I was sprawled out on the couch, drinking a cold beer and watching the Bears whup the Packers. For the moment I was master of my domain. When my nuts itched, I scratched them. When I hungered, I scarfed down some pretzels.

Everything in my world was as it should be. Then the wife entered the room.

“Kristy and the girls from work are coming over tomorrow night for a Lusty Tarts party. You’re gonna hafta make yourself scarce. Play pool with your jackass buddies at the bar or something.”

“Ok.”

I didn’t ask questions as that would only prolong the conversation. I merely focused my eyes on the television and pretended she wasn’t there until she was no longer there.

Later I phoned my jackass buddy, Alex.

The wife thought of him as a jackass because of his inability to hold down a job or stay sober. Basically the same reasons she thought I was a jackass. But he knew a thing or two about a thing or two. In fact he was the smartest man I knew. He could quote some guy named Nietzsche though his pronunciation of the cat’s name differed from one day to the next.

“Alex, how’s it going? Whatcha up to?”

“I’m just staring into the abyss. How’s it hanging on your end?”

“High and tight, brother. Whatcha doing tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night... let’s see... Oh yeah, I’m gonna get smashed on cheap whiskey and jerk off to some old school eighties porn. Why? It’s not like the old ladies’s gonna let you leave once the street lights come on, will she?”

“Hell yes, man. The wife wants me gone so she can have some kinda Lusty Tarts party with her girlfriends.”

“Lusty Tarts? Holy shit. You can’t go. We gotta stay for that.”

“How’s that?”

“Cause it’s Lusty Tarts, man. It’s women getting nekkid and playing with dildos and butt lube.”

“What? Nah...”

The wife was too bashful to even wear a bathing suit that didn’t have the little skirt flap concealing her round, bubble ass from appreciative glances. There was no way she’d go around flopping rubber cocks with her girlfriends.

“I’m telling you, Vic, it’s gonna be a daisy chain of middle-aged, soccer-mommian proportions. We gotta be there.”

“The wife don’t want me there. Which means she definitely don’t want you there.”

“Shit. She ain’t the boss of me. And she ain’t the boss of you, neither.”

“Don’t you think they’re gonna notice us sitting around watching?”

“Not if we hide, dumb ass.”

“Where the hell we gonna hide in my house trailer?”

“I know a couple places.”

This should have set off a few mental alarms, but I’d recently decided to quit caring. And I gotta admit, since embracing a lifestyle of emotional apathy, this baptism of blah, I’d never felt so gloriously indifferent. So monotonously alive. So I just kept my mouth shut and told him I’d call him the next day.

The next day the wife announced she had to run into town for vegetable dip and margarita mix.

“I’ll just walk down to Alex’s trailer,” I said. “We’re gonna make a day of it. Shooting pool and what not.”

“Just don’t go sniffing around any strange pussy,” she said with the sort of half smile she reserved for telling me how good I am in bed. As if she didn’t really expect me to believe this but felt obliged to say it for the sake of decorum.

“I won’t so long as you don’t,” I replied.

She smiled her half smile again and I resolved to see Alex’s dumb ass scheme through. The moment the wife backed my truck of the driveway, grinding gears through the trailer court, I phoned Alex.

“The rooster has left the hen house. I repeat, the rooster has left the hen house.”

“That’s a big ten-four, good buddy. I heard your truck leave. I’ll be there soon as the Blue Collar Comedy Show’s done.”

“No time,” I hissed. “The rooster just went to get some margarita mix.”

“All right. All right.”

Five minutes later he walked in the door carrying two sixers of Natural Lite and a mason jar of moonshine, two wrinkled peaches floating in the clear liquid like a pair of alien testicles in a jar of formaldehyde.

Though he’d been in my trailer a hundred times (that I knew of) he looked the single wide over like it was his first visit.

“Where they gonna hold the festivities?” He asked.

“I reckon the front room.” It was the only room in the trailer that could accommodate more than four people.

“What about the bedroom?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you know anything? Them Lusty Tart parties always end in the bedroom with a bunch of fish eating and twat diddling.”

I didn’t think the wife cared much for licking the hole. She barely tolerated sucking the pole. And all the times I’d searched her belongings for proof of infidelity, I’d never once found a “marital aid”. Unless you count the oddly vibrating flashlight. Which I don’t.

“I simply answered “you’re probably wrong, but you could be right”.

Actually Alex could have watched his hillbilly show four times over. I underestimated the amount of time it took to drive five miles down the road for booze and finger foods. I figured twenty minutes. The wife took three hours.

