“Yeah, but there’s twelve bottles here.” Bill had finished opening the wine and had poured some in each glass.
I sampled the wine. It was about average for a Beaujolais Nouveau. Marilyn and I had gotten into the habit of buying a case every year. If it was a good year, we would buy a second. This year’s was a touch tannic, but otherwise quite agreeable. “A good year. Not a great year, but a good year,” I pronounced.
Marty and Bill sipped their wine. Neither had much experience with wine, but they didn’t just swill it down, either. “So we end up drinking three bottles apiece?”
I laughed at that and sipped some more wine. “Not necessary. Listen, if you guys cough up another five apiece, I’ll split up whatever’s left with you. Otherwise, I’ll just take it back to the dorm with me. It’s no big deal. I like wine and I’ll just drink it myself.” I stirred the stuffing in the bowl and mixed in the butter and broth.
I got Marty to help by holding the turkey upright while I loaded the stuffing inside. Bill seemed to like the wine, and started asking, “So how do you know so much about wine?”
“I’ve been drinking wine for years. I prefer it over booze and beer, actually. Plus, it’s an excellent way to get your girlfriend in the mood while still acting sophisticated and cool.”
Bill wasn’t buying it. “You’ve been drinking wine for years? You want to explain that?”
I looked at the two of them and shrugged. “Okay, but I’m just asking you, don’t go blasting this all over the house, okay?” They both nodded, and I finished stuffing the ass of the bird and carefully lowered him to the counter. I quickly grabbed a few skewers and closed him up. “Where’s your home?” I asked.
“Huh? West Babylon,” said Marty.
I turned my head to Bill. He shrugged and said, “Sacramento. Why?”
“My home is wherever I’m standing. These days it’s Troy. The last couple of years it was Towson, Maryland. Before that it was Lutherville, Maryland. Two years ago I moved out of my family’s home and started living on my own.”
“I’m not following you. Your parents threw you out?” asked Marty.
“More like the other way around. Things were really bad at home, like really bad, and I told them I was either moving out and getting an apartment or I was going to leave and never come back. We struck a deal, and I moved out just after I turned sixteen. I had my own place through most of high school.”
“That is so cool!” gushed Bill.
“Whatever it was, it wasn’t cool,” I replied. “But it was necessary.”
“Why was it necessary?” asked Marty.
“I’ll get to that, but let me finish this.” I stuffed the neck of the bird without any help and found myself with just a little left of the stuffing. I tossed that out and turned the oven on. “Where’s a roaster?” We found one on a shelf, and I rinsed it quickly. Finally I set the bird in the roaster, basted it with cooking oil, covered it with tin foil, and stuck in a meat thermometer. Then, after I put the bird in the oven, I had time to answer their questions. I washed my hands and sipped some wine, and then refreshed our glasses.
“Okay, back to me moving out. The problem is my little brother, who’s kind of nuts. I couldn’t live there anymore.”
“So what? My little brother is nuts too,” commented Marty.
“No, you don’t get it. I mean my brother is nuts!” I waved a finger in a circular pattern around my ear. “As in, my brother is a raving psychotic. He’s dangerous for me to be around. I think he’s a paranoid schizophrenic, and his delusions are aimed at me. Towards the end, I was sleeping in a different room behind a locked door, and I still wasn’t safe.”
“You’re shitting me!” said Bill.
“I wish.”
“You mean he’s actually crazy? What about your parents? Couldn’t they do something about him?”
It was my turn to shrug. “That’s a big part of the problem. I think my Dad knows something’s wrong with him, but he won’t go up against my mother, and she thinks the sun rises and sets because my brother tells it to. She doesn’t see any problem at all. I finally had enough and got out of there.”
Marty eyed me curiously. “We’ll get back to that in a moment, but what does that have to do with wine?”
I grinned at him. “Hey, I was sixteen and had a bachelor apartment by myself. I got an older buddy to keep me stocked on booze. It was great for wining and dining pretty young ladies.”
It took a second for it to sink in, but you could see the comprehension in their eyes. This time the ‘Are you shitting me?’ comments were much more appreciative! Jack Jones picked that time to wander in and after hearing how I had been living for the last two years of high school, simply said, “You dog!”
While this was going on, we finished the first bottle and the boozemaster opened a second. I started getting all the sides ready. The canned yams were opened and put into one sauce pan, the bottled gravy was opened and put into another, a baking pan was pulled out for the rolls, and I grabbed the bag of green beans and a cutting board, and started cutting the ends off the beans. Meanwhile, the guys peppered me with questions about the crazy shit my brother used to do, and I went over a lot of it, all the time explaining that I had to move out.
Eventually we exhausted that topic, and Jack said, “So that’s why you know how to cook. You’ve been on your own for two years.”
“Bingo!” I agreed. “I do like to cook, though. I used to go over to my girlfriend’s house and cook a big meal about once a month for her and her family. Still, we broke up over the summer, and this is the first chance I’ve had to cook in months! I really appreciate it!”
“What’d she think of you having your own apartment?” asked Marty.
“She really liked it. I mean, really, really liked it.”
“And her parents?” quizzed Jack.
“Somehow we never got around to telling them the story. Jeana would come over to ‘my place’. We just weren’t too specific about where that was,” I commented.
“So you lied to them.”
I gave a thoughtful look. “I think of it more as a sin of omission, rather than one of commission.”
That got a snorting laugh out of the others, and we ended up talking quite awhile about high school girlfriends and who had done what to whom. Once the preparations for all the side dishes were out of the way, we grabbed another couple bottles of wine and headed to the living room, and continued the discussion. Jack said, “We need to give Carl the Purity Test!”
“What’s the Purity Test?” I asked.
“It rates how pure you are!” replied Marty with an evil laugh.
“Oh, it’s a requirement!” agreed Bill. Jack was sent upstairs to find a copy, and a Bible.
The Purity Test consisted of 100 questions, all related to some form of sexual activity, from the mild (’Have you ever seen a girl?’) to the deviant (’Have you ever fucked a barnyard animal?’). Your score was the number of NOs you gave. A score of 100 meant you were probably an alien from Mars and had just landed. A score of 0 meant you generally spent your nights gangbanging sheep. Male sheep!
Jack came back down with a stack of tests and handed them around, and placed the Bible in front of me. I was ordered to place the Bible in my hands and swear on pain of eternal damnation and torture to tell the truth. I then took the test. It only took about five minutes or so, maybe less. I scored a 29, which seemed very impressive to the others. Jack wasn’t sure he believed me, since my score was actually a good 15 points lower than his, but the truth came out that his girlfriend had just popped his cherry that September, which got him razzed by the other two.