The party featured an inflatable bounce contraption with a Velcro wall in the dark corner of the back lot. All night long the drunks climbed in and out of Velcro suits and went and plastered themselves up on that wall. It was a very strange party.
I kept pulling at my flask of Johnny Red and squinting around at the dark faces. It was poorly lit except for a large red neon beer sign in another corner of the lot where all the smokers huddled like moths. I couldn’t see a thing. I’d lost my eyeglasses off a highway in Indiana 6 years earlier and had never scraped together the scratch for a new pair. (And yet, I wore Ray Ban sunglasses most days. Go figure.) I went on squinting. I couldn’t make out the pretty girls from the ugly ones. None of them looked too great. They all looked drunk and shallow as they milled about making plans for better parties.
I flagged one down.
“Hey, guess my middle name. It starts with H.”
“Is it Hank?”
No one can resist guessing at another person’s middle name, especially if it begins with the letter “H.”
When she got close I could make out her face. She was alright. Not great, but if she had anything interesting to say she might not look half bad.
“Hubert?”
“Keep guessing.”
My friend Jess was supposed to be playing wingman, but she was drunk and kept chiming in with strings of nonsense names all slurred together, not taking my game very seriously.
“Habadashery. Harvard. Higgenbottoms.”
She was not so secretly sabotaging my efforts, and it was working. The alright-looking girl quickly began losing interest; she couldn’t get a guess in edgewise and I had to keep hushing drunk Jess.
Then a yellow-haired girl stumbled past and caught wind of the situation.
“Is it Harry?”
That stoked the interest of all parties. Each girl wanted to be the girl to guess my middle name. The yellow-haired girl smelled like make-up, but I still let her guess.
“Herbert? Hubert? H? What names start with H?”
They guessed and I kept ripping off jokes, riffing on this and that, showing off a little, taking conspicuous swigs from my little flask of Johnny Red, not taking anything too seriously, but the girls were hung up on the name.
“Whaddaya think of a party like this? I saw a man break his neck on that thing not 30 minutes ago. He got up and drank a beer after and everyone cheered.”
“Is it Humphrey?”
Great. They won’t stop and talk to you unless you catch them in a guessing game in a well lit corner with plenty of witnesses, and even then they won’t let you carry on a conversation, it’s all business.
“A famous figure of literature bears the same name.”
A little hint to keep the wheels turning, but mostly fishing, praying one of these dimwits will say something interesting. I’d even given them the subject: literature.
“Holden?”
My middle name is not Holden Caulfield. The alright-looking girl had enough sense to read Catcher in the Rye and wanted everyone to know it. Everyone reads Catcher in the Rye. It’s a short book and it’s on every high school reading list in the country, Texas notwithstanding. (In Texas they only read about Cadillacs and faggots and Jesus H Christ.)
Now I was getting bored. These were silly girls. They weren’t interesting or kind. I was about to tell them the name and be done with it when, sensing my waning interest, Scott Bell chimed in from behind his neatly trimmed mustache and crooked short-billed cap.
“A famous porn-star shares the name as well.”
Well played. An obvious hint laced with scandal, surely they’d get it now.
“Handy?”
It wasn’t worth it. Even drunk Jess had given up.
“Yeah, Handy’s the name. You guessed it.”
I went for another little blue can, then climbed in a Velro suit and went and plastered myself up on the wall.
Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 10:11PM 
