Post by vhodka on Nov 22, 2022 0:35:41 GMT -5
This time of year there is always some asshole asking you “what are you thankful for?” as if one, they are entitled to the answer and two, as if they care about the answer in the slightest. This year that asshole was a man we called the Sauce Boss but whose real name was probably, like, Garrett or some shit.
Garrett was the guy running this whole World Series of Wrestling thing that I’d spent the better part of the last few months being followed around for by a cameraman more invasive than my OBGYN when I tell him I’m feeling a bit yeasty. And while usually I would tell someone like Garrett who asked dumb questions they didn’t actually really mean to go engage in an Atlanta dustbuster with Roseanne Barr, the fact that it was his competition of which he was in charge of judging precluded me from doing so at this time while simultaneously forcing me to really ponder the question. But there was always time later for the Atlanta dustbuster, should I lose, of course.
“It’s jizz.” Murphy confidently said for the sixth time since he had commandeered the chair at my side, causally popping a walnut into his open mouth.
“You’re out of your fucking element, Donny.” I responded. “The man hasn’t even touched his own little less anyone else's. That’s Ickyville, USA.”
“You’ve lost the plot, Cube. What else could it possibly be?” The Irishman asked incredulously as he tried to ignore Vincent’s wandering hands that had suddenly appeared from behind to guide another nut into Murphy’s mouth.
“It’s THE SAUCE.” I said.
“AYE! The sauce is jiz- the queen's filthy cunt if you don’t get your old man off me nipples.” Murphy swatted at Vin’s hand where it was at present tweaking the other man’s nipple through his shirt.
“Why the fuck would someone call themselves the Jizz Boss? It’s like THE SAUCE. You know, if a man does not have THE SAUCE then he is lost, but the same man can be lost in THE SAUCE.” I couldn’t believe I was having to explain this. I mean, come on. This was beginners stuff. “Everyone knows that. It’s THE SAUCE.”
“And what is the sauce made of then?” Murphy asked with a grunt. Vincent had abandoned Murphy’s nipples to plop his ass directly on the table in front of us in a full on man spread as he shoveled almonds into his mouth with the gusto he usually reserved for shoveling my intimate parts into his mouth. I guess now is a good time to mention that Vincent was also very very drunk at this point.
Murphy clicked his tongue to draw my attention away from Vincent smiling down at me from the table and back to our very serious conversation. It took some doing but I finally refocused, doing my best to search the confines of my mind for an answer about THE SAUCE. The problem was, I don’t actually know what THE SAUCE is, tbh. Trivial detail.
“THE SAUCE is a metaphor for life and our reliance on tech.” My arms folded across my chest and I knew that I looked smug sitting there in my rightness. I was always right, you’ll learn that.
“YEAH MURPH.” Vincent said.
“Fuck off, the lot of yeh.” Murphy threw his hands in the hair, waving away the thought. “It’s fuckin jizz; The Progresso soup of the dick and I won’t hear nary another word about it.
“Gonna give you my sauce. Made it with my giblets.” Vincent interjected as he used the toe of his boot to lift at the hem of my dress where it rested across my thighs as Murphy
I looked up at my husband whose usually stocic face was glowing with the flush of Guinness and things much harder judging by the dance his foot was doing between my thighs as Murphy made gagging sounds beside us.
Once upon a time I couldn’t have been here, like this, with these people. See, I’ve not always been a great person. Actually, I’m a pretty shitty person, just no one believes me when I say that on account of I’m so easy to love. But let me be the first to tell you, bottom of the barrel certified scumbag.
For example, I fully intended to sneak off and service my husband in the bathroom at some point during the night as I had done every other Thanksgiving since I returned and before I had left. Some people might find the sort of love that Vincent and I share to be romantic and thus give us a pass on the bathroom thing. But those people would likely forget that with the exception of the last three, every other Thanksgiving I had spent engaging in this tradition Vincent had been married to the striking redhead across the room who was currently throwing her head back in a howl of laughter in conversation with Jenna Riggs.
See? Scumbag.
And look, I get it. I know it was wrong and awful and what have you but you have to understand… I fucking loved this man.
When we were together before we were together there were times when every cell of my body wanted to tell him that I was in love with him and that I needed him in a way I had never quite known I could need another person. I wanted to cry and scream and beg him to leave her, to stay with me and give me the chance to prove that I could be just as good as she was and I was so very close to it but every time I started to try he would shush me and eat the words in my mouth with a kiss.
And so I did what I always did with him and complied with his wants, convincing myself that if I told him the truth I’d just scare him away. But that night, on a night like any other, I don’t know what it was but it was just different. We’d been sleeping together for months at that point and it had been heated and passionate and amazing but it had just been sex. That night was soft, gentle even. He touched me like he was afraid that I would break into a million pieces should he handle me too roughly and I remember thinking at the time how ironic that was because the knowledge of knowing I could never really have him had already broken me.
