All Aboard the Hot Mess Express

It all started with a shrimp ring and my desperate desire to fit in.

So there I was, done up in a fluffy black cocktail dress, four-inch Mary Janes that I'd worn to prom, and pearls, surrounded by restless homosexual men in ugly Norwegian sweaters, looking at the remains of a very stinky shrimp ring that was supposed to be the main course in our pescatarian-friendly Christmas Eve dinner.

I'd brought a loaf of Nutella pretzel-bread, some concoction that I'd seen on Pinterest and attempted after half a bottle of Moscato and an entire season of Doctor Who on a slow night at home. The hosts had done up this terrible excuse for finger food, hummus, homemade pita chips, and with my Nutella Braid, that was dinner. Jesus Christ, this was a dire emergency.

Brandon picked the vile thing up and took it over to the sink grinder. "Well, this is shit," he proclaimed, dumping it down and turning the switch. He was twenty-eight and had an actual job at a call center, so we listened to his sage wisdom. Instead of making it better, the stench was worse, something like old vegetation, probably lettuce. The last thing anyone wanted to do was eat. "I'm sorry, guys. I have no idea what we were thinking. It looked okay at the store." He shrugged and came back to us. He looked us all up and down, probably calculating in his head. Hummus, chips, and sweet bread wouldn't sustain four hungry men in their twenties and the odd hag, especially not considering this was Christmas fucking Eve, dammit, and for once we planned to eat like kings. Kings that live in fishing communities, anyway.

Parties are bad enough. This one had gone from Tolerable Small Holiday Gathering to Dangerous Awkward Mess in about ten minutes. I wanted out, but I had to support my boys. So when one of the Other Couple suggested, "Fuck it, let's go out!" I resisted the urge to flee back to the safety of my home and books and cheap wine and stable relationship. Against my better judgment, I piled into the Other Couple's dinky little sedan and sped off into the night.

Now, if I'd have had any sense at all, I'd have volunteered to stay at the homestead and look after Brandon's boyfriend Jason, who stressed himself into a migraine over the whole shrimp thing and went to bed. But no, I decided to do that thing people love to tell introverts to do. Come out of your shell, they say. It'll be fun, they say. I looked Mad Men fabulous, I was with people I liked, what could possibly go wrong?

There is only one gay bar where I lived at this point in time. The rest are for rednecks, and we weren't about to risk getting the shit beat out of us by the sad people who'd rather get shithoused and listen to Merle Haggard than be at Christmas dinner with their families.

Nobody does Christmas like small-town gays.

Kinkead's is a little hole-in-the-wall place at the end of the booze street in our town where everybody knows everybody. It was done up in rainbow tinsel and lights, and they had these adorable little rainbow trees set up. It was festive and warm and inviting. Nate, the masculine half of the Other Couple, had made a good call. We hadn't known there would be a drag show on Christmas Eve, but I guess we got lucky. One of the new girls was on stage lip-syncing Mariah Carey's only Christmas hit. Fuck that shrimp, we were going to have a big gay Christmas and nothing or nobody was going to stop us.

Brandon decided I was his date for the night since Jason stayed home and it was a crime for anyone to dance alone on Christmas Eve. This of course meant he was paying for drinks and nobody would hassle me if we decided to take the party elsewhere. It's probably worth mentioning that gay here is relative; Brandon and I had been spending an increasing amount of time together as of late. He'd come over with a bottle of wine and a bundt cake and we'd lay on the couch together and be big ol' bitches, watching historical dramas on the tube and enjoying each other's company when my girlfriend was at work. There wasn't anything wrong with this, exactly, but one day something between us changed and laughing turned into kissing and the lines just got blurrier from there. I blame the Borgias, that show is just too hot for its own good.

We didn't talk about that. In our little community, what we did was just plain weird. I mean, he's a perfectly respectable gay man. I'm a well-known bisexual woman, but I'd been with Mary for almost twenty off-on years. We'd been living together for the last five. Our relationship was pretty open, I mean, she'd sometimes bring a man home and I never got upset about it. Not once did it occur to me to see how she felt about me fucking our best gay friend.

I wasn't worried about any of that tonight, though. Three beers in, I was good. I mean, my feet kind of hurt because four-inch heels, but no big deal. I was okay. The queens were down circulating with the crowd now that the first part of the show was over. One of Brandon's queens came over and said hi, insisted we accompany her to the bar to "dump the latest tea". I hadn't met her yet but Brandon insisted she was "Awesome, Linden, she's adorable. You'll love her, I promise."

