Poolside: Dead of night

DATE: Friday, July 29
PLACE: Emma's backyard
POISON OF CHOICE: 1.75 liter bottle of Popov Vodka
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Me, Emma, Rachel, Mallory, Josh, Alison, Amanda, Johnny


The Maryland Heights bars are closing right about now, and I'm sitting on a wrought iron patio chair around a matching table in Emma's backyard.

We're talking about a night that occurred a couple weeks back, in which a group of twelve to fifteen of our friends and friends of friends had spent several hours drinking at back-to-back bars then returned to Emma's backyard to swim in her pool and, well, get even more fucked up.

There was definitely a Sun Way Up In The Sky / Car Ride Home Kinda Hazy ending to that particular night and morning. I remember the clock reading somewhere in the 7:40's when I returned home and cooked myself an egg, cheese and garlic omelette.

Emma tells me she was still poolside for at least a half-hour after I'd passed out with that belly full of omelette. Her boyfriend, drunk and exploring the deep end, just wouldn't fucking come inside.

EMMA: As long as I've known him, I mean he can swim, but he's afraid to go spelunk in the deep end or open his eyes underwater. But this time he's drunk, he's going for it! Doing front flips and back flips, diving for flourescent pool rings, eyes wide open.
ME: His eyes were red as a motherfucker the next afternoon, I bet.
EMMA: Crimson. Fucking crimson. But here I am, I'm cleanin' up after everyone - dozens of empty beer bottles and half-deflated pool floaties spread all around - and Johnny's splashing in the water like an eight year old.
ME: And the sun's way up in the sky by now.
EMMA: It's like 8:30 in the goddamn morning. All through the neighborhood I can hear the sound of responsible people's garage doors coming up and everyone backing out of their driveways and into their workday. And here I am begging my boyfriend to come inside and go to bed.
ME: And he's blowing bubbles underwater with his eyes bugged open.
EMMA: He was getting on my nerves. Telling me shit like, "Babe, this is a breakthrough, I've been waiting my whole life to enjoy diving! I need you to let me have this!"
ME: (laughs)
EMMA: I mean gimme a fucking break.

--

I was absolutely going to stay home tonight and stay sober. Scout's honor.

But god damn Emma, she knows exactly how to socially seduce me, to push my fucking drinking buttons. We were sitting at work after finishing our closing duties and watching the remaining handful of restaurant employees file out the door.

I sat sideways on a booth bench at Table 21, my back to the wood-and-glass five-foot divider between the nonsmoking and smoking areas of the dining room. Emma sat aross from me, and we talked about miscellany. Fifteen or so minutes of idle prattle about workplace gossip and the recent local highway pileup that took the lives of five family members traveling in the same van.

The victims were on Interstate 44, right at the exit to the St. Louis Six Flags, a park full of innocence and wonder, cheap fun and throwaway amusement. Two young boys, their mom and an aunt and uncle were rear-ended by a dump truck in what the newspaper called "a fiery crash."

The article noted that authorities had refused to comment on whether the family was headed to Six Flags - why ruin every other parkgoer's day with that kind of trivial information?

The now-deceased young boys had a third brother, Alex, 11. He wasn't
with the five victims because he was away at that other childhood ritual of summer's dog days - summer camp.

So Emma posed the question, what would it be like to be Alex? You're in the middle of swimming and archery and making tacky leather corn purses out of stinky half-moon pieces of leather and colored plastic lanyards. And you get that kind of news.

"You're that 11-year-old kid, your dad shows up out of the blue," Emma says. "You're thinking, What the fuck? Camp's not over until Sunday.
"And Dad says, 'Get your stuff, it's time to go.'
"You ask, 'What's going on?'
"And all he'll say is, 'Get in the car and I'll tell you.' Then you find out your mom and two brothers all died together in a grisly fucking car accident."

In conjunction, Emma threw out another one: "How would it feel to be the grandparents? In one second, you lose three children and two grandchildren. How could you live your life after that?"

"God, I don't know," I told her. "I'd probably crawl into my head and never come back out."

--

I was presented with several social options for the evening - sit around with eight to ten friends at a house party tossed by my friends/coworkers/acquaintances Ashley and Jessica, spend a couple hours at Hilltop playing shuffleboard and/or singing karaoke, per usual. Or pick up some beer and hang out in the Keller backyard.

