There were warm summer afternoons spent hanging from trees, running through garden hose sprinklers and digging in a custom-made sandbox while wearing a delightful red sun hat .

I also, chopped firewood, fetched kerosene and knew how to fire up a chainsaw – but that was another facet to my personality that doesn’t fit the tone of this story so we’ll drop it in the bin for future use in a grittier post where I’m sporting a flannel shirt and smelling of fossil fuels.

During this idyllic youth, there were also long arduous sessions where I relentlessly badgered my parents for a puppy or a kitten to love.

I’d grown up with our “community dog” Rheingold , a beast of a German Shepard who would be tamed by no man (or child) who spent his days wandering the property lines around my aunt’s house and mine. He refused to be trained, loved or cleaned ,as was evidenced by the toxic cloud of stench that followed him everywhere he went and the clumps of matted hair that hung off what was once his majestic coat.

Instead of seeing this as a horrific sign of neglect and poor judgement on the part of my parents and my aunt and uncle, my cousins and I took to running around after him with a garden hose and an industrial sized bottle of discount Prell shampoo in an effort to make him presentable to the public.

Formerly the prized show dog champion of my two younger uncles and my Grandmother, before they moved away, this beautiful but menacing  creature, who had been named after a cheap beer, was now reduced to chasing squirrels and causing the UPS man to defecate in his own pants every time he stepped on our lawn.

We’d also managed to live through the horror of “Flappy”, the Siberian Husky puppy who’d torn his own dog house to shreds with his teeth and the powerful combination tool of wanderlust and misbehavior. The stress of several all day and night search parties had found him the first few times he’d escaped, but finally his born free vibe got the better of him and on the seventh or eighth escape attempt he’d run for the hills.

Sigh

So much heartbreak, so few warm, furry, cuddly moments.

Finally, I decided I’d had enough of things that could run from you and reject your love. I wanted something captive and completely reliant on me for survival. Something that would have no chance in the outside world. An animal that was nice to look at and  held no hope for escape, unless a malicious idiot left the cage open.

I wanted a bird.

Looking back, this was a terrible experiment in pet compatibility, but at the time it seemed like the answer to all my prayers.

I mean seriously, birds are all delicate bones, sharp edges, and pointy anger.

After a long and serious period of contemplation I decided to lobby both parents for a yellow parakeet.

I named him Georgie.

Georgie weathered many storms but eventually went the way of all birds and bit the dust in the most untimely of fashions. When I stepped off the school bus I spotted the tell-tale  clue.

A poorly camouflaged empty cage in our garbage bins.

Had I known then what I know now from all that Law and Order, I would have understood it as clearly as a dead body rolled in a carpet,  duct taped and stuffed in industrial black garbage bags.

I became a tiny detective scouring my home for clues and questioning all suspects.

My mother, who had become a person of real interest due to her avoidance techniques, high sing songy voice and inability to meet my eyes -was my number one suspect.

Finally when my endless inquires and refusal to stop my investigation wore her down, I got my answer.

He’d “Flown south for the winter”.

She’d fucking stymied me with an endless riddle that my five-year old mind had no hope of unraveling. How far down WAS south? Could we go there and get him back? By presenting me with an answer that couldn’t be proven or disproven, I was forever doomed to run the cyclical track of “did he or didn’t he?” There was no way of knowing.

Deep in my heart of hearts I knew she’d killed him.

The mystery of Georgie’s murder was left in the cold case files of my heart but then an alarming pattern began to emerge in our lives.

Every time someone of moderate importance in my life would suddenly cease to come around any more they were “on a trip” or “gone someplace I couldn’t see them”.

Effectively, everyone who was old , infirm and mysteriously vanishing in a puff of smoke, had “gone south”- the mysterious part of the country you ended up in when you flew your coop, ate your doghouse out of despair or died of a terrible disease your Granddaughter needed to be shielded from.

Finally, in a fit of terminal curiosity, I demanded to know what the hell was going on because I damn site remember having two grandfathers who conveniently disappeared a few years apart.

One let me drink beer. I especially missed that one.

“Come sit down sweetie”, was the start of my lesson about goin’ south in life and I got an eye-opening lecture about just how many people and animals had died off while I was skipping down the lane and building a tree house.

Right afterward, we took a trip to the Samsondale pet store where I picked out my very own angry, squealing BLUE parakeet who defied the odds and stayed alive well into my middle school years, biting friends and family members who tried desperately to form some kind of bond with him.  I christened him Georgie II and  despite my festering dislike of this hateful creature, I kept up my end of the bargain while risking the tender skin on my fingers and forearm every time I reached into his hellacious cage of pent-up bird rage.

My husband has these heartwarming tales of how he owned a bird who he taught to sing and do tricks, while they went on fulfilling adventures together -like an avian themed Huck Finn. For the record, I think he’s lying because I’ve never met a bird that was wasn’t secretly wishing it’s owner dead in a fiery car wreck.

