The Wedding, Part 02
“Awwwwwww, SHIT!!!!!!”
It was Kevon. He and the rest of the fellas, including Terry and Jennie, were milling about in the hotel lobby when I returned from my encounter with Lisa in the conference room. I tried to put on a brave face.
“Who you done did it to? Already? It’s only six o’clock!!” exclaimed Jennie. (She often slipped easily into Ebonics around us. But she could be painfully proper in her professional interactions.)
I’d failed at masking that silly “I’ve just cum and all is right in the world!” look. There was no disguising my failure to this bunch. They knew me all too well. I decided to fall back onto semantics.
“What’re you talking about. I ain’t did nuttin’.”
“Nigga, youse a LIE. I know that sneaky look. And I know your Judeo-Christian background, too,” she rebuked.
“I swear on a stack of Bibles that I have not had…um…intercourse with anyone.”
Technically, this was true. Lisa and I had not had intercourse. We’d trotted up to the edge of it. But we hadn’t actually done it.
“I know who it is. It’s LISA. They been makin’ googoo eyes at each other since yesterday,” said Teralynn.
“It’s not Lisa,” I lied.
“Well, who is it, then? We know you’ve done did SOMETHING. Spit it out, Artie.” Jennie nagged.
I decided to flip the script.
“Can I have just a tee-nine-chee bit of privacy on this? You know I’m going to pungle at some point. I swear it’s not what you think it is. But I admit it IS something. In fact, Miss Gotta-know-everything Louis, I was gon’ pull you aside and ask your advice before I got around to talking. You got a minute?”
Jennie looked at the other members of our group with a big smile. She was going to know the dirt before everybody. This inferred a level of trust between us that superseded my relationship with even my boys. Of course, she felt special. This was my intent, since she seemed to be the most interested in getting into my business.
“Come on, honey. Tell mama what’s bothering you. And make it fast. I don’t want to miss the party!!” she said while walking me away from our group.
We walked down the foyer towards the conference rooms. I opened the conversation with the mea culpa that I knew was due.
“You were right. It was Lisa. But we didn’t have sex.” I admitted.
“Oooooh, Artie! Something freaky, hey?” Jennie laughed.
“I…I just have some questions first.” I stammered.
“Go. And make it fast. I have some dicks I want to measure and a pocket full of singles to spend.”
I ignored her crude comment about the impending bachelorette party.
“OK. Tell me this. Say you wanted to, you know, suck somebody’s dick, but you didn’t want to come out and say so. What hand signals would you use?”
“OH….MY….GAWD.”
“I’m serious, Jen. Apparently I missed the ‘I want to suck your dick’ class back in school.”
“You’re saying Lisa was giving you the signal. And you missed it?”
“Yes.”
“Artie, I knew you was dumb. But I ain’t think you was THIS dumb.”
“Thanks. Just show me the signal, nyugga.”
“Well, it’s a bunch of things a woman will do. She could rub her finger into your palm.”
“I know about that one.”
“She could reach across you and grip your forearm, you know, and squeeze it, you know, like a pussy squeezes a dick.”
“That’s one of the signals?”
“Yep.”
“I missed that one.”
“She could poke her tongue into her cheek and fake like she’s licking her teeth.”
“I missed that one, too.”
“You missed THAT one? Tell me, how did you ever get your dick sucked in the first place? I mean, a five-year-old knows that one.”
“Whatever. Go on.”
“She could be holding your hand and reach up and squeeze your finger in her fist.”
“I thought that one meant she wanted to fuck?”
“That’s what it does mean. But it can mean she wants to suck your dick, too.”
“OK.”
“She can bat her eyes at you and look away.”
“Oh man. All women do that.”
“All women like sucking dick, is what it means. Don’t be dumb.”
“Do you bat your eyes at men?”
“I do if I want to suck their dicks.”
“You batted your eyes at me freshman year.”
“That’s different. You ain’t picked up on it. That’s why you ain’t get your dick sucked.”
“You told me you didn’t suck dicks. Remember? Sophomore year.”
“I lied.”
“OK, what else?” I asked, now frustrated.
“Oh, Artie. It’s a bunch of little things. Sometimes you just have to know.”
“She said it was some hand signal she’d given me at the church.”
“Did she touch her fingertips against your fingertips and drag her fingernails down your fingers real slow?”
“Ummm, yes. She did.”
“Well, there you go.”
“That’s the thing? THAT? How could I be expected to know that translates into a blowjob?”
“Sometimes you just have to know, Artie. I think she could have just come out and told you to whip it out and you wouldn’t have known what it meant.”
