Is California Part Of America Pt 4.

During football season the outcome of my weeks are entirely dependent on whether or not the Chicago Bears win on Sunday. Because they won this week I feel comfortable enough to discuss the most unsavory event that has occurred in my six weeks in Long Beach.

The Gay Rapist of Long Beach

Our usual watering hole has become “The Red Room” off of 4th street in Long Beach. They serve 32 ounce schooners of Pabst for four dollars and have a near entirely male bar tending staff which equates to better service. As a result of my years of pizza delivery I am not a phenomenal tipper, I have driven 15 miles round trip for a dollar tip too many times to feel the need to give a dollar for someone walking a beer to me from ten feet away.

I also carry no illusions about taking cute bartenders home. Male bartenders have to work harder for their drinks and that gender based ethic usually equates to a more expedient service that can wrangle a dollar tip out of me. Cute women will get tips anyway, so they need not work for it. The one female bartender at the Red Room is a woman in her forties with some severe physical handicaps, he head has been permanently tweaked to the left side and she walks around with a non-subtle limp. I usually tip her fifty cents.

The night before our trip to Santa Barbara, Ben and I started our usual walk to the Red Room at 11:30. The Red Room has a line and the bouncer, who always looks at my Illinois Driver’s license skeptically even though I am at that bar twice a week, informs us that we will probably have to wait a half hour to get in. Not being people who like to wait in line to spend money, we take our business to “Vern’s”, the punk bar.

The punk bar has a two very fashion oriented female punk bartenders and they are adorned with all the staples of their counter-culture. Green and black vertical striped sweaters hanging around their shoulders, piercings and tattoos galore, meticulously ripped tights hanging out from under black mini-skirts and loads of bitchy attitude. We spend five bucks a piece on 24 ounce tall boys of PBR and immediately begin wishing we were at the Red Room, where we could have been drinking 8 ounces more of beer for a dollar less.

I am dressed in a white button up collared shirt and nice slacks, my usual work attire that I have not changed out of. In my casual attire I usually feel more “Punk” than most punks since I have not spent a dime on clothes for myself in years and my t-shirt regiment is full of hand me downs and thrift store gems. Though I listen to Dylan and the Stones I am also familiar on a shallow level with the major tenants of punk music, so usually when I am wearing my thrift-store clothes I can look down on the fashion oriented punks who reek of effort (the Clash would never spend 25 bucks on a Misfits T-shirt). However in a white collared shirt and slacks I am a glaring pariah in this bar and through sideways glances and sneers it is apparent no one is going to want to talk to me here. No one accept the gay rapist.

Now I’ll prefix the rest of the story by saying I have no problem the “gay” part of the term “gay rapist”, but the rapist offends me. I have never raped, or date raped, or drunk raped any woman and as a straight man I have never worried about some burly girl with a female mullet, boots and flannel shirt taking advantage of me. Mostly because that woman I described has, through my experience working in Hardware stores, always been a Lesbian.

I don’t fear some fairy taking advantage of me either, I feel like I would be able to fight off someone who primarily slaps in fights, that is until I met Norrie.

Norrie approaches Ben while I am in the bathroom. He buys him a shot and being the perpetual cheapskate I am, I state “Where is mine”. Norrie is a skinny asian, maybe five foot ten, a hundred pounds at best and extremely feminine. At no point did I ever ask him if he was gay because there was absolutely no need to. Whenever a man refers to another as “Honey”, sexual preference is a point that is inferred and does not need to be vocalized. Norrie hands me the shot he is holding on to, Jagermeister, or the homosexual communities version of a “Roofie”. I drink it, Ben drinks his and Norrie demands that Ben buy the next round.

Ben does not need to do this, being that neither of us want to spend our Friday night flirting with a man. But my inherent cheapness senses the opportunity for free drinks, so I suggest Ben and Norrie “Rock, Paper, Scissors” over who buys the next round. Ben has an abnormal ability to win RPS matches and many of my friends believe that Ben can look into people’s souls, only in the RPS context. First round Ben shoots paper, Norrie shoots Rock. I am pleased with my suggestion. Second round Ben shoots Scissors, Norrie shoots Rock, a ballsy rock to rock move that no one saw comming out of a gay man. All for suspense I think to myself. Third, and deciding round, Ben shoots paper and Norrie shoots Scissors, and Ben travels to the bar defeated.

Neither of us can believe Ben lost, and Norrie with a large smile on his face heads for the bathroom. I lean over to Ben at the bar and say “Lets just go to the Red Room, we don’t need to buy this dude drinks.” To his credit Ben is a man of his word and says “No man, I lost” and he motions for the bitchy bartender’s attention. We will both soon regret the decision, and Ben will soon regret those words.

I go back to the table where our beers are and begin drinking with Norrie. “I want to give you a rim-job” Norrie genially puts to me. “Buddy,” I state in the most hetero sounding way I can muster “You are going to have to get me really drunk” words that I soon will regret. Instead of taking that as a joke, Norrie takes it as a challenge, or rather an invite and for the rest of the night I don’t buy a single drink.

Ben ends up buying three shots, two more tall boys simply because “Vern’s” has an exorbitant twenty dollar minimum on credit card charges. “Just charge me twelve for the shot’s and I’ll give you the rest in tip.” The bartender says that they do not do that there so Ben ends up spending twenty two dollars and stiffing the Bartender on a tip out of principle. “Tell your Boss this is why you didn’t get tipped!”

