by Lydia Millet
I ordered a second margarita, then, thinking of a future time when muscular man-balloons might rise into the air, eventually popping. By the time I focused again, the ropes-over-a-brackish-pond obstacle was history and they were just running in a pack, a crowd of heads moving up and down, bobbing, some with wide grins—a pack of humanity. Some wore glued-on handlebar mustaches or Scottish kilts, others were painted all over their bodies in various colors, resembling zebras, tigers or indigenous tribesmen. One joker wore a Louis Quatorze wig.
The running part was, to me, tedious. I recalled someone saying people had perished, during other mud marathons—and more than one, even. Some people perished, in the course of proving their toughness: well, so it went.
It was a rumor, anyway; Chip said the paper they’d made him sign was purely a gimmick, a legal form known as a death waiver.
Someone remarked that it would be another ten minutes until the second obstacle, so I decided to take a walk outside to look at the party prep. The organizers were throwing a big bash after the race, with live bands and plenty of alcohol, where tattoo artists would put a tattoo on a runner’s head for less than fifty bucks. I walked across the grounds—I’d poured my second margarita into a plastic cup and carried it with me—and glanced into some of the body art tents, thinking fearfully of Chip’s scalp. A guy like Chip, if he’s in a triumphal mood, can be tempted. He’s not a rock, Chip, in the heat of the moment, when it comes to aesthetic decisions; he’s fallible. Chip’s only human. He never claimed not to be.
I saw photos displayed of armpit work, photos of naked-chested people raising their arms above their heads, and in those armpits were tattoos. In one pair of armpits there were grinning skulls, while in another two large eyes popped out to look at the viewer, one in each pit. They seemed to be the eyes of snakes, perched balefully on scaly lids. One man had women’s legs tattooed in his fishbelly-white armpits—a pair of disembodied legs in garter stockings and red high heels, one leg-pair per armpit. The legs were spread wide, one pointing up the inner arm, the other down the ribs, to reveal betwixt them both a nest of springy armpit hair.
I turned away from the tattoo tent, feeling one’s idealism might be sullied there. Before I left the area, though, a tattoo artist called out and propositioned me, jauntily offering his body-scarifying services free of charge if I would be a little more outgoing. Although I felt gratified and waved amiably, I wondered if my jewelry had been a factor in the attraction. I’ve heard that, on a male finger at least, a wedding band can be an enticement, alluring as a loaner puppy. Was it the same with engagement rings? I thought of asking the tattoo artist this question, since surely there could be no harm in it, but when I turned around, my plastic cup newly drained, he’d already gone to ground.
I got back to the screening room in time for obstacle number two, called “Radioactive Jacuzzi” (although, as far as I know, there were no actual particles of thermonuclear fallout). It was a wriggle on the stomach across a long vat of ice cubes, with barbed-wire netting close above them. This time I really would have liked to catch a glimpse of Chip; he’s always been sensitive to cold. He doesn’t eat ice cream, even, claiming it freezes his brain near the forehead. But once again I failed to spot my soon-to-be husband: there was too much humanity, it all looked the same to me and I lacked the necessary patience. Instead of squinting and studying those figures of athletes, I bellied up to the bar.
And so it went: obstacle, drink, obstacle, drink. The men and several women ran through lines of flame; they carried logs up hills on their shoulders, abraded their knees and elbows climbing through massive corrugated pipes, and scaled treacherous vertical surfaces. As they became exhausted, injured and covered in mud I threw back margaritas, added some nachos to the mix. I flirted with several other spectators, even got my palm read by someone taking methamphetamines; it was oddly relaxing, even luxurious. A girl with blue fingernails did numerology, while off in the corner a group of wholesome, rich-looking men wearing Harvard letter sweaters chanted ominous runes in some foreign and possibly ancient tongue … the point was, it was a party scene, and we the audience even forgot what we were there to watch, after a while. Few of us even glanced over at the screens; it was like being at a party on election night, supposedly “watching” the “returns.” We paid no attention to the faint sounds from the speaker system—squeals, screams, and bells ringing repeatedly.
