Non-Albino Et Al
In my mid-forties, along with pretty much every other decade of my adult life, I found myself starting over, again. This wasn't new to me. I was quite accustomed to change. In fact, I thrived on it. In a world where most people are scared shitless of change, I consciously sought it out. However, the problem with starting over, for me, usually meant commencing with limited funds, rendering the new transition all the more difficult. That’s what changing jobs every six months since college graduation will do to a person. I had also been changing my living situation at least every six months to a year since then - from living with roommates to living alone in a trailer to living with both of my parents on two separate occasions in my forties. That was fun.
During this prelude to my now past middle-age existence, I was unfortunately forced to find housing with others. The rental market in Colorado, where I lived, had boomed since the advent of legalized marijuana, and affordable apartments had all but vanished. I was reticent, of course. Aside from my parents, I hadn’t had a roommate in years. Reticent because my past roommate experiences were more often than not, less than stellar. In all my years sharing living quarters with others, I had run the gamut of bad roommates - from living with your garden variety stoners and alcoholics to one who used to sleepwalk into my room, sit on my desk chair, and pee on it thinking it was a toilet, to another who would, upon hearing about a guy I liked, immediately sleep with him, and finally, the pièce de résistance, my roommate my senior year of college who tried to kill himself during finals week in my brand new Honda my father had bought for me as an early graduation present. So, my apprehension about living with others was most definitely not unfounded.
By this time, I had gotten pretty good at spotting the crazies, however, one can never really be sure how nuts another person is until living with him/her/them. Everyone tries to be on their best behavior during roommate interviews, kind of like on job interviews. You feign professionalism, gusto, and sanity, then once accepted, see how much shit you can get away with without getting fired or evicted.
I scoured Craigslist for the perfect place to live. I had a list of criteria, most of which I knew I wouldn’t find but still had hopes for - a private room, a private bathroom, a roommate who was never there, or above all else, a gorgeous, rich male roommate who would fall in love with me and take care of me forever, a pipe dream no doubt, but always a hopeful circumstance. A private room was the only non-negotiable requirement of the lot. My days of sharing a room with stoners, sleepwalkers, and sluts had run its course.
I finally found a beautiful house in the small mountain town of Evergreen where I had been wanting to live for years. The ad read something like: “We are looking for an awesome roommate to become part of our awesome family of caring, awesome, open-minded people. We are all non-binary and use the pronouns, “they, them, and their.” If you are not comfortable with non-binary humans or the LGBTQ community, please look elsewhere. We want this house to be awesome!”
At first glance, the use of the word "non-binary" perplexed me. As hip and open as I thought I was with the LGBTQ community, I did not know what this meant in this context. I had only seen the word, “non-binary” used with numbers, and although I had heard of people using plural personal pronouns, I had never met any. But the ad drew me in - maybe by the emphatic use of “awesome," which was one of my favorite words, along with, “dude,” “fuck,” “retarded,” “party,” and “totally,” - my parlance resembling that of a twenty-year-old fraternity guy.
I made an appointment to come see the space and meet the roommates. The house was perfect, nestled in a wooded area surrounded by wildlife and fresh mountain air and large enough not to feel cramped by the other people living in the house. I would have my own room, but to my chagrin, would have to share the only full bathroom with… everyone, which would, later on, come back to haunt me.
The roommate who had written the ad was named Paula, and they were every bit as energetic and vivacious as their ad - hugging me upon opening the door, telling me I was awesome and would be the perfect fit for the house. Then as per my request, they explained to me what non-binary meant, to which they told me; non-binary is a human who does not identify as the gender they were assigned at birth, which is the binary male or female. They may lean more towards one end of the spectrum of male and female than the other, or they may freely flow between the spectrum of male and female on a daily basis. They may be gay or bi, they may be straight, they may be trans, or they may identify as queer, and because the English language has no gender-neutral pronouns, non-binary humans usually prefer to use the non-gender specific, but confusing to someone not educated in LGBTQ vernacular, “they, them, and their.” Having just spent a year in Thailand where non-binary, gay, and trans people are readily accepted and even celebrated in some cases, I was intrigued, plus, I was almost positive that none of the people in this house had voted for Trump. So that was a bonus. I moved in.
