Tanner's and Jenn's Pieces from Inner Monologues: Haters (Dec 3rd 2008)

THREE DAYS IN THE SEVENTH GRADE
by Tanner Dahlin


Part One: Fight Day
The second day of seventh grade I fell in love with a girl named Sissy Larson. I could tell I was in love with her because I couldn’t stop staring at her. She had beautiful hair and her laugh was the most wonderful thing ever invented.
One day, that first week of school, I was walking down the crowded hallway when she just popped out of the girl’s locker room making her hair swoosh by my face and I couldn’t help but stare as she walked away. I stared hard. I kept on walking, but I also kept on staring. This is probably why I ran smack dab into Herb Olafson. Herb Olafson was six feet three inches tall and weighed 230 pounds the day he barely graduated the sixth grade. And he grew all summer.
I ran into his giant ‘man-chest’ and bounced off hard. My books went flying. I got up and tried to evaluate the situation when out of nowhere, little Susie Storts yells, “Kick his ass Herb!” First of all, Little Susie Storts was, and probably still is, 3 feet tall. I never got to sit at their table at lunch and never said three words to her in my life, yet for some reason, she was calling for my ass to be kicked.
I had never been in a fight in my life before, so I just stared at him, frozen in horror. Then I heard, “Yeah kick his ass Herb!” and people were like, “yeah!” I was like, “Oh my God!” Then my best friend, Dan Wey, shouts, “Tanner would kick your ass Herb. Kick his ass Tanner!” I was like, “shut the fuck up, dude!”
At this point, thirty people are gathered around, including Sissy Larson, and they all are just waiting for me to get pounded, when out of nowhere, Sissy shouted, “Kick his ass Herb!” I was like, Holy Shit! My dream girl just yelled for me to get my ass kicked!
And something flipped in me and I looked at Herb and said, ‘bring it on fat ass!’
It was arranged that it would all go down the next day after eighth period, behind Laffeens Gas Station. That is where all the fights went down. I remember standing behind Lafeen’s once where I saw Herb Olafson throw a guy through a garbage can then pick him up and throw him through another one, then take another garbage can and bash him on the back with it.
As soon as I got home, I told my dad about the impending fight. Now, my Dad retired from bull riding at the age of 19 and then went on to fight half of northeastern Wyoming in these crazy street fights. I guess Wyoming in the seventies was a crazy place. So my dad grabbed two beers, and gave me one. My first beer with the old man, which is kind of like a big coming of age moment for Rednecks, then he got out his old boxing gloves and took me to the basement and began teaching.
“A crowd of people is going to gather around, Tanner, trust me, it always happens. Next thing that’s going to happen is he’s going to call you faggot. Trust me. Always happens that way” My dad role played, “So imagine there’s a circle of people, here let me put down my beer, there is a circle of people and this Herb nerd comes strutting in and yells You gonna die pussy! Now, Tanner, what do you do?”
“I would say … no, you’re the pussy, Herb!” My dad hung his head. “No, Tanner, you do not call him a pussy. You do not call him anything. You run up to him and punch him in the nose as hard as you can, boy.”
At some point, my mother came down stairs and said, “For god sake’s Bill, it’s 2:00am” and my dad and I made an agreement that he would be parked at Laffeens, and if the cops came, I could jump in the back of his pickup and he would drive away.
The next morning in second period, I was called to the office. Herb was already there. The principal told us that he found out about our fight, and would expel us if we went through with it. He wouldn’t just suspend us, but actually expel us, forever. Herb and I actually talked for the first time ever in the office and realized that not only did neither of us want to get expelled, but neither of us knew why we were even going to fight in the first place. We actually talked about baseball for ten minutes, and we are still friends today.
