The Swingers's BBQ (27 of several): The starting...

The half-Asian dude and his girl ended up somehow tearing themselves away from each other and wandering back my way towards the table, so I went back up to the porch. My friend was there without the bi girl, who had disappeared somewhere, and there were like around five people standing in clusters but not really talking, holding beers in their hands but not really drinking them, and everyone was smoking a lot, and every once in a while someone would start saying something and not complete their sentence, or they would and someone would half-answer and the conversation would kind of drift off and not continue, and everyone was absolutely tensed up, and you could just feel that their minds were somewhere else.

All of them were white and most of them were in leather, and older, and were like the freakish people who had been scattered here and there throughout the bbq, only now they were all here in one place -- one shorter clean-shaven late 40s hispanic guy with a pasted-on smile and fake laugh and a big gut, and this one early 60s guy with glasses and a grizzled grey beard and a pulled-up ponytail and these big wide eyes that never seemed to blink, and, since he seemed to have trouble walking, a cane - I had seen him at a sex documentary social hour before, wearing a t-shirt that saying

NOBODY KNOWS I'M A LESBIAN

- and more people like that, and suddenly I realized that it was after 2am and all the normal people were gone...

I quickly looked around some looking for this well-groomed non-profit CEO business lady who used to run a major charity that had ties to my university and who I had talked with earlier in the night, and also the older Italian guy who had used to be a thug and then became a sexologist and has now calmed down in his old age but still likes to tell long rambling stories about when he got a lot of ass, and they were all gone. The people like who were on the porch were like the only people left, besides the younger set, who semed to be all upstairs on the 2nd story porch.

Me and my friend tried talking to each other then too, but we also couldn't keep up a conversation, and she kept chain-smoking, and everyone kept looking around and not looking each other in their eyes and not talking at all, and just being generally tense. Someone got a beer from a nearby cooler and opened it, but didn't drink from it.

Then, this small grizzled early 60s white guy with a moustache and a leather jacket on shuffles up to me and my friend, and said in our general direction while kind of staring off into space, "It takes 40 minutes now, it always does."

Neither of us answered him, and he didn't particularly seem to notice though he had shuffled towards me and my friend and had made his announcement for our benefit, and my friend kept smoking and I took a swig off my beer, as I was doing now and then when I remembered.