After a while, and multiple occasions using the wrong pronouns with my roommates, I finally got accustomed to using the third person plural for each of them and it became second nature. However, it was confusing for my binary friends and family. When I talked about my roommates and used “they, them and their,” they (my friends and family) would ask who “they” were when I was talking about only one of my roommates. “My roommate is awesome,” I would say. “They know so much about blah blah blah”
“Who’s they?” they (my family) would ask.
“My roommate,” I would reply, confused with their (my family’s) question.
“But you said your roommate knew a lot about blah blah blah. Who else were you talking about?”
“No one. Just one of my roommates.”
“Oh. Because you said “they” so I thought you were talking about more than one person,” they (my family) would respond, to which I would have to explain, yet again, about the preferred use of third-person plural pronouns with non-binary humans because English does not have gender-neutral pronouns.
“Why don’t you just call them “it?” some people would ask me, to which I would reply, “because they’re not a hairy monster from the Adams Family. Would you want to be referred to as “it? They are human beings, dumbass.” But alas, some of my friends and family just couldn’t grasp the concept and continued to use the wrong pronouns or used “they, them, and their” but completely incorrectly, as if they had suddenly metamorphosed into backwater Appalachian rednecks, - “So, your roommate, Frank…”, (long pause with a confused look on their face) “Umm… them are, like, a woman but really a dude?”, or, “So, what is,” (longer pause), “them’s job… they’s job?” I would squint my eyes in a confounded smirk and just reply “really?” Why it proved so difficult to use these pronouns correctly baffled me.
I gave a pass to my ten-year-old and eight-year-old niece and nephew, respectively, when it came to making mistakes while talking about my non-binary roommates. After hearing my explanation of what non-binary meant, they subsequently asked me a few more times, “Auntie Aimee, tell us again about your non-albino roommates again!” Kids say the darnedest things.
The roommates in the house each had their own unique identities and sexual orientations. There was Paula, who was assigned female at birth but identified as gay non-binary but who had also dated cis-hetero men, another term I learned at the house, cis-hetero - a heterosexual person whose gender aligns with what they were assigned at birth, or in laymen’s terms, a straight person. Then, Paula’s partner and co-owner of the house, Frank was assigned female at birth but identified as gay non-binary trans-masculine, which meant that they were more on the male side of the gender spectrum but didn’t identify as a full-on trans male. Frank was also on testosterone and had had top surgery to remove their breasts. Next was Cody, who was assigned male at birth, identified as bisexual non-binary, cross-dressed on occasion, and was dating a non-binary lesbian named Melissa, who was assigned female at birth. And last but not least, the most colorful of the group, was Rachel, who was assigned female at birth, identified as either non-binary or female, didn’t mind the pronouns “she, her, and hers,” and whose sexual orientation ran the gamut of pretty much everything. “Pansexual,” is what she called it, meaning she was more attracted to people’s souls and personalities than their gender. Rachel dated both cis and bi men and women, non-binary and trans humans, and was also into BDSM, polyamory, and swinging. But after having lived with her for a while I began to notice that she indeed had a type, which could best be described as gay non-monogamous polyamorous pre-op queer trans-females. The number of adjectives my roommates used to identify their sexual orientations and gender fluidity reminded me of when I lived and taught English in Chile and the traditional assemblage of middle and family names the Latinos embraced. It was like reciting a tongue twister when addressing my students by their complete identifications during roll call, which I had to do because so many of them shared the same first name and often, the same middle and family names. I had one student named Carlos Miguel Enrique Angulo Manriquez Ponce de Leon. I just called him Chaz. I once asked Rachel what was so appealing about her preferred type of human to have sex with, to which she replied, “I love being with women, but I also love dick. So I get the best of both worlds.” Touché, Rachel. Touché.
Not only were my roommates’ genders and sexual orientations super unique to me, who had thus far only identified at straight, or cis-hetero, as it were, so were their appearances. Paula was tall and voluptuous with a shaved head and a motley array of tattoos and facial piercings, however, for being someone who identified as a non-binary lesbian, they were more stereotypically feminine than I had ever been. Paula wore make-up every day, jewelry, skirts, and dresses had a motherly, protective quality about them, was a raging feminist, and loved arts and crafts. They were also well-known in the local BDSM community and regularly held classes and seminars on rope play and other BDSM techniques. Frank was also tall, almost six feet, and very thin with short brown hair. They also had a mass of tattoos displayed over the entirety of their body and wore big round gauges in their stretched earlobes. Frank’s voice was low because of the daily testosterone injections, but not low enough for a stranger to decipher if they were merely a woman with a lower voice or a man who had never fully developed a more baritone timbre.