Now, the Keller backyard is a frequent afterparty destination in the summertime. Emma lives with her parents, a sister, an uncle, two cousins and - half to two-thirds of the time - her boyfriend of more than five years, Johnny.

The Keller house is a hub of activity, with two other sisters popping into town from time to time, extended relatives and neighbors frequently dropping by and, two or three nights a month, friends and strangers partying until sunup in the backyard.

The backyard patio features a hot tub, a hammock, three tables and probably a couple dozen chairs and deckchairs of all different designs and eras.

Just past that is a sizeable in-ground pool, three feet in the shallow end and eight feet in the deep end. Luckily for our drunk asses, there's a shallow ledge all around the inside of the pool.

Scattered around the pool - an amalgam of inflatable rafts, inner tubes, foam noodles, beach balls, snorkels, diving masks, plastic rings and glow sticks.

This - along with a cooler full of beer, a pocketful of one-hits, good music filling the beautiful, still weather of the dead of night in the middle of summer - is all a stuck-in-adolescence, indulgent human being could reasonably ask for.

That Emma's parents, sister, uncle and cousins (not to mention neighbors) also put up with these pre- and sometimes post-dawn drunken romps and leave all kinds of junk food stocked in the kitchen... well, that's icing on the cake.

So it was a tempting destination, as ever, but I had a nagging twinge of resolve. Go home, Andrew, you can work out, save your money, get some writing done, not be hung over in the morning. These are thoughts of self-preservation I manage to shut down several times weekly, but tonight Emma subtly did the work for me.

She pushed my fucking drinking buttons. I had turned down all the existing options - house party, Hilltop, evening around the pool - when she just kind of casually announced we'd stop at the neighborhood liquor store so she could get some vodka to drink around her pool. And just chill out, put on music, enjoy the weather... do everything I love to do.

I had my swimming trunks on not five minutes later.

Not ten minutes after that, I was mixing club soda with a sizeable liquid chunk of Popov vodka. Its yellow $12.99 price sticker still protruded from the cap of the 1.75 liter plastic jug in a blatantly tacky display of just how much ethanol you can buy in bulk for a cheap price.

--

"You are not getting a pet snake in your room! No way!" She's shaking her head as she throws in another pair of no ways: "No way! No way! What if it gets out?"

"It's not gonna get out, Emma."

"My room's right across the hall. I'd have a heart attack. No way!"

Emma has gone into pseudo-hysterical mode all of a sudden. Her 13-year-old cousin, Rachel, has joined us on the patio and just announced that Aunt Erica - matron of the house - has granted her permission to have a pet snake of up to ten-foot long in an aquarium. Emma is deathly afraid of snakes, spiders and, fuck, I've seen her run screaming from a lightning bug before. She's a nervous sort of girl.

And she's gotten drunk in light speed, it appears. Emma is usually a couple notches below me on the old Waste-O-Meter when we drink together - tonight is an infrequent exception.

Case in point - the conversation soon turns from, I can't live in a house with a snake in it, to, I can make your snake love me more than it loves you.

Rachel, the sober soon-to-be ninth grader, calmly tries to explain to Emma that snakes are cold-blooded beings incapable of loyalty and love and are mainly just meant to be looked at and admired. Emma doesn't buy it.

Emma, in fact, soon becomes possessed with the idea that Rachel's pet snake will become her (i.e. Emma's) cuddly, scale-covered companion. They argue about this for a couple minutes; I sit, sip my drink, listen and laugh as the remarks out of Emma's mouth get more and more implausible.

EMMA: My question is, if the snake loves me and wants to be with me, if the snake will curl up next to me and make me feel good, can the snake sleep with me?
RACHEL: No, it's impossible.
EMMA: Fuck you! I will bet you I can teach your snake to be loving.
RACHEL: You need to get your own snake.
EMMA: I could train a snake to do tricks. I could teach a snake to bark. Maybe not a "bow wow" or a "woof," but some kind of (unintelligible gurgling noise).

I've got a pocket composition book out on the table by this point, trying to write down all this outlandish shit word for word. I give up by the point at which Emma boasts, "I can teach a regular snake to rattle!"