As I went back to my seat in class, I exchanged glances with the young pretty witch who stole my heart and yelled for my ass to be kicked. She was as beautiful as ever and she looked up and she gave me the biggest smile you could ever imagine.
Part Two: Running Day
I never mustered the courage to ask her why she yelled for me to get my ass kicked, because, well, I hadn’t mustered up the courage to even say hello to her in the hallway. The only time she ever said anything to me was once in gym class.
On ‘running day’ we would go outside and run around the parking lot, clockwise, for 55 minutes. I had decided to actually talk to her, so I tried very hard to catch up to her. She was fast. When I finally got right beside her, I was running at top speed, and was kind of wondering if she wasn’t trying to get away from me. That’s when she turned to me and said: “You smell bad. You should wear deodorant.” Then she just took off faster.
Part Three: Chainsaw Joke Day
Mrs. Jones seated me next to Sissy Larson for the whole last month of seventh grade English. I was working on a new strategy for winning her heart that was sure to succeed. I would wait until the last day of class and then write my feelings for her in her yearbook, as well as my phone number. Couldn’t fail.
My plan changed on Chainsaw Joke day, however. Mrs. Jones was showing us a little film about a man who was lost in a vast wintry forest somewhere and was freezing to death. During the film, I started getting a really grumbly tummy. There are two kinds of Grumbly Tummy’s. One means you are hungry and it is felt in the upper stomach and lower esophagus. The other Grumbly Tummy is felt in the lower stomach, and large intestine. The first means you have to eat, the second means something else totally different from eating. As the arctic man froze to death in the film it became clear to me that my Grumbly Tummy was the second, lower one. I winced and flinched in my chair, and shifted endlessly. When the film was over and the lights were flipped back on, just about the time I was planning to ask for a hall pass, Mrs. Jones asked a simple question.
“What could have saved this man’s life?”
“Matches.” Sissy said. So perfect.
“Good answer, what else.”
Then a doofy kid in the back shouted, “A chainsaw! A chainsaw!”
This was the funniest thing I had ever heard, but apparently, no one else thought so, because it was dead silent. I was trying to stifle my laugh cause it would be embarrassing to be the only one to laugh at a stupid joke. But as this bad joke hung in the air like a cloud, the absurdity of yelling “Chainsaw” became too hilarious, and out of my mouth came “Ha!” immediately followed by what can only be described as an earthquake fart. It was my ill timed, goofy laugh that brought the class’ attention to me, but it was the subsequent, frightening, desk-rattling, stink bomb that caused Mrs. Jones’s hand to involuntarily shoot up to her mouth as she gasped in horror.
It wasn’t like a little squeaker, where you can play it off and pretend like it was someone behind you. She was staring right at me and said, “Tanner Dahlin, that was not funny in the least bit.” The class was silent. Then Mark Carlson said, “oh my god, dude”. My face was bright red and I was so embarrassed I really honestly thought I was going to puke and go down as the only guy in Agazzi Middle School history to laugh, fart, and then puke, in 30 seconds, in class, next to the woman he loved.
Mrs. Jones screamed, “Out into the hallway funny man!” But no punishment she could inflict could have been worse than the look I got from Sissy Larson, as I scootched past her with my head hung low on my way out to the hall. She crinkled her forehead, held her nose and fanned her face and said, “Gross.”
After class was over, I went back in to collect my things, and there on my desk was a little note. It said, “To Tanner” on the front. It read:
Tanner,
“Your fart was the grossest thing ever. It smelled forever in here after you left.” – From Anonymous.
Sissy Larson had no way to know I could recognize not only her handwriting, but also the purple glitter pen she always wrote with and chewed on with her perfect teeth. She had such great handwriting.