If I could exemplify what non-binary looked like to me, Frank would have been the perfect embodiment. They didn’t look wholly like a man, nor a woman. Instead, they possessed both physical and emotional qualities of both genders. They were an aesthetically beautiful human being with high cheekbones, glowing skin, long eyelashes, and a svelte body that was neither entirely masculine nor feminine. They indeed were non-binary, a composite of male and female. One interesting aspect of Frank, I thought, was that they had no desire to get bottom surgery, nor to wear a packer (padding or a phallic object worn in the front of the pants or underwear to give the appearance of having a penis and male bulge). They once said to me, “I don’t want to be a dude. And I don’t want to forget that I was born a woman either.” Frank was very in tune with who they were, probably more so than the rest of the roommates.
Cody was the most unsuspecting regarding their identity and sexual orientation. They stood around six feet seven inches with a shaved head, full sleeves of tattoos, a thick beard, and did construction for a living - an epitome of what most binary people would classify as masculine or a man’s man. But Cody was a gentle giant, overly sensitive and emotional, tearing up on a regular basis lamenting their fucked up, abusive childhood or problems with their lesbian partner, Melissa. They (Cody) slept with women and although had yet to sleep with a man, spoke regularly about their fantasy to suck Chris Hemsworth’s dick.
Rachel was petite with dyed jet black hair which she preferred to wear in a high, messy bun that resembled a 60s style beehive. Other than wearing almost exclusively black clothing and having a smattering of tattoos, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Rachel’s appearance. But make no mistake, that girl was a freak, which is probably why I hung out with her so much. Freak attracts freak. However, had I not lived with her, there is no way she and I would have organically become friends. She was sixteen years my junior, rather self-centered, and I am pretty sure was a compulsive liar. So, other than loving kinky sex and having bathroom humor, we really didn’t have all that much in common. She was funny though. I’ll give her that. Some things that came out of the girl’s mouth will stay with me for years.
One of the reasons I enjoyed living at that house with those people in particular was that we were all very sexually open and talked about sex almost non-stop, very unfiltered and crassly, usually at the kitchen table over morning cups of coffee or tea. Even if the conversation started on a topic as banal as something like vitamin supplements, it eventually would make a sharp turn to anal plugs, anal sex, or double penetration. We talked about the ass a lot for some reason.
I learned a lot living at the Evergreen house, mostly about ass play, which I had not done a lot of until after having lived there - my education about all things ass having grown exponentially during my stay. Frank starting calling the house “50 Shades of Evergreen,” (a play on the popular BDSM books and Movies 50 Shades of Grey), because of the sheer amount of sexual and BDSM talk we all engaged in, but I would say Rachel and I talked about it the most since we were at home a lot, single, horny, and spent more time together than with the others.
After the first two months of living at the 50 Shades house, Rachel and I started to bond. We went out for drinks one night and realized how much we both loved kinky sex, talking about sex, joking about sex, and most importantly, making others around us feel extremely uncomfortable by having unfiltered conversations about sex. I told her how many men I had slept with, which was well into the triple digits by then, and she told me how many people she had slept with, which was approaching the triple digits. There’s nothing like two women bonding over some beers and the sheer amount of people they have fucked. Around Christmas that first year, Rachel and I started a competition for who could sleep with the most people by a certain date. I knew I would lose. My days of one-night stands and dating multiple guys at once had long since passed, but it was fun to reminisce about my glory days. Sometimes I missed being a ho.
When the competition started, I had slept with one guy, and Rachel had slept with two. We had a tally sheet on the refrigerator entitled “Aimee and Rachel’s Fuck Contest,” for the other roommates and guests to behold as they reached for their gluten-free keto vegan Paleo veggie bowls, or whatever other strange food was in the fridge - all the other roommates aside from myself were vegan and had severe dietary restrictions. They did not take to it kindly when I cooked cow tongue in the crockpot overnight, filling the air with the rather unpleasant stench of boiling organ meat. While cow tongue is delicious, cooking it for ten hours in order to separate the membrane from the delectable flesh gives off a pungent aroma reminiscent of vulcanized rubber and roadkill, but it sure tastes good in tacos.
