In the KISS Navy
by Elmo Keep
In Miami I’m about to watch Gene Simmons get married.
Me, and however many millions are also watching A&E right now. In the real world, Gene Simmons was married weeks ago in LA, but here on the television it hasn’t happened yet — although I just got off a four-night cruise to the Bahamas that functioned as his honeymoon, which, in turn, won’t be aired for weeks. Meanwhile on Twitter, Gene himself is giving running wedding commentary to his 278,000 followers.
I feel as though I’m operating on dream logic; everywhere, everything is KISS. In New York on my way here there were giant billboards all over the city advertising The Wedding Episode — enormous, towering Gene Simmonses standing atop enormous, towering wedding cakes. On the way to the airport the little screen in the cab’s backseat played a promo for that episode on endless repeat. Even once I’ve left Miami, in Los Angeles on my way home, I go to a bar and emerge from the bathroom — the walls, ceiling, and floor of which are plastered with the band’s made-up faces.
So here in the South Beach hotel room, exhausted, I watch roughly five hours of Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels, the show that’s now America’s “longest running celebrity family reality television series.” And I’m exhausted from the previous five days spent at sea with 3,400 members of the KISS Army, and KISS, on a 100,000-ton mega-cruiseliner on the inaugural KISS Kruise. It’s because I’m exhausted, I think, that I cry — just a little — when Gene Simmons finally says “I do” to his long-suffering girlfriend of 30 years and mother of his two children, Shannon Tweed.
Gene Simmons might be reputably one of rock and roll’s more infamous arseholes, but come on, show me a girl who doesn’t cry at weddings.
+
Everyone I know is full of helpful warnings and advice before I leave Sydney, as though I were setting sail on the voyage of the damned: don’t ever go anywhere alone. Don’t accept drinks from strangers. Don’t get drunk on the deck. In fact, just don’t drink. Definitely don’t do any drugs. Don’t take anyone back to your room. Don’t give out your room number. Don’t catch a cab in the Bahamas unless you want to get stuck on the wrong side of the island. Don’t lose track of time off ship. Don’t look out your porthole, you’ll see the sea pitched at a 45 degree angle. Take anti-nausea medication with you. Tell people you’re married. Do you know any martial arts?
+
The First Day
We’re standing in lines six people deep to receive our safety briefing on the ship’s portside, just as soon as we’ve boarded and found our cabins. If you’re KISS, your “cabin” is a plush, enormous Princess Room, which guests are also welcome to purchase to the tune of roughly $10,000. I discovered that my cabin is literally the last room on the left: on the bottom deck of the ten-deck ship, and at the very end of the corridor. I can go no farther than the CREW ONLY doors, which lead to the engine room beside me. The room’s also in the ship’s interior, so there isn’t a porthole, which I decide is perfect: this will be my fortress of solitude. My tiny fortress of solitude just big enough to fit a bed, lying on which is a welcome letter (“Hey, KISS Kruiser! Are you ready to party with the hottest band in the world, KISS?”) and a fresh towel adorably and a little dissonantly origami’d into a swan.
Everyone has been furnished with their room key — a swipe card adorned with an image of KISS, which is also your boarding pass on and off the ship, your ticket to the KISS show, and, most ingeniously, your credit card. Well, it’s tethered to your credit card, to be charged on disembarkation. No actual hard cash ever changes hands on the ship. It’s the first of many logic-distending techniques employed to warp reality.
The KISS fans, having come from all over the world, decked out in every kind of sleeveless KISS shirt you could imagine, are positively itching in their flip-flops by this point. KISS, unlikely hard rock behemoth (vintage: 38 years), the band to whom fans go so far to pledge allegiance that they call themselves an army, are about fifteen minutes away from playing a show on the ship’s top deck. As soon as the siren sounds the end of the briefing they scramble like F-16s to get there first.
+
If you’ve ever read about cruises, you’re probably familiar with the ever-present threat of being pampered to death while aboard. This is actually easily explained through mathematics: there are 3,400 passengers and 1,200 crew. So that’s one crew member for every 2.83 passengers, and it’s their job to follow you around cleaning up after you. The second you vacate your room, someone will make your bed. It is kind of freaky how you never see it happening, though. Empties don’t last the time it takes to look down at the bar before they’re ninja-whisked into a bin, and if a guest manages to drop her glass, from nowhere someone immediately materializes to sweep it up. Dirty plates are instantly cleaned, and every surface shines.
