Thanksgiving (part 2)

So I was fixin to tell y’all about my turkey bowl experience this year on Thanksgiving, and got all caught up telling you about last year and the total jerkoff who tackled me when he shouldn’t have and how I got him back with a Block block that should have settled things between us.

The jerkoff was back this year, and he started calling me pretty boy the minute I got there. When they picked teams, both the jerkoff and Keaton ended up on one team, and I was on the other. I was thinking playing against Keaton was gonna be fun…and I could tell from the way the jerkoff kept looking at me that he was gonna pull some kind of stupid shit again. He did it ten minutes into the game when he sacked the fuck outta me like I was Tom Brady and he was some monster lineman. It was way way too hard for the kind of game we were in, and I could have gotten hurt. As it was I got the wind knocked out of me and needed a minute or two to get up.

As far as I was concerned, the motherfucker had a target on his back for the rest of the game.

The game was a little rougher than the one the year before, maybe because the ground was wet from rain Wednesday night. The blocking was harder, and everybody got a turn landing on his ass. It was dang fun, and everybody was having a good time, even if we knew we were gonna be feeling it the next morning lol.

It would have been awesome, except for the jerkoff. Who was still calling me pretty boy. Shit, man, everybody heard you. Fuckin chill. And, hey, I’d rather be a pretty boy like me than a jerkoff troll like you.

I guess y’all know where this is going. First chance I was lined up opposite him, I just took a run at the jerkoff. I got all my 185 pounds behind the hardest and meanest Block block I’ve ever thrown. The jerkoff went down. Hard. It’s one thing to be a jerkoff and throw all your weight at an unsuspecting quarterback. It’s another thing to get hit by a dude who knows what he’s doing. When the jerkoff finally did get up all I could hear him say was “fucking chad.” Whatever that means.

He stayed away from me for the rest of the game. That was the first smart thing he did all morning.

There was one more Block block, and Keaton got it. Like I said, he was on the other team, and he said “you ain’t gettin past me, bubba” a few times too many. Y’all must know that quarterbacks don’t usually do their own blocking, but, on one play, I got free and was running with the ball (ok by the rules we were playing by) and Keaton got in my way. And said I wasn’t gonna get past him again. The TV play by play would have sounded like this: “…Block just erased Penner…and…touchdown!”.

The difference between totaling the jerkoff and erasing Keaton is that I went back and helped Keaton up. Hey – he had it coming. And he knew it. Not only for all the shit talk: I still had to get him back for making everyone sing Happy Birthday to me at The Volcano.

Oh yeah, even with the penalties our team took for the Block blocks, we still won, 32 to 22. (Don’t get mixed up by the math: we were playing with 2 point conversions for extra points.)

Then it was back home to get cleaned up (I needed it big time), and watch the Washington/Dallas game. I didn’t get to see the end, but I had a feeling Keaton was gonna be happy with the final score. (I’m sure he had money on his Cowboys.) Then I got dressed – blue shirt with two buttons open, the necklace inside, khakis, blazer, church shoes – and headed over to pick Joyce up.

When I got there, she looked more businessy than she usually does when we go out together. I can’t exactly say what she did, but I thought what she had on made her look older. (Of course I told her she looked good.)

Adam and Allan have a house in Arcadia. The place looked nice from the outside, like a normal American house. It was sandwiched between what Joyce called “Chinese palaces” and even I could tell those were ugly. Adam answered the door. Without his catcher’s gear, looked gayer than I was used to seeing him, but he was still a long way from looking too gay. I guess you can say he looked normal gay. At least he shook my hand – I can’t stand the way gay guys hug just to say hello.

Before I tell y’all about the guests, I reckon I need to tell you about the house. Adam and Allan have an interior decorating business, and you’d certainly guess that looking at where they live. We got a tour before dinner, and the whole place looked totally perfect. There wasn’t a little nicknack that wasn’t in exactly the right place and the white couches in the living room made you afraid to sit on them. Maybe Allan didn’t show us the part of the house in which they lived, and maybe they got everything cleaned up since they were expecting company. But even the kitchen looked like it belonged in a magazine. Mom hated a messy kitchen, but, on Thanksgiving, you could at least tell that a lot of cooking was going on. I could smell the turkey roasting and I was sure they’d been cooking all day, but there was barely any sign of food when the tour got to the kitchen.

