Old School

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

OLD SCHOOL

By Royce F. Houton

DANO

"So here I am going down on this girl for all I'm worth, and she's thrashing around like some Tasmanian devil, getting nut after nut after nut, right?" Danny Albertson continued spinning his bizarre, biologically improbable story, one that was getting more bizarre with each passing Pabst Blue Ribbon.

"Mmm hmm, Dano," I said, weary of the tale. It showed. Even the bartender eyed me sympathetically, shaking his head.

"So then,... then, just as I'm plunging my tongue into her gash for the big finish,..." Danny resumed his yarn. I signaled the bartender for my check. Enough. But even that hint zipped right past Danny like a Justin Verlander fastball. "... this chick, right in the middle of cumming, cuts loose with this ginormous, nasty-ass fart..."

Now even Angelo, the bartender, was beyond his limit. Customer's always right up to a point, but Danny's fable about cunnilingus performed on a flatulent, orgasming lady passed that point without even tapping the brakes.

"Look, guy, this ain't church and salty language ain't unusual here, but you gotta take that disgusting stuff somewhere else. You're running off customers," Angelo, a burly man with powerful, hairy forearms showing beyond his rolled-up sleeves, told Danny. Angelo and I had been friends for years.

Looking dazed, Danny turned toward me just as I handed Angelo my credit card to settle up. Danny shrugged, as if to say, Are you going to let him do that to me? I said nothing, waiting for Angelo, part owner of my favorite neighborhood bar with his older brother Raphael, to bring the credit card receipt to sign.

"I'm just now getting to the good part, Les," Danny, pleaded — the alcohol from his first half-dozen PBRs in barely an hour slurring his words.

"You heard the man, Dano. His bar, his rules. He just said last call for you, and I gotta go. Got client meetings starting at 7:30 in the morning," I said. "Tab's all settled. It's time for you to Uber home, pal."

He stared at me balefully, through bleary and unfocused eyes.

"Well ain't that some fine shit? Known each other how long? Twenty years? No, wait, that's how long it's been since we graduated from Dunbar. So... thirty, maybe 35 years? Little League. Football captains...," he said, drilling down decades to dredge up self-pity in which to wallow.

"You were the football captain, Dano. Remember? I was the B-team tight end. Baseball was my game: second team All-Kentucky centerfielder. Anyway, it's after 8 on a work night and you've been overserved, captain, so it's time to hit the showers," I said, still studying the credit card for Dano's tab plus mine and adding a 35 percent tip as a way to thank Angelo his patience with my potty-mouthed friend. I put my card back in my wallet, signed the receipt and closed the black leather folio containing it and slid it back across the bar.

"You... you not bein'... a friend," Danny said, his sullen mood deepening along with his alcohol-induced torpor. "Ffffuck you, Les."

I rose from my barstool, put an arm around Dano's slumping shoulders and gave him a familiar hug. "You too, Dano. I love you, buddy. Get home safe."

I left the Queen City Bar and breathed in the clear, cool autumn air that blows in from the northwest and enlivens Cincinnati in late September each year, and it was no different around the autumnal equinox of 2022. I turned left to walk the three blocks eastward on Hatch Street to my two-story brownstone and call it a night. I hoped the refreshing breeze, after a summer spent sweltering in the notorious Ohio River Valley humidity, would clear my mind of the disgusting mental images Dano had just planted there. It helped.

But something nagged at me.

I had known Danny Albertson since we grew up on the outskirts of Lexington, Kentucky, in a working class neighborhood west of the city, just outside New Circle Road, which circumnavigates Lexington, and east of Versailles (pronounced Vuhr-SALES, for all y'all who aren't from around there). We had indeed known each other since elementary school. We ran with the same crowd, hung out a good bit and played plenty of organized and sandlot sports together.

Danny had a fondness for beer and partying from roughly age 15. I believe that if he had spent summer evenings in high school working out instead of boozing and carousing, he might have landed the University of Kentucky football scholarship he dreamed of. He was, indeed, a strong player for Dunbar High School. He was one of the captains our senior year, as he said. I always thought there was potential he just didn't work to unlock. So he tried out as a walk-on linebacker at UK and quit after one week of preseason camp.

