gullybogan

Swingers

Dear Reader,

TLDNR

This is quite a long post, so i’ve broken it into headlined sections, as i tend to do with my long posts, a stratagem designed to allow you to pick and choose what you read, if you can’t be bothered reading the whole thing. There’s mating rituals, meteors, bad service, bathtub Gin, girls receiving impromptu gynaecological examinations, vibrating dresses, interrupted orgasms, two-fisted drinking, the ghost of Dean Martin, and snuggling. Dip in anywhere you wish, read from start to finish, or click off to somewhere else; it’s your choice, as ever, dear Reader.

Cultural traditions

Every now and then, Princess and me observe a ritual called the ‘Hot Date’. This particular ritual is an ancient tradition amongst our ppl, and typically involves

• travelling to somewhere far away from home where we feel completely out of place
• drinking quantities of expensive intoxicating fluids in the company of strangers
• eating greasy, crappy over-priced food served in annoyingly small portions on ridiculously large plates
• tolerating without comment the obscene behaviour of fellow Hot Daters around us
• and then going home for a snuggle.

You have to respect traditions like that, or your culture disappears and the whole world turns into one giant Starbucks™.

The occasion for this Hot Date was a sort of fund raiser for Princess’s charitable organisation. They organised a booking at a venue in the Melbourne CBD where all the ppl who work for the organisation and who bought a ticket to the event would gather together to spend time with each other, in a two-bird-one-stone solution to the twin problems of nobody in the organisation knowing anybody else in the organisation, and the perennial challenge of raising enough money to buy blankets for the poor.

The Near-death from above experience

Driving in, headed west on Boronia Road, there came a moment where we almost turned around and went home.

Not because we were having a Hot-Date-ruining fight in the car, dear Reader, but because we thought Melbourne had been destroyed.

Suddenly, up there in the darkened western sky, there had appeared a mysterious green light, headed rapidly for the horizon dead ahead of us.

It was the size and brightness of a streetlight, and moving so fast that it had to be a meteor. That or a missile afterburner.

I’ve worked out that it shot across the sky for a full four seconds – count that out in Mississippis. That’s a hell of a long time for something huge and green and glowing to be plunging across the sky towards the city of Melbourne.

My onboard black box flight recorder captured my thought processes as the meteor dropped towards the inner suburbs, dear Reader, and i share the transcript with you now.

what’s that? it’s green. it must be a shooting star. it’s green so it must be copper. it’s ok, it’s only a shooting star. it’s beautiful. it won’t last long so i’d better enjoy it. it’s beautiful all right. maybe it’s space junk. gee, it’s going for a long time, long enough for me to think about enjoying it. i wonder how big it is. if it’s the size of a basketball and it hits the ground, it could destroy a city block. it’s still going! it’s going to hit the ground! it’s so big! it’s not burning up… burn up! burn up! it’s going through fog… it must be very low, very close to the ground, to be passing through fog… or is it cloud?… it’s glowing brighter. it must be tumbling. it’s fading… it’s… it’s burnt up. phew, that was close. or did it just stop burning and hit the ground anyway?

Which, if you read it, lasts much more than four seconds, but thought, of course, is faster than speech.

We snapped the radio over to 774 to hear if there was some suburb that no longer existed, due to the crashing to earth of a meteorite the size of a piano. There was no news, so we kept driving, hopeful that Melbourne and all its constituent parts would still be there.

It was sobering to think how easily something could just fall from the sky and potentially crash to earth like that.

Plus, it would give us something to talk about as an ice breaker with all the strangers we were about to meet.

The Bar – Round 1

We parked and walked through the frosty post-meteor landscape of a deserted Melbourne. At Fed Square the huge projector screen was showing the football game between Geelong and Carlton to an empty concourse. There was almost nobody on the streets.

We found the address, nodded to the door security gorilla and climbed up some steps to the place. We met the organiser and he introduced us to some strangers, which gave us the opportunity to make small talk about the meteor, which, of course, no-one else had seen and so everyone thought we were mad and possibly dangerous.

Princess said she wanted a drink, so i headed off to the bar to get her a Lemon Lime and Bitters, and to order myself a Tom Collins.

I have this thing about walking up to a bar and ordering some drink that i’ve read about on the interweb somewhere, and the barman just making it, as if by magic. Last year, at the previous Charity Evening Hot Date, i’d had a very jolly time with a barman who knew exactly how to make the perfect Gin and Tonic, and who could extemporise clever things from random ingredients i named so that i could take them back and surprise Princess with them.

This year i wasn’t so lucky.

For a start, it took twenty minutes to be served. They had six private functions going on at the bar, and a public area for walk-ups, making seven groups of around forty ppl each.

They had six staff on the bar.

Several of the private functions had an ‘open bar’ arrangement, so girls everywhere – liberated from having to pay – were ordering complicated cocktails and layered shooters. This slowed things down considerably. Rather than having roving servers with trays of random wines and beers, everything had to be ordered through the bar, and made on request. If you ever run a bar, dear Reader, go with the roving servers. Trust me on this.