Much has also been made lately of the murderous nature of cruises. Specifically about how many people meet uncertain ends on them. The company hosting this cruise, Carnival, has the worst missing persons record of all — 43 missing guests since 2000. In that time some 45 million people have sailed on the line. There’s no denying how easily someone who wanted to erase themselves could leave port in the Bahamas, or Jamaica, or Mexico or wherever, and never get back on the ship, but aside from one disconcerting afternoon during which the crew use the PA to call for “Cindy to please make your way to the Lido deck, Cindy” (Cindy, thankfully, was located a few hours and several announcements later), I didn’t see anything untoward happen. In fact, the KISS fans in four nights of partying could not have been a more courteous, friendly bunch of people.
There is one night, though, when I’m walking between floors to my cabin. A small, redheaded young woman extremely intoxicated with both alcohol and rage, hisses at me:
“Have you seen a little back-haired lady come through here?”
Her eyes are unfocussed as I shake my head.
“She been with my man. I’m gonna fucking kill her!”
+
“You are not the person you are at your job! You are not who you are at home! For the next four days, nothing matters except being. Right. HERE!”
Capi is hollering this incantation through a microphone at the couple thousand assembled KISS Army members on the Lido deck who have just been informed they are going to be known as the KISS Navy for nautical accuracy (and t-shirt sales) for the duration of the cruise. Capi is one of the ship’s MCs, and he looks not unlike a young version of Hogwart’s Rubeus Hagrid. He is whipping the Kruisers into a state approaching frenzy. I’m on the deck up behind the stage looking over the crowd, which affords me a slightly elevated view to the one the band will have of their faithful. The stage has been built across the two pools on the deck, and the concentric viewing tiers are covered in deckchairs at the top of which stands a waterslide that a few kids are squealing down. The cumulative effect is of going to see a rock show at a water park.
The KISS fans are putting it all out there. Some have their faces painted: a Starchild here, a gaggle of Spacemen there. Others have painted their faces with their country’s flag, or have it draped over their shoulders. Almost everyone has stripped down to their bathing suits, bikinis, or shorts. But one brave fellow is kitted out in full Gene Simmons regalia, despite the pelting Miami heat that’s made the railing is too hot to touch. The more laidback cruisers, perhaps KISS-neutral family members dragged along, are sunning themselves on deck chairs and ordering beers from passing maître d’s.
As we pull away from Miami, the ship’s horn sounds perilously close to the brown note, and we look back to see an enormous, black storm has gathered over the city.
“And look what we’re leaving behind!” yells Capi. “Now. Are you guys ready to see KIIIIIIIIIIIISS?!”
+
The ship we’re on, the Carnival Destiny, was built in 1996, and at the time it was the biggest passenger ship in the world. The only way to describe it is as stupidly huge. Stretching ten stories high, the 101,000-ton ship is more than three football fields long, and the food provisions are enough to feed a small town for a week (for example, a week-long cruise packs 56,000 slices of bacon). It is so big, I initially find its scale almost sickening: it’s hard to fathom how something that enormous stays afloat. Also, really big things just freak me out in an existential way. You get used to it, though, when you’re onboard and don’t have to look at it dwarfing buildings and bridges, docked in a line with four other equally monstrous vessels. But 1996 was fifteen years ago, and the biggest cruise ship in the world today is the Allure of the Seas, built in 2008 at the cost of 800 million Euros. Its gross tonnage is more than double this ship’s, at 225,282.
Most parts of the Destiny look like the inside of a casino, except for the casino itself, which looks like some sort of candy-striped acid wonderland, with neon rainbow tubing running along the ceiling and up and down the columns. The casino is open nearly all the time. It’s the only place inside the ship where you can smoke, and so it attracts almost all the same barflies every day and night. And me. Smoking! Indoors! There really are no rules in this place.
