Long ago, I was asked to write a short monologue/speech thing for my friend's bachelor party. I'm sure he regrets it now, because the following is what I wrote, which someone else read in my absence. The names of the groom-to-be, his guests, and his fiancee have been replaced, to protect their dignity and social standing, by names chosen at random from the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame.Before I begin, I should soothe the anxieties of the environmentally conscious by noting that this speech was written on 30% recycled paper and consists of 60% recycled jokes. Never let it be said that I didn't chip in for the good of us all.
Now then, the speech. When Felix Ross first suggested that I contribute to the roast of our good friend Alex Bennett, I was rather surprised. And flattered. Felix and I, you see, have a unique friendship in which we both hate each other. I was concerned that, due to my as-yet-unstable housing situation, I wouldn't be able to write anything to mark the occasion. But I snapped out of that pretty quickly. This was important, by thunder, and I needed to pull my weight, for two reasons:
1) My friend Alex Bennett, who proposed to his fiancee Alice Fergusson during the opening night performance of Faustus—a play I was in—is embarking on a special and wondrous life journey with someone he obviously loves very much.
2) My friend Felix Ross—who is fruitier than Carmen Miranda's party hat—is attending a heterosexual marriage ceremony. It's a novelty too bizarre and unlikely to let pass without comment.
Oh, and the rest of you oughtn't worry; Felix and Alex are the only two standing in front of my slings and arrows this time. Everyone else gets off easy. Or so your girlfriends tell me.
Anyway, back to the groom-to-be. We met in college, you see, and thus mutual acquaintances often ask me what my first memories are of Alex, and...actually, they don't. My friends know me well enough to never ask me anything like that, because I have the worst short term memory in Christendom. Also, my sleep schedule in college was highly irregular, so I'd often distinctly recall things that never, to be technical, happened. Hell, my first memory of Alex involves us on the sawdust floor of some sketchy oyster cellar, pounding opium into the soles of our feet with wooden mallets as the two lithe, pulchritudinous daughters of a wealthy Arab sheik—himself half-crazed by strong drink and giggling somewhere off in the corner—danced around us before doing things to, with, and for us that we'd only read about in Hustler's Letters to the Editor. And what the hell kind of remembrance is that for a stag party? What kind of effect would it have on Alex as he crawled into bed with Alice? Christ, he'd get cold feet so hard his ankles would freeze together.
Besides, it isn't true. No Arabs attended our alma mater. My first plausible memory of Alex brings to mind an odd, lanky fellow fascinated by Gumby and prone to running about in the woods swaddled in foam. He also played a hand in that year's Dungeons & Dragons campaign as a plucky, young adventurer on an endless search for “tray-sure,” a term I recognize but can't identify.
Other things come to mind as well. His sleep schedule was similar to mine, in that he'd spend all day playing video games in the house I lived in, and he'd be there button-mashing away as I went off to bed for the evening. When I woke up, he'd either still be there playing, indicating that he hadn't slept, or he'd be asleep on the couch, game still on, controller loosely gripped in his slumbering hand. Had I the presence of mind to fetch a camera, the resulting picture would be a modern-day Goatse; familiar to all corners of the Internet and, in its own degraded way, an accurate symbol of the human condition.
...Jesus, why do I write things like this? I must be getting sick. That ungodly cleaning lady of mine is trying to poison me. Revenge for leaving that spanikopita box where their dog could get it, I suspect. But that doesn't have much to do with Alex. I'd better get back on track.
Alex also had, and still has, a remarkable grasp of philosophy. And it is his alone, because when he goes off on random theoretical tears, no one around him knows what the blue fuck he's talking about. Oh sure, the graphs and puppets help. But Tube Socrates can only explain so much before the brain of whoever he's talking to goes into autopilot to avoid implosion.
What else? There's got to be more. I've known the man for years now. Man. How long it's been since his freshman year. Since my freshman year. We're getting old, Alex. It's only a matter of time before we're reminiscing about dining hall food during alumni weekend because it'll be the only thing there that still connects us to the alma mater. Once it hits that point, we're led away from the watering hole at sundown by well-meaning undergraduates who promptly remove us from the breeding pool. Come on, they'll say. Come on, grandpa. Cooing at us like we're goddamned children. Come on and take your medicine.
Good lord, how did that tangent hijack this speech? Did I get a contact high from something? Ether under the carpet? Fresh paint? It doesn't matter. Gotta keep moving.
Alex's theatrical roles come to mind now, for some reason. He played such memorable, imagination-capturing characters as...um...fuck...oh! One of the murdered husbands from Big Love, and the creepy vagrant from The Cherry Orchard, and various Shakespearean parts where he was either good with a sword or gussied up like a Cambodian hooker; I honestly can't remember which, and it may have been both simultaneously.
But it was Faustus, his senior showcase, that I actually do remember, because the stupid bastard cast me in it. And dressed me as a pimp, no less. Working on that show was a lot of fun, and it was my first main stage production (and my only proper one, since I'm trying to expel that ghastly Brecht play from my head with all appropriate speed). Alex put together a professional-looking show with limited time and extremely limited budget, and no jokes are necessary to once again thank him for the experience. The Faustus movie was also pretty cool, although it did suffer a bit towards the end when one of the actors stopped showing up.
And that's pretty much it. Whatever further accomplishments, trials, failures, or successes Alex has experienced during his life are best left for someone else to detail. All I can say is best of luck my friend, may you and Alice have many years of happiness and joy, and please, if you have a kid, don't name it after me. It'll probably turn out to be a serial killer, and I don't want that on my conscience.
Thank you.
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