You may have noticed; I’ve talked about it around here as recently as last week: I tend to be a homebody. I used to be a lot more social than I am now, but it takes quite a bit to overcome my societal inertia nowadays. Like… I dunno, a superhero movie. That’s about it.
A couple of weeks ago I committed to being part of a team for a fundraiser trivia night. I did this when “February 1” sounded like it was way off in the future, so far off that I’d never actually live that long. My wife, a bigger fan of trivia than I, also committed. Then we realized on Thursday night that February 1 was in two days and sorta had to scramble for a babysitter. Whoops.
I was at OtherJob all day Saturday, watching shitty weather happening and dealing with a miserably low number of customers. I got a lot of stuff done, but I got no school stuff done at all and so I got home in kind of a crappy mood and in no way interested in mingling with puny humans. The fact that a solid majority of the people we were competing with were going to be strangers made it worse. I don’t do mingling well. I am worse at mingling when in a preexisting bad mood.
My wife made me go. I scowled, but I agreed.
Trivia Night was at the Fraternal Order of Police’s bingo hall. I’d never been in the part of town where it was; easy enough directions, but a lot of looking around for the place we’re going, in the dark and bad-visibility snow.
Oh! Look! A bingo hall. My wife notes that there’s no signage declaring the place to be an FOP.
“There’s no way in hell there’s two bingo halls on the same road,” I say, and we pull in. And we drive past the place. There’s bingo happening inside, and I can’t quite describe why but the place, which was all windows in front, looked like it very well could have been the most depressing building on the planet. I wanted to kill myself just driving past it.
And it was pretty clearly not the FOP. Weird. Well, back on the road.
Two minutes later, we’re driving past a second bingo hall. “This has to be it,” I said, and then we noticed the entire building was dark. So… that’s two bingo halls, on the same road, and neither of them is the one we’re looking for?
Where the hell am I and what the hell is going on? Am I still on Earth? Is it still 2014?
No, the bingo hall we wanted was the third such hall on the same road. We found it. The parking lot was packed, and mostly unplowed. We had to drive entirely around the building and park behind it. There are what looks like millions of people trying to crowd into this place, and my misanthropy has already been well and truly activated.
We walk in. Now, we’re supposed to pay to get in, and the table is registered under the name of one of the members of our group, which makes me think there’s an assigned table for us. We walk in and there’s like fifty tables scattered around, none of them numbered. There’s a woman standing by the door who looks semi-official, but me making eye contact with her just makes her look at me funny, and she doesn’t have any paperwork or anything with her, so we’re… just supposed to look around, I guess? And pay… somebody? Eventually?
Luckily for me our group ended up being by the door; I don’t think I had the heart to search for too long.
Two things become immediately apparent to me: one, I should have taken the “bring a snack” suggestion that I was given much more seriously. There are 45-50 teams of 10 here. These motherfuckers have decked their tables out like goddamn Thanksgiving dinner. They look like they’re tailgating at the Super Bowl. “Snack” does not quite cover it– “each team member will bring enough food to feed thirty people” is slightly more accurate. I spent a moment considering just wandering around the room and seizing food from people’s tables, first to see if they’d even notice, and second to see if they would let me.
Not a joke: one table I walked past several times over the course of the night had six large pizza boxes on the table. For ten people. And there was a lot of other food that was not pizza. Our table, mostly composed of newcomers who had no idea of the, uh, local culture, had a meat and cheese plate, some brownies and a sad-ass bag of Krunchers. And Bek and I hadn’t even brought that.
The second apparent thing: What with judges and employees and bartenders and everything else in addition to the teams there are six hundred people in this place and every single damn one of them is white. Weird fact about me: I am as pasty-complexioned as one can be and I avoid the sun as one avoids the wrath of God, but large groups of white people make me deeply nervous. I spent twenty damn minutes trying to find, at the very least, somebody who looked like they might have had a Hispanic grandparent or, hell, somebody vaguely Jewish-looking, and nope. Nothing. So as soon as these folks get all het up about whatever white Republicans who go to FOP trivia nights like to get het up about, they’re gonna find my ass.
I look under the table to see if there are hoods and robes. No such luck.
Then the PA announcement for, I swear to God, “Ray Lee Ray” to come to the judges’ table, and I had to be physically restrained from fleeing. Nothing good ever happened around anybody who was named Ray twice. And if Ray Lee Ray is running shit then I need to get myself gone, now.
I brace myself for the prayer before the trivia night starts. Amazingly, it doesn’t happen. Which causes me to relax, just a tiny bit.
There’s actually no punch line to this story; once the actual event got rolling and everybody sat down and stopped creeping me out, it was fun and went well. I just did not walk in remotely prepared for what I was going to be greeted by, which is my fault. We got 82 of the 100 questions right, and it probably should have been a little higher– there was at least one question that we would have gotten right if, like an idiot, I had not overlooked the existence of an “all the above” answer, a fact that aggravates me deeply, because I yell at my kids for that kind of shit all the time. That wasn’t a high enough score to place. The wife won a gift basket. And I had a bizarre moment at a urinal that I may save for another post. (How’s that for burying the lede?)
But, yeah: I live in a place where there are three bingo halls within a two-mile stretch of the same damn road. I may need to move.