I spend a lot of time exploring the ship and often find myself walking through enormous spaces — dining rooms, conferences rooms, a library, more dining rooms — that are completely empty. No surprise really, everyone wants to be up on the pool deck, at the continually open buffet, or sleeping it off in their cabin. But the effect is still a little spooky, all those set tables with no one sitting at them. The registers where the crew swipe their cards on and off their shifts measure their hours in “Fun Time!” and screensavers on idle computers scroll Fun Time! over and over while piped in everywhere through the speakers is the same compilation of metal songs on repeat, prominently featuring Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”
+
So KISS take the stage for this “acoustic sail away show” as it says in the brochure, and they have all made concessions to the weather, wearing fedoras, teal blue shirts (Paul Stanley), and singlets. Not Gene Simmons. Gene Simmons will not modify his persona for anyone, so he’s sporting a black shirt, jeans, and boots, and sweating mightily for it after about three minutes. The fans are out of their minds about this, as KISS haven’t played any kind of makeup-free show in years, and they’re rocking out as hard as it’s humanly possible to rock out to acoustic versions of “Detroit Rock City,” “Shout It Loud,” and “Do You Love Me?”
After knocking out the hits, the band decides to play some obscure b-sides, as again promised by the brochure. So obscure it turns out, that they don’t actually know how to play them. This happens for about five songs in a row. They try various old tunes and each time it devolves into a quick fade out, or playing over one other, or playing the wrong part, or, more often, not knowing the words. Gene Simmons just stands on the edge of the stage, arms by his side shaking his head. He visibly mouths “I DON’T KNOW THIS SONG,” until everyone cracks up.
Paul Stanley is laughing. “I guess we should have rehearsed more! But we’re among friends, right?”
He trills over the roar of the fans, “What happens on the KISS Kruise, staaaaays on the KISS Kruise!”
Throughout this, getting almost as much attention as the band, is Gene Simmons’ wife Shannon, standing by the side of the stage. Their TV show has made her a goddess among the fans, and seeing her in the flesh, she almost doesn’t look like a real person; so statuesque and yellowly blonde, and there was that one episode where they got matching facelifts. She dances and takes photos of the crowd and of the band, and Gene Simmons comes to her side of the stage and does a little soft shoe shuffle for her every couple of songs.
After the semi-successful acoustic show (well, very successful; the fans couldn’t care less if the band forgot the words, they’re high on a heady mix of beer, sun, and proximity delirium), KISS take questions from the crowd, no matter how mundane. (“So, hi. Um, do you guys still work out?” “Yes,” “Yes,” “Not if I can help it,” “Yes.”) Anyone with a question lines up, writes it down, and then gets up on the stage to awkwardly read it out loud.
A little Gene Simmons is waiting, and when he gets up on the stage, his question is for his personal hero:
“I want to know what I need to do to be a rockstar.”
Gene Simmons asks, “How old are you?”
“Seven.”
“Well, I can tell you, you’re standing up here in front of all these people, you’ve already got what it takes. You’ve got heart.” Gene Simmons starts the crowd applauding and this little guy looks as though he isn’t sure if that’s exactly the right advice.
“Now,” Gene Simmons takes him to the edge of the stage. “I want you to show me your best rockstar pose.”
They strike identical demon poses, goat hands in the air, sticking out their tongues. The kid is screaming, “Yeeeeeearrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!” whipping around his head, totally high on this taste of adulation. He gets lifted down back in the crowd and into the arms of his father.
“Proud of you buddy, that was awesome,” his father tells him while trying to dole out a hug.
Embarrassed, tiny Gene Simmons wriggles away. “Daaaaaaaaad!”
+
The Second Day
Cruising is all about activities. And eating. But mainly activities. The planning on the attending of activities, the attending of activities, then dissecting the attended activities. Just a few one could attend: welcome night ball (dress as the country you’ve come from), KISS Halloween ball, KISS army social, KISS tattoo social, KISS trivia night, KISS movie screenings, putt putt golf with Tommy Thayer (KISS guitar player), a round in the Kasino with Eric Singer (drummer), a Q&A with KISS’s manager, three KISS shows, KISS door decoration contest, KISS lookalike contest, and a KISS wedding vow renewal ceremony.
Well, the tattoos were pretty wild.
+
In what was probably the most logistically impressive operation I’ve ever witnessed, 3,400 KISS fans had their photo taken with the band. This was achieved with military precision: break it down into halves, over two days. Over two afternoons, fans were split into groups of eight and were ushered through a series of ballrooms in a massively long queue that culminated in 2.5 seconds of time with the band — the time it takes to shoot a photo. If I was going to get this holiday snap, I realized, I was going to have to make friends fast.
No problem! You know who the friendliest people ever are? American KISS fans. The first few groups of people I pass are already in their bunch of eight (“Nope, sorry. We’re full!”) until I come to a group I count as six. Success! I ask them if they wouldn’t mind me joining them, as I’m alone.