I never thought my friend would turn out to have such a God complex about her snakecharming abilities.

--

The conversation shifts as the minutes go by. Young Rachel reveals her desire to study snakes and grow up to be a herpetologist. I tell them I'm surprised that I even remember the word herpetologist.

It's only really because of an oddball friend I had in late-elementary and middle school who was hellbent on becoming a studier of snakes and would drop the H-word into conversation as frequently as possible.

This friend used to spend entire recess periods in fifth and sixth grade pretending he was a dog, communicating only through growls, barks and yelps and scratching at fleas that weren't there. I think he bit me once.

Last I heard, my ex-canine buddy was off to attend his freshman year at Yale. I still wait on his parents every now and then at work. All three of us pretend we don't know each other from fifteen years ago.

Emma still insists she can train a snake. She offers as proof the following - her boyfriend, Johnny, has a lizard in an aquarium. When Johnny is away at work , his grandmother (who lives with Johnny in her house) will go into his room and blow cigarette smoke in the lizard's face.

I've seen Johnny buy cigarettes for his grandma, too. Her lung poison of choice is a brand of cheap, unfiltered Canadian smokes I've never heard of. A poor aquarium-encased lizard wouldn't stand a chance. Indeed, by Emma's account, the lizard is thoroughly addicted to granny's Canadian unfiltereds.

"I have seen the lizard exhale," Emma proclaims.

--

This is my fourth, or maybe my fifth drink. I've been pouring them heavy and kinda fast, but I'm still in control. I come out of the kitchen and into the family room at the back of the house. It's the only path from kitchen to patio, and even at two in the morning, still houses two wide-awake, sober members of the family.

An older sister of Emma's, Amanda, is playing online poker on a DSL-equipped personal computer. The Keller mom and daughters are all enormous fans of online gambling.

I'm not really friends with Amanda, but I've partied with her off and on and usually when I see her exchange small-talk pleasantries. Tonight we've already covered the old standby topic, What movies have you seen recently?

It's a step up from, Hot one out there today, ain't it? and, How 'bout those baseball Cardinals, huh? But it's still definitely small talk. Turns out Amanda and I both liked Wedding Crashers and thought War of the Worlds was a little overblown.

Six feet or so to Amanda's right, Emma's boyfriend Johnny is sitting on the floor, prying open a computer's hard drive. He's worked with me as a waiter for five years, but he kicks ass on repairing cars and computers, and he's finally getting paid to do the latter.

Johnny's been repairing computers for Emma's uncle on a freelance basis, but he's about to start his first Real Job. About which he is nervous, naturally, and for which needs to purchase an entire new wardrobe. Lots of dress shirts, ties and slacks. I hate slacks.

I ask Johnny what he's up to; he spews out a bunch of technical jargon I don't even pretend to follow, and I leave Johnny to his work. I'm on my way back outside when I notice a travel brochure kind of sitting askew on a desk shelf.

"Whose Schlitterbahn pamphlet is this?" I ask.

Amanda perks up. "Oh, that's mine, I just got that."

And suddenly we have something fun to talk about. I watched an hourlong Travel Channel special on the Schlitterbahn Waterparks. There are two in Texas, one in New Braunfels and the other in South Padre Island. The New Braunfels location is the largest water park in the world, and the newer Padre branch has revolutionized the aquatic amusement scene.

Traditionally, there are two things that suck about water parks. First, if it's even remotely busy, you end up waiting twenty minutes to an hour for a ride that lasts 45 seconds if you're lucky and eight seconds if you're not. You're there to play in the water, and you spend most of your time on dry land, feet sizzling on wooden slates and getting scraped up by concrete sidewalk paths.

Second, before you ride every waterslide, you have to climb an endless series of stairs to the top of the launch tower. That's four to eight stories for every slide you ride. You get your exercise in, yeah, but if you're like me, sometimes you want the line to be kinda long so you can get your fucking breath back before you ride.

Water parks haven't invested in moving sidewalks or elevator cars just yet, and I'm surprised the Americans with Disabilities Act people haven't demanded equal rights. I suggest they get on it. It would be awesome to just get on an elevator, step out and plunge down the slide. And, come on, this is America - do we want to deny our paraplegic citizens the right to shoot down a pitch-black, tube-enclosed slide known as the Black Python? I don't fucking think so.

