Sophisticated living

It all starts with the blowjob behind the dumpster, because when you're an attractive young lady and you arrive to the birthday party of a minor acquaintance -- a minor acquaintance who vomits shortly thereafter, vomits all night, vomits to the point where it's like The Amityville Horror and blood comes from the walls -- and you make eye contact across the crowded bar with a handsome young man, your jowls yearn. And to the dumpster you must go.*

But you're a young lady in your 20s, and you make the worst choice of your life and find yourself with another gentleman, a gentleman who horrifies your roommates when, after being sexed up, walks to the bathroom in boxer-briefs. This faux pas is second to that of the lover of your most hated roommate, whose boyfriend's porn-star boner stuns the household in a moment of indiscretion. A roommate's Cuban mother catches a glimpse, and impropriety ensues.

Yet conversation shifts when the main courses arrive. "Are you going to eat that wasabi?" a gentleman asks a well-known pussy. "I'll give you $20 if you eat that entire block of wasabi, right now."

The pussy demurs. He won't eat that wasabi unless offered $100 or more.

Conversation changes again, about the differences between eating whales and dolphins and toxic fish. Still, that pussy refuses to eat the wasabi.

Dinner ends. The group narrows from seven to three, and moves to a sake bar, and to another bar after that.

"You don't have to scuba dive to realize that finding a U-boat is some bad-ass shit," a well-known pussy observes. "My point in all this is, are submarines ever not cool?"

With no disagreement, the conversation turns cosmopolitan, to experiences in Prague and Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and the duties of royalty.

"What I think would be awesome," observes the pussy, "would be to fucking go out with people when they discover something under the ocean."

Exhausted -- either by the sophisticated conversation or by a bout weeknight drinking that began at 5 p.m. and is approaching its seventh hour -- one of the remaining three departs. She is bereft that she has tickled no one.

The author glances up to see young girls in the window outside. They are 20, 21 -- 23 at most. In the 90-degree night, they are dropping ice cubes in each others' shirts. They lift their shirts to reveal thin stomachs, ice channeling down through their breasts, dropping down to their bellies, sliding down and falling to the sidewalk below. For a moment, their navels are ice machines.

*This paragraph is 90% fictional. The rest of this post is accurate.