“Oh sure! You’re on your own?” I get this reaction from everyone I meet. I shake hands with the big, sandy-haired guy accommodating me, as I introduce myself. His name is Bill, and he’s a travel agent.
“From Australia? Man, that’s a long way!” says Bill, introducing me to his friend, Bill. To Bill’s friend Lisa, and Lisa’s husband and another more-reserved couple who sit quietly in chairs off to the side.
He asks, “Where’s your boyfriend?”
“He’s back home, working,” I say.
Travel agent Bill says, “Well!”
I tell them I’m alone because I’m writing about the cruise. This information makes them a little wary of me for a while. Except for Bill, who gives me his card. Bill is the president of his own cruise and travel agency in Wilmington, Delaware. “Be sure to put me in your story!” he beams.
“So you’ve been on a lot of cruises then?”
“Oh yeah,” Bill says, which puts him at odds with almost everyone else I talk to. For most people, like me, this is their first cruise.
“But this one is definitely the best, definitely the best cruise I have ever been on. Plus it has KISS on it, so I mean, no wonder.”
This line is moving improbably quick, and it only takes about ten minutes of us making small talk (“But you do actually like KISS, right?” “Yeah, I think they’re great!” “Okay, good”) before it’s our turn. On our way in, people high off their two seconds with KISS are streaming out the other way, squealing and high-fiving each other, giving everyone else a contact buzz.
“I am so gonna touch him!” Lisa squeaks.
I ask which KISS she’s referring to.
“Gene! Duh!”
We’re at the front of the line now. A crew member is barking orders to keep things moving. “This is your group? Okay, let’s go!”
So we’re basically running, and there’s KISS standing in the photo booth saying things like “Well, hey there,” except Gene Simmons, who’s making growling noises instead of speaking. We hustle in a huddle and I don’t want to ruin these people’s photo so I get down in the front. The picture is taken, our 2.5 allotted seconds are up and we’re booted out of there.
Travel agent Bill is ecstatic, “Oh man, that was so freaking cool!”
“This is the best day of my life!” says Lisa. “I rubbed my back into Gene’s crotch,” she says dreamily. “He looked at my boobs and made this ‘Mmmmmm’ sound.” She is almost shaking with disbelief.
I thank my new best friends and ask them if they’ll be at the Halloween ball later that night.
“Heck yes,” says Bill. “You’ll see me.”
+
A couple of weeks later, once everyone is home, the cruise promoter sends an email with a download link to everyone’s photo, a postcard from another world.
+
At the Halloween ball I begin to realize how serious an event Halloween is in America. We don’t celebrate it in Australia, which is really a huge bummer. People have packed enormous extra suitcases just to transport their amazingly elaborate costumes. There’s a guy dressed as Predator in a suit, ghouls with split-open heads revealing demon skulls beneath, all manner of zombie-KISS incarnations, witches and deformed aliens, and one big guy who is dressed as a hideous version of a Baywatch babe, with a ratty-blonde wig and a novelty-sized bikini line. He recognizes me first.
“Elmo! Look at me, I’m beautiful. Take my picture,” implores Travel Agent Bill from under his wig.
Bill’s costume is so good he winds up in the top three in the parade, where he has been christened by Capi as the Ugliest Girl in the World.
The Third Day
Today the origami towel animal on my bed is an elephant.
In the morning I go up top to hang out with my true friend on the ship, the buffet, and think for a weird minute that I’ve somehow slept through the whole day. Outside it’s so dark you can hardly see, and I soon realise that this is what a tropical storm looks like: black clouds as far as the eye can see. It’s pelting sheets of horizontal rain. Still, people who’ve paid to go parasailing are determined to go parasailing, dammit, even if that means being up in the air in a giant carwash. I take the slow day as an excuse to stay in my cabin and get some work done until the KISS show later in the night. Soon I get sucked in to watching the closed-circuit TV channel where the crew make a kind of never-ending pretend soap opera, starring themselves in little skits. Which is I guess one way to stave off cabin fever when your job takes you out to sea for seven months at a time. I spend the afternoon roaming the ship and taking photos of all the different iterations of fan-made KISS boots stomping around. Dozens of KISS fans have spent pretty much the entire trip in costume.
