Knowing full well that you’ve come to expect only sporadic, mediocre offerings from me, here’s another installment from the “slice o’ life” series that I’ve begun affectionately referring to as “idiots burden”.
It’s not that I wasn’t aware that these type of things go on undocumented all throughout the world as we spin on our axis and go about our lives it’s just the alarming frequency with which they befall me and my terrible lack of skills to deal with them properly.
When I lived down south, it was hot and sultry and the bugs were prehistoric in size and strength. Cockroaches flew, bees could pick up small children and fly back to the hive and I once saw a spider that dwarfed my hand jump from a building wall and land on an unsuspecting womans face. I also had a penchant for exaggeration and romanticized all events so that in my mind everyone looked sun-kissed and windswept while wearing billowy sundresses.
The summers were debilitatingly hot, there were endless things for a young person to do and the rent on the apartment I shared with my boyfriend could be scraped together from underneath our couch cushions and some light panhandling.
You get the idea: Cheap AND fun.
Anyway, while it’s not unheard of for relationships started so young to last ,rarely they do stand the test of time and keep chugging like the steam-powered locomotive force behind that newly minted coupling. (spoilers ahead– we got married)
Nestled within a frame of time so small it’s hard to believe we packed it all into two years, our small existence was brimming with events. There was the band he played in, which made it easy to get all swoony and caught up in the moment or the endless number of live shows I watched with friends downtown. There was a local group of very constant bar goers up the street that we eventually settled down and befriended. They were lovely and seemed like they were your average run of the mill folks with jobs, lives, homes. What could be more lovely and non threatening than a night out at the King Plow Art Center or a day white water rafting in Tennessee with these people?
Nothing, I tell you!! Nothing!
Why then, was I blindsided when one evening turned out to be every bit as explosive and controversial as a bad 70s swinger film?
If you ask me now how I didn’t see this coming, I’ll probably just laugh along with you at the humor I can now mine from this trainwrecky derailment of intuition and good sense but back then I can honestly say I was speechless and caught off guard.
It all started as a suggestion to return to the home of one of the “friends” after an evening out for some ‘hot tubbing” . Now I don’t know about you but when I jump in a hot tub it’s usually in a public place so I make a point of wearing a swimsuit. So we excused ourselves to make a pit stop at home remarking that our other friends must have had great foresight to wear their suits underneath their clothes that evening not knowing that we were headed for an evening swim.
Upon arriving, the entire patio area where the hot tub sat was shrouded in a veil of inky black darkness. This should have been where the alarm bells started clanging for my boyfriend and I, but still we were too naive to fully comprehend what we were walking into. In the movies this is the part where everyone is yelling at the screen for you to “GET OUT OF THERE!!” before the doomed character walks straight into the arms of their waiting demise.
After feeling my way around the cursed backyard like Helen Keller without the benefit of being mute, I grasped the edge of what was an already jam-packed bubbling heat bath. It looked an smelled inviting and my senses ,dulled by the dark night, gave me the go ahead to step right in.
As soon as my eyes adjusted they began to melt right out of their sockets because in front of me there was a tub full of hot steaming naked. Not a stitch of clothing anywhere on the sea of skin. I was in a giant vat of bodily fluid primordial ooze with nowhere to go.
Now let’s stop here for a moment so we can clarify something. I love naked. Naked is great. I would have even been completely on board if there had been people I really liked and fantasized about seeing naked ( note to you all, if you’re a friend of mine that is not at all creepy. Well okay it’s a little creepy, but be happy I’ve thought about you naked okay?) but these were acquaintances. There was no long history between us that would make it understandable for us to be sitting together with only the thin fabric of my bikini to shield me from the cheeks of your naked ass.
My husband didn’t seem as upset about the three pairs of breasts floating above the waterline for everyone to admire, but he DID mind when the husbands bound to those breasts by matrimony or commitment ceremony started to plead relentlessly for me to remove my swimsuit and his as well, “C’mon, take off the suits!” “You can’t get the real FEEL of the bubbles if you’ve got anything on” . It was peer pressure that I hadn’t felt the likes of since my high school boyfriend begged me to wear a matching underwear set for his birthday.
And guess what?
We caved.
Like spineless tenth grade sluts giving in to a panting sports star, we whipped off our bathing suits and sat down with the hedonistic hot tubbers. What followed was three agonizing hours of watching all the guys getting in and out to use the bathroom with the endless parade of hairy asses and swinging dicks proudly displayed. I didn’t come up out of that water past my shoulders until everyone was gone and my skin looked as pruned as an elderly pensioners.
After saying our hasty goodbyes, I couldn’t wait to get in the car for the ride home with my boyfriend. We had just seen something we couldn’t unsee. Now, when ever we stopped into the local pub for a drink the memory of the naked body underneath the clothes had forever ruined our ability to look these people in the eye and take them seriously. “I’ve seen your nut sack, I can no longer drink Bass Ale with you and discuss music” .
