GRIMBOL WEDDING

Here's a couple of emails I wrote to Heather in 2009. I was on a road trip.
We are getting married on Wednesday. Wish us luck.
Grimbol

email #1

i just fought with myself about which side of the bed i should sleep on. thats how much i miss you. 
when you get here i am going to shove my dick into you. i'm going to take your temperature with that fleshy telescope. 
and yell
damn! this bitch has a fever! call the doctor. oh wait, i am the doctor. its fucking time to operate. bam!

email # 2
 didnt get to talk last night. miss you. going to jerk off and think about ass and your eyes and your warm sweaty skin. 

This email was written by Heather when we were in college:

hi you miss you lots. in the lib. talk later about penis in vagina

hh

Old Stuff VS Young Stuff

I sat in the hot tub and watched the Astoria High School swim team. Some of the girls had big, strong looking butts. I couldn’t stop staring.

There was an old lady sitting next to me.

“They look good don’t they?” she said. “They look so round and firm. When they see me in the locker room they look disgusted. I’m an abomination to them.” She laughed. “I think I look good. Those brats would be lucky to look this good when they’re my age.”

What a cool old lady. I wanted to high five her, but it felt inappropriate. 

BIG FAT DEAD PEOPLE LIVE AND UNPLUGGED AT THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN SAG HARBOR, NY

I found a box full of old tapes. They were each labeled REVEREND CHRIS GRIMBOL, SERMON. That was my mother. She had died when I was eighteen, a week after I lost my virginity on a golf course to a temperamental Greek girl. 

I had not heard my mother’s voice in years. I missed her most of the time. Just not right then. Right then I didn’t miss her or the way things used to be or any of that. But I felt like I should listen to the tape anyway.

 After drinking a giant bottle of diet coke,   I got in my golden minivan, drove to the beach and waited for the sun to set. I wanted this moment to be perfect. I wanted to listen to my mother’s voice and cry and have everything be beautiful. I wanted it to be like the scene from a movie. I wanted to cry so hard that it would win me an Oscar. Or I would settle for the type of scene that would be in a Hallmark movie.

But I got impatient. It took too long for the sun to set. I decided to play the tape while looking at an ordinary sky.

The tape started with the church singing a hymn. It sounded awkward. Most of the congregation was just mumbling the song. It didn’t sound like singing. I fast-forwarded to my mother’s sermon.  

I had imagined my mom’s voice being deep and wise, like a fat female version of Malcom X. But her voice was nasally. She sounded more like Roseanne Barr. Her voice was high pitched. Something had to be wrong with the tape. I put on another tape, it sounded the same.

This was just what my mother’s voice had sounded like. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten her voice.

After her sermon they sang another hymn. It sounded awkward. It was as if no one in the church wanted to sing. Then I heard one voice over the rest. It was my mother. She sang each hymn like she was in an old timey opera. It was beautiful and obnoxiously loud. It made me laugh.

After I listened to the tape, I drove to my fathers place. It was only two in the afternoon and he was sitting on a lazy boy eating a popsicle.  His flannel mumu was hiked up and I could say too much leg. But at least his balls were hidden. Sometimes his mumu would get hiked up so far you could see his massive ball sack. It was unsettling.  

“Are we having another ice pop marathon?” I asked.

The old man could eat a dozen icey pops in one night.

“They are only two weightwatcher points,” he said, sounding annoyed.

“Yeah, but you aren’t on weight watchers.”

I used to love how fat my mother was. I thought it made her cuddly. But I hated my father being fat. I was convinced the next icepop was going to kill him.  

“Did you come here to fight?” he asked.

“No.”

I sat down on the couch. He turned on the tv. His new wife, Patty, tried to get us to watch General Hospital.  My father didn’t like that show. He snagged the remote and started flipping through channels. I got bored and went to the kitchen and found myself an ice pop. It was delicious.

Eventually my father started watching some show on fashion. He was the least the fashionable guy in the world but he liked to pretend like he was some sort of style master. I grabbed the remote from him and started flipping through the channels. Reruns of Roseanne were on.

“We’re going to watch this,” I said. “And if there is another episode on, we are going to watch that to. You got it?”

“Fine,” my father said. “Why are you so moody?”

     “Just watch the show,” I said.

"NO REFUNDS"

Heather, my fiancé, drove us through upstate New York. I sat in the passenger seat, my head pressed against the window.  We passed through one rundown town after another and I was loving how sleazy and quiet they looked.

It started to snow.

As we climbed the Appalachians, the snow intensified.

“It’s fine,” Heather kept saying. “We got this.”

