Texts from last night

I was running behind because my afternoon nap with the cat ran long, but finally I was on the bus to head out for the evening, when Tony texts, Laura you're killing us, we've totally peaked! Get here like yesterday.

Karen’s the one I went travelling with last summer. She spent the summer in Switzerland, running away from her failing relationship with Tony and in the fall they broke up, only to get back together this spring. I hate Tony because I’ve spent two years hearing about everything he’s ever done wrong. I get home from shopping at seven to a text from Tony telling me to hurry to and get over there -- even though Karen told me the barbecue was starting at eight. He wants me to bring over beer but I say I’ve already got too much to carry. Eventually I am convinced to go to the liquor store and pick up vodka.

When he bitches about how long I am taking, I remind him that I’m late because I was in the liquor store for half an hour. I imagine slapping him in the face with the mickey of Polar Ice.

Karen must realize that he’s texting me, because she sends, Ignore daddy -- he’s being a goof lol.



We call Tony, “daddy.” Like when we were shopping at IKEA, and Karen told me not to mention that she was shopping with me (I had told facebook that I was going to IKEA. Some things need to be celebrated), and while we were at the store, Tony texted me and asked, Does that mean you’re going to Ikea to get a pull out couch so Karen can take refuge in your AC haven?

“Daddy knows you’re here,” I hissed at Karen from across the aisle. “How does he know you’re here?”

“It’s daddy,” Erin said, shaking her head and pushing the cart over to bedding.

“But how did he know?” I asked, following after her.



I get off the bus onto a streetcar, and Tony texts, Lol - it's all good Laura Mark keeps asking me when you're getting here and whether you're single :)

What the fuck is happening? I ask Karen, and she says it’s just the four of them -- her, Tony, Mark and Jessica. She stops replying to my texts. Tony keeps texting me.

I show up, text all four of them, and still wait outside for five minutes before someone comes to the door. Karen tells me I get a present to open before I have to go outside and deal with all of the idiots. "It's a weird evening," she warns. They’ve already barbecued, and she smells sharply of smoke.

She's got me card, I found this little book and although you have figured out so much on your own, a little cheat-sheet wouldn't hurt, and the book Stuff Every Woman Should Know by Alanna Kalb in celebration of me getting a job/buying a car/that adulthood thing I've been marching towards. It's incredibly thoughtful of her, and I tuck the book into my purse and feel guilty.

We walk through the house to the back patio and when I step outside, Mark says, "Are we allowed to touch the exulted one?"

Jessica pushes past him and clings to me. "I'm sooooo glad to see you." She's wearing a strapless patchwork cloth dress from Cuba. I can't ever remember hugging her before, but surely I must have.

"You're glowing," Mark tells me. "From employment."

I say, "Okay, were you guys talking about this before I got here? Maybe we shouldn't talk about that anymore."

“Did I say anything bad last night?” Mark asks. He called me at 12:30 am.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You didn’t say anything awkward but there were some weird silences.”

“I wasn’t masturbating,” he exclaims. “I didn’t go into the garage to call you and start masturbating.”

Karen puts hotdogs on the grill and Jessica mixes a rum and Coke for me. She pours it free hand but the proportions are good and it tastes like a Coke slurpee.

Marks tells us, “I have an excellent penis,” and then there’s some discussion about whether it’s bigger than the hotdog I am eating. “Almost,” he says proudly.

“I spend a lot of time watching internet porn,” Mark says. He’s been drunk for over twenty-four hours at this point.

He asks me what I did today (woke up at six am to get my little brother into a cab so he can fly back after his summer here, took the cat to the vet at eleven, napped, went shopping, got groceries, got booze, came over) and tells me that he woke up still drunk, grabbed another beer, and masturbated in his bed.

“Masturbation is a selfish orgasm,” he says.

A guy I’ve never met shows up, one of Jessica’s pile of boys. She ended a four-year relationship in the winter and has since developed Veela powers in attracting boys. I don’t even know how many guys she’s dated in the last six months, but I don’t think there’s been even one guy around who hasn’t been trying to get with her. It’s uncanny. Karen gets asked, often more than once a night, “So, your roommate...”