Danny's drinking had worsened in the two decades since we left high school. I had no doubt that he was a functioning alcoholic, able to hold down his job on the maintenance staff at the stadium where the Cincinnati Bengals play. But his behavior had become increasingly erratic in the past couple of years as evidenced by the increasingly sexualized conversations that dominated our meetings every other week or so at Queen City and occasionally in the dive bar he frequented near his apartment across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky.

His braggadocio seemed out of place from the outset: Dano had been quite awkward with girls in high school. Handsome, tall and likeable, it wasn't that he had trouble getting a first date. It was getting the second or third date where he hit a brick wall. Girls — at least those you spoke of seeing publicly — inevitably found something off-putting about Danny. To his closest buddies back then, he bragged of bedding cougars, older women of, shall we say, lesser moral fiber, but it was never something anyone could corroborate and no one had ever seen him with such a woman. But he always talked a good game, positioning himself as the consummate swordsman who knew his way around a vulva.

Tonight's story with its gross, graphic specificity — not to mention the discomfiting volume with which he told it —seemed especially off. The sequence of the supposed seduction. This nameless woman's light-switch response to his oral ministrations. The vehemence with which he asserted his tale. It had all the appeal of an animal husbandry discussion, yet with less class.

He's trying way too hard with these stories, I reasoned as I approached my house. It wasn't so much that he was trying to convince me of this tale as he was trying to convince himself of it.

I opened the door and Ryder, the crazy three-year-old yellow Labrador/boxer mix I had rescued from the shelter two years earlier, jumped up on me with his usual slobbering, enthusiastic welcome. By then, Dano's disgusting word picture was no longer troubling me. My concern had shifted to his mental wellbeing.

▼ ▼ ▼

You meet all kinds of sad cases as a family law attorney. My field of practice, trusts and estates, may sound dull but it's the most unpredictable, emotionally volatile and bitter field in the legal profession: divorces, child custody fights, wills, nearly all of them involving high net worth individuals with fortunes counted in at least eight figures to the left of any decimal. I've heard cuckolded clients spin stories of catching spouses indulging in all kinds of kink with someone else, but none of them approaching the excretory, almost zoological detail of Dano's fantasies of late.

My morning began with a conference in our downtown office with opposing counsel for the estranged husband of my client, Sheila Moffett. Earle Moffett, her soon-to-be ex-husband, had gotten a tip while on a business trip to Sacramento that she had been entertaining a gentleman caller at their home since shortly after he had left for the airport two days earlier. Earle cut his trip short by two days, took a red-eye back from California to Cincinnati, arrived home unannounced just before dawn one day and caught his wife in their marital bed riding her lover's freakishly large hog. Two days later, Earle served Sheila with papers naming her as the defendant in a divorce action. Earle was asking the court, as he was entitled under Ohio law, to award her zero spousal support in light of her adultery as documented in high-def video on his iPhone when he surprised her in the act of copulation outside of wedlock.

Our defense strategy — a legal Hail Mary, really — was to countersue Earle for mental cruelty, emotional and physical abuse and our own unsupported allegations of his infidelity. To that end, I had set up an interview after an in-office conference with Dr. Wynn Persons, a psychologist who specializes in sexual dysfunctions. I wanted to pick her brain on why a woman in, say, Sheila's circumstances might seek carnal comfort with a younger man not her husband. Yes, she said, a cruel, unfeeling husband who withholds affection and even basic consortium with his wife could lead her to question her femininity, even her humanity. Usually, such behavior left physical signs of battering: old bruises, untreated broken bones that didn't mend properly. Or on the other hand, Dr. Persons said, "maybe she's just a slut, a nymphomaniac." If the latter is true, Dr. Persons said, evidence of her serial dalliances shouldn't be too hard for the plaintiff, aided by a private eye and the top-flight lawyer he had already retained, to find. Not what I was hoping to hear.

While Dr. Persons' off-the-record guidance was helpful, it was essentially meaningless and probably inadmissible unless we could find corroborating witness testimony or physical evidence, and both were conspicuously lacking. So I thanked her for her time, but just before she left, Dano came to mind.

