Chapter 5: Frequent and Infrequent Guests

I am often surprised to hear people speak with such zealous nostalgia for their years in college. They talk as if there will never be a better time in their lives, and when I look back on the sunrises I watched through bleary, sleep deprived eyes, away games and strenuous off-season workouts, and more general social malaise that dominated the majority of my four years, I find it difficult to echo the popular “I would kill to do that again” refrain so many others are want to tell me. But I was fortunate to meet some of the singularly most amazing and endearing people ever to enter my life while I otherwise fumbled my way through an undergraduate education, and for them I would subject myself to the experience a thousand times over.
Recently, two of the more uniquely special of those amazing people converged on my decreasingly quaint hometown; Virgil, a dark comedian with the power to intellectually intimidate strangers by accident, wandered down from his home in the former Confederate capital in the same weekend that Mattie Silver, the only woman on earth capable of quelling my once door-biting rage, drove up from her well appointed apartment on the outskirts of the country’s largest Delta and AirTran hub bringing her good friend Little Spoon along for the adventure. Virgil and Mattie were some of my favorite people to converse with during my final year in school, both understanding and appreciating the sheer genius of Matt Groening while also nursing a growing disdain for the tiny environment that was what so many others were happy to call the best time of their lives. To this day I feel some guilt for graduating before them, but they seem not to notice.
Their visit came and went without any particularly dramatic or impressive story, but to describe the weekend as typical suggests that the places we went and drinks we consumed could have happened any other time and were the defining moments. Sure, like so many other weekends Winkle stayed on the couch and attempted to make drunken, ham-fisted moves on Little Spoon. Of course, we called upon the same dingy yellow Ford Windstar that has been my chariot into battle for two years now. And yes, we did end up going to the almost universally unobjectionable Dark Flipper bar one night and the neighborhood favorite Samadillo Sam’s another night, but the words, glances, smiles, and thoughts exchanged were different and otherwise impossible without Virgil and Mattie.
For example, while imbibing the only beer brewed colder than the Rockies in mason jars popularized by southern moonshiners in a bar that was originally famous for showing every Manchester United game, we sat and stood around a chest height table playing the world’s lamest game of one-upmanship by trying to figure who had gone the longest without an intimate (or clumsy) union with the opposite sex. We had finally found a game the happy couples could not win and the lonely and desperate among us reveled in finding humor and pride in our situations, but I’m not sure anyone was prepared for Virgil’s amazing victory:
“Last time I was even WITH a woman, a prom dress was involved, and yes it was actually PROM” he began. “I’m practically a virgin by now. It’s been so long since anyone has seen my penis that you could declare it legally dead. The only thing I could tell you about a vagina at this point is that babies come from there and the diagram from my high school biology book made it look suspiciously like the University of Texas Longhorn. The last boob I saw that was more than two dimensional was one actually one of MATTIE’S that accidentally escaped from a low cut tank top and I know exactly one other person saw it because Thaddeus could not have moved faster to cover it up like a ‘decent’ person otherwise I would have assumed I just hallucinated the whole thing like a desperate legionnaire mistaking heat for water while crawling through the desert.” Through the laughter he began to wind down his tirade, but not before admitting “I don’t even remember what a vagina actually feels like.” He next looked directly at me, shrugged his shoulders in a sincere expression that I might be able to lend some clarity to his confusion regarding the female anatomy, and cracked just the slightest smile to let me know his next words were going to be worth remembering. “A freshly mopped floor??” he asked before letting his shoulders drop and sighing a very real sigh through a very real smile.
A few more shots and a couple of beers later, a surprisingly early last call snuck up on us and kicked us out. It was in fact a Sunday night, and even though most of my banking, court house needing, and educating friends had the next day off to honor Christopher Columbus’s discovery of what he was really hoping was India, I had to work, and for that reason was the only person sober enough to drive everyone home and translate the hieroglyphics on the remote that would allow my drunk guests to watch a DVD. I went to bed hoping that four hours of sleep would be enough to get me through eight hours of work, and dozed off to the sound of a movie I knew no one was watching.