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MATING RITUALS IN THE RED STATES
by Jennifer Coates


Okay. I’m just going to say it. And you’re all going to think I’m a frigid bitch, or really in need of a Midol. But you know what I kind of hate? Dudes.
I’m not a lesbian—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Actually, I don’t get that whole lesbian/man-hater stereotype. I mean, if I was a lesbian, why would I hate men? I’d hate women. I’d be like, fuck women, the goddamn bitches. They break your heart, they’re always crying for no reason—they never let you hang with your buddies; they start hinting at marriage when they’ve known you a month—and whenever you’re in the mood, they’re all like, “Honey, I’m PMSing.” If I was a dyke, I’d freaking hate chicks. But I’m straight … so I hate on men.
See, in New York City, guys can be divided into three categories: Douchebags, Dull … and taken. And that’s not including the elusive fourth category that sometimes encompasses all of the above: Gay.
Yeah, all right. Maybe I’m a little bitter. Maybe there’s a reason for this y-chromosome-directed vitriol. This burnt-out cynicism with which I cast my withering gaze on every Tom, Dick, and Harry—or at least, every Dick—I come in contact with. Is it because I recently got dumped by a man who said things like, “I have 435 friends on Facebook; people like me”? Or perhaps it was the guy who wanted me to host live sex shows for money in his co-op? Or does my hating go back even further than the Sex and the City bullshit of dating in New York? Maybe so.
Study Hall. 1991. Me: a shy freshman in the back of the room with acid-washed granny-waisted jeans. Permed hair. Because everywhere else in the country, kids were dressing grunge. But in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, it was still the 80s. Still is, last time I was there.
You: Derek Bennett. A cute sophomore with a Tom Cruise smile. One day, you turned around and crinkled those blue eyes at me. And then, you did the unimaginable. You took a page from your notebook, as if to write me a letter, tore off a few sections, crumpled them up and—grinning—began to throw paper-wads at me. I gathered in later years that you were sweet on me, and that you probably had an enormous erection. But at the time, I sat in panic, cursing my own lack of social skills, because I didn’t know how to flirt back with a boy throwing paper at my head.
This, my friends, was high school. Mating rituals in the Red States. This was where the hating began. Luckily with Derek Bennett, I dodged more than a speeding college-ruled missile of love. Turns out, he became a born-again Christian pastor with a Sarah Palin fan page on Facebook. But I spent most of high school wondering what was wrong with me that I didn’t have replies to such pick-up lines as “Hey bitch, get in the car” and “I love the way you do algebra.”
By junior year, I’d just about given up. I refused to date any of my classmates, and only flirted with hot teachers and people’s hot dads. I was a very popular fixture at sleepovers. I wore baggy pants and flannel—unbeknownst to me, like the rest the world—and spoke to boys like they were human, not expecting a reply. And then, one day, I got asked on a date—by the eligible, intelligent, popular, talented, total hottie Weston Moore. And no, that wasn’t his real name. It was Jim Moore. He’d made it up. See, his name was Jim Wesley Moore, and he’d always gone by Wes, but in high school he’d asked us to call him Weston because it sounded more “artistic.”
The night of my first date, I wore a Wonderbra and my tightest T-shirt. My mother burst in and took pictures, crying, “I’m so proud!” I don’t know if she meant of my cleavage or the date. But I sat on my bed, sweet-sixteen and nervous as hell. When the bell rang, I dashed for the door.
“Um … Weston?” Was that him?
His skater-length blond hair had been arranged in multiple braids, complete with beads on the end. He looked like Bo Derek, and the look was not a “10.”
I turned to see my parents and my little siblings standing on the stairs behind us. My mother slowly lowered the Polaroid she’d raised to capture my first encounter with the male sex—now that she was no longer certain which sex this thing with the pigtails was.
“Guys—meet Weston.” I shoved him out the door and into his car, which he fired up with a screech.
“Oops.” He grinned at me. “Was that too loud?”
You asshole, I thought. My parents are going to think you’re an irresponsible maniac.
“No way, I love your car!”
“Yeah?” Weston asked, pleased with himself. “It’s brand new. Got it for my birthday. Watch how fast it goes.”
I’d really rather not, I said silently. Are you compensating for something? This is not a good sign. He’s compensating for something. He has a small dick. Oh my God, I totally just looked at his dick!
“Weston—watch out—!”
My face hit the dashboard, as I felt a very trippy moment of vertigo, followed by a second impact. It took me a while to realize what had happened. I’d never been in a car wreck before. And what better timing than on my first date! When I finally sat up, I saw we were the pastrami in a three-car-collision sandwich. Luckily, Weston exited the car as if he’d done this a million times before. After the cops came, I felt better. Wes apologized all the way to Kansas City. By the time we made it to the symphony concert, I was ready to start fresh.
We spread out our picnic blanket in the park, its bandshell a softly-lit silhouette in the April dusk. Soon, I was lost in “Eine Kleine Nachtmusic”—which would have been the perfect date. Except, when Weston put his arm around me, all I could think of was how ridiculous he looked in those stupid “dreds”—like my grandmother in the 70s when she would braid her hair wet to make it curl.
After the orchestra’s last, rousing chorus of the 1812 Overture, Weston Moore awkwardly released his grip and we followed the crowds to his car. I carried the rolled-up blanket in uncomfortable silence. Suddenly, a man about our parents’ age jumped out and knocked Wes to the ground, pointing a long umbrella at his throat.
“Hey, is that thing loaded?” I joked.
You see, I assumed this was someone Weston knew—because I was a logical girl who had never been to New York City. I was wrong. The dude turned on me and growled: “It’s been 25 years since I killed a man, and tonight was the closest I’ve come.”
As Weston stumbled to his feet, his assailant’s suburban wife joined us.
“He was in the war. He doesn’t like hippies,” she explained; as if attacking people with pointed objects at the symphony was perfectly normal behavior.
We drove home in silence. I was sure Wes would never ask me out again—and it wasn’t even my fault. I felt like a failure for my own bad date—I was hating on my luck, and hating on myself. As I sadly said goodbye, I forgot to check for the last, crucial element: whether or not Weston Moore had an enormous erection. Apparently, he did. I felt his mouth on mine, and was so taken aback by the entire night that I hesitated a second too long before realizing: this is the part where he kisses me. Because, after all, that’s what would happen on a normal date, not one with car wrecks and police reports, Bo Derek impersonators, and umbrella avengers from Nam whose wives look like they robbed the LL Bean catalog.
Misconstruing my delayed reaction as either rejection or ignorance, Weston backed away.
“I’ll call you,” he said, in that voice that means the opposite.
On Monday, it was all over the school that I was a “terrible kisser.” I was so mortified that I didn’t date again until college—and then I spent my freshman year kissing everyone I met just to prove it wasn’t true. And not just people I was on a date with, either.
And that, if my armchair psychology does not deceive me, is how I became a dater-hater. Oh, and as for Jim “Weston” Moore? He dropped out of Boston University, knocked up some teenager, and the last I heard was cooking at the cracker barrel off Missouri Highway 291. My verdict? Douchebag, Dull, and—thankfully—Taken.

