The Innkeeper's Reckoning
Episode 7: Do I have "Fuck with me" written on my forehead?
Last week the owners were away and we had a going away party for some of the Europeans who were here for the summer. They worked 80 hour weeks and risked life and limb trying to fix our faulty electrical wiring so we figured they deserved a night of drunken bliss. The guests of honor were scheduled to arrive later in the afternoon but this didn't stop a few of the workers from starting the party a few hours early. I swear a few of them were already drunk by 3 pm. I was working the desk that night so I refrained from drowning myself in alcohol but I did vacillate back and forth between manning the desk and visiting with the revellers out back. They quickly outpaced me, leaving me in the dust - sober and out of the loop.
One of the workers brought her husband, who we will call Gary. Gary is an older man who was bobbing and weaving by the time we all sat down for dinner at 4:30. He stared at me across the table before finally shouting, "Are you a rich kid?"
Taken aback, I stammered, "No....do I look like one?"
"Yeah you do," he sneered, "where are you from?" I explained I was born in New Hampshire and lived in Utah and Maryland before moving here.
"Utah?!" he exclaimed and I knew what was coming next.
"So you're a Mormon?"
"No."
"Uhh....." I hesitated. What kind of question was that? Where was this conversation leading? I said the first thing that popped into my head.
"I don't know, I guess I'm just not into 6 hour services on Saturdays." He stared for a second then threw his head back and cackled. Finally, I broke him. I cracked the stony face that had been staring me down with what seemed like the utmost contempt. He was finally warming up to me. I returned the question.
"Why aren't you a Mormon?"
He instantly stopped laughing and with all seriousness declared, "Because I'm not a liar."
Later I found myself sitting right next to Gary again, with no one else around. He asked about my major in college and how I ended up working at an Inn and why I wasn't following a dream somewhere.
"That's the problem with your generation," he told me. "You have no passion. In my day we read people like Kerouac and Whitman. I hate to be the old man talking to the young punk but what's wrong with your generation? Where is the Mario Savio of your generation?"
I told him I didn't know and explained that I at least knew who Mario Savio was, hoping that would please him slightly. It didn't. He caught his wife's attention and said to her, "I like your friends, they're alright - all except this guy." As he said this he pointed his meaty index finger in my direction and cackled.
The sun began to set and I decided to retire to the front desk for the night. The rest of them were growing drunker by the minute and there was no way I could keep up. The conversations were getting stranger and stranger and rational thought had no place at this party. I got up, walked across the patio and headed for the sliding glass doors just as Gary was coming back outside. I looked up and smiled. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, "Shut the fuck up!"
In the next hour and a half, things changed drastically outside. Gary started hitting on the housekeeper. CDs featuring the Velvet Underground were kicked off the speakers in favor of Shaggy, who was blasted at top volume, so loud that the patio speakers buzzed and crackled, unable to handle the decibel level at which the music played. Since I was the only one working as well as the only one sober, I took over the role of dad and ended up turning the music down and turning off spotlights shining into the upstairs rooms so they didn't bother our houseguests. The partygoers couldn't have cared less about the fact that they were possibly bothering anyone. Every time I turned the music down, someone would sneak in, crank it back up and run outside. I went outside to ask everyone to please leave the volume knob alone only to find them dancing in drunken circles around a table covered in 9 empty bottles of wine. Our piano player was sitting down, swaddled in a tablecloth like a robe and wearing a headdress made of flowers.
"He's Caeser for the night," someone explained to me out of the shadows. I turned on my heel and went back inside, washing my hands of the situation. Gary's wife wished me a good night on my way out.
"You're
way too sober for us," she said. She was right. At 10 to 1, I was horribly
outnumbered. It's no fun being the dad.
Jeremy Paquette resides in Manchester, Vermont. That gleam in his eye is not his second child.
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