I Drink for a Reason (12 page)

“Hey, guys, sit down at the table.”

We could all sense bad news was coming.

“Your Aunt Patricia passed on last night.” There was silence from all of us. I felt like I should say something out of a vague
sense of respect, even though I didn’t care and I knew my sisters didn’t care, either. And I suspected that Mom didn’t, either,
but maybe this was one of those grown-up things where God just makes you somehow magically care when you have to.

“Oh,” I said and tried to look sad. “How did she die? Was it peaceful?”

My mom opened the freezer and took out some ice pops.

“She was involved in a shoot-out with some FDA agents and was shot in the head and chest over a dozen times.” That seemed
funny to me, and I laughed, and my mom shot me an annoyed but understanding look, like someone who was in on the joke but
didn’t want the other people in the room to know.

“Does everyone want ice pops?”

My two sisters raised their hands, and Jenny asked what my mom meant.

“Well, sweetheart,” my mom said as she sat down and gave out the ice pops. “Remember how Aunt Patricia moved up to that farm
in New York, the one near the border with Canada? Where that nice man paid for that big, nineteen-hour Canadian fireworks
display that Aunt Patricia told you about? And remember how she told us all before she went that she was going to do the Lord’s
work and how even if something bad happened that she would get to go to Heaven where seventy white angels awaited her with
baskets of apple fritters and hot cocoa?”

Jenny nodded and took her ice pop.

“Well, that’s what happened.”

“She’s with Jesus and the angels having cocoa?”

“That’s right, honey.”

“I wanna have hot cocoa with the angels!” Abby said.

“Me, too!” said Jenny quickly and even more emphatically. As if not saying so in time would disqualify her from going to Heaven.

“You can’t have cocoa with angels until you’re dead, stupid. You have to wait.” I looked to my mom to see if what I said and
even what I was doing was the right thing. She had her back to us and was staring inside at the open freezer. After a bit
she closed it and turned around. “Kenny’s right.” Then, in a surprise to all of us, she smiled and said those magic words:
“Hey, who wants to go to Dairy Queen?” We all jumped up and yelled, “We do! We do!”

When we got to Dairy Queen, I ordered the Nut Buster Parfait which is the only thing I’ve ever gotten there. It’s my all-time
favorite thing ever. We had just gotten our stuff and sat down when the TV that was on in the corner up by the ceiling had
one of those “Breaking News” things with all the explosions and space-war sounds. There was a photo of Aunt Patricia that
I hadn’t seen before. She was in an army uniform and she had a black eye. They were talking about all these people being killed
up in NY and how she was from here and that’s why they were showing her picture. Mom gasped and stared silently and then,
like she was shocked or something, started to quickly gather our desserts and us and told us to get into the car. But I pretended
I left my free
Pirates of the Carribean
figurine I got with the sundae on the seat and went back inside to listen. The news lady called the church that she was with
a terrorist group and said that they were kidnapping gays who went to Canada to get gay married there and “unmarrying” them
by force. They raised funds going across the border into Canada and buying up lots of prescription medicines, which were a
lot cheaper up there, and then selling them online back in NY for five times as much money. That’s how they afforded all their
guns and things. Plus the guns were super cheap at the Wal-Mart where they lived. I guess one of the gays had escaped and
told the police about it, and that’s when they had the shoot-out.

Pretty soon my mom figured out what I was doing and came in really angry. I lied and told her I just remembered it was in
the car, but she saw right through that. She told me we’d talk when we got home. We drove home in silence except for Abby
singing a song under her breath about all the things she saw out her window. When we got back home, Mom put on the TV for
Jenny and Abby to watch and took me by the hand down into the basement. She did the “shhh” thing where you put your finger
to your lips meaning “Don’t say anything.” She went to the window sill at the far end near the boiler and stood on her tippy-toes
and felt around on the upper ledge of it. She finally got a key from on top and, without waiting for me, walked around to
where the lawn mower and all the garden equipment was. She moved it all over to one side, and I realized for the first time
ever that there was a small door there. It had a rusty old lock on it. I never even knew there was a door there!! She unlocked
it, again did the “shhhh” thing, and opened it up. It smelled like raw pancake batter. I mean it wasn’t that, but that’s what
it smelled like. My mom closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then sort of flung herself in. I tried to

