From 'Lucky Bitch', the Ting Tings backstage aftermath

This time down the hall, Tori noticed that the walls were lined with the posters of lineups past. She became transfixed by vibrant posters calling out stellar acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Killers, the Cure, Shiny Toy Guns (a poster already in her collection), Queens of the Stone Age, etc. As much as she was admiring the artwork, she was taking notice of the posters’ firm affixation to the wall. Each one bolted in with one more screw than the one before. Bad Religion was nailed to the plaster; Hot Hot Heat was sealed tight; the Hives were…lacking any security whatsoever. Tori was by no means a vandal or a thief, but she had pinched a poster for the Ting Tings show from the Hot Tub dressing room and managed to stash it safely under her shirt before anyone had noticed its absence. Thinking going for broke was appropriate in this situation, she gave a quick push on the bottom of the frame to see if it could easily be loosed from the wall. Oh yes, yes it could. Tori nearly knocked it to the floor with a timid nudge and was working quickly to realign the print when Dougie and the Hot Tubs came barreling into the hall in a blitz of laughter.

“Girl, where you been? Giving head to one of the security guards? Or just taking care of yourself in one of the stairwells?” Dougie had doubled over laughing at his own jokes.
“Bitch, I was getting more beer. You can talk again when you do something productive.”
Tori was quite proud of herself for being this coherent after so so many beers.
“You know, if you keep being such a salty cunt I’m not taking you with us to hang out with the Ting Tings.”

Tori tried to look at her watch but had trouble placing the exact location of the big and little hands. She instead pulled out her phones and discovered that it was nearly 3am. Not that Tori had given any thought to the exact location of Jules and the chick, but she didn’t figure they’d be here this late hanging out. All the same, there had been many fruits to pick from in the abandoned dressing room of NP’sSH, so why not venture a visit?

As Dougie, the Hot Tubs and Tori rolled into the Ting Tings room, she was not at all surprised to see that….the Ting Tings were there. Shit. Who’d a thunk it? At this point, Tori had no sense of propriate and inappropriate, so she went right into the Ting Tings’ dressing room and made herself a vodka diet. While drinking it, she tried really hard to maintain a normal line of conversation, but somewhere between starstruck and drunk, Tori had nothing. She tried to ask questions about the album, the tour, the production, even that night’s show, but all that came out was “I danced too much tonight. Do you guys have another beer?”

Shortly after, Tori wandered out into the hall back towards that Hives poster which was still unaffixed to the wall. She lifted it from its mount and attempted to stuff it under her shirt. Big as her boobies were, there was no room for those luscious Swedes. She instead tucked the dapper lads’ poster under her arm and headed for the exit, her hopes high that Dougie was following her.

Mere steps from exiting the building, Tori realized she had to pee. Right now. She stopped, pondering a detour to the toilet, and turned back to the ladies’ room. As she was pulling the door open with the urgency of 18 beers trying to make their way out of a golf ball sized bladder, Tori was stopped dead in her tracks by a security guard.

“Hey!” the security guard barked. “You can’t take that!”
Tori looked down at the wonderful Hives poster she was attempting to abscond with.
“What? This?” She asked.
“Yeah. You can’t take that.”
Tori really wanted that poster. Should she run? Hide? Pee?
“Oh.” She said, door cracked, inviting her to the toilets. “I thought I could.”
Tori let the door to pee relief slam shut as she relinquished the night’s newest prized possession. She looked longingly at the poster- just for a second- before she scooted out the front door knowing that motion was necessary to keep from pissing her pants.

Once Tori had scooted down the escalator and was halfway across the street towards the car, she noticed Dougie was nowhere to be seen. God, Tori was quite sure she was going to pee herself. If….if she didn’t find somewhere to drop trou and water the plants. Scanning the territory, Tori was relieved to see that downtown was as dead as ever and there would be no one around to judge her if she could find some shrubbery willing to receive the products of her liquor soaked body. Hmm. Meter, meter, wall, sparsely dense bushes, car, car, WALL OF BUSH!

Tori raced across the street to the crook of a wall of bush that she ascertained would provide maximum relief with minimum exposure. She dropped her purse, gently removed her pilfered Ting tings poster (at least she made it out with something) and placed it on her bag, dropped her pants, pushed far back into the foliage and let loose the bevy of beer she’d consumed in the last six hours. It. Felt. Aaaaaamazing. When all had been released Tori picked up her bag and her poster and piqued her ears to determine where the unmistakable cackles of Dougie were echoing from.