Laura's Piece from Inner Monologues: Haters

The Real Threat
by Laura Motta

No one ever threatened to kill me until I moved to New York. I don't want to be braggy here, but I'm just not the sort of girl whom one threatens to kill. I am relatively mild-mannered. I have nice friends. I am, to quote a saying on one of Donnie Wahlberg's old t-shirts, a drug-free body. I pay my credit cards on time. But on 9th avenue in gridlock on a rainy Tuesday night, none of that mattered.

See, I was in a van. And before you ask, I wasn't tied up in the back. I was riding in it.

This van takes me to and from work every day and is paid for by my company. The former point makes it the grimmest and most embarrassing form of transportation known to mankind—worse than any panel-sided station wagon you could imagine. The latter makes it the greatest.

I had an appointment after work to see my shrink—honestly, the timing here, as you'll see, was impeccable. The van was caught in traffic and running late, so I decided to jump out and grab the subway. We were stopped at a red light and I communicated my desire to de-van to the driver, who grunted without moving any part of his face, signaling that I could open the door and dive into oncoming traffic for all he cared. So I gathered up my stuff and opened the door. That's when I hit the guy.

He was riding a bike between the lanes of stopped traffic and the van door hit him square in the side in a spectacularly precise sort of way, like hitting the bullseye on a dunk tank. Like, somewhere in my mind, a congratulatory bell sounded.

He groaned and toppled over, and my first thought wasn't, "Wow, I just killed someone." Or, "How unfortunate." Or even, "Fuck." My first thought was, "I'm going to jail. I will need to surrender my mascara and wear nothing but jumpsuits."

Let me also say that I hate people who ride bikes. I blame either some youthful association with Puck on The Real World or the fact that my ex boyfriend liked his bike better than me. But if you ride a bike, let me tell you that you're doing a beautiful thing for the planet and an ugly thing to my disposition. Also, pull down your fucking pant leg and walk like the rest of us. You're not in Brooklyn anymore, Benji. And I bet that's really your name, too. The one you gave yourself. When you joined the band.

But I knocked the guy over and he sort of wailed and harrumphed, and as he lurched to the right, I saw it happen. The palm of his right hand touched the fender of the car on the other side. That palm is probably what stopped him from getting seriously hurt, because he stood up immediately, steadied himself, and aimed the best WTF expression in the general direction of the van. And then the guy in the other car—the one the biker had used to catch himself—started threatening to kill everyone.