My anxiety kicked in. I was sure we were going to crash and be stuck in an endless blizzard. Soon we would have to start drinking each other’s pee. And not in a fun kinky way.

I tried to convince Heather to pull over at a motel. She refused. I didn’t like that. I tried to hold in my anger. I’ve never been good at holding things in.

“This isn’t fair!” I shouted. “You can’t just force a man to risk his life like this.”

“It’s not that bad out,” she said. “Relax. We are doing fine.”

“This is just like how you forced me to live in Portland.”

“What the hell are you even talking about? What does that have to do with anything? You are so dramatic.”

“I knew living in that hipster hellhole was going to be a bad idea. My instincts told me I would be miserable there, but you made me live there anyway. Now my instincts are telling me that if we continue to drive in this weather, it’s going to be a mistake. And just like with Portland, you are going to make me go against my instincts. I have good instincts, but you always try to get me to go against them.”

“Well, we don’t live in Portland anymore. We’re moving, so you can stop complaining now.”

“Yeah, we finally got out there and now we’ll probably get caught in this storm and end up freezing to death.”

“Fine, you want me to pull over. Well, we aren’t near a motel anymore we might as well keep going.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I thought you said you wanted to pull over.”

“Fuck it,” I said. “We’ve made it this far, we might as well keep on going.”

We drove on. Snow covered the road. I felt like we were bobsledding.

After an hour of this hell ride we reached Watertown, where our old college friend, Jonell lived. I didn’t want to deal with Jonell’s cats so I had us get a motel for the night. I got us a room at the Budget Inn.

I should have known by the card board sign that read “no refunds,” that his would be a bad idea. But I was sick of the snow, my nerves were shot, and I just wanted a room somewhere.

The room looked fine, at first. But then we noticed that someone had been using the shower as an ash tray and that the bed had been mutilated with cigarette burns. There were none of those cheesy,comforting, paintings on the wall. The only decoration was a glow in the dark cross that was held up by yarn and a thumb tack.  

“It’s nice enough,” Heather said. “It probably only cost thirty bucks right?”

“No, seventy.”

“Oh boy.”

We drove to Jonell’s. It was great to see her. Her home was cozy. I wished I had decided to brave the cat dander. I didn’t want to go back to the Budget Inn. An image of that sign kept flashing through my mind. NO REFUNDS. I had to stay there or I had wasted seventy dollars. I tried to just drink some of my friends wine and not think about it.

Jonell looked good. She had gotten curvy. This made her self-conscious but I thought she had risen on the boner scale considerably. Her hips and boobs and butt and even her belly looked twice as good as they had in college. She still had those long, smooshy lips though. And she still had those watery stoner eyes.  

We reminisced about school and gossiped. All three of us missed college in Vermont and had thought about moving back.

 The girls smoked weed and I drank the majority of the wine. It felt like old days.

I started pestering Jonell, begging her to show me her boobs. I made sure to do it quietly though. She still lived with her parents.  I’m sure they didn’t want to hear some fat bearded animal trying to check out their daughters naked ninnies. By the end of the night I even tried to bite them. She laughed.

“Oh Grimbol, you haven’t changed.”

“Yes I have,” I said. “It’s been so long since I have asked a friend to show me their boobs.”

“That’s not true.” Heather said, laughing. “You asked Laura to show you her butt last weekend.”

“I know but I never feel fully comfortable doing it. People get so annoyed when I ask them pull them out. Jonell doesn’t seem annoyed at all.”

“I miss you guys.”

We left at midnight. Jonell had to work in morning.

I didn’t sleep well. I kept hearing people in the parking lot. They sounded drunk. I didn’t know whether I should join them and keep partying or whether I should worry about them breaking into our minivan and stealing all of our shit.

I held the minivan key close to my chest. Occasionally I pressed the lock button. It would make the minivans beep and flash its lights. I hoped this would scare away the parking lot goblins. 

"TOO MUCH CHOCOLATE CAKE!"

I’m a Res Tech at a homeless shelter in Afred Maine. It’s rewarding work. But often, just like any job, it can be tedious. I spend too much time at the front desk answering the phone, filling out paper work, checking the appointment book, eating my boogers and drinking massive bottles of Diet Pepsi.

The phone rings. I answer with the most chipper and cordial voice you have ever heard.  People call inquiring about getting admitted, and I have to remind them that this is not a normal shelter and that they have to sober and remain sober, that they are not allowed to leave the facility for the first thirty days, or have cell phones. This is usually when they hang up. I can never tell if the person is an addict or just really attached to their cell phone. Either way, it’s discouraging.