The guy’s got a weird name, and very shortly we’re calling him Douchefuck -- DF to his face. He asks how we all know each other and Tony says that he’s dating, “her roommate.”

Cumberdouche is like, “Wait, what?”

“Tony and Karen are dating. Karen and Jessica are roommates,” I say.

“I know that,” he snaps and starts walking into the house before I’ve finished speaking.

I glare at Cumberdouche’s retreating back and say, “Excuse you!” I look at Tony: “He asked.”

Cumberdouche -- who’s real name is Cumbersomethingelse -- claims to be an architect, but says he’s looking for work with a marketing company. He knows the title of every Woody Allen movie and says that French-made romantic comedies are more highbrow than Hollywood ones, so they’re a decent guilty pleasure.

(At the end of the night, I ask Jessica is she’s planning to have sex with Cumberdouche, and she says, “Yeah, maybe.” “Tonight?” “No!” she exclaims, giggling. I ask her why she likes him, and she says that they’ve got a really intense connection. “The first night we met, he read me poetry,” she says. “Wow,” I say.)

Mark wanders between the patio and the house, grabbing beer after beer from the fridge and playing songs from the laptop.

He puts on Mr. Jones and takes off his shirt.

“I’ve got moves,” he says. He circles his hand at his hip before raising his hand, folding his fingers into the shape of a gun and pointing it at me. “One of these,” he says, pretending to put his hand back into his pocket, “and the girl is gone. Right from across the bar.”

“Put your fucking shirt back on,” Jessica says. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He points his gun at her and winks.

“Are you going to start swearing at each other in French again?” Karen asks. “It’s funnier when it’s in French.”

“Jesus Murphy Christ,” Mark says and walks back to the laptop. He rests his hands against the table, arches his back and shakes his ass at us.

Karin barbecues the food that Cumberdouche brought with him -- a single hamburger patty and two sausages. Tony’s already drunk, and leaves the vodka I brought in the freezer. Mark puts on Lay Lady Lay and walks out of the house wearing only his boxers. He sits down on the other side of the couch and pulls the material higher up on his thighs.

“This is what I’ve got,” he says. “This is what it’s all about.” He cups himself over his boxers.

Karen goes for the camera.

“I’ll put it on Facebook tomorrow; it’s the only way he’ll learn.”

Cumberdouche rants. Seeing a little thigh is too much for him.

Jessica says, “Put your fucking shorts back on, what the fuck. You fucking asshole.”

"Yeah?" Mark says, indignant. "Well, sometimes my nipples get hard, but that doesn't mean I'm going to make lemonade in the sunshine."

He goes back in the house, hiking up his boxers at he goes.

“He really should have worked at the gay bar,” Karen says.

I say, “Oh, yeah. Didn’t that really happen?”

“They didn’t hire him,” Karen says, laughing. Mark’s boxers are pulled up as far as he can get them, a make-shift lumpy thong that also looks like an adult diaper. He circles his hips around, pausing occasionally to shoot his gun at one of us. He comes back out of the house and we make him pull his boxers out of his asscrack before sitting down on the couch.

Cumberdouche has brought strawberries and bananas to grill on the barbecue. Tony bitches that Karen keeps blowing smoke at him, as she stands over the little grill, waving a fan to keep the flames going. She tries to take the strawberry-banana skewers off, but Cumberdouche says they’re not cooked enough.

Somewhere in there, Tony leaves. Someone hands me a place with charred strawberries and bananas covered in chocolate ice cream. I hate cooked strawberries.

Another of Jessica’s boys shows up: someone who did the same program I did but hasn’t graduated yet. Mark greats him, his boxers rolled to expose three-quarters of his ass.

“Wasn’t expecting that,” the guy, Brian, says. He’s twenty-eight, but he looks younger to me, maybe because I know he’s still in school.

“It’s okay,” Karin says. “He doesn’t have a job. He’s blowing off steam.”