Schlitterbahn South Padre has stepped up to the plate. The entire park is set up like a massive lazy river. You get in your tube, you get in the water, and you're done walking for the rest of the day. The entrances to the waterslides are actually in the lazy river. You channel your tube-assed self into a certain line, you mill around in the water and wait, and conveyor belts or kick-ass canal-linking devices slowly transport you to the top of the slide. It's cool, and the paraplegics can play too. That's a win-win.

These are topics Amanda and I chew over before I head back outside.

--

Our group has swollen to six. Me, Emma and her cousin Rachel have been joined by two female coworkers, Alison (the girl who drove me home from the casino last night) and Mallory.

Mallory and I have the kind of vibe a little sister and big brother would have if they were overly physically affectionate in public. She's all about the hugs and the lap-sitting and just general physical closeness, and I'm happy to oblige, more so as my blood alcohol rises.

Tonight she's with her new boyfriend, Josh. They dated briefly a few years back, ran into each other recently and have pretty much been together since.

Josh is a cool enough guy, if a little nondescript. Easy-going, amiable, and he always appears to have exactly four days of stubble on his face. Not three, not five. Four.

Mallory and Josh have been swimming for the past couple hours. They missed the entire snake-training conversation. Their loss.

We've been talking music the last few minutes. Mallory sports the distinction among my friends of being able to recognize, sing along with and remember the lyrics to nearly every song on every radio station.

This is an ability I can appreciate, and when riding drunk in her passenger seat, the two of us inevitably scream along with whatever's playing in the background.

The oldies are on right now. Social background music-wise, there's no safer bet on your radio dial. Country and rap are too polarizing, alternative radio is too morose for a social gathering, and adult-contemporary is too goddamn cheesy and ballad-heavy.

Top 40 honestly isn't bad in the context of outdoor poolside drinking, but the same couple dozen songs repeat every couple hours, and there are way too many breaks for pre-recorded idiot-DJ/listener chatter.

If you want feel-good music everyone knows all the way down in their souls - whether it's brilliant rock or something goddamned childish like "Do Wah Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Do" - you complement good weather, good drinks and good times with the oldies.

Just ask the Schlitterbahn people. Try to fucking go to the water park and not hear the Beach Boys two dozen times before you pull all your stuff back out of the rental locker and head to the car all sunburned.

Speaking of goddamned childish, one of the worst musical atrocities known to man has just popped up on the oldies station. Mallory and I exchange a quick glance and both start laughing. We've made fun of this one together before.

"Quick, Josh - name the song!" Mallory pokes down on her new boyfriend's right knee. She's doing some of her patented lap sitting at the moment.

"Name the artist, name the year, name the peak chart position, name the record label, name the B-side!" I chime in, bordering on drunk and obnoxious.

"I don't know any of that shit," Josh says, expelling laughter between each syllable.

"Andrew, name the song!"

"That would be, 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've Got Jesus In My Tummy,' by the Ohio Express, 1968, Bogus Pop Records, peaked at #3 in July."

"And what was the B-side?" Mallory asks.

A few seconds of silence, and I say, "Fuck, I can't remember!"

I get three laughs. "Yummy Yummy Yummy" gives way to the Beach Boys water park staple "Barbara Ann." I point out that it always sounds like they're singing "Bobber Ann," like Ann's some kind of slut that gives a lot of head. Bobs on knobs quite a bit. I only get two laughs on that one. Should have quit while I was slightly ahead.

--

It's 2:45 in the morning. The topic of the five-victim car accident has popped back up, and with it, the question of, What would you do if you lost five close family members at once?

Alison responds, "I'd kill myself. I'd be too fucked up."

"I'd be fucked, but I'd live on," Emma tells us. "I'd strive on somehow."

"A guy in my eighth grade class killed himself," says Rachel, the 13-year-old cousin. She talks about this as casually as if she were telling us what she had for dinner tonight.

The topic of suicide, as I'm about to quickly remember all too well, always sets off Emma. She sees suicide as the ultimate selfish act, in that you leave behind a family full of emotionally scarred people who have to pick up and carry on in your absence.