I drunk-dialed Gina on my cell; she’d been passingly interested in seeing the mud marathon and Chip had invited her, but as it turned out she had a scheduling conflict—free tickets to a special showing of an old Karen Carpenter movie. Now, tipsy and at loose ends, wanting Chip to be finished so he could join me at the after-party, I hit the speed dial. It was the intermission in the Carpenters movie so I gave her the room rundown. That’s what Gina calls it when you’re surrounded by people you don’t know in a social situation and feel compelled, whether under the influence or straight lonely, to dial a friend and callously describe the other people at the scene. I meandered out to the finish line eventually, with Gina still on the phone; in the lobby of the theater she was talking to me rapidly, even as a random hipster guy tried to persuade her to go with him to a glow-in-the-dark tap dance show.
“It’s a critique of Bush v. Gore,” she said.
And then I saw Chip, though at first I barely recognized him. I’d promised him to snap a cell phone pic, a photo of him completing the mud marathon, and so that’s what I did. I raised my phone. He was beaming with joy through the mud plastered over his eyebrows, cheeks and chin, a Stevie Wonder look. But as he ran toward the finish line, right through the final obstacle, his arms raised to greet me, just beaming like a child, he got an electric shock. I think the wires hit him across the lip; maybe the tongue. His mouth was open for the smile. I saw him jerk back like a spastic.
Then he crossed the line and was with me: he shrugged off the shock, hugged me and lifted me off the ground, making me filthy. Soon he collapsed in a heap, and when he recovered it was time to celebrate.
In the end I was able to prevent him from getting a tattoo, but only by the skin of my teeth. As I’d predicted, he ultimately declared he wanted one—not a head tattoo, he knew he couldn’t shave his head before the wedding, but maybe a back-of-the-neck adornment. He saw the other extreme athletes taking swigs of whiskey and going under the needle; with a few beers to his credit Chip turns into a joiner, that’s his way, and soon he longed to top off his own effort with a marking ritual too. He joined the tattoo line and requested that I catch his branding on my phone’s video.
Instead of debating the merits, I had to distract him. I lured him out of the line, then led him into a dark stand of trees and had my way with him. That’s how it works with Chip: you have to skip the preliminaries and bring out the big guns. You don’t waste your time, and his, with words and sentences.
Argument’s a dull blade, when it comes down to it, and I like to be efficient. We both left the party satisfied, me because I’d pulled out a last-minute win on the inking crisis, Chip because he was drunk, certified tough and newly laid. There’s not much more a man like Chip asks for.
Or any man, possibly.
THE NEXT DAY he was pretty achy; he had a long bath, popped some muscle relaxants and did the couch potato thing, gaming. By the time I left for my Ball-and-Chain Party, as Gina was calling it, he had a bowl of popcorn at his elbow, a console on his lap and was gazing wide-eyed at the large screen, where one of his many avatars flew into a fanciful moonrise/sunset on a steampunk zeppelin, pulled by a team of elegant purple dragons.
Gina had found the perfect venue for the festivities—perfect for her, at any rate. The rest of us were just along for the ride. She had us meet her at a generic wine bar, probably so that no one would instantly bail; then we trooped over to the nightspot, Gina in the lead. It was instantly obvious I hadn’t gotten clear of the sex industry after all: this was some kind of Goth, medieval-bloody S&M fetish club with the tag line “The Decadent
Seduction of a Horrific World.” I was glad I hadn’t invited members of the older generation, though it did give me a bit of pleasure to ideate Chip’s mother entering the place.
There was a band playing dirge-like atonal music whose singer had multiple studs sticking out of his cheeks Chia Pet-style; in cages hanging from the ceiling, ghoulishly clad people danced in zombie-style slow motion. Holes were strategically cut in the dark, shining costumes they wore, which made them resemble enormous spiders, albeit with hanging or popping characteristics. On the walls played grainy, obscure movies of what seemed to be morgue attendants plying their trade; and then, of course, there were your basic whip scenarios, masks and black latex.
