My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

drunk, and we butcher it into further nonsense, which only makes it more fun. And by this time Amity has charmed everyone: my family, the waiters, the busboys, the pianist at the bar. My mother is sailing with happiness, waving her wineglass in the air and singing so unbelievably off-key, as she does in Episcopal church, that I fear our glasses may shatter at any moment.

And in the middle of all this boozy dare I say gay frivolity

I suddenly become a little sad. Because I realize how much my mother wants me to be straight. And even though she loves me dearly, and there’s never been such levity in her heart as there is

this evening, here, with Amity, I find it all to be a little false. And I realize that it wouldn’t even matter if my mother did know that in the short time I’ve known Amity, she’s fucked Bart, Troy, Hunt, Miguel, Wade, and me. As long as Amity is willing to provide legitimacy to her son’s life, she’s in the fold.

And poor Winston. He’s been driving me to this moment since the day at the baseball park. He can’t stand my attempt to be legitimate, to be gay, to be myself. He’s resented that I’ve refused to walk the same straight line that he does, making it impossible for all of us to have a comfortable prosperous life. But now that I’m finally doing it he’s trying to derail me. Forget it. I’m marrying Amity. And getting my inheritance. For all the right reasons.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Amity’s five-year-anniversary “Award Ceremony” with the air line is tonight. It’s only June, but it’s the hottest day of the year so far. The stagnant air is dripping with humidity, causing leaves on the trees that line our street to hang heavy and cast shadows of resignation on the baking pavement. Like Wichita, Dallas has no oceans or mountains to temper its weather, or even give its air a salt or pine scent. The heated Texas earth forces the air to rise up high into the atmosphere, where it cools and forms huge cumulonimbus structures that serve as a patchwork blanket fiddled with holes. The sun blazes through the voids in vertical streams that bear down on us as if we’re ants under a magnifying glass.

We have both of the wall-unit air conditioners blasting in the house (we bought a second one, after cashing the enormous check my mother wrote me the day we left Wichita), so we’re somewhat relieved from the heat as we get ready for the big hoedown. The party is being held in a ballroom of some downtown hotel and requires formal attire. These events are renowned at the airline. It’s a chance for all the employees to put on their TV star clothes and go up on stage and accept awards for things like “Five Years of Perfect Attendance” (you have no life) and “Most Inspirational

Employee” (misguided zealot), but most importantly, stand around and get drunk while gossiping about whoever is out of earshot. It’s that magic night when the stewardesses get their chance to meet the unknowing wives of the pilots they’ve fucked on their layovers. Then all the employees sit at tables of eight and eat gristly prime rib while the president of the airline, Mr. Gherkin, a highly religious man who doesn’t drink or smoke (and has a legendarily tiny penis), tells them he wouldn’t be able to live without his devoted workers. Amity showed me a recap of last year’s ceremony in an old issue of the employee paper. It was a gushy article with lots of splashy pictures that culminated in the coverage and photo of the “Employee of the Year,” a dead ticket agent who had died in a single-car accident and was lauded for her “irrepressible good humor, kindness, and honesty.” Amity told me the inside story was that there were two sets of tire tracks on that fated highway; the ticket agent was a prissy bitch with breast implants who, after she’d threatened to go to his wife, was run off, the road by the executive VP she’d been having an affair with.

I sit on the edge of the tub and watch while Amity patiently separates her hair into clumps and puts those clumps into rollers, winding them up, one by one. She’s dropped the formality of boxer shorts and camisole and stands naked, her freshly showered ass to my face.

“Hey, baby, did you know that Eva Catrell is going to be there tonight with her shit-kicker boyfriend?”

My first trip at the airline I flew with Eva Catrell, who tried to get me to fuck her while we were on a layover in Amarillo. I had dinner with her, and she suggested we go back to her room, where she gave me a Valium and poured me a drink, and we lay down on her bed. She told me she always brought her vibrator on her layovers, but loved when she didn’t have to use it. Get it? This gal was rough around the edges, tougher than most of the guys I’d slept with. “Rode hard and put up wet,” as Amity would say. When I

realized she wasn’t offering me her vibrator as a loan, I got off the bed and headed for the door, but before I got out of the room, she stuck her tongue down my throat. The next day, she drank Bloody Marys on the last flight and insisted on taking me home with her, since it was too late to commute to Kansas. I begged off and let her drop me at what I claimed was a friend’s apartment house where I called a cab to take me to a hotel.

“Oh great,” I say.

“Don’t worry,” Amity answers, finishing up on her hair. “I’m sure she didn’t tell her boyfriend that she French-kissed you, Harry!”

“I bet her pussy tastes like sourdough biscuits and campfire logs.”

Amity screams with laughter. “Ooh, baby, you gotta get some