“Jesus Murphy Christ,” Mark exclaims from inside the house.

“How long has he been unemployed for? So that I can gauge my own progress, “ Cumberdouche says.

I don’t believe that Cumberdouche has ever worked as an architect.

Karen disappears into the house for a while, and when she comes back, I ask, "Is daddy mad?"

"Daddy's in bed," she says. "It's okay."

It's like 10:30. Tony’s thirty-seven years old, going to medical school, and stressed out beyond belief. Given what I know from watching Grey’s Anatomy, he doesn’t do as much work as I would expect.

“Put that fucking beer down,” Jessica tells Mark.

“If you call me an alcoholic one more time, I’m going to take my boxers off,” he says, and walks back to the laptop.

I’ll be sitting when the evening comes. Watching the ships come in and then I’ll watch them roll away again.

Karen sits down beside me and I say, "I feel like I was somewhere else in this completely different place, and now I'm here and it's also like I've been here forever."

"I know," Karen says. "It kind of feels like it's always been this night."

“I don’t think I really knew what was going on in this house,” I say.

Karen spent the last two months applying to a job in another province, and this morning she finally realized that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

“It’s been... yeah,” she says.

Jessica’s moving out next weekend, back in with her family. Her dad’s in the process of dying of cancer and she doesn’t have money to pay rent anymore. Before I leave, she hands me a pile of stuff that she does’t want to move -- an astrology kit for Scorpios in a little box, a Sephora’s bag filled with origami cubes.

Mark’s still standing in front of the computer, gyrating. He’s a good dancer; he would have done well working in a gay club. He's got a body like William Beckett, with the legs that stretch on for miles and an easy curve in his waist.

“I can’t believe you went to school with this guy,” Cumberdouche laments.

Jessica and Brian leave, come back with a new package of cigarettes and the box goes around the group. Jessica pulls out a tiny joint that's rolled too tightly to smoke. Brian unwraps it, cuts a cigarette open for more filler, and rolls another joint. "Is this really all the weed we've got?" he asks over and over again.

Jessica and Cumberdouche lean in closer and closer on the couch.

"You're going really well with everything," Jessica tells him, glaring at Mark.

"I drank 1.5 litres of wine," he says, pleased with himself.

I had wondered who had brought the monster bottle of wine. What a douche.

Mark yells from inside the house, “Hey Laura!” circles his hand and points his finger gun at me.

“Thanks,” I says.

“Hey Jessica!” Mark yells, and she doesn’t look up as she lights the cigarette.

Mark pulls his boxers further up the crease of his ass and Cumberdouche says, “This is why people are driven to smoke,” dramatically turning his head away as Mark spreads his legs and thrusts along with the music.

“We were already smoking before Mark started stripping,” I say.

The flap in Mark’s boxers is gaping and sometimes when he rolls his hips, there’s a shadow of skin.

Brian asks, “Is he hurting?” and Karin nods.

Mark’s girlfriend dumped him in April. She’s going to grad school in Chicago next year, and he was going to move to the States to be with her.

“You need to get laid, my friend,” Brian says.

“I’m not some cheap... I am not a one night stand,” Mark says with great dignity, holding his junk in one hand. “Your dick is probably infected with fucking herpes.”

“It’s not,” Brian says, calmly. He broke up with his girlfriend of eight years this summer and has been fucking around ever since.

“Oh my god,” Cumberdouche says, and Mark walks out of the house. He’s completely naked, but it takes me a moment to realize. He’s got a long smooth body and there’s nothing shocking about his nudity.

Cumberdouche seems genuinely concerned that the slight is going to make him throw up. “This is why people pick up smoking habits,” he says once again.



This morning Karin texts, I am silently at brunch with a grumpy daddy an a exausted me. The house is a bomb. She says, I think Mark walked in on Tony and I having sex. Omg. Just to top it off.



Mark calls me just before I am finished writing this post. “Did I get completely naked?”

“Yes,” I say. “You were completely naked.”

“I’ve given up on finding a job,” he says. “I’m just... fuck it.”