In the meantime we sat in the closet drinking beer. I would have felt better about the whole deal had I been able to sit on the couch watching football like a real man, throwing the empties in the garbage instead of stuffing them in coat pockets. But Alex demanded we get ourselves accustomed to the cramped quarters, rather than pile in here on the run the moment we heard tires on gravel. As it was, we were sitting in the closet, heads obscured by dangling Acapulco shirts, discussing the pros and cons of the Bear’s offensive line when the wife returned with company.

The moment the screen door banged open and shut, I realized I had to piss something fierce. But I didn’t dare move. The first I heard was female but did not belong to my wife. It was much too feminine.

“Where’s that hubby of your’s?” The voice asked.

“Out being worthless as usual.”

Alex giggled and I had to throw an elbow to his ribs. Little did he know this was one of her little endearments for me. Like calling fat people “Slim”.

The voice clicked in my head. Regina, the trailer park tramp. In her short residency, she had managed to fuck every Mobile Home Estate male between the ages of eighteen and eighty. Except me. It didn’t make sense that she should be here. The wife hated her and her whoring ways.

“What’s she doing here?” I whispered. “She don’t go without dick long enough to need the fake kind. Or so I heard.”

“You heard right. Maybe she’s here for the lube.”

Peeking out the closet door we could see into the dining area side of the kitchen and the couch side of the living room (as opposed to the television side). Regina stepped into view wearing short shorts with red satin hearts on the back pockets and a pink halter top that highlighted her twinkling navel ring and the tribal tattoo on her lower back.

Not to be outdone, the wife wore a track suit that concealed every inch of flesh from her throat to her toes. Now, her and Regina were the best of friends, slurping blender drinks and bad mouthing me.

Moments later, there was a knock on the screen door and Sylvia and Monica entered bearing six packs of exotic flavored wine coolers. These were women I forbade my wife to associate with due to their seditious nature. They were always saying things to the wife like “you deserve better than Vic” or “you should start making him do some of the housework”.

Hell, if they wanted to talk that kind of shit, fine. But if you’re going to take my pussy away from me, replace it with a pussy of greater or equal value. Don’t leave me out in the cold because I don’t like to wash dishes.

The ladies squealed and hugged each other around the necks, pressing their boobs lovingly against each other.

Wine coolers were cracked open. Once the blender was turned on, it didn’t stop again for two hours. It’s a true fact, the wife burns through four blenders a year.

I needed a margarita.

Watching the ladies get tanked over the next several hours, I realized Alex and I had no where near enough booze to last us the evening. The beer was gone. The moonshine was gone. All that remained were the shriveled peaches and I had no where near enough hair on my sack to eat those.

“We need to make a beer run,” I whispered.

“And miss the good stuff?”

Good stuff? I prowled into the bedroom and peeked through the doorway. The girls were seated along the couch and love seat, drinking their fancy drinks and talking about what a whore, basket case and generally disreputable woman Kristy was.

Moments later, Kristy arrived to a flurry of cheek-kissing, breast-mashing and ass-kissing (metaphorically, unfortunately). A drink was placed in her hand. Kristy set down her luggage and introduced herself to a couple of the women who knew her only by reputation. Kristy opened a briefcase and began pulling out catalogues as the wife and Regina mixed liquors into a pitcher, creating a drink they referred to as a blow job and pulled a number shot glasses from my fifty state shot glass collection.

“I don’t think they’re gonna get naked,” Alex whispered.

“I can’t believe they’re using the Midwestern states from my shot glass collection.”

Through a cacophony of drunken giggling, Kristy welcomed the ladies to the Lusty Tarts extravaganza. She popped a disc into the DVD player. She called it mood music, but all I heard was a lot of bad jazz and some grunting and groaning. She said the Lusty Tarts special of the month: Buy one Stryker Maximus dildo, get one of equal or lesser length and girth for half price.

“That’s what I need,” the wife said, a little too quickly, a little too loudly.

I cringed as they laughed at this obvious untruth.

“I’ll go ahead and pass around this Stryker for you girls who don’t know what nine inches of cock looks like. But you’ll have to pass it around without using your hands. Like this:” Kristy tucked the dildo between her chin and neck who walked to Monica who nuzzled the dildo beneath her chin before passing it to the wife.

“We use to pass it mouth to mouth,” Kristy said, “but supposedly Angie Sisolek caught herpes from it.”

I could see Kristy rolling her eyes from two rooms away. Sylvia laughed so hard she dropped the Stryker.

