when you’re from Los Angeles, where one is either black or Mexican, not Martian, your opinion of people opposite the globe is formed almost exclusively by the movie Not Without My Daughter. Forged in the fires of Lifetime, NWMD is a film about race, religion, family, abuse, divorce, escape, and Sally Field’s convincing hijab. Basically, she marries a doctor who happens to be Iranian (as played by Alfred Molina) and everything’s all lovey-dovey until he takes her and their kid to Tehran and then goes bat shit crazy after praying or something. In the end, Field plus her daughter escape on a magic carpet, kind of. Anyway, the movie also doubles as code word for racism in romance if, finding ourselves in mixed company, we need to express fears over a potential partnering of one with an other.

“Ooh, look at Punjabi MC being all sexy at the bar. Hollaaaaaah….” one of us might say in reference to an attractive gentleman of South Asian descent.

Cutting her off after a quick up-and-down, the other might reply, “Dude. Not. Without. My. Daughter.” And the issue would get tabled—indefinitely. Gina’s looking past Bilal’s African-ness was huge, therefore prompting me to utter the phrase, “I like him for you.”

Third-wheeling it suddenly didn’t seem so bad. She was super hyped about a guy, and I wanted to bask in some of the afterglow. Unfortunately, my time in the spotlight was all too brief.

Okay, there was a tranny at the bar who kept eyeing Bilal. Gina pointed her out. When he (Bilal, not the she-man) walked over to chat it up with her (the tranny), we were horrified. The scoop was that the tranny (name unnecessary) was in fact a real live thirty-five-ish woman with whom Bilal had done some things. How we came to find out this information I was never sober enough to know, but once it was revealed, there was no stopping the onslaught. Also I don’t think she looked so absolutely mannish—there were some very women-of-the-WWF thighs and a pair of arms that would decimate Angela Bassett’s in What’s Love Got to Do with It—but nothing that would place her last in the LGBT acronym marathon. But Gina said, so I went with it.

“They didn’t do it or anything,” Gi reported back after interrogating Bilal over by the men’s room. “But they got close. Made out, but didn’t do it. I was like, ‘Oh word,’ and he was like, ‘It was a bad look. I was drunk.’ He admitted the folly of his ways—immediately.” Fine, can we go back to talking about my life now?

We’d been pounding Rieslings for about three hours. The last lick of the scoop was that Bilal and the tranny were only one naked sexy time removed, meaning that this was the chick delivering the goods before Gina got the job. I won’t say she was jealous, but she was definitely something close. My job as the best friend was to deflect. “Dude, look at her.” Knock back. “Puhlease, she’s hideola!” Swig. “What the hell are they over there gumming it up about? Prostate cancer?” Chug-a-lug. When it finally came time to pack up our stink eyes and head home, I won’t say we were drunk as fuck, but we were definitely close.

There’s something that happens at the end of any night when a nondriver has been driven to some far-off locale—Beverly Hills, say—by a driver who has found herself exhausted by drink. Call it the whispering hour. It’s when the driver slurs to whomever’s closest, Who’s taking [social retard who can’t drive] home?

Fortunately, since 1996, Gina and I have never had to suffer through the faked loss of hearing necessary for the nondriver to survive the whispering hour. The term gas money was Greek to me, but my lack of language skills never seemed to bother her. Whenever the lights came up, dunking whatever club in vampiric mace, I’d never have to pretend-hail a cab or ask who was heading my way—Gi was always heading my way.

With Tranny gone and the lights on, Gina, Bilal, and I waited for the valet to bring The Explorer around front (Gina’s Ford Explorer has been around for more than a decade, earning through sheer guts the respect of a direct article). Standing far enough away that I didn’t vomit from their cuddling but still close enough to make it obvious I needed a ride, I may have heard the soft grumbling of a quiet riot against taking me all the way