The Unanticipated Dinner Guest, or The Hitchhiker, a Short-Story
Acknowledgments: for Joe Biden—see you in hell; for Sophia Delia Black and her hilarious series on Amazon, “Single Broke Drunk,” about a twenty-eight year-old alcoholic who after conking her boss in the head with a phone receiver drunk one morning at her marketing job, moves in with her divorced mom and sobers up after getting into a drunk driving accident and works in a supermarket; for Jack Kerouac and John Kennedy Toole for being writers who lived with their moms; for my friend Alex for encouraging me to womanize; for my sister who over Christmas was encouraging me to womanize whether someone’s already in a relationship or not; for myself for still repressing this terrible ungodly personality trait; for myself for valiantly nobly not letting anyone pick me up in that supermarket, and also dodging their less straightforward conniving ways to see and meet me outside the store; for Riley Poisson for being the first hot girl to knit me a scarf; for a Mariah and Mercedes for my writing attracting them to me more than myself, and how this is going to be a lifelong phenomenon now, there being no better way to meet girls than announce you’re a writer and a damned good one, and then have them read it
Author’s Note: this is an interesting one. Earlier I mentioned how women come onto me without me even wanting them to. Here is a good short glimpse of how it happens. I’m obsessed with this. Because I want nothing to do with their girlfriends, but I have my friends lashing out at me later anyway. Like blame her or blame yourself. The only crime you can accuse me of is that I’ve read a lot more books than you have and been in a lot more pain than you and that I’m not afraid to talk about it freely. You don’t hate me. What you hate is yourself. That’s because you don’t know how to love yourself. If you had any notion of your own worth and powers, you would never be jealous of or hate anybody.
“Dad I feel like I can always depend on women whenever I feel down,”—me in a revelatory text to my dad after lifting myself out of a bout of severe depression by raking in two hot girls’ numbers, Lara Johnson and Nicole Abraham (the barista) in a coffee shop called, “Opus;” indeed ladies it is in your hands the ability to stabilize my low moods
“Haven’t you heard God’s a woman? Nothing embarrasses Her.”— the Georgene character in Couples by John Updike.
“The Swing” by Jean Honore Frogonard, a painting controversial in its day because it implies that infidelity might not be bad—of course it’s a highly amusing painting to me with the glowing happy damsel bathed in light and the mesmerized aristocrat beneath her looking up her dress
The Unanticipated Dinner Guest, or The Hitchhiker
by Sir Jay Burkett
Centerport,
“It’s very silly to me how religious we are these days about drinking at five. It was only a few decades ago when drinking not just during the day but even in the morning was normal. When I studied alcohol in Ireland I drank almost as soon as I had breakfast and coffee. Sometimes I had Irish coffee if I ate out too with my bangers and mash and I would put whiskey in my thermos and drink in class. I hate my generation. I hate our times. They’re so repressive and abstemious judgmental and overly cautious and chilly.”
They were having over for dinner—maybe it was a big mistake— the most fascinating because he was the most eccentric and learned and anxiety-ridden dinner guest in the history of the world.
First he liked dry vermouth in a glass and vermouth alone; straight mixed with nothing, a mug of German beer on the side. He barely ate. He was thin as a rake.
Helen Sparks was beside herself with how besotted she had suddenly become to her own horror at the dinner table. On the dinner table. She wanted the talent to bang her on the table. Her husband would later chide and tease Helen for being “rather charmed” by him.
“This is great? What is this, calamari?”
“Yes you have eyes don’t you?”
“Hey that reminds me. You know since I was a little boy I acutely resented women who showed too much cleavage. Because you know on one hand, they want you to look at their tits—and if I could get away with it I’d gaze at them all night, I’m a tits not an ass guy; I don’t why so many men love asses so much; a big ass makes a woman seem unintelligent to me; tits are a lot finer, they produce milk for babies, an ass does nothing—on the other hand you can’t look at anyone’s tits for any longer than a split of a split of a hair of a second, and not even a hair, even that’s too long, especially with the husband or the best friend around.”
