The Olive Garden

I had dinner with the whole family last night at The Olive Garden. We always have such a great time. They’re having a special this month on some kind of double-stuffed raviolis – Tuscano Poppers I think they’re called, or something like that. It’s a wonderful place for family and friends to gather. It’s like eating at home almost, but surrounded by strangers in an extra large dining room.

Everyone was there. Aunt Sylvia and the twins were even visiting from Italy. Aunt Sylvia said the décor was just like the décor in the neighborhood restaurants that she and the twins often went to back in the old country. This was good, she said, because the twins, like most autistics, responded well to consistency.

I was hoping the twins could tell me how the pastas stacked up against the pastas of Italy, whether The Olive Garden had authentic ristorante-style pastas or not, but they ended up ordering hot dogs off the kids’ menu. When I asked the twins how they were liking their hot dogs, Aunt Sylvia reminded me that they were non-verbal. I asked Aunt Sylvia if that meant they couldn’t taste hot dogs, and she said, “Sshhh. Maybe…I don’t know…they don’t taste nothin’.”

Aunt Sylvia was going to order the lasagna, but at the last minute she changed her mind and went with the poppers. “What can I say?” she said, shrugging with conceit. “The lasagna’s probably good, but I just don’t think anyone can make a lasagna better than I do.” Aunt Sylvia does make a great lasagna, it’s true.

Pops had the all-you-can-eat salad and breadsticks. Every ten minutes he’d ask the waiter for more salad and more breadsticks (Pops is obese), and whenever the waiter would bring more breadsticks Pops would ask, “Hey, is the wine here bottomless, too?” The waiter would laugh nervously and say that it wasn’t, and then Pops’d order another wine anyway. He kept pinching the waiter on the ass and calling him “Bambino, my handsome Bambino.”

Mama glared at Pops as she does. Mama wanted a cocktail, but The Olive Garden doesn’t serve cocktails and so she went out to the car to get her bourbon. Before she left she told Pops to order her a coke but Pops forgot, and when Mama came back she was really pissed. “It’s a coke, Rico! What? You can’t manage to order a coke, you fucking buffoon?”

Grandma was in fine form – at least, at first. She told this whole story about red sauce and white sauce and how when she was a little girl a Gypsy had once told her that every mortal had a preference for either an Alfredo sauce or a marinara. “If the man he likes the red sauce then he burns with a passion,” she said, quoting the Gypsy, “but if the man he likes the white sauce then he be a wise man, like, say, a scholar or a diplomat.” We all laughed and laughed.

“What sauce are you, Grandma?” someone asked, but Grandma’s Alzheimer’s had suddenly kicked in and she just stared blankly ahead as she picked aimlessly and floppily at the cold cuts and cheeses in her antipasto. After a while, Mama pulled the antipasto platter away and out of Grandma’s reach.

“Alfredo is to marinara as New England is to Manhattan as chowder is to sauce,” said Cissy. (Cissy’s studying for her SATs.) Then she started banging on her knuckles really hard with her soupspoon and muttering, “No, that’s not right; no, that’s not right” over and over again.

Annie had brought along her boyfriend, Brando. His real name is Brandon and so his nickname makes sense to me, but the weird part is that he doesn’t know whom Marlon Brando was. He (Brandon) had never even heard of the real Brando (Marlon) until I brought him (Marlon Brando) up when he (Brandon) and Annie first started dating.

Annie and Brando are vegans. Annie said there wasn’t anything on the menu that they could eat (“I don’t know why we have to come here,” she said), and so Annie just ordered beers. She’s been 21 for several months now, but Brando's still a few weeks shy of drinking age and so he didn’t order anything. He’d occasionally sip from Annie’s beers, and between sips they’d make out until Mama told them to stop.

“Annie Marie, goddammit!” Mama would snap. “Brando, get your filthy hands above the table.”

The lovers would grudgingly (and temporarily) desist. “Geez, Ma…it ain’t church. Why’d you even make us come?” Annie’d grumble, and Brando would chuckle whenever he heard the word “come” being used in a context in which it might be a remotely viable double entendre.

