Minnie
Minnie was a deep-voiced woman. I know she was a woman because her adam’s apple was of normal size and about ten months after we had sex four times in one night I got a letter from her saying I was the father of a baby girl.
When Minnie told me her name that night, I thought it was funny because her voice was so deep, the opposite of the first Minnie I’d known, Minnie Mouse. Then I thought it was funny because I was pretty sure I’d never heard Minnie Mouse speak, and it was her “husband” Mickey who had the high voice. I’ll have to check to see if they were married or brother and sister. What would Rick Santorum say about cartoon mice marrying? If they gave money to the Republican Party it would be fine by him. I’m pretty sure he would want me to marry Minnie as well, but that crazy douche isn’t seeing a dime of my money.
Minnie’s voice wasn’t husky like Demi Moore’s. It was a smooth, deep voice and reminded me of Michael Douglas when he was saying, “Greed is good.” It wasn’t her voice that got me to have sex with her so much, though. She didn’t actually say very much. The fact that she would have sex with me is why I had sex with her, and that she seemed to like it was why we did it four times in one night, still my all time record for deep-voiced women and three more than for any other type of woman.
Needless to say it isn’t every day the undersexed single man finds out he is the father of a baby girl. I read the letter three times. It could have been a prank, but it would have taken a lot of effort to mail it with a Fresno postmark, and I didn’t think I had any friends who would go to that length, but one of them might have an uncle in California who’d been in a frat and still did things like snap his towel in the locker room and lived to pull one over on someone. No matter how stupid the crime or monumental the time to be wasted on a prank, it always seemed there was at least one willing accomplice. Look at all the guys who would work for the Joker in that Batman movie. Or the Nazis (though it is not very appropriate to insinuate their acts as “pranks”).
Minnie gave a pretty legitimate sounding email address and was doing what she’d been doing when I met her: working as a legal secretary, now for the counsel at Fresno State. I thought of her long legs and how nice her calves were. I tried to remember the girls I’d known with nice calves to figure out if they had deeper voices than usual. Probably not.
I read the letter again. She didn’t specifically ask for money but wanted to let me know so I could be involved if I wanted. That was good, reasonable thinking. She was probably exaggerating when she wrote that the baby had my nose. I bet she couldn’t remember what my nose looked like at all. Did we ever see each other again? I didn’t think so. I could remember parts of her well, but other parts were vague. And my nose was probably the least interesting feature: two holes separated by a piece of cartilage and hanging from a bunch of bones from my forehead. No, I think she was exaggerating.
Stefan
Stefan was a Frenchman who had a certain Je ne sais quois about him, from his thick, tousled dark hair to his sparse, clipped facial hair to his body odor, which was similar to an old vinyl car seat in the hot sun that a guy had just done a hundred pushups on before vomiting all over. He spoke English with a pleasant accent, not like Inspector Clouseau, and he was very attractive to women. I hung out with him not because I liked his company but because women were always drawn to his sulky good looks. Once they caught a whiff of him, a guy nearby who was even decent looking had a pretty good shot.
Stefan really liked to drink beer. His favorite kind of beer was free beer. If you type “Free Beer Signs” into Google Images, you will see Stefan in about three out of every ten photos. It is easy to tell it is Stefan because he will be standing apart from everyone else. I think getting beer for free made him happier since he was usually sad that women seemed to initially find him intriguing and then quickly escaped before he could close the deal. He didn’t have many friends and every one of them had the same agenda, so they weren’t about to tell him to take a shower or try some Axe and a toothbrush. I occasionally felt guilty about the whole set up, but that was usually only on Sunday mornings when I woke up in the apartment of some girl I’d never want to see again and it was too late to get to church, so the guilt was fairly diffuse and easily pushed aside when it was time to call Stefan again.
When we went out we had to be careful to rotate the spots. If Stefan had just been to one bar, the women would stay away from him if we went back there before the memories faded. Women don’t like to admit this but they are all so desperate they will keep at anything remotely promising. That said, you have to first get them to see some sort of promise, and that isn’t always easy. The challenge diminishes as the night goes on, and even Stefan could get lucky if he hung in there until 2am and spent most of his time on the balcony or veranda if it was windy. There were a lot of variables that needed to fall into place, and it is surprising he never seemed to figure it all out.
Stefan wasn’t dumb. He was a graduate student in mathematics and was well on his way to a PhD. He was well read and good at small talk if you could hang in there long enough. According to him, he had several girlfriends back in France, and his family had enough money that he went back a few times a year. He would never take us, though, as he thought we were bad luck with the ladies.
Rudy
Rudy was a guy I met at my first job and we still see each other a lot. He is the kind of guy who doesn’t make a good first impression and usually gets worse from there, but he had a nice car and had inherited some money from a rich uncle, so I could put up with his foibles in order to get somewhere happening.
When I say Rudy had foibles, that is like saying an elephant is gray and wrinkly. No, it is like saying people liked the way Elvis danced and sang. He had a lot of foibles. He wore his hair high and seemed unable to keep from touching it. He blinked and coughed before he lied, and he told lots of lies. He would wear the same clothes several days in a row, sometimes even washing them every day so they would look nice. The weirdest thing he did, though, involved people listening to music, first with Walkmans and later with CD players and iPods. If the person was drumming or acting like they were singing, Rudy would go up to them and try to guess the song.
His guess was usually some kind of pick up attempt when it was a female and usually a variety of insult when it was a guy, unless the guy looked a little cool. In that case, Rudy tried out his coolest groups to try to impress him. To insult a guy he wouldn’t ask for something as obviously sucky as Kenny G, but might mention Richard Marx or Glen Campbell, or, more recently, Nickelback. To pick up a girl he would try a rap song or something Goth or metal. He used My Chemical Romance a lot when their second CD came out. I think he was right only once when he got an older guy drumming the tricky parts of “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin.