END PART ONE (
idrinkforareason.com/gaycanadapartII
)

H
OLY SHIT
! G
UESS WHAT
? R
EMEMBER BEFORE AT THE BEGINNING
of the book when I was imagining that I would be invited to all these wonderful author parties? Well, I’ve just been invited
to attend a party this weekend! No shit! It’s at the mid-summer home of Charmin Killington (of the Willowbrook Killingtons).
It sounds exactly like one of those “literary” parties I was fantasizing about earlier. Wow. Now I will get to see firsthand
what it’s like and not have to rely on my adorably jaded speculations. And I of course will write about it. In fact, it should
follow this sentence directly:

Yes!!! I’m here! I arrived by Phillipino butler arms to the house after taking the griffin-pulled hansom cab from the outer
moat. This house is fucking HUGE! The pool house’s pool toy’s storage room’s wine cellar is easily as big as the apartment
I grew up in. I was greeted by one of the Puerto Rican eunuchs stationed around the entrance. He sang a song of fierce bidding
wars as he dropped gilded lilies at my feet. I felt at once self-conscience and oddly liberated. “This is my new life,” I
thought. “I like it.” I involuntarily started to imagine how others saw me. I would vacillate from Dickensian street urchin
with a smudge of soot and rotten lettuce around my mouth wearing week-old newsiepapers for shoes, to your basic Ivy League
nerd who has benefited from a scholarship that your great uncle, the mustard baron, established. A severe-looking waitress
passed by carrying flutes of champagne with small black pearls floating on top. In a deft mix of balance and classlessness,
I took two, shooting one down and handing it back. With my mouth closed, I motioned for the waitress to stay and parted my
lips to reveal the pearl between my front teeth. I bent slightly and said, “A beautiful black pearl, for a beautiful black
pearl,” although because I couldn’t really close my lips all the way it came out more as, “A uteful lack earl or a uteful
lack earl.” “What?” She coquettishly replied. “A uteful lack earl or a . . .” I lightly spit the pearl onto her tray. “A beautiful
black pearl for a beautiful black pearl, is what I was saying.” She looked at me with what some might mistake as violent contempt
but what I could clearly see was lustful frustration. “I’m not black,” she said as she masterfully “pretended” to walk away
while walking away. I was in!! Newly imbued with confidence, I swaggered over to a table of dandies and rifled through one
of the ladies’ purses. I took eighty dollars, making a point of showing that I was still leaving her with most of her money.
So as not to appear impolite, I sat down. “Hi, I’m David Cross from television and now books. Well,
a
book. Singular.”

“Oh, yes. A humor book, right?”

“Well, let’s hope so. It’s supposed to be.”

“Well then, you should be at that table over there. That’s the humor table. This is Puppies and Fish.”

I looked around and realized that the entire party had been arranged so that each table represented a type of book. Seated
at my table were Jeff Foxworthy, Dave Barry, Cathy Guisewite, Ann Coulter, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, amongst others. We were
in between the “Yes, You Can, Goddammit!” table and the “Kids Are Nature’s Crybabies” table. I took the hat off of the gentleman
to my left, put it on, and then doffed it to the table before giving it back to its rightful owner. “A thousand pardons.”
I smiled and moseyed over to the humor table.

HOLY SHIT! Alert!!

I was obviously making all this up, but now I have some real news to report! So, as I’m sitting here writing (currently in
my East Village apartment on break from shooting a movie—that’s right, you heard me, a MOVIE!) I got a phone call from a number
I didn’t recognize. I let the machine get it, and it’s from a woman named “Leslie Tietalbaum” (I’m guessing the spelling of
her name) who works at a public relations firm here in NY. She left a message that I was invited to a charity event taking
place upstairs at the Saks Fifth Avenue store in midtown. It’s in a little over three weeks from now. My invite is due to
the book that I’m writing right this very second and you are reading (in the present
and
future!) right this very second. So there you go. Fiction gets replaced by nonfiction. Fantasy, by fact. I could waste some
time conjecturing, seriously, what it will be like, but then you’d have to trust that I didn’t go back and rewrite it to make
myself look impressively prescient. And I don’t believe that I have earned your trust yet. So I am going to stop right here
and whatever follows this sentence will be my “reporting” on what (honestly) took place at the aforementioned charity thing.

