From Warning...

A scene from Aubrey Tannhauser's new transgressive novel, WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content, which can be found here.



...When I walk back into the basement, everybody is staring at me.  I look at Tony and Eph, and I think “so what's your excuse?”  They're here, at the same party, and clearly just as slutty as I am, but perhaps not so successful because they couldn't get in the right hole (unless you prefer BJs, which I’ve never understood as it relies so heavily on the talent (and jaws) of person whose primary job qualifications are diminished motor skills and judgment).  Tony and Eph are just as smelly, nerdy, and insecure as I am, but it seems to me that they're much worse, possibly only because they aren't me.  Tony's story is easy to figure out: the wealthy father, now on his third wife.  All kinds of family weirdness over the decades, affairs, betrayals, and ultimately a red brick basement with neon Budweiser signs and Saturday nights alone in West Nyack while dad drinks champagne with the vice presidents of various consulting firms.  If there's nothing nihilistic about that, I'll be damned.

     Eph, on the other hand, has two parents on their first marriage.  They buy him all sorts of presents for his birthday, and he has a family credit card he can use to buy gas and pizza for us whenever he wants.  What could be screwed up about this kid, so screwed up, in fact, that he comes to a party like this and just watches, instead of taking the free pussy when it comes?  (He also does things like hold pornography parties with open masturbation, which is completely abhorrent to me.  And the kid will spend forty minutes peeling an apple because he's terrified of the 'toxins' in apple skins, but that's not the root of the problem.)  Two things: his sister and Yale.  His sister: beauty queen.  Goes to pageants around the country.  Two weekends a month his father is off driving her to some county or state pageant or some underage beauty shoot on a beach somewhere.  It's disgusting, and you wonder how he keeps his job as a Wall Street lobbyist, but then you recall that Ephraim is Ephraim Littlestone IV, and numbers I and II were fairly well connected, so III must be secure.  Then you recall that numbers I, II, and III went to Yale and your friend Ephraim IV, though he has an IQ of 156, good grades, and always raced circles around you in math and science classes, was recently rejected by Yale, and therefore by his paternal lineage.  You've been to their house, and you can see in Ephraim III's eyes that there is no despair like that of the parent of the 99.4th percentile child who can't buy his way into the palace of the 99.9th.  And where is Ephraim's mother in all of this?  She's a doctor.  She's working.  She's busy being a success.  She’s writing a book about Parenting for Professionals.