The Mandy Club

(recut 9-13-08)

So last night I go see Justin because Jacob ditched me and I haven’t seen Jonathan (the hippie) in a long time.

As predicted, the minute I get there he’s pulling out a blunt that he’s rolled from his glove compartment. I get in his truck. He hands me the broken window crank and we roll down the windows. He puffs on the blunt and lays it in the ash tray.

“Have you ever heard how loud my speakers go?” 

He cranks up his hippie music and we get to the stop sign. He pulls out a pack of cd’s from the glove compartment. “Just wait until you hear Outcast!”

“What!?” He is yelling over the music. Silence ensues and then suddenly Andre 3000 is apologizing to Ms. Jackson for making her daughter cry. Justin punches the stereo up as loud as it will go and the truck rattles with the bass line. 

People are looking at us through the windows.

Justin looks at me, heavy lidded.

“Awesome,” I say, grinning back at him. Jonathan cracks me up.

Anyway, we get to Fat Willie’s which is the unfortunate name for the pool hall that Justin works at. Thankfully no fat guy named Willie frequents it. I’m sure all the overweight Williams and Bills stay far away and play pool at the bar on Northwest Broad. But regardless of its mildly ludicrous name, Fat Willie’s is where Justin works. So we walk in.

Immediately he’s greeting everyone and introducing me, which I have always appreciated from him. It becomes apparent, however, that Justin’s brain is fucked beyond belief because as he’s yelling at the captain of one of the pool teams, I realize that his words are slurring really badly. For a second, I worry for him. But Justin has always been this way. 

He’s thirty-two and can be both remarkably mature and immature in the same breath. We went through the teacher-education program at the same time, though he didn’t finish. Though that probably had little to do with the millions of brain cells he's killed by doing so many drugs at concerts and on tours and in crappy bars and at home and once, he claims, by eating a whole block of weed as the cops pulled his friend over.  

We sat down at a low table with comfy chairs and watched the rest of Justin’s pool team suck or not suck against this guy named Larry’s team. Eventually Justin got up to play, and I hung out with the previous player, Ferrell, who was apparently 27, worked at Lowes, lived with his parents, and was hysterically funny. He had lost his match, and some of the other players were giving him a hard time about how much we was around and still hadn’t practiced enough to beat the 21-year-old blonde, nerdy guy who had beat him. 

Justin came over after a break. 

“So I just had to talk that guy out of being pissed because some girl was spreading rumors that he was gay.” He gestured at the door where apparently the guy had just left. 

“Dude," Ferrell spit some tobacco into his empty New Castle bottle. "Blame it on Mandy. Just blame it on Mandy, dude! She had a big mouth and she don’t even hang out here any more!”

Justin shrugged and went back to playing. 

“Hey, Mandy doesn’t hang out here anymore?” Someone asked.

“Nope,” and Ferrell took a swig of what I assumed was a different bottle of New Castle. Though the color of the liquids was frighteningly similar. “Yeah, have I mentioned that I’m a new member of the Maggie club?”

Someone laughed. “Yeah, and who else is it? Like John, and… Frank, and…”

“The Mandy Club?” I asked them. 

Ferrell cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah, she’s this slut that a bunch of dudes here have--”

“--Oh.” I said. The Mandy Club? I was horrified! 

“She got you too, didn’t she, Ferrell!”

“Well, it’s more like I just fell into it.”

Thoroughly disgusted, I now had the mental image of Ferrell,with his cheek full of disgusting dip, literally falling into a giant vagina.

Justin won four games in a row against a chubby guy with glasses whose name I’m sure was not Willie and clinched the top spot for the pool team he was captain of, Balls Deep.

Yes. It was a classy day in Murfreesboro.

That Mandy Club was disturbing though. And I wondered if there was a girl somewhere named Mandy who was having a great time with her friends, or riding in her car to a fast food restaurant, or watching the nightly news with her mom. I wondered about this real person who was being torn down and degraded into the punch line to a bar joke, and I wondered if she was happy somewhere, or if she hated herself. Did she even know what she was to them? Could she?