Beer Pong Ballerina On The Rocks

Bro took a frothy swig and wedged the tall boy between his thighs.

My bouncer brother and I were sitting at the bar, our knuckles white and our eyes glazed, having just pre-gamed in the vicinity of pigs in the bar parking lot. It was a shitty maelstrom of confusion that started when we turned the Impala SS off the highway, on to the side street by the bar, and saw a cop tailgating us.

"Fuck, this is great," Broseph said. "I'm gonna get a Dee-wee with cans rolling around on the floorboards and some tool box with a spear through his eyebrow bugging out in my passenger seat."

"Fuck off," I said. "The beers aren't even crack..." CRKSNAPFIZZZZZ!!!

Bro took a frothy swig and wedged the tall boy between his thighs. He stopped short and the squad car nearly raped us. Then the Cop swung around and drove past.

"Oh..."

Pulling into a handicapped spot, we watched as the Cop double-parked by the rear entrance and jogged into the bar, adjusting the holster over which his corpulent mid-section sagged.

"Fuck, what now? Ah, dude, something must've popped off inside."

"It's a Wednesday night," I said. "Who the fuck's even here much less inside fighting?"

"Work weeks drive everyone batshit," my Brother insisted. "And I'm gonna be the victim of the bastinato this cunt is gonna dole out after the frustration of pulling two Frat boys off of each other."

"Fuck for?" I asked, drowning myself in 23.5 ounces.

"Handicap parking."

"Well, you are Sick, Sore, Lame and Disabled," I reasoned.

This was technically true; Brosenheimer had been in a car accident four years earlier. Between the collision, his day gig hurling old refrigerators around in waste management and the nights spent yanking out his bad shoulder by spiking belligerent prepsters into club entranceway pavement, his body was a mass of devastated sinew. The doctors who prescribed him liters of painkillers were the ones that branded him S.S.L.D (Sick, Sore, Lame, Disabled).

We stashed the rest of the 24-ouncers under the passenger seat, took a deep breath of moist mid-April air, and headed for the entrance. As we neared the curb the scenario was flipped on its lid and reprieve came in the form of take-out. The Old Cop emerged from the bar, carrying a cardboard box of fried chicken and garlic knots.

"Hey, sorry bout that back there," the Officer exclaimed in a congenial pitch. "I know I was close."

"What-huh?" It took The Bro-Life A second to make sense of what was really going on here. "Ah, no! I thought you were pulling us over."

The Cop laughed. "No, I was sipping my coffee. Tailgating. I thought you were gonna leap out of your car and start cursing me out for rubbernecking."

Token Bro-ken laughed like a bastard. "That's just what I would've needed."

We made it inside and didn't leave our stools for the next six hours, except to contract Hepatitis from the claustrophobic cluster-fuck of urinals in the Men's latrine. That Cop may have seemed nice with a tray of meat in his hands, but the carnivorous are never to be trusted. Once he's licked the bones clean of their gristle he'll be back with a musket. And we'll be the fowl.

****

Bro-Mo was there to talk up a 23-year-old gymnast who tended bar to pay her tuition bills. He was there to put in face time, to make a healthy investment in the Trim Industry, an industry that would hopefully pay off in the near-Future. I just wanted to get shit-faced after the aggravation of watching eight intensive driving videos from the 80's in the dank basement of American Driving School. The outrage of sitting through Christopher Reeve telling me how not to take automotive risks when he spent the last years of his life as a paraplegic because of horseback riding...It made me angry with thirst.

I wasn't looking for eye candy any more than I was looking for an STD from using the elementary school size john in the Little Boy's Room.

A morbidly obese Italian guy in his mid-Thirties was sitting next to Bro at the bar. I nicknamed him The Man With Eighteen Chins. Each stubbled flap folded carefully into the next as he gazed down and fingered the key-pad of his Blackberry.

"I think he's in Porn," my Brother said.

"The Man with Eighteen Chins?"

"Yeah."

That's when she bent down in front of him and started jabbering. It wasn't the Hooters school of customer-employee relations. There was no flirtation going on, rather she looked like he had written her a bogus check or sold her little sister into prostitution. But he was calm, cool and collective the whole time, regardless of his breathing which grew more bilious with each inhalation of oxygen.

When she walked into the kitchen I commented that she looked like a haggard pornstar and that maybe that dirty Bro-and-So was right. Maybe this was Joe Francis's overweight brother-in-law.

* * * *

She emerged from the kitchen and I didn't even notice her until she made some sort of punch drunk pirouette around the popcorn machine and muttered something sarcastic to the young bar manager.

She was teary-eyed and she kept wiping her palms across her stomach in a way more akin to an abbatoir than a Hooters chain. Her grimaces were subtle, but the swipes she made at her lower eyelids were unmistakable.

I shot a squint at her, an equally unreadable but obviously interested look. "Why are you tearing up, Dulcinea? It's not the sight of the scar tissue on my eyebrow piercing, is it?"

Stone Temple Pilots were playing on the jukebox. "Think you're kinda neat. Then she tells me I'm a creep."

She shook her head to the negatory. As the 23-year old gymnast and the manager zipped past jabbering some more and some old British man yowled next to me about Continental Existentialism she shouted something in my direction. "Blah blah blah blah fucking chicken guts."

"What? Did you say chicken guts?" I cried.

She shook her head to the affirmative, explaining that the fry cook was off tonight and she had to skin the chickens and disembowel them before dipping them in hot grease and throwing them on spits.

"I don't eat meat, I fucking hate even looking at it."

She fumed about the unfairness of the place, about how the charm had been wrung out of these quarters years ago. She had been here for nine years after all.

"Hey," I said. "At least they're not Kentucky Fried. 'Roid-injected poultry that can bench press a llama, that's the hardest to contend with."

