Tales of Latent Heterosexuality

This is my favorite encounter from a fun party I attended in Downtown LA on Saturday night.

I was unusually drunk; unusual because I don’t usually drink and when I do drink I don’t usually drink that much. I wasn’t THAT drunk, and I certainly wasn’t THAT DRUNK (I’ve lapdanced your co-workers or mooned your grandma…I’ve been THAT DRUNK…this was not that). I was drunk, let’s stop trying to quantify it.

Drunk or sober, I am always a gentleman. I helped a girl named Erica who may or may not have been on hallucinogenic mushrooms (I’m not trying to protect a drug user, I honestly don’t know if she was tripping) locate and open a beer, at which point she followed me upstairs to smoke what may or may not have been marijuana (this time I’m trying to protect the drug users, it was definitely marijuana).

Here’s where Caesar enters the picture. He may or not have been Arabic and he may or may not have been Mexican, but he definitely wasn’t Roman like his name suggests (sometimes accidental racism can’t be stopped, you can only hope to contain it). So Caesar and I are about to start the rubber match of our best of 3 thumb-wrestling competition when he notices that Erica’s needs were not being met. I don’t know what Erica’s needs were, but this international man of mystery wanted to meet them. This sounded fine to me until Caesar decided that Erica and I needed each other.

Erica may or may not have liked me (I have never in the history of ever known whether someone liked me). She probably just came upstairs for the weed. I definitely only wanted the weed. But Caesar persisted. Here was the remainder of our conversation:

CAESAR
Ben, I don’t want you to think. From the gut, tell me what you want from this evening.

ME
Uhhh…

CAESAR
What happened?

ME
My gut didn’t say anything.

CAESAR
Try again. Tell me what you want from this evening.

ME
To get drunk!

CAESAR
That’s what you think you want?

ME
I wasn’t thinking. That’s what my gut wants.

CAESAR
FROM your gut, not what it wants. What do YOU want from this evening?

ME
A Subway sub sandwich!

CAESAR
Ben, you are standing here with a beautiful woman. She likes you.

ME
She does? I think she likes marijuana (or whatever we were smoking).

ERICA
Uhhhh…

CAESAR
You need to acknowledge this beautiful woman.

ME
Beautiful woman, I acknowledge you.

CAESAR
Ben, c’mon. You need to acknowledge her.

ME
BEATUFUL WOMAN, I ACKNOWLEDGE YOU!

ERICA
Stop saying that.

BEN
Okay.

CAESAR
Ben, this woman came up here to be with you and you aren’t acknowledging her.

ME
I tried. She didn’t like it. What are you? Her pimp?

CAESAR
Ben, you’re blowing this. Talk to the beautiful woman.

ME
Okay.

Caesar leaves.

ME
I’m drunk. This is the time of night when people start taking advantage of me.

ERICA
What?

ME
Are you planning on taking advantage of me because I’m drunk?

ERICA
I’ll be right back.

She never came back. Whether she liked me at the beginning of the conversation I’ll never know. If she did, by the end I had made her stop. So I used my time to convince a male dancer named Marlon we should choreograph something for the party. He said no, which was the only bummer of the evening. That, and Caesar and I never completed our thumb war. And I didn’t get my Subway sub sandwich. Though the latter was my own undoing.

Take two related things from this story: 1) I am so socially awkward it’s adorable. And 2) I am so adorably awkward it’s social. People will pay good money to watch me awkward it up. They have. Those people were my parents and they were paying people to socialize me. But I think it still exemplifies my point. Either that or it’s the exception that makes the rule. But I’m not really clear on how those work.

Please don’t take advantage of me.

My name is Ben and I blogged this.