Butt Piracy Aboard the Crimson Tide

From the time of our fateful introduction over groincobbling and beer, Tom and I became fast friends outside of the LARP world. Over the course of our friendship, he began to play a more frequent role as the "surrogate boyfriend" as my relationship with the Granola-Eating Assclown rapidly deteriorated, mainly due to the fact that Tom was *always* available to hang out whenever I needed someone to have a drink with because I felt like shit. At that time, "like shit" was a very frequent and familiar feeling.

Granola-Eating Assclown, you see, had a debilitating addiction to the massive multiplayer online RPG known as "Puzzle Pirates." Readers who have just re-read that last sentence to make sure I hadn't, in fact, said "World of Warcraft" should know that Mr. Clown hadn't really had the decency to develop a more manly type of gaming addiction than one which involved pirating on the high seas as a little tonka-toy-looking character challenging players 'round the globe to fierce bouts of Tetris. While I am by no means implying that the manliness of a Warcraft addiction supersedes that of a Puzzle Pirates addiction, all I am saying is that perhaps misrepresenting oneself as a sassy young lady because "guys are more likely to give you things and be nicer to you" leans a tad toward the creepy side of things. To those of you who have played Puzzle Pirates online and have flirted with a blonde pirate queen named Jaenelle - you should know that you were playing net-footsie with a scraggly long-haired 30-something year old sysadmin sporting a desk-gut reminiscent of a man smuggling a Christmas ham into a concert under his black Ani DiFranco T-shirt. Don't go asking for your dubloons back now, you don't want to know where he's put them.

I say this with not an ounce of bitterness toward the gaming world, but rather, toward those who would once again conflate reality with fantasy to the degree that Mr. Ass-Clown had. For you see, Mr. Clown had taken to fits of passive-aggressive rage when I didn't respect the sanctity of gaming by committing such heinous acts as asking him for a 2 minute ride over the steep hill to the bus stop (an otherwise annoying 15 minute walk, especially when carrying groceries) in the middle of a raid, or daring to invite him on any weekend outings without paying heed to his weekend pirating excursion schedule. At the time, I hadn't yet become cognizant of the fact that perhaps it was he who had the problem, and often took to drowning my feelings of inadequacy as a girlfriend in alcohol; after all, if the man I'd been with for several years now found it more engaging to spend time prancing about online posing as a puzzle-solving pirate queen than to spend it with me, that naturally had to reflect poorly upon my qualifications as girlfriend material.

As was the natural course of things once the relationship headed down the road of confidence-destruction, Mr. Clown dumped me for failing to respect his interests or anything, for that matter, about him (a job he made exceedingly difficult over time), and ended our last conversation as a couple with an exceptionally poignant and articulate "fuck you."

Continuing with the natural course of things, naturally, next came the "moving out" process of breaking up. Since Mr. Clown had originally been the one to insist on my moving in, it was up to me to move my ass out of our cohabited state. I lined up an apartment out in Alewife in record time, especially for mid-December, and was slated to move in no later than 2 and a half weeks from the date of our breakup. Most fortunately for me, during that time, I had the spare room in the house to sleep in. Most fortunately for Mr. Clown, that meant he could redecorate.

Mr. Clown spent the entirety of the first week of our awkward semi-cohabited state combing the aisles of Bed Bath and Beyond, along with several other interior deco/design stores. Much like the last two months of our relationship, the power of alcohol alone made these two weeks remotely tolerable, and what little time I spent in that house, I spent completely blitzed. Through my mostly-drunken haze, it seemed to me as though Mr. Clown was nesting. It was only a week later that the full understanding of why hit me, when Mr. Clown started speaking overly loudly on his cell phone in the middle of the living room one evening.

"What? Wait, you're not lost. Can you find the house?" asked Mr. Clown, careful to enunciate each word to his incidental audience of housemates. "No, you take a left onto Orient St. and we're the first house on the left. Okay!"

Already half in the bag by that point (as it was 7pm, and I had to get the party started early on weeknights if I wanted to be able to get up for work in the morning), I took no great pains to disguise my disgust when Mr. Clown opened the door and greeted a girl by the name of Harmony with a hug and a meow. Harmony was a girl Mr. Clown knew from a LARP, who played a fairy princess with a great big pocket of air between her ears. Reality, however, was not that far of a stretch. Mr. Clown's character had been wooing said fairy princess for *years* in-game, during which time, he'd gone so far as to have traded gifts with her, including a stuffed rabbit which he kept religiously tucked in his bedding each weekend we attended said LARP. Naturally, my burpy, farty ways could never compare to the delicate ladylike manners of Mr. Clown's fairy princess, and after years of hearing him make irritating comparisons of myself against her, it seemed only right that he would take the opportunity now that I was out of the way to ask her out. Of course, you were going to ask her out, Mr. Clown, of course.

My irritation having grown twofold at the fact that Mr. Clown didn't have the decency to wait until I was at least moved out of our goddamn house before finding another warm wet hole to plug, I called up Tom to come over to join me for a power hour of drinking in my guest room. Having nothing else to do that night, Tom was over within the hour and we began our work on a case of Stella.

Halfway into our drinkfest, Tom excused himself to go to the bathroom. Upon returning from taking his wicked piss in the bathroom down the hall, he seized my hand, a look of urgency in his eyes.

"Hey, you wanna go get sushi, like RIGHT NOW?" he asked.

"Oh my god, Tom," I replied, "it's 9pm. Why do you suddenly feel like sushi right now?"

"I just do... let's get out of here. Right now."

I began to bitch and moan about the logistics of our inebriated state, and how we would get there without a car, since obviously we'd both had too much to drink.