And I did. She was funny and smart and kept our drinks full. She insisted we try her new favourite thing, which was the exact colour of Drano but tasted like a tropical bubblegum paradise. I liked it so much I had two more. You could hardly even taste the alcohol. It was time for the second part of the show and the other two guys wanted to depart for the only other club anything close to this one, so Brandon and I waved her off and stood up to collect our coats and go.

All at once, the drinks hit my system. The room spun like a Tilt-A-Whirl and suddenly my body seemed way too heavy for my spindly ankles. Brandon grabbed my waist before I went down. "Whoa, ladypants! You can't be done yet! Come on, Paul called a cab." It was like I was a little girl trying on my mother's shoes. Brandon successfully got me off my stool and almost to the front of the bar when stairs happened. One of my retarded shoes slipped off and I put all 154 of my pounds onto my big toe. Something snapped, and I yelled, and the next thing I knew, I was ass-over-teakettle at the foot of the stairs. Brandon and Nate came down to try and pick me up, asking if I was okay, and all I could do was laugh.

Oh my lord, I was fucked completely up. I stood up, supported by somebody, immediately slammed the same damn foot into a stupid potted plant with Christmas lights on that fell over with a crash. "Okay, let's just go. No, no, fucking come over here," Brandon caught me and took off my other shoe. There was a dull cramp in my bum-foot, but the Liquid Plumber made me invincible! I was going to don my gayest apparel and spread some rainbow Christmas fucking cheer even if it crippled me!

If I'd have been at least sixty percent less drunk, I'd have realized my foot was fucked up and asked somebody to take me to the hospital or at least home to ice and elevate it. I don't think anyone even realized anything was wrong. I wasn't hurting much or really feeling much of anything, so I wasn't about to ruin the good time. Paul stuck my shoes in my purse and that was where they stayed most of the night. The last thing I remember was a slight scene happening when I tried to go in the Electric Cowboy (exactly as awful as it sounds) without shoes on, and I put them back on for a whole five minutes to get in and then immediately fell over again when I got on the slick wooden dance floor.

The next morning was absolute hell on earth.

The light that shone through the curtains felt like needles in my eyes. I sat up, realized quickly how much pain I was in, how drunk I still was, and how bad I smelled. I stank like weed and shame and sweat and something that smelled suspiciously like rancid lipgloss, and possibly gravy. I was also woefully underdressed. Oh, and there was blood all over the sheets, I was between two naked men, and a big piece of glass was stuck in my foot, which had swollen up twice its normal size.

Yes. I should have gone home the first time I fell and whacked my foot, but no. I was a goddamn trooper.

I pushed at the right guy's shoulder and recoiled in horror when I saw Brandon's TARDIS tattoo. My screaming woke him up. We managed to get me into the bathroom and peeled the glass out of my sole. He'd had some basic first aid training at university, so I at least was able to stop the bleeding until I could figure out what the hell else I could do about my giant foot and the growing list of bad decisions I'd made the night before. I gained a whole new appreciation of his body, actually seeing it in the full light of day. His cock bobbed around obscenely as he worked and as soon as he walked out to dispose of the foot-glass, I checked the first phone I found: eight in the morning. I wouldn't have to go home until the afternoon. I didn't want to be the family trainwreck that ruined Christmas.

Going through the house was like one of those murder-porn crime shows. It was obvious what happened when we backtracked the mess. There was a busted rocks glass at the bottom of the stairs which explained the bleeding, an unfamiliar bong on the coffee table, and the sad remains of a tofurkey on the stove. An M83 record was still on the player in the living room. Brandon assessed the damage and sent me to rest up while he found pants and got something for my foot. I hobbled over to the couch and laid back. He didn't have an ice pack, but a bag of frozen fruit wrapped in a towel worked okay for the swelling. He lit us both a cigarette and we slowly put together the rest of the night.

Everything leading up to the Cowboy pretty much happened like I remembered.

I was an absolute mess there, and Brandon couldn't let me out of his sight because apparently I said I was looking for the bathroom and ended up taking a bottle of beer off another table and upset the young redneck upstart that occupied it. He let it slide since I was a girl and obviously off my tit. Brandon was pretty wrecked but not as much as me, and actually thought that dancing and sweating it out might help.

Blurry images of the night before lit up my mind like a cinema. I remembered vaguely a dull throb in my whole leg, but the rest of me feeling amazing, crushed up against his chest, grinding back against him, inhibitions completely gone. I remembered feeling his hands snake down my hips and over my thighs and right up my skirt, but it's not like anybody could see it for how crowded it was in there. I turned and shoved my bubble skirt into his crotch and stood on my toes to kiss him, and then faceplanted right there on the wood floor.