But before he did that, he rolled down his window. Because that's always what you do before you start threatening to kill people. The window was tinted and from behind its shiny sheet of dark emerged the smooth, gleaming expanse of bald head and I knew immediately that this was going to be awesome.

He leaned on the horn for a minute. And then it began.

"Did you touch my car? Did you touch my fucking car? Did you touch my fucking car? Did you touch my fucking car?"

Because, you know, all of those questions could have different answers, depending. He's shouting in the direction of the guy on the bike, who, at this point, was standing there all lopsided and mouth-breathing. When the bald guy doesn't get an answer, he switches tactics. He gets out of the car.

The first thing I notice is his sweater because it's cashmere and his ears because they're enormous and his height because he has none.

"I want your ID," he screamed at the guy on the bike. "I want your fucking ID."

The guy on the bike continued to mouth breathe and stare and not hand over his ID, which I’m sure he forgot that he had on him. In fact, I’m sure he forgot he had a name, a place of birth, that today was a real date (anchored in real time), and that George Bush is no longer President. I’m sure, at that moment, the only thing he “had on him” was four broken bones, paralyzing fear, and soiled undergarments. Watching him, I forgot for a moment that he was riding a bike and remembered that this man also rides the grand roiling tidal wave of this thing, as Prince once said, we call life. And that I ride it too and am totally willing to hold other people’s heads under for a while if it means I’ll make it to shore safely.

But the bald guy loved the biker’s nonreaction so much that he turned away and started looking for someone else to yell at.

Now, while this was happening, I surely qualified for some sort of good citizenship award by doing the only thing that came to mind. I closed the van door. Thinking that it would, you know, make the van less conspicuous.

But then the bald guy, in what must have been his most intuitive moment of the week or maybe even the last two weeks, figured out where all this mess had started.

He marched over and pulled open the van door and, as the kids say, got all up in my face. He hesitated for a moment when he saw me with this look, like, “Oh. You’re clearly useless.” Which I am. And I know already, thanks.

"You motherfucking fuck. You scratched my motherfucking car." (This is clearly the version he uses for women.) "You scratched my motherfucking car. I'm going to motherfucking kill you."

How does a girl respond, really?

I could have really stooped. I could have said, "I almost killed the guy on the bike. I didn't touch your car. Keep the chain of blame straight, at least." I also could have said, “Wow, small penis, right?” but then he would have gotten the Baretta out of the glove box. I also, possibly, could have commented on the surreality of the whole thing, but he doesn’t know what that means. So I did nothing.

Actually, I think I made like a tweeting noise in the back of my throat.

That's when he slammed the door closed in my face, and that time, I made sure to lock it. Crafty, I know.

And then the light turned green. And the only reason why I knew this is because I was thrown to the floor because the van driver accelerated so quickly. We rode in silence until we approached my stop—the one I'd originally planned to use—and the van driver spoke for the first time.

"Did I touch that guy's car?" he said. He didn't look back, but he sounded scared.

"No," I said. "The guy on the bike touched that guy's car."

Because it was his fault. It was. Even though I shook and sobbed for the next four hours, it was. Even though I flinch every single time I see a guy on a bike now. Even though I still look for that guy, racing up between the lanes on 9th Avenue, simultaneously hoping that I do and don’t see him.

It was his fault. You know. Just so we all have the story straight.

My Piece from Inner Monologues: Haters

Here is the piece I read at the show on December 3rd...

MIAMI VICES

I strongly believe that there should be a sign upon a arriving at the Miami International Airport that reads, “Welcome to Miami. Now Go Fuck Yourself.” As a New Yorker, you would think that it would be difficult to offend me. I do not come from the Land of How Can I Help You. But in a recent trip to Miami for a bachelorette party, wherever my friends and I went, we were treated as if we had stepped on a pile of dog shit and were dragging it around our 4-inch heels wherever we walked.

The war of the bachelorettes versus Miami began at the check in desk at our hotel. The maid of honor, who I will call the “MOH” for short, had been assured five separate times in advance that we would have adjacent rooms with ocean views. The check in girl looked us up and down and pointed her plastic D cups at us as she handed us our room keys to rooms on floors five and twelve located with a pleasant view of the power generators. As if anticipating our complaint, the girl immediately stated, “There’s absolutely nothing we can do to change your rooms. Nothing. We’re totally booked.” She gave us two keys to share amongst the eight of us. Hotel policy. And we wouldn’t be allowed inside the hotel lobby, the pool, the restaurant, the sidewalk or be allowed to breathe the hotel air without them, so we’d better stay together. They felt more like hall passes in elementary school than VIP key cards. What kind of 4 star hotel was this anyway? Since I was paying a month’s rent per night I expected the absence of snark and maybe a sexual favor or two. Definitely not attitude.

