Everyone had warned us about out-of-towners coming to visit when my wife and I moved here. What they hadn't warned us about was the culture shock, the experience of seeing your old life from a new perspective. But how could they when the friend in question was a young, radical lesbian from our old home base, San Francisco? How could anyone prepare you for that?
Her first words upon setting her suitcase in our apartment were: "Have you two ever thought about introducing a third person into your bedroom?" We replied with a hastily coughed out "No!" in unison. Of course, we might have still been in shock from seeing our friend with her head shaved, wearing a sports bra to hide her bust but not her belly, which overflowed the top of her jeans. (On further reflection, the answer is still no.)
We soon discovered we had all the wrong kinds of food in our fridge. Despite the semantic similarities, Vegas and vegan apparently are not compatible. Trips to Albertsons were complicated by our friend's insistence on haggling with the cashier over the price of produce, a quaint habit she picked up in San Francisco, shopping at a farmers' market frequented by crackheads and the tuberculosis-ridden homeless.
Our friend was unimpressed by the food choices at local restaurants, too, despite each one offering salads and veggie burgers. Instead, every meal began with her ordering items not to be found anywhere on the menu, involving ingredients not necessarily even in the kitchen. And this was not limited to trying to get vegan-acceptable food. She demanded that Thai iced tea be brought to the table hot and without condensed milk. In other words: regular tea.
(To be fair, her vegan dietary restrictions vanished when she had a hankering for milkshakes or pizza.)
Conversation centered on sex. Lots and lots of sex. Straight, gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, incestual. Discussed in a loud voice. With lots and lots of profanity, mostly the F-word. Again, my wife and I offer our apologies to the parents and young children seated directly behind our friend at Cheeseburger at the Oasis. I'm also sorry that within five minutes of meeting a friend's wife, our Californian asked, "Have you ever thought of f--king your husband up the ass?"
That's not to say sex was all we talked about. No, people from San Francisco are better informed and more cultured than us Las Vegans, doncha know? We also touched on:
• Zumanity (bad because of the lack of man-on-man anal sex);
• footwear (Nike bad because of Asian sweatshops; Reebok good because those are the ones she owns, and her friends like them);
• fur coats (bad, unless it's the one she got from her grandmother);
• personal appearance (bald and heavy, good; slim with long hair, bad; unless we're at the Olympic Gardens, then good; until she found out that local lesbians don't like overweight, bald chicks with bad tattoos, then it was just disappointed);
• men (bad, unless it's the pizza cook at Il Fornaio—then good, but in a confusing kind of way)
• rich white people (bad, unless it's her parents in Marin County, the couple she is a nanny for in San Francisco, or Howard Dean)
But she was our guest, so when she wanted to go to Pahrump to visit an honest-to-God brothel, we agreed. Hey, we were curious, too, especially as to rumors of gift shops stocked with T-shirts perfect for gag gifts. We weren't too surprised when our friend started asking if she could have an encounter with a woman. We expected her to refer to prostitutes as "sex industry workers"—it's the custom in the enlightened Bay Area. But nagging the shift manager for prices (despite being repeatedly told that this was something to be discussed between the girl and the client) and asking why the workers weren't unionized only made us shake our heads in disbelief.
Not as much, though, as when she announced her intention to come back in the summer and get a job as shift manager herself. Hey, at least she won't be staying with us.