Within a week of the contest, Rachel had amassed two more guys, then two more, then two more. She just kept going. I thought I had slept with a lot of men in a short amount of time during my slutty heyday, but this girl was going for a world record. We eventually had to take down the tally sheet because it was filled with Rachel’s conquests, plus, I had graciously bowed out of the contest, still having only racked up one forgettable guy since Christmas and not really interested in continuing the competition, which Rachel had already won by a landslide.
With every person Rachel slept with came a funny story, to which I eagerly listened. There was the guy with a dick so small she couldn’t tell if it was inside of her or not. Then there was the guy with the dick so huge that he couldn’t fit it all the way inside her. There was the bisexual guy who surreptitiously brought another guy on one of their dates hoping to secure a threesome later, and the guy who kept “forgetting” his wallet on every date. Then there was the polyamorous bearded lesbian trans female named Mabel. That’s when the competition stopped for Rachel. She fell head over heels for Mabel. Why, I do not know. To me, Mabel was an unattractive, rude, alcoholic kleptomaniac with horrible fashion sense. I mean, she wore berets for Christ’s sake, not to mention she regularly stole condiments from restaurants in defiance towards corrupt monopolistic corporations, as if shoving crusty-topped bottles of ketchup or Sriracha down her purple leopard-print leggings could in any way impact America’s capitalistic subterfuge. But according to Rachel’s rehashing of their sex life, Mabel was amazing in bed, and all about the ass - Rachel’s ass in particular - so she was willing to forgo Mabel’s affinity for lifting half-empty bottles of Tabasco from Chipotle.
Rachel began purchasing many ass accoutrement to use with Mabel - anal plugs, anal beads, a large metal hook with a ball on the end that looked more like something used to catch swordfish with than insert into someone's rear end. I’m sure she had a few other accessories in her quiver, but those were the only ones she showed me.
During this time, the 50 Shades House was beginning to fall apart, relationship-wise. Cody had broken up with their partner, and Paula and Frank were on the outs as well. There was tension in the air. Both Frank and Cody began drinking heavily, and when sufficiently sauced, would resemble two belligerent, bitter cis-hetero “dudes,” lamenting their sex lives or lack thereof. Cody’s partner hadn’t had sex with them in over a year, and for as sexual as Paula and Frank were as separate humans, their sex life together had also dwindled down to almost nothing. Rachel was really the only roommate getting any, and boy did she get a lot, which we all heard emanating from within her room while she and her partners expelled myriad cacophony of moans and groans which echoed throughout the house. I suppose if I had a giant silver hook inserted into my rectum, I too would be howling like an injured coyote.
Rachel, Frank, and I hung out the most together and had done our fair share of drinking and bar hopping in the small downtown of Evergreen. Until this time, Frank had been so much fun to drink with that Rachel and I started calling them, “Dranky” (a combo of drunk and Franky) when they got to a certain point in their alcohol consumption and began doing funny dances, making weird faces, and turned into a delightfully goofy, drunk version of themselves. I loved Dranky. They were always good for a laugh, that is, until they started having problems with Paula. Then, Dranky turned to the dark side. Gone were the gnome-like jigs they would do around the kitchen and the adorably slurred stories of their time in San Francisco, pre-trans, when they identified as “dyke as fuck.” Now Frank was drinking to escape their problems, and it wasn’t pretty. They became angry and aggressive, so much so that when Rachel and I knew they were going out drinking, we would make sure to be in our rooms when they came home as to not get caught in the angry tirades of how shitty and sexless their relationship was with Paula.
It was a rare treat to have the 50 Shades House all to myself and enjoy the silence of being alone, away from the bedlam of Cody weeping in their room (which they did a lot), Rachel’s bestial grunting, Paula’s over-enthusiastic cheers about how awesome everything was, and Frank’s drunken laments. But on one particular, lucky night, everyone but myself was gone for hours. Cody and Frank had gone out drinking. Rachel was on a date with Unstable Mabel (my new nickname for her). And Paula was at some BDSM seminar probably giving a lecture on how to properly insert a ball gag into your partner’s mouth without suffocating them.
It was bliss, and because the house was in a sparsely built-up neighborhood surrounded by pine trees and dirt roads, the silence was almost eery - the only sounds coming from curious nocturnal creatures creeping outside my window and the faint din of chirping crickets.
