A gavel and a guinea pig

FOR a week she’d been making fists in her sleep, my first hint that something was amiss. My wife would toss, turn, pound the pillow. Then it got worse. Gift baskets began showing up in the garage. Finally, I had to ask:

“Are you, um, having a fund-raiser?”

“Yes,” she confessed, her fingers fluttering nervously over the buttons on her blouse.

Next thing I know we’re at some banquet hall, everyone beer-silly in Hawaiian shirts.

“OK, we have a bid for $200 for this fine guinea pig,” I say. “Do I hear $225?”

We are at the live-auction portion of the fund-raiser that my wife helped organize. Through some miscue, I am at the microphone, helping auction off a pet guinea pig. It’s a nice pig. Black, with eyes like Pacino.

“We’ve got $250 on the guinea pig,” says my auction-mate, Chuck. “Do I hear $275.”

Chuck is wearing a grass skirt and, apparently, no pants. I am wearing pants, but, apparently, no grass skirt. At one point in the live auction, the grass skirt they make me wear slipped down around my knobby ankles.

“I have pants,” Chuck explains later, and lifts his skirt a little.

That’s the way these events transpire. Men in skirts. Women in sarongs. Flirty. Festive. Loud.

The evening started with a car rally. It moved on to dinner and a silent auction -- condos, Laker tickets, private islands. Now we’re doing a live auction, umbrella drinks on all the tables. Like little tombstones.

“Next up, we have a two-night golf vacation,” Chuck announces.

For a man with no apparent pants, Chuck seems to really know what he’s doing up here. He goads the audience. He pits one bidder against another. I hang back and wonder why my skirt fell down around my ankles.

The guinea pig started at $25 and has soared to 10 times that, after we assured the audience that this little piggy is not pregnant. Which is probably more than you can say for many of the other females here tonight.

“How long do guinea pigs live?” someone shouts.

“One hundred and forty years,” I say.

“Speed it up, OK?” hisses one of the auction organizers, who are sitting off to the side like executive producers.

“SOLD!” I say, and head off for another beer.

Like most things in life, I have no idea how I got myself into this. I’m just one of those guys who seems to stumble into things, bad and good. Each morning, I get up and shout, “How’d I get here?” With loving pats, the people I live with assure me everything will be OK and send me on my way.

But this gig seems particularly odd. First, I’ve never hosted a live auction. Heck, I have only witnessed a couple. I usually use the opportunity to get some fresh air and maybe enjoy a good cigar (smoke being my favorite form of fresh air).

Yet, here I am on a Saturday night, holding the microphone like a hero sandwich. I am at that one moment at any speaking engagement when you realize that no one is really paying that much attention.

“OK, next -- an evening at the Hollywood Bowl,” I say.

Whoa, the Bowl. This gets their attention. Music. Romance. Abysmal parking. The box seats for six quickly reach $1,400, which includes three bottles of really good grape juice, a picnic basket and a catheter, for when you’re still sitting in the parking lot at midnight, waiting for the goon parked in front of you to show up so you can finally leave.

“SOLD!” I finally say, though I’m not sure to whom or for how much.

In the end, the auction turns out to be pretty fun, in a sort of “whew, I’m-glad-that’s-over” sort of way. A lot of suburban activities are like that. In fact, there are five stages to a suburban event: Denial. Refusal. Avoidance. Acceptance. Relief.

The moms who staged this fund-raiser are now in the relief stage. As the live band plays a Procol Harum song, one swings her hips in her blue sarong.

“How much, exactly, did we spend?” I ask my wife the next morning.

Our clothes are piled in the corner of the bedroom like flowers from a funeral. They smell vaguely of baked beans and rum.

“Spend?” she asks.

My wife responds with vague mumbles, sort of like when I first asked her out and she declined, citing disinterest and concerns for her safety. She never made eye contact then; she doesn’t make eye contact now.

That’s the way it is after a big fund-raiser. Clothes on the floor. Plastic leis on the bedpost.

In the suburbs, no good dad goes unpunished.