And the only buzzkill is how every Romeo comes to sniff a circle around her, trying to grab her in an eye lock and giving her tits his best Pepsodent toothpaste smile. And this one time, riding on the bus, a pack of Romeos stand themselves around where Brit and I are sitting in the back of the bus. Brit likes to sit on the aisle right over the back wheels so she can see to punch me first when there’s a Volkswagen, and this one big Romeo comes to stand with his crotch situated at her eye level, and when the bus hits a pothole maybe his hip brushes against her shoulder until Brit looks up at him, and talking around her fingers in her mouth Britney says, “Hello, Big Boy.” And that’s just how Brit can be: friendly. And she winks and waves her wet fingers for the Romeo to lean down, and he looks around to make sure his competition is clocking his good luck, and this
Romeo squats down to Brit’s eye level, his face all bedroom smirk. And maybe because she’s trying to make me jealous, Brit says to this Romeo, her smokin’ hot green eyes look at him and she asks, “You want to see a magic trick?” And all the other Romeos perk up with looks that prove they’re all listening, and Brit takes her fingers out of her mouth and slides them down inside the front of her pants, grinding her Fingers around inside the skintight crotch of her jeans, and the back half of our bus gets so quiet with their watching her fingers wrestle behind her stonewashed denim zipper. And you can see these Romeos swallow, their Adam’s apples going up and down with all their extra spit and their eyes bulging like horny boners.
And as fast as clobbering a slug bug Britney yanks something out of her pants and yells, “Magic trick!” She swings this thing, shouting, “Puppet show!” And swinging from her hand is something on a little string, like a tea bag only bigger. It’s like a hot dog bun smeared with ketchup swinging on a little string, and Britney screams, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” and smacks it across the cheek of the Romeo still squatting down next to her seat. And Brit chases after him, yelling and slapping his leather jacket with streaks of red. And the other Romeos are not looking at her on purpose, fixing their faces to stare down at their shoes or look out a window; she’s swinging her little string to smack them upside their heads with red smears, the whole time squealing, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” laughing ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, shouting, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” The bus is ding-ding-dinging for the next stop, and a hundred passengers get off at the 7-Eleven, pushing and stampeding off the bus like they all need to buy Slurpees and cash in their winning Powerball mega jackpot tickets. And I’m yelling after them, “It’s okay, everybody!” I’m yelling out the bus window, waving to get their attention, “She’s a performance artist!” I’m yelling, “She doesn’t mean anything by it; it’s just some political gender politics statement deal.”
Even as the bus pulls away with just the two of us left onboard, I’m yelling, “She’s just a free spirit.” As Brit goes up the aisle and starts flogging the driver with her tea bag thing, I’m yelling, “That’s just her zany sense of humor.”
And one night I come home from work and Brit’s naked and standing sideways to the bathroom mirror, holding her belly in both hands, and since we met on the train she’s gained a little weight, but it’s nothing that a couple weeks of pineapple and vinegar won’t fix. And Britney takes my hand and holds my fingers spread against her belly and says, “Feel.” She says, “I think I ate a baby.” And she looks at me like a puppy dog with her green hottie eyes, and I ask if she wants me to go with her to the clinic and take care of it, and she nods her head yes. So we go on my day off, and there’s the usual Sunday school teachers blocking the sidewalk. They hold a garbage bag full of nothing but broken-apart plastic baby doll arms and heads mixed together with ketchup, and Brit doesn’t hesitate. She reaches into their bag and takes a leg and licks it clean like a french fry, and that’s how cool my beautiful girlfriend is. And I open a National Geographic magazine while the nurse asks her if she’s eaten anything today and Brit says she ate a whole canoe full of Iroquois warriors the day before, but no, she hasn’t eaten anything yet today. And I haven’t finished reading this one article about ancient Egyptian mummies before there’s a scream and Britney comes running out of the back still wearing a paper dress and bare feet, like this is a big deal, like maybe she never had an abortion before, because she runs barefoot all the way back to my apartment, and to make her stop shaking and throwing up I have to ask her to marry me.
And it’s obvious my friends are insanely jealous because they throw me this bachelor party, and when Britney goes to the ladies’ room all bummed out because the chef won’t carve her a war canoe, my so-called “friends” all look at me and say, “Dude, she is the total most-hot best thing ever, but we don’t think she’s stoned....” My best friends say, “You didn’t marry her yet, did you?” And their faces don’t say Brit being knocked up is good news. And you know the feeling: You want your best friends and your fiancee to mesh, but my friends grit their teeth and look at me with their eyebrows worried tight together in the middle, and they say, “Dude, did it ever cross your mind that maybe—just maybe—Britney is mentally retarded?”
And I tell them to relax. She’s just an alcoholic. I’m pretty certain she’s a heroin junkie, too. That, and she’s a sexual compulsive, but it’s nothing so bad some talk therapy wouldn’t fix her. Look at me: I’m fat; nobody’s perfect. And maybe instead of a wedding reception we could get our two families together in a hotel conference room to surprise her with an intervention, and instead of a honeymoon we could get Britney committed to a 90-day inpatient recovery program. We’ll work through this. But no way is she retarded. She just needs some rehab.
It’s obvious they’re only bad-mouthing Britney because they are actually totally Romeo-boner, insanely jealous. The minute I looked the other way, they’d be so up in her business. They say, “Dude, don’t look now, but you fucked a retard”, and that’s how unpopular I am, that I have to settle for these shitty friends. Brit, they insist, has the intellect of a six-year-old. They think they’re doing me a favor when they tell me, “Dude, she can’t love you because she doesn’t have the capacity.”
Like the only way somebody would marry me is if she had irreparable brain damage. And I tell them, “She can’t be retarded, for crying out loud, because she wears a pink thong.” And it has to be love because every time we’re together I come so hard my stomach hurts. And it’s like I told my mom’s boyfriend at Thanksgiving, no, Britney is not a high-functioning anything. My best guess is she’s an alcoholic, glue-sniffing, dope-shooting slut, but we’re working on getting her into treatment after she has the babies. And maybe she’s a nymphomaniac, but what’s important here is she’s my nymphomaniac, and that drives my family crazy with envy. I tell them, “I’m in love with a beautiful sex-crazed slut, so why can’t you just be happy for me?”
And after all that fuss there’s a lot less people at our wedding than you’d expect.
And it could be that love makes you prejudiced, but I always thought Brit was pretty smart. You know the feeling, when you can watch TV together for a whole year and you both never argue over what shows. Seriously, if you knew how much TV we watch every week, you’d call us a happy marriage.