The Birthday Party

Hamish couldn’t believe he was turning 245 days old in less than a week. A milestone like that deserved a bash, a big gala dinner dance filled with feather-topped, high-kicking can-can dancers and waiters serving up dimpled buttcheeks braised in a succulent kerosene sauce.

It needed a photo booth. Fireworks. Handmade chocolates flown in from Belgium, inscribed with superlatives relating to his life thus far.

Keen. Brilliant. Star Athlete. Tantric Sex Master. All these things delicately traced into the the crust of truffles.

It needed music. A bright, up-and-coming pop songstress. A young broad with a supple body and a nightingale voice; a sprightly thing who would take the stage in a latex thingaroo, barely covering her hummahoos. He made a note to check MTV to find such a starlet.

The next day, Hamish left his hut to begin party planning.

Discouragingly, it took three days alone for Hamish to find dancers. Unable to find can-can dancers with altitude crushing kicks, he settled on a troupe called the Octogenas, who were usually booked every night by their nursing home to perform in the rec room, but Myrtle Methadone had just met her maker and no one there was in the mood to watch a crew of old biddies shake their wattles.

Never performing outside of the home, the Octogenas excitedly signed the deal.

The next day, Hamish learned the lesson that fancy party waiters do not fit his budget, so he gathered up a group of bar flies who used to play darts with his dad and feel up his mama. They didn’t own tuxedos, so he grudgingly allowed them to wear flannel.

A day before the party, Hamish resolved to forgo the personalized Belgian chocolates, pouring a bag of leftover Easter Hershey Kisses in a microwave-deformed Tupperwear bowl.

The up-and-coming starlet he found came packing a rider that included a Lalique vase filled with blue and only blue M&Ms, fresh water from a Moroccan camel’s hump, a kilo of angel dust, and a current copy of US Weekly. Hamish settled on a folk singer he had seen downtown, sitting on a curb in a heap of earth-toned fabric, who plucking a broken guitar and collecting pennies and trash in a fedora.

And then it was the day of the party. The Octogenas undulated in seductive paths carved out by their walkers, with Agnes’s left breast flopping about and slapping bystanders with the misfortune of standing too close. And then Bertha lost her grip on her walker, crashed into one of the flannel-clad waiters trying futilely to take a reticent swig from his flask. The rest of the Octogenas abandoned their gig to accompany Bertha to the hospital, where she would undergo a hip replacement.

The folk singer, Sunny Moonbeam, twanged away quietly on the stage, eventually putting himself to sleep.

As Hamish looked around, he realized that his party had put everyone else to sleep, too.

Snagging the bowl of Kisses from the buffet, he left his own party and went downtown, where he settled in for a fifty cent peep show. He officially turned 245 days old as a brassy-haired, tough-skinned woman contorted herself in eye-widening positions on a wooden stool.
____________________

The deets.