WOO-HOO! BACHELOR PARTY!

In a week and a half, I’m heading to Vegas for a bachelor party.

This is going to be weird.

I can’t quite predict exactly in what ways it will be weird, but this will not be a typical trip to Vegas, nor a typical bachelor party.

Let me first give you some details on Eric, the groom:

• Eric is a devout Christian.
  

• Eric doesn’t drink.
  

• Eric has a pet snake.
  

• Eric is the most competitive person I know.
  

• Eric proposed to his fiancee via a short film he put together, and he rented out a movie theater to screen it for her.
  

• Eric says “Jiminy Christmas!” in almost every conversation.
  

• Eric is a really nice guy.

Eric can also hold a grudge. When my friend Dave fooled a group of us into thinking he was a feral ape-man while we were camping in Joshua Tree (long story), we all vowed revenge. But Eric was the only one to actually get revenge — about five years later — by using his connections with the police department (Eric was my boss when I wrote for World’s Wildest Police Videos). Eric had a cop track Dave down and handcuff him, giving some cockamamie story about Dave’s car being used in a drive-by shooting of Richard Riordan’s son. (I helped concoct that cockamamie story. I’m so proud.)

That also happened in Vegas.

Ordinarily, a bachelor party might not scare me so much. Hey, I’m a liberal gay man. The idea of men ogling naked women doesn’t gross me out. I’m hip. In fact, the last Vegas bachelor party I went to was even kinda fun. I got drunk, I watched my friends act horny (which my friends don’t often do), I chipped in for the bachelor’s lap dance, then I went back to the hotel and gambled some more.

But I suspect this bachelor party will be a little different. For one thing, Eric’s having a joint bachelor party with his fiancee. The guys and the girls are going to split up on Saturday night to do their own things, but whatever happens, Eric’s going to have to answer for when he gets back to his hotel room later that night.

Plus, Eric’s a devout Christian, Eric doesn’t drink… (see above)

I talked to Eric this morning, and he told me that the RSVP list is shorter than expected. (It’s hard to recruit people to go to a party in another state, as I learned when I had my 30th birthday party in Vegas.) The girls look to have a good group, but as of now, there are only seven men planning on going. And most of them are people I haven’t met before. As it’s shaping up, it looks like it’ll be me and Drew (two gay men — always the life of a bachelor party), plus Eric, my friend Michael and three of Eric’s married friends from church.

Woo-hoo! Let the bachelor party begin!!!!

Drew hardly knows Eric and is not overly thrilled about going to strip clubs with straight men (though he’s being a trouper about it all). I promised him that if things got too buck wild, we could bow out of Cheetah’s a little early. (Having been to Cheetah’s for the last bachelor party, I can almost guarantee that things will get buck wild.)

But now I’m worried. It’s easy to leave when the group is big, but in a group of only seven people, even the absence of two bored gay men could be a blow to the party. If a man looks around a strip club in the middle of his bachelor party and asks, “Aw, did the gay guys leave?”, it is a sad night indeed.

So maybe this won’t be so easy. I can’t trust the Christians to orchestrate a wild night. And I want to make sure that Eric has some adventures he can’t share with his fiancee. So I might have to get my hands a little dirty.

I’m in way over my head.