As she managed to focus her vision- just for a moment- Tori saw Dougie careening across the street splashing beer all over himself from his half drank Tecate. Resituating herself, Tori walked up to Dougie as if she hadn’t just watered the property of the Staple’s Center with her va-gi-jay and made him think he was the mess of the group.

“Dougie! Last time I checked there is no such thing as eau de Corona. So what are you doing splashing that filth all over yourself?”
Dougie looked down at himself, apparently unaware until now that he was drenching himself in warm beer.
“Well, I had to make sure the car smelled like something other than your dirty snatch. I think I’m doing us both a favor.”
Tori wanted to come back with something, but she was far too impaired for that. Come to think of it, she was way too wrecked to drive. So was Dougie. She looked at her car- the last left before the hotel’s taxi area- and weighed the pros and cons of driving home.

Pro: no ticket or tow for leaving her car in a tow-away zone
Con: DUI’s are expensive
Pro: She would save on a cab now and in the morning
Con: She was far too tore up to be taking a mug shot that night
Pro: Money saved on cab could be parlayed into tomorrow’s concert ticket
Con: Dougie looked like he might ralph in the car
Pro: Dougie looked like he might ralph anyway and it would be easier to deal with him doing it in her car than trying to explain it to a cab driver
Con: Was it sleepy time yet?
Pro: all the cons are long forgotten and the keys are already in my hand

And the pros have it!

Tori auto started the car, something she did more for fancy than function, and pushed Dougie’s ass into the passenger side. She hurried around to the driver’s seat, eager to lock the passenger window and avoid an encore performance of “That’s Not My Name” from a man who thought karaoke was best performed eight beers in. While Tori would agree with his principles of hammered howling most of the time, it was closing in on 4am and she thought the cops downtown might be a bit suspicious of that kind of recital.

Tori channeled the drunk driving lessons of Clemmy from Reno: 911! And kept her hands at 10 and 2, stayed within three miles of the speed limit, made complete stops and did her best to ignore the face prints Dougie was making on his window. Ok, she was actually pretty amused and distracted by that, but she did her best to keep her eyes on the road.

Lucky for the both of them, Dougie’s new digs were within spitting distance of downtown and it only took them 10 minutes to get back to his house, haphazardly park the car and start drinking again. Tori was pretty sure Dougie slurred something about being quiet because his roommate was home, but he went right into the kitchen and started shouting back to her in the living room, so she dismissed the need for discretion. Oh, and she was drunk, so she really didn’t care anyway.

Tori plopped on the couch, took command of the clicker and prepared to abuse the house’s cable TV for all she could get before passing out. She went right to Bravo hoping for Project Runway but struck out. Cake Boss, Ace of Cakes, Top Chef and King of the Hill were also absent from the program guide so she scanned over to the cartoon channels hopeful that if she found something good Dougie would be too drunk to care that she had turned his cable box to Nickelodeon. Sure enough, Phineas and Ferb were on and Tori was going to enjoy it until her drunk friend’s hand/eye coordination superseded her own and he was able to wrestle the remote from her.

Coming from the kitchen holding two mugs full of gin and tonic, Dougie was all shits and giggles until he saw cartoons invading his living room. Letting the mugs drop heavily onto the table, he put his hands on his hips, made his best angry face and started gesturing wildly towards the triangle shaped heads on the screen.
“Girl, what have I told you about cartoons in my house? If they aren’t wearing a banana suit singing ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ I don’t wanna see it!”
Tori sulked a bit. Not really. She was amused by his anger at cartoons.
“But it’s Phineas and Ferb!”
“What the fuck is a Ferb?”
She waited for the little English sidekick to reappear on the screen.
“That! See, he’s Phineas’s limey little helper.”
As she pointed to and identified Ferb, Tori was quite sure she didn’t know which of these characters was which, but was sure that Dougie would turn it off before the program could correct her.

Sho’nuf, Dougie went right for the remote, bit Tori’s arm like a rabid pitbull, and got her to release the remote.

“You cock!” Tori released herself from the body hold of Dougie and took a quick swig of a 4/5 gin, 1/5 tonic. She then dipped a couple fingers into the alcohol solution and rubbed it on the bite. “You’re a shitty bartender and you need to get your teeth cleaned. You have any limes?”
“I do and you can go get one yourself. They on top of the fridge.”
Making her way to the kitchen, Tori did a quick turn to give Dougie a much deserved one finger salute. As she was about to cross under the archway to the kitchen, Dougie started howling with laughter.
“What now?” she thought, trying to resist the urge to stop and indulge him. Of course, even sober Tori had a short attention span and the inability to move on without asking questions. Just that one sip of gin and (tonic) would have relieved a theretofore sober person of their ability to ask questions later.

