Fabulous Pipple
Grandview-on-Hudson, New York
“So how’d you two meet?” Dane asks, licking a drip of hummus off the side of his hand.
Robby glances at Jack and the tips of his ears turn red. “You sure you want to hear this story?”
Dane’s glance volleys between the blushing husbands. “Sure, why not?”
“Well,” Jack says, rubbing the back of his neck. “As is wont to happen in my world, I had to go to the ER because I had a certain...” He turns his hand over in the air a few times. “Sexual plaything lodged in my...” The hand circles again.
“Ah,” Dane says. “Gotcha.” He takes a suave bite of celery and hopes it isn’t obvious he’s clenching his butthole.
“And the nurse, who was a total sweetheart by the way—”
“She came to our wedding,” Robby says.
“And got us a lovely toaster,” Jack says. “Anyway, while she was talking me off a ledge, she told me not to feel too bad because there happened to be another man in the ER with the same problem.”
Robby wags an index finger in the air. “Representing.”
“She introduced us. We commiserated. And that’s how we met.”
“Love at first dildo extraction.”
“Except it was Jack’s second.”
“All right, we don’t need to share everything about the encounter. Whoa, Dane, are you okay?”
Dane is doubled over now, the laughter splashing in his chest and the tears rolling down his face. Teeth clamped together to keep the mouthful of celery and hummus from spewing everywhere.
“Breathe,” Robby says, thumping Dane’s back. “Want a little dick with that choke?”
Huff Jensen comes by with a tray of drinks. “Hey, hey, don’t break my brother-in-law. I’ve just spent long and arduous months putting him back together.”
“Told him how we met,” Robby says.
“Oh, the dildo story. You guys are so basic.” Huff hands Dane a napkin to wipe his eyes. “Stop clenching your butthole.”
Liko Greenman stands on the far perimeter of this exchange, hearing Jack and Robby’s how-we-met story for the third time tonight.
With each telling the dildo gets bigger, the nurse shifts between male and female, and the wedding gift is either a toaster or a blender.
But Jack and Robby always end up together so what’s the harm with a little embellishment. They’ve earned it.
So instead of listening, Liko is watching Dane.
Liko doesn’t know the man’s name is Dane. They haven’t been introduced and Liko hopes they aren’t. Not just yet.
Liko doesn’t think of himself as an introvert.
He likes parties. He’s not afraid to join a group he doesn’t know.
He makes small talk easily and more than once he’s been referred to as a social tether—someone who becomes the mothership of your party mingling and you often make your way back to him or her, just to catch your breath, process, collect yourself.
Liko digs being that person. A beacon of social safety.
Come stand next to me. Join my conversation.
Or just stand here and siphon off some peace.
But this dude… The man whom Liko doesn’t yet know is named Danelaw Strong… He looks at Liko once, just a glance across a crowded room with a pair of illegally blue eyes, and Liko introverts.
Panics, if we’re being honest, he thinks. He retreats a few steps to the living room’s bookshelves. Pretends to peruse. Glances at Dane, who is looking at him. Liko looks away, puts his nose into a random book, and introverts further.
Weird. He’s not even my type.
Liko likes to be thrown around a bed if he’s in it with a man. Bears are his type. Dane is not a bear. In fact, it’s pissing Liko off he can’t get a bead on this guy, and that he’s even trying to classify Dane with body type slang is pissing him off more.
Dane stands in his circle of conversation, head turning from one person to another.
He’s a short man, so his chin is tilted up.
His sandy hair is buzzed tight and he pulls the extreme style off well.
Dressed in jeans and a V-neck sweater. A beer in one hand, the other fingers tucked in his front pocket.
He looks at the person on his right, and he’s a poet.
He looks the other way, and he’s a construction worker.
He’s whip-thin and sparse, then he moves or turns or shifts and he’s all fit muscle.
Unsmiling, he looks early forties, tired after a long day, feeling his years.
Then he smiles and he’s barely out of his twenties, rawboned and bristling with energy.
What is happening? Liko thinks.
Dane’s looking at him with those ridiculous blue eyes.
Liko is used to being on the receiving end of eye compliments because his own are an intense purple-gray.
Honest-to-God Liz Taylor violet peepers.
Dane is competition. His gaze and Liko’s are two bucks circling each other, each believing they are the fairest of all, and they ought to take it outside and decide.
Or upstairs.
Don’t panic, Liko thinks, looking away.
