On Vacation With the Mile-High Club

Us. Love.
So Kelly and I flew to Denver last weekend, and I will let you know now that despite the title of this post, we did not join the "Mile-High Club." For one thing, our departing and returning flights were both very crowded, and while I say that merely adds a certain frisson to lavatory love, Kelly says it's bad manners, because there could be people who need to go. Plus, she wasn't allowed to use the restroom on the first leg of our trip after she stole a flight attendant's Oprah magazine and he shrieked at her for it. And it's a moot point anyway, because we're saving our secret flowers for each other until we're married.

But tell that to our friends Tony and Michelle, whom we went to visit. Back when they lived in Nebraska, Tony and Michelle were pretty conservative, but I guess the liberal mountain air (you can smell the weed smoke blowing in from Fort Collins) does something to you, because pretty much the whole trip went like this:

Tony or Michelle: You guys wanna watch this HBO Real Sex program about swinging/this DVD box set of the Red Shoe Diaries/this video we made in our bedroom the other night?

Us: No, we will not make out with you!

They've been into "the lifestyle" for a couple of years now, ever since they were introduced to it at some mutual friends' wedding. Hey, whatever, it's no big thing to Kelly and me—we just want to be left out of it, is all. To reiterate: We both have a special gift from God that we're waiting to share only with the right person.

Polars bears eating watermelon. No, seriously.
When we weren't fending off advances, though, we did get some real vacationing done. On Friday afternoon, we tromped through Denver Zoo, which gave the ladies a chance to oooh and aaah over fuzzy things while Tony and I concocted the kind of awesome make-believe schemes for which we are not famous, but should be. Basically what happens is that we see a bunch of signs that say "Do Not Feed the Animals" and immediately imagine entering the zoo with giant bags of food around our necks, and indignantly telling any staff member who questions us that That is ridiculous and Obviously, these oats and slabs of raw meat and varieties of birdseed are just, like, snacks for us, because the concessions are too expensive, and shouldn't they be doing something about that instead of harassing us? Also, mixed in with the food are chunks of chocolate and, like, cheese dips that contain a lot of high-fructose corn syrup and other things that are totally harmful to animals. Also, we actually are planning to feed the animals. That's a pretty good example of the rich fantasy life Tony and I enjoy. Our other great idea involved dressing up in full safari outfits (with pith helmets and monocles) and strolling in with blunderbusses on our shoulders; and, just as a staff member was saying something like, "There are fewer than 3,000 of these rhinoceroses left on Earth, and we have two here at the zoo," shooting one of the rhinoceroses. "Big bloody boy!" we'd say. "Went down like a rock, he did!"

Those two plans were pretty much the highlight of the afternoon, although Michelle was strangely enthralled by a gorilla that was eating a large piece of its own poop. It was shortly after leaving the Primate Panorama that she told us we were having an egg casserole and "monkey bread" for breakfast the following morning.

Me [whispering]: I don't know what monkey bread is, but if she tries to serve it to me, I will fling it at her.

Kelly [also whispering]: Relax. I'll sabotage the oven, and we can go to Perkins like normal people.

Me [still whispering]: Don't let me forget to lock the bedroom door tonight.

We finished with the zoo, and then it was time to head for dinner with my friend Brandi from high school at a Denver mainstay, Casa Bonita. In the seventh season of South Park, Kyle gets to go there for his birthday, and that totally made us want to go, too. Brandi—the only one of us who'd actually been there before—described the food as "of slightly lower quality than Taco Bell," but since in high school we'd eaten at Taco Bell literally every day, that didn't sound so bad to me.

The ladies.
Actually, the food was the least of our problems at Casa Bonita. The restaurant itself is awesome: It is enormous, and they have, like, cliff jumpers and Black Bart's Cave and all kinds of stuff. More sopapillas, please!