Stopping just before the kitchen, Tori spun on her heel and faced a hooting, teary eyed Dougie.
“What now Dougie?”
“Girl. Girl! What did you do to your back?”
Tori chased the source of Dougie’s amusement much as a dog would chase it’s tail; searching in vain for a visual explanation of his amusement.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dougie. What’s so funny?”
“Girl,” Dougie was positively choking with laughter, “lift up the back of your shirt. It looks like you just got felt up by Wolverine.”

Confused, Tori lifted up her shirt and saw giant red streaks running from her butt cheeks well up her back. They were deep, bleeding gashes left from the Staples Center port-a-potty.

“Son of a bitch!” Tori exclaimed, less concerned about her skin and more bothered by the fact that she may have bloodied up her shirt. “I must have gotten that when-“
Tori stopped short of fessing up to dropping trou in the parking lot but could tell see Dougie reading her face like a large type book, trying to decipher her expression and figure out what she was hiding.
“Must have gotten it when what?” he needled.
Tori knew damn well the story of her scraped ass would become the cherry on top of tonight’s story when she retold it myriad times in the weeks to come, she just didn’t know if she could give Dougie the satisfaction of prying it from her now.

“I must have gotten that when…”
Dougie was literally on the edge of his seat, wild with excitement to hear what happened.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, I took a piss in the parking lot across from Club Nokia. I guess those bushes were just a touch more dangerous than I anticipated.”
Dougie started laughing so hard he went and fell off the couch. Rolling on the floor, beating his fists on the couch he managed to slip out “Ch-ch-child I could have told you the bush is dangerous! That’s why I only-“
“Go after dick.” Tori finished Dougie’s thought and left him thrashing on the floor while she went searching for something to soften the gin in her drink. Stopping short of the fridge, Tori had the good sense to sneak her phone around the corner and take video of Dougie’s laughing/ wheezing/ feet flailing fit.
“That sure is gonna’ shut him up tomorrow.” She smiled and let the camera roll until he laughed himself tired and started drinking again.

I'm writing a book called "Lucky Bitch"

Some friends of mine are doing the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and they convinced me to join in. Not really knowing what to write about on short notice, I decided to do a chronicle of the crazy luck (both good and bad) I've had this year. I imagine in December, when I go back and edit the damn thing, it'll be less disjointed and have more of a point (I do have an idea of what the point/ plot should be). But for now, here's an excerpt about when I met Bruce, my butthole bunny.

PS- For legal and friend retention reasons, I've changed names. Mine is Tori. I think y'all could have easily figured that out


Yea, But This One Has a Real Butthole

Not that Tori wasn’t used to things going well for her (she was quite used to accepting that good things in her life were begat by horrible things and vice versa), but February had been a bang up month. She managed to book a roundtrip ticket to Australia- one that would put her in Sydney just in time for gay Mardi Gras- for less than $600 on Virgin’s new service down under which, given her past experiences flying Virgin Shaglantic, would prove to be a great deal for the 14 hour flight. She also got hooked up with a shady tax guy who got her a boatload of money back from the government and the checks were supposed to arrive just before her departure the first week of March.

But wait! There’s more!

Despite being a bit of a shithole, Tori always managed to rent out her West Hollywood apartment any time she went out of town for more than a few days, providing her with a little extra spending money and a good reason to aggressively clean the house. Which didn’t happen often. Tori lived in what could easily be described as filth, but she spent so little time in her house she really couldn’t be bothered to care. Amazingly, the girl she had booked to stay this time was from Sydney and wanted to stay the duration of Tori’s journey to Oz. She was willing to pay $700 for a 2-week stay and even offered to watch Tetley, a godsend considering there was no where else to board the little shit after John decided he was going to rent his apartment too. For this great convenience, Tori knocked $50 off the bill and used some of the girl’s money to provide her with new sheets and towels and a featherbed to fill in the bed’s epic chasm.

Since Tori had more than $20 in her bank account at this point, she decided it was best to spend some of it so she could get back to feeling like the broke bitch who bought Miller Lite in the 30 pack because the per bottle cost was less. Top on Tori’s list of money redepositories was the Kid Robot store. Seeing as it was just a mile away on Melrose, Tori saddled up to ride the scooter, making sure to stuff a backpack in the bubble just in case the shopping got out of hand.