He can’t get words to stick to his reaction. His ex-wife would probably call it a trauma response.
Don’t be dramatic. You’re digging someone. It’s been a while. Enjoy it.
He can’t. This isn’t enjoyable. He needs to get back to a mothership but he has no tether.
He looks at Dane across a galaxy, walking free in space, placing his feet on nothing, aware of time and gravity and vastness and how everyone is an infinitesimal, insignificant speck of dust with no control over anything.
At the mercy of a conniving Universe who likes to put her cheek on the heel of her starry hand while the other fingers delicately move two motes into place.
You. Annnnnd you. Say hello.
Trust me. I know what I’m doing.
Some people you meet do an effortless end run around your psychological constructs (or worse, around your chemical ones).
One encounter and they’re suddenly wandering the emotional hinterlands of your soul, where the line between sad and wretched, or happy and manic, can’t be seen with the naked eye.
These damn people not only see everything, but they make you feel shit to your bones.
The stupidly blue gaze of this impossible twink-otter-construction worker-poet is slipping under Liko’s skin and throwing arms wide to encompass his entire emotional spectrum, right out to the hinterlands and beyond.
Some call this love at first sight.
Liko Greenman calls it Pump the brakes, you moron.
In his twenties, Liko would fuck this guy in the next five seconds. Liko is fifty-four now and knows it’s wise not to eat this proffered delicacy in one sitting. He doesn’t even have to taste it.
Fine, Universe, you obviously have a plan. Noted. I’ll take it from here. On my schedule, thanks very much. Bitch.
So Liko Greenman walks away from the party.
Grabbing his jacket from a pile on a bed, he goes up the stairs and down the hall to its end, where he opens a door to the attic steps.
From the attic he opens another door, climbs a ladder and steps onto the widow’s walk.
A railed-in space of maybe five feet by seven feet, with two Adirondack chairs, a little table, and Huff Jensen’s telescope.
Liko sits, remembering his first time visiting this beautiful house.
Six months ago, when Liko was newly divorced, still bruised and smarting, and finally finding his feet and feeling he could play nicely with others.
Huff and Maisie were throwing a housewarming and invited Liko over early to help with preparations, let him establish himself as a host instead of a guest. Before anyone else arrived, Huff took Liko upstairs and showed him the way to the rooftop haven.
“We tell everyone the roof is in need of repair and it’s not safe to come up,” Huff said. “But it is. And if it gets to be too much tonight and you need to get away, don’t go home. Go here first. Just sit alone and listen to the party. Pace like the widows of old and watch the water. Okay?”
Liko didn’t pace that night, for he’d found himself content.
Still profoundly wounded by his ex-wife’s betrayal, but the hurt graciously moved over and let a peaceful happiness swell in his chest, alongside a dash of petty smugness: Janelle had left the marriage so Liko not only got the house, he got all the cool friends and their sympathy, plus this magnificent rooftop vista.
Suck it, bitch.
With a bottle of beer and the cut-off crusts of Maisie’s famous cucumber sandwiches, Liko sat and gazed at the panoramic view of the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Not waiting for a ship to come in. Not making wishes on the first stars that peeked into sight.
It was a pure moment of not needing anything and Liko liked to practice leaning into such mindful, content times.
He watched the sunset, blissfully unaware that Madame von Universe, the conniving bitch, was manipulating Danelaw Strong into his path.
Tonight, in the last minutes of 2015, Liko steps onto the widow’s walk again, neither mindful nor content. He clutches the rail and shivers, butthole clenched tight. Behind his closed lids he sees a million shades of blue. He puts an eye to the telescope, looking for the Universe.
“What are you doing,” he whispers. “What is this? Who is he?”
The Universe just shrugs.
Nothing for it, so Liko sits down, reaches for his vape and proceeds to get really fucking high.
It’s an excellent party and Dane feels he’s doing quite nicely.
After a year of eating, sleeping and breathing a complicated widowhood, his grief invading every aspect of daily life, he’s playing a little experimental game: How long can he go at this fiesta as an unattached man with no past to speak of?
So far, so good. It helps that the Jensens have an eclectic, diverse circle of friends.
What Dane’s late wife would’ve called “fabulous pipple.” Dancers.
Musicians. Artists of all ilk. Advocates.
Entrepreneurs. Survivors. All of them superb conversationalists.
They make it easy for Dane to reinvent himself as a superb listener.