Having someone’s body is one thing and it’s nice up to a point but it’s always been low on my list of priorities if I’m being truthful. What I wanted more than the physicality of what we had was the man on my couch reading Pablo Neruda poetry, the man who spoke so little but said so much. I wanted the man who in his childhood wanted to fly away in a hot air balloon to escape the world he found himself in. That was what I wanted and that was also the one thing I knew I could never have. That night as his moonlight bathed body rose and fell in the peacefulness of sleep, I traced his lips gently with my thumb before laying the most chaste kiss we’d ever shared upon them.. and then I cried myself to sleep.
Tonight we no longer had to hide and I didn’t need to tell him that he was my world because he already knew. We’d eat with our family and we’d laugh and debate about jizz and then we’d go back to our home, the one that he’d built me to make me feel safe in a place where I’d never felt safe enough to drop my walls and be myself lest one of the many secrets spill it. Tonight I didn’t have to hide anymore. We didn’t have to hide.
And for that I was thankful.
There was a time in my life that I had longed to have a large family. Granted, I didn’t exactly have a small family with a whole town full of aunts and uncles and cousins - a quarter of which were actually blood related - but growing up as an only child sometimes left me longing for the sort of connection that you can only really have with people born of your blood and raised by your side. Maybe it was watching too many reruns of The Brady Bunch that gave me an idealized fantasy of what it would have been like to have siblings, I can’t say for sure. But more than anything else I spent every holiday in the Ponderosa Trailer Estates desperately longing to one day not to be alone.
And then I met the Wolf family.
Trying to explain Parts Unknown to someone who has not seen it for themselves is much easier said than done. It had become the stuff of legends, passed down wrestler to wrestler throughout the years in hushed whispers by people who had never actually been there but had heard from a friend of a friend of a guy who knew a girl. You know how it goes.
Some people said it was a stronghold for people with more enemies than friends (true), others said it was an ostentatious display of wealth and ego (also true), a third likened it to Jonestown and did their very best to convince others that it was some sort of weird rich wrestler cult (that one was actually me and I am still not convinced I’m wrong). The stories were as numerous as the residents and believe me, there were a fuck ton of residents in the spawling manmade town.
At present, the numerous residents of this pseudocult fortress were assembled in what Damon refers to as “the grand ballroom” but what I call a glorified airport hanger. Tonight was not a rager (indoctrination) for the chosen lucky enough to be invited to such a private place. Tonight was merely for the family. All of the family.
I could tell when she walked in by Murphy’s body language alone. He went rigid beside me, his eyes showing just a hit too much white as if he was thinking about bolting for the door. My hand left the tip of Vincent’s boot and gripped onto Murphy’s arm beside me to draw his attention away from the woman who had just sent a quiet hush over the room and back to me. He smiled weakly.
Sarah Wolf had not made it to Thanksgiving since she died and while her presence was not a complete shock to me I could see plainly the agony it caused the men at my side.
Sarah wasted no time ignoring her carefully assigned place setting at the table beside us, instead making a beeline for the bar where she hissed at the bartender until a bottle of vodka magically appeared in front of her. No, the irony isn’t lost on me.
Vincent ignored her as best he could, reaching for a bottle of whiskey that had materialized courtesy of Paul Montuori sometime earlier in the night. He removed the lid and took a swig off the bottle, extending it towards Murphy who solemnly shook his head and took another sip of Guinness.
The world knows who Sarah Wolf is, she’s made sure of that. But the world doesn’t know who Sarah Wolf was to us, not really, anyway.
See, Sarah had been my best friend. More than my best friend, really, she’d been my sister once upon a time. But a man named Stephen Stratford saw fit to change all that with one simple decision that almost had destroyed us all. Though she walked, talked, and stank coochied among us she was not of us or with us.
I’ve been disappointed by a great deal of people in my life and Sarah had just been another in a long procession. Though it broke my heart, I could deal with it. Handle it, ya know? But then I’d look at my husband very seriously trying to lose the memory of his sister in a bottle of whiskey or my promoted best friend Murphy focusing on a loose thread on the hem of his shirt like it was the most fascinating thing in the world all so he didn’t have the focus on the presence of the ex-fiancé across the room who had done her best to destroy him as she had been destroyed and I’d feel the ire bubbling in my stomach like intestinal issues after too much Taco Bell.
I don’t have much use for cars, I mean, like, I have one I like already. So it’s not as if I need a new car. But for as much as I didn’t need a car, I did need a time machine.
I know the right answer to give when someone asks what you would do with a time machine, I mean, that’s pretty obvious. You go back in time and stop Hitler and anyone else who gives any other answer is a bigger scumbag than I am. So yeah. If I had a time machine my first stop would be to single handedly thwart the holocaust cause like that’s just good manners. But my second stop would have been for Murphy Doyle Maher, and for Vincent Black and for all the other people in this room.
But most importantly, it would have been for Sarah Wolf.