The reason your cleats are too small and mismatched is due in large part to the poor planning and lack of foresight the executives at Modell’s showcased by building their superstore on a stretch of suburban highway a thousand miles away from my city home.

I’m driving with an expired license because the DMV closed the only decent branch in Georgetown and relocated all it’s services to the C Street location which takes an hour to get to, has NO parking and cannot guarantee me a turnaround time of forty minutes.

So it’s no surprise that when I decided to stop in the shopping center close to my youngest sons school to pick up everyone’s dinner at the local Subway, I heard the most eye-opening earful I’ve ever digested from the Subway Svengali.

I call her that because she absolutely floored and captivated me with her definitive statements about parenthood, nutrition, discipline, child labor and the dangers of soda.

1. Single parenthood is hard. The Svengali explained to me exactly HOW hard. She gets up at 4:30 every morning to lovingly hand craft a nutritious organic lunch for her son and then sends him off to catch his bus up the street. She readies herself for a full day at Subway and begins her journey. After school, her son catches a bus to the place of her employment and does his homework behind the counter. Then he is sent off to work with the wonky eyed man in the center kiosk handing out flyers for mall discounts.
For his full day of work he receives two dollars in tips.
If there is something that her son wants (i.e. LEGOS) he must pay his mother his earnings to show her he means business and to learn the lesson that NOTHING in this life is free. While she was telling me about this part of her philosophy, her son was working what I assumed to be the second part of his  shift, dragging a bucket of foul looking water around behind the food court janitor.  The look in his eyes screamed “make it stop” but his mom just beamed at him and kept on dispensing nuggets of wisdom.

2.  The Subway Svengali gave me the stink eye and wanted to know why I was always stopping in to grab a turkey sub instead of cooking at home. After a few complicated mathematical equations and some home truths I came away with the understanding that I could save myself exactly four thousand dollars a year in food costs and an estimated ten thousand in medical bills in the distant future if I’d just get my lazy ass to the grocery store and cook three damn meals a day for my children instead of burning all that gas and filling them with processed poison. It was at this point that I wondered if my sandwich maker had some sort of hidden agenda to undermine her employer because of a past grievance I had no way of knowing about. Was I simply a pawn in the saga of the Yoda Sandwich Lady and the giant Subway conglomerate, or was this genuine concern?

3. Soda. Soft drink executives of the world, you have a new and very formidable enemy in Subway Sandwich woman. She spent fifteen minutes decimating you and your product with chilling effects. “Kids”, my children snapped to attention when she addressed them ” Do you know that if you put a metal screw in a cup of soda, it will dissolve it in less than a week? Can you imagine what it must do to your soft growing organs when you put it inside of your body?” Three terrified heads bobbed in unison and they ordered sweet tea instead. This woman has mad skills and the benefit of what appears to be some sort of Jedi Mind Trick solution to every problem (” now you WON’T be ordering those soft drinks no more, will you?!?”).

4. Discipline. Having spent the better part of forty-five minutes trying to break the spell she’d cast over us , with the futile hope that a line would form  and force her to assemble sandwiches for other families fading, we started checking our watches and trying to tear away towards the food court entrance –  but not before we got a proper dressing down about how to discipline your kids. When each child was handed their meal, they responded with the niceties of thank you’s  but made the mistake of asking me if we could stop at the Dairy Queen for shakes on the way home.  Sandwich lady didn’t like the idea that they weren’t satisfied with what they’d already gotten and made them repent for their mistake by explaining the entire sacrificial dynamic that permeates most adult/child relationships. By the end of this lecture they wished that they’d never asked me for anything.

We said our goodbyes and promised to come back soon (or maybe not? ) , gave one last parting look of concern to her small son, who was getting a lesson in “mop wringing” and ran for our car.  But instead of laughing or mocking Subway sandwich lady  we sat quietly letting her Confucius - like teachings sink in during the ride.

I was told by my youngest that “we may not speak of *it*“,  but before the pure visceral power of the moment escapes me forever ,I feel I must document what happened on a warm September afternoon  during a late summer pool party in a picturesque, leafy New England town…….

Try to picture the scene.

I am on my knees in the  luxurious guest bedroom of the Norwalk Connecticut home of one of my best friends with kitchen scissors, a tube of vaseline and my partially nude seven-year old son.

You see, over the course of a long day of jumping with great vigor into and out of her pool he’d had a most unfortunate situation occur where the delicate skin on the underside of his “private area” had been pulled through a tiny mesh hole in his swim trunks and ballooned out the other side.  Much like what would happen if you took a partially deflated balloon, wrapped a rubber band tightly around an area three-fourths of the way towards the end and then inflated that part.  Except, of course, it’s someones penis and it’s slowly being strangled by a malevolent patch of fabric which seemingly defies all laws of reality. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more you pull, the worse off you are.

