Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single

by Heather McElhatton

  “Is she bringing any guys?”

  “Shut up, Lexi! It’s my bachelorette party. She’s not bringing any guys.”

  “Then leave her!”

  Up goes a chorus of “Leave her! Leave her!”

  “All right, shut up, you guys! Shut up! Okay, Jen, we’re waiting five more minutes and if you’re not here, you’re queer. We’re leaving.”

  “You do know the bar you’re going to is gay, right?”

  “Excalibur is not a gay bar. It’s an alternative bar.”

  “I don’t think you know what alternative means.”

  “Yes, I do, it means they’re funky but they’re poor.”

  “You’re an idiot.” I hang up and speed through two more lights and turn the corner to my apartment just as my cell phone starts vibrating so my spasmodic sister can tell me she and the titty-studded booze crew are leaving.

  “I’m here, I’m here!” I park alongside an ice bank, praying there won’t be a snow emergency and the Scout won’t get towed. I dash out of my car and take a single sharp breath of cold air only to duck back into the hot, perfume-heavy, neon-blue-lit limousine that’s waiting for me.

  “Hi, guys!” I say. “Wow, Hailey, nice shirt.”

  My sister is wearing a white-sequined miniskirt and a white tank top covered with unwrapped Jolly Ranchers.

  “We couldn’t get the Life Savers to stick,” Lexi explains, “but if you lick a Jolly Rancher and press it hard enough, it sticks really good!”

  They’re all drinking prebottled Pink Squirrels and blasting old Blondie songs. Lexi tells Hailey about a book called Penis Pokey, which has a hole on every page in the book that’s big enough for a guy to slide his penis through, so his dick looks like anything from an elephant trunk to a fire hose to an old man’s nose. Before I know what’s happening, they decide they want to go find this book and the white limousine pulls up in front of the Barnes and Noble in Calhoun Village. All the wild, screaming girls pile into the store, fanning out through the aisles looking for Penis Pokey.

  I stand at the counter, where an employee asks if I need help. Her name badge says KELLEY. “Hi, Kelley,” I say, “I’m looking for Chicken Soup for the Suicidal Soul. Do you have that book? Because that’s the one I need.”

  She blinks and says maybe the crafting aisle.

  Then Christopher calls. He’s broken down on Highway 12 and there’s a two-hour wait for a tow. “I’m just afraid someone will stop and it won’t turn out like the porno I imagined, but look more like the Matthew Shepard story.”

  “Where’s Jeremy?”

  “Cooking class,” he sniffs. “I can’t even get a cab to look for me, because I can’t tell them where I am. All I know is I’m on highway twelve about a quarter mile past that hotel where we had a three-way with that bingo guy.”

  “The bingo guy?” I say. “I know right where you are! The Fairfield Inn, right off the Ridgedale exit. You’ve told me that story a thousand times! I’ll be right there.”

  “I have to go,” I tell Hailey. “I’ll be right back. Christopher broke down. Just go have dinner and I’ll see you at Excalibur.”

  She pouts and calls me the Ruiner.

  I have a cab take me to my place and I get my car. I think that’s better than paying a taxi to cruise highways looking for my little wandering parakeet.

  I drive down Highway 12 as slowly as I legally can, which is forty-five miles an hour. Have you ever actually driven forty-five miles an hour on the freeway? You might as well get out and crawl. Cars pile up behind me and honk, drivers shout expletives and give me the finger as they zoom past.

  Christopher turns out to be exactly where he said he’d be, precariously huddled in the center of the highway against the median about a quarter mile past the Fairfield Inn. I pull the Scout off onto the narrow shoulder and honk twice. He’s actually got the hood up on his car and is peering into the engine, like he has any idea what he’s looking for.

  “What are you doing?” I holler over the cars speeding past us. “Get in!”

  “I think I’ve got it!” he says, and motions me to come look. I pull the emergency brake—I guess because this is an emergency—and make my way alongside the cement divider to the front of his car. “I think this is it!” he says and pulls whatever totally retarded, wrong thing he’s got ahold of and suddenly sticky green fluid explodes everywhere.

  “Oh my God!” I scream. “Is it acid?”

