You Fart Too, Bitch!

I am now secure in the realization that Sherman is not going anywhere. Nowhere except for further into our cave to hibernate anyway, since he is a big black bear. Before you go thinking this is not some sort of epic romance, remember that Sherman becomes a real-life ninja when his sister tries to eat me. It has taken a while for me to get there psychologically, but now that I am confident that Sherman is the one, I know I can take another venture out into civilization—human civilization.

It’s pretty good timing too, as one of my childhood friends is getting married this weekend.

“A human friend?” Sherman asks.

“Yes,” I snicker. Sherman isn’t exactly seeing me in my prime. I used to be fairly social. I had plenty of friends—I just didn’t like most of them. Then I found that website, Plenty of Fish, and it changed my world. There really are plenty of fish in the sea. You have ass-hole fish; angel fish with no personality; self-deluded fish and contagious fish. There are so many kinds of fish out there I just became overwhelmed with all my options and ran to the forest, where I found my Romeo, who is neither fish nor fowl, but bear.  “I didn’t swear-off humans until I went to law school.”

“You know what they say,” Sherman says, as he toasts me some birch bark to lather my fresh honey on.

“What do they say?” I ask, hesitantly. I assume he is referring to that often misquoted statement, ‘kill all the lawyers’ which was meant because lawyers were the protectors of truth in William Shakespeare’s day. Now they have a tendency to be seen as the border-patrol into the land of ass-hole-dom, but like fish, lawyers come in many different kinds. I thought Sherman would know all that though, as he is very well read.

“I don’t know,” Sherman says, handing me the honey-coated bark. “I don’t speak human.”

“Lucky you.” Sherman really is the apple of my eye. Or, he would be, if I put  apples in my eye. In mid thought the phone rings. It is the friend from my past. I don’t think weddings usually bring out the best colour in people. This is certainly true with Darlene.

“Why do you have to go all the way to Niagara Falls for this wedding?” I ask. I had read this information on my Facebook e-vite to the wedding and I did not like it. “And why do I have to pay $400 fucking dollars to come and watch you sell yourself to the Italians?”

“Fuck it,” she said.

I figure that had been a fair reaction. This was her big day after-all, and I had known her since we were three weeks old. But, that made my point valid too. I mean, I had spent the better part of two decades watching her sell herself on and off to a lot of shady “gentlemen” and I had never had to front $400 bucks to do it.

“I heard they closed the Pond,” I said despondently. The Pond Motel would have been the obvious first choice for a wedding, just as it had been the place we usually sold ourselves for as little as a happy-meal and a box of wine in those lonely years growing up left of suburbia. You take a right and you end up in hell but take a left and you find yourself at the Pond. It had been accurately named in the sense that ponds tend to be stagnant and so was this motel. Well, unless you are meeting your friend Chlamydia for brunch.

“It’s not at the fucking Pond!” she screamed.

“No. We have established that The Pond is no more. So clearly you went the other way on this one,” I said. “The Pond never saw four hundred dollars.”

“That’s for fucking sure,” she agreed. “Unless it was testing for herpes.” Darlene is a little obnoxious the way Tiger Woods kind-of-sort-of likes to have sex with people that aren’t his wife. This is the only reason I still talk to her. The only reason I am going to this wedding is that while Darlene is a little obnoxious, her family is over-the-moon-ridiculous. They’re the kind of people that speed past you for the sole purpose of mooning you only to realize that you are not their cousin Bob, but both a stranger and an undercover cop who is itching to issue a ticket. This is why I love them.

“Will your aunt Giselle be there?” I ask, hopeful. A lot is riding on Giselle’s presence. She is what Anderson Copper would call “controversial”. I met Giselle when I was in the second grade and Darlene’s cousin, Sophie, used to babysit us. Giselle had just come home from what she only ever referred to as the “night shift”, threw down a stack of twenties and farted.

I couldn’t help but stare. I might have only been six, but I knew this was life-style was something to strive fo in the futurer.

“You fart too, Bitch!” she screamed at me. That’s when I knew I would love drag-queens.

“Yes, she’ll be there,” Darlene coughs through a cigarette. I hung-up the phone on Darlene. There was no time to lose. I needed to see what had happened to Giselle twenty years later.

“Sherman, can you watch Richard Hatched?” I ask with the panicked efficiency of shark-trainer at Marine Land. Richard Hatch is our fat cat. She is super lazy and refuses to wear clothes. She also hogs the remote when Survivor is on television.