"Dr. Persons, I wonder if I could get your advice on a friend of mine since childhood who seems consumed these days with spoken fantasies of the most depraved, outlandish sex acts that he believes are true but, in my opinion, aren't remotely possible. Danny has other problems, too, particularly heavy alcohol use," I said. "I'm not going to ask you to try to diagnose him on so scant a description, but what sort of professional help would be best for him? Psychologist? Psychiatrist? AA? Some other sort of therapy?"

"Well, here, give him my card. I treat patients fitting many of those descriptions, though alcoholism isn't my field," she said, handing me a card from her purse. "But until he recognizes he has a problem, I really don't expect it will do any good to give him my card or anyone else's. But you're a great friend to him for asking."

I nodded, walked Dr. Persons to the door and thanked her. "Donita will validate your parking and have someone escort you to the parking deck if you wish."

I trudged to my desk and gazed out the window at the Ohio River flowing westwardly 12 floors below and three blocks away from my downtown office. I had, at best, gained only fragmentary insights from a preeminent relationship psychologist — a few for my client, almost none for my friend.

There was no doubt that Dano would not take it well when I handed him Dr. Persons's card, but I felt I needed to see him again soon and learn a little more about the demons that seemed to increasingly steer him toward the abyss.

I opened up my Facebook app and hit the messenger icon. I found the profile for Danny Albright and started thumb-typing: Hope you got home OK last night, Dano. Care to watch a game Saturday on your side of the river? UK @ Ole Miss is early game. Ohio St-Minn follows that.

He'd probably answer after work when he got to his apartment in Covington, the Kentucky suburb just across the river via the Brent Spence Bridge from downtown Cincinnati. But, surprisingly, I got a DM right back: Bit of a hangover, but sure. Buffalo Wild Wings @ noon?

I clicked the thumbs-up emoji in response. We were set. Hopefully, I could get a better assessment of the unwell mind of Danny Albertson.

▼ ▼ ▼

The game wasn't going the way Dano hoped. The fact that a quarterback at 7th-ranked Kentucky, reputed to be the most attractive draft prospect in the land to NFL scouts, was slinging passes off-target when he wasn't getting sacked while Ole Miss, with its fast-tempo offense run by its new transfer quarterback, were slicing through Kentucky's defense like a hot knife through butter. It sent Dano into a spiral of anger and he shifted his focus to another round of increasingly unhinged, explicit sex talk.

"I get more snatch than that guy," Dano said, nodding and pointing his beer toward the screen where Kentucky's passer was picking himself off the turf and extracting shreds of Mississippi sod from his facemask after Rebel tacklers had sacked him, knocking the ball loose and recovering the fumble in the process, to end the Wildcats' last chance to win.

"Reel it in a little, Dano. We can't afford to get run out of another bar," I said.

Leaning my way in a stage whisper almost as loud as his previous outburst, he launched into a description of what he claimed to have done on Super Bowl Sunday, seven months earlier, with a woman we both knew.

"So we're at my place, right? And we're watching the game and I have a couple of other friends over, and she starts unbuckling my belt and unzipping me right there on the sofa. Yeah, the lights were turned down in the room for the, you know, theater effect, but you could see plenty from the light my 72-inch screen was giving off," he said.

Why was everything always quantifiable in inches with Dano? He continued.

"So I'm going commando and she grabs my dick, pulls it out and then starts pouring the bleu cheese dressing that came with the hot wings all over it. I'm like, 'What's this crazy whore doing?' and like, 'This is going to ruin my pants and my brand new couch.' So just as I'm getting ready to kick her ass out, her mouth starts slurping up all the bleu cheese sauce, and now nobody gives the slightest shit about the game," he said.

The story went on as the woman not only fellates Dano to a tempestuous orgasm, she then extends the favor to both guys watching the game with him and — the pièce de resistance — she performs oral sex on the girlfriend of one of Dano's friends.

"Les, I never saw anything like this. I mean there was jizz and girl-grool all over my den, but, hey!, what has two thumbs and don't give a shit? This guy," he roared, laughing as he pointed to himself. Two or three tables full of people nearby looked on with disgust.

"Man, we had three guys fucking two girls, and it was Kass who was taking one in the cooch and another in the throat," Dano said.

