-black hair and a constant cigarette in his mouth. But he definitely wasn’t what I expected. He said next to nothing in our meeting, leading me to believe he didn’t speak English, and excused himself to his room in the middle of the orientation.

  I worried that my opportunity to introduce myself to our “chaperone” was lost, but
by the grace of god, his room turned out to be directly next door to mine, across the hall from my hot teacher’s.

  After orientation, I walked the streets of St. Petersburg, pretending to sightsee, but actually looking for a bottle of nice vodka and a case of beer. Extremely difficult, you can imagine, when your linguistic abilities are equal to that of the average stray canine. My four semesters of Russian were no help, except I was very used to not panicking when people talked directly to me in a foreign language. But eventually I found and overpaid for a cheap bottle of vodka, a six-pack of a beer called Baltika, and stole a lemon.

  As the sun set, I grabbed my pocketknife, threw on my fanny pack, and with the nerve of a soldier fighting in a war he believes in, I knocked on Igor’s door.

  When the door opened, I immediately noticed two things. First, there was a small party happening. This I hadn’t expected. I had hoped for a one-on-one with the man, where Igor would be impressed by my gregariousness, generous party favors, and friendly face. Second, there was his “casual” look—cigarette still in mouth, but wearing a wifebeater, track pants, and a most uninviting expression.

  He met me with a gruff voice and I knew enough Russian to understand the gist of his muttering.

  “What do you want?”

  I’m sure he was expecting me to ask them to keep it down. I felt as welcomed as a lump in his nut sack. In a panic, and not really sure how I was supposed to respond, I said the first and only words that came to me in Russian, words that would define me for years to come.

  I said, in Russian: “I am the machine.”

  It was one of the only things I knew how to say after my four years in the department—that and “I work with cats,” which I believed loosely translated to “I work pussy.” These were things I would accrue in a moment of attention in class and drop at a party back at school. I was told later that I must have been thinking I was saying, “I am a man,” which I’m sure he could have deduced by himself, and sounds now like an extremely direct gay proposition. But regardless of why or how I said it, I said it.