. I took a deep breath, climbed into the
GROOM
car, and off we went.
Inside were Bill, Joe, both of our dads, and Barney Fleegleman. The party was already well underway, and Portia's dad handed me a shot of tequila. None of them had any idea where we were going, and none of them really cared.
Good OPSEC, Betty! Damn.
Finally, the limo pulled to a stop. We were next to a dock on the south shore of Town Lake. The driver led us all to a pier and escorted us onto an odd little boat. Imagine a donut that is seven meters wide, with seats for ten folks inside, and a blue canvas canopy over the middle, and you'd have a pretty good idea of what these contraptions looked like.
Our "captain" passed out snacks, and kept our glasses filled with tequila or beer (or both) for the next few hours. We cruised up and down the lake, drinking and making merry. Everyone took turns telling their most embarrassing stories about me.
Joe and Bill told a few tales from our dude ranch trip, where I'd met Portia. Bill moved here from New York and Joe was from New Jersey. However, they have both picked up the Texas national penchant for exaggeration. They made the gentle Medina River sound like a piranha-infested backwater of the Amazon, with snakes hanging from every tree. They suggested that all the time Portia and I spent writing together in her room at the ranch was merely a cover for threesomes with Jessie, the perky cowgirl who worked there. Not only that, but they hinted that the rope-twirling tricks I had demonstrated to Portia were merely the prelude to dark BDSM acts in a secret dude ranch sex dungeon.
Bill and Joe had been feeding off each other, amping up their exaggerations and outright fabrications, but this last whopper crossed some internal line with Portia's dad, Ed. He dampened their enthusiasm for making shit up about Portia by pouring a pitcher of beer on their heads. I gave him a fist bump for that and refilled his shot glass. He and I were going to get along well.
My dad definitely won the 'Humiliate Harry' contest. He had plenty of material, and his threshold for revealing it diminished with each new tequila shot. He regaled the group with stories about how I tortured my little sister Pam by using her and her friends -- and her dates -- as roping targets. This eventually put me in massive debt at the karma bank. According to Dad, Pam had spent many hours complaining to him about this and sharing her plans for my doom. Dad was a dutiful father and more than once told me to lay off, but... I think he kinda wanted to see what Pam would do. And he got his wish,
boy howdy
, did he ever.
He told the story about how payback occurred one evening as I was on my way out to pick up my high school girlfriend Cindy for a movie. On the way out to my pickup, I stepped right into a tree snare Pam had set for me. One moment I was planning my ploys for advancing from second to third base with the voluptuous Cindy, and the next I was in a net, hanging eight feet off the ground, strung up on a branch of the large live oak tree in our front yard. Apparently, Pam had some serious rope skills of her own, and I had inadvertently taught her a few of them. I was pretty helpless, with my arms pinned to my side by my own weight. I couldn't reach my phone or my knife, so I just hung there, cursing.
For several minutes I dangled thusly. I passed the time by taking my personal pile of profanities out for a walk, and marinating in my own bile. Finally, Pam and several of her friends came out of the house, laughing their asses off. They took innumerable pictures of me with their phones, including several selfies with me hanging in the background. Then Pam called Cindy. I could only hear Pam's side of the conversation, but I didn't like it very much.
"Hi, Cindy. This is Pam."
"Harry's hanging out with me and my friends."
"No, he can't come to the phone -- he's a little tied up at the moment."
"No, he's okay -- for some reason, he can't get his pickup started."
"So you'll come over and pick him up? Great, I'll tell him. Bye."
Pam finally let me go, but only after Cindy had taken a few selfies of her own. Cindy and I still went out that night, but my confidence had been badly shaken. Sadly, there was no base running that night.
That incident with Pam taught me an important lesson: being bigger and stronger means nothing if your opponent is patient, cunning, and has a very particular set of skills. Liam Neeson ain't got nuthin' on my little sis. I took the lesson to heart, and Pam and I have gotten along really well ever since.
When dad finished telling this story, he was declared 'Harry Harasser Supreme' for the day. Up to this point, I had been sipping my tequila slowly. After that, I reached for the bottle and started to drink directly from it.
As dusk approached, our boat began to meander closer to the Congress Avenue bridge. In case you've never been to Austin, the crevices under that bridge host a colony of one and a half million Mexican short-tailed bats. In warm weather, they swarm out in a vast cloud at dusk, and go out to dine on 200 tons of mosquitoes and other bugs.
Yum.
By the time the bats came out to feast, we were feeling little pain, and cheered and hooted as the tiny critters emerged in a vast cloud. Our boat stayed well back from the bridge to avoid being showered by guano or by 'honeydew', as the Austin Bat Refuge euphemistically calls their urine. Certain bat superfans consider this honeydew to bring good luck. Our boat's captain held the more traditional view that good luck consisted of
not
being shat or peed upon by bats. I wholeheartedly agreed, and made a mental note to up his tip.
