<\/p>\n
James drove the corkscrew through the foil, worked it brutally into the
\ncork, then ripped everything out. It took three tries, but he finally
\ngot some red in my glass.<\/p>\n
“Fucking wine,” he muttered under his breath, presenting it to me.<\/p>\n
“Thank you, my good man.”<\/p>\n
He said something I couldn’t understand, eyes lidded, than sat back in the lounge chair and stared up into the night.<\/p>\n
“Like back yard,” he muttered, before falling asleep as quickly as if I had hit him with a brick.<\/p>\n
Yeah, the backyard was nice. So was the wine. I’d like to say it was a
\nsign of maturity now that I could sit in my own backyard, drinking wine
\non a good Saturday in between hard working weeks. James still rode a
\nmotorcycle, but he was an office worker just like me. The degrees were
\ntucked away into drawers and our time was worth money now.<\/p>\n
I suppose everyone misses the college days, though.<\/p>\n
My old room mate in the dorms was John Kreibel. He was an overweight
\nStar Trek fan, as sad and hopeless and borderline homosexual as you can
\nget. James insists that my unique brand of homophobia – that is,
\neveryone but me is gay and part of a sinister plot – is simply how I
\ninterpret the fact, according to him, that everyone is basically
\nlonely.<\/p>\n
James lived in town, proud of an independence that had been forced on
\nhim. He’d been kicked off campus after he put a deer’s head in the
\nlaundry machine at my dorm. His reasoning for committing such a bloody
\ncrime was, quite simply, “I must have been drunk.” It was the
\nultra-conservative, mega-virgin freshman girl who found the head and,
\naccording to my RD, they ended up having to rush her to the hospital so
\nshe could be sedated. She left school a month later, never to be heard
\nfrom again. One of many lives James would destroy completely.<\/p>\n
Kreibel never left the dorms on the weekends. I was usually a shut-in,
\nbut I did tend to drift down to the APO suite. They’re the service
\nfraternity, so you could always bet dollars or doughnuts or what have
\nyou that the 12 members at my campus would be involved in some sort of
\nbi-sexual orgy fueled by vast quantities of bathtub gin. Welcome to the
\nworld of real Christians. These service fraternity types are real
\nD&D, LAN party kids, mind you. In a small town college, those are
\nthe ones you want to hang out with. They’ll unwittingly share their
\nbooze with you and then hold your hair when you throw it back up. Kind
\npeople, really.<\/p>\n
Every once in a while, I would wear out my welcome in the APO suite.
\nThat’s how I met James, who spent his weekends ambling from dorm to
\ndorm and staying over with an ever increasing succession of temporary
\ngirlfriends and tolerant well-wishers. Curiously, nobody at my college
\nhad ever seen him out during the daylight hours.<\/p>\n
He ran into me at a deck party hosted by a handful of the popular
\nindependent kids. I had staked out a corner and stuffed a bottle of
\nscotch down my pants, working it in as far as possible while a confused
\nlesbian blathered in my ear about how, being a total and confirmed
\nlesbian, she really wanted to prove that she could suck my cock like a
\npro. James nearly knocked her over the railing when he lurched towards
\nme and grabbed my shoulder.<\/p>\n
“Nacho!” He screamed in my ear.<\/p>\n
“Um…” Fight or flight.<\/p>\n
He had heard about one of my classic stunts – mixing Budweiser,
\nblackberry brandy, Smirnoff, Triple Sec and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
\nin a glass and drinking it down in thirteen seconds. Back then, I was
\nsomewhat immortal where such things were concerned.<\/p>\n
He glared at me drunkenly and leaned close, “All true?”<\/p>\n
“Afraid so.”<\/p>\n
He patted my shoulders, then massaged them lightly, “You, sir, are my number one.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t see James again for several weeks. I’d just lost a girlfriend He waved distractedly at my head and I took off my headphones, “You’re the only one I can trust anymore!”<\/p>\n “I don’t really know you,” I replied.<\/p>\n “Are you queer?”<\/p>\n I shook my head.<\/p>\n “Pussy and only pussy?”<\/p>\n “Yes.”<\/p>\n “Does God come into your house, in any form?”<\/p>\n “I’m afraid not.”<\/p>\n He nodded. “Then you’re the only one.” He pointed at me, turned his hand and beckoned with his finger, “Come.”<\/p>\n “Where?”<\/p>\n “The gates of hell, you motherfucker! Where do you think?”<\/p>\n “I don’t really – ”<\/p>\n “Motherfucking cunt son of a- ”<\/p>\n “Okay, okay!”<\/p>\n We ended up a floor below mine in the suites reserved for the Japanese James pressed his lips to my ears, “We can dance, we can dance, A zit-covered kid with a rising sun headband shoved a boiling hot Knowing full well the direction my life would take from that point, I took a sip of the steaming Saki.<\/p>\n “No, no, no,” the kid said, taking the pot, “this, like,” and he poured The radio clicked over to Human League as I took a more manly gulp of The night James and I became true friends is only a series of flashes A Japanese girl grabbed me when Peter Schilling’s Major Tom (Coming Home)<\/em> Second stage was cut and I was in orbit when she led me away to a dorm “There is nothing physical down here,” James was saying a half hour I blinked, then stared, then closed my eyes.<\/p>\n There was a long pause throughout the entire world. I was going to throw up.<\/p>\n Then I was okay.<\/p>\n Let’s spin.<\/p>\n “Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me…”<\/p>\n James screamed with laughter and punched me hard, “Well I talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it…”<\/p>\n We re-entered the core of the party and this land was our land, this land was their land. Funky Town<\/em> Every voice in the party raised in a shout: “SAKI!”<\/p>\n James was handed six cups of boiling saki. To my drunken horror, he “You’re a fucking machine,” I shouted at him after he quit on the four cup line.<\/p>\n “I am not here.” He replied, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling and spreading his arms out.<\/p>\n The party’s closure came at about 4am. I was sitting between two It was no surprise to return and find Kreibel wide awake, still smoking
\nin a violent, somewhat famous explosion and had been doing my best to
\ndrive Kreibel over the edge. The big man had taken to sitting in the
\ndark, smoking cheap cigars, drinking scotch and listening to the
\nsoundtrack from Star Trek: Generations<\/em>.