“At seven we have the Ravage Room booked,” said Gina. “A private show. Just for us.” The prospect filled me with creeping dread—at that point I would have welcomed a few basic, beefcake male strippers—but I ordered a drink and played it casual, as Gina demanded. One woman in our party, the only person I’d invited from my office, was openly terrified, eyes darting around like those of a hunted herbivore. She said she was feeling sick, slunk off to the bathroom, and did not return. I felt bad and made a mental note to reach out to her when I went back to work; she had photos of poor kids tacked up on the walls of her carrel whom (she believed, at least) she was sponsoring with monthly payments to a multinational charity. Seated atop her computer were several “cute” bobbleheads.
“Gina,” I said with some audible irritation, because Gina only intimidates me sometimes, “congrats. One down, thirteen to go. You really outdid yourself this time.”
“That woman’s got an actual PBR can stuck through her giant ear-pierce hole,” mused Gina. “You think it’s got any beer in it?”
“Seriously, Gina,” I said, shaking my head. “I swear.”
“Absinthe for everyone!” she cried.
Nearby stood our waitress, waiting for orders with tears of blood flowing from her eyes. She was wearing a skin corset, that is, a corset whose dozens of opposing hooks, between which dark-red-and-black silk fabric was stretched, went into her actual skin in two rows up and down her back. I stared at the hooks, goggle-eyed.
“First round’s on me!” crowed Gina. “Let’s raise a glass of the favorite drink of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast! To Debbie and Chip! Absinthe for everyone!”
“Could I please have a wine cooler?” asked someone timidly.
“I’d like a Budweiser Chelada,” said someone else to the torture waitress. “Do you have Budweiser Cheladas? Those ones that come in cans?”
“Pimm’s Cup,” said my college friend Ellis, a good-looking dentist.
Ellis pretends to be a Brit, doing an accent he learned from Masterpiece Theatre, but his deal is he won’t admit he’s not English no matter what you say—despite the fact that his parents were born and bred in Teaneck, N.J. The mother chews enormous wads of bubblegum-flavored bubblegum. Though technically a prosthodontics specialist, Ellis is really more of a method actor. He never drops his English persona, going so far as to eat cottage pie, Marmite and large jars of pickled onions; he even leaves his bottom teeth slightly crooked. He makes annual trips to London, ostensibly to “see some West End theater” but really for language immersion, honing the accent. I think he tries to pass there, and where he fails he makes adjustments. The upshot is it works perfectly for him, here in the Golden State, where based on his Englishman status he sleeps with dozens of women.
No one was jumping onto Gina’s pretentious absinthe bandwagon. Everyone was annoyed they even had to be there in the first place, all they’d signed on for was a harmless bachelorette party and instead here they were at the Plague Death Tavern, where rooms off the main area had blood-dripping signs in visceral designs that read RAVAGE, BLACK TUMOR, and PUSTULE.
Also, the cover charge wasn’t nothing.
I sympathized with my guests, hell, I agreed with them, so that when it was Gina’s turn to make a bathroom run I smiled at their plan to get back at her. And when we did—before too long—file into the private space referred to as the Ravage Room, several of us were feeling better than we’d felt before, newly brimful of liquid courage.
A minute later the red lights in the Rav. Room changed to a purplish-blue and an amateur theatrical began, involving a peroxide-wigged woman in a white dress, behaving fakely innocent, and a muscular man, possibly garbed as some kind of primitive metalsmith, who wielded a battleax-like tool and seemed to have small nubs of horns implanted between his skull and his scalp. I couldn’t figure out what they were enacting, but I got the message that it was both purportedly twisted and achingly stupid.
“You’re kidding,” I groaned to Gina. “The pedophile theme? Really?”
“It’s tradition,” said Gina, smugly.
She wasn’t so smug a minute later, when the guy with horn implants turned his attention away from the pretend virgin and focused it on her. One thing about Gina is, she talks a great game and she’ll even walk the talk if she can do so in private, but she doesn’t like to be in the spotlight. It’s a secret weakness that can, if necessary, be turned against her.
