PASADENA, CA─Hosts of a local dinner party were surprised to find one of their guests taking a shower without asking during the main course. The faux pas was not immediately discovered as there were more than twenty guests in attendance, and conversation at the large dining table was not without raucous laughter and animated stories about inner tubing the sand dunes of Idaho.
The freedom of showering with the curtain pulled back is beyond orgasmic.
“I think like fifteen minutes went by after he left the table. I was worried the hor d’oeuvres had made him sick,” said hostess Nicole Chandler. “So I went upstairs to check and I heard him cursing in the shower. I came back to the table and everyone already heard the water running, people were in disbelief. Total weirdo move, right? Complete idiot. We’re not in college anymore, grow up and stop playing the stooge.”
In actuality the hostess had descended her staircase, interrupted someone’s story about trying three-card-monte in London, and announced that Darby was showering upstairs. This news was met with a mixture of blank stares and a few others saying “what the fuck” in unison.
On Arroyo just in case you want a diuretic right before a crowded dinner party.
Before excusing himself, local entrepreneur Braberius Darby 32, was embroiled in a debate about whether or not USC would return to the Rose Bowl game during the next half-decade, and was heard muttering something about UC Berkeley grads being “god-damned snobs” as he excused himself from the table by saying “the john” out loud to no one in particular.
Host Stephen Chandler claimed he was not surprised, despite the strong sense of surprise in his home. “We went to college together. He did random shit all the time. Whatever, he’s a strange dude. He used to blow off class to plan campus pranks. Total lightweight drinker and smoker, too.”
The man in question, Darby of South Pasadena, seemed to regret showering upstairs and feared his future social calendar might suffer because of the incident. “I totally wasn’t fucking around this time,” he whispered sheepishly, standing next to the mantel and peering over the top of a whisky tumbler. “Susan is a sub-par cook, so I devoured some King Taco before I arrived. I had no clue Chandler had catered in Italian tonight. The burrito was a big mistake, mon.”
Maserati: for the mid-six figures earner who happens to have an inverted penis.
Guest Claire Van Owen, a San Pedro veterinarian, offered her opinion, “Darby’s a jackass. He took me to dinner once during our mid-twenties. I reserved a table while he went to find parking because he wouldn’t valet his precious El Camino. I’m waiting with my menu for like 30 minutes, of course I had left my phone in his car. I go outside and he’s hiding across the street in some bushes waving at me. He hit a parked Maserati and drove off like an idiot ’cause he didn’t want his insurance to go up. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to sneak back into the restaurant to get me. Not a terrible guy, just sort of an idiot. Glad it happened, if the date had gone well I might have slept with him.”
Before everyone gathered around the table to eat, Darby was also said to be acting bizarre and taking impromptu polls about who might want to dance if the hostess could be coerced into playing some “proper jams.” He even asked one guest if they wanted to invest in his latest business venture, renting sets of theme costumes to people throwing “Who Dunnit Orgies.”
“I told him to shut up and have a drink. Talk business with the men, meet one of the single girls, stop bothering me–I’m throwing a party here. He even wanted to log onto his Spotify account and play songs over the surround sound system so people would dance. I told him no,” said Nicole the hostess. She added “I kept dreading he was going to go start taking shots and try to do the worm on the carpet. That was my new year’s party four years ago. Totally mortifying,” said Nicole Chandler.
The upstairs bathroom is a dimension where taking an “upper deck” is nearly impossible.
Despite everyone at the party knowing about his shower, Darby continually denied that anything took place in the upstairs bathroom with the chain-pull toilet. Fellow guests politely avoided him during a post dinner billiards game, and an impromptu wine tasting in the study’s fully restored conversation pit.
Darby then loitered by the mantel just off the main foyer, trying to subtly rejoin the group, first by chatting up an available paralegal from Alhambra about his personal record for consecutive free-throws made. And then by mistiming his canned laughter trying to blend in with the outskirts of the crowd. He didn’t make a splash liked he had planned to earlier in the evening, when he plotted his moves whilst taking a shower at his own home.
“Totally unplanned, that burrito was coming out no matter what, and I had to bolt upstairs through the kitchen. It was so bad TP wasn’t going to cut it. I realized that pretty quickly. If I didn’t shower I would have just ghosted out the back door. Without the shower there’s no way I’m salvaging the night. Now everyone’s acting like I’m screwing around. The universe avoids my advances tonight, mon. I should probably run out and grab the Chandlers a bottle of wine as a secret apology.”
At press time Darby had not yet managed to get any phone numbers, business cards, or even affirmative responses to his conversational offerings on sports, barbecue, investing, or his medieval puns.
“Showering without saying something is just the way Darby rolls. As long as he didn’t mess with the toilet up there, it’s all good,” said Stephen Chandler. “I like having wild card/borderline idiot friends around sometimes. It keeps things loose.”
The mantel, where off-the-charts charisma has been ignored for centuries.
The hostess had initially tried to leave Darby off the invite list, but her husband insisted he be included. She then conceded that he would probably be invited to their next dinner party as well. And that in the last year Darby had at least left their gatherings when the crowd started to thin out, as opposed to his old tradition of having Last Guy to Leave the Party Syndrome.
The Basement of my Mind 