I always brought a few dolls along with me to the house parties. It was kind of my calling card; better to be known as “that weird guy with the dolls” than “that weird guy” simpliciter. It was weird at first having little, perfectly mannered porcelain people at a rowdy frat party, but as the beer flowed it usually stopped mattering.
The question I inevitably got, once, from everyone, was “do you fuck them”. It came either right away, hushed in my ear, or half a dozen drinks in, loud for everyone to hear. I always said no, which was mostly true and helped reduce the awkwardness when someone made a pass, or got found with one in the bathroom.
I didn’t mind, ultimately the question was a way of getting at “why do you have this weird hobby” and I don’t really have a good answer for that. I got my first one at 13, from parents with more money than love, and it’s just been a normal part of my life ever since.
Freshman year was awkward, at least that first semester with the housing crunch; I almost put the pair of dolls I had then in self-storage to lessen the weird looks my roommates were giving me. I just couldn’t do it, though. My routine was just too dependent on waking up and having them next to me to keep me from falling back asleep.
It’s only when I moved off campus that the whole thing kind of exploded into a full on lifestyle. I was supposed to find roommates to split this big old place with but no one really wanted to live with me; go figure. I gave both of my dolls their own bedrooms but that was even lonelier. I found myself just pacing the house, or turning the tv on just to have some background noise.
So I gave in and bought a few more: some newer models I’d had my eye on for a couple years at that point, all soft-touch and composites, real state of the art, far more active than the ones I’d had before. The exercise was good for me, I told myself, lose that freshman fifteen or whatever.
And then I started prowling the garage sales and the estate sales, scooping up any doll that its owner was trying to get rid of: wooden ball-jointed models, old plain porcelain dolls with half their fingers missing, stuff like that. The house filled up with the pitter-patter of little feet, I had all the projects I could ever want, it was great. So great I kinda stopped going to class.
My parents really didn’t like that, but they had made the mistake of buying the house outright and deeding it to me, so I didn’t have to worry too much about what they liked. I had what was left of my college fund and about a dozen dolls at this point and very little concern for what anyone else thought, so I would show up to the parties that acquaintances still on campus threw, just to get some beer and see how people reacted.
The dolls liked it too, as much as I could tell. They enjoy variety in their own way too, I think, especially the newer ones that haven’t spent a decade in someone’s attic yet. They were always up for drinking games, even though it meant a bath the next morning so they didn’t smell like old beer or dried jungle juice.
It’s a pretty good life, all things considered. I can fix a doll and get refuge from feeling like a useless fuckup. I can go to a party and get refuge from feeling like a weird hermit. The money won’t last forever, but what does? I’ll figure that out when it happens.