Thanksgiving (part 4)

For Thanksgiving, me and Joyce got invited to the home of the Parrots’ catcher, Adam. He and his husband Allan had a big dinner with ten guests invited. Besides me and Joyce, there was a gay latino couple (they had totally non-gay jobs: a sportswriter and Home Depot manager), a scaryass lesbian, two pity invites, and Adam’s sister’s totally fucked up family. She’s a total hypochondriac and the 6 year old kid doesn’t even know what a shortstop is.

The table in the dining room was set like something out of one of Melanie Kate’s issues of Southern Living…only on steroids. It looked totally amazing, but, like the rest of the house, it made you feel you shouldn’t touch anything.

Adam and Allan sat at the ends of the table. Given the totally obvious thing he has for me, I wasn’t surprised that I was sitting next to Allan, with Esteban (the sportscaster) on my right. He got stuck with the ball-less father of the fucked up family on his right. Next to him was the little kid (Ethan), and then the fucked in the head mother (Leslie), who was next to her brother. Going down the other side, it was Joyce, the two pity invites (I reckon someone thought they would talk to each other), Frank the scaryass lesbian, and then Raul (the Home Depot dude) opposite me. So I was surrounded by gay dudes lol.

Of course nobody said grace or anything.

As for dinner, some it was good, but most of it was too fancyass for me. The appetizer was avocados stuffed with crabmeat with a great creamy dressing, but then it was stuff like a turkey that was “maple glazed” (whatever that means)…and yams made with pine nuts and cardamom. There was something weird in the mashed potatoes, too. Y’all get the idea. There was a dish of beans too, but it wasn’t anything like good ole Southern hoppin’ john. It just looked like plain boiled white beans.

They were for Ethan, the little boy. Because his mother said he was allergic to turkey. To fuckin turkey??

“He’s allergic to all poultry, and he’s still too young to have Dr. Ebersole’s desensitizing treatment. So no chicken, no eggs, and we don’t let him sleep on a feather pillow or with a down comforter.”

Just when you think someone couldn’t get any more fucked in the head…

So all Ethan got were a few beans and some weirdass pasta (I think they said it was amarinth or some shit like that?) with no sauce. And then he got a whole bunch of medicine drops out of his mother’s toolbox purse afterwards.

And, oh yeah, he had to have his own special water, which the father had to go get from the car. Things got real tense for a few minutes before that when Leslie got mad at Adam for having gotten the wrong water for Ethan.

It made me want to kidnap the kid, take him to a ballgame and stuff him with Dodger dogs, cokes and ice cream. (Y’all know how I handle dudes whose mothers don’t let them have ice cream lol.)

Hearing about what Ethan could and couldn’t eat dominated the conversation of course. That and hearing about what was wrong with the mother and what this Dr. Ebersole chick was selling her for it.

To try to get some kind of other conversation going, Esteban asked Leslie’s husband (I never caught his name…not sure he has one) if he’d caught either of the games on earlier today. Before he could answer, Leslie interrupted from the other side of Ethan.

“Oh, we don’t have television in our house.”

Ok, that’s just fucked up. It means the kid never gets to watch cartoons or anything.

Every question you asked them got a locoass answer from the mother. Like when I asked whether Ethan had started T-ball.

“Oh, we don’t have competitive sports. Ethan’s not healthy enough for them.”

“Just as well,” interrupted Frank. “Competitive sports encourage toxic masculinity.”

So Allan asked me:

“Did you play football today?”

“Yeah. In San Marino. Our team won. And I got to steamroller this one dude who was a total jerkoff. That felt good. Keaton got hit with a Block block too.”

“Keaton’s on the Parrots?”

“Yeah, second baseman. You met him at the cookout.”

“Is he the Clint Eastwood one?”

I had to laugh.

Allan kept asking me all kinds of questions (like what a Block block was) and staring at me when I was answering, but it was ok. And, even if the food wasn’t my thing, I got enough to eat.

But then things with Allan got a little out of hand when it was dessert time.

They brought out three pies…pumpkin, apple and a surprise. Allan made a whole speech about how the surprise was something new and they made it just for the special guest from the South so he’d feel at home and not miss his family.

In other words, Allan baked me a sweet potato pie. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just the way he was looking at me when he made the speech that got a little uncomfortable. It wasn’t like he wanted to rip my clothes off or something…more like the way Melanie Kate looked at pictures of Zac Efron when High School Musical was a thing ten years ago.

And Adam noticed. So did everybody else. Adam noticed that too.

When Allan was dishing out slices of pie to everyone, suddenly, totally out of the blue, Ethan started throwing up. He didn’t look sick or anything, he was just throwing up.

Y’all can imagine the next part. Leslie got totally hysterical, dragged the poor kid off to the bathroom, and, after another ten minutes, had them packed up so they could leave. They didn’t just make excuses and leave quietly. For those ten minutes, Leslie made herself the focus of everyone’s attention. There was even a part where she pretty much accused Adam of trying to poison his nephew. At least that got Adam to stop shooting angry looks down to our end of the table.

By the time we were able to get back to our pie, our coffee was ice cold, so Adam had to go make some more. If you ask me, everyone seemed more relaxed once the bat shit crazy sister and her family was gone.

Except that meant it was time for a political discussion.

Which consisted of Frank pretty much attacking me, the straight white dude from the Republican South with his sports playing toxic masculinity. (Whatever the fuck toxic masculinity is.)

Look: I live in California, and I know what kind of politics that means. So I’m used to shutting up and waiting for the subject to be dropped. Maybe that was wishing for too Raul were cool, and about as willing to get into a discussion as I was, but not Frank. I don’t know what kind of a fight she was trying to start, but she was really beginning to piss me off. Y’all know how proud I am to be Southerner, and I don’t like hearing the South trashed. She also did one of the things that most pisses us Southerners off: using “y’all” as a singular. (She asked me whether “y’all liked your pah.”)

Allan finally stood up for me and said we should end the discussion. To which that bitchass lesbian said:

“You’d agree with anything he says. I’ve been watching you salivate all over him. Good luck with that. I’ve had to sit here feeling his straight energy all night long.”

Straight energy? That must have something to do with toxic masculinity lol.

Unfortunately, Adam heard that, and we were back to the awkwardness from when Allan made his speech about the pies. Even from the other end of the table, I could tell that Adam was seriously pissed.

I told Allan the sweet potato pie was good (it wasn’t Meemaw’s, but it was probably the best thing I got to eat), and I even had a second piece. We didn’t stick around for a second cup of coffee, though. Things had gotten kinda unpleasant, and I think we all wanted to get out of there. I got Esteban’s number in my phone and signed up to follow him on Twitter and we got up to leave.

I was a little worried about Adam, so I asked him on the way out whether we were still good. He said yeah and then gave me a bro hug. Adam’s not the bro hug type, but I reckon he thought a bro hug would show me that we were totally cool. That was a relief.

And then we were safe in the car and on our way home.  Not a moment too soon.