“Ah, take your blow job!” The girls cat-called.

Sylvia got down and wrapped her lips around the shot glass and knocked the liquor back without using her hands.

“That looks so good,” the wife said, “I think I’m gonna have me one.”

She took the Illinois shot glass in her mouth and took the concoction down her throat in one smooth motion, swallowing it without the slightest hitch or gag. Regina refilled her shot glass, and the wife knocked the second back just as easily. That was two more blow jobs than I had received all month.

“I’m so goddam liquor starved,” Alex said, “I’d drink a blow job if they let me.”

“I don’t doubt that for an instant.”

The ruckus in the living room continued to escalate. The ladies poured liquor down their throats, hooted and hollered, blind-folded themselves and played pin the penis on the stud. The wife won that game. Her prize was a tube of cherry-flavored lube.

“Believe me,” the wife said, “the last thing I need is lube.”

The women fell over themselves laughing. Another little piece of me shriveled up and died. Sensing my sudden depression, Alex said “hey, man, you wanna light out the back window, go play some Texas Hold’em at Marv’s? I don’t think these ginches are gonna have an orgy after all.”

“No shit?”

Kristy set down styrofoam bowls in front of each woman. In each bowl Kristy placed a little gummi phallus. She took a can of Redi-whip, shook it vigorously and filled each bowl with whip cream.

“Ok, girls, first one finds the cock in the cream wins the anal beads. On your mark, get set, go!”

The ladies dived mouth first into their bowls with gusto. Jaws and tongues worked through the whip cream. Mercifully, the wife didn’t win this event, but she came close. Real close.

“I’m good at finding little dicks,” the wife laughed.

The women brayed laughter. Regina claimed her anal beads. They all chased down blow jobs with margeritas.

My shoulders slouched down to my knees. My sacral chakra imploded. Marriage had emasculated me long ago. Now, I was bearing witness to my own neutering.

“Dude,” Alex hissed. “Is it really that small?”

“Hell no.”

“Let me see it”

“I’ll let you see the back of my hand.”

“Whoa, there, Napoleon. Don’t take your short dick aggression out on me.”

“I’m not.” A knock on the front door interrupted my short chain of thought. “Oh, Christ, what now?”

An expectant hush fell over the ladies. Alex and I exchanged curious glances. This couldn’t be good. The wife hopped off the couch and answered the door. The women peeked around, stifling giggles. Two men dressed as police officers entered the foyer.

“We got some noise complaints,” the taller officer intoned. “You ladies having a party?”

“Oh no,” I sighed.

“Alex grinned and nodded his head. “Male strippers, Vic. Male strippers make women go fucking crazy. We may see some pussy, yet. We’ll probably have to see some dick, too, but the pussy will make it worth it.”

“Fuck this. I’ve had enough.”

I kicked open the bedroom door and charged through the kitchen before anyone knew what the hell was going on. I focused on the shorter of the two impostors, grabbing him by the collar of his uniform. I punched him twice in the nose. He crashed into the coat rack and fell to the floor.

“Let’s see you dance with a broken nose, pretty boy,” I hollered and frothed.

I reared back to kick him just as the other sumbitch elbowed me in the head. I dropped down to a knee, dazed only for a moment. I went to stand back up but the stripper had the jump on me. He took a realistic can of pepper spray from his authentic utility belt and spritzed me right in the fucking eyes.

Twin thermonuclear explosions rocked me back. It was like eating two habanero peppers with my eye sockets. I screamed for help but there was none forthcoming. Alex remained frozen in place in the shadows of my bedroom. I heard giggling from the front room.

“Help me!” I shrieked. “I’m being man-handled by male strippers.”

The officers rolled me over onto my belly and handcuffed my wrists behind me. I bit at the air in front of me.

“I believe the fool’s done gone feral,” a male voice said. “He rung your bell but good.”

“That’s all right. We get him down to the station, we’ll give him a couple rounds of rabies shots. See how he likes that.”

They grabbed me under my shoulders and used my head to open the door.

“You ladies keep it down, now,” the officer said. “We don’t wanna hafta get called out here again. It’ll be trouble for everyone.”

“Y’all better put my shot glasses back,” I mewled. “Those are my fucking shot glasses.”

But I don’t think they heard me. Between the laughing and the burring blender. I thought about my one phone call. Maybe, the wife wouldn’t spend all my bail money on rubber dick. Maybe. Driving out of the trailer park, I set my mind toward figuring a way to explain this to my parole officer.