I’m lubricated, quite honestly, cruising my rental car to some Chattahoochee Forest. Sunglasses and clouds, left arm hovering over black woodland road, a finger pilots from the bottom of the steering wheel. Gun shop in a red barn, mountain pines. To the left, barbeque cathedral. I refilled my vodka Big Gulp with vodka at the Peach State Gas Station.
Drinking while drinking, officer… pardon: operating a motor vehicle under the affluence of alcohol. This is not that, despite my demonstrable potentials. I’m going in hard, that is all, to a reunion of college pals. My best friend Chester’s wedding. Factually, yes, I’ve been to the gas station… you understand… I haven’t seen the boys in years. Look in my Big Gulp. Just ice, now. This is me.
I brake and veer into thickets at the proper signage for the cabin grounds, and in total accordance with local laws including blinking and such. Low hanging tree branches tumble on and lacerate the hood (it’s a rental) until a cluster of yurts emerge and beyond those, a wooden deck and… heavens… I stare, transfixed, at that deck—after shifting to park, rest assured—as raindrops thrum on the windshield.
Where red maple leaves blanch in the chilly morning drizzle, a shirtless and barefoot bison of a man. He lifts an insulating spa cover from the deck and tosses it aside ceremonially. Submerging to his nipples displaces unnecessary water, like an ancient pastor who took only what was needed. He tips an open handle of bourbon into a crystal glass.
The cigar I meant for the boys, I grab it, then hopscotch the wet pebble trail on my toes to the man with the booze in the jacuzzi.
“Drinking appears tolerated, here, in the jacuzzi,” I say, out of respect.
“It’s salubrious,” he says. “But this is a hot tub.”
Brown crud flops in patches on the jetted water and I wriggle my upper back against a neighboring nozzle. He slides me a bourbonly refilled crystal glass for my sippy and astonishes me with a well-read and cultivated explanation that, if I follow correctly, in a hot tub like this, but not in a jacuzzi, natural oils “exude” off our skin in the one-hundred-degree waters, Celsius no mind you, and lather into what is your everyday floating layer of brown scum. He swigs. “The scum—this is critical—it exists because of a lacked filtrated circulatory system. Piping,” he says. “Jacuzzis got it and hot tubs just don’t.” Without looking, he presses a button that shuts the jets so I can scoop a thin patch of morning scum, cratered by rain drops, in my palms and, indeed, it is sleek, like skin oils ought to be.
“Flapjack on the griddle,” I say.
“Comes out in the wash.” He slaps the jets back on. “But soap and rinse before you dip, they say, and you avoid the whole mess.” He points out bathrooms, that are “germane” with stalls of showers, then says, “I don’t mean to inquisite, but you are awfully early for a wedding.”
“Inquisite, please. You must be on Barb’s side. The groom is my best friend.”
“I own a lot of property around here.” He strokes his beard. “Get into any trouble, just tell ‘em you were in a hot tub with Bill.”
Bill and I torch the cigar to get going, and determine, legislatively, as two likeminded individuals, that two likeminded individuals can drink simultaneously if one swigs from the bottle while the other sips from the crystal glass. Then we rotate and so forth.
“Mosquito summer, Bill. The beer was like fresh milk and all the boys lived in the same town.” He nods along to the vision. “But Chester was away.” Chester was away and Barb and I built a penchant for situations and we were watching softcore on a yellow school bus at tailgates while everyone else sixth inning piss drunk filed into the stadium. Barb’s little sister batted against the clowns. The driver’s name was Larry, and Larry rigged the soft stuff to his box television by delicately warping aluminum foil wands he massaged off the antenna prongs. Fuzz cut to nips, “Nips!” but most innings just the sound got hacked. Smacks and heaving.
We started turning it on in the living room, too.
“All we did was listen, Bill. Me, Barb, and Larry.”
The two of us watch red leaves succumb to light drizzle and fall to the tub on the scum between us, like old friends, and I’m swiggy with the bottle, he’s cuppy, then we trade. The inches beneath Bill’s nipples evaporate and, based on this only, he guesses it is eleven “ante meridiem.” Bill’s wide surface area means lots of oils which will, thankfully—in his words— “recidivate” the evaporation when the scum seals a plane between tub water and air.
Bill pours a dandy refill. He clicks the lighter at our wet cigar.
Chester was away, and Barb slumped in algal mud on the shore of Verdant Lake. I smudged tears on her cheek brown-green with my thumb while the boys hammered nails into stumps on our lawn. Between me and Barb, the sun downed on the lake and my wormy finger began sniffing an empty belt loop on her jeans shorts.
Bill noodles with the rim of his glass until shrieking tree branches warn of a car. Footsteps bumble familiarly on the gravel. Bill is about to see things, and he’s been so honest with his own knowledge.
“Bill, to be frank about Barb.” We had to be wasted. Totally wasted and alone. “That summer Chester interned in Tuscaloosa,” I tell him, “Barb and I would go to the bars.” I gulp. “I touched Barb’s boob, Bill. She let me. We did it together.”
“Under the bra?”
“In the morning she said she didn’t remember anything,” and the next night I touched two boobs. “Then Chester came back. You know the doink of a snapped fishing line, Bill?” I gaze into my lap. Nothing hooked and nothing to tug. “It’s over. Tonight, with the marriage. No more games, no more looks. Chester is my best friend.” Bill blows a thunderous note out the lip of the bourbon. “Bone-dry?” he hushes. “Or one last drop?” He tilts the bottle high above his stuck-out tongue. Light rain patters on giant lily pads of scum.
A chirp, like a southern chick: “A jacuzzi!”
A half-drank scrunched plastic bottle, the same kind me and Barb refilled with vodka all mosquito summer, plunks into the tub. She flung it underhand.