+
Tonight is the real KISS show — the band in full costume this time. Here’s the thing about KISS: you would have to be made of stone not to think they put on a great show. I feel the involuntary smile creep across my face as I’m watching them from about four feet away. The shows are in the auditorium, which is normally the domain of lounge singers and cabaret, but given how close KISS come to vaudevillian circus act, it’s the perfect place for them. It’s also extremely comfortable, sitting in these big, cushy chairs. But no one is sitting down once the band starts playing.
This is the kind of thing that would get me shot in certain parts of New Jersey, but watching KISS plying their trade like sturdy, garishly-painted warhorses, I’m reminded of Bruce Springsteen — minus the make-up. If you take it apart, it’s not all that different: sure, “Christine Sixteen” possibly doesn’t have quite the same pathos as “Downbound Train,” but essentially KISS write working-class anthems about escaping the everyday, and take the job of playing them to their fanbase all over the world in two plus hour shows extremely seriously.
“KISS was never anything but a business, and they do take it very seriously,” their manager Doc McGhee will say at a Q&A the next day. He’s also managed Bon Jovi and Motley Crue in his storied time. “Motley Crue? They were never anything but a gang. Motley went around the world terrorizing people, and KISS went around the world entertaining people, that’s the difference.”
So there KISS are on stage, giving it hell even though their two frontmen are into their sixties now. But KISS can get as old as they want behind that make-up and for as long as they are physically able, continue to play big, dumb, great rock shows and not look any more inherently ridiculous than they already purposefully look.
I see that security guys are patrolling the crowd, keeping an eye out. What they’re actually looking for are kids, all the little KISS kids who are too short to see anything but the back of the person in front of them. The security guys pluck them out of the crowd and take them down the front of the stage for a song or two so they can see everything in all its eye-popping, confetti whirling, ear bleeding glory, and then return them wide-eyed back to their parents.
By the end of the show I’m pretty convinced that KISS is the greatest band in the whole world. I don’t know if it’s all the hours in the sun, the beers they kept serving at the show, the little kids held aloft, or the smiling faces turned up to the ceiling as the confetti falls over us inside this giant snowglobe. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care to know what it is about it either, and that, really, is the whole point of KISS.
+
The Fourth Day
Today is the vow renewal ceremony, and when I get there I feel slightly like a creep when I realize I’m the only one not recommitting their vows. Should I leave? It seems weird to watch! I find there’s one other person watching, one of the young guys on the crew, and he turns to me and asks if I want to get KISS married, so we don’t stand out. Thinking about the trouble I would be in once I got home, I realize there are limits to what I will do for a story, and so I have to politely decline. He just shrugs and says, “No problem. Worth a shot.”
There are more than one hundred couples in the room. Some of them are dressed as KISS, sometimes only one half of a couple is. They are all sitting quietly, waiting. This is very serious, I realize, and I feel as though I’ve walked in on something I don’t have a right to witness. This is somewhat dispelled once the ceremony actually begins and the ship’s mates start reciting the vows, which are evidently reappropriated KISS lyrics (“Repeat after me: I was made for loving you, baby”). Once the recommitment is finished, everyone cheers, makes out with their betrothed, and has their photo taken on the stage in a tiny recreation of a chapel. I cry a little bit when everyone was looking into each other’s eyes afterwards, embracing. But come on, show me a girl who doesn’t cry at weddings.
I chat with one couple afterwards, whose accents I recognize as my own. I ask how long they’ve been married.
“Twenty-five years,” he says.
“Wow, you guys must really love KISS, coming all this way.”
“Not my wife,” he says, squeezing her by the shoulders, “just me.”
“Yep,” she says. “That’s what love is.”
+
That night the ship’s atrium is teeming with KISSalikes, and the competition is fierce. This is the last officially scheduled activity of the Kruise, and no one is going to miss it. There are hundreds of Paul Stanleys, hundreds of Spacemen all lining the three tiers of the atrium while we, the spectators, are gathered below in an inverse coliseum echoing with KISS songs. The best of each KISS member will again by judged by the tried and tested “loudest yelling” method. Each KISSalike comes to the top of the staircase and is introduced by the MC before theatrically doing their best impression, and we then holler for the most convincing. There is no prize other than bragging rights, which in this instance count for everything.
Because KISS have been around for many decades, they also have many incarnations of costume, and so this presents intricacies in accuracy that I can’t really comprehend. They all look good to me, and I think anyone who does this is worthy of being appreciatively yelled at, but when after an hour we haven’t even gotten through all the Catmen I feel myself getting hoarse. Thinking of the days of travelling I have ahead of me, I decide to go up and lie on the deck to watch the stars passing overhead for a bit, while the ocean clips past me and the sea breeze brings a relative quiet. It’s so relaxing being lulled by the current that I wake up and find I’ve been asleep for two hours.
