Thanksgiving (part 3)

For Thanksgiving dinner, Joyce and I were invited to the home of Adam, the Parrots’ catcher, and his husband, Allan. The guests when we got there were two pity invites and two married latino dudes, Raul and Esteban. They were cool. Esteban even has a bilingual sportstalk radio show.

The next guest to arrive was the scariest lesbian I’ve ever seen. She almost could have passed for a dude. She must buy her clothes in the men’s department: it was just a pair of grey flannel pants and a white button down shirt, but some of the stuff we sell for men is more feminine than what she had on. She looked like she went to a barber for her haircut, too. Her hair was all white, so she probably looked older than she was. I reckon she was around Adam and Allan’s age, which means about 50. She didn’t have a purse, but she did have a cane or a walking stick or something like that. She wasn’t limping or anything. It just made her look scarier.

Allan said her name was Frank. Told you she was scary.

Y’all know that I have a friend who’s a lesbian – Dani – and I think she’s super cool. So it’s not that I have anything against lesbians. But I could tell I wasn’t going to get along with this one. Once she found out that I was with Joyce and had a southern accent (maybe I should have called her sir instead of ma’am?), she looked through me like I was made of air. Or shit.

I went back to talking to Esteban and Raul, since Joyce seemed to think Frank was interesting or something. All our conversations stopped dead when the last of the guests came in.

That was a family of 3, father, mother and a little boy, who we found out was 6, so he’s about the age of my younger nephew. Ok, so these people were batshit crazy. Even the kid, although that’s no fault of his…it’s because he’s lived 6 years with his crazyass parents. I’ve seen some messed up parents and their kids since I’ve moved to LA, but this family was at least ten times worse than anything I’d seen before. The mother was Adam’s younger sister, and don’t ask me how a cool dude like Adam could have so locoass a sister.

No sooner was she in the door than she said she was having an attack of low blood sugar and needed to eat something. I reckon I was the idiot in the room, because I jumped up and got her some cheese on a cracker, since she was wobbling on her feet and I thought she was going to pass out.

From the way she jumped away from the cracker, you’d think I’d done the worst thing in the world to her.

“Oh no! Not cheese! Not dairy! I’m allergic to dairy! The last time I had dairy I almost ended up in a coma!”

“Oh. Sorry, ma’am. I meant well…” Then Adam came up behind me and whispered “just ignore her.” So I shrugged and ate the cracker myself.

“Adam…please…get me something that I can eat. The room is spinning…”

Her husband helped her to one of the white couches. A few minutes later, Allan came in from the kitchen with a few slices of apple on a little plate.

“It’s organic, Leslie. We got it in from Whole Foods yesterday.”

“Oh, thank God. Thank you, Allan. You’re a lifesaver.” So she ate the apple and like two seconds later was normal again. “I’d better take my medicine, just to be safe,” was the next thing she said. “Could you bring me a little glass of water? But it has to be distilled if I’m going to put Dr. Ebersole’s drops in it.”

Allan ran back into the kitchen and came running back with a glass of water. I don’t think I was the only person who thought he just got it from the tap.

Then came this crazyass scene where she opened up her purse, which was more like a little toolbox. It was filled with little bottles with eyedroppers in them. Once she found the right one, she counted out loud exactly six drops before drinking what still looked like plain water. I reckon it did something, since she then sat back into the white couch and sighed.

“Thank God. I thought I was in real danger there. The drive was so long from Santa Monica.”

By this time, I was onto her. It was a holiday. I’m sure the drive took less than 45 minutes. And she could have taken a banana along for low blood sugar emergencies.

I got the husband’s number right away too: he signed away his balls and she had ‘em, in a jar, pickled, and entered in the county fair. I didn’t know if I should feel sorry for him or get mad and try and shake some sense into the dude. But at least he could take care of himself if he wanted to. The little boy was another story. When the mother finished her scene about the blood sugar, I noticed he was hiding behind the piano with the pity invite dude. Not that they were talking to each other.

So I went over.

“Hey. I’m Hunter.” I held out my hand.

“Mommy says I’m not allowed to shake hands because people have germs on their hands.”

I tried again.

“I play shortstop on your uncle’s softball team.”

“What’s shortstop?”

Ok, this is America. Any American boy ought to know that shortstop is between 2^nd and 3^rd base. But I was getting the feeling that this kid didn’t know where those were, either.

I seriously wasn’t liking Adam’s sister. Looking around, I got the feeling that everyone else in the room already knew that she was fucked in the head.

All this before we even sat down to dinner.