  A truck roars past and hoses us down with a huge sheet of slushy ice water. We both do this weird “it’s-all-over-me-get-it-off-of-me” Riverdance thing as we run to the car. Inside, out of breath and panting, Christopher makes a face.

  “It smells like damp hamster bedding in here,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, would you prefer to wait outside?”

  “We could have stayed out there.” He licks his lips, tasting a smear of green on the corner of his mouth. “I think it’s antifreeze.”

  I rummage around the backseat to find my gym bag under the crumpled nest of Taco John’s wrappers. I dig out a pair of pink sweatpants and a torn Replacements T-shirt for him, and a zip-up lime green terrycloth cover-up for me.

  Christopher raises an eyebrow.

  “It’s for poolside,” I say.

  “Is the pool in a rent-controlled Palm Beach retirement community?”

  “Well, my fundamentalist Mormon dress is back there, would you like me to wear that?”

  Christopher’s eyes light up and he dives into the backseat where he thrashes around until he finds the opened FedEx box. “It’s hideous!” he squeals, pulling the thick powder-blue dress from the cardboard box. “I love it! The high collar! The pleated shoulders! It’s so Polygamist Couture! So Porn on the Prairie!”

  “I have to return it, it’s huge. I mean, I know they’re supposed to be roomy, but this looks like a tea cozy for a refrigerator.”

  “Is that how it came?” he asks. “Packed in straw? Using hay is so Ralph Lauren 1988. They should get Gaultier to redo their packaging. Maybe he could redesign the dresses.”

  I look in the rearview mirror and try to fix my makeup. “Yeah, I’m sure Warren Jeffs wants his next child-bride to wear haute couture.”

  Christopher sits back down in his seat and wipes his hands off. “Well, I don’t know. You should see what Gaultier did with a burka for the spring collection. Amazing.”

  “God, even fourteen-year-olds in Utah can find husbands. That’s depressing.”

  “Why don’t they just airlift Queen Latifah into one of those nasty little fundamentalist towns? She’d sort it out by sundown. Can you imagine Queen Latifah at a sister-wife prayer meeting?” He claps his hands. “Why don’t they do that!”

  “God,” I sigh, “I don’t want to be around a big group of insane women right now. I don’t want to go to Excalibur.”

  “Hailey’s bachelorette party is at Excalibur? That’s right! Let’s go!”

  I tell him it’s for girls only.

  “Please,” he says, “I’m better at being a girl than your sister will ever be.”

  “Can you go to a gay bar in sweatpants? Isn’t there a law?”

  “No,” he sniffs. “Track suits are like the unofficial uniform for gay bees. Plus, my natural charm overcomes any outfit. Um, I don’t think it could overcome yours though.”

  I put my head on the steering wheel.

  POP!

  I lift my head and Christopher is holding a foaming bottle of champagne.

  “That’s for Hailey!” I shout. “Where did you get that?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugs, holding the bottle as it foams. “Under the seat?”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You don’t know where you just got this?” I snatch it away from him. “That’s how your mother raised you? You find a bottle of gift-wrapped champagne in someone else’s car and you open it?”

  Christopher pats the little blue ribbon on his head like a tiny blue crown.

  “Yes,” he says.

&n
bsp; I glare at him and then I start laughing. I can’t help it.

  I take a swig and pass the bottle back. “Fine. Let’s go to a bridal shower.”

  I step on the gas and as we go charging into traffic, Christopher holds the champagne bottle out the window and says, “To evil!” and then adds, “I’m hungry. Do you have anything to eat in here?”

  We hit the drive-through at Wendy’s and order a triple cheeseburgers, and extra-large fries, and two Sprites, which we mix with champagne. Christopher calls them Drunkdrivetinis. We eat as we drive and I don’t look in the rearview mirror once, because I can feel mayonnaise and ketchup glooping on the corners of my mouth, and why should I look at something I don’t want to see?

