Author Archives: Joel Derfner

The ski trip in the Poconos with the gay cheerleaders started out beautifully. There were six of us in attendance: me, L.O. (the captain), the gymnast, the bodybuilder, the pretty one, and the Jersey boy. (I’m not giving the last four initials, because it would just be too confusing, and also they aren’t relevant to the story as individuals.) It rained on Saturday, which meant that we didn’t have to ski; we were of course all thrilled and relieved, the obligation to ski having been the only downside to the trip.

So instead of skiing we went shopping at the outlet mall, where I bought things that I liked, needed, and couldn’t afford even at outlet mall prices. Long live plastic.

After such a delightful afternoon, one might ask, what could possibly go wrong?

We went to a bar, that’s what.

Even this started out promisingly, with my virgin karaoke performance (“I Don’t Know How To Love Him” from Jesus Christ, Superstar) a smashing success. Then I went upstairs to the bar and smiled at the cute, shirtless bartender, who smiled back at me.

Then everything started to go to hell.

One of the other cheerleaders (the bodybuilder), on whom I had theretofore had a crush even though, as my friend D.R. says, he looks like a young Bob Hope, saw the cute, shirtless bartender smiling at me and said, “Oh, he does that to everybody.”

My soul shriveled into a little ball of self-hatred and despair.

Then the young Bob Hope said, “Hang on a second,” and walked away. He came back three minutes later and said, “He asked me to meet him after close.”

Any normal person would of course have committed entirely justifiable homicide. However, since my soul was now, if you’ll remember, a little ball of self-hatred and despair, I just said, “Oh,” and went into the bathroom and tried not to cry.

Of course, it gets far worse. The gymnast, the bodybuilder (a.k.a. the young Bob Hope), the pretty one, and the Jersey boy all got roaring drunk (L.O. and I weren’t drinking—I because I don’t, he because he had to drive), and the gymnast and the bodybuilder started dancing shirtless in the gogo cage, clearly having more fun at that moment than all the fun I have had in my life put together. I watched them in agony for a while, torn between my desperate desire to join them and actually have one iota of fun and my mortal terror of joining them and making an utter and complete fool of myself. Eventually the former won out over the latter and I took my shirt off and got into the gogo cage with them.

Where there wasn’t really enough room for three people.

And where I felt like a total idiot moron because I have about as much confidence in my ability to move gracefully and suggestively as I have in Ricky Martin’s ability to enjoy cunnilingus.

So I gyrated half-heartedly for about two minutes, during which time I was so miserable I wanted to put my eyes out with a carving fork, and then I got out of the gogo cage.

Then the four roaring drunk cheerleaders started to get really annoying, as drunk people tend to do when you are not drinking. There was all this drama about who was taking whom home, and who was trying to avoid taking whom home, and in the end nobody took anybody home. After puttering around for a while I went up to the room I’d slept in the night before to find the drunk Jersey boy blowing the drunk gymnast. I figured this was my cue to find somewhere else to sleep, so I made up the air mattress downstairs. Then I puttered around for a while longer, helping L.O. clean and rolling my eyes with him at the drunken behavior of the other four. It was a shared moment with somebody I like and respect and for the first time since the fateful intervention of the bodybuilder (a.k.a. the young Bob Hope) I felt like maybe my life wasn’t a cruel joke somebody had decided to play on me.

At some point in the middle of the night, the bear with whom the bodybuilder had been locking lips all night arrived, and the two of them had annoyingly noisy sex. I comforted myself, however, with the knowledge that L.O. and I had a special bond that was infinitely more meaningful than the shallow fun the drunk cheerleaders were having.

Then, when I woke up the next morning, I found out that L.O. had had sex with the drunk gymnast during the night.

I had forgotten how much it was possible to loathe oneself.

Once again, I’ve let too much of the day slip by and have neither the time nor the emotional energy to write about my disastrous ski trip. I would promise to do so tomorrow but I have too little faith in my ability to keep my word.

In the meantime, I seem to be going either deaf or insane, or perhaps both. Yesterday I was taking the crosstown bus to gymnastics class and the bus driver said, “Tenth Avenue next.”

Except that wasn’t what I heard. What I heard was “Goddamn eunuchs.”

Though, this being Manhattan, maybe that’s exactly what he said.

I was going to write a post about how the ski trip in the Poconos with the gay cheerleaders started out beautifully and then turned into an emotional disaster on the scale of Hiroshima or Carrie: The Musical, but at cheerleading practice tonight the spirit stick was once again awarded to someone other than me, so all my mental energy has been diverted to planning my impending killing spree.

