Proud Skank

La Vic’s, San Jose’s most authentic Mexican food joint, closed at 3, so I sped down the empty streets at 2 in the morning to get there. The streetlights passed overhead in succession, and with each succession, Trung tried to get a clear picture of me in the light. He examined me closely.

“Is that a hickey on your neck Brian?”

I glanced in my rearview mirror. A faint hickey disappeared and reappeared under the streetlights. “Aw fuck.” I rubbed my neck. Cold and sticky with sweat. “We’re eating dinner with my parents and brother tomorrow!”

“I’ll make sure to point it out to your parents. ‘Oh, my, Brian. Did a really big spider go crazy on your neck?’”

I scoffed and rolled my eyes.

“He pretty much was a spider,” Trung went on. “Seriously, he was all over you as much as you were all over him. You guys looked pretty skanky compared to the couples dancing around you.”

“Tonight was a good night at Fuz for me.”

“You remember Rual?”

“Yeah.” Rual was a guy who Trung and I occasionally hung out with along with a few other guys during summer of 2008.

“I was sitting at the bar talking with some friends and watching you make out with that guy when Rual came up to me and said, ‘Oh my god Trung, I’m so sorry. Brian is such a pig!’”

“Oh my god, haha. What’d you say to that?”

“Oh I laughed. I told him, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re not together anymore.’”

“Man that’s great. Me, a pig?”

“No Brian, but youz a skank!”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m pretty proud of that. I’ve always wanted to make out with a cool, cute guy at a club, so I accomplished one of my goals today.”

“Are you really proud?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“Y’know, Brian, we went out for twenty months. I think by the third month I could already tell whenever you were lying.”

“You think I’m lying?”

“You are.”

I shrugged. I reached for the nearest empty water bottle, twisted off the cap, and managed to shake out four or five drops of water into my mouth

“And now you’re doing the drinking thing again, which you always do when you don’t know what to say after I’ve won the argument.”

“This wasn’t much of an argument.”

“Nope.”

We drove in silence for another minute, and then Trung piped up, “Can I tell you a story?”

“Yeah sure,” I said.

“Now, this story may or may not be related to only tonight. I’m just telling you now because I feel like after all the things you’ve been through, you’re at the right time of your life now to hear this story. I’m going to tell it to you with the bare minimal amount of details. I’m giving you the skeleton of the story, basically, and, when you think about the story, I want you to fill in the missing details—the setting, the histories, the emotions and the motivations, and the adverbs and the adjectives—okay?”

I nodded.

“Alright, here’s the story. A teenage boy wants to go drink with his friends at a party, so he asks his dad for permission. The dad asks him, ‘Oh, so you want to drink, is that it?’ The boy nods. So the dad takes out a handle of whiskey, and he tells the boy to drink. The boy does. He doesn’t get through more than half of it, and now he’s spending the entire night vomiting into the toilet. The dad is observing, telling his son, ‘You wanted to drink, so you got to drink.’ End of story.”

I turned and stared at Trung blankly. He sat poised in the passenger seat and returned my stare with a sharp, confident grin. “What,” I said, “what the hell does that story have to do with anything?”