Our room was right outside the elevators. Worse, we heard people having sex right as we were putting our coveted key card in our door. I don’t know if I can blame that on the hotel itself, but I just needed to throw that in as an added insult to injury. Luckily they weren’t having sex in our room, but at that point I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Later that night we scored a reservation at Nobu on what the hostess called the “patio”. I like to call it the wind tunnel behind the hotel next to the parking lot where all the air conditioners blow their excess air. We tried to convince ourselves we were in a sexy perfume commercial complete with wind blowers but by the time the meal ended we looked like we each had a bad case of bed head.

But we were not ready to surrender to Miami quite yet. The next morning we got up early to ask for seats by the pool. Sunny seats. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were so obviously from out of town that made everyone want to seat us away from the fun. But I was starting to see a pattern. I guess perhaps it was kind of obvious. There we were, a pack of brunette girls pale as ghosts, each in black bikinis and black handbags and black sandals. Everyone else was blonde, in hot pink or gold bikinis, Pucci headwraps, and stiletto heels. It reminded me of that Sesame Street song, “Which of these things is not like the other?’


At around 12:30 we were huddling together for warmth in our towels while the other side of the pool oiled themselves up, clinked champagne glasses and danced with the cute DJ. It was like our side of the pool was Fargo and the other half was 90210. We asked one of the pool servers when our side would get sunny and she nearly burst into laughter. One of the house keeping women came up to me and said, “Chile. That side of the pool don’t never see the sun.” Great. So we’d been shunned to the cursed side of the pool. Like, “Never go to THAT side of the pool. No one goes THERE.”

The MOH was super pissed that we’d been promised sunny chairs and had gotten The Polar Express instead, so when she complained to the Pool Manager he promised us that tomorrow he’d give us the epitome in pool coolness: A swanky poolside bed—the kind that usually requires thousands of dollars of bottle service—free of charge.

After a night of drinking and dancing at a club, we went back to the hotel for some more dancing at the hotel’s bar. Or, if I’m being more honest, spilled drinks everywhere and fell on the floor. Same diff. When the music was cut off I went over to the DJ. “What’s going on? Why are you closing down already?” It was only 3am. In New York, we’d just be getting started. “It’s the law,” he told me. “We always close at 3.” Convinced that this was all part of the Miami conspiracy against us I was determined to find a loophole. “Where can I find a pole around here?” I asked him. “A pole?” He smirked. He told me to go to someplace that sounded to me like “Sweet and Lo” and somehow I convinced one of the other girls to come with me.

We ended up in a seedy bar in the outskirts of Miami where no one spoke English. We took some shots and I decided it would be a great idea to pole dance in my dress with my thong underwear on display for all to see. I also didn’t think about the fact that maybe rubbing my crotch and bare legs over a nasty pole in a seedy Miami bar might not be the best idea—but more on that later.

So the next day we were lounging on our wonderful expansive bed, completely hungover. We looked for one of the pool servers to come by so we could ask for water. She seemed to be ignoring us for about forty minutes so we got one of the pool guys’ attention. He came up to us in his little white shorts and white sweatshirt, tan legs, and greasy hair. ‘If you see our pool server could you ask her to please come over to us?” we asked. “Oh, you know women.” He said. “She’s probably like, doing her hair or something. Who knows what she’s up to?” We were like, “Really dude? You know you’re talking to a
group of women here. We actually take offense to the bullshit that just came out of your mouth right there.” Because even though our behavior may have been less than classy the night before, we were sitting on The Bed and you know what? The bed demanded respect. And you know what else? You’re wearing tiny white shorts.

“Well when she’s done doing or hair or something could you stop scratching your ass and get her?” I wanted to say. But he walked away too quickly. I swear.