The horned man in his satanic leather stylings had a piggy, solid kind of face on him, a face that signaled openly that he was a minimum version of a Homo sapiens—not unlike the gay male strippers we would have been watching if Gina were more of a Republican. And when he turned that dumb face on Gina, then knelt down and began lavishing attention on one of her feet, she turned red as a beet. Not only was he lavishing slavish, adoring attention on the foot, he actually slid one of her boots off and buried his face in her toes.
“Oh! No!” protested Gina, trying to shrink away. “I’ve been wearing leather all day with no socks on. Jesus, it’s gotta be—I mean—”
The horned man took a deep sniff, like it was manna from heaven. I watched her face closely as she struggled to regain her composure, reject her own unguarded, sincere alarm and reconstruct the ironic distance.
“… totally rank,” she said faintly, as the panic faded and the irony returned.
It wasn’t much but it was enough to cheer most of us up just a smidge, so that we coasted through the remainder of the show with lighter attitudes. All part of life’s rich pageantry, I reflected, life’s rich pageantry.
For the next hour my mind wandered as I plotted how to mend fences with my coworker who had fled, the one with big-eyed bobbleheads. Technically I was her superior in the corporate hierarchy, earning several times what she did since she was a secretarial type. The contrast was stark at times, me with my spacious corner office and panoramic views of cityscape and sky while she worked in a shared cubicle out in the open. Her only view was of an old Accounting lech we called Tricky Dick for his habit of sliding his hands into his pants pockets while he was talking to you and then moving them around, furtive.
I don’t want to come off arrogant, but I’m not apologizing for it either: the kind of business I do comes pretty naturally to me. The Stanford MBA was pretty much a sleepwalk through the borough of Lazy Ass. We all have our skill sets, right? At least, some of us do. Some of us don’t, I guess.
Chip has plenty of skills, just different ones; he has me outclassed in at least six categories but he couldn’t perform a basic cost-benefit analysis on a supercomputer named Deep Blue. He’s great at other computer stuff, but nothing too financial. So I’ve got the corner office and I’ve got the decent salary, where Chip at his workplace, and my young coworker at ours, have their desks out there in the open like any Tom, Dick or Harry.
My point is, I had to stop by my office first thing in the morning—I had two days off before the wedding weekend, but I’d promised a colleague to look at some numbers for him on the way to my mani-pedi. And there she’d be, this sweet young woman fresh from her southern sorority, looking up plaintively from her cubicle populated by orphans with missing appendages to whom she, full of naïve hope, sent her hard-earned cash. She was trying to make for them a better world—even if eighty percent of her gifts
did go to pay the admin overhead of a fundraising department in Chicago. And there I would be, too, the callous exec with no pictures of orphans tacked up at all, not one single orphan on my wall—just a defiantly ugly print of Hulk Elvis by Jeff Koons.
Me, the callous exec that had taken her to an S&M den, which she’d run away from, probably weeping. If that wasn’t a litigation scenario I’d never heard of one.
Plus which, I liked her quite a bit, though admittedly I only knew her because, before we both went on the patch—I was a light, social smoker but had promised Chip to give it up entirely—we used to slink out to the pre-cancer ghetto every day or two, with the comfortable solidarity of the self-condemned.
“Damn it, Gina,” I said in the cab home. “You screwed me this time. I work with that girl Suzette.”
“If you don’t have regrets after a bachelorette party,” said Gina, “you’re doing something tragically wrong.”
“I didn’t say anything about regrets,” I said. “I said you screwed me, G.”
“Same thing,” said Gina, shrugging and scrolling on her phone.
I growled and lowered down my window, sticking my face into the wind doglike. Gina doesn’t accept responsibility; that’s not the way she rolls. She also doesn’t apologize. She says it’s a sign of weakness, like an animal peeing on itself.
They tried to teach us that in B-school too, but what can I say: at the end of the day, I choose to leave my powermongering at the office, where it belongs.