He says he’s going ease up with the drinking Tuesday, but right now his body is feeling fantastic. It’s called hair of the dog for a reason.

“Was it just me, or was that guy from last night the biggest douche that’s ever existed?”

“No, he definitely was the worst person in the world,” I confirm.

“I woke up this morning, and he and Jessica were fucking naked in bed together,” Mark says. “They totally fucked. She has the worst taste in men.”

“She really does.”

“Okay, I’ve got to go. Last night was okay, right?”

"It was funny," I say. "You put on good music."

And then, on his tenth beer of the day (“Which is better, because I had twenty yesterday.” “It’s only 3:30 in the afternoon.” “... Yeah. And I’m also stoned.”) Mark went back to work on the deck he’s been building.

You must be hungry.

Friday Night:

All my favorite things: fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil.  And then because you can't just eat a mozzarella salad, add some tomato.  I don't know why I'm so frequently enticed by foods that I don't actually like but despite not liking raw tomatoes, I get wicked cravings for this salad.  

On one of her shows, Nigella Dawson said that salads should either be green or red -- lettuce or tomato -- but not both.  And then suddenly the world made a little more sense.

I love watching cooking shows when I'm stressed.  Especially while I'm eating.  It's not necessary to eat the same thing that they're cooking, but it's torture to watch someone in the kitchen and not have anything to stuff your face with. 

Nigelle is great because she's got the warmth and the sensuality.  I find her hilarious because even though she's a woman with cooking shows, who writes cookbooks, she's not actually a great cook. It's adorable to watch her use her little rolly knife (a rounded blade with a wooden handle that she can hold in both hands) because she's not able to finely chop things with a proper knife.  As she narrates, "Chop the onions finely.  Well, I'm not doing a very good job of that, but it doesn't really matter."  

Jamie Oliver is exceedingly good at chopping things.  He's got the technique down where out just wumpwumpwumpwumpwump and the blade keeps moving and then all the sudden everything is diced.  I know you're supposed to cut with one clean stroke, but I can't stop the little back and forth movement of my hand.  Clean strokes make the knife clatter too loudly on the board. 

Sophie Dahl is infinitely gentle with her food.  I think it must take her five hours to make each dish (or there hard flocks of interns waiting off camera with bowls of already-diced produce) because she's so careful as she prepares the ingredients. I haven't decided whether or not I think she's a good chef.  She's gorgeous and she's got these swoopy bangs that defy all the regular laws of hair physics in their perfection.

Sophie's recipes are always Events, and I don't think I've ever tried to cook anything of her's.  Nigella likes to put lime in everything and she likes spicy food more than I do.  Jamie always cooks with raw herbs, which makes me entirely more likely to try his stuff out. (Sophie uses creme fraiche all the time, which -- tempting. But still not enough to commit to three hours in the kitchen.)

It's funny, the communal aspect of food.  Sophie never seems to have people over to eat the food she made.  Watching Nigelle and Jamie serve is somehow this important thing to me.  I want to see a group of people eat meals, even though I'm just one person alone in my house watching the program.  I never realized how much we scrutinized how other people eat until I started working.  A man who I didn't recognize walked into the communal kitchen where a bunch of ladies were eating around the table while I microwaved my pasta.  "You sure have a big appetite," he said to the woman sitting at the end of the table, who had a salad that covered her entire plate with orange slices circling 'round the edge.

"She's having salad," one of the other women said.  How did it become a humiliation to be judge by this man who had just walked in, but I kept the microwave closed and waited until his back was turned before slinking off with my plate piled high with spaghetti and meat sauce.  I think it's better to be round and enjoy the food you're eating, leave other people alone to their rations.   There's so much discussion about food around the office -- what have you got there? Looks like a lot.  Looks like you're hungry.  Looks good, but I can't eat like that.

I think -- I will never be like that.  Policing what other people eat.  And then in moments I'm just as bad as everyone else: Nigelle, you are putting too much lime over your dish.  I do not want to watch you eat that much sour.

It looks like you really enjoy your mozzarella cheese, Laura.