HO, HO...Who, Me? by Adrian Ryan

Can you pack away your dick into your carry-on suitcase over the holidays? Doesn't it deserve a present, too? Adrian Ryan tries to tuck himself away for the holiday, unsuccessfully yet again. In fact, he doesn't even make it past the "migrating snowboarders, skiers, students, and scrumptious young daddies" populating the airport.

Part One:

The Green Suitcase

It's that time of year again.

And somehow (somehow!), my penis seems to know it.

Oh, that's rich. I say "seems" like there is really any question about it at all. No such thing. Call it cellular instinct. Call it subconscious atavistic response. Scientize it, psychologize it, animize it, anthropomorphosize it, whatever, the Little Red Bugger Down Below ("BDB" for short) has by some supernatural twist been bestowed with not only mind, but will, agenda, and strategy, and has been sending me deeply urgent communiqués from the moment we went to fetch the big green suitcase from under the bed; an insistent, persistent, throbbing Morse code that protests the search for this singular piece of luggage -- an inner itch, a vague anxiety, and a raging, raging boner.

No kidding.

See, BDB knows what this behemoth, barf-green, travel-worn monster that was once lugged around by my grandfather symbolizes; this, the only piece of luggage in all of creation formidable enough to haul to and fro the unholy mountain of packages that the hordes of sisters, brothers (in law), aunts, uncles, nieces, cousins and various friends and holiday hangers-on insist on getting and giving each Christmas. It means we're going home. Montana. Butte Fucking Montana. And really, my penis is none too pleased about it.

Who can blame him, honestly?

Each year we -- BDB and I -- take this crushing journey to the frozen wastes of our ancestral lands, and each year he reacts this way. He knows (somehow, somehow!) that the lush, spoiled existence he has become accustomed to (perhaps-ahem-too accustomed?) is screeching to a halt. He knows that he will soon be forced spend two trembling, eye-twitching, nail-biting weeks surrounded (the unkind might say hounded, smothered, trapped) by a Walton's Mountain of relatives murdering our libido with omnipresent Christmas cheer.

With one bathroom to share between us all.

Let's not bring up fact that my youngest sister is fourteen months pregnant and forever peeing, peeing, peeing. Forget that my 13-year-old niece guards the bathroom mirror like a 13-year-old girl guarding her bathroom mirror. Gramma (bless her heart) isn't what you'd call incontinent, but in my book it's always best to err on the side of caution where elderly bladders are concerned, and with everyone sharing a bedroom and hardly seven-point-five inches of space to spare, BDB and I can take our slightest hope of "quality time" together, wad it up into a ball and flush it right down the crapper.

If we could just approach the bathroom, I mean.

Why, Oh Why?

I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking it myself. "Then why do you do it? Why torture yourself? You are an intelligent, capable, sexually empowered young man…grab yourself a handful of hottie, fly his ass to London and spend the holidays wrapped in a gay Dickenesian dream of butt sex and Christmas trifle! Be free, man, for the love of God, be FREE!"

But, no. The whole cursed Christmas parade is too stubbornly entrenched in my little WASP sensibilities to simply abandon, and, hey, family is family, after all. (Not to mention, heaven forbid, this year of all years should actually turn out to be the year -- the long fabled and much worried-over "Gramma's Last Christmas.") Therefore, I do it. Every year. I wave a blue-balled "good-bye" to the shores of Seattle, forsaking the land of my liberation and my easy, accessible sexual stomping grounds for the backward, homophobic and most definitely homosexless wasteland of semi-urban SW Montana. And we go in search of grandpa's formidable puke-green suitcase, my seasonal erection and I, and, inevitably, somewhat sadly, my boner's bitching-however persuasive, persistent and logical -- is overruled by a potent combination of affection, guilt and plain old tradition.

But see, none of that is entirely true. Not really. I like to blame my relatives, because, well, who doesn't? But the family's cheerful, damned omnipresence during my yearly Christmas sojourn isn't really the problem -- isn't really what makes BDB (always uber-hyperactive anyway, thanks) demand constant, maddening, frustrating, inconvenient attention (attention I have no prayer of giving him, much as I'd love to) during the holiday ritual. It's an older, more primal power, a power that inspires my pecker with the fierce will of a spoiled brat. It's caused by the simple, elegant power of the word, "No."

"You can't."

"There's no way."

"Sorry."