She may have managed a weak laugh, but her mouth was like a Botox specimen at that moment as her eyes darted off toward the front door. The pong players, a flotilla of identical Abercrombie & Finch pud-wackers, would be pouring in at any moment as the tables were being set up.

"I hate all people," she said.

Part of me wanted to be cute and say something like, "Even me?" But I was galvanized. This was my kind of woman, a kindred spirit to the nth. Hot enough little body. Probably a mid-level brain. And a hatred for the filthy and indecent denizens of middle-America.

"Well, we have something in common at the gate," I managed. "I could use an apprentice, someone who can write vicious screeds about these worthless sacks of flesh when I'm too under the weather to focus. And you certainly deal with them in a direct way that I don't."

"What are you a writer?"

"Sometimes."

"Shit, I wish someone would give me a job. I've been here for nine years, this is bullshit. Below the poverty level after all that time."

"Do you plug away with the resumes like every other poor fuck?"

She nodded. "I have a BA in Business Administration from Hofstra."

I cringed and shook my head, sucking twelve ounces through a straw. "Fat lot of good that'll do ya in the modern market. You might as well have a Bachelor's Degree in Liberal Arts from a community college."

"You think so?"

"You're fucked," I said. "Still you've got a dirty mouth and you're obviously no dumber than these guttersnipes. Have you considered working in Public Relations?"

* * * *

The chick that had started out as a haggard and hackneyed sex performer had morphed into something else. Ten or twelve beers into the evening's festivities and the swirl of magic was cast upon the bar. MGMT was pulsing on the electric groovebox and I felt like that guy in that Timbuk 3 song. I should be wearing shades.

She lit up my beer-goggled bloodshot blues with her facial idiosyncracies, which included her sticking out her top row of not-quite-pearly white teeth and squinching up her nose like a disgusted hare. "I'm Aquila," she said at some ear-blown juncture.

"What a beautiful name."

"Yeah, I needed the money."

If I was text-messaging the screen would have likely read, "WTF?" or some lower-case variation with a million exclamation marks.

Just as I was making full-thrust impact with a harangue about the bitter male inadequacy responsible for lousy tips she was off at Prefontaine pace to feign interest in the sophomoric antics of pubescent preppy cats at the other end of the bar.

When she returned the subject somehow turned to sex and she confided that she is a Lesbian...mostly. "Oh, so you weren't lying," I said, more than a little disappointed by this point. "You really don't eat meat."

Broseph doubled over with laughter and she grimaced. "I'm just joking," I said. "So what's that like?"

"It's beautiful, except I don't ever go out because I'm always here."

"You're already out."

"Exactly."

"So what's mostly?” I asked. “There's exceptions?"

"Yeah, some. Not a lot but some."

She had already ignored me at least twice at earlier points in the evening, so she could lean on the counter and talk up my bouncer brother who had a history working for the place. It was the macho icon in the flesh, the brutish bear, an easy light for the weaker and dumber fireflies to gravitate toward.

Cock-blocking or casual conversation? No matter, I had thought. There's big screen TV's to watch and not hear.

But now it was my time with her. "What if I told you I look good in lipstick and I give phenomenal head?" I proposed.

"Could be," she said before sprinting down the other end once again.

When she returned a few moments later, her body buzzing but her eyes sagging, she told me of a biker bar in South Dakota where she worked twice a year, during the big motorcycle runs. The image she painted of her pulling Tabasco sauce from her cowgirl holster for a room of burly leather freaks made my sail rise to half-mast even after thirteen beers.

It was getting late, too late to steer the Impala back to Lindenhurst, 10.1 miles away, without running into the by-now-blood-thirsty police officer or smashing headfirst into a power pole. It was definitely time for large quantities of water. So I had another beer and that's when we really got into it.

I slapped my hands together, as if I had cracked the formula. "That's it! You've gotta take me with you on the August trip," referring to her next biker gig.

She didn't blow up at the suggestion, but she told me to write my phone number down. In her own stolid way she was being responsive. More responsive than I had been when she was telling us about her asshole landlord and my eyes kept drifting over to the lard ass porn guy who, by then, was staggering slovenly over to the pong table and standing a mere foot behind the closest player. A brawl was what I really wanted to see, even more than a half-toothless blowjob or a black g-string hitting the floor of a drab studio apartment while a superintendent bangs on the door with the rubber tip of his cane. Blood lust. It's a societal handicap of mine.

As I feverishly scribbled a last minute message on the credit card slip she had given me the Beer Pong Ballerina raced over with a smile and waved her arms around like a cheerleader. "What are you writing? What are you writing?"

I don't think I even knew, but I handed it to her anyway. She took a minute to mull over each word, but finally, she laughed and stuffed it away in her pocket. The fact that she laughed could mean that I was on target or it could mean that she was running the same game on me that she ran on all the Ivy League punks that littered the joint. Either way I wasn't buying anything so much as selling something of my own.

She was off again as the gymnast did a cartwheel and swiftly handed me one more beer that I didn't need. The Beer Pong Ballerina wasn't even panting. And her hair was never out of place once. There was a lot of Taurine and trucker speed at work here. Watching one little damsel in undress plow past a second, third and even fourth wind was both exhilirating and, paradoxically, nauseating. Why wasn't she somewhere else?

When we finally limped out the back door I thought of turning back to look at her, but quickly fought off this stupid urge by flicking myself in the sack. There's nothing special here. Vaguely pretty girls, like Fatigue, are an epidemic syndrome.

Thankfully I can't remember the grotesque wealth of vicious things I scrawled on that credit card slip, but I know that somewhere a busted and beleaguered bar keep is beating her clit like a bongo to the ballpoint tune of, "Take me in your trunk to the South Dakota run. Show me your ugly."