My return to Chicago; III

This is where it gets fun, for a couple of minutes.

I am waiting in Tin Lizzies on Clark. It is Friday night, and I am dressed to the nines, a new thing, for my usual Friday night Chicago attire is a shirt, jeans, a bad attitude and really rad snakeskin boots. My friend Kitty is meeting me here. She was incoherent in a cab when I finally got hold of her, which is how she usually is when I get hold of her. It is also how I usually am when she gets hold of me. I went to dinner with my sister and a friend earlier and had a few glasses of red wine, which is more consecutive consumption of ethyl alcohol than I've drunk in weeks. Nobody drinks much in LA. They're in AA or they do drugs. The Southpark 10th anniversary party was a bit of a boozery, but excluding that night, it's been a while since I've imbibed with the intent of getting hammered. So my red wine intake puts me at drunk. Even really drunk.

I am so fucking excited. Kitty is the best-kept secret in all of Chicago. She is the lesbo sun to its brooding, Midwestern moon. She and I are catalytic. When we are met in the Petri dish of a Chicago bar, "unstable things" happen, sometimes involving police, sometimes not. Last New Year's Eve, a gang of conservative Trixies tried to boot us from the champagne boat cruise we were on, and they tried to do so while a half mile off the coast in the midst of Lake Michigan. What were they going to do? Put us in a dingy? Somehow, I think we would have made lesbian lemonade of that.

Kitty arrives and kisses me seventy times on the mouth. She grabs my tits and screams, "I love my Bunnyyyyyy!" We jump up and down at an accelerated rate, and kiss some more--the chemical reaction starts. We add a jagerbomb to the mix. We talk about Kitty's life (while hopping) and my life (while hopping) and what's changed and what's new. We drink another jagerbomb. Kitty grabs the breasts of every straight girl in the room. Shelly arrives. We three hug and kiss seventy times on the mouth. The straight girls begin to form a lynch mob, not unlike the one we encountered in Lake Michigan last NYE. We celebrate this with yet another jagerbomb.

Kitty sees the lynch mob, walks straight up to its leader--a busty Greek girl I'm not sure we could take should it be necessary--and gives her a pat on the crotch and a wink. Somehow, Zorba is not enraged. I say, "Kitty, she's straight!'

She winks and smokes and says, "They never are...at first."

That girl is my HERO.

Shelly and I get into an hour-long conversation about the guy I was supposed to meeting here. She says some really prescient things I can't remember now. The next day, she will call me and say, "So are you dating anyone?"

No more than an hour into our party, I've consumed more liquor than I have since I left Chicago. My pass out clock is set to expire in mere minutes, and I take this opportunity to leave Zorba and her band of angertons, gather the girls into a cab and head further north on Clark to my favorite Chicago dive bar, Carol's pub. Inside, it's empty. There are only a few regulars and the Diamondback Band on stage, for it is only midnight. Kitty and I dance to Ring of Fire on an almost empty dance floor, and when Kitty dips down and shoves her head under my dress, Reva, queen bee of the Diamondback Band, shouts "Security!" into the mic. Kitty, Shelly and I are escorted from Carol's, a thing I previously thought impossible. Bordy, the bouncer, asks us to "take lots of pictures."

On Clark, the pass out clock kicks in. I run to a cab and flag it down, jump in and slur my sister's address. I tally the amount of liquor I've consumed and find my performance to be a paltry one. My liver is out of shape, and it doesn't occur to me to go about getting it back into fighting form. I don't think about it much. I only think, "Damn, I luf Kitty. And Shelly too. How cool is Shelly? We never hung out much when I lived here, but then, she did date Brandon."

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Posted by: KungFu Mike at October 18, 2006 08:30 AM

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