“Who doesn’t remember what?” she says, piss ass wasted. Her hair is bleached and deranged. She creeps on the deck, waving.
Bill turns to her. “No one remembers anything, Barbara.”
“Uncle Bill!” she cheeps.
My mind is dawn mud that Barb and I would paddle out from, luring dinks to hooks we bent from shards of empty beer cans. At night, our sweaty asses on curbs outside bars, handing homeless loosies we bummed from other drunks. Then Chester came back, and we never said another word about mosquito summer. No sound of softcore. No over-the-shirt, no under-the-bra. Like it never happened. Tell me, Barb, what happened.
Bill tells her congrats. He hasn’t seen her since she was this big. “Come enjoy the hot tub with me and my friend, here,” he says. He rescues Barb’s warmed vodka and empties it into the crystal glass. “For your special day.”
She chugs it. She rubs against the nozzle next to mine. She rakes scum with her fingernail down my arm. “What is this stuff?”
I tell her its germane.
We sit jetted and speechless. Long dreams really last a few seconds and my eyes play for Barb all of mosquito summer, in a flash, every time I see her, and I got nothing if I don’t believe hers do too. They say, “I remember,” not just one boob, but two the next night. That’s three total. We did it together.
“Chester gets here with his father in an hour, already,” she tells me.
“There’s showers.”
Barb and I shove each other into a stall.
We clock one more past the fence in centerfield, into the airspace of an emptied tailgate, a whole row of port-o-johns thrashed, not even bus drivers around, then forget like we forgot in Oxford and Knoxville, twice in Pine Bluffs, thrice in Tulsa. Oh, Omaha. Endless highway miles killing our backs and then finally Georgia with a jacuzzi. Barb pulls on her underwear and walks off. Bill turns on the shower in the stall next to ours. He pumps the soap dispenser.
I crash with an alarm set for cocktail hour.
Barb and I carve an axe from planks we chopped from palm trees. Marinating in the high tide, a beached seal, hacked to steaks, fired to char, and served rare under the stars with thick slices of wild pineapple.
“Chester is dead, Barb. Everyone else is dead.”
She twiddles her wedding ring, round and round, until the voyeur sun peeks over. Rudderless fish in the lagoon shimmer baby blue.
“Trojans.” Barb spots the freight container, crash debris, half-floating in the ocean with its door unhinged. “Extra Thick.” We harness them as canteens and sandbags, pillowcases. Thousands wash ashore. We stuff them in our pockets for socks and sacks, then journey into the forest. The view from the peak– no one else is around.
“I don’t think we’re getting out of here, Barb.”
“Sucks there’s no beer.”
The stream babbles with fresh water. I step across its smooth pebble bottom and waft my shirt. I hang it from a low branch in the mango breeze. Barb draws three boobs in the mud with a twig. Behind paper mountains, the magenta sun sets, no longer curious, no longer watching.
“Barb, you remember Larry?”
“Larry was a wizard with aluminum foil.”
The silhouette of a toucan.
“He was tender,” she adds.
In the brook, in a basket, a scrunched plastic bottle of vodka.
“Rescue it.”
“I’m buzzed.”
“It’s not enough vodka.”
“Chester’s dead, dude.” Ding ding ding.
Barb, in a gown, greets guests at the main cabin. “You look beautiful,” I say. Chester, it’s been years, we tell each other. His parents, his sister, his one aunt and uncle, they haven’t seen me in forever, either, and they want to know if I’m still at it like I used to be.
Shaven Bill is with his family. He introduces me to his children. The youngest is Tyler, then Jason, Bobby and Junior. He has a wife, Pam.
“Bill told me about all his property here.”
Tyler interrupts, “I’m five.”
“You look ten.”
The boys assemble by the bar to rev rusted engines for Chester. George runs a packaging plant: “Bad luck with the weather,” he begins. They blink and stare until Finch pipes in, too loudly: “Chester’s wedlocked. His life’s over.” He downed his first gin and his kids are with their mom in Chattanooga. I offer a spark: “Remember Peepee launching an unopened beer can that bonked sweet Mr. Ginger in his only thigh?” Peepee zings, delivering soft chuckles that spurt through their puckered memories. “Mosquitos that summer were the size of softballs.” “What is Barb’s little sister’s name?” “We hardly missed any of her games.” “Did she win it all in Omaha?” “There she is.”
And to me, “Dude, go for it.”
Barb is twirled. Dumb children hide from goblins beneath white tablecloth. They burst out swinging sticks, booming and banging. Grown men in tuxedos, like knights, assemble in line for pulled pork and gravy. The whole show, a dripping, reeking grime. I slink to the window with my whiskey and melted ice, a weight in my hand. I set it on the sill and smush my eyes against the glass. The dead of night, no woods, no deck. Stepping back, the wedding is reflected and blurred, with Barb in the center of it all, and I try not to stare, but… her cheek. It nudged exactly when my eyes caught hers, like the beginning of a fuller motion. A signal. I swig.
She’s wafting her hand toward the door, or she swings her elbows, mouthing at me, and slender.
And Chester’s brother speeched what they’re saying to me in line for the bathroom, where I whiz, to have been done elegantly, but I’d been at the bar, free, getting sippy.
Where is Bill, who is there, drunk, surely, and he saw the signal too. He hides a bottle he’s jacked behind the bar in his jacket. He did what is, at worst, he says, “purloining,” and we smuggle the bottle outside to the tub.
Tomer Langberg workshops fiction in the alleyway of Halper's Bookstore. He did a PhD in neuroscience at UC-Berkeley and was a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow.
The cat sure isn't putting money on the table. Tomer is a scientist and a teacher