But they seated us not in the main part of the restaurant, where you could actually watch the cliff jumpers and hear the mariachi band while you dined, but in this bullshit room that looked exactly like a room in any other restaurant, except more run-down. Quite a bit more run-down, really. We assumed it was because the rest of the place was full (it was Friday night), but on further inspection, vast swaths of tables lay open and unseated in the main room. I mean, honestly, easily fifty tables. We should have asked to move, but Kelly had knifed me in the foot the night before to fix an ingrown toenail, and you had to carry your own food, so I voted to stay where we were and make the best of it. (After thirty years, you'd think I'd have learned how worthless making the best of it is.)

I look really handsome in this picture.
We did drink a lot of margaritas and watched the cliff divers after dinner, and we went through Black Bart's Cave (except for Brandi, who got her boobs honked by an adolescent boy the last time she'd been in there). Then we parted ways with Brandi, and Kelly and I were left to repel our would-be seducers. Kelly feigned an allergic reaction, pretending that she couldn't breathe, and went to bed. I ended up slipping a roofie in Tony's scotch so that I could watch the U2 Zoomerang DVD in peace. It was too bad, I thought as I sipped my own drink, that he and I couldn't stay up until 4 A.M. having the sort of great, meaningful conversation that we used to, before his new hobby.

(We drank a lot of scotch. We love scotch....scotchy-scotch-scotch...)

On Saturday morning, "disaster" struck when Michelle couldn't get the oven open to get the monkey bread out. Kelly did a great job of acting like she had nothing to do with it, and I was relieved—until I learned that in spite of the name, monkey bread is just soft, doughy bread cooked in sticky butter and sugar. Then I wanted some, and having learned from the night before that making the best of it was not going to help anything, I explained in no uncertain terms that if I didn't get some goddamn monkey bread for breakfast, my vacation was ruined. Finally Michelle pretty much kicked the oven open, breaking it completely, but it was worth it. Trust me.

Nature.
We enjoyed our breakfast and orange beers (which are beers mixed with orange juice—basically, Tony and Michelle figured it would improve their chances of scoring if they fed us drinks all the time), and then we drove up to the mountains to hike. I suppose I should tell you how beautiful it was, but you and I both know that it was just a bunch of trees and sunshine and breathtaking views of the Rockies; if that's important to you, I guess you should go buy a Successories poster. We sat by a rushing creek for a while.

Tony, not sick yet.
The drive home was more exciting, because Tony got carsick and Michelle helpfully took the twistiest, windiest, swerviest, bumpiest shortcut in the history of roads, saving us, like, five minutes. Kelly sang an impromptu inspirational song called "Tony, We're All Pullin' for Ya." Totally beautiful.

Kelly and I wanted either Thai or Italian food for dinner, but Tony and Michelle demanded that we order pizza, I think because they were frustrated by the lack of making out with us and wanted more time at home for their sexy machinations. I don't remember much about dinner except suddenly not being able to move and someone dragging me up the stairs to the master bedroom and my mouth tasting funny when I woke up. Like, really funny. Not only that, but I must have misplaced my roofies after using them the night before, because they weren't in my bag anymore. Annoying.

Michelle had to work on Sunday, so the remaining three of us watched Tivo and then picked up lunch to bring to her at the art center where she works. Tony parked in a spot that was clearly marked "15 Minutes or Less," but he said it was fine, because he's a "luxe member" at Banana Republic. There was a high school art show going on at the center, so we checked out some high school art (and some high school students—Kelly is like my little Mary Kay Letourneau); and then Michelle made us talk to an old person, so we smiled a lot and pretended to have manners—but as soon we left, we vowed to be cool when we were old, like Dumbledore.

After that, we got to the airport and flew home, and our taxi driver rolled down the window to make fun of some drunken-driving college boys from Virginia who proceeded to call him a terrorist and tell him he should be driving a camel instead of a cab. So we knew were back in New York, which was kind of melancholy, but at least our purity was still intact.