The smile on his face was fragile and forced as his eyes searched mine for some sign of affirmation. What he saw — my lips pressed tightly into a grimace over clenched teeth and my eyes looking off into the crowd — told him I wasn't happy and definitely not buying it. The time had arrived to act, so I defaulted to what I mastered for a living: a withering cross-examination.

"So one guy had no date, correct?" I asked.

"Yeah, that was Gooney. Works with me at the stadium. Hung like a fuckin' horse," he said, trying to rekindle a sense of humorous bonhomie. Dano saw immediately it had failed.

"The other guy, he brought his girlfriend. And this girlfriend just sat there and let this random woman fellate her boyfriend in front of everyone?"

"Well... I... guess," he said. "I really wasn't looking at her... the other girl..."

"And nobody said anything when, apropos of nothing, your date coated your member with dressing and started this whole food-orgy?"

"Uh... not that I noticed."

"OK, so who was screwing who after your date had serviced the genitalia of everyone in the room? Who got to plow Gooney's girl?"

"Well, I did."

"But wait, wasn't Gooney the guy who arrived solo?"

"Oh yeah... that's right. Then it was Ben's date. Yeah, Ben's."

"Date? Not his girlfriend? You said she was his girlfriend. What was her name?"

"I didn't get her name," Dano said, now getting uneasy sensing he was being caught in a trap of his own fictions.

"You work with these guys every day, but you don't know his girlfriend? Not even a first name?"

"I think it's Angeline. Anna maybe. Something that starts with an A."

"I see. So who's nailing your lady, Ben or Gooney?"

"Uh... Ben. It was Ben."

"Did that upset Angeline or Anna or whatever Ben's girlfriend's name is, seeing him getting sloppy seconds after Gooney?"

"I wasn't watching her," Dano said.

"Just a minute ago, you said that's who you were fucking. And if your earlier account was right, your date was taking someone in her mouth and someone else down south, so there wouldn't have been any sloppy seconds."

An uncomfortable silence. Dano's face was turning red. He was looking at the tabletop, unable to face me.

"And this date of yours, Kass? Are you referring to Kass Felson? The straightlaced honor student Kass Felson who was a year behind us at Dunbar? You're telling me that she made her way from Lexington up to your apartment in Covington on Super Bowl Sunday and got railed by two or three guys? And if memory serves me, Dano, snow was falling at a rate of two or three inches an hour that day. About half the region lost power that day. Closed schools for the better part of a week."

I just stared at Dano, letting the unease simmer.

"Answer me Dano," I persisted. He wouldn't. More silence.

I was in dangerous territory here. I am a trained, experienced litigator. Tinkering with fragile and troubled psyches who aren't under oath outside a courtroom or deposition setting is not something I should ever do, yet here I am, using my well-honed professional skills to dismantle the sloppy, flimsy, made-up-on-the-fly fantasy told by one of my oldest friends. So I let the silence hang for a discomfiting minute or two.

"Listen to me, Dano. I know that story isn't true and you know that story's not true. And I am telling you this as a friend who's also a lawyer: if you ever told that sick yarn to anybody but me, you could — and should — find yourself in a defamation suit that would leave you on the street," I said.

"Please tell me that no one else has ever heard that story whether it's Kass in that disgusting pivot role or any other identifiable, living person."

He just shook his head, tears welling in his reddened eyes.

"Dano, why are you doing this? These crazy stories? Man, that stuff is twisted and disconnected from all decency and even reality. Nobody believes it. What's going on? I love you, buddy, and I want to help you."

Danny Albertson's jaw quivered. It wasn't clear whether it was from a rage building inside him that would trigger him to crush my face with a blow from his meaty fist and his still mighty arms or from guilt and sadness over someone having peered behind the curtain at what a mess his life had become. He tried to speak, both of his hands palms down on the tabletop, but the words wouldn't come.

"Pal, you're like family to me. I think you need somebody to help in a bad way. What you tell me goes nowhere else, OK? Just give me some idea what's going on."

He shook his head and glanced fleetingly at me. "Can't."

"Can't... why?"

"Man,... too much. Too much going on. I can't tell nobody. Not you, not my folks, not nobody."

I let silence hang for a minute or two. Gave Dano a chance to compose himself, but his sense of agitation showed no sign of diminishing.