On the other side of the room is Sirgeo’s chair. There’s a sign above it with his name written in glitter and hearts drawn with red marker. Sirgeo drank so hard his mind became mushy and slow. He’s in his fifties, but mentally he’s three. He speaks some English and some Spanish. We have some Techs that know Spanish and they say what he says is mostly nonsense. The guy’s out of it.  He spends most of his day mumbling, and making loud whiny sounds.

I like to play this game with him. I call it “The Noise game.” It’s simple.  I make a noise. He imitates it. Then he makes a noise and I imitate that. I think he likes it. I can’t tell for sure. He always has this annoyed look on his face.  

One day I got him making a sound like a police siren. It made him laugh. I liked that. I was rarely able to get him to laugh.  We made noises back and forth until a councilor came out of her office and asked us to be quiet. I apologized. Sirgeo mumbled something dirty in Spanish.

I decided to get him out of the building for a while. We went for a drive in the gulf cart that I do perimeter checks. It felt good to be out of that building. Summer was ending and things were cooling down. I loved the way the breeze felt. It told me things. It told me I didn’t have to be sweating all the time, and that my crotch did not have to feel like deadly swamp any longer. Fall is coming, it said.  You are going to drink unhealthy amounts of hot cider and feel so sentimental that I can barely function. It told me those things and I put saluted the September air with a goofy smile on my face.

The breeze told Sergio something different. He was just cold.

“FRIO! FRIO!” he whined.

“It’s not that cold,” I said. “Chill out.”

The shelter was built on an old Shaker village. Near the exit is a path that leads to the graveyard. An entire town was buried there. I wanted to check it out. Sirgeo didn’t like that. He looked scared. “You don’t like it in there, do you buddy?”

“No…”

“Should we leave?”

He made a loud crying noise, which I took that as a yes. I drove him back to the main building and got him in his special chair. It was dinner time. I brought him his soup and a piece of chocolate cake. He ignored the soup and ate the cake. He ate quickly. Once he was done, he started to make crying noises again. He wasn’t actually crying. It was a fake crying, but you could tell he was actually upset regardless.

“What are you crying about, you just got to eat  chocolate cake?”

He mumbled something in Spanish and looked at me like I was the biggest prick he had ever known.

“You maybe have too much chocolate cake. Do you have a tummy ache?”

 He nodded his head looking like a little boy. “Too much chocolate cake!” he mumble-screamed.

I yelled with him. “Too much chocolate cake!”

“Too much chocolate cake!”

A councilor came out of her office and looked at us. I apologized again.

Later that night, while doing safety check in the golf cart, I went back to shaker graveyard. The path was only a couple blocks long, but it felt like miles. I grew up watching too many horror movies and I get paranoid. I made it half way down then I turn the golf cart around. When I put the thing in reverse, it started making this loud beeping sound. This heightened my paranoia. The beeping was going to wake all the shaker ghosts and they were going to get me.  

“Fuck it!” I yelled. I put it into drive and I stepped on the gas pedal, hard, and zipped away.

By the time I got back to the main building, I was feeling giggly from all the excitement.

Moses was awake.

I told him about the ghosts. He made a crying noise. At first I thought he was scared about the Shaker spirits rising from the grave, then I realized he had pissed his pants.

Pissy pants: the ultimate ghost deterrent. Ghosts hate pissy pants. The guy was a genius.

“How bout we go to your room and get you changed?” I said.

“Ok.”

I got him too his room. I took his pants off and then gave him a warm rag to rinse himself off with. “Remember to wash your dingus,” I said, pointing to his cock-and-balls area.

He washed his dick and laughed.

I wish I still could have that much fun while watching my dick.

“THERE NEEDS TO BE CAKE”

The other day I caught Heather looking at a wedding cakes on the internet. The cakes she was interested in were big and fancy. I didn't like that. Fancy cakes made me anxious.

“Why don’t we just get a big Carvel cake for our wedding?” I suggested. “A face cake. A face cake with our faces printed on it. Or maybe a cake shaped like an animal, like a duck.”

“That makes me mad,” she said. “Don’t suggest that ever again.”

“I can’t handle this little girl wedding fantasy shit,” I said. “I don’t want to buy some big fancy cake.”

“There needs to be cake.”

“Why?”

“Cause it’s our wedding!”

“You’re just trying to impress your friends,” I said. "There is no reason to buy some big tacky looking cake thats going to cost us a zillion dollars."

She groaned and closed her computer. I had ruined her fun. 

“I thought we were having a non-traditional wedding,” I said.

“We are. But we will need a cake. I want a fucking cake, and you can’t make me feel bad about that.”

