Love & Profanity

Why is it Wet Here? by Carrie Mesrobian

I will not get too specific. No addresses or real names. No times or dates.

The setting I will admit to: my parents’ house. When they were not in it for the weekend.

This information was not like other information that passed around my high school, like tacos for lunch or having a sub in gym class. The information that someone’s parents would be leaving their flag unguarded for a 36-hour period was not to be shrugged off.

All echelons of the high school caste system tuned in.

My friends, their boyfriends, their friends. My boyfriend, his friends. All sorts of peripheral acquaintances across the high school divide.

In this situation, all of us had to unify. Who would get the keg? Who had money? Did someone have a car to transport it? How much was the tap deposit? It takes a village to throw a proper high school keg party.

I was always very nervous about parties in those days, because back then, you never knew what would happen. It could be fun. It could be lame. It could get busted. Sometimes all three.

Of the actual party, I will give a few details:

There were lots of people.

Everyone, including myself, was very, very drunk.

Cigarettes were smoked.

Someone pelted peanut M&M’s from the upstairs balcony into our sunken living room.

Someone who may have been my boyfriend stayed overnight.

And someone who may have been my boyfriend smoked too much pot and barfed peanut M&M’s on the carpet.

There was one last key detail. This detail was that there was a boy who procured the beer. Let us call him “Randy” just for this story. And what “Randy” provided was not a keg. It was an object called a “party ball.” A party ball was a new invention back then. It was a round plastic ball filled with 5.2 gallons of crappy yellow fizzy American beer. Probably Budweiser. This was a cheaper option than a keg or even a pony keg. And it was the best “Randy” could do. I wasn’t going to argue with him. I just insisted that when he left my house, “Randy” take the party ball with him. Because I didn’t have a car or a license and there was no way I could just drag that thing out the front door and throw it into our trash can.

“Randy” assured me that he would take care of the party ball. The next day, my friends and I worked like hell to combat the barf/smoke/beer smell with perfume and cleaning products.

By the time my parents came home, the house was too clean. It also smelled weird. Like chemicals and barf and the bottle of LouLou perfume that my father had bought for me from a duty-free shop on a business trip. There was an uneasy moment when my mother stepped in the wet spot where someone’s boyfriend barfed and said, “Why is it wet here?” My parents were suspicious, yet I skated past any concrete accusation or punishment for several weeks. Except for the occasional random peanut M&M cropping up between the couch cushions of the living room, life was fairly normal.

Fast forward to my sister coming home from college for Christmas break.

“Let’s play a board game,” she said. We had lots of games in the cupboard in the family room. Scrabble, Monopoly, Pay Day, Trivial Pursuit, Uno.

My sister opened the cupboard and saw, along with the stacks of games, one cashed-out party ball.

My sister whispered, “What the fuck is that thing?”

I lost my mind. Because “that thing” had been sitting just feet from where my mother did her genealogy projects and stuff in the family room. It had been there for weeks. Because “Randy” was a shitty liar fucker. I could have KILLED him.

Sweating, my sister and I played the tensest game of Pay Day ever. Because we couldn’t do anything else. My parents were in the other room, dithering around in their parental way. We couldn’t exactly tuck the dreggy party ball under our arms and go out in the December night whistling and saying, “We’ll be back in a minute, don’t mind us!”

We waited until they went to bed. I got a laundry basket and my sister got some blankets and a garbage bag. We swaddled the ball in the bag, then covered it with blankets in the basket. Then my sister shouted up to our parents about returning a movie to the store.

Then we wedged the party ball in its laundry basket manger all cozy in the back of my sister’s pick-up truck and drove around, laughing like nervous idiots, looking for a store that had a Dumpster not in view of any employees.

My sister rolled up to Jeff’s Superette, a little convenience store next to a hair salon/tanning booth place we frequented.

“Not here,” I said. “All of my friends always go here.”

“It’s the only place that doesn’t have lights behind the store, dummy.”

“But…”

“Just go!” she yelled.

She pulled up to the Dumpster, which was around the back of the store. Casually, I checked the latch—it was unlocked. I flipped it open. It didn’t even bang; a plastic lid! No one was coming; the night was dark, black, empty. Perfect. Why “Randy” couldn’t have taken care of this himself, I didn’t know. But I was in love with my own guile and craftiness as I reached back toward the blanketed ball and wrapped my arms around it. We were going to get away with it! I had a party, we had fun, nobody got hurt, it was all going to be fine. Any anxiety about it, any regrets or lessons or blowback were all quenched as I picked up that black-caped plastic ball and launched it into the Dumpster, the dregs of that perfect-crime party reaching for the stars.

Carrie Mesrobian is the author of Sex & Violence and Perfectly Good White Boy. She and her older sister were raised in Mankato, Minnesota, by very nice people who didn’t deserve such misbehavior from their children. To this day she is still known as “the bad daughter.”