When our server, a blonde in an all white jumpsuit came over, we ordered the waters. She sighed and rolled her eyes when we asked. In the fifteen minutes that passed between our ordering the waters and receiving the waters, multiple servers pretended to look at something in the trees behind us. Soon after, a piece of something that looked like human feces dropped from the tree and right onto our bed, and to this day we still don’t know if our server planted it there. Women. Who knows what they’re up to?

When she came back with our waters she had an announcement to make:

“I just want to let you know guys, that I can’t be doing this all day.”

“Doing what all day?” the MOH asked.

“Like, I mean, when I get slammed? I can’t be like, bringing you waters.”

“Huh. So does that mean you can’t bring us alcohol either?” the MOH asked.

“I mean, yeah. I can bring you alcohol. But like, I can’t keep on bringing you…Like, never mind.”

So basically she wanted to tell us to go fuck ourselves if we wanted water. She was only here by the pool to serve alcoholic drinks, and if we wanted H20 we’d be shit out of luck, or we could lap up the pool water if we were so inclined.

It was ok though. We had the bed, the holy grail of coolness, of comfort. The entire bachelorette party agreed we could spend a week on this bed and be happy. I felt like Joe from “Joe Versus the Volcano” in the scene where he’s living off of his Louis Vuitton trunks. Here on this luxurious bed, I could float out to sea with my bikini, some friends, some magazines, and I’d survive.

A little while later, the pool manager came by. “Hey girls,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “You look like you’re enjoying yourselves.” He wore a fanny pack and had a clip board. He also smelled like Cool Waters. This guy was not to be trusted. We looked at him warily. “I uh, have a favor to ask you.” He assumed the asshole stance: Hands in pockets, furrowed brow, groin jutting in our direction. A look that said, “I’m going to make you suck my dick, but I’ll ask in a very nice way.”

We looked at one another knowingly. Alright, give it to us. And meanwhile, everyone else at the pool was looking in our direction at well. What curious fate had befallen the girls of the non-sunkissed flesh from New York?

“So I was wondering. I have this group of guys over there.” He gestured to a group of bored looking thirty something European men with chiseled abs, already sharing a bottle of Dom Perignon.

“I didn’t know it was going to be such a big party but now it is. And we were hoping maybe you would give up the bed. It would be a huge favor to me.”

He looked at us with hope, the promise of thousands of dollars spent on vodka and chasers, and Eurotrash men with bulging biceps and their botoxed girlfriends, dancing in his eyes.

“Are you serious?” we asked him.

He looked behind him as if he were about to divulge a big secret then leaned in close. “Listen. I got some nice chairs by the pool. Very comfortable. And I tell ya what. We’ll throw in a bottle of tequila. And mixers. How’s that sound?”

To me, it sounded like the opposite of a great idea.

I tried to picture this situation happening if we were a group of dudes on the bed. I pictured for example, my husband and his friends in our place. Would Pool Manager have walked up to them and said, “I have a favor to ask you. You don’t look like you’ll be spending much money on alcohol today. Would you guys mind letting these more muscular assholes over there have this nice bed I originally promised you? I swear you won’t look like pussies when you make the switch.” Yeah. I couldn’t picture it either.

Some of us were close to tears. We looked at each other in solidarity and our eyes said it all. WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED. “No.” We told him. “We are not going anywhere. And you know what? There was shit on this bed a couple of minutes ago, but we don’t care. We are staying right here. You gave us this shitty bed. We’re keeping it.”

We turned over and gave him our behinds as the unanimous response. “Kiss our asses.”

He walked away, defeated. Yeah. Take that, Miami. We won: We kept the bed, we got a bottle of wine because the MOH complained to the hotel about the asshole Pool Manager, we got our water-hating pool server in trouble, and we got an apology from the hotel for all of the “misunderstandings.”

Two days later I was getting dressed and I noticed I had an itch on my upper thigh. I turned to the mirror to get a close look—and that’s when I saw a very scary looking red splotch. And that’s when I remembered 5 in the morning at that gross bar with my bare legs wrapped around a pole. The nasty, dirty, germ infected pole that I decided to do swan dives on, and hang upside down from without a care in the world. I have pictures to prove it. Lovely words like INFECTIOUS DISEASE, ringworm and staph infection suddenly came to mind.

Oh Miami. You got me. You definitely did. Just when I thought I’d won. But I’ll be back. I’ll definitely be back.