Who Writes This Stuff?

It was the most awkward moment in the whole history of moments. It was the grand daddy of them all. That is to say if Gilgamesh had walked in on his mom in the middle of an H-clap between Grendel and Odysseus that awkward moment would still come in second to the one I created myself some five thousand years later. This is the story of that moment.

It was a snowy Saturday night in December. I got off work at closing time and got a call from a friend that some friends of his were having a party. I didn’t know these people and I really didn’t feel like trekking to a party through the snow when I could sit at home in front of the TV and stay warm, but my friend gave me an address and I realized the party was barely a quarter mile from my house. He also said there would be girls there. I would have been sort of a poop not to go.

So I shaved and put on some decent clothes and headed out through the snow to the party with strange people I didn’t know. It was only when I arrived at the party that I realized just how strange these strange people would be.

Everyone there except my friend and I had multiple pieces of metal stuck in their faces. Elephant pants were a staple and chains were practically a requirement for entry. For the record, I don’t approve of any of these fashions. Elephant pants are impractical. Chains are just extra crap to get caught on something (worse than ties). Unusual piercings mean you got molested as a child. The crazier the piercing, the worse the molestation.

My friend introduced me to the people at the party. Some of them had ICP tattoos. I should have left when I noticed that. I didn’t. Instead I walked around trying to get to know people. One of these people was the host of said party. We’ll call him Steve. Steve didn’t like me. I didn’t know why Steve didn’t like me. I hadn’t said anything to offend him (yet). I tried a couple times to make Steve laugh or bring up some common interest. I failed at all these attempts. Steve just inexplicably hated me. I could sense it.

Now about the same time I realized Steve hated me, a very attractive girl walked into this party. She had the whole suicide girl look going with the bottle black hair and the tattoos but, all that aside, this chick was smoking hot. She had a body like a work of fine art. Thing is, there was something very familiar about her and I couldn’t help but stare from across the room trying to figure out where I had seen her before. Did she know someone I know? Did she shop at one of my stores? I did a stint at Hot Topic. I bet I met her there. I couldn’t quite place it.

Another twenty minutes or so went by and another girl walked in fitting almost exactly the same profile. Tattoos. Body piercings. Figure like a battle axe. I knew I’d seen her before. I thought about asking her where, but that sounds like a line and I don’t like to be the line guy. I’m more creative than that, even when I’m obviously hitting on girls.

So I sat down at a desk chair in front of Steve’s computer. As I was sitting there, pretty much in the way of the computer, everyone stopped fiddling with the iTunes playlist as they had been. As a consequence of this, the screen saver started up. Steve’s screen saver featured a long series of pictures of a model following the same peculiar trend as the other girls I had noticed at this party. As I sat watching the bizarre pictures of this strangely familiar model I began to put the pieces together. It was when I saw a photo in which I could clearly see her name tattooed on her body that I realized exactly who she was. She was a stripper. They were all strippers. I didn’t recognize them because they had clothes on.

I shouted across the room to my friend while pointing at the monitor “Isn’t that the stripper that gave _____ a lap dance that one time?”

The room fell completely silent. Heads turned. Jaws dropped. Faces fell ghostly white. You could hear iron oxidizing in the vacuum of my comment. I swear even the stereo stopped for that moment as if it somehow knew that I had just stabbed the massive African elephant in the room with the stone spear that is my glaring insensitivity.

My friend dashed across the room to shut me up. He leaned over and said “That’s Steve’s girlfriend. She killed herself. Blew her brains out like two months ago. Don’t talk about it.”

He even had a kid with her. There were pictures of the baby hanging around the place. I just figured he split up with the kid’s mom or something. No wonder the guy seemed cranky.

It turns out Chris Rock was wrong. No matter what a stripper tells you, she might kill herself and leave you to raise her child alone.