\nHe would, on many occasions, masturbate, whether or not I was in the
\nroom. I had learned to tune him out and plugged headphones into the TV
\nfor long nights of horror movies. I was averaging eight movies a day,
\nthree on weekdays, and feeling rather proud that my intense trivial
\nknowledge was still intact after the somewhat crude distraction of a
\ncommitted relationship. It was a Saturday in November when James burst
\ninto my dorm room without knocking. He glared around with a lunatic
\ntwitch for a moment, his eyes settling on a surprised Kreibel and,
\nthen, on me. I calmly stared back.<\/p>\n
\nexchange students. They were all English-challenged and, by reputation,
\non some sort of lunatic fringe. James took my arm and dragged me into
\none of the suites – a common room surrounded by four dorm rooms. The
\ncommon area was full of Japanese, rolling and dancing and cheering to Safety Dance<\/em>, of all things.<\/p>\n
\neverything’s out of control!” With a screech, he leapt away and threw
\nhimself into a half dozen little Japanese. They fell to the floor while
\nI was grabbed and pushed against the wall.<\/p>\n
\ncoffee pot into my hands, except the pot was full of a tanned liquid.
\n“SAKI!!” he screamed in my face.<\/p>\n
\nthe near-boil Saki into his throat without flinching. Sputtering and
\nwith eyes wide, he screamed “SAKI!!” Then he handed it back to me.<\/p>\n
\nthe hot stuff, then I screamed “Saki,” as well, to appease the natives.
\nEveryone cheered.<\/p>\n
\nin my mind. The Japanese kids had seven six cup coffee pots running a
\nseemingly endless supply of saki. There were moments where it felt as
\nif I had stumbled into some Haitian Day of the Dead ceremony, where the
\nafflicted convulsed and fell to the ground with the help of their
\ncolleagues. They would be dragged off to rooms, or simply into the
\ncorner, as the core of the party boiled and screamed from the center of
\nthe suite, the stereo plugged directly into everyone’s bones and blood.<\/p>\n
\nblasted at full throttle into the air. We danced close, her eyes
\nsmiling, and I sang along. Four…three…two…one; Earth below us,
\ndrifting, falling, floating weightless, calling, calling home…<\/p>\n
\nroom. Three party casualties lay huddled in a corner, drunken eyes
\ntrying to stop the vomit spin, as the girl pulled down my pants and lay
\nher mouth on my cock. My eyes closed, a bottle of vodka somehow in my
\nhands, I drank with a gaze fixed on the Ramones poster on the wall. She
\nmoved me like a barber, sat me down, tilted my head one way, then the
\nother, move it back. Rucking up her long skirt, she climbed on top of
\nmy cock and I felt myself slide into her, a sort of distant knowledge
\nof what was happening lingering around me, but all so fleeting. All so
\nsimply…physical.<\/p>\n
\nlater as I leaned out a window and tried to breathe. “You could move
\nthrough walls, if you wanted.” He was leaning next to me and staring
\ninto the night, “You could do anything now, and it wouldn’t matter.”<\/p>\n
\nalways knew how to keep a man from throwing up. James and I danced an
\nabsurd parody of disco. I think saki’s about the only thing that can
\nget me dancing.<\/p>\n
\nbegan chugging it. Even the Japanese kids looked terrified, ready to
\nsplit if James fell dead.<\/p>\n
\nJapanese students and their broken English discussion of Haruki
\nMurakami was enough to pique a literary curiosity that, years later, I
\nwould follow up on. Little did I know that even that tiny conversation
\nwith strangers, the side door mention of a Japanese author, would shock
\nand change my life when I finally opened that author’s work. Murakami –
\nan artist who would shape my later life. Everything about that Saki
\nnight would set me on a clear path; though, then, I had no clue. James
\nand I walked back up to my room, shouting “Saki!” the whole way.<\/p>\n
\nand drinking, listening to Star Trek music. James laughed, turned off
\nthe music, then turned to Kreibel’s angry face, “Tea! Earl Grey! Lots
\nof cock!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353,179],"class_list":["post-2495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-james"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2495"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2774,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}