When the barflies dropped

It all started with Mimi.

Mimi decided to give up wine for Lent. Then she convinced Zoro to do the same. And then she started harassing me.

“Leave me alone,” I told her.  “I gave up my sanity.  I’m not giving up my cocktails.”

Next there was Portia, whose husband bet her a new minivan that she couldn’t stop drinking for six months.  And she took him on…FOR A MINIVAN. 

They were dropping like flies.

When I went in to have my hair done, Thomas, my hairdresser, whom I love, because he does great things to my hair and also because he’s funny and flamboyant and irreverent—Thomas announced that he was giving up booze.

“I hate it when people do that,” I said, and Thomas dropped his scissors and laughed so hard that I knew he was kidding.

Saturday was crazy. Mimi had abandoned me to go to Alabama, and I was home alone with Bean One and Bean Two.

I knew it was going to be one of those days when I had to use Hyacinth’s oatmeal shampoo to wash my hair. No matter how hard I try to hide it, the little Beans think that shampoo = bubble bath, so they hunt it down and empty the whole bottle in the bath.

Besides bubbles they were into nudism and shoes. No sooner did I manage to get clothes on Jax than I would find him parading around the house in the buff, and the constraining garments somehow dirty and littered all over the house, adding to the mountain of laundry already threatening to overwhelm me.

Moose was on a shoe kick. (What can I say? Shoe fetishes run in the family.) My new red boots. My Paul Greens. My Donald Pliner sandals. My Christian Louboutins. Jax’s Keens. Jax’s church shoes. Jax’s Crocs. Papa’s moccasins. Papa’s Five Fingers. Everybody’s shoes but his own. And it’s not like the little blanket toter understands that he needs to put them back from whence they came. Oh, no. Scattered all over the house.

The only matching pair of shoes to be found in all of Maison Bean were a scuffed up pair of white walkers in size 8.

And so by the time Papa came home from whatever it is that Papa does on Saturdays—I suspect he was hiding out, I was ready for a margarita.

“But it’s only 4:00,” Papa said.

“Daylight savings time starts now,” I said, adjusting the clock on the stove.

Papa saw the logic in my thinking and went to work making a batch of margaritas.

We hadn’t had margaritas since last summer, and we were a little rusty on the recipe. “Better get this right before Sylvia comes over and thinks we don’t know what we’re doing,” Papa said.

Note: Papa and Sylvia are still an item, and she’s a foodie, which means that he goes to great lengths to impress her with his culinary/bartending prowess.

It was while I was drinking my second margarita that Belle called.

“Hey, she said, guess who I’m having coffee with?”

Belle is a charter member of AA, and Starbucks is her watering hole these days.

“Who?” I asked suspiciously.

“Thomas Black.”

“Thomas Black? My hairdresser, Thomas Black?”

“The one and only.”

“I didn’t even know you two knew each other.”

“We met at a meeting about a month ago.”

There it was—proof that Thomas had defected. He was having coffee with Belle. You can’t get any more sobering than that.

I topped off my margarita and decided not to think about it.

The next morning Papa, who had not hydrated and who had not gone to bed at a decent hour and who had had a late dinner and red wine with Sylvia, came shuffling in for coffee a little slower than usual.

“You know, I’ve been reading,” he said, “about how bad drinking is for you, and I’ve decided to give it up.”

And that was it—they had all jumped ship, and I was by myself.

“Will you babysit?” I asked. “I’m going to the pub for a bloody Mary. Maybe I’ll find some new friends.”

Addenda

• Papa later clarified—he was talking about giving up reading.
• Zoro called. “Don’t tell Mimi,” she said, “but I slipped up and had some wine last night.” (I should have known that one wouldn’t last.)
• The Christian Louboutins—I don’t really have a pair. I just thought it sounded lyrical.
• Charlie Sheen just called.  He wanted to know if he could do rehab at Maison Bean.  As much as I love “Two and a Half Men,” I had to decline. Life is already crazy without Charlie and the skanks goddesses taking up residence.