“Yes,” Sherman sighs. “Such is the burden of loving you.”

“Oh, I always bring you honey-ed ham home from these things,” I reply, giving him a peck on the nose. “You love it.”

On the drive up to Niagara fucking Falls for a wedding I have little-to-no interest in (mostly because I am a Brazilian soccer fan and the Italians often get in their way) I wonder about what my life might have looked like if I had stayed on that tried-and-true path that Darlene has chosen to walk. She went to college, got a couple of dogs, is getting married and will have kids all y the time she is thirty. Comparatively, I’m a fucking mess who lives in the bush with a bear and a cat named after a quasi-reality-tv-star.

Just when I am beginning to think I took a wrong turn in life, I arrive at the hotel. I check into my room and then go to say hi to Darlene and see what Giselle has been up to all my life.

As I walk into their hotel room—not plural rooms, mind you, they are “bunking down” together—I see Darlene railroading Giselle on a chair. I always suspected they were inbreeding-lesbians, which is obviously the only reason I have kept them in my ever-dwindling circle-of-trust.

Darlene’s brother, Steve, is providing the commentary.

“Why don’t you try and fling me into the falls?!” shrieks Giselle. Who, I am happy to see, has grown to the size of a small bus.

“You break it…you bought it,” hollers Steve.

“I think I’ll fucking pass then,” laughs Darlene, as she grabs another run-and-coke and a cigarette. “Scott, you communist bastard! Do you want a smoke?” she asks, grabbing me in the kind of embrace I usually only accept from Sherman these days.

“No thanks,” I smile. “Do you have any birch bark?”

“What the fuck?” she asks, swivelling on Giselle’s groin. Giselle is now massaging her. I suspect I will cash in on one of these free massages until I catch that twinkle in Giselle’s eye that says “I only do men, asshole!” So I grab a cheese roll and flop-down on the couch beside Steve.

 I suspect I have some explaining to do. This is the trouble with negotiating different worlds. We all see things from our own vantage point, and while the view of the Falls is enjoyable from up here on the 22^nd floor, I have always found my greatest experiences at the end of the hall of floor eight in life. I spent a long time deliberating whether to tell them about my special friend Sherman. But, at the end of the day, he is the one I trust to watch over me and Richard Hatch, so like Darlene and Giselle seem to have, I am going to adopt the fuck-it philosophy of life and bare my soul to them.

“I don’t smoke or eat meat Darlene,” I begin, starting out small. “And I sleep in the forest with big black bear named Sherman. Who I love very much. Can you dig it?”

Giselle knees Darlene off of her lap and strides over to me with an impressive gate. “Good for you, Jerk-Off.” Then she gives me a massage. As Giselle needs deeply into the tightly-wound aggression I apparently have stored in my back the way Sherman stores acorns, Darlene ways in.

“You always were a nomad. Thankfully, that’s what we love about you.”

“That and you have pretty decent pours for someone living in the fucking woods,” chuckles Giselle, between belches. Darlene picks up a large knife to cut herself a piece of wedding cake. “Steve, what the fuck happened to this knife?! It’s all crusty.”

Steve smiles knowingly. “I cut the cheese.”

“Oh, okay,” says Darlene, as she cuts into the cake. Then, a few seconds later her nose turns up in the air, not unlike a well-trained drug dog.

“No, really,” Steve laughs. “I fucking cut the cheese. And I don’t know what was up with that knife.”

“I fucking hate this family!” howls Darlene.

“You aren’t too big for me to slap you old girl,” Giselle shouts to Darlene, as she sparks-up a cigar. “Scott, you really have to bring your bear home for dinner some time. We want to meet him. You know, make sure he’s good enough for you.”

“Thanks G-bird,” I smile, as she hands me the cigar and I take that ceremonial toke that suits such rights-of-passage and acceptance.

That’s the thing about family. The important people in your life each hold a piece of your heart. A different piece to be sure, but, without Darlene or Giselle, I wouldn’t be the same version of me that I am today. They carry my past the way Sherman holds my present in his weathered paws.

As I traipse back out of the wilderness of my youth and into the forest of my young adulthood, I can’t help but smile. I mean fuck it, right? As a brave lesbian prostitute once told me, everybody else farts too, so you may as well own the life you’re living. That’s when I stop to get the honey-ed ham for the big black bear that I love. The one I will force to endure my next public engagement.