I noticed that one of the twins, Stefano (or was it Giancarlo?), would stop eating and would rest his hands in his lap every time that Brando and Annie started kissing. Every few seconds he’d glance furtively at the couple, and he’d rock back and forth in his chair ever so slightly. I think he was trying to bang one out underneath the table all subtle like.

I had the chicken cacciatore. It’s my favorite; I always get the chicken cacciatore. I can’t go to The Olive Garden and not get the chicken cacciatore. It’s the best. Everybody wanted a bite.

When the waiter asked us if we’d like to see the dessert menu, Pops said that there was a Krispy Kreme right across the parking lot and that we should all just go get Krispy Kremes. But Aunt Sylvia said that she wanted to try the tiramisu and that, besides, if the twins were to set foot in a doughnut shop then there’d be pretty much no way to safely get them out. So we all had tiramisu, all of us except Annie and Brando. But then, on the way home, Pops made us go through the drive-through at Krispy Kreme anyway.

Sexual Integrity

I like to think that I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself, and I know that I certainly wouldn’t fuck me. I mean, even if I was gay and I enjoyed my own company I still wouldn’t fuck me. There’s virtually no chance.

My hair’s almost always greasy, first of all. I have a dandruff problem, it’s pretty serious, and I think shampoo just makes it worse.

Second, I assume my breath is horrible. (I smoke, I rarely brush my teeth, I never floss.)

I’ve got these red dots on my nose that don’t seem to be going away.

I don’t even have toenails anymore…I have chalky cakes of yellowish, brownish fungus that look and smell like tabs of rancid Parmesan glued to the tips of my toes. When I clip them and they crumble, the resemblance to Parmesan is uncanny. I would definitely not want those nasty things rubbing up against me in bed. I’ve often heard that toenail fungus isn’t contagious (or maybe that it’s only contagious through a virus that gets into the bloodstream, that isn’t transmitted topically or something like that), but that all sounds like total bullshit.

I’ve got eczema (or some other itchy-as-hell condition) all over my shins (shins, plural, from ankle to knee). God, how I rage against my shins’ maddening itch! It's terrible. I scratch at my shins constantly; they’re covered in scabs. I’m supposed to put a salve on them, but applying the salve always tears off all the older scabs and it hurts like a screaming bastard. It feels like I’m rubbing fresh wounds with a rough paste of sloughed off skin cells and bacon bits and salad dressing and twisted up shin hairs. Wearing long pants is aesthetically necessary, even when I’m alone, and the friction is perpetually exacerbating my problem.

I’ve been getting awfully tubby around the middle lately. I hear the term “pear-shaped body” bandied a lot by my crueler friends (even though I’m shortish and barrel-chested, and so my rotundity more resembles an apple or a plum – not a nice plum but an overripe, spotty plum that even some fruit-fucking pervert probably wouldn’t care to squeeze). Wrist fat is beginning to muffin-top out from underneath my watchstrap.

There are five or six nose hairs, prominently visible more often than not, that I simply cannot get to with my nose-hair trimmer. And you really don’t wanna use scissors to go chasing around after rogue hairs in your nostrils (or any other tight, dark spaces…just ask my scrotum). They are outlaw nose hairs, living at the edges of my jurisdiction, but I tolerate them because, a, I have to and, b, they offset the salience of my red nose dots.

I could go on for most of the day I suppose (moles, flat spots, discolorations, etc.), but suffice it to say that I am not a traditionally handsome man by any stretch of the imagination in any conceivable tradition. Basically, I’m pretty much the last guy in the world that I’d want to fuck. I would rather stay home by myself jerking off than go out and fuck me, and when that’s the case hooking up is rarely a good idea.

So how can I expect anyone else to have sex with me? I can’t – at least, not without being a complete hypocrite. The only ethical choice is abstinence. Nothing else would be reasonable.

Prostitution’s no help. It’s great theoretically…I’d fuck just about anybody or anything if you paid me enough – so yeah, sure, I’d fuck me. But it’d be so expensive that I wouldn’t be able to afford it. I like a posh trick (who doesn’t?), but I make a meager living and any escort willing to negotiate the situation down to my price range would have to be pretty desperate. I'd have me over a barrel, and it wouldn’t be right to exploit that desperation. It wouldn’t be sexy.