Blackouts and Breakdowns. Mark Brennan Rosenberg
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I had sworn off brown liquor years before after a mishap involving a bottle of Jim Beam and a few lesbians, which I care never to discuss again, but I was just drunk enough to accept a drink. We drank and continued making out. The room began to spin so I excused myself to the bathroom. I had way too much to drink and now I was beginning to feel sick.
The next thing I knew, I was sleeping on the bathroom floor under a bathmat, which I had been using as a blanket. The sun was coming in from the bathroom window and hitting my forehead. I got myself up and splashed some water on my face. I guess I drank more than I thought, as my head was ringing. I got myself together and opened the bathroom door. When I peered out of the door, everything in the apartment was missing. The boxes, the television, the couch I had been making out on hours earlier, were all gone. Eric had moved out while I was passed out on the bathroom floor. I looked at the clock on my phone and noticed it was three o’clock in the afternoon. What a gentleman not to wake me up from my twelve-hour slumber on the bathroom floor. Or, had I fallen into a small coma and he tried to wake me, but couldn’t? At least I got out of helping a stranger move. I walked out of the vacant apartment and went home. That was the final time I ever offered to help anyone move, drunk or sober.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A few months later, Jason and I went down to D.C. for Thanksgiving. I decided to join Jason and his parents for dinner one night that weekend. We went to a bistro that was right next door to a gay club. Jason’s dad is nearly deaf and you literally have to scream for him to hear anything.
“Colonoscopy, Dad!” Jason yelled at the dinner table after his father asked how my father was doing, “Mark’s dad just had a colonoscopy!!!
“Oh,” Jason’s dad replied.
Of course, this is inappropriate dinnertime conversation, but with Jason’s family, this is the norm and it is also typical for everyone around you to hear what is going on. It makes for quite an embarrassing evening, so Jason and I decided we would dance it out at the club down the street. On our way over, Jason pulled me aside:
“My mother told me in the bathroom that my Dad is not only going deaf, but blind as well.”
“You and your mother go to the bathroom together?” I asked.
“Shut up. On our way to the bathroom….” Jason continued, “whatever, anyway, I don’t think she is really happy about the fact that she is going to be living with Helen Keller.”
“Yikes,” I replied.
“I know,” Jason said, “and he is still driving, it’s such a mess.”
“Well, let’s forget about all that and have fun,” I said as we entered the club. I always have such pearls of wisdom after a few cocktails.
Jason and I entered the club and tried to have fun. Coming from New York back to D.C. you realize how superior everything in New York is. However, Jason and I manage to have fun wherever we go, with a little help from our friends, Jack, Jim, Jose and Johnny. We drank a ton and as we were dancing, I spotted a group of really cute guys in the corner, talking and moving their hands about. I assumed that they were just really passionate about what they were saying, but Jason informed me that they were deaf.
“That’s sign language, you moron!” Jason yelled. Having learned sign language to accommodate his father’s dwindling hearing, Jason walked over and began signing something to the boys and they laughed. There he goes again cock blocking me. I walked over to join them and introduced myself, and noticed one of the deaf boys was very attractive.
“Jason, that one is really cute,” I said about the boy I was eying.
“Ok, Mark,” Jason said. “How on earth are you going to have a conversation with him?”
“Oh, Jason how little you know. In middle school chorus, I had to sign “The Star Spangled Banner” and “I Swear” by All-4-One when we performed at a nursing home. I can wing it.” Although, at that point in the evening, the only sign language I remembered was “stars”, “moon” and “sky”. I could totally make a conversation out of that. Perhaps he was into astrology.
“How do sign ‘thank you’?”
I looked at Jason, gave him the finger and walked away. After a few drinks my English usually isn’t that great anyway so what difference did it make if he could hear me or not?
I walked over to the cute deaf kid and waved ‘hi’. He waved back. I could do this after all. He began signing something and I pretended to understand what he was signing. He signed something else and I decided that having a conversation was not necessary and I dragged him onto the dance floor and tried making out with him. We began dancing and he continued to sign something.
“I DON’T REALLY KNOW SIGN LANGUAGE THAT GREAT!” I yelled into his ear. After remembering he was deaf, I gave him a I don’t know look and we continued dancing, but I could tell that the deaf kid was drifting away. He kept signing something, but I didn’t know what it was so I just kept grabbing him and dancing. I saw Jason yelling something from the other side of the room, but I just ignored him. He was always trying to ruin my fun, but I was not going to let him do it this time. The deaf guy kept on signing and I had no idea what was going on. Finally, Jason intervened.
“Mark, what the hell are you doing?” he asked as he pulled the deaf kid away from me.
“Dancing,” I replied. I turned around and the deaf kid disappeared. “Damn it Jason! Thanks for ruining everything!”
“I think you are completely retarded,” Jason said. “So much for you ‘winging it’, you moron.”
“What do you mean?”
“The whole time you were dancing with him, he was telling you that he had a boyfriend. The guy he was sitting next to when you walked over to him was his boyfriend.”
“Damn All-4-One and their pointless lyrics! It’s no wonder their careers were short-lived.”
As Jason and I continued talking, a six-foot tall black guy, who was built like a brick shit-house walked over to us. It was the deaf kid’s boyfriend.
“Which one of you were trying to steal my man?” the huge man asked two scrawny gay boys. Jason and I looked at each other and ran out the door. Once outside, Jason smacked me upside the head and called me an asshole.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A few years later, Jason and I moved into together. We found an apartment on the Upper Upper East Side. Actually, it was more like Spanish Harlem. We decided to coin the name “SpaHa” to make it seem as it we were living somewhere cool.
“Wow Jason, we live on the 6, just like J. Lo.! Isn’t this exciting?” I said. It was very exciting for both of us to be living in our own apartment after having lived in student housing for two years. It was cheap and just what we needed. Although it was right next door to a slaughterhouse where they killed chickens and the sound of chickens meeting their maker was rather unappetizing so we opted to eat out every night. Jason and I moved into the new apartment and the shenanigans immediately began. We would host after hours parties just about every weekend and have about seven to ten of our new best friends that we had just met that night over for drinks. One night, our straight new best friend Bill got sick in our toilet and ended up clogging it up. The next day, Jason and I did not know what to do. We had a clogged toilet and about $17 between the two of us. That $17 was most definitely going to have to be spent on drinks that night, so we decided to leave the toilet as is and figure something out at a later date. That’s what you get for having straight people over to your apartment. Over the next few weeks, Jason and I managed to make do without having a toilet. We befriended the Chinese lady who owned the restaurant downstairs and she let us use her bathroom whenever we needed it. If it was an emergency, Jason and I both knew what drastic measures to take. That’s where the big plastic bags from Key Food came in handy. In actuality, we were the exact opposite of J. Lo.
Jason and I loved living together. Every weekend was a new journey into the unknown. If there was a new gay