Joyce was definitely impressed by the house. I could tell by her reaction. I just hoped she wasn’t planning to get white couches you were afraid to sit in.

Adam offered us some sparkling cider in some champagne glasses I could tell were expensive, and there was some cheese and crackers and little plates on the coffee table. I was hungry, but it all was so perfectly arranged that I almost thought it was there for decoration.

Then he introduced us around. He started with what were obviously the pity invites: his nephew and Allan’s niece. The nephew was the scrawny scared type, the kind that doesn’t look you in the eye when he gives you a weak handshake. He mumbled that he works for a tech company, where I’m sure he makes a lot of money. Then he went and hid behind the piano.

Allan’s niece was the opposite. She wouldn’t shut up. She was closer to 30 than I am, brunette with brown eyes and a lot of makeup. She was wearing a tight red dress and super high heels, and I’d have said she was a 7, maybe a 7½ . Or she would have been, if she could keep her mouth shut.

She said she was an actress, and kept talking about all the famous people she said she knew, directors and shit, like it was gonna impress me. Like I even read who the director is when I got to a movie. Hey, I’m just an ignorant redneck who works at the Gap, you don’t need to try and impress me. I ain’t gonna get you a part in a movie anyway.

I thought at one point that she was coming on to me, since she told me that I looked like Zac Efron. (Do all pretty boys with blue eyes look alike to some people lol?) Then I realized that was only so she could start this long story about how she knew “Zacky”. I just hit her mute button and left it there for the rest of the evening.

There were two other dudes in the room, and they were more interesting. Adam introduced them as a married latino couple, Raul and Esteban. I reckon they were both in their mid 30s. Raul’s as big as Miguel at the Volcano, minus the tattoos. Still, you got the feeling you’d want him on your side in a bar fight. They met Allan and Adam at the Home Depot he manages. Esteban’s more of a middleweight. He writes the sports column for one of the Mexican newspapers. Even cooler, he’s got a sportstalk radio show that’s sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in English (and, he says, a lot of the time in both.) I said I’d check it out. When it’s on in English lol.

So the dude knows a shitload about sports. Even soccer, which says he has to know about for his Mexican audience. Raul and him are serious Dodger fans, so we talked about the World Series and how I think they need to get rid of Dave Roberts and what an asshole Manny Machado is. (I didn’t want to say anything about him at first, since I was afraid that they’d like him because he’s latino, but they think he plays dirty and has stupidass hair. I don’t usually talk about hairstyles with gay guys, but Machado’s hair really is stupidass lol.)

While we were talking, Raul started in on the cheese. So I decided it wasn’t a decoration and helped myself. I was still starving from my super active morning.

Then Luis noticed my necklace and recognized it as the same one Cody Bellinger has. They said they were trying to figure out what it’s made of ever since he got it, so I told them it was black diamonds. Then I told them my girlfriend had given it to me for my birthday, and they rescued Joyce from the actress chick by calling her over so they could tell her how cool a gift it was.

Joyce didn’t have to go back and talk to the actress chick because then Allan came in from the kitchen. It kind of creeps me out when you meet a gay couple and instantly know which one is the chick. One of the cool things about Adam and Allan is that they never give that away. Like they take turns in the kitchen and cooked the dinner together. Allan seemed really pleased to see Joyce (he gave her a super gay hug and a kiss), and, yeah, y’all guessed it, he was even more pleased to see me. He didn’t stare the way he had at the cookout on Labor Day, but he was still pretty obvious about it. Obvious enough for Esteban to start singing “Hunter’s got a boyfriend” once Allan went back in the kitchen.

I helped myself to more cheese. We were waiting for 4 more guests to arrive.