When I am out pushing my stroller in my bougie little neighborhood, and somebody whizzes past us on a skateboard I think, “What a chump. I bet that young punk doesn’t have the world’s cutest kid. Sucks to be them.†And then I think, “What if she falls off of her skateboard? She’s so young and tough, it probably wouldn’t even hurt. And she probably won’t fall, even though she is carrying a huge paper bag full of jangling liquor bottles. She is on their way to their friends’ house to drink all that. She can stay up as late as she wants, without getting a babysitter. And I bet her hang over won’t last longer than an hour. She can sleep in the next morning and won’t ache from crashing on her buddy’s dirty couch.â€
Sometimes it looks pretty appealing to be young and stupid for a day or so. I really needed to get out there and be stupendously stupid for a night.
Our toddler is a pretty good sleeper at night by now, and when I am home with him (constantly), if he wakes up for a few min to chat with his friend, Blankie, I don’t go into his room to check on him. He is pretty much by himself all night – safe, dry, warm, well-fed and hydrated – from 7pm until 7am. So he would never even know that we were gone. So why can’t I just get him all set, lock the door and leave him to think that I am listening to his snoring from the living room? Because there are fires. If there were no fires or floods or randomly spiked fevers in the middle of the night, we could all go out and party once the babies went to bed. Alas, we must find a babysitter – someone whom we will instruct not to bother going into the nursery unless a tornado strikes.
I am not nervous about leaving my toddler with nearly qualified strangers, but they do double the cost of going out. An inexpensive babysitter in Portland, OR costs $10/hour, and on my quest to be really stupid for a night, just going out to dinner at the bistro down the street for a measly two hours wasn’t going to cut it. I needed longer to become truly idiotic. A queer dance party can last from the 9pm pre-game cocktail til the 3am hours it takes to hail a cab home. That’s five hours and fifty bucks on top of the cover, taxi and top-shelf booze that I have grown accustomed to. But it’s worth it when I can find a baby-lover who is available on a Saturday night and wants to hold my couch down and act as a human fire detector for a while.
When I was young and babysitting for my parents’ friends, they were just trying to get out of their house for a dinner party, or church function, or maybe a movie. Unless they were completely faking their wholesomeness – and based on my years of working with people who have kids, they were not faking – none of them were headed out to a sex club to prance about in their strap-on or go dancing to grind up on the hot little things with contemporary haircuts. They never came home drunk.
I have been lucky enough to find a unicorn! I have a queer and kink-friendly babysitter. She is rare, but I love her for her willingness to snuggle on my couch once in a while when I go participate in events she’d also like to be attending. She sees the hankies in my back pocket and is not phased by the color-coded suggestions of what I might get up to. She even helps Partner do his eye make-up when we are running behind, which is always. She is my unicorn. You cannot have her number. Go find your own magical, babysitting fairy.
But when we came home from our most recent adventure at a gay ol’ dance party – right on time – I doubt that she really appreciated me slurring apologies as I struggled to count the cash to pay her. I had been drinking – I planned on it and I followed through. It was a warm night, and the tequila tasted sooooo good. Despite the fact that I was sipping instead of doing shots, I bit two willing victims on the dance floor and pinched a hot stranger’s offered nipple out on the smoking porch, before settling on taking home our hot contractor friends.
The married two-some who fixed up our house when we bought it are smoking hot. Tattoos, potty mouths, good senses of humor and an open relationship. We’d been looking for an opportunity to jump them for two years, and had finally found a window.
I was way, way too drunk to play it cool. Nothing I said was making any sense. My jokes were way off, and pretty soon, so were our pants. It doesn’t take me long to go from kissing a pretty girl to getting her lacy panties off. And when Partner took over with the boyish queer wife of the duo, whom he had had his eyes on for eons, I was more than pleased to scootch over and ravenously make out with her buff, twinkly-eyed husband. I was so out of my league.
Unless a bio-guy wants to bend over in front of me, I don’t really know what to do, and Contractor Husband was the only non-queer in the room. But I was having a jolly good time, so we all just went right ahead and took our pants off. I was so enjoying myself, that I lost track of whatever Partner and Contractor Wife were up to. I didn’t notice much of anything but the delightful moustache in front of me, until the toddler piped up from his nearby room.
It’s not unusual for Toddler to wake up in the middle of the night, and, typically, I would just let him mutter to himself for a few minutes until he went back to sleep. But I am usually the only one awake at 3:30AM. Partner sleeps through Toddler’s midnight serenades and the contractors certainly didn’t know that our moaning is not what woke the little cherub. So, despite my standard policy of letting Toddler do his own thing until morning, I found myself noticing his vocals and paying attention to the reactions (or not) of the other three naked primates.
When one is wasted, distracted and a novice at the skills being employed, it is virtually impossible to remain effectively self-lubricating, and I was far, far too blotto-ed to have the good sense to walk tot he bedroom and get some synthetic lube. So Contractor Husband and I gave up on my dehydration factors at about the same time that Partner and Contractor Wife realized that the couch could desperately use some towels to soak up the puddles that were forming. We basked contentedly on the living room carpet until, true to my constant temperature, I realized how chilly I was. It was only a matter of time after the donning of my fleece suit, before the contractors let themselves out so I could gratefully pass into unconsciousness.
Oh, what a hangover. Oh, the stupidity. Oh, the exact dumbness I had been craving. When I woke up with my Munchkin at 8am, I was still tipsy … only, I hadn’t realized it yet. I thought I just barely had a hang over. “I still got it!†I ate a huge egg sandwich and giggled with my tot.
However, as soon as he went down for his first nap, I started to sober up. Ughn, gross. I worshiped the porcelain throne like an inexperienced teenager. It had been years since I curled up on my bathroom floor with a big mixing bowl in case I should barf away all of my precious tequila. This was exactly the level of stupid misery I had been seeking. Whyyyyyy? Why didn’t I stop after three stiff pours of tequila, neat? Why hadn’t I just sluttily attacked the contractors sober? Why hadn’t I walked to get lube so that I wouldn’t be so damned sore? Why hadn’t we kept the lights on so that I would at least know what hot Contractor Husband’s probably-awesome-but-I-didn’t-get-a-good-look cock was like?
Worse, there were some serious concerns. I was well too hammered to judge anyone else’s sobriety, so I had no idea if our driver had been ok to be behind the wheel. I wasn’t sure if I had amply paid our amazing, tolerant babysitter, who must certainly have been annoyed by our obnoxious slurring and tricking when she just wanted to take her money and go home. Most ridiculously, neither Partner nor I had followed though on our vows to The Church of Condoms. Very, very unlike us. I have an IUD, Contractor Wife had a hysterectomy for health and cool-scar reasons and Contractor Husband has been snip-snipped, leaving our only concern the stepping up of our regular STI screens, but geeeeez. What an idiot I was.
The tequila tasted delicious, the contractors were unbelievably hot, and I got exactly what I was looking for – the worst headache of my life and enough truly horrific, un-composed behavior to make me swear that I will never ever be so stupid ever again. I am too much of an old man for that. Until the next time a little punk goes past on her skateboard and I push her over, taker her beer and stow it beneath my sporty get-away jogging stroller.