The evening went downhill from there.

Paul and Nate took off for the casino after a while, but Brandon was pretty sure I didn't need to be around money or other people at this point. He called us a cab and we got home. There are deleted scenes here because somebody had to come over with the Hello Kitty bong and things, but we're not certain of details. It had to be Gwen, our perpetually-stoned mutual friend, but she was nowhere to be found and it was very unlike her to just abandon her favourite pipe anywhere like that. Of course, that didn't explain the new bong on the coffee table... but one step at a time. I wracked my brain for pictures of her or anybody, for that matter.

At one point, the Tudors was on the big TV and the room was hazy. Somebody was laughing, high-pitched giggling that few boys can pull off. I was on Brandon's lap and a big pipe rested between our legs. It was heavy and warm and the pressure was too much. Brandon took a big hit and pulled my chin up to him. I kissed him and sucked the smoke in through his lips. I abandoned the pipe on the floor and crawled back up into his lap. The laughter died down for some reason.

Jason came down the stairs and either didn't notice or didn't care, I don't remember which. There was a brief exchange of words but it all sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher. The next part I remember was Brandon hefting me up the stairs wrapped around him and throwing me on the bed. I remember Jason laughing and pulling up a chair from the desk across the room and I didn't have time to contemplate that because Brandon was yanking my dress over my head.

Midnight City filled my head. Somebody turned on the record player. Brandon's peeling my panties off. They're a sticky pink satin mess and somewhere on the floor now. Jason's watching and someone else is in here too but I can't see. I ceased caring when Brandon dove face-first between my legs. I let myself get lost in his week-old beard and soft tongue sliding between my lips, fingers sliding easily inside. I was so wet and relaxed that I didn't tense when I felt the fat head of his cock pushing in, and I think I just forgot that people were watching. I curled my legs around his back and held his throat like he likes. His bony hips slammed into me fast, but that was exactly what I needed.

So we fucked for his boyfriend. I remembered the door shutting loudly at one point, and when it did, Jason started stroking himself through his American Eagle pjs. Brandon lasted a while; we were able to shift around twice. He pulled out to dig in the nightstand for a condom while I adjusted myself, bent over face-down on their bed. He held my hips like when we were dancing, but this time I wasn't disappointed. He kept his own pace and yanked my hair back hard when he came, but I liked it. I was feeling a bit ill after, so I laid back on the bed. He was gone for a minute but then returned, and went back to work on me. He licked and sucked and fucked me with his hands until I was arched up off the bed and begging to come.

I must have passed out for a while after we fucked. I remember next waking up in Brandon's arms, him still awake and talking to Jason. Jason had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, trailing smoke towards the ceiling. "Get some rest, baby," Brandon's voice was low and sweet. "You're a star."

At some point, the munchies hit and Brandon and Jason cooked the tofurkey. They brought some up to me to eat, but I hate tofu and rejected it. There was still some smeared on the wall to confirm this. I got up at some point to get a drink and that's how the glass-foot happened.

We were quiet for a while, just observing and taking in everything that happened in the last twenty-four hours. He spoke before I did.

"So...I feel terrible about all of this." He said. He pushed the ashtray across the table to me. "We'll pay for you to see a doctor Monday if you need to. I think you probably need to. That foot looks like shit. I'd take you now, but it's Christmas. Nobody's there." I nodded. I put my head in his lap and cried. God, it hurt so much and I was so fucking embarrassed I wanted to just die.

I would end up taking him up on that offer. It wasn't broken, but it was definitely screwed up. The offending heels went missing somewhere between the Cowboy and bedroom, never to be seen again. Good riddance.

I'd love to say that the incident put me off of both booze and heels for life, but god, I love shoes too much. I did, however, resolve to never touch anything that isn't beer outside my own home ever again, and I've kept that promise. I have also since made it a point to be thankful that both feet are attached, not broken, and not throbbing every time I put on shoes.

I would be with Mary for another two years. We separated on terrible terms and haven't spoken since. Jason and Brandon are still together, far as I know. For a long while, Brandon and I still had our nights in, and sometimes Jason would sit in. Mary didn't know for the longest time, and I'm pretty sure that was a contributing factor in our decline.

Every once in a while, I'll go up to where the boys live now and we'll relive our debauchery. But trust me, nobody ever gets as drunk as they did that Christmas.