The Imperfect Gin and Tonic

I finally reached the front of the bar and stood for another five minutes under these bright lights, the sort they use to keep roast chickens warm in Safeway. Ppl were crushing around me, and i was hot and sweaty. I could feel sweat trickling in intimate places. I hadn’t planned on that sort of a hot date! I really wanted to get out of there, but i couldn’t leave empty handed.

The girl behind the bar serving our section finally made eye contact and asked me what i wanted. I asked if she knew how to make a Tom Collins. She looked at me and shrugged and said, sure, what are the ingredients.

OK.

So i asked for a Gin and Tonic instead, and a Lemon lime and Bitters.

Who doesn’t know how to make a Gin and Tonic? I mean, the instructions are in the name. Same as a Lemon Lime and Bitters. Or a Coke.

It’s a classy bar, and we’d already had the embarrassment of her not having proper cocktail skillz, so i forewent the usual little thing i do where i ask what Gin they have, which i do to impress the bar person that i’m some sort of Gin connoisseur (which i am, actually).

Big mistake, that forewenting.

She filled the glass with ice like they do at McDonalds, pulled out – i kid you not – a plastic bottle of some sort of generic Gin, slopped some into the glass, squirted something out of the postmix gun in on top, and threw a mangled lime in for good measure.

Glerk.

I took the drinks back to where Princess was talking to someone about the baby that the someone was going to have, possibly at any moment, and i noted that it took me fifteen minutes of careful nursing to finish the drink. It had taken twenty minutes to get it so, had i gone straight to the back of the bar queue again as soon as i got it, to order the next round, i still would have been waiting for five minutes drinkless under those chicken warmers.

Happily, though, there had been some entertainment in the bar queue, to help pass the time.

Well, i’m not a gynaecologist, but i could have a look

The guy immediately to the left of me in the bar queue was clearly concerned that his girlfriend was about to suffer a prolapse at any moment.

She certainly looked like she was in some sort of distress, as she was hanging around his neck as if he’d just rescued her from the surf.

Every couple of minutes, he’d reach his hand around behind her, grab a bunch of her dress in his hand, and sink his fingers deep into her natal cleft. That’s ‘arse crack’ to you and me, dear Reader, as non-gynaecologists.

Once he’d sunk his fingers in there and worked his way as far forward as he could manage, he had a good long feel around, as if he were making absolutely sure that her internal organs were all still where he last left them.

Obligingly, she pushed back onto his probing fingers, so as to make the beak of her cervix more accessible.

Once he was satisfied that her uterus was still in place, he removed his fingers from her for a couple of moments, looked around the room while she continued to hang from his neck, and then he repeated the examination.

I assume that she was his girlfriend. But maybe he was just making a house call.

The Girl with the vibrating dress

To my immediate right was the girl with the vibrating dress.

Now, it didn’t actually vibrate under its own power. She had to move. Once she did move, it was a black dress with these clever little white frilly layered hems that jiggled and danced about, making the dress look like either she or it or both had some sort of internal power supply, and that energy was simply bursting out of her through her clothes.

Hopefully it was sexual energy because, let’s face it, if it wasn’t, who cares?

She’d been disporting on the nearby dancefloor, making a vibrating spectacle of herself, clearly with some success.

As she stood next to me now, a big, buff guy had positioned himself and his beer next to her, and with his shoulders thrown back to display his magnificent pectorals, he had his meaty hand – the one not holding the beer – placed on her hip, like he was holding her in one place. He wasn’t giving her an examination the way the gynaeie next to me was, but he was exerting just as much sexual ownership over her. And her dress was vibrating less and less under the weight of his paw, now that she had been claimed by someone, and its job was done.

Standing next to her was her much plainer girlfriend, whose dress didn’t vibrate. It was a dress bereft of life. She just stood there. I could see – or imagine i could see, which is the same thing – this sad look in her eye. Her girlfriend in the vibrating dress would now spend the rest of the evening next to but cut off from her, in pre-coital small talk with meathand, while she, the drabfriend, would stand irrelevantly by. She looked not only lonely, but betrayed. She looked like it happened a lot.

I wondered what the girl in the vibrating dress thinks about the way she treats her drabfriend, if she thinks anything at all about it.

Do you mind if we ask you questions about your orgasm?

If you do find yourself in a public bar, dear Reader, and you can’t be actually having penetrative digital sex, or working your way up to having full-on coitus in a dark corner while your drabfriend holds your handbag and keeps an eye out for security, you can assuage your disappointment somewhat by ordering a drink with a sexually explicit name.

You know the sort of things. The “Slippery Nipple”, the “Sex On The Beach”, the “Long Comfortable Screw”, the “Tie My Hands With Electrical Tape Before You Enlarge My Genital Opening With Chicken Shears And Roger Me Merrily With A Tartan Thermos™ Flask”.

And the list goes on.

One of the charity workers introduced herself to the little group Princess and me had managed to associate ourselves with by announcing that she was about to have an orgasm.

She held up the little shot glass, just in case we thought she was about to de-pants herself and get into some clitoral stimulation action.

One of the group asked her if she minded us watching her having her orgasm.

She said she was cool with that.

Since she was clearly a swinger, i asked if we could ask her questions about her orgasm.