Seriously,  now let’s return to the action..

After numerous attempts at just “pulling it off  fast” like a band-aid, the imagery was becoming increasingly gruesome as each try elicited ear shattering guttural screams and the area was beginning to look raw. In an effort to do something to seem in the smallest bit productive, I  used my kitchen scissors with surgical precision to cut his entire bathing suit off his body, leaving only a small modest patch of mesh to cover the “problem area”. Telling him that our most promising idea and best chance for penile freedom, was for him to utilize that tube of vaseline gave him hope and was the only thing providing brief respite from the impassioned wailing that punctuated his conversation every few seconds. I’d be just about to cut the mesh square a little smaller when I’d be jolted by his yelping and begging “PLEASE DON’T CUT OFF MY NUTS”.

I violently cursed the person who had invented mesh and silently put a pox on the group who voted to install it inside swim trunks.  Here I was, with a working area covered in shredded shorts, gauze, sharp objects and a screeching child. Like the interior of a medieval pediatric hospital but surrounded by party going New Englanders gaily frolicking poolside with  drinks and finger sandwiches .

Needless to say,  an hour of failed ideas later and after having slid into the desperation zone, we were able to wrangle what remained of his privates away from the strangulation clutches of a fabric I will never again underestimate. Several long drawn out monologues about how he’d never have kids and perhaps live on a eunuch farm later  – it was over.

We emerged from the bedroom to thunderous applause, and I dutifully disposed of the white mesh devil that had dragged us into the third circle for what seemed like an eternity.

Years from now, Il Duce will look back on this episode without fondness and remember how close he came to being childless and I of course will be apologizing for making it public record.

Fourteen kids, two homes without parental supervision and a set of metal lawn darts was all it took for us to dream up a game so terrifying and properly menacing that it would haunt all the participants until the moment they died.

To this DAY, if I hear something coming at me from above my first instinct is to serpentine wildly to avoid being impaled.

People sometimes wonder why colorfully adorned heavy metal projectiles – that were thrown into the air and came down with alarming regularity right into the soft flesh of small children – were ever invented.

Kids will LOVE these! Next let’s release a frisbee covered in razor blades.

I figure it’s the same group who put real chemistry sets and exploding cans of snakes on the market, but that’s a whole other story right there.

Apparently, one day when we were sitting around in our youthful ignorance, the devil decided to come down and make use of idle hands by whispering the location of lawn darts into our ears,  and pointing out to us a place where there was no parental supervision and a six-foot high fence.

“There” coaxed Satan, ” you delightful little rogues must stand on one side of the fence while a ‘chosen one’ (read-the smart one) tosses a lawn dart high into the sky and over the wall, while the others scatter wildly trying to avoid being speared to the ground and sent to the hospital or dying on the spot!’ Now GO!”

With that parting shot, Satan scurried away on his hoofed feet dragging the unfortunate souls who had a contract expire that week, but not before turning to remind us that we should, “make sure to call out when the dart is coming to give them chance, it’s only fair”.

You act like it was UNREASONABLY dangerous. That just wasn’t the case. Lawn darts are VERY popular and those kids were BORED!

At that point he disappeared in a fiery blast of sulphuric acid and yellow smoke, back to his raging inferno in the third circle.

Left to our own devices, our ‘chosen one’ tossed the first projectile of death from the anonymity of his perch behind the fence and high into  the air, announcing in a shrill scream “READY OR NOT, HERE IT COMES!”

Tiny bodies flew everywhere trying furiously to avoid the shiny metal point, our adrenaline pumping so high that we were like scattershot marbles dropped on a smooth surface –  going everywhere fast.

Dart after dart –  red, blue, yellow, red, blue,yellow.

They hit the ground with a loud sickening thud as the business end sunk easily into the cold ground.

I kept imagining both my arms nailed to the ground by two lucky shots and me being unable to get up and run from the kill throw that would be aimed straight for my small skull.

I’m not sure why it took me two rounds of terror roulette before I stepped away to see what the other kids were having for lunch, or maybe it was the sound of the ice cream man coming around the bend. Whatever it was that tore me away, I now consider it an act of divine intervention.

Somewhere, deep in the recesses of the scorched earth netherworld, I’m sure there were a few guys with pitchforks and horns  having a real laugh at my expense.

I think I smell sulphur.

Pigtailed and bracefaced, I sat there with my gaping maw hanging  open enough to catch one of the many passing flies as she spun the tale of the young revolutionary war soldier that was now a ghost  who  wandered the grounds of her impressive home, threw shit around her bedroom and slammed doors when annoyed. To further cement my sidewalk of unspeakable terror she brought in her mother to corroborate the long list of paranormal happenings as I sat wide-eyed while marinating in the puddle of urine that now soaked my underoos.