At the moment Vivian Boulderwallow a ridiculously hideously gorgeous blonde who looked a hell of a lot like the Australian porn star Monica Mayhem with massive eyes bearing whole universes became self-conscious as to her own cleavage on full display. “Am I making you uncomfortable?” She teased even with an Australian accent so she was exactly like her.
The guest looked downwind. She put her hand over her chest.
“Not now,” he said sheepish. Everybody laughing. He was telling everyone how his anxiety was so bad dinner tables seemed to levitate when he’s hungry enough, and he was always ravenous; or when he’s driving he hears a car falling apart on the highway, and he starts wondering if its his car.
Now over dinner: tits, eye contact and anxiety.
Vivian’s husband next to him took a phony swing limp through the air at him, for which he anticipating it ducked, genuinely terrified. Everybody laughed. “Why,” the guest said in a tone of lubricated liquid humor. Mixed with trestles and tresses and trusses of longstanding lifelong indignation. “Do you want me to look at your boobs when I can’t? When I’m not allowed?”
“Well maybe you are allowed,” Vivian flirtatiously.
Is she hitting on me? The guest wondered. His anxiety hit the ceiling.
1.
“What are we going to do with you?” Helen said next to him.
Maybe stop stressing me out he said in his head.
The women here listening and looking at him like he were the dinner, not the dinner. Everyone’s old husband was oblivious of course, so the pretty lady next to him didn’t mind if she stabbed him gently with a fork in the leg.
“OW!” The interesting dashing man whispered. “What was that for?”
“Forgive me,” she said “if I appear to have mistaken you for the repast.”
“You’re married, damnit.”
“My husband’s a cool guy and look he’s got every mistress you need multiple hands with a lot of fingers to keep track of them all. And he’s old and I’m young. And I like you.”
“No!”
2.
He was a hitchhiker and a biker. No one knew why. Just as every man was locking his wife and girlfriend in the attic, because of his short-story A Driving CALAMITY, this guy this weird kid making himself and his chronic anxiety and his humor and girls he depends on to escape it—Americans in his neighborhood in their enveloping paranoia conspired to confiscate his car! Even though he never drank and drove, or drove and drank like the hysterically unreliable narrator. This was while real drunk drivers, because of high school parties on Long Island were the ones you really had to worry about. But ever since he was born, he was loved, admired, and hated loathed feared envied. He ran off by accident with his friends’ dates, lost friends, made new ones very fast and he was the bane of his family’s existence, the black sheep the demon child; this was because he couldn’t do anything with them not without getting stone piss blackout drunk like every single Christmas. Just as it wasn’t this writer who wrote about the rise decline and fall of his British empire of a career as an anguished pickup artist you had to worry about seducing your wife, not per se, it was your immediate friends and their wives who were at least as tempting and damned sneaky and artful.
While you’re worried about the stupid writer, it’s your best friends and cousins actually fucking your wife.
3.
Anyway everyone in their shamelessness were in all events conspiring to make his life harder than it needed to be. So they found him barefoot and starving on Jericho Turnpike. Who wasn’t going to pick up a pick-up artist who was cute as a teddy bear and a puppy?
“Back up!” Helen said to her friend who was driving, “What’s that J. Crew model doing barefoot? He needs our help. A little rest. I’m going to eat him for dinner!”
4.
The men got up and left to go to a strip club and then everyone’s wife came onto him a little like animals. They were literally not letting him leave their house, tapping into one of his worst nightmares which was also a perverse fantasy being held hostage by a beautiful woman like Stephen King lived in terror of his own fans. Be careful what you write about.
They were closing the blinds, tying or chaining him to the bed.
Grayson the old husband said, “I want you to film what you do with him, everything you do. Then even if he sues us we’re putting it on the internet to humiliate him.”
“No! You’re filming this too?” The writer exploded when he saw the camera.
“Yup!” Helen said on his side with Vivian on the other at the foot of the bed.
“What do I have to do to get out of here?”
“There’s nothing you can do, I’m afraid.”
“There has to be something!”
“Nope,” taking off their shoes and sliding, tracing fingers over their stockings.
“I can’t do this.”
“Yes you can.”
“You will.”