She said she was cool with that, too. How hip.

I looked the ingredients up in the drinks list that the bar staff use to know how to make the drinks, and found that an orgasm contains kahlua, baileys, and amaretto.

“So it’s like a milk coffee with licorice, this orgasm you’re having?” i asked.

My timing was terrible. And as you know, dear Reader, timing with the female orgasm is the absolute key.

I asked her just as she was about to shoot, and she stopped, mid shoot, to reappraise the drink, as if looking at the layers would help her identify the ingredients.

Of course, when she stopped, we all shouted at her.

“No! Don’t stop halfway through an orgasm! You’ll lose it and then you’ll have to start all over again!”

But it was too late. I’d ruined her orgasm for her.

We offered to buy her a Cock Sucking Cowboy to make it up to her, but she said that wasn’t her bag, Cock Sucking Cowboys.

The Bar – Round 2

We’d worked out, dear Reader, that the only way to offset how slow the bar was working was to order two drinks each at a time.

This, of course, slowed everything down even more, but most of the venue was drinking high potency alcohol two-fisted, so we didn’t really mind all that much.

For the second round, i decided i’d order something with Gin that wasn’t a Tom Collins, but that was actually listed in the instruction manual for the bar staff. I chose a Dry Martini.

As opposed to a Wet Martini.

I’d been impressing chicks all night by pointing to the toilet when they wandered into our private function space by mistake, since we were directly opposite the loos. I found myself in the bar queue next to one of these random women i’d impressed with my superior knowledge of toilet location, and we were chatting about how fricken terrible the service was, and how awful the food was, and how ugly the girl in the aquamarine top was, and how girls with armpit hair really shouldn’t wear revealing halter-neck dresses.

Cos that’s the way we roll in the bar queue.

Shaken, not dead

When we’d run out of small talk, she told me the specific variety of vodka mixer she was getting two of, and asked me what i was ordering. I said i was getting a martini; shaken, not stirred.

She looked at me like i was a wanker and asked what i was really getting.

I said no, really. A martini.

She asked me if i was James Fricken Bond or something.

I told her i was channeling the spirit of Dean Martin, and, sadly, lost her.

She left with her vodka thing, and i got my Dry Martini. At the first sip i remembered.

Vermouth. Oh, yeah. That’s right.

I took it and the other drinks back to Princess and the little group we were with.

Princess tried the martini and pulled that face she always pulls when she tastes anything i drink.

She suggested i mix it with the other drink i’d gotten for myself, which was a bottle of Lift.

I told her i didn’t think that was such a good idea. The taste would completely swamp the martini’s complex flavours.

Well, that would be a good first step, she said.

The group were talking about how the ‘party’ could have been improved, since most of the charitable ppl had grown sick of turning the other cheek and were starting to leave early. We focused on the fact that there wasn’t really any decent food, or anything to do except talk to weird-arse strangers – present company excepted – and wait in line for expensive drinks made inexpertly by teenagers.

Someone vowed to go home and blog the crap out of the bar.

Imagine that.

Another someone pulled out a Crackberry and offered to do it right there and then.

Like that would make any difference. The bar is staffed by twenty year olds, and managed by a twenty-two year old, and the owner’s probably some seventeen year old in the Russian mafia. Like they care what we old ppl think.

It’s not about the service, they’d argue, it’s about the oblivion of alcohol. And paying large, token sums for the privilege of that oblivion.

As i made my way further and further down the inverted cone of the martini, it occured to me that the whole process of going out and drinking is pretty much like planning an evening of sipping exotic poisons, and seeing how sick you can get without actually dying.

Coupling

But it wasn’t just about getting as sick as you could without dying, dear Reader, it was also a Hot Date. And that’s at least in part about sex.

Princess and me met when we were teenagers, and so we sort of missed out on that whole scene of picking random sex partners up in bars.

So, to compensate, we go home, snuggle in bed, and say things to each other as if we had actually just met that night, randomly, in the bar.

You know, i compliment her on the symmetry of her knees, and she says what a fine set of forearms i have, and so forth.

Then we go through all the other ppl at the venue that we might have chosen if we hadn’t chosen each other and, in great detail, the terrible mistakes we would have made in choosing those losers as lovers.

I told her about the girl with the halter neck dress and the hairy armpits that you met earlier, and she told me about the guy who spent fifteen minutes telling her about his antique radio valve eBay business.

I pointed out all the girls with those knee-length f**k-me-boots and the resultant passion-killing boot-odour you’d get at the unwrapping stage.

She pointed out that jeans really are for working on the railroad, all the live-long day, and not for picking up girls in bars.

And on we went, dear Reader, reassuring each other that meaningless sex with random strangers wasn’t something we should necessarily regret having missed out on.

And then we fell asleep together, all snuggled up in our flannelette sheets.

And that was our Hot Date, dear Reader.

If you’ve read right through, thank you for your patience.

And if you were hoping i was going to name the bar, i’m sorry, but Victoria’s libel laws are quite strict, even when everything you say is true.

Money (and an expensive lawyer) talks louder than the truth.

Yours,
Gullybogan