  We’re a little inebriated by the time we arrive at Excalibur. I valet the car. Normally I might be ashamed that I look like a slutty senior citizen in my lime green coverall or that my car is festering with junk-food wrappers, but tonight I don’t care. I drop the keys in the valet’s hand and step over the empty Taco John’s cup that rolls out with me. “Look, Buddy,” I tell him, giving him a twenty, “I’m about to have a really bad night. Can you just keep it out in front for like twenty minutes?” The guy looks so happy, like I gave him a hundred dollars or something.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he says, “you bet I can!”

  Inside the bar it’s dark. The walls are red leather, it’s humid and warm, and I feel slightly grossed out, like I’ve stepped inside someone’s mouth. I can smell sweat and stale cigarettes, even though smoking hasn’t been allowed in here in years. The music is so loud and the bass vibrations so strong I can feel my heart straining to readjust to the beat. The stage on the far side of the room has a line of half nude men dancing on it, and several patrons leaning far across the brass rail to try and stuff money in their G-strings and cowboy boots.

  Christopher leads me through the crowd. There’s the main bar downstairs with the strippers, and then upstairs there are a series of connected rooms with different themes. One room looks like an English pub with a billiards table and darts, and another room is like a funky Mexican siesta room with a margarita bar and young boys wearing sombreros lounging around. “They’re at the Damsel in Distress table,” I shout over the deafening music. Standing on the open highway seems peaceful compared to this.

  “That’s in the drag emporium,” he shouts, “up here and left!”

  We weave our way up another set of stairs through the thick crowds and into another large vaulted room, where a drag show is under way. There’s a woman onstage singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and her hair is in an enormous set of red braids. She’s wearing a blue gingham dress and ruby-sequined slippers—which she clicks together—and a painted rainbow drops down onstage behind her followed by a multicolored disco ball. The music changes to a house beat and she rips off the gingham dress to reveal a blue-sequined thong and red pasties with long tassels, which she starts to twirl.

  “I think that’s the Damsel in Distress table over there under the portrait of Phyllis Diller,” Christopher says, “but I don’t see them.”

  Then I feel someone tapping me on the shoulder and it’s Lexi, who promptly spills half her cherry-strawberry-bumbleberry-whatever-it-is drink on my leg.

  “You have to come!” she says. “Hailey got the gays mad! Come, come, come!”

  Christopher corrects her. “Don’t say ‘the gays,’ sweetie,”

  “What should I say?”

  “Just say gays. Nothing good happens when a straight person says ‘the gays.’”

  “Okay.”

  Lexi hurries us to the other side of the room and out into the service hallway, which is littered with service carts and dirty drink trays. Hailey is there, arms akimbo, and she seems a little tipsy. Her tank top is conspicuously devoid of Jolly Ranchers, and they’ve each left a little rectangular-colored candy shadow on her shirt. She’s squaring off with a giant man in a Las Vegas showgirl outfit, whose giant peach and yellow plumes fan out from his sequined headdress and gyrate when he wags his finger.

  “I don’t think so, missy,” he says, “but nice try.”

  “You let the table go,” Hailey says. “You should comp us!”

  “What’s all this about?” I ask.

  “We were here like ten minutes late and they let the Damsel in Distress table go to another party,” Lexi says. “They gave us a different table.”

  “Which one?” Christopher asks.

  “The Clamshell.”

  “Then they were already mad at you, honey.”

  Lexi frowns. “When the bill came, Hailey said the Clamshell table sucked. It was way in the back and had a blocked view so she didn’t want to pay. They told us we had to talk to Janet Reno.”

  “Who?”

  “Her.” She points to the magnificent drag queen, who stands at least two feet taller than my sister. “I don’t care what they told you on the phone,” she’s saying to Hailey, “we hold the table for five minutes and then we give it to people who are actually here. If you hadn’t noticed, it’s sort of a popular place.”

  “We were here!” Hailey shouts. “Do you see us here? We’re here! You can’t take a reservation and then just cancel it. Don’t you have any idea how to run a club?”

  This apparently was the wrong thing to say, because Janet Reno seems to grow ten feet taller. “Listen, sister,” she says right in Hailey’s face, “don’t bring your bitching and your big old bleeding vagina in here and tell me how to run my place!”

  Hailey takes a step closer and I’m impressed she’s not backing down. I would have run like hell by now. “Well, why don’t I take my big bleeding vagina to the police and tell them you’re scamming people up in here!” she says.