"We'll just take the bus!" he suggested, ever full of helpful ideas.

"I already paid for a 12 pack of beer," I complained as he dragged me to my feet and into the hall. "This isn't a fucking free ride night, I'm not going to pay for you to gorge out on sushi too. I thought you said you had pasta before you came."

Despite Tom's best attempts to hustle me down the hall and past Mr. Clown's door, my complaints were immediately silenced as I realized why Tom was so keen on getting me out of the house. The door to Mr. Clown's newly furnished room was mostly ajar, giggles, sighs and meowing emitting from within. Despite the wooden screen obscuring the view of occupants within, it sounded like a poorly voice-acted bestiality video in the filming (though sadly I knew better, for Mr. Clown had a tendency to purr and make other catlike noises). I threw up a little in my mouth, and it wasn't because of the beer.

As Tom and I stood, chilled to the bone, at the bus stop waiting for the 77 in the middle of the night in December, I looked at him completely speechless. For the first time since the beginning of our friendship, I didn't know what to say. I didn't know where to even begin explaining how I had ever gotten entangled with someone quite as indescribably revolting as Mr. Clown.

At last we boarded the bus and made our selection of the empty plastic seats. I pressed my forehead against the glass and vacantly focused on objects moving outside. It was all I could do to prevent the beersickness, carsickness, and heartsickness threatening to overwhelm in an all-consuming bus-soiling manner. Besides, I had no idea where to go for sushi at 10 o' clock at night in Arlington.

The 77 lurched to a stop in Arlington Center, and with it my gut. Making the keen observation that I had turned pale green and begun to yawn and gag, Tom pulled me off the bus to get some fresh winter air. I stood poised beside a trash can waiting for the world to stop spinning, as Tom assessed our present situation. As expected, most places in Arlington Center were closed; being an old-people town, no doubt its good citizens were all tucked away in bed watching Matlock by now. We began our dismal and aimless walk down Mass Ave back towards the Heights. If nothing else, our poorly-thought-out misadventure with the bus did at least get me out of the house.

Several blocks later, we passed a restaurant inset from the rest of Mass Ave with the lights still on. From the fogged up glass, they looked to still be serving food and drinks. Immediately upon entering, Tom and I discovered we were thoroughly under-dressed for the trendy dining establishment that went by the name of Tryst. Despite our shabby attire and my pallid complexion advertising that at any moment I might suddenly blurt out "can I use your bathroom? I'll buy something!" we were treated with immense kindness and warmth by a waiter named Paul.

Paul was a suave waiter with many rare qualities, including the ability empathically connect with his patrons upon first sight. He could tell by the look on my face that I needed a little warmth and unobtrusive cheer, which he provided with a pair of martinis and a steaming plate of mussels from their late night bar menu. I would remember his kindness fondly for years to come.

Slowly, my food proceeded to melt me from the inside out. Silently, I began to cry fat salty tears into the savory brine of the mussels on my plate. I thought about the sequence of increasingly drastic mistakes that had led me to this point in my life, the waste of 3 years that I would never get back, and how I had let myself slide so far into being a sad sack of a worthless person. I'd become exactly the kind of person I detested most: someone who'd become a garbling retard in the process of caring about someone else. I'd long ago stopped standing up for myself. I gave everything in my heart to something that had so very obviously passed its expiration date, and yet I kept partaking and regurgitating like so much bad milk. For years, I talked a tough game, but when it came down to it, I ate way more shit than anyone with an ounce of self-respect not utterly dissolved by the bilious acids churned out by an ulcerating love would have. I was so far in, I'd stopped taking care of myself. The catalogue of complete and utter bullshit that I'd put up with for years all began to run through my mind, one by one. All the times that Mr. Clown had done something completely appalling to everyone looking on, and I would continue lovingly pretending everything was fine, and that I understood why it was acceptable. That was who I was. A weak little fool so easily taken for a ride by emotions that I lost sight of everything else important in life. Succinctly put, I'd become a twentysomething pathetic mess. I was full of self-hatred. My martini became dirty with tears and a touch of snot as I sipped it to hide my face from anyone who could be looking.

Tom reached over and held my hand. "Don't cry..." he said with the earnest pleading tone of a boy consoling momma after daddy done been a bad bad man. His sympathy broke my heart.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, wiped my leaky face up, and we ate the rest of our food in relative silence, punctuated by stilted conversation prodding fun at the elephant in the room that was sure to be waiting for me back at home. After dropping the sizeable bill on my credit card, we caught a late cab back to the Heights. I resumed silently crying after I verified that Tom had passed out in a drunken stupor on my futon.

The next morning I awoke to find that Tom had wandered off (presumably in a hung over stupor) to work. It was perhaps just as well, as my breath smelled like dog shit floating atop red tide, and nobody deserved to be greeted with that. Well, almost nobody. I took my shittybreath to the bathroom that I shared with Mr. Clown to perform my morning ablutions, only to find a shit streak smeared across the seat of the otherwise pristine white john. I merely shook my head in disapproving silence, toothbrush protruding from my mouth, as I heard an overly perky voice declare from the kitchen downstairs "chocolate makes a perfectly fine breakfast! It's a Harmony breakfast!"

It would be years later before I felt any remorse for blaming that shit stain on Harmony. Despite the humor I found in imagining Mr. Clown diddling his fairy princess in the bum til her poo fell out, in all likelihood, the shit stain was probably Tom. However it wasn't until I found identical shit stains again on my toilet seat two apartments later that I finally put the puzzle pieces together and determined that Tom was a master of the Shit & Run. For the time being though, I contented myself with thoughts of Mr. Clown committing acts of butt piracy on the high seas, and Tom for having the decency to respect his sugar momma.