Ha! These are words you simply do not present to my fierce and hard-bitten sex drive. A lack of options is simply out of the question. Unthinkable. Since the day I stepped blinking from the family nest, a half-closeted teenager as horny and determined as a rutting bull, my pecker has worked miracles, eked sex from the most sexless of situations, in the weirdest of places -- on packed busses and Presbyterian altars, the middle of nowhere and in the middle of everyone. And the ego that developed around these impressive (by the libido's own reckoning) libidinous accomplishments is not easily denied. And it's not about to let me forget it. Not now. Not for a second.

But, inevitably, DBD, the suitcase and I somehow (somehow!) find ourselves at the airport each season, waiting to board the shaking, rattling, barf- inspiring dual-propellered deathtrap that will spirit us off to Butte Fucking Montana, anyway.

It happens every year.

Gate C24

I. Deplore. The fucking. Airport.

Barring naked frat parties and drunken rugby bonding (or, more honestly, the idea of naked frat parties and drunken rugby bonding), nothing makes me hornier than the SeaTac International Airport at Christmas.

Let me explain something before we go on: I am not sexually compulsive. Okay, yes I am. But ain't it great? I wouldn't change it for all the chine in tina. At an early age, I made the determined realization that grand, sweeping clinical generalizations (such as "sexually compulsive") have no foundation in reality whatsoever, being the insalubrious result of culture's obsessive need to demonize the angel fucking, choosing instead to value murder, rape, war and reality TV, and were invented by wheezing old geezers who were just jealous that I was getting laid so much anyhow. So I embraced my libidinous inclinations with the joie de vivre and respect they deserve, and would be given without question in a society with its priorities straight.

So what?

So, the fucking airport, that's what. I feel like a really randy rat trapped in a really randy rattrap. For as far as my three eyes can see (my nose-straddling peepers and my pecker's much-limericked single one) seethes a sweating sea of migrating snowboarders, skiers, students, and SYDs (Scrumptious Young Daddies), any of whom could easily put a little Feliz into my Navidad, let me tell you; all rubbing elbows, bumping knees, shrugging bulging backpacks onto bulging shoulders (that taper nicely into bulging biceps) and nodding "'Sup's?" at each other in a way that makes my testicles quake.

But I know that this eye-candy is not going to end up in my stocking. The sexy are for other gates, more glamorous destinations. Sadly, I duck behind a potted plant and wrestle BDB (my pecker, remember) into an angle that won't frighten little children and turn away from this exquisitely torturous parade of flesh. My penis and I belong somewhere else -- Gate C24.

Gate C24 is where the rickety puddle jumper that whisks me to and from Christmas cheer each year lives. It's squirreled away in some poor cousin's annex of the not-too-recently remolded airport, and no matter how many two-legged spank-fantasies populate the main terminal, not one walking wet dream will be coming or going or coming at Gate C24.

SeaTac has spared sparing no expense on the sad strip of terminal where Gate C24 is: the food courts and magazine stands, having better sense, have settled in classier parts of the airport; undecorated drywall has been exposing its naked nails for at least the last three seasons here. And it smells funny. (Don't ask me to elaborate; I don't want to get into it.) But the most remarkable characteristic of Gate C24 is its people.

The Bowling Crowd

Now, taking the big picture into consideration, I guess there's probably nothing fundamentally wrong with white athletic shoes (in late December, for the love of bleeding Jesus), ten-dollar haircuts and those ridiculous overstuffed baked-potato looking silver gangstah jackets that seem to scream "Walmart! Walmart!" like a mean accusation. Not a thing wrong. But in such combination and en masse, these expressions of sartorial suicide point to a single conclusion -- man are these people ever hicks.

Author's note: You probably find it impolite to refer to my fellow travelers and townspeople as "hicks." You're impossibly wrong. The impolite would call them white trash. The epithet "hicks," you'll note, paints a succinct and exact picture without entertaining the word "white" (clearly racist, I'm sure you'll agree) or (for god's sake) "trash." In referring to "white trash" as "hicks," I am being as considerate as possible while remaining accurate yet succinct.

(And besides, these people were once really, really mean to me.)

Gate C24 is teeming from window to naked drywall with white tra-- I mean, very nice hicks, I'm sure, and the only unmanned chair is smushed between two unmanned women and their collective mountain range of carry-ons. (Thank goodness I've been freed of grandpa's green suitcase by the emancipating virtue of baggage check.) I squish myself as politely as I can between them, feeling like an insecure thong trying to get cozy in the ass crack of the world. I scrunch around until it's as comfortable as it's gonna get and try my hardest not to be there.

Then, somehow, it happened.

Continued...mom's generic vitamin E enriched night cream and visions of the 'Sup? boy