Jirafas

This is fiction.

The party is supposed to start at 7 pm, but of course, no one shows up before 8:45. When the guests finally do arrive, I randomly assign each of them to one of four groups–A through D–as they enter. Each assignment comes with an adhesive 2″ color patch, a nametag, and a sharpie.

The labels are not for the dinner,” I say, “they’re for the orgy that follows the dinner. The bedrooms are all color-coded; there are strict rules governing inter-cubicular transitions. Please read the manual on the table.”

Nobody moves to pick up the manual. There’s a long and uncomfortable silence, made longer and more uncomfortable by the fact that we can all hear the upstairs neighbors loudly having sex on their kitchen counter.

“Turn on the music,” my wife says. “It masks the sex.”

I put on some music. Something soft, by Elton John, followed by something angry—a duet by Tenacious D and Leonard Skynyrd. One of the guests—unsoothed by the music, and noticing the random collection of chairs scattered around the living room—grows restless and asks whether we will all be playing musical chairs this fine evening.

“No,” I reply; “this fine night, we all play Mafia.” Then I shoot him dead as everyone else pretends to stare out the window.

In the kitchen, my wife uncorks the last bottle of wine. As trendy wines go, this one wears its pretention with pride: Jugo de Jirafas, the label proclaims in vermilion Helvetica Neue overtones.

“What does jirafas mean,” I ask my Spanish friend. “Giraffes?”

“No,” she says. “Jirafas was a famous rebel general who came out of hiding during the Spanish Civil War to challenge Franco to a fight to the death. They brawled in the streets for hours, and and just when it looked like Jirafas was about to snap Franco’s neck, Franco screamed for his deputies, who immediately pumped several rounds straight through Jirafas’s heart. They say the body continued to bleed courage into the street for several weeks.”

Jugo de Jirafas, I enunciate out loud.

There’s an awkward silence in the living room as the assembled guests all hold an involuntary thirty-second vigil for the dearly departed General Jirafas, who was taken from us much too soon. Poor man—we barely knew him.

Then the vigil is broken up by the arrival of my Brazilian friend João, who lives across the way. Our housing complex is nominally open to all faculty and staff affiliated with the university, but in practice it more or less operates as a kind of hippie commune for expatriate scientists. On any given day you can hear forty different languages being spoken, and stumble across marauding groups of eight-year old children all babbling away at each other in mutual incomprehension. Walking through our apartment complex is like taking a simultaneous trip through every foreign-language channel on extended cable.

It does have its perks, though. For example, if you want to experience other cultures, you don’t need to travel anywhere. When people suggest that I’ve been working too hard and need a vacation, I yell at João through the bedroom window: how’s Rio this time of year?

Exceptional, he’ll yell back. The cannonball trees are in full bloom. You should come for a visit.

Then I usually take a bottle of wine over—nothing of Jugo de Jirafas caliber, just a basic Zinfandel from Whole Foods—and we sit around and talk about the strange places we’ve lived: Rio and Istanbul for him; Mombasa and Ottawa for me. After dinner we usually play a few games of backgammon, which is not a Brazilian game at all, but is acceptable to play because João spent three years of his life doing a postdoc in Turkey. Thus begins and ends my cosmetic Latin American vacation, punctuated by a detour to the Near East.

Tonight, João shows up with a German lady on his arm. She’s a newly arrived faculty member in the Department of Earth Sciences.

“This is the bad Jew I was telling you about,” he says to the lady by way of introduction.

“It’s true,” I say; “I’m a very bad Jew. Even by Jewish standards.”

She wants to know what makes a Jew a bad Jew. I tell her I eat bacon on the Sabbath and wrap myself in cheeseburgers before bed. And that I make sure to drink the blood of goyim at least four times a year. And that I’m so money-hungry and cunning, I’ve been banned from lending money even to other Jews.

My joke doesn’t go over so well. Germans have had, for obvious reasons, a lot of trouble putting the war behind them. When you make Jew jokes in Germany, people give you a look that’s made up of one part contempt, one part cognitive dissonance. They don’t know what to do; it’s like you’ve lit a warehouse full of bottle rockets up inside their heads all at once. As an American, I don’t mind this, of course. In America, it’s your god-given birthright to make ethnic jokes at your own expense. As long as you’re making fun only of your own in-group and nobody else, no one is allowed to come between you and your chuckles.

The German lady doesn’t see it this way.

“You should not make fun of the Jews,” she says in over-articled English. “Even if you are a one yourself.”

“Well,” says I. “If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“Other people,” offers João.

So I laugh at João, because he’s another person. There’s an uncomfortable pause, but then the earth scientist–whose name turns out to be Brunhilde–laughs too. A moment later, we’re all making small talk again, and I feel pretty confident that any budding crisis in diplomatic relations has been averted.

“Speaking of making fun of others,” João says, “what happened to your lip? It looks like you have the herpes.”

“I damaged myself while flossing,” I tell him.

It’s true: I have a persistent cut on my lip caused by aggressive flossing. It refuses to heal. And now, after several days of incubation, it looks exactly like a cold sore. So I have to walk around my life constantly putting up with herpes jokes.

“I’ll go put something on it,” I say, self-consciously rubbing at the wound. “You just stand here and keep laughing at me, you anti-semite.”

Turns out, I’ve forgotten the name of the lip balm my wife buys. So I walk around the party with a chafed, bloody lip, asking everyone I know if they’ve seen my Tampax. The guests mostly demur quietly, but one particularly mercurial friend looks slightly alarmed, and slowly starts to edge towards the door.

He means Carmex, my wife yells from the kitchen.

Eventually, all of the wine is drunk and the conversation is spent. The guests begin to leave, each one curling his or her self carefully through the doorway in sequence. For some reason, they remind me of ants circling around a drain—but I don’t tell anyone that. There is no longer any music; there was never an orgy. There are no more Jew jokes. I turn the phonograph off—by which I mean I press the stop button on my iTunes playlist—and dim the lights. My wife stays downstairs.

“To do some research,” she says.

Much later, just as I’m making the delicate nightly transition from restless leg syndrome to stage 1 sleep, I’m suddenly jarred wide awake by the sound of someone cursing loudly and repeatedly as they get into bed next to me. I vaguely recognize my wife’s voice, though it sounds different over the haze of near-sleep and a not-insignificant amount of wine.

What’s going on, I ask her.

She mutters that she’s just spent the last hour and a half exhausting the infinite wisdom of Google, circumnavigating the information superhighway, and consulting with various technical support workers scattered all around the Indian subcontinent. And the clear consensus among all sources is that there is not now, and never was, any General Jirafas.

“It just means giraffes,” she says.

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