I had been asleep for a few hours when I heard Frank violently crash through the front door and stumble around the living room. Then all went quiet. I figured they went to bed. But then I heard Rachel come home and yell, “Gross! Oh my God! Eww!” I didn’t know what had happened, and I didn’t really want to know. Nothing good could come from those five words. So I stayed in bed. But a few minutes later, I heard an incredibly loud thud. Something wasn’t right. I sprang out of bed and threw on my robe. The bathroom light was on and the door was open. When I entered, I saw Frank inside the tub, hammered drunk, with their legs hanging over the edge of the tub and head against the tiled wall, covered in puke and blood and cackling like a demon. “Oh my God!” I yelled as I looked at the smeared bloodstain on the shower wall. Frank must’ve slipped and fallen and bonked their head on the tile on the way down. Rachel, having also heard the racket, ran up the stairs from her room.
“Oh my God!” yelled Rachel. “I just stepped in puke in the hallway!”
“What the hell happened?” I said.
“When I came home, Frank was passed out in the living room so I just left them there. They must’ve gotten up and puked all the way to the bathroom. This is so gross!” Rachel said. She had already stepped her socked foot in puke in the hallway. We both attempted to lift Frank out of the bathtub, but Frank resisted, calling us both assholes. Neither Rachel nor I wanted to touch Frank and the vomit covering their fleece pullover. Rachel was still in her date clothes - jeans and a sheer black long-sleeved top. We were attempting to grab non-puke-covered parts of Frank’s clothing but it proved difficult, not to mention that Frank kept trying to bite us like a rabid beagle every time one of our hands approached their face.
“Fuck this,” she said and took her top off, baring her perky breasts. “I am not gonna get puke on this top. I just bought it.” There we stood - I in my robe, Rachel in jeans, one sock, and topless, hovering over our bleeding drunk gay non-binary trans-masculine queer roommate who had just vomited all over themselves, flailing in the only tub we all shared.
“I don’t wanna touch them and get puke and blood on my hands,” I said.
“You think I want to?”, said Rachel. “But we should check their head. Make sure it’s not too bad of a cut. I don’t wanna wake up and find Frank dead because we didn’t do anything.”
“Fuck you guys,” Frank slurred. “I hate both of you.”
“Dammit, I wish we had some latex gloves,” I said. But who, aside from nurses, caregivers, and OCD hypochondriacs, has latex gloves in their homes at the ready? It was then that all the ass play education Rachel had been receiving from Unstable Mabel really came in handy. After just a few beats of trying to think of what to do, Rachel blurted out, as she raised her index finger in a gesture of epiphanic realization, “Wait! I have latex gloves! For anal!” And with that, she scampered down to her room, then re-emerged into the bathroom with a full box of blue medical grade latex gloves which she had recently purchased for the specific purpose of having Mabel wear whilst inserting her digits into Rachel’s anus as part of their new ass-centric sexual repertoire. Who would have thought that in a time of semi-crisis, an accessory purchased specifically for avoiding getting shit on one’s hands during digital anal penetration would prove so useful? The truth was that I had never thought of using latex gloves during ass play, or any sexual play for that matter, but after having lived at the 50 Shades house for a while, I learned that more experienced ass play aficionados always wear gloves lest they get fecal matter embedded under their fingernails. Made sense.
After donning the gloves and inspecting and cleaning Frank’s head wound, which turned out not to be serious, just bloody, Rachel and I were able to successfully heave Frank out of the bathtub, leaving behind a trail of blood and vomit that was slowly oozing down the tiled wall. “Frank can clean that shit up,” I said. “I am so done with this.”
“Oh my God, me too,” said Rachel. We walked Frank down to their room and laid them on their bed. We were both rather annoyed at the responsibility forced on us. It should have been Paula caring for their troubled affianced instead of educating kinky strangers on how to hogtie each other.
“I love you guys,” Frank mumbled, “fuck you,” and then swiftly passed out. Rachel and I were standing at the foot of Frank’s bed, sweaty and tired, still wearing our soiled latex gloves that were meant to be used for much more pleasurable activities than hoisting a troubled, drunk, and bleeding roommate out of our communal shower in the middle of the night. Rachel’s “sex hook” could have come in handy as a sort of pulley for the hoisting had we had more ingenuity and some scaffolding attached to the ceiling. We had plenty of rope, which was in everyone’s room but mine (all the roommates were into rope play). Irritated at what had just transpired, Rachel looked at me, still topless, in jeans and one sock, and said, “Great, now every time I use these for anal I’m gonna think about this gross night.” And I thought, “Next time I use latex gloves for anything gross, I am going to think about anal."