“You’re a lot of help.”
“I’m serious, Artie. She came down to breakfast and wedged a chair in next to you. That should have told you something right there.”
“You noticed that?”
“I notice everything, baby. Now can I go back to the party?”
“Yeh. I guess.”
She scurried off, hot with the latest dirt. When she got back to the fellas, of course, they wanted to know the details down to the last iota. Unsurprisingly, Jennie acted as if she and I had been discussing coupons for a 10% discount on Captain Crunch at Publix. I knew she would do this. If the fellas found out anything, they would have to hear it from me. That’s how we rolled in college. That’s how we roll now. They pressed her. She stuck her nose in the air and ignored them. They knew the rules.
I sauntered up. They pressed me, too. I just shook my head.
“It’ll come out eventually. It ain’t coming out now, dawg. Give me a day or two.”
I think Eddie knew, but wasn’t saying anything. He was matched up with Nicole. For all I knew he and she had their own hand signal issues.
Mike Simpson gathered us all up for the first diversion of the night—a titty bar on Liberty Avenue known for flouting the local lap dance rules.
“If these women don’t bust nuts in your pants, your balls ain’t functioning properly,” he warned.
We all laughed. But again, I wasn’t really interested in strange. I wanted Lisa. As far as I knew, we’d be out feting Kevon all night with lap dancers and assorted trollops while the woman who had my nose open (Literally. The scent of her panties was still impressed on my nostrils.) was somewhere across town eating chocolate penis cake and stuffing dollar bills down the g-strings of muscular men whose dicks were bigger than mine. I imagined all sorts of bachelorette party scenarios, all of them bad.
As I was envisioning some muscle-bound dancer ignoring the scent trail Lisa had imprinted on her cheeks and her chin, one of Cynthia’s fattie girlfriends came wandering up.
“Artie? Which one of you is Artie?” she queried.
I cautiously raised my hand. She passed me a piece of paper as if we’d known each other all our lives. Then she waddled away. The paper read:
12370317
SHARP.
WTF?
I considered running after her. I had no idea what this cryptic message meant. At first I thought maybe this was a foray from the fattie. But she obviously didn’t know me from Adam. She’d had to ask who I was. She was passing me a message from someone else.
Lisa? It had to be!
I searched the crowd of crowing biddies for my bridal party partner. Finally I saw her getting into the stretch Escalade Cynthia had hired for the evening. Lisa paused and looked back. Our eyes met. She mouthed the word “SHARP”. Then she bounced into the stretch Escalade.
What did the eight digits mean? Obviously, it was up to me to decipher the message.
I took the numbers to mean a time. Lisa had said “SHARP”. What was the numeric format? 12:37:03:17? That would be HH:MM:SS:?? format. Why add the 17? What did it represent? This night was not going to end at 12:37. I figured that the debauchery would be just hitting stride then. Besides, I had no way of knowing where the women would be at that time. From what I could tell, Mike Simpson didn’t look like the type to schedule any part of his brother’s bachelor party at a male dancer club.
For that matter, why wouldn’t Lisa specify a place along with the time? She’s a Duke graduate. She should know that much at least.
Waitaminute. Maybe she DID specify a place. I looked at the number again. 12370317. 1237? That MUST be her hotel room!! Therefore 0317 must be military configuration for 03:17 a.m.!!
I congratulated myself on my savvy. Surely, the women would be back in their hotel rooms by that time. I wasn’t sure the groomsmen would be back by that time, though. Titty bars stay open until dawn. I tell you what—if nothing else happened in this life, I was going to be at the Sheraton at 03:17, on the twelfth floor, come hell or high water.
Having solved the mystery, I happily joined in with Kevon’s groomsmen and other assorted buddies for a night of dissolution. We hopped from titty bar to titty bar, hooting and laughing like Neanderthals, foisting Kevon upon the ugliest naked women we could find. There was this one bar where the woman’s titties “hung like sleeve of wizard” (in the immortal words of Borat). And we paid this woman to flap her titties in Kevon’s face. He was drunk by this time, or he would have fought each and every one of us.
In another bar, we paid the dancers to call Kevon up to the stage and grind on him until he was aroused. (These women weren’t ugly.) Then they stood him up so that we all could see the poke in his pants. Then they made him moonwalk until he fell off the stage into some big redneck’s beer. This almost generated a riot until Kevon stood up and ordered tequila shots all around. The redneck smiled a toothless grin and patted Kevon brusquely on the back as if they’d been long-lost brothers. We took the redneck (his name was Tommy) to the next two bars with us and had a rip-roaring time.