"Suicide is ignorant!" Emma exclaims, then starts talking in a self-mocking dumbass-teenager voice. " 'Oh, I didn't get the car I wanted!' 'My brother's retarded!' 'I got an F!' Fuck you, kid, deal with it!"

It's a serious topic, granted, but this shit makes me laugh.

Emma continues: "When I was in high school, I had a couple different friends call me up crying and tell me, 'I love you... I just took 30 pills.' These girls would swallow the pills then call everyone they could think of, just so someone would stop them. They'd get taken to the hospital, get their stomach pumped and get flowers sent to their room. The whole thing's about attention."

This monologue is the last uninterrupted stretch of conversation for ten to fifteen minutes, with everyone on the patio offering their two cents on the suicide argument in loud, overlapping vocal ejaculations.

My main point, which barely puts a dent in the discussion, is that Emma refuses to consider the irrational biological imbalances caused by clinical depression and several other major mental illnesses. Which are, all of them, life sentences.

--

The 13-year-old cousin has gone to bed at this point, thankfully. Around 3:30, the evening takes a turn for the strange. In the midst of random chit chat, I crack a joke to Emma that she doesn't like. Nothing too mean, just some playful shit that pops a pseudo-indignant reaction onto her face.

Emma rears back like she's going to throw her drink on me. I say yeah fuckin' right, you're not gonna throw your drink on me. She throws it right in my face and down my chest.

The vodka and whatever is cold as fuck and soaking into my shirt, and without even thinking I grab the two open, practically warm beers sitting in front of Alison - one in my left and one in my right hand - and douse Emma with both of them. My arms are flapping up and down and around like a demented lawn sprinkler.

The remnants of a Tupperware bowl full of tortilla chips sit on the table next to Emma. She tosses the bowl's contents at me - mostly crumbs. Half the crumbs hit the ground, half sog their way into the chest of my wet t-shirt, which I yank off.

"You realize I'm just going to dive into your pool and wash the mess off in there," I tell her. "I don't even like to food fight. It's not my thing."

While I'm delivering this little solliloquy, I see Mallory pass Emma something under the table. A quiet second later, she's jerking an open jar of salsa at me. She yanks the jar back toward her body while a tennis ball-sized glob of the salsa splatters into my swimsuit-covered crotch.

"Salsa? Fucking salsa?!"

I hop out of my chair while fisting up a goop of the chunky crotch slop. And I shove it down Emma's cleavage on my way to the pool. Dive into the deep end headfirst while hearing her shriek, "It's cold! Oh God the salsa's cold!"

My crotch salsa dissipates underwater as I surface and watch Emma dip a semi-dainty, disbelieving finger into the top of her swim suit. I swim around the pool a little bit, and she calls over, "Andrew, no more! We've got to clean this shit up! We work in the morning!"

Mallory, Josh the boyfriend and Alison start to gather their shit. Once I'm sure I'm entirely chip- and salsa-free, I climb the shallow-end ladder out of the pool.

We're kind of laughing about the whole thing - Emma says she never would have tossed the drink at me if I hadn't insisted so strongly that she didn't have the balls to douse me. I say I never would have shook the beers all over her if she hadn't thrown her cold-ass vodka drink at me. And so on.

Emma gets up to take the empty beer bottles and salsa jar to a nearby Rubbermaid trash barrel. I hear the bottles clank to the bottom of the plastic drum, and before I know it I hear the liquid farting sound of a condiment bottle just over my head. Something cold kind of ooze-squirts over my wet scalp, and a pair of hands starts kneading the shit into my noggin.

"What the fuck?!"

Mallory, Josh and Alison are busting a gut around the table.

"What is that?"

Emma, giggling too, lowers her palms and fanned-out fingers into my view. Bright yellow. "Mustard!" she shrieks, almost like a little kid.

"You put French's Yellow in my hair?" I laugh too, but I'm still only half-amused. I reach up gingerly, to feel my hair. It's spiked into porcupine points - mustard, apparently, offers more natural hold than your average hair-care product.

Once again, I'm headed to the pool. Head-first. I'll get Emma back somehow.

