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volunteered to go next, expecting waves of sympathy for the tragic story of losing a fifteen hundred-dollar watch in his mother’s garbage disposal trying to unclog the turkey grease in the drain.
    â€œYou try finding a plumber in Plano, Texas, willing to do emergency house calls in the middle of Christmas afternoon!” he huffed, after receiving a round of lusty boos for his story.
    Thomas’s tale of woe involved being stranded in O’Hare for seventy hours, sleeping on the floor and bathing in the sinks, waiting for the blizzard to subside so he could make a connection to Omaha, a story that wasn’t even interesting, let alone epic. Archie Duncan had spent one Christmas Eve in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai after an allergic reaction to peanut oil at Melissa Gilbert’s—yes, THAT Melissa Gilbert’s—Taste of Thailand holiday buffet. And Philip, whose catastrophes always involved a boyfriend, had arrived back in New York after a three-day visit to his parents’ retirement community in Sarasota to discover his partner had changed the locks to the apartment while he was in Florida.
    â€œBoring . . . Boring . . . Boring,” Leo announced. “Doesn’t anyone want to win the Loving Cup?”
    â€œBuckle your seat belts, boys,” Alex crowed. “You’re about to hear about my worst Christmas ever, which also happens to be James’s worst Christmas ever, but I’m better at telling it, so with your permission, James, I will proceed.”
    â€œBy all means,” James conceded.
    â€œSo, after five years of going our separate ways for Christmas, I was finally able to persuade James to come to Birmingham with me, pleading I needed his protection because my daddy was going to kill me when he found out I’d quit my job at Doubleday to try to make it as an agent. He could pop and spit like Mount Vesuvius once you got him irritated.”
    Unlike most of the men in their circle, who predictably kicked their families a rung or two up the social ladder in their provincial hometowns, Alex didn’t exploit time and geography to recreate a more polished, serene, fictionalized version of his early years. Alex insisted on portraying his Alabama childhood as a particularly raucous episode of The Simpsons. The colorful caricatures of a bulging-eyed, sputtering Armenian patriarch and his slightly daft, kindhearted wife bore no resemblance to his reserved and formal parents, the owners of a chain of Oriental rug emporiums, advertised on late-night television across north and central Alabama as perpetually “Going Out of Business, All Prices Slashed.” Mom-bo-la and Pop-bo-la, as he’d christened them as a tonguetied toddler, doted on their only son’s every whim.
    â€œSo, I said to James after Christmas Eve dinner and a little too much sparkling wine, I have to admit, I said, ‘James, I am going to die if we have to sit in this house the rest of the evening with Mom-bo-la and Pop-bo-la and fall asleep watching White Christmas on television.’ And so we got in the car and drove downtown, where, of course, every bar and club was shuttered and the sidewalks pulled in, and I said, ‘James, pull into the back lot, near that door with the red light over the entrance, I think we can find something to drink right there’.”
    â€œI wish you could have seen the look on his face when we walked into The Teddy Bear Lounge, scene of my earliest crimes against nature. Every drag queen in Alabama and half of Mississippi was in that tiny room, and the fabulous Miss Brandy Alexander was emcee of the midnight show, and a half dozen horse-hung dancers were shaking their weenies on the bar. I spotted him right away, before James. The most astonishingly beautiful man we had ever laid eyes on, the spitting image of Steve McQueen, military, rough, and masculine. He told us his name was Chance, right out of Tennessee Williams, perfect. . .