Giant Cum

"Is that Paris Hilton on your shirt?" A guy says to me. I'm looking straight down into a urinal, watching dark yellow liquid escape my body through a convenient route. Without raising my head, I say "No, its just a random blonde chick." "Oh," he continues (he himself relieving his body of fluids as well), "I just came back from the Las Vegas Porn convention and I might have met that little chick who's on your shirt."

This was in the men's bathroom at Local 16, a bar on U St. It was weird enough that I had "urinal-side" conversation, but what are the odds that the guy beside me just happened to come from the city of Sin?

During the night, my shirt had been light conversational fodder, and I do mean light. Its a thin yellow shirt with an image printed on it. In full colour, it is a picture of an attractive blonde woman eating a half-finished donut. She is wearing a white shirt that reads "GIANT CUM" in large black letters. The shirt has been siting idle in my wardrobe for about three months as I couldn't really decide where to wear it. I toyed with the idea of wearing it when I was at home in Jamaica but decided strongly against it. A guy wearing a shirt that said those words, girl or not, would probably be taken as gay and promptly dispatched.

It’s Friday, and its my friend’s birthday. I receive a long text message somewhere between six and seven p.m telling me to come to Saint Ex, a bar off 14^th St. I fiddle with the idea of going (I am very tired from spending the entire day shuffling coffee and doing grunt work in Farragut North) and then I play an intense game of indoor soccer. A crushing defeat, a few wasted curses, one of which was “Fucking drop man! Mark you man! Come on! Come on!” which I blurted out three seconds before the end of the game.

When I arrived home, a warm, smelly mixture of sweat and raging hormones, I received a call from my friend Allison.

“Heyyy…” she says.

Her voice always sounds like she’s smiling, if that makes any sense. She says she and some people are traipsing about U st, and they were seeing what I was up to. “Give me a few hours to rest and then I’ll meet up with you guys wherever you are.” I eat a massive meal and try to sleep immediately afterwards. I spent thirty minutes staring at my curtain, realizing sleep will be impossible. I laugh to myself and play some music. This is a part of my Friday ritual—the wanton eruption of music from my speakers—and it fulfills two key things: One, it gets me in a good mood, no matter how boring or lackluster my week was. Two, it gets me a in a good mood, no matter how boring of lackluster my week was.

My track selections are based primarily on my moods from whatever events transpired during the week. I feel a sense of overwhelming Melancholy because some girl I liked pull the ol’ flakeroo on me again, I might start out with some touchy-feely Sugar Ray, segue into some disturbing yet pleasing Flyleaf then go ballistic and listen to some hyper-violent Dancehall music. At that point I am so charged that I am ready to run to the hills and have ten babies with a group of six-foot mountain women.

This never happens, but more often than not, I end up at bars talking to women in a five-foot four to five-foot eight range who are less than willing to be man handled in post-Mavado coitus.

So, like any Friday, I started playing some dancehall music. My mood during the week was somewhat flat. There was no crescendo, no up, no down. It was merely there. As such, a quick dose of dancehall always does the trick. After a few songs played and I heard “Boy get shot inna face”, “Boy get shot inna head”, “My gun…”, “Body on the ground”, Over and over in different songs, I turn it off. Hyper-violent music really does have its own time and place. I switch to the Garden State sound track and listen to some Shins. I felt much better. My no measure of the imagination was I in an excitable mood, but I put on my Giant Cum shirt anyways.

I hop onto my bike, a wobbly dangerous piece of Architecture and head out. I’ve been frequenting U St more it seems. Before it was almost foreign, merely that in between place from destination to destination. Saint Ex is where everyone is. As soon as I walk in, my friends try to zip up my shirt.

“Wow, your shirt says “Giant Cum”.” Allison says. Her friend, Christina, reaches over and attempts to zip up the jersey I’m wearing over the shirt. I laugh.

The conversation runs the gamut, from my non-fiction writing aspirations, using a journal as a tool to cross-examine one’s self with, a rotating story of how a friend spilled beer on someone’s shoes and other things. Downstairs, they are playing old-school hip-hop, which I do not enjoy. Allison and Christina make good fun of it, dancing in tune to the beats. I barely dance these days, much less to old hip-hop that I can’t relate to. Each time I hear “Engine Engine number nine, on the New York Transit line….” I cringe.

Not really because the song annoys me, but I’m in a bar with mostly preppy white guys who raise their hands as the songs come one, as if to say “Dude, that’s my joint!”. After a little while, my Serbian friend strolls in, tall and resolute with a swishy head of hair. I give her a perfunctory happy birthday kiss on the cheek and introduce her to my friends.

The night goes on like this for a while longer. A few people smile and point at my Giant Cum shirt, and I smile back.

We head to another bar, Local 16 briefly. They are playing house music, the kind I really love. I am however, insanely tired and my knees hurt. I won’t be the tall, sexy Euro-dancing Jamaican guy tonight. We sit at a table downstairs. There was a moment when I almost fell into conversation with the ladies about my current track record with meeting “qualified” women. After a few stops and starts, I successfully dodged the conversation,

Not before a few items slipped.

“Have you even been in love?” Christina asked.

“Of course.” I responded with gusto.

“Was she someone you knew?” she says.

“Yes, I knew her from school.”

“Ah…”

Allison interjects.

“That is SO true! I remember when I was in love it was someone I had known for a long time before. He was a friend before I loved him.”

Allison goes on to mention a survey done by National Geographic about cities with the most singles, citing DC and New York as having some of the highest numbers. We chatted on the topic a little more, with me trying not to speak about certain flagging aspects of my life in a bar of all places, Allison no doubt reminiscing about her possibly current love, and Christina looking at me in a way that suggest that if I were to continue speaking, she would probably feel pity for me. I made sure to dodge the rest of the conversation.

“Listen ladies,” I said, straightening up.

“It’s nice to talk about these things if they are a prevailing thought in your mind. For me they aren’t. I don’t want to start chatting about these sappy situations and then you all have good reason to pity me and feel all sorry-like.”

They both reacted at the same time, like a set of Birds being startled in a cage.

“Oh no, No!” they said.

“This is nothing,” Christina started. ”We girls talk about these things all the time.”

“In fact, just before we headed out we were talking about a similar subject.” Allison added. I nodded for a second, then completely switched the conversation. A few minutes later, it was Ben’s Chili Bowl time.

Christina somehow gets served in three minutes behind a line of twenty people. She brings a large, disgusting-looking bowl of fries over. It looks like a cat threw up and then took a large, runny dump on a set of large fries. I was offered.

“I’ll pass.” I said. After some more light conversation, it was time to go.

By now the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees, and again I regret my Alfie-isms. I have no gloves and I’m riding my bike back home. I follow the ladies a few blocks from their house and jet home. Inside, I wolf down a donut I bought at 7-Eleven just before I reached home and sip on some soda. Friday was OK.

I flop into bed and wonder if I should watch a movie on Saturday, or walk idly around Chinatown watching out for some of those President’s day sales. No matter, I say, wrapping the covers around me, watching the word disappear under my closing eyelids.