Chapter 1
I was looking forward to the weekend. I had plans to go to Myrtle Beach for a three-day golf trip with a group of my buddies. I hadn't seen some of them in several years. We used to get together for a guy's weekend annually, but lately, I've been too busy to make them. The only reason I could attend this time was that my wife of twenty years, Maggie, was going to New Orleans to serve as a chaperone for a bachelorette party the same weekend. She insisted I join the boys since she wouldn't be home anyway.
Our daughter Trina was the Maid of Honor and had planned the whole bachelorette weekend. Her, the bride and eight of their college friends were renting an old, three-bedroom house in the French Quater, near Bourbon Street. They would fly down Friday, have a late-night bar crawl down Bourbon upon arrival, the main party on Saturday, then return home Sunday evening. I didn't understand why they would go to New Orleans when they could have had a perfectly fine party at home.
You may wonder why a bunch of grown girls need chaperones. Well, apparently, the groom was nervous about letting his bride-to-be, Stephanie, go to the Big Easy to party it up, so he insisted that a couple of the girls' moms go along to keep them out of trouble. Stephanie's mother, Angela, and my wife got the job. Maggie enjoyed a good party, but she was very responsible. I was confident she would make sure nothing inappropriate happened.
We arrived at North Myrtle Beach around 6 and checked into our condo at Maisons-sur-Mer. We had three bedrooms and a fold-out sofa. With eight of us along, it meant we had to double up on the beds. Jodie, who I'd known since High School, and I grabbed the master bedroom, which had its own private balcony overlooking the beach. We unpacked, then met the other guys in the kitchen for whiskey and cigars.
As I was pouring my second Bib & Tucker, my phone rang. Maggie and the girls had landed and were grabbing taxis to their hotel. I felt relieved that they'd made it safely. As we were saying our good-byes, I told my wife, "Have fun, but don't too wild, and don't accept any drinks from people you don't know. You never know what people may be up to."
My comment got a few curious looks, and when I hung up, Mark, who had been my best man, asked, "What was that all about?"
"Oh," I explained, "Maggie and Trina are in New Orleans for a Bachelorette party this weekend. They're going to Bourbon Street for dinner and drinks."
"New Orleans?" asked Jim Miller with a weird grin on his face. We had two Jims: Jim Miller, my former college roommate, and Jim Turner, who we called TJ. We used to call him JT, but once during a big lacrosse game, he scored on our goal, by mistake. After that, we reversed his initials, and he became TJ.
"Yeah, I know," I said, assuming his reaction was the same as mine. "Why would they want to go all the way to New Orleans to have a Bachelorette party? It seems like a waste of money, to me."
"Bro," piped in TJ, "what are you talking about? New Orleans is the destination bachelorette party capital of the United States. There's always a pack of horny girls, drunk off their asses, going from bar to bar, having one last fling before tying the knot."
"Well, some of them are already married," contributed Jodie. "But, they get wild and lose control once they get started. It's like a thing."
"A thing?" I asked, sounding clueless.
"Yeah, a thing," replied Jodie. "You know, like an Internet thing. They got all kinds of porn websites about it."
"Porn websites?" I spit out. "What the Hell, man, this is my wife and daughter. Nobody's getting that crazy."
"Yeah, that's what my brother thought," added Andy, the quiet one of the group. "His wife went down there with some girls from her work for a bachelorette party. He found out about two months later when his wife failed a pregnancy test and confessed. She'd had sex with three strippers at a party."
"In New Orleans?" I asked, not really buying it.
"Yep."
Just then, the last of our group, Doug, came in from the patio reeking of Marijuana. "What are y'all looking so uptight about?"
"Maggie and Trina are in New Orleans for a bachelorette party," replied Mark.
"Fuck," Doug said with a long sigh, patting me on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Hank, divorced life isn't that bad."
"Oh, come on!" I retorted, "It's not like that, at all. Maggie is very responsible, and Trina has a good head on her shoulders. They're not going to do anything crazy."
TJ had turned on the big screen TV and was casting video from his phone. "Look, bro, I'll just search for bachelorette party new Orleans." A bunch of thumbnails immediately filled the screen. "Look at all these!"
He picked one and played it. "It showed a dimly lit bar, with loud music blaring and a bunch of women having a wild time. There was a naked man in the middle of the room with a massive schlong. As he danced around the women, they had their hands all over him. Young and old, they all acted like they'd been hit with the Martian Slut Ray. As we watched, the guy rotated his hips, making his big dick swing in a circle in front of a woman Maggie's age. She reached out, grabbed his cock, and started blowing him.
"Oh, bullshit!" I shouted. "Turn that shit off. That's fake as fuck."
"Ok, how about this?" TJ said as he went back to the thumbnails. "Look, I'll sort by newest first. Here's one from last night called Bachelorette Bourbon Bar Balling." He picked it, and like the previous one, it showed a bunch of women in a bar, laughing, drinking, and partying. One chick, who looked to be about twenty, had a sash over her boobs as you would see in a beauty contest. Instead of saying Miss Tennessee, it said, "Bachelorette." Next to her was another girl, wearing a banner that declared she was the "Maid of Honor." Lastly was a woman of about fifty also wearing a sash, but this one said "Chaperone."
