This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.
OLD SCHOOL
By Royce F. Houton
DANO
"So here I am going down on this girl for all I'm worth, and she's thrashing around like some Tasmanian devil, getting nut after nut after nut, right?" Danny Albertson continued spinning his bizarre, biologically improbable story, one that was getting more bizarre with each passing Pabst Blue Ribbon.
"Mmm hmm, Dano," I said, weary of the tale. It showed. Even the bartender eyed me sympathetically, shaking his head.
"So then,... then, just as I'm plunging my tongue into her gash for the big finish,..." Danny resumed his yarn. I signaled the bartender for my check. Enough. But even that hint zipped right past Danny like a Justin Verlander fastball. "... this chick, right in the middle of cumming, cuts loose with this
ginormous
, nasty-ass
fart..
."
Now even Angelo, the bartender, was beyond his limit. Customer's always right up to a point, but Danny's fable about cunnilingus performed on a flatulent, orgasming lady passed that point without even tapping the brakes.
"Look, guy, this ain't church and salty language ain't unusual here, but you gotta take that disgusting stuff somewhere else. You're running off customers," Angelo, a burly man with powerful, hairy forearms showing beyond his rolled-up sleeves, told Danny. Angelo and I had been friends for years.
Looking dazed, Danny turned toward me just as I handed Angelo my credit card to settle up. Danny shrugged, as if to say,
Are you going to let him
do
that to me
? I said nothing, waiting for Angelo, part owner of my favorite neighborhood bar with his older brother Raphael, to bring the credit card receipt to sign.
"I'm just now getting to the good part, Les," Danny, pleaded — the alcohol from his first half-dozen PBRs in barely an hour slurring his words.
"You heard the man, Dano. His bar, his rules. He just said last call for you, and I gotta go. Got client meetings starting at 7:30 in the morning," I said. "Tab's all settled. It's time for you to Uber home, pal."
He stared at me balefully, through bleary and unfocused eyes.
"Well ain't
that
some fine shit? Known each other how long? Twenty years? No, wait, that's how long it's been since we graduated from Dunbar. So... thirty, maybe 35 years? Little League. Football captains...," he said, drilling down decades to dredge up self-pity in which to wallow.
"
You
were the football captain, Dano. Remember? I was the B-team tight end. Baseball was my game: second team All-Kentucky centerfielder. Anyway, it's after 8 on a work night and
you've
been overserved, captain, so it's time to hit the showers," I said, still studying the credit card for Dano's tab plus mine and adding a 35 percent tip as a way to thank Angelo his patience with my potty-mouthed friend. I put my card back in my wallet, signed the receipt and closed the black leather folio containing it and slid it back across the bar.
"You... you not bein'... a friend," Danny said, his sullen mood deepening along with his alcohol-induced torpor. "Ffffuck you, Les."
I rose from my barstool, put an arm around Dano's slumping shoulders and gave him a familiar hug. "You too, Dano. I love you, buddy. Get home safe."
I left the Queen City Bar and breathed in the clear, cool autumn air that blows in from the northwest and enlivens Cincinnati in late September each year, and it was no different around the autumnal equinox of 2022. I turned left to walk the three blocks eastward on Hatch Street to my two-story brownstone and call it a night. I hoped the refreshing breeze, after a summer spent sweltering in the notorious Ohio River Valley humidity, would clear my mind of the disgusting mental images Dano had just planted there. It helped.
But something nagged at me.
I had known Danny Albertson since we grew up on the outskirts of Lexington, Kentucky, in a working class neighborhood west of the city, just outside New Circle Road, which circumnavigates Lexington, and east of Versailles (pronounced Vuhr-SALES, for all y'all who aren't from around there). We had indeed known each other since elementary school. We ran with the same crowd, hung out a good bit and played plenty of organized and sandlot sports together.
Danny had a fondness for beer and partying from roughly age 15. I believe that if he had spent summer evenings in high school working out instead of boozing and carousing, he might have landed the University of Kentucky football scholarship he dreamed of. He was, indeed, a strong player for Dunbar High School. He was one of the captains our senior year, as he said. I always thought there was potential he just didn't work to unlock. So he tried out as a walk-on linebacker at UK and quit after one week of preseason camp.
Danny's drinking had worsened in the two decades since we left high school. I had no doubt that he was a functioning alcoholic, able to hold down his job on the maintenance staff at the stadium where the Cincinnati Bengals play. But his behavior had become increasingly erratic in the past couple of years as evidenced by the increasingly sexualized conversations that dominated our meetings every other week or so at Queen City and occasionally in the dive bar he frequented near his apartment across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky.
His braggadocio seemed out of place from the outset: Dano had been quite awkward with girls in high school. Handsome, tall and likeable, it wasn't that he had trouble getting a first date. It was getting the second or third date where he hit a brick wall. Girls — at least those you spoke of seeing publicly — inevitably found something off-putting about Danny. To his closest buddies back then, he bragged of bedding cougars, older women of, shall we say, lesser moral fiber, but it was never something anyone could corroborate and no one had ever seen him with such a woman. But he always talked a good game, positioning himself as the consummate swordsman who knew his way around a vulva.