Stepping into Kid Robot somehow transported Tori back to a time when it was ok to lust after brightly colored playthings. You might think this had something to do with a lack of toys growing up, but no, Tori had all the My Little Ponies and GI Joes she could handle in her adolescence. So try as she might to figure out what caused her to desire things like Lost action figures and stuffed reindeers, the root cause was unidentifiable. Tori simply liked poseable action things that took her attention away from her job and man troubles and things of that nature. She also liked looking at pictures of Dave Grohl and Ben Folds which was why her walls still resembled those of her Freshman dorm room. Tori was considering her arrested development and how she should think about combating it when she sidetracked to thinking about Arrested Development and how good looking Jason Bateman is and forgot why she wasn’t in the toy store already.

Once inside, Tori grabbed all the toys she could justify buying and schlepped them to the counter. It should be mentioned that as much as Tori loved displaying these action figures for her and others’ viewing, the thrill of opening them comprised about 48% of her joy. Since the figurines were all blind-boxed (sealed so you didn’t know which bit of the set you were buying) Tori got to drift through the store’s selection until she got the feeling that she needed to pick something up. She relied on instinct and luck in these situations to guide her towards the best stuff. With Kid Robot, Tori rarely got what she was after, but the thrill of tearing into the foil cased Dunnys ensured that Kid Robot was a recurring line item on her credit card statement. Today’s purchase was no exception to the rule; Tori calculated it would be a $70ish debit on her Visa. She was ready to take out her card and move on to lunch when something plush caught her eye.

It can’t be said that what happened next was love at first sight, because the first glimpse Tori got of a 5” stuffed rabbit smoking a cigarette was from the front. And she wasn’t nearly as impressed with him as she was with his little pal with the mustache. Tori picked up the white fuzzy labbit with the mustache, rubbed him against her cheek and was immediately sold on adding him to her tab. When she turned him over and saw he had a little black bum sewn on, she took him to the front and started thinking of names. The guy at the counter, Josh, who knew Tori well from her many commission purchases, complimented her choice to pick up the new stuffed bunny.

“Didn’t take you long to find the new merch.”
Tori was completely fixated on the little black bum and had to refocus herself on the real world to answer. “He’s fantastic! His little mustache is so soft and fuzzy. I’ve already got half a dozen super gay names bouncing around my head.”
“Well, if you want him to be really gay, you should check out the one smoking the cigarette. He’s got a real butthole.”

As quickly as Tori had fallen in love with the mustachioed bunny, he was back on the shelf, replaced by a rabbit of the same size smoking a cigarette and sporting a pink satin butthole just big enough to stick your pinkie in. Tori knew it was pinkie size because the first thing she tried to do when she flipped the poor bastard around was stick her thumb in there.

“It’s so tiny!” Tori squealed. “I wonder if it’ll stretch?”
“Oh wow,” the counter guy winced, “nobody’s asked that yet. You’ll have to let me know.”
“I will!” Tori said a little too convincingly.
“Do you need anything else today?”
Tori fingered the bunny a little more before responding. “No. I just need to get home so I can find more stuff to stick in this rabbit’s asshole. At which time I will take pictures and put them on the internet. So awesome….”

This chance meeting in the Kid Robot store would be the start of Tori’s healthiest relationship in years. She had found someone/thing who would accompany her to concerts and lunches and shopping and who did not require a passport to leave the country. He would give her a torso to lean on when she was feeling shit and he didn’t seem to care about smoking laws or others’ perceptions of his appearance or his devotion to his new friend. He would appear in photos regardless of time of day, appearance or potential embarrassment factor. Most importantly, he would be accepting of her bizarre sexual proclivities as she passed him from friend to friend to have his butthole prodded for her amusement. This smoking bunny would be Tori’s new bestie and would be named for her dad’s pole vaulting partner from San Francisco State College.

When competing against other schools who assumed all SF college students were flaming homosexuals, her dad would chase his friend around the track, arms flailing, screaming about how he had promised to grab his pole from the bus. Countless athletes had gone through their adult lives scarred by the images invoked by Tori’s dad and his friend, Bruce. Ready to conjure newer, more frightening images, Tori tucked Bruce the Butthole Bunny under her arm and started dreaming up ways they could shock and revile her friends.