The Night I Left the Cocktail Party Benefit for Doughnuts

This article originally appeared on MUNCHIES in July 2015.

Welcome back to Stranger Than Flicktion, our Flickr-inspired column. We provide writers with five random food-related Flickr images and ask them to construct a fictional short story in under five days. In this edition, we hit a cocktail party benefit gone wrong.

I'm here tonight at my old friend Fred Hardesty's lake house, and it's a big cocktail party benefit. I always tell Fred it's stupid to have a lake house in Dayton, Ohio, but I love coming over.

Fred poured us imperfect Herradura margaritas on the dock a couple hours ago, and passed out clever coasters printed with statistics: "Four out of five sex-trafficking victims in the Miami Valley are recruited from middle-class or higher homes." What the fuck is going on? Everybody's stupid smartphones are exploding the sexual exploitation of children everywhere—especially in Dayton, which is a city that sits on the X of two major interstates.

Now I'm alone in a guest bedroom on the second floor, where I guess Fred keeps cases of caper berries in this closet I'm exploring. What the screw is a caper berry? I've decided tonight never to Google anything anymore—you can't tell me that Google isn't partly responsible for these sex crimes against babies—so let's Bing that shit. Caper berries are basically bigger, milder versions of capers. Screw Bing. I turn my phone off, but I'm not sure it goes all the way off. Do phones turn all the way off anymore, or are they just full-time boob-surveillance devices? I rub my phone against my chest and purr for my surveillers.

I step out of my shoes—one, two—onto chilly dark carpet. A whiff of must rides the release of the insoles' trapped heat. Spores are everywhere. Can fungus be a gas? An asshole in Silicon Valley, or up the street, or anywhere, can only dream of smelling me through my phone. I don't mind telling you guys what kind of shoes I'm wearing, but listen:

I take another slug of sweet, sparkly Moët. Why settle for one flavor (sour-shoe smell) when you can have two flavors (sour shoes and Champagne)? The moon outside looks bigger than I'd paint it at gunpoint. Do you like to paint? I don't like to paint, but if I'm handed a brush and told I'll be shot if I don't produce an image of the night sky, I'll aim for realism.

I take another Moët sip. One of my thighs prickles under navy sequins. The other thigh is numb, and I pause to consider that it, too, happens to be wrapped in navy sequins. I finish my Moët, toss the empty crystal flute onto a pillow, and plop down on the bed. I hear someone yell, from outside, that another round of pineapple drinks is available.

The red bedroom door is open wide, but my white legs are crossed as hell. I tighten, loosen, and retighten my legs, enjoying the rhythmic crackle of my pubic hair. I hear the Ass Doctor's penny loafers tapping up the steps down the hall—an eager little jog. It's safe to assume he's coming to me with the usual open heart and mind. His loose tie bounces in the privacy of my imagination like a Labrador's tongue. His voice enters the bedroom before his rectangular body:

"Hi. I've brought you Schuler's doughnuts and Mumford's potato chips."

We all love Schuler's—the bakery in Springfield that calls itself the "Home of Homemade." You need to go there and order a chocolate Bismarck doughnut. "Ambrosia," my grandpa called the Schuler's Bismarck. The chocolate they use tastes so great, like nothing else. Mumford's chips in Urbana are also unmissable. Crisp, potatoey, the best. Google it. Bing it. Buy it all.

The Ass Doctor closes the door on the leak of hallway light, and sets down the doughnuts and the chips. I fart, we laugh, and I apologize. He farts and does not apologize—the privilege of the crude. He's wearing a nice suit that doesn't affect my feelings. The downstairs cocktail party laughter is muffled. The big moon and the big man in the room with me are brighter than average but, I don't know, they feel like they could be bigger and a lot brighter. Remember: we've all seen what the sun can do when he decides to show up.

"How long have you been feeling hot for me?" the Ass Doctor says, a total nerd in my hard-to-disagree-with opinion.

The Ass Doctor's real name is Rundy Hardesty—the cousin of our party host Fred. Rundy is a full professor at Wittenberg now, but Fred and I still call him the Ass Doctor—a joke held over from when Rundy got an associate professor job right after he finished his PhD. ("Associate Professor" plus "Doctorate" equals "Ass Doctor.") The construction-paper banner we made Rundy to celebrate said, "NICE WORK ASS DOCTOR" in huge block letters. We didn't have to explain this joke too much—he basically got it, and basically found it funny. The nickname stuck.

"If you have a fever—a fever for sex with me—then let's figure something out," says Rundy the Ass Doctor.

"No. No sex right now. No thanks."

"The door is open. The good-sex door." He produces, on his phone, a gross photograph of wigs. "We can do it on these wigs. I'll weave you a shag carpet of wigs in our love nest. I've found a pattern on Pinterest. Women love Pinterest.

"The sex door is closed, Rundy. I'll love you forever, but there are swathes of me that I will never let you access. Now are we going to put our heads together and solve this mystery, or what?" There is no mystery, really. The Ass Doctor and I have an ongoing childish game: we pretend to be amateur sleuths, like we're twelve years old. We talk about how we trust each other's instincts and intelligence. We do this while we eat the best doughnuts and chips in the world, and (these days) while we drink Fred's alcohol. Fred and the other partygoers may think we've snuck up here to get frisky—or perhaps nobody's thinking of us at all—but what the Ass Doctor and I are actually doing is hatching a plan to solve a terrible crime. The Mystery Of The Bejeweled Skull. The Mystery Of Caper Berries. The Mystery Of The Sex Technology. The Mystery of Why Fred Bought This Stupid Lake House in Dayton, Which Is Not A Good Place. Whether or not Rundy and I solve tonight's crime—and I really do hope we crack it, just as I always hope we crack all our cases—one thing is certain: this man cannot earn, does not deserve, and will never receive my sexual attention.