The monkey made me do it

Christina Aguilera has got nothin' on me

P had a yearly tradition of going up to Vancouver, B.C. to blow off some hedonistic steam, renting a penthouse hotel room with 10-20 of his closest friends and hitting every club and strip joint in the city. My partying was light years away from his wild drinking/drugging extravaganzas. He would typically crack the first beer at 11 a.m. and not finish until he was unable to lift glass/can/bottle/unidentified-thingie-that-looked-like-it-contained-booze to mouth. But the year that we got back in contact, I decided that I had to see this Vancouver trip first-hand. I brought my friend K along, and she brought her boyfriend (this is the same guy who knows the entire musical offerings of Janet Jackson and is slightly less than masculine). The rest of the party was P's pals, a ragged bunch of Seattle dorks with sci-fi, computer programming day jobs and lecherous, alcoholic nighttime wanderings that I'm sure never made it to the water cooler at Microsoft.

We got to the penthouse and in the grand tour, the concierge mentioned that it had recently been rented out by Eminem and that Christina Aguilera had broken a wine glass there. The living room was incredibly tall, close to 3 stories high and overlooking downtown Vancouver. There was a small office, a big bathroom, a huge balcony with trees in pots (love those), a master bedroom (very early on claimed by P - no one complained, as his snoring prowess is legendary and the door would at least offer us a slight buffer), and a 2-person jacuzzi tub on a marble podium right off the living room. It also was painted the most horrific color of yellow I have ever experienced, and the decoration was a mishmash of tassled animal-print upholstery, purple velvet, and end tables and a coffee table built to resemble guilded Greek ruins. The end table was a squat little column with a carved inset covered by a disk of glass. It was the gaudiest thing, and in combination with the rest of the fashion explosion it made my head spin. Luckily that was the desired effect of the evening, and after the pre-func began and I'd had a few cocktails, the patterns made a little more sense.

The first strip club of the night was in the neighboring building, and was surrounded by "massage parlors" and gentlemen's clubs. I had never done the strip club thing before, and was excited to see the shiny, glittey, nekkid world that they show in movies (nudity doesn't do much for me, I have done figure painting for years and have seen hundreds of bare bodies. I wanted to see some pizazz! Pasties! Feet over heads!). The women were numb. They came out and did their things, showed off their tan lines and limited flexibility, and left the stage with eyes as dead as my enthusiasm. I started watching the T.V. on the side of the stage, which was featuring a snowmobiling race if I remember correctly (love that snowmobiling). I was determined to stick it out, since the guys seemed to be having a good time making snarky comments about boob size, but then the announcer stopped one of the dancers who was about to make her nude, listless way offstage and hollered into the mic, "Who's ready for some CUNNILINGUS?". A second dancer came onstage and brought the first back up to the end of the walkway, kneeling down in front of her. I decided that my life would be much better if I never saw what was about to follow, and got up and bolted from the club, followed by a stunned K and boyfriend (who seemed relieved to go).

We weren't up for the club scene after that, and decided to head back to the hotel room and drink there and wait for the rest of the group to tire of the ladies. We made quite a dent in the room's stash of booze, and after I fell yet again over the leopard-printed couch arm in an attempt to cross the room, I decided that it was party time. We cranked the music and started dancing around like preschoolers who have just learned that recess is all day today. When the boyfriend put on George Michael (such a manly man) I hopped up on the end table and boogied on down, exhausting my repertoire of dance moves and setting my monkey free.

Then I stepped wrong on the glass disk and completely shattered it, spraying the immediate area with thin shards of glass and cutting up my foot in the process. We giggled for a long time before the "oh shit, this is a hotel room and Jay's bleeding" realizations kicked in. I tried to clean up, cutting my hands as well as my poor foot, but it was no use. The hotel was not pleased the next morning when they found glass all over their purple carpet and customers who were barely able to agree about what had happened the night before. P assumed that someone had fallen, and I wasn't in a state to remember, much less recount, the events until later that afternoon. Luckily they bought his story before I could tell them that, in fact, it was a direct result of me shaking my thing in an inappropriate location (AGAIN). I don't know how they didn't see the footprints on the rest of the table.

They said that out of all the rock stars and celebrities who had rented that room, we had caused the most damage. Score!

posted by LadyJay @ 4:23 PM