--

A couple minutes later, the next round's ammo drops into my lap, almost literally. I'm kneeling in the pool with my elbows over the concrete, and Alison bends down to deliver two more squirt bottles from the Keller refrigerator door.

Hershey's syrup and barbecue sauce. I can do some damage with this shit.

Casually this time, I get out of the pool. Emma's in that same chair, back to me, while Mallory and Josh keep her distracted in idle talk. I catch Mallory's eye briefly; she moves her gaze back down to Emma just as I start drizzling chocolate syrup up Emma's thighs, like I'm garnishing a dessert plate at work.

Meanwhile, I squeeze the bulk of the barbecue sauce in a straight vertical line into her cleavage. I can still see a chopped piece of onion on the top of her left boob from the salsa. I keep squeezing until the pressure runs low on the plastic bottle.

"Andrew!" she screams. "You Heinz 57'd my titties!"

Seconds later, Emma pulls open the back of my swim trunks and lets loose an oily stream of ranch dressing. It squidges straight down my butt crack in a goopy, refrigerated progression.

I'm back in the pool in no time. A couple swervy laps later, Mallory and Josh and Alison say their goodbyes, and Emma comes over to the pool, practically whispering conspiratorially.

"I'm done with you," she says, "but let's grab these squeeze bottles and soil the fuck out of those girls. They're the ones who egged us on."

Sounds good to me. I don't really want to vandalize their clothes or hair so much as maybe hunt them down and scare them. So it's around the side of the house for us, Emma leading the way and cocking her head back with thumb and middle finger in an O shape and index finger to lips in the universal signal for Shhhh.

They see us coming, quiet or not. Mallory takes off around the other side of the house, while Alison is nowhere to be found. Josh just kind of shrugs his shoulders, car keys in hand, while I half-heartedly try to track down Mallory.

Then I see a dude about my age, medium-build, somewhat preppy, walking down the sidewalk. It's dark, and I'm kinda near-sighted, but that's Alison walking with him. I pivot on my heels and head toward the pair. Emma sees me. "Andrew, that's not her! That's not Alison!"

I hesitate for a second. The guy is a total stranger, but no, that's definitely Alison. She keeps close to him, on the inside of the sidewalk, before she finally breaks character and huddles behind her male companion.

"You shouldn't squirt her with that ranch dressing," the guy says, without much conviction. "Don't do that."

"This is a new tank top," Alison chimes in. "You can't ruin a twenty-dollar tank top."

I stand down for a second as the dude keeps walking and Alison eventually hangs behind. She remarks that it would have been worth it to get doused in Hidden Valley Ranch just to get the guy's phone number. Loud enough for him to hear, though he doesn't appear to react to the remark.

I uncap the bottle of dressing just to hear Alison shriek, and I throw a psych-out fake-move at her. And, completely unintentionally, I squirt a line of ranch up her shirt - from bottom to top. Alison's jaw drops.

This is the end of the food fight.

--

The cleanup process takes awhile and involves a broom, a makeshift dustpan and a hose. Also, the last two beers in the fridge, which are the remainders of a six-pack Emma's boyfriend Johnny brought over earlier.

Emma's reaching for her family's cordless house phone as she tells me to get the beers. The exact words: "You go in and grab two Amber Bocks, I'll get the ranch off the phone."

I reach into the fridge and chuckle at the thought of Emma's family being utterly pissed off tomorrow when they discover there's nothing in the house to put on their sandwiches and salads.

When I come back to the patio, Emma says to me, "You know what? Ranch dressing glows in the dark."

After using the net-on-a-pole pool cleaner to strain out the soggy floating tortilla chips, Emma and I spend an hour or so in the pool. I'm thoroughly drunk by now, and I keep rubbing my butt cheeks in attempts to get the ranch off. Oil-based cream dressings are more impervious to chlorinated water than I thought.

When I get up tomorrow, I'll discover my alarm clock's time had been reset overnight and my mustard-saturated hair is still standing perfectly on end. No shower - I'll barely have time to put on shoes and a non-salsa-stained shirt for work.

I'll spend eleven hours waiting tables, all the while annoyed and perfectly grossed out by the oily residue of ranch dressing in the depths of my ass crack. And I'll finally take one of the most rewarding showers of my life at eleven p.m. before heading back out for another night of social drinking.