OKAY! Just got back from the “Evening in Gold to Benefit the Evening in Silver Benefit.” It was pretty boring. Not the wealth
of material I thought it would be. I would like to say that I just hung out in the bathroom and bonded with the men’s room
attendant, an old black guy named Alistair, but that was too depressing to do. Plus it smelled a little like poo-poo and pee-pee
in there. I met two reporters for
Mother Jones
who put a book out about the shadowy big businesses behind the push for ethanol development, but… why the fuck am I writing
about all this? It was boring. Fuck writers’ parties. That’s the last one of those I’ll go to. Let’s get back to the good
stuff—making fun of something Mary J. Blige said!!!!

R
ECENTLY
,
IN AN INTERVIEW WITH SOMEONE SOMEWHERE
,
THE
lovely and unarguably talented singer Mary J. Blige said, out loud for people to hear, that “God wants me to have bling.”
Hmmmm, seems odd at first glance, but this may in fact be true. I certainly can’t verify that God did or didn’t talk to Mary,
because I wasn’t there at the time, but I’ll go ahead and take her word for it—much like the rest of the planet takes the
word of Abraham, Moses, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Joseph Smith, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, George W. Bush, or that crazy lady
in Houston who drowned her three kids in a bathtub a couple of years ago, who, like Mary J., were all spoken to by God while
nobody else was around to verify it.

So we are left to take it on good faith that Mary J., if she’s not lying, is correct that God truly does wish (or perhaps
command) her to wear “bling.”

Now it’s not my place to say that Mary J. Blige is full of shit, although because I firmly and absolutely don’t believe in
God, much less one that whispers fashion advice, I can say, “I think she’s full of shit,” because I believe that God is a
human construct and not real, and that it would therefore stand to reason that it is impossible for a God that I don’t believe
exists to do anything including but not limited to taking time from what one would imagine to be a very busy (I mean
packed
!) schedule to help a self-important American R&B star justify her narcissism and greed. But if you
do
believe in God, then why not believe that in the nanoseconds between shattering the left leg of a housewife from Taipei,
making a rainbow in Gottenburg, Sweden, and allowing that guy in Oakland the strength and courage to rape that lady, all while
simultaneously allowing a child of Christian Scientists in Santa Fe to die from untreated strep throat, that he chose to make
his presence known to her (because that was the only time to get Mary J. alone that day, because she, too, has a busy schedule).
And that God quickly expressed his desire that she wear bling just before scooting off to Yellow Knife, Canada, to make sure
a grizzly bear decapitated an honor student before dawn.

Actually I should say “continue” to wear bling, as she had been wearing bling long before God ever chose to, seemingly unnecessarily,
intervene. Sure, why not? God chose to make sure that Mary J. knew that he wished it that she adorn herself like so many Nubian
princesses, with precious metals and gems. He talked to her about this, and only this, not about issues of morality or anything
concerning spiritual guidance. He didn’t even tell her where the treasure was buried! I guess he told her to wear bling in
order to allay any guilt she might have had over such a selfish and vain use of precious resources. He did this so that she
could feel better about herself. Basically so that she could feel better about herself for this simple blingish act as opposed
to feeling better about herself and inflating her worth through an act of charity. Through helping others with a small stipend
of the largess, which has been given to her by millions of fans with neither her talent nor bank account.

Is there a correlation to be made between Mary J. Blige (whose God made his light known to her to assuage some guilt she might
have had about the recent purchase of a 24-karat, white gold Rolex watch with kangaroo strap and sapphire centerpiece) and
the semiliterate 42-year-old father of six who mechanically wants, hopes, and actually prays for some divine guidance to help
him finally pick the winning lotto combination? You might think there is, but I say no.