In the lift down to my cabin, I’m joined by a Gene Simmons who looks so much like the real thing that I think for a second it might be.
“Is it time to take off the costume now?”
“Yes ma’am, it is,” he says sadly.
“How did you go in contest?”
“Man, I didn’t even place.”
“Oh. It really was tough competition.”
“It sure was.” With that he loped out of the lift and away.
I get back to my cabin for the last time, and my towel animal is a bunny rabbit holding a KISS keyring.
The Last Day
Day breaks on Monday as it dawns on all aboard with no uncertainty that the honeymoon is over. The people are bummed. They are trundling by with their luggage and carefully peeling their doors free of KISS paraphernalia. Some stagger down the corridors in a daze, and for many that’s compounded by their encounter with their bill, which had been slipped under everyone’s door while we ate breakfast (I’d dutifully said one last tearful, delicious goodbye to the buffet). I high-five myself for sticking to my tiny budget, laundry list of trinkets for friends included, and am relieved to not have somehow in a blackout run up hundreds of dollars on my room key. Or, in the case of one guy I see eyeing the piece of paper as though it were excrement in his hands, thousands.
“You spent how much?”
“Twenty-six hundred dollars.” He seems equal parts bemused, confused, and proud. “What the fuck?”
I’m trying to mentally calculate how much of a windfall a blow-out like that from even half the guests would equate to for the cruise company when my sleep-addled brain decides it’s just “a lot.” Plus at this moment we’re called to disembark. Soon our orderly lines are snaking their way around the sparkly floors of the atrium, past all the jewelry and booze and merch stores, which are now forever shut. Everyone is downbeat but polite, with only the odd “No cutting!” rising above the murmur.
“I said no cutting!” an increasingly agitated woman repeats.
“Hey, don’t you know who that is? Shut up!”
“Yeah! Let him through.”
Pushing past in front of us is poor Eric Singer, KISS drummer. Apologetically he explains he was meant to get off early this morning, “But they forgot me.” He forces a laugh and makes his way out, parting the sea of KISS fans like Moses.
“It’s been an honor, dude!” Someone yells after him, but he and his ponytail are gone.
Once we’ve made our way portside in Miami, everyone is blinking as they emerge from the terminal. The sky is gray, heavy with storm clouds, and it’s raining. It’s raining, but it’s still awfully, stickily hot. There are long lines for cabs, and it strikes me, looking at the dozens of bedraggled KISS Army members heaving away their suitcases and lugging costumes over their shoulders, that what this makes me think of is the beaches at Normandy. This, despite the fact I wasn’t there and I doubt that our forebears who fought for our freedom had this exact vision of freedom in mind, but in any case I don’t mean any disrespect, so let’s just go with the analogy.
People in the line are savoring the last few minutes of communing with their brethren before being reluctantly dragged back to the real world of day jobs and responsibilities. Of not lying out by the pool drinking beers and comparing tattoos. Of not parasailing and swimming with dolphins and not recommitting your marriage vows after 25 years. Of not being told by your own personal demigod that you are a rock star, aged seven. Of not being with the people who make you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself. Like you aren’t a freak. Like you belong.
They’re shouting after each other, “Oh yeah, I’m on Facebook! Add me. I’ll send you those photos.” “I really loved your costume man, I thought you were the best Gene.” Others are vowing to start saving for next year, if it all should happen again.
Next to me at the front of the line stands a dour old punk New York couple in their fifties who are arguing, a little, about whether or not they’d agreed to attend a friend’s dinner engagement.
“That’s on Thursday, you know.”
“What? I thought you said Friday. I can’t do Thursday.”
“We have to go. We’re going. On Thursday.”
“I never even said I would go!”
Interrupting, I ask them, “Would you guys do this next year, if they do it again?”
“Oh hell yeah.”
“Definitely. Would you?”
“Ah,” I shrug and wave as I get in the cab that will take me to my hotel room where, in a blur of verisimilitude, I’ll watch an all day marathon of Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels, just because it’s on. “I don’t know.”
But I’m lying. Of course I would.
__
Elmo Keep lives in the country and occasionally watches Law & Order.