After a less than seamless Friday drive, detailed in Part I, my wounded car and I are within five minutes of the Tahoe Air BnB. A text tells me to pick up some White Claws and something that passes for dinner before I get there because the household has already eaten. After a full day of golf in blustery weather the lads are full of a hot meal and friendship, meanwhile after eight hours alone in a car I contain half a bag of nuts and a Mountain Dew. I leave the store with a gluten-free Lean Cuisine and 12 high ABV seltzers.
My plan upon opening the door is to be sensible and reserved, understated like the 5 gentlemen relaxing in the living room. I get maybe two hugs in before I loudly announce that I missed my flight and blew my car up. For dinner I slam my Lean Cuisine into the microwave and shotgun a Whiteclaw before the timer even beeps. This being a bachelor party, my objective is to drink fast from red cups, argue about contact sports, reminisce about the good times, and drink enough to remember maybe half of it.
But there is an unsettling aura about this house. Something sinister. Reserved. Adult.
Inspecting any weekend fridge will give you a rough blueprint for the coming days, and as I’m packing my White Claw Surges into the door I am sensing what awaits. Bacon, eggs, waters, IPAs, Pedialyte, all standard bender tools. Rolling open the freezer drawer reveals some toaster waffles and a bag of shredded hash browns. Can’t complain. It’s not until I’ve cracked my second White Claw and am walking back to the living room that I’m struck by a conspicuous absence. We’re missing something that is usually a main character in events like this:
There is no hard alcohol in this house.
A low panic, cold and fluid, moves through my veins as everybody retires to their rooms to grab boardshorts. I won’t dwell, because I figure at some point a bottle of Bulleit Rye is going to sneak its way out of somebody’s duffel bag and into the kitchen. Besides, I am neither the groom nor the best man, the pace of the weekend is not mine to dictate. Everybody’s interested in using this Air BnB’s sauna and hot tub at this point, and fuck knows I’m one of them. I throw my bag onto the top bunk, settle into some boardies, and opt for the room full of sweaty men.
I settle in to my place in the sauna greeted by some head nods and the familiar ass-singe of heated pine.
“ShakeAndBake, man. It’s been forever, what are you up to?”
My go-to answer to this question is “I dunno. Working, paying taxes”, but I haven’t seen some of these men since the 12 months of social dissolve that followed graduation. They deserve so much better than my standard, lazy nihilism. I give the salient bullet points summarizing half a decade of mere existence before things become an open forum regarding the difficulties of real estate, city managers, and tax law. This speak, to me, is tantamount to a foreign language, but I chuckle knowingly like I’m some kind of grown-ass man. A manchild can only nod his head so much, so I grab the sauna-toasted dregs of my seltzer and make for the Jacuzzi.
The hot tub is lukewarm, so my sojourn in there is only minutes long. By this point in the evening everybody is sufficiently loosened up, so a semi-toweled coalition shuffles inside for extracurricular activities. Lacking the necessary cups for beerpong we play the drinking game ‘hockey’ which requires projectile-flicking quarters at cans of beer. For over an hour American currency pings off Coors, doors, knuckles, and oven windows as we recapture a field sample of our fraternal youth.
While there is joy and laughter to be had, by this point each and every one of us has had a lengthy day and a handful of beers, so it is time for slumber. I crawl into my top bunk and pass into sleep unimpeded.
Saturday morning involves paying a man to fix my car, but after I get that handled I crawl into an Uber (also a Subaru) and make my way to the State Line, where the hotels also have casinos. At a sports bar I find the Lads, eyes fixed intently onto a game between two colleges nobody in our group has ever attended, not even online. As my first whiskey soda of the day contacts my face I overhear the financial benefits of opening a bank account for the signing bonus, then keeping the minimum balance in it until you can cancel it with no penalty. It’s like I never left.
After doing a price comparison we hop over to a casino with cheaper drinks. So now we sit in the circular lounge bar of the hotel, filling the low tables with the green glass of emptied Heinekens. For my part I’m excreting Zyn spit over the ice of my empty whiskey glass and begging my brain for something intelligent to say to the man next to me.
“Damn, J, I’m going to be honest, your hairline’s made a serious comeback. Rogaine or some shit?”
Holy shit, is this how I talk now?
