It all started when Jack took his socks off and put them on the old fashioned radiator. Everyone in the room went on chatting away and swigging their beers as the UFC fight shouted from the television.
Ruby walked in with a plate of sandwiches which had been quartered to become little h’orderve sandwiches and the guys went nuts for them, popping whole ones in their mouths like they were Pez candy.
Ruby was disgusted by the smell of beer and body odor, but a deal was a deal.
Her and Jack met at traffic school. She was trying to break into the industry as a journalist and he happened to be a sports writer for the biggest news paper in the city. Handsome, but a complete and utter slob Jack was the type of guy who was great to get to know, but a pain in the ass once you knew him.
It didn’t matter to Ruby at the moment. She looked at this as paying her dues. Jack promised to introduce her to the editor of his news paper and get him to read her work in exchange for her organizing and “catering” a party he wanted to have for his friends.
“Simple enough” she thought.
That’s when Feral slithered up to her. A rugby player and well known misogynist, Feral got his name from biting members of the opposite team during a rugby match. He was small, hairy, loud and rude.
“Hey Ruby! So if your right leg was Thanksgiving, and your left leg was Christmas, could I meet you between the holidays?” Feral said, laughing like a hyena and moving closer in.
Ruby responded with a very dry look, followed by a very dry martini in a plastic cup which she used to pour on Feral’s head.
“Not if you were the last man on earth, I was the last woman, the fate of all mankind depended on it and I was slobbering drunk. You should think about trying a new line Feral. Maybe something like ‘c’mon honey, it’ll only take a minute and you won’t feel a thing’”, she said, mimicking his raspy voice.
Now Feral handled this well. With a smile, and blowing some of the vodka from his lips, he simply said “I like ‘em feisty”.
It was then that people began to notice the odor. It smelled like a goat cheese factory was on fire and the smoke was wafting in through the window. Jack’s socks were cooking on the radiator.
Feral, possessing an unusually keen sense of smell, reacted most strongly to this. He sneezed violently and staggered back, bumping into Carl, a football player from New Jersey, who fell over and landed on the coffee table. The coffee table smashed to bits sending a half full beer bottler hurtling into Greg’s nose. Greg, a basketball player from Detroit, reeled back from the impact then was still as the blood came gushing from his nose.
“BLOOD!” he cried in terror, having no stomach for anything resembling the macabre.
Greg’s eye’s rolled up into his head and all seven foot four inches of him collapsed as he fainted. Not wanting to catch such a big fellow, other members of the party politely stepped aside as Greg toppled like a felled redwood tree right onto a raised end table that Otis, Jack’s cat, was sleeping on. As one end of the table collapsed Otis was thrown into the air and flew across the room onto the back of Jason’s head. Jason was a Polo player from Connecticut, who had grown up deathly afraid of cats. Lost in conversation Jason did not know what was going on until the cat hit his head.
“AAAAHHH…get it off…get it off” he screamed like a little girl, flailing his arms about and spinning around.
In the middle of one spin he managed to slap Ruby directly in the face, sending her into a spin and forcing her to throw her platter of sandwiches right out the window. She landed right in Jack’s lap.
Jack gave her a wink and said “This is the best party I’ve had in years”.
The platter of sandwiches, in the meantime, fell some eight stories from Jack’s over sized apartment, landing right on a blanket that Gus had just put out to lay down on. At least thirty small sandwiches and a sterling silver platter landed right on the blanket without touching the street.
Gus looked up, looked back down and took a swig off his bottle of whiskey.
“Thank ye Lord” he managed to say while in the middle of his third sandwich, sitting now on his blanket with his back up against the wall. It had been two days since he had eaten anything that was not from the garbage.
This was his lucky day.
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