Tea

Friday night and I’m on the train home.  Red Line.  Silver Spring. Three cars down and leaning against the right side door and staring hard at this little mouse of a girl.  Thin and small, with that boyish ass and the almost permanent business casual and secret girlish curves pinned behind a rapidly failing puritanical knot that could make Mr. Wee Wee dance around in his cage and upset his water, if you know what I mean.

I had advanced to the stage where I was thinking about cutting her up and putting her in my freezer when her phone rang.  The sort of jarring ringtone that invaded me so deeply it stirred up a past life memory and made me want to fall on a sword.  “I have failed you, Caesar!”  Schlunk!

“Hello…?” She said.

Oh yeah, yeah.  Hello you little bitch.  You cheap little whore.  You cum-crazy anal slut.

“Oh!  Hello!”

Yeah, yeah, you fucking said that you cheap little bouncing cock monkey!  How’s that sweet daddy’s little girl ultra Christian no concept of hardship pussy of yours?

“Oh, I’m fine.”

That’s good.  It’s good that you’re fine.  It’s fine that you’re fine.

“How are you?”

I’m fine.  I’m paying fines.  Fines for love!  Yeah, you heard me, now turn around and get on all fours and you’ll pay your fines!

“Are we still on for tea tonight?”

Now that threw me for a loop.  Tea?  It’s 7pm on a Friday and she’s meeting someone for tea?  Who does that?  Two thousand-year old Chinese arch-villains maybe. Ho-ho-ho, and now I will destroy you.  Let us settle down for the…last…tea…you… shall…ever…have!

Nice try Lao Che!  But I turned off the hot water.

Here’s this pretty girl meeting someone for arch-villain tea on a perfectly fine Friday night.  It seems wasteful to me.  If she’s meeting a guy on a date, there’s a big red flag right there. What girl would agree to that?  Hey, wanna go for tea?  Maybe afterwards you can help me pick out a doily for my sofa arm. But you can’t come home or else mother will become enraged again!

Maybe she’s meeting a girlfriend or something.  They’ll talk girl stuff and it’ll be a polite sort of something…I don’t know what the fuck girls do when they get together.  My friend’s wife gets together with her girlfriends and they make t-shirts.  It’s so refreshingly retarded I find myself comforted by the knowledge that women, really, are quite adorable.  It’s sort of the mindlessly girlish equivalent of what her husband and I do while she’s doing that: Sit around and drink entire bottles of vodka and disagree violently with each other on topics that I can’t ever remember.  Just like drinking games, everything I argue about can only be recalled or performed while under the crippling influence of Far Too Much Alcohol.

I don’t want you to think that I look down on tea.  As an anglophile, I’ve come to respect tea.  It’s a treat for me to make a cup of tea and eat imported English biscuits like the shamefully sad and lonely creature that I am. But I do it at a normal, civilized time because, even for sad and lonely creatures, 7pm on a Friday is time to introduce poison to the body.  Here in my dark and horrible 30’s, the nature of the poison doesn’t matter anymore.  Throughout my 20’s, it used to be fun.  Let’s get drunk!  Let’s get high!  But then I turned 30 and, as the years have rolled on, any form of escape will do.  Let’s take too much xanax and go to bed!  Let’s drink until it all goes away…

Though I think I drink just so I’m able to drink straight booze, which has always been my goal.  To order a glass of vodka. Straight.  So, yes, I drink so I can drink simply so I can impress people by getting drunk after I’m drunk.

This girl, though! I wanted to save her from tea.  I wanted to pull her back from the brink.  You, young lady, could very well be locked into an abusive and unrewarding relationship with me.  In our relationship, Friday at seven would be martini time.  We can do things with my shaker, if you know what I mean.  Saturday mornings will be a horrific, unrewardingly slow awakening during which we’ll eat loads of Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls, drink more coffee than Columbia can produce in a day and watch bad sci-fi.  The morning will bleed into the afternoons during which I’ll either write like an emo freak or just go back to bed or, in a grand funk without a railroad, go walk around the alleys of Silver Spring and DC.  Saturday night: Enough with the martinis, it’ll just be a mixed bag of whatever booze is in the freezer and downloaded movies from the week before. No order.  No focus.

Sunday morning coming down bleeds slowly into the following week where I work 739 hours a day and pray for my skin to fall off just so nice men in an ambulance can take me far away from the grim reality that surrounds me. And you, because, by that time, I’m really tired of your goddamned ringtone.  What the fuck is that ringtone? What fucking human being chooses that ringtone?  What fucking god do you serve?

She got off at Silver Spring with me and I watched her ponytail bob away into the sea of commuters.  I decided, unlike most nights, to stand on the escalator and just let things pass me by.  My Friday night plans have become quite sad and pathetic in recent years:  Go home, drink alone and watch TV.  Except I haven’t even made that easy.  I don’t own a TV so I have to download the shows I watch.  I have nothing to mix my drinks with because all the liquids in the apartment are stolen booze, mostly wine, and water (which I’m told is free, but that’s a lie).

I was never much of a wine man, though I’m determined to teach myself the finer art of wine snobbery.  I used to be a beer snob but, one day, I bought 24 cans of MGD and plowed through them one frozen Saturday and it hit me – there really aren’t any limits. Snobbery undone.

But if I were able to free this girl from whoever was serving her tea at 7pm on a Friday, I’d learn wine for her.  She was that cute.  She was worth me being a wine-nut.  Actually, that’s a stupid thing to say.  And a lie.  You get to a point, when writing something for the internet, where you begin to stretch and say things like I loved her so much I wanted to learn wine for her when, really, you want to write: I wanted to fist her right then and there while wearing full SS regalia. Teatime!  Oomph!

Don’t hold your breath.  That makes it worse.