“Thanks, duder!” He runs a hand over his, truthfully fuzzier, head, “No Rogaine, I just kind of let it be.”
Others reiterate my claim. Success.
From here there is an easy, downhill flow in conversation topics. From hair loss, aches, and pains, to sports, movies, and cunnilingus theory. Somewhere by the third hole of an indoor puttputt golf round I notice that copious alcohol has brought out the kind of bullshitting to which I am accustomed. Nobody’s thrown up, but we are throwing drinks back.
The evening inevitably ends up on the felt of the blackjack tables, where many nights go to perish. By this point I’ve lost some hundred dollars on the tables and more than that mainlining clear whiskey sodas throughout the day. For my part, I’m hovering around drunk, and I’m hearing an appreciable amount of slurring from others. Bleary eyed and something that passes for inebriated, we organize our evac and pile into a Suburban to head back to the cabin.
En route home there is something warm and meaty on the lap of the groom to be, but it’s not the ass of a stripper, it’s boxed chicken wings and pizza. By this point in my life, that’s honestly preferable. Briefly we talk of who’s going to purchase the OnlyFans account just for the night, and my heart lifts at the thought of technological perversion. But no man is brave enough to risk his credit score on that site.
Back in the cabin the pizza is distributed. Someone cues pornography up on the big screen, carelessly, almost to check a box, then leaves the room. On the screen a woman licks various toys and there is a short period of polite, communal curiosity before we disperse to separate activities. Ping pong, sauna, hottub.
I slip into the overfull hottub and prepare for some kind of dissertation on reverse mortgages, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, a JBL tucked into the porch rafters sings the four of us songs by the Black Keys as we talk about the best concerts we’ve ever attended, taking turns describing different venues, groups, states. Some speak of concerts in the heady days of our early twenties, others regale us of more recent affairs with family. By chance I’m in the tub with our group’s two parents.
And so I ask, “Hey man, how old are your kids now?”
Pretty soon the subject becomes offspring and how to make them. I’m learning about the mechanical, dogged nature of sex when your only goal is to conceive. Vocab terms like ‘basal temperature’ and ‘cervical mucous’ become known to me. Then one of my friends begins a personal story about the birth of his child.
There was a complication in the hospital. Suddenly all the science in the world couldn’t find his child’s tiny heartbeat. Even amongst the unfamiliar, tremendous suffering of labor, a new emotion took prominence his wife’s face: panic for her son. A look one doesn’t forget. The doctors said that they’d have to move her to a different wing of the hospital, better equipment, more scanners, closer to the scalpels. Naturally, he moved to follow but a hand held firmly against his chest let him know he couldn’t come along. And while he’s standing there, his wife being carted away under the sterile halogen lights, he was essentially told:
“We don’t know who we’re coming back with, and it could be neither of them.”
My chest is tight from forgetting to breathe. I’m only fractionally able to imagine watching everything I love get carted away. The hapless isolation of being on the outside looking in, and not even knowing where in this goddamned hospital “in” is. To be in a dingy waiting room next to the mundane hum of a coffee mach- Wait a minute, what the fuck?! I’m at a bachelor party?
Not only did I not expect to hear the phrase “cervical mucous”, I expected to be too fucking hammered to pronounce those words by this point. I am well aware that I occupy an entirely different lane than my friends in this group, it’s just that in none of my imaginings did I anticipate a day of reasonable drinking followed by a harrowing treatise on bringing a child into this world.
A Venn diagram of our two lives has come sharply into focus, and there is little overlap.
I am not mad at him for answering my questions and bearing his soul. True, I’m not throwing up rum all over a street performer, but I refuse to be upset at my friends for maturing into better versions of themselves, laden with responsibility. To never accept the mantle of adulthood is to never change, and to never change is to die in place.
My friend finishes his story, in which his wife and son are wheeled back into his life alive but a little ragged. Minutes after, my wheels are still spinning as the group starts migrating inside. Drained physically from the hot tub and mentally from the reckoning I’d been putting off, I enter the house.
On the screen there is fresh nudity. New girl. New Room. New toy.
“Hey, that other lady ever show her butthole?”
“Yup.”
“Damn.” A new Whiteclaw hisses to life between my hands. “Missed out.”
Some things may never change.
I Did This To Me 
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