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This was not exactly true. My brother and I had spent the previous New Year's Eve together, but that was it. His habit was to declare anything that had occurred once a tradition if he wanted to do it again. This was not some weird revisionist history that he deployed as a way to imbue one with guilt and get his way; he was not as clever as our mother in that regard. He was sincere, and for this reason I looked back at Lilith and made an apologetic face while simultaneously fighting the urge to grab my brother's keys from the ignition and hurl them into the bushes and take off running with Lilith. But she had heels on, and Brandon was, after all, my younger brother. I opened the car door for her and he drove us the few blocks to Karen and Harry's.
Karen and Harry lived in a modest cottage in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood, just across the railroad tracks and down past the Penguin restaurant. We appeared to be the early arrivals, as the house did not give off the appearance of being in full swing. Harry, a fellow about the same age as me, with dark hair and a chiseled, gymnast look, answered the door. He was wearing roughly the same clothing as my brother.
"Lilith!" he exclaimed as he opened the door. He pulled her into a tight embrace and kissed her full on the lips. I thought this was a bit inappropriate, swinger or not, then he suddenly released Lilith and swept me into a deep bear hug, kissing both of my cheeks and saying, "And you must be Kevin! It's so good to meet you -- Karen and I have heard so much about you." When he let me go, he was beaming with a warm, friendly smile, but there was something too friendly about it that made me uneasy. His smile quickly collapsed into puzzlement when I stepped aside and my brother, who had been loitering in the background on the front porch, moved to make his way in the house.
"And you are ...?" Harry trailed off.
"Oh, I'm sorry. This is my brother, Brandon." I offered no further explanation, and Harry stuck his head out the door and glanced both ways.
"Just the three of you?"
"Yep." I looked around for Lilith; she had disappeared.
"Ah, okay. Well ..." Harry stuck out his hand to my brother. "Nice to have you, Brandon. Come in and have a beer."
My brother said, "Cool," but I had distinctly detected in Harry's tone that it was not cool at all. Not by a long shot.
Harry and Karen's home seemed like one catalog photo after another: every item in every room was carefully chosen and placed. It did not feel like an actual home, but rather a model of what the home of a twenty-first-century, young, urban, professional couple should look like. When Harry opened the refrigerator, I noticed everything inside it seemed arranged: things lined up in an unnatural way. The beers were in rows; the cottage cheese, sour cream, and cream cheese were placed in order of descending size. A menagerie of anonymous Tupperware containers was also separated by size. The condiments in the refrigerator door: sized. At one time in my life such tidiness would have made me feel as though I had encountered my soul mates, but there was something fucked-up about neat-freak swingers.
I mentioned to Harry how nice his house was, but he dismissed the comment as though he'd heard it all before, saying only, "Yeah, it's okay. Karen decorates. You guys want a bong hit?" He opened the freezer and took out three quart-size mason jars, then reached into the cupboard and removed an ornate bong standing about eighteen inches high. My uneasiness began to subside significantly.
"So what we got here," Harry said as he opened the jars, "is AK-47, Trinity, and Northern Lights. What do you want to start with?" Start with?
Harry had just announced he had three varieties of high-grade weed -- weed that had a name. When marijuana has a name, prepare for the complete annihilation of reason. I consider myself a cultured smoker of pot, but I don't have the connections to rendezvous with the contraband Harry presented as though it were merely a series of frozen dinners. I was worried that I might not even remember the impending orgy.
Harry packed a sample of each variety for me and my brother, and as we worked our way through each numbing hit, I heard the laughter of women emanating from a doorway. Occasionally their tittering was punctuated by a deeper voice, and I said to Harry, "Who else is here?"