Liberace: I rest my case

A little pointless fiction to make you wish you hadn't eaten breakfast.

One name. That’s all it takes. If the world only needs one name to remember you, then you’re a sex symbol forever. Done deal. You could be ninety-seven years old, and to your core of devoted fans, the sound of that one word will still be a smack in the groin with a greasy feather duster.

My cousin Trayla had a thing for Napoleon. “That name, it just slides around your mouth like a popsicle blowjob,” she’d muse dreamily as I tried not to hear. “Makes me wanna quit taking showers, then find me a jockey to hump.”

Exactly. Disgusting, but on point. It’s a reflex, like yawning while your wife is yammering on about her feelings, or farting in anticipation at the McDonald’s drive-through. And thus it has long been for me with Madonna, that gap-toothed, furry-pitted goddess whose face I baptized in effigy a thousand times during my luckless high school years. MTV was my church, Madonna my sacrament, and I gave nightly praise.

Still, I was the laughingstock of Yahtzee Bootcamp ’09 when I admitted that my loins still burned for the Material Girl. The reaction to what I thought was a private conversation, whispered furtively in between drills, was completely disproportionate. It wasn’t like I stood up and announced, “I wanna stick my dick in your grandma!” (And maybe I do, but that bit of information is on a need-to-know basis, and only your grandma needs to know.)

Bixby, with his full-on man boobs and his halfhearted roll, had the nerve to snicker at me. He snickered so hard he had to blow his nose, and his Dizzy Gillespie tissue stylings made us the center of attention in the room. I tried to shut him up as Yahtzee Master Dale made his way toward our table; he was a no-nonsense motherfucker, and you’d better be talking about Yahtzee when he came around.

“This doesn’t sound like you’re thinking about the dice and the numbers,” Dale admonished us. “It sounds like you’re wasting your time and mine.”

I was ashamed and stared down at my now-still lap. Dale was about to move on when Bixby had to open his big mouth.

“Kevin wants to bone Madonna!”

Dale’s face was carved out of stone, but pebbles began to fall, then the pebbles gave way to boulders, and after the avalanche, the Master was barking laughter and slapping Bixby on the back. Everyone in the room joined in, jeering at me and rattling their dice. I wanted to crawl up my own ass and disappear, but it was clamped shut in humiliation, and there was no tiny crowbar in sight.

I opened my mouth to explain, to defend my position, to tell them that Madonna wasn’t so bad if you just did her from behind. In the end, I set my dice down on the table and made my way through the braying crowd with as much dignity as my club foot and bicycle shorts would allow. Dale bellowed at me as my hand touched the doorknob.

“Mister, if you walk out, you stay walked out!”

There was no going back, although I did call Bixby and ask him to bring my lucky pencil to me in the hallway. He was still blowing his nose.

It gnaws at me, late at night when the sheets are clammy with regret and I’m rewinding Desperately Seeking Susan. What might have been? Where would the dice have taken me? Would I be riding the Yahtzee high life if I hadn’t lost the Master’s respect? I’ve come to hold Madonna herself responsible for my failure, as if she and her pointy bazooms personally led me to confess our secret love twenty years too late for it to be anything but gross.

Madonna, you’ve had the world by the balls for decades. Did you really need to crush my dreams like one more set of grapes in your bony hand? I would shake my fist at you in quiet rage, but my wrist is kinda shot right now.