Beryl is our current tour manager. A UF graduate with a strong interest in graphic design, she’s been on the road with us for the last couple months. On paper her duties include designing T-shirts, selling merchandise, getting hotel reservations, and generally making sure everything runs smoothly. In reality, her most important job is just to “be female.”
Of course you can’t put that on a job description because, in addition to being sort of illegal, it would attract the exact people that you didn’t want . It’s not that we’re raging misogynists or anything. It’s the exact opposite. We’re uh… philogynists I guess.
With so much testosterone oozing around the van, there’s an imbalance. Too many egos. Too many penises. Too many individuals who, on a very basic chemical level, feel the urge to break, conquer, and reproduce. The repression of those urges creates a tension that the presence of a girl, especially a neutral girl , doesn’t quite fix, but moderates. Like prisoners in the presence of the guard, they still have the urge to pillage and plunder (apparently it’s a prison of pirates) but they pretend to be civil cot-dwellers.
As such, Beryl is the sweet smelling ying to our rancid, burping yang. She is just sweet, and wants nothing more than to play with your hair or cuddle with you. Studies show that it’s hard to really bitch at someone, when someone else is playing with your hair. Try it. It’s safe to say we love Beryl. It’s also worth pointing out that Beryl is a virgin. Our love of Beryl has nothing to do with her virginity, but it is relevant to the story.
Virginity is not always, as one would assume, the result of excessive weight, poor genetics, or a bad sense of personal style. While those things will definitely do you in, there is a second more insidious cause of virginity. Correction: Undesired Virginity. Undesired virginity is often the result of extreme sexual awkwardness mixed with fear. The basic mechanics of sexual intimacy inevitably explain themselves once the stage is set, but sometimes setting the stage is difficult. Without knowing the proper cues, moves, and lines, sometimes the play just falls apart before it even begins. This is why they sell alcohol. This is where our story begins.
We were in Destin, having breakfast, and somehow or another the conversation of hooking up came up. (Or kissing or making out or whatever you want to call it.) Beryl voiced her uncertainty as to how to start hooking up. As a girl, if you mention that you don’t know how to hook up, a guy will inevitably tell you. If you are cute, or he is inebriated, a demonstration will ensue. In that respect, us guys are natural teachers.
Do you know what happens when a guy claims ignorance in the world of hooking up procedure? Neither do I. It never ever happens. We are genetically programmed to commit hari-kiri before uttering something so emasculating. If a guy says that in front of other guys, you can only assume that the nearest guy will just hand him a sword. At any rate Beryl is not a guy so when she voiced her uncertainty, Julius, our resident pimp, decided to hold an impromptu lecture on how to initiate that first move.
[Note: In Jules’s pre-emptive defense, I don’t think this upcoming move is the staple of his repertoire, and Julius has more luck with the opposite gender than just about anyone I know, but I still have to share it]
Without a drawing a schematic or a scripted dramatization this might not make a ton of sense at all but…use your imagination. The sentences that came out of Julius’s mouth defied retelling. I was simply too stunned to remember them with any accuracy. Coupled with his body movements there was no way for my inner stenographer to jot down anything other than “…?”
The basic idea is this: when you’re sitting next to the person you’d rather be lying next to, all you have to do is crack a joke, push their shoulder in an “Aww you’re kidding me!” way, and then rest writes itself.
What allegedly happens is that their body will fall away from the exertion of what is basically an unanticipated attack, and when they rebound from said strike their body will overcompensate and bring them closer to you. Then this turns into some sort of Greco-roman wrestling grapple or something and the rest is intimacy history.
Julius then pseudo-demonstrated this with Beryl and orange juice shot out of my nose.
I may have heard and seen more ridiculous things in my life, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you about any of them.
Jules, rather than him being embarrassed and backing down, simply said with the confidence of a Zen master, “Fine, believe what you want, it works.” Which means that it probably actually does.
My awkwardness with the fairer gender is fairly legendary, but the Julius attack doesn’t seem like a step in the right direction. “How did you and Mommy first kiss?” my kids will ask, and then I will say “You know kids… the old fashioned way. I just shoved her.” I just can’t start walking around shoving people and expecting that to turn into anything other than confusion or an assault charge. “Hey you’re cute, [shove] [kiss].” It doesn’t make sense.
Peter, a friend of ours, who we later discovered to have (among other things) a serious drug problem had a name for it. Not taking the time to finish eating the eggs in his mouth, in mid-chew Peter nodded solemnly and said “Oh yeah, the love nudge.”
Eventually, just as I was getting to a point where I could breathe again, Peter did his best attempt to finish me off by adding “Sometimes you nudge too hard, [chew chew], and you make a baby.”
The show that night, paled in comparison. I love Destin.