“You’re insane. Look how obsessive you are being over a fucking cake.”

“I’m not being obsessive. You’re just lazy.”

“Fuck off!”

“It’s three in the afternoon and you’re still walking around in nothing but that ugly tie dye t shirt you like to wear. Look at your dong. A dong shouldn’t just be hanging all over the place at this time of day. It just aint right.”

“Give me break. I just worked a graveyard shift. That means I just woke up like an hour or two ago.”

“Yeah, most people get dressed as soon as they wake up. You go around porky pigging it for hours.”

I laughed. She was a professional ball buster. And I liked that about her.

I walked up to her and I tried to snuggle. She pushed me away and told me that I was in the dog house. I told her she was in the dog house. That got her even more upset. Eventually I was able to force kiss her a little. Then I did a little dance. That cheered her up. She loved it when I do goofy little dances, especially in when I’m wearing nothing but a shirt, my dick and balls flippy-flopping all over the place.

“I got an idea. Let’s get a big tacky ass cake. And have two ducks sitting on top of it.”

“Real ducks?”

“What? No. Ornamental ducks.”

“That would be cute.”

She noticed I had a boner. She grabbed it and jerked on it slowly, seductively.

“What do you wanna do right now?” She asked.

I pretended like I had to really think about that question.

“Hmmm,” I said. “We could watch a bunch of episodes of Roseanne on Netflix.”

“That’s the best idea I have ever heard,” she said. “I just got to fold the laundry first.”

“Right now? Are you serious? Why do you have to ruin the mood!”

She laughed, and then started folding our underpants. We shared the same underwear drawer. While she did this, I set up the computer. And waited. 

“LOOK AT THAT ASS”

We pulled into the drive-in to see Magik Mike, a movie about male strippers. Heather, my fiancé, had recently fallen in love with this movie. This was her fourth viewing of this fine film. I had already seen it and had no real interest in seeing it a second time. I just enjoyed being at the drive- in. Its was a spiritual place for me. It was how I communed with nature.

 I was very ritualistic about the whole thing. First, I parked the minivan, with its ass facing the screen, then, I opened the trunk, and sprayed myself down with insect repellent. Once we were all set up I rushed to the concession stand, which seemed to be run by fourteen year olds. The whole place seemed to be run by fourteen year olds. I liked that. It made the place feel lawless. I also liked that the food had been sitting under the heat lamp for an eternity. I liked that I had to eat my fries without ketchup because the ketchup bottles were surrounded by an impenetrable swarm of gnats. It was rugged. It added to the whole back-to-nature feel.

 I brought my snack back to the minivan. Heather and our friend Lila were lying on the mattress I had put in the back of the minivan (it was my way of making it a “makeshift RV”). The girls were drinking wine and smoking weed out of one hitter. They had their own snacks that they had bought at Trader Joes, which I thought of as sacrilegious.

My buddy Gorcoff was with us as well. He was skeptical about the movie. Gorcoff only liked movies with Clint Eastwood, or movies that reminded him of Clint Eastwood. And to be fair, a movie with Clint Eastwood stripping would be amazing. But this one was good too. Gorcoff had smoked a little weed and that helped him get into the film.

“This is actually pretty good,” he kept saying. “It’s emotionally stirring.”

Throughout the movie, Gorcoff and I kept thinking we were seeing shooting stars. “It’s meteor shower,” I said. Then we realized that it was just bugs getting lit up by the projector.

“This is bullshit,” Gorcoff said. “I want to see real shooting stars.”

The girls weren’t as into the stars.

“Fuck yeah, look at that piece of ass!” Heather kept yelling at the men dancing on the screen.

It was as if we were at an actual strip club.

Lila didn’t get into the movies as much. “I don’t like that guy’s hair cut!” she said.

“Don’t be such a hipster,” Heather said to her. “What do you want some skinny dork with a scruffy hair and a mustache up there. Ef that, look at that ass. Channing Tatum is fucking HOT!”

The next movie was Step It Up 3D. This was a strange choice for a second feature. It was a movie for pre-teens. Would the people wanting to see it wait through a movie about strippers? Would the Magik Mike crowd be into watching Step It Up 3D? Usually the kid’s movie is the first to be played during a double feature. Needless to say there were not many cars left when Step It Up 3D was playing. We stuck around though. Heather was so drunk everything seemed like porn. “WOOHOOO! LOOK AT THAT ASS!” she kept yelling.

Gorcoff and I were not as into it. We wandered around the parking lot and continued to look for shooting stars. We saw a few. They might have just been bugs flying past the projectors light, but, at that point we didn’t care.