===
PORTIA
Inside the limo were Betty, my mom, Harry's mom, Doris Fleegleman, Harry's sister Pam and Bill's wife Marjorie. Before I was even able to find a seat, someone shoved a mimosa in my hand. In general, I'm a bit of a loner, and don't tend to have a lot of female friends. You sure couldn't tell that tonight - I was surrounded by joyous women who kept me smiling and laughing all the way to our destination. After a few drinks, we took turns standing up in the open sunroof like in
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
, with long paper streamers and balloons trailing along in our wake.
The limo eventually dropped us off at a dock on Town Lake, and we were escorted onto a rectangular 50-foot, double-decker party boat with its own open bar. A fresh round of mimosas was poured, and our ship set sail into Town Lake. Someone asked Betty where all the men were. She belched, then laughed, "Who cares?!"
Stay classy, Betty!
The first order of business was to embarrass the bride with progressively naughtier gifts. My posse wasted no time in humiliating me. Every one of the gifts was covered by rather garish wrapping paper -- covered with hundreds of little dicks. To think that I had once accused Harry of making dick joke single-entendres. There was absolutely NO entendre here. Just... dicks. Everywhere. Clearly, I had led a sheltered life.
Things started off gently with a gift from my mom. Somehow, she found throw blankets that looked like giant flour tortillas two meters in diameter. She gave me a set of two, and we all took turns posing for selfies while wrapped up in them. Doris took a great one of me and my mom wrapped up together like a giant pair of Mueller burritos. My dad was going to love that shot.
Harry's mom inadvertently turned up the gain control a bit with her gift of T-shirts for Harry and me that simply said, "Married A.F." on the front. I think she probably thought the "A.F." stood for something sweet, like "Always Forever". If so, she was rudely awakened, and blushed crimson when Doris hooted, "Married! As! Fuck! Good one, Helen!"
Marjorie briefly brought the gift rating back to PG with a set of embroidered pillow cases. The first one said "Blanket Stealer" in big letters. The other one said, "Snore Master". Harry was definitely going to get the second one. Marjorie also gave me a thesaurus for romance writers, filled with all sorts of useful euphemisms for body parts and sexual acts. That was going to come in pretty handy.
Pam picked up the pace with a whole passel of profane and phallic props. I will only mention a few of them, including a bag of dick-shaped pasta, a box of phallic shortbread cookies, a golden penis-shaped bottle opener, a blow-job bib, and a plain cylinder the size of a Pringles can. Against my better judgment, I opened it, and a meter-long, spring-loaded dong shot out of it, arcing over the heads of an awestruck group of women.
Pam was not done with me. Somehow, she had smuggled a rather intimidating giant pink penis piñata on board, and proceeded to hoist it up with a pulley attached to the overhead. She put a blindfold on me, spun me around a few times, and let me take several swings at it with a bat. I kept missing, and finally passed the blindfold and the bat on to another woman. It was actually fairly cathartic for all of us, trying to whack off (sorry) one phallic object with another one. When it was my turn again, even my mildly conservative mom got into the spirit, yelling "Hit that dick, Portia!"
Harry's mom was not to be outdone. She hollered, "Give that dick a few more blows, Portia!"
Who knew that penile pugilism offered so many low-hanging (sorry again) puns? I was progressively told to 'Don't peter out, give that thing a few more strokes!', to 'Give it a few more licks!', to 'Give it a really big smack, right on the tip!'.
I was laughing so hard that it was hard to swing the bat. However, I eventually connected with a solid thunk that knocked off one of the large, glitter-encrusted testicles. Alas, none of the contents emerged, so I handed off the baton, so to speak, to Marjorie. She finally provided the happy ending we had all been waiting for. With one last, mighty backhand swing, the dick disintegrated in a giant golden shower -- in this case a shower of little chocolate dicks, each individually wrapped with shiny, gold foil. The sight of all of these women that I loved down on their knees, giggling and filling their arms with tiny dicks is one that I can never unsee. And never want to unsee.
The little, dark chocolate dicks were hilarious -- the end of each little shaft was coated with a white chocolate condom. Needless to say, many dicks went into many mouths, and were deemed delicious.
A few minutes later, Doris cleared her throat. "Ahem. Portia, my dear. I have a few things for you. Barney and I brought you a few items from our hardware store back home." I nodded. "What you probably don't know, is that we have a whole corner of the store devoted to sexual hardware. I call it 'Love Forest by Doris'."
I broke into a cold sweat. Doris is an enthusiastic fan of my books, and celebrates each new release by banging her husband Barney into catatonia. Behind her wholesome Midwestern exterior lurks a Central Illinois succubus who sometimes alarms me with the occasional glimpses I see behind her innocent-appearing facade.
The smile on her face did not reassure me. "I'm sure that you and Harry have absolutely no problems in the bedroom. However, if either of you ever want to do some..." She paused to make air quotes with her fingers, "...'lay' research for one of your books, I'll give you a personal tour of our showroom."