  “Go ahead,” Janet Reno says. “You’re banned.”

  “Banned?”

  “From this club,” she says, “for life.”

  Hailey throws her hands up. “Oh, how terrible! Banned from a mediocre gay club that sells seven-dollar mineral water? Oh heavens, where else shall we go?”

  “Try Applebee’s,” Janet Reno says and summons her security team—men waiting in the wings wearing tight police uniforms with shorty-shorts.

  “You can’t ban me!” Hailey shouts. “You have stubble on your tits!”

  “All your little breeder friends are banned, too,” Janet Reno says. “Now pay your bill or Monty here will help you open your little Louis Vuitton knockoff.”

  My sister gasps and grips her purse. My sister loves her purse and, yes, it’s a fake, but only I knew that. This is why she loves it, because it cost ten dollars and all her girlfriends think her fiancé bought her a real one.

  “That’s right, honey,” Janet Reno says, “when the Home Shopping Network told you it looked just like the real thing, they were lying. We can all tell it’s fake. Everybody can tell.”

  Now, I know Hailey is a pain, but that was a little mean. Calling her a bleeding-vagina breeder is one thing, but insulting the integrity of her purse is something else.

  Before I can say anything, though, the security guys swarm in and start hustling everyone toward the stairwell. “Wait a minute!” I yell and the security guys stop.

  “Let me see the bill,” I say, and Janet Reno rolls her eyes, but she swishes up her skirts and hands me the check. I look at it and say, “Hailey, this is fine. I’ll just get it. Okay? You guys wait outside; I’ll take care of this.”

  Hailey looks at me with total disgust. She mutters something inaudible and then says, “Fine. Come on, you guys, let’s go. Let her pay if she wants to.”

  They all head downstairs and Christopher approaches Janet Reno with me. I smile when I apologize for my sister’s behavior. “She got involved with this real douchebag,” I say, rummaging around in my bag, “and she’s been a real pain ever since.” Janet Reno smirks and the security guys seem disappointed there won’t be a scene. They glumly disperse into the club and look for other sources of trouble.

  “The problem is,” I say, taking out a
wad of cash, “you can’t tell which guys are dreamboats and which guys are douchebags, you know?” I wink at Christopher and he winks back, but looks confused. “A real douchebag can look like anyone,” I say, counting out the money, “even when they’re wearing a tacky dress that looks like it belongs on a dinner theater stage in Branson.”

  Janet Reno’s eyes, deeply hooded with fake spidery lashes, narrow slightly.

  “I don’t like it when people disrespect my sister,” I say, dropping the cash on the floor, “so don’t ever do it again.” Janet Reno looks down and I slap her right across the face. It’s a good, solid, old-fashioned slap, like when women in the 1950s would slap men in bars if they got fresh. Christopher gasps.

  Janet Reno steps back, aghast, her ruby-red lips slightly parted. I can feel the dry, powdery pancake makeup on my fingertips. I hoist my purse up on my shoulder and spin on my heel. Christopher nods at Janet Reno. “See you, Janet,” he says.

  “See you, Christopher,” she whispers.

  Brad invites me to the Keller cabin, which is a big freaking deal. He told me the Kellers are like the Kennedys—they don’t invite strangers to their vacation compounds. They’re for family only. Family. Only.

  I almost think it’s a trick because I haven’t been dating Brad for that long and I’m pretty sure Mrs. Keller doesn’t like me. I don’t think she likes any girls near Brad. The only reason I can think she’d let me come is that she’s possibly luring me out of the city to a secluded area so she can kill me with a Jesus fish.

  Christopher and I consult on my North-Woods wardrobe, as there are so many pitfalls to consider. First, it’s important to pack light so no one associates you with heavy luggage, but the problem is it’s winter and so I need bulky stuff. We want to go with a Hemingway Hunt Club look—you know, cable-knit sweaters and jodhpurs—but I also have to consider evening wear. This is a nightmare.

  He comes up with a wardrobe color system for me, where every piece I’m packing works with every other piece. Everything on his list says “ecru,” “cream,” or “khaki.”