This could be pretty embarrassing for us, but Rudy seemed incapable of embarrassment. I tried not to go with him to gyms or parks where there would be people working out with their headphones on. To his credit, he almost always got them to smile and occasionally they would say something witty, and that witticism would always be better than anything Rudy could come up with.
Craig
Craig chose a different path in life. He had gone to graduate school in Psychology and was a researcher at a minor university. He was very average in every way except for his enthusiasm for the study of the penis.
Since we went through puberty at the same time, I have been around to listen to him talk and talk about the penis. He insists he is not gay or even bisexual. Apparently he is mostly Craig-sexual, and he is that with an alarming frequency, but that is not what this is about.
Craig’s research is proof there is something for everyone in life: he has devoted himself to cataloguing the triumphs and tragedies of having an abnormally large penis. As a heterosexual male who has occasionally dated women for more than a few months at a time but has yet to marry, having a friend with this sort of interest can get a little troubling. It is absolutely a must not to have him around with a female you like or just want to bone. Despite an upbringing in a mainline protestant church and having parents who still seem to want him around, he talks of little else than cocks, rods, missiles, cum-guns, and shafts. If I have to hear him say “glans” one more time I may have to move to Thailand, a place Craig finds uninteresting because apparently there aren’t many penises longer than 8 inches there.
Craig’s most obvious dilemma is that most men do not want to talk about the size of their member to a stranger. Despite the internet and it’s suggestion otherwise, there aren’t that many “monster-cocks” that spray ejaculate like fire hoses. He has been able to track down only a few guys and it turns out that having a really big penis is mostly an inconvenience except when you want to have sex, and even then it can be a problem. Though many men want to have sex a lot of the time, even if you have a big penis you won’t be able to unless you are making movies or are some sort of hustler, like the guy in “Boogie Nights” (Craig’s favorite movie). Some of the guys do go down that road, but if you don’t live near a place where there are people making movies or people wanting to have sex with a guy with a large penis (there are apparently more male than female customers for that), Craig seems to think it is like having a Ferrari when you live at the end of a long, rutted dirt road.
Craig wishes more than anything that he had a huge penis. I think I would pass if given the opportunity. Having to hide something like that most of the time would be a drag, and not hiding it would most likely get me in jail. If only he would stop coming over unannounced with his videos and stop emailing me pictures at my work address.
Richard
Believe it or not, I know an actual U.S. Senator. He used to refer to himself as “Dick,” but now only other people do, and they are mostly not his friends. Richard is a few years into his second term, elected by one of the states in the northern Midwest, as best I can tell because no one else wanted the job or could fill out the application.
I met Richard in a gay bar in D.C. I am not gay, but I was there with a friend who told me a lot of Republicans came there, and he thought that was amazingly queer in so many respects. Being a bland-looking senator from the Midwest, Richard made no attempt at disguise, wearing tight jeans with cowboy boots, a long-sleeved plaid shirt and a baseball cap (Twins). He was one of the few men there that did not have a mustache.
My friend recognized him and we tried not to be too obvious as we started a conversation about the Twins and how much they paid their catcher. My friend made a good joke about not letting that guy find any tax shelters for all that money. That got Richard going. The only thing he hated more than having sex with his prim, proper wife in the missionary position once a week with the lights off and some Barry Manilow playing was the IRS.
After listening to his stump speech on that for a while, we tried to change the subject. “Of course I’m a Christian! I’m a Republican!” was his reply to my friend’s question about his religious beliefs. My friend took a chance and asked him for some proof.
“What do you mean?”
My friend moved in a little closer and said, “Are you wearing a crucifix? Can you quote some chapter and verse for us? Have you given money to any poor people lately?”
The last question seemed to inspire him. “Jesus said, ‘The poor you will always have with you.’ That’s in a Gospel!”
“What does that mean to you? I’ve never understood why so many Christians quote that passage while they are talking about cutting welfare or denying health insurance.”
“No matter what you do, there will always be poor people, so it is best to leave well enough alone.” He seemed pleased with himself and leaned back on the bar while he took a long pull from his Bud Light.
My friend feigned annoyance, waving his hand and starting to move away. He turned and leaned back in to Richard and said, very discreetly, “By the way, I work for the IRS, and I also know that Jesus said, 'Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give unto God what is God’s.'" We occasionally go back to see if he is around, and he is always exceedingly polite.
Seamus
Seamus was Irish but he didn’t drink. Everyone thought that was weird, including Seamus, but it still didn’t make him want to chug a brew or drink tequila from a woman’s navel. He was poorly groomed with a ratty beard and shoulder length hair that was receding at the temples, and he usually wore some kind of rugby jersey out with us.
He always told people he’d left Ireland because there were too many drunks, but I only ever saw him at bars here, and everyone around him was pretty loaded. He was some sort of paradox, or at least an enigma. He told me he never goes to church anymore and he always wears a condom to have sex, even when he masturbates. He has never played golf, tossed a caber, or played rugby for that matter. He has no green shirts or sweaters, either.
One time I asked him when he’d been back to Ireland last, and he said he’d not been back since he left. Didn’t he miss his family? Not particularly. But all of them, he didn’t keep in touch or wish he could see them? No, not really. Then he asked me if I thought Denver had wasted that first round pick on Tebow, because it didn’t look to him like he could ever throw accurately enough from an NFL pocket and really wasn’t much good at running besides barreling straight into the backs of his linemen? I really should ask to see his passport.
*People like these may exist, but for me only in a made up world in which I get out more often and talk to people I would never come across otherwise.