I swallowed a big mouthful of Bourbon.
The girls in the video went nuts. By the end of it, half of them were naked, the bachelorette was being fucked by a big, dark-skinned black guy, while simultaneously blowing a white dude. The most shocking part was the frumpy middle-aged chaperone was one of the wildest of the bunch. She was bent over a table being fucked from behind. When one guy finished, another stepped up and took his place, feeding her a continuous stream of ready cocks.
"Turn it off!" I yelled. I was pissed. "Thanks a fuck of a lot, guys! Now I gotta worry about this shit all night. Fuck all of you!"
"Dude, we're just trying to educate you," Jim Miller said. "You should do something."
I nodded and picked up the phone, quickly dialing my wife. It went to voicemail. I tried three more times. Finally, on the fourth attempt, she answered.
"What the fuck took so long?" I asked angrily.
"Excuse me?" Maggie answered not happy with my tone.
"What took so long to answer the phone?" I repeated, sounding a little sweeter this time.
"I was in the bathroom getting ready to go to dinner," Maggie explained. "Since when did I become tethered to my phone?"
"Sorry," I said, feeling silly. "Look, the guys here all told me that apparently New Orleans is like famous, or infamous may be more appropriate, for wild, sex-filled, drunken bachelorette parties where the women lose their shit and do things they wouldn't normally do."
"Is that why you called with your panties in a knot?"
"Yeah," I said. "TJ showed me some videos, and you wouldn't believe what the girls at these parties get into."
"Honey, we're just going to dinner and have a few drinks," she tried to reassure me. "That's why Angela and I are here. We're chaperones."
"Yeah, I know, but," I started, but felt utterly foolish. "Never mind, you're right. I trust you. Have fun."
"Ok, Hank, I will," she replied. "I love you."
"I love you, too," I said, then quickly added, "not too much fun."
"Don't worry, I'll text you periodically and send you pictures," she said, "if that will make you feel better."
"Actually, yeah," I said, "that would. Thanks."
"Bye, Hank," Maggie said. "Tell the boys I said hello and to stop filling your heads with crazy nonsense."
I hung up and relayed the conversation to the boys. They all laughed and acted like nothing negative had ever happened. TJ even apologized for playing the videos. Mark admitted it was probably just fake news. Then Andy said, "That's exactly what my brother thought."
Chapter 2
We had dinner at an upscale steakhouse called Martini, and of course, we had to have a few of the namesake cocktails. I ate a gargantuan steak, smothered in a whiskey-peppercorn sauce that filled me up, but did little to offset the amount of alcohol in my system. I was feeling no pain and seemed to be in good spirits, but something about the earlier conversation was nagging at me.
It did not help when Maggie sent me a picture of her and the girls outside a bar on Bourbon Street. They were all dressed up in short dresses or skirts, with flowery lei's and Mardi Gras beads around their necks. The Bride-to-be had a silver Princess tiara and was waving a star-tipped magic wand. The thing that hit me in the pit of my gut and left me nervous was that the bachelorette, maid-of-honor, and chaperones all had on sashes that were IDENTICAL to the ones in the video.
Maggie sent me three similar pictures, including a selfie of her blowing me a kiss. I texted back that it looked like they were having fun. I sent her a picture of my steak, and she told me not to overeat. Just as we were finishing up and settling the bill, my phone chimed. Maggie sent me a short video clip of the girls getting a little rowdy inside a bar. Two of them were drinking what looked like radiator fluid from unique specialty plastic mugs that looked like green hippopotamuses. That's when it hit me.
"Hey, TJ, you still got that video queued up on your phone?" I asked.
"Which one?" he asked.
"The one with the lady with the chaperone sash getting fucked over a table," I answered.
"Oh, uh, hang on, let me check," he said. I watched him flipping through things on his phone. Finally, he held it up for me to look at. "This one?"
I grabbed his phone and stared at the screen. It was it. "Yeah, this one." I rewound it and played through some of the scenes. I was looking for something, but I didn't find it. I went back to the beginning and let it play. There it was! The girls in the bachelorette party were all sitting around in a circle making a toast, and every one of them had in their hands a big green plastic mug shaped like a fat hippopotamus.
"Son of a bitch!" I exclaimed as I dialed Maggie's number. She didn't answer, so I called again. She picked up the second time, but the connection was terrible. There was so much background noise, I could hear loud music, someone talking over a PA system, lots of yelling and laughing. In other words, it sounded just like the video.
"Maggie?" I yelled into my phone.
"Maggie?" I yelled again.
"Hey, baby!" She replied. "I can barely hear you!"
"Where are you?" I asked.
"What?"
"Where are you?"
"In a bar."
"What bar?" I shouted so she could hear me.
"What?"
"What bar are you in?"
"I don't know! Some bar on Bourbon Street! We're getting drunk!"
"Yeah, I can tell by the way you sound."
"What?"
"I can tell!"
"What?"