Norrie, Ben, Norrie’s fat lady friend and I sit at the table and drink. Norrie buys two more rounds of shots and two more rounds of tall-boys. By the time the bartenders yell “last call” I have a full PBR sitting next to my half-full PBR and I am drunk. At some point in the conversation I am asked by Norrie where me and Ben live and I say “Ocean BLVD” to which he says “No your address” to which I haphazardly state “8** E ocean BLVD”. Upon leaving Ben and I both stick our full tall boys in our back pocket and sneak out. Norrie yells “After party and your guys house!” which is our cue to book as soon as he enters the bathroom.

Now during the period drinking Norrie asks for my phone number. Now initially I tried to make one up that sounded California-esque “Uh, 510-381-uh . . . 4576?”. Norrie obviously has had this happen before. “That is not your number Honey, your making it up.” I tell him I am not and he calls my bluff by calling the number. I try to reach the button on the side of my phone that adjusts the ring volume in a clever rouse to make it sound like it is ringing but it doesn’t work out. He smells my deceit and begins to pout. “You could have just said you don’t want me to have your number” which I could have if I was sick of the free drinks, which I never am. So I say some bull-shit about how I was just “Joking” and give him my real cell phone number because I am dumb.

About a block away from the Bar, beer in tow the calls begin. Norrie calls me no more than twenty times in the eight minutes it takes to walk home drunk from Vern’s. I walk into the house and five minutes later a tapping begins on our window. That motherfucker remembered our address and decided that our invite to have a drink after was true. It definitely was not. I sneak into the back of our complex and call my buddy Joe Coia in Illinois so it looks like I have a reason to not be answering his phone calls. He keeps calling and is no yelling “Braddddd . . . Braddddd.” Ben told him I was in the back because he accurately assessed the problem of the gay man outside as Brad’s problem, being that I was the asshole who granted him to our address and my phone number.

After ten minutes of phone calls and yelling I half smile to myself and state “damn, what a persistent mother-fucker” and let him into the backyard. I offer him a smoke and tell him I am about to crash out, something Ben has already done. We bullshit for a minute and I head inside. “Can I crash here, I have to work tomorrow so I’ll be gone by the time you wake up” Norrie asks of me to which I reply “Yeah you can crash on the couch as long as you don’t steal anything” which he agrees to even though he is lying. Norrie, in fact, has been planning to steal the virginity of my asshole since he first laid eyes on me.

I walk into my newly acquiesced closet room and fall flat on my face drunk. I begin to have a dream about my girlfriend, of the sexual nature. We are kissing and caressing and beginning to become intimate when all of the sudden I wake up to a small Asian gay man, wearing nothing but a beige pair of briefs, kissing the small of my back.

“WHOA WHOA WHOA” I yell as my brain, inebriated and weary begins to asses the situation. “Not me buddy, sorry not me” I state but to no avail. They gay man grabs for crotch.

I understand at that moment how my girlfriend has felt every time I began to put the moves on her. I start with kissing and caressing and when turned away I lunge for what I want, a last ditch effort, a salvo of sexual energy that I always assumed she found sexy but now know she probably only considers molestation. Molestation is not sexy, and I have no idea how any woman has ever put up with what I to that point viewed as “the moves”.

“Fuck man No means No!” I yell as I begin to feel for every virgin on prom night.

“You have a boner don’t you” Norrie replies, which in my life is the most innacurate accusation ever levied against me.

“I most certainly do not buddy” and I stand out of with this little clump of Asian homosexuality straddling my leg. I have to walk both of us from my room to the couch and peel Norrie off of me. As unsettling as everything to this point was, the most unsettling part was that Norrie insisted on moaning the entire 8 foot walk.

“Alright man, uh, go to bed” I say as I push the homosexual onto the couch. Many of my friends may ask why I didn’t beat the living fuck out of this kid, which I most certainly would have had the right to do, which I most certainly could have. I don’t know, I don’t know why I even let him stay on the couch. I was drunk, but I guess there is no more satisfaction in beating up a gay man than there is in beating up a woman. I have no idea why I decided to even say sorry to him for the fact that I wasn’t gay, and why I went back into my room and stayed awake for another half hour watching the double doors to my room praying they wouldn’t open. I think that in my subconscious I was afraid of the fact that if I began to beat the shit out of Norrie he would probably find something erotic about the exchange.

The next day I wake up and my butt hole is not bleeding and Norrie is gone. Ben walks out of his room and I begin to recant the story of what happened when Ben interjects. “Yeah he’s gone . . . uh . . . I called him a taxi this morning at like seven.”

“What did he knock on your door and ask you,” I ask.

“No, I woke up at seven and saw him lying on the floor of my bedroom wearing nothing but tan colored underwear. He asked me if I could call him a taxi and I said ‘Yes I definitely can'”

I have never been against homosexuality in my adult life, neither can I ever remember calling someone who was gay a “fag”. I only call my straight friends “fag” when they do something feminine. Not even an attempted rape was enough for me do be embittered against the gay community and I wonder what that says about me. I would like to think that it means that I am a non-prejudiced person, but the night is probably a metaphor for how much I like free booze.