My dog and I have an advice column that we run from our blog, but nobody ever writes to us for advice. I take this in stride, but it upsets Goblin terribly. She feels inadequate and starts to put on weight, and I cannot pull her away from her soap operas. Sometimes we steal letters from Miss Manners and the late Ann Landers, and this cheers her up a little, and she will change her dress, comb her hair, and join us at the table for a civilized meal.

If you would like advice from a wise Boston terrier, you can write to us here.

Sorry about the commercial, but Faustus is coming home today, and I do not want to write something so interesting that it competes with his account of the gay cheerleaders’ ski trip. I could easily do so. I could talk about the time I had to drag my ex-boyfriend across the border from Mexico in a shopping cart, or how my ex-roommate’s Felix the Cat doll committed suicide, or the festive year I did not take any holiday decorations down.

But maybe I will save those for my own Upside-down Hippopotamus. Which you should all link to and read every day and tell all your friends about.

Faustus and I went to the gym together two mornings this past week. I would say that we worked out together, but we did not: I use the free weights, and he is afraid of the free weights. But we did end up across from each other on elliptical trainers, where we made eye contact a few times.

We have studiously avoided seeing each other naked in the locker room.

Last night, before he left on his ski trip, we went together to the Apple Store in SoHo. (Readers of my own blog know that I consider the Apple Store a shining mecca of truth, beauty, and sensibility, and god knows the world can use more of that.) We then went someplace called the Café Borgia II, where I paid almost ten dollars for a tea bag and a slice of dry apple pie, and Faustus had a hot lemonade, which he claims tasted worse than Thera-Flu, even after he dumped a ton of sugar into it. I informed him that refined sugar is a poison, but he pointed out that someplace called “Borgia” is an appropriate setting for being poisoned. The café was so ugly on the inside (its décor had probably not changed since it was established in 1975) that we spent part of the time discussing how Hildi would improve it.

Then I came home and watched “Battlestar Galactica.”

Tonight I am leaving for the weekend to go on a ski trip with the gay cheerleading squad. I have not been skiing in over twenty years, and I was terrible at it even then. Apparently, though, everybody else on the squad is in more or less the same position, which makes me feel better.

Picture it: a bunch of fags screaming in terror as they stumble down the bunny slope.

In my absence, this man and his dog will be guest blogging for me.

I’ll return Monday. I hope my limbs will be intact. I’m certain my dignity won’t.

I just quit my horrible day job.

All I can think about is:

1. that I can now finally ask my office crush out on a date, and
2. that our relationship will perforce be short-lived, because soon I will starve to death.

Even dead of starvation, though, I will still be ahead of the game, because I will no longer have to spend hours a day transcribing tapes of interviews in which people say things like this:

“Yeah, as I told you, the problem is that, seriously, I mean, here, we are a very vanilla house. We don’t do a lot of–the mandates we’re working on are basically global government bonds and currency, so there’s not much that we do in terms of structured credit and derivatives. Even, as I told you, futures are mainly used to hedge some positions or to implement continuing duration strategies, but not as an important distinction or asset class. So, to be frank, I don’t really—I think you should probably talk—did you talk to my colleagues in New York on the derivatives side?”

How the hell did I do this job for a year and a half without LOSING MY FUCKING MIND?

Today I went to the gym and worked out for the first time in over ten years. My body is in agony.

I’d better start developing muscles quick, because otherwise I don’t know how long I can keep this up.

It didn’t help that there wasn’t any action in the steam room.

Last night, for the first time in my life, I was stood up by a date.

Drip Café had set me up with the zany guy who responded to my profile; we were scheduled to meet there at 8:00. At 8:40, by which time he still hadn’t arrived, the Drip people called him at home.

Where he was.

It’s not clear to me whether he thought Drip was closed because of the blizzard, or just assumed I wouldn’t get through the snow, or what. Writing “theatre” instead of “theater” is one thing; not calling to let anybody know he wasn’t going to make it, however, is a far more serious offense. But the Drip woman on the phone with him told me several times that he felt really bad and that he said he would make it up to me. (She also told him, when I came up to the counter once they’d gotten him on the phone, that I was really cute, too, and he’d have to make it up to me big time. So I owe her one.)

Luckily, my friends B.N. and D.R. were already there, having come to Drip to spy surreptitiously on my date, so I just went over and sat down with them and vented and had an Oreo milkshake.

I’m willing to cut him a tiny bit of slack because of the blizzard. We’ve rescheduled for next week. But he damn well better bring chocolate and flowers.

After writing yesterday’s post about my father, I realized I haven’t mentioned him much in these pages. This morning I dug up a letter he sent me six or seven years ago around the time of Yom Kippur (the Jewish holy day on which we atone for our sins against God and against other people) that makes it clear why, despite his unfairness with the peanut butter, I hope someday to be half the man he is. (It’s a long letter, but worth the time.)

Dear Faustus,

I want to write to you about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.