At that point, a wave of envy and nostalgia rushed over me. Oh, to be 30 years old, full of piss and vinegar and teeming with the desire to fuck everything in sight. I don’t know how many people Rachel had slept with since she moved into the 50 Shades House. From my calculations, around 30 in about six months and those are only the ones she told me about. I, on the other hand, had only slept with one guy since the inception of the contest. But the sad truth was that I had only slept with one guy in about four years, my longest dry spell ever. My forties had not proven as fruitful of a harvest as my younger, drunker, and more carefree/careless years. That’s what maturity and having standards will do to a person’s sex life, making being a slut that much more challenging. But at least I could live vicariously through Rachel’s colorful and verbose sex life.
We both snapped off our puke and blood-covered gloves like two surgeons after a successful operation and nodded at one another, pleased at our accomplishment. Then we threw the soiled gloves in Frank’s trash can and went to bed. The next morning, Frank remembered nothing about the night before - their only clues were a knot on their head, a dried puddle of vomit in the living room, and the smear of crusty blood on the shower wall, which they shamefully cleaned up, alone.
I moved out of the 50 Shades House not too long after the bathroom incident. Frank and Paula broke up and ended up having to sell the house. Rachel broke up with Unstable Mabel, then got back together with her, then broke up with her again, and Cody, I am not sure what happened to them. Maybe they finally decided to explore their bisexuality and pursue their dream of fellating Thor or at least a Thor lookalike.
My residence at that house spanned only a short year and a half, and that was enough for me, not because of who my roommates were as people, but because sharing quarters with five other humans is always going to present problems at some point no matter how many adjectives they use to describe their sexual and gender identities. I was ready to downsize the number of roommates with whom I chose to cohabitate. I never saw nor spoke to any of the roommates again after we all left, not for any reason other than all of our lives being so different.
I genuinely enjoyed my time at the 50 Shades House and the motley parade of individuals with whom I lived and who visited, which included, but was not limited to, a trans-male ex-porn star, a BDSM expert who was a master at rope play and had even authored several instructional books on it, a trans-female dominatrix who specialized in candle wax play, and last but not least, Unstable Mabel, the bearded trans-female lesbian kleptomaniac.
My stay at that house reminds me of that clichéd quote about how people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I was provided with all three.
The season - according to Paula, who not only was a queer lesbian non-binary BDSM master but also an adherent of Wicca, when all this shit went down it was the Season of the Witch, or Autumn, when an ambient prescience of impending death and doom is in the air. All the roommates aside from myself were into paganism and all had shrines in their rooms made up of scary-looking mythical creatures, crystals, and acrid-smelling incense. Outside in our yard, by the functioning chicken coop, was a perpetual creepy mound of dead roses and rotting fruit - discarded offerings to whichever pagan goddess was being observed that month. I was sure at some point I would find a bloody beheaded chicken carcass amongst the fecund remnants, especially when the atmosphere in the house took a dark turn. I asked the roommates once if they could just give me the fruit instead of wasting perfectly good oranges and pears on eight-armed celestial deities who weren’t going to eat it, anyway. But they declined, claiming that consuming the fruit or transferring the flowers into a decorative vase to brighten my room would render the offerings powerless.
It was this season, this Season of the Witch, when all the relationships in the house began expiring and things got strange, or I should say, stranger. Nothing about what went on in that house wasn’t strange.
The reason. Well, I believe the reason was to gain knowledge, knowledge that I never would have had access to had I not lived with this array of non-hetero heterogeneous humans. After all, I learned about the non-binary, trans, and queer cultures, quality sex toys, which type of candles won’t burn your skin during wax play, and finally, how to make keto Paleo-friendly vegan baked goods while still keeping them moist.
And as for the last measure of the quote, I describe having lived at the 50 Shades House, in my own words, “Dude, a totally fucking awesome retarded party,” most of the time. And for the other not-so-fun times, unbeknownst to me, we had had a secret stash of blue medical grade latex gloves, really meant for anal, which I will remember for the rest of my lifetime.