Tonight's story with its gross, graphic specificity — not to mention the discomfiting volume with which he told it —seemed especially off. The sequence of the supposed seduction. This nameless woman's light-switch response to his oral ministrations. The vehemence with which he asserted his tale. It had all the appeal of an animal husbandry discussion, yet with less class.
He's trying way too hard with these stories
, I reasoned as I approached my house.
It wasn't so much that he was trying to convince
me
of this tale as he was trying to convince
himself
of it.
I opened the door and Ryder, the crazy three-year-old yellow Labrador/boxer mix I had rescued from the shelter two years earlier, jumped up on me with his usual slobbering, enthusiastic welcome. By then, Dano's disgusting word picture was no longer troubling me. My concern had shifted to his mental wellbeing.
▼ ▼ ▼
You meet all kinds of sad cases as a family law attorney. My field of practice, trusts and estates, may sound dull but it's the most unpredictable, emotionally volatile and bitter field in the legal profession: divorces, child custody fights, wills, nearly all of them involving high net worth individuals with fortunes counted in at least eight figures to the left of any decimal. I've heard cuckolded clients spin stories of catching spouses indulging in all kinds of kink with someone else, but none of them approaching the excretory, almost zoological detail of Dano's fantasies of late.
My morning began with a conference in our downtown office with opposing counsel for the estranged husband of my client, Sheila Moffett. Earle Moffett, her soon-to-be ex-husband, had gotten a tip while on a business trip to Sacramento that she had been entertaining a gentleman caller at their home since shortly after he had left for the airport two days earlier. Earle cut his trip short by two days, took a red-eye back from California to Cincinnati, arrived home unannounced just before dawn one day and caught his wife in their marital bed riding her lover's freakishly large hog. Two days later, Earle served Sheila with papers naming her as the defendant in a divorce action. Earle was asking the court, as he was entitled under Ohio law, to award her zero spousal support in light of her adultery as documented in high-def video on his iPhone when he surprised her in the act of copulation outside of wedlock.
Our defense strategy — a legal Hail Mary, really — was to countersue Earle for mental cruelty, emotional and physical abuse and our own unsupported allegations of his infidelity. To that end, I had set up an interview after an in-office conference with Dr. Wynn Persons, a psychologist who specializes in sexual dysfunctions. I wanted to pick her brain on why a woman in, say, Sheila's circumstances might seek carnal comfort with a younger man not her husband. Yes, she said, a cruel, unfeeling husband who withholds affection and even basic consortium with his wife could lead her to question her femininity, even her humanity. Usually, such behavior left physical signs of battering: old bruises, untreated broken bones that didn't mend properly. Or on the other hand, Dr. Persons said, "maybe she's just a slut, a nymphomaniac." If the latter is true, Dr. Persons said, evidence of her serial dalliances shouldn't be too hard for the plaintiff, aided by a private eye and the top-flight lawyer he had already retained, to find. Not what I was hoping to hear.
While Dr. Persons' off-the-record guidance was helpful, it was essentially meaningless and probably inadmissible unless we could find corroborating witness testimony or physical evidence, and both were conspicuously lacking. So I thanked her for her time, but just before she left, Dano came to mind.
"Dr. Persons, I wonder if I could get your advice on a friend of mine since childhood who seems consumed these days with spoken fantasies of the most depraved, outlandish sex acts that he believes are true but, in my opinion, aren't remotely possible. Danny has other problems, too, particularly heavy alcohol use," I said. "I'm not going to ask you to try to diagnose him on so scant a description, but what sort of professional help would be best for him? Psychologist? Psychiatrist? AA? Some other sort of therapy?"
"Well, here, give him my card. I treat patients fitting many of those descriptions, though alcoholism isn't my field," she said, handing me a card from her purse. "But until he recognizes he has a problem, I really don't expect it will do any good to give him my card or anyone else's. But you're a great friend to him for asking."
I nodded, walked Dr. Persons to the door and thanked her. "Donita will validate your parking and have someone escort you to the parking deck if you wish."
I trudged to my desk and gazed out the window at the Ohio River flowing westwardly 12 floors below and three blocks away from my downtown office. I had, at best, gained only fragmentary insights from a preeminent relationship psychologist — a few for my client, almost none for my friend.
There was no doubt that Dano would not take it well when I handed him Dr. Persons's card, but I felt I needed to see him again soon and learn a little more about the demons that seemed to increasingly steer him toward the abyss.
I opened up my Facebook app and hit the messenger icon. I found the profile for Danny Albright and started thumb-typing:
Hope you got home OK last night, Dano. Care to watch a game Saturday on your side of the river? UK @ Ole Miss is early game. Ohio St-Minn follows that.
He'd probably answer after work when he got to his apartment in Covington, the Kentucky suburb just across the river via the Brent Spence Bridge from downtown Cincinnati. But, surprisingly, I got a DM right back:
Bit of a hangover, but sure. Buffalo Wild Wings @ noon?
I clicked the thumbs-up emoji in response. We were set. Hopefully, I could get a better assessment of the unwell mind of Danny Albertson.
