Touch[Downs]

This is not done yet by any means.

Touch[Downs]

I don’t normally drink alone in my apartment. Ever. I’ve always been comforted by going out to a bar because at least then I’m engaging in what might be the lowest form of prostitution: I’m alone, and paying, at the very least, a bartender to comfort me in a moment of weakness. Tonight is a different story, however. Tonight is the 30th birthday of the man who helped me transition into kissing the mirror in front of me instead of breaking it to bits and cutting myself with its remnants. Tonight, I’ve walked miles of beach with couples, their dogs, and versions of relationships I may never know. Tonight, I talked to my little sister about men that have been inside me and meant something.
Tonight, I ran into Tammy and Tonya.
One could not ask for a more altruistic duo. Tammy has fostered more illegitimate and unwanted children than Brad and Angelina could ever aspire to. Selflessly. Unapologetically. Her husband died several years ago and it spurn her into taking on children the way that lesser-than heterosexuals take up crocheting or model airplane construction. She cooks at the local Methodist church for disenfranchised, disease-ridden miscreants, and occasionally persons the counter at their secondhand store.
Tonya is nearly 50 years old. She has DOWNS syndrome. In conversation, one can generally gather every third or fourth word but never a full sentence. She adapts her appliqué nail polish with the seasons, and dons sweaters that fit loosely and chronicle her travels around this grand country spreading the news of how upwardly mobile her tribe truly is. If anyone is to be considered “handi-capable,” it is she. Her only handicap is her supreme memory. When the rest of us are paying people to help us forget, Tonya revels in reminding us what awful human beings we are. Never malicious about it. She’s just glad we take notice of her haircut and strategically off-centered ponytail.
This is where I crack another PBR Tallboy and light another Parliament Light. This is where I get real. This is where I realize that I harbor envy for those less fortunate than myself.
Tonya met a boy.
His name is David.
I’m a jealous bitch.
Apparently, there is a dance held on Cape Cod that approximates mentally retarded adults against a soundtrack of cool/soft rock of the 70s and 80s and offers them ample opportunity to let their inner/outward wild child shine in a safe environment. It’s a ‘tard prom. If I hadn’t spent most of my life worrying about how all of my mentally retarded friends would feel about me using that term, I would have coined it ages ago. Their feeling: “You had a prom; why shouldn’t we?” My sentiment: exactly.
Apparently, at the Tard Prom, Tonya met her “sweetheart.” Monosyllabic words are often a challenge for her, yet she was able to utter a complex, compound word such as “sweetheart” when talking about her new found love interest, David. Going back a brief moment in time, we three are at a restaurant. Correction: Tammy and Tonya are at the restaurant, and I’m sat at its bar. Alone. Drinking a Manhattan. Shaken, when I wanted it stirred. Drinking bourbon when I wanted rye whiskey. Paying for a sub-par drink constructed to less than the standard to which I wanted it prepared.
Tonya’s in love.
I’m drinking an approximation of death.
But I’m thrilled for her. She waxes poetic about her love of this new boy, and even though I can only understand every fourth word, I know that she truly cares for him and he apparently thinks quite highly of her. It’s mid-January and her nails still have Christmas trees on them. She ebulliently tugs on my vintage leather jacket and says, “I like … soft.” Yeah, Tonya. I like “soft,” too.
My mind is racing at this point. I’m not drunk, and I have another mile to bike in the cold before I reach home. I mount my bicycle, mostly because I want to be home and drunk enough to understand how I could manifest such envy for an over-weight mentally retarded woman. I get home, open a beer, pour a Scotch, and do what every narrowly attractive, intellectual single gay man would do in a situation such as this: call my mother, refuse to leave her a voicemail, and then take the next-best-thing by calling my little sister and strong-arming her into an hour-long conversation that is at best a monologue punctuated by her occasional giggle or grimace at my inappropriateness.
I do what any sane individual would do at a time like this, and I quickly turn the subject around on her. While I would love to wallow in my own guilt around judging harshly the actions of a middle-aged mentally retarded woman, I, instead, insist that straight people don’t actually have sex but rather calculatingly violate one another. At this point I’m not even sure if I believe this statement, but I’ve made it so I have to go along with it. I begin to reference the number of times my sister has coquettishly