What kind of parent was this? It’s completely unfathomable to me as an adult that a grown woman would sit there and compound the terror of two small idiots grasping for some sort of normal, reasonable intervention. “Now girls, you know there’s no such thing as ghosts!” as opposed to “Yes, and he likes to wrap the chains that bound his hands together for eternity around the necks of young children.” If I had been Patty I would have demanded to be handed over to social services immediately.

Compounding the difficulty of being friends with a person who came with an angry ghost and a haunted house was the fact that I was the only person in the entire school who she wanted to sleepover her home on a weekly basis. She once sat in a tree and cried, refusing to come down until I agreed to spend the night the following Friday.

“But Patty..” I’d protested ” I’m scared of haunted houses and your sister tried to force me to drink Drano the last time I was there!”

Tears streaked her dirty face as she yelled between sobs, “I’m not coming down until you say YES!”

The expectant crowd that had gathered to watch her potentially break a limb if she decided to jump became hushed as it waited for my answer.

Hanging my head to fight the fear, I managed to mumble “okay.” Completely defeated, I failed to recognize this as a class A act of emotional blackmail. All I knew was that I felt screwed and guilty all at once.

Every built-in mechanism that exists for the sake of self-preservation was vibrating at full tilt while I packed my bags to spend the evening with a ghostly spectre that was as freshly pissed off about the revolutionary war as he had been the day he  last fought it, and my very clingy & manipulative friend.

That night was not one I’d soon forget. Nor would I be able to erase the year and a half of sleepovers that followed. Thursday would come around and my stomach would curl into painful knots in anticipation of whatever bizarre shenanigans Patty would dream up for getting me to hang out. Weekends felt like the end of the world.

Finally, after one spectacularly disastrous evening where I stayed up all night because I was convinced I heard heavy military style boots dragging down the stone pathway that ran outside the long line of picture windows in Patty’s bedroom, I’d had enough. The following morning, delirious from lack of sleep and after a particularly bad round of Space Invaders played on her own private entertainment system, I put my foot down.  It was one of those conversations I would only have in my head but it didn’t matter. Patty, my passive aggressive tormentor, was dead to me.

I didn’t fuck around.  Patty smelled trouble the moment she stepped out of her Dad’s Lincoln and began chasing me down trying to sniff out the root of the problem. What she couldn’t have known was that she had ceased to exist.  As far as she was concerned, it was something that could be remedied with gifts or bribery.

“Hey, how about Broadway tickets?”

“What do you think of ice skating?”

” I’M NOT COMING OUT OF THIS TREE UNTIL YOU COME OVER!”

Sadly, the legacy of Patty and the disgruntled revolutionary war ghost didn’t end when I cast her off into the gutter of discarded friends. For years afterward I’d wake up, in my bed, covered in sweat, worried that the restless spirits surrounding my own two hundred year old farm-house were plotting my demise by way of knocking over a carelessly left candle or misplacing an ember from the eternally burning fireplaces.

Even in adulthood, when asked to return to the place I grew up to house sit for a week and watch the dog, I slept under my bed with a fire extinguisher, my faithful canine and one of the industrial staple guns my mom used to upholster old furniture.

So the legacy of Patty lives on……

This all started out as a simple experiment. All my neighbors had done it for years and it couldn’t be as hard as it looked- this growing of vegetables and herbs. They spent hours out there cultivating and watering. Entire weekends weeding out the murderous vining plants that originated in our yard and stretched themselves insidiously over the fence and threatened to snuff out the potential bountiful harvest.

Why couldn’t we become farmers, living off the land? It would be a matter of months before our plants began giving us what we needed to survive and my need to roll a wonky cart up a too small city supermarket aisle would be gone! All that remained to purchase was the goat for milk and we were set to move off the grid and start canning shit to store in our basement.
Wrong.
What followed was a lesson that growing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in your    desolate urban wasteland of a backyard bears no resemblance to the idyllic existence among the rolling hills and vast acreage of a real farm.

Leaving the safety of my home, I’d venture out to check on my quickly growing plants only to notice large gaping holes in my newly sprouted tomatoes and entire insides gutted from my impressive cucumbers. Shrugging, I was quick to blame this on “hungry birds and insects”.

Then came the sinkhole sized tunnel openings all over my small patch of backyard dirt and the seventeen neighborhood cats who took up permanent residence on my fence while watching my garden with the intensity of starved lions waiting for a herd of bleeding antelopes to collapse.

Finally, I saw them.

Large, well-fed, bold and outrageously healthy looking. I had bred super rats.

These son of a bitches ate every single tomato, cucumber, strawberry and basil that popped out. They left the jalapeno peppers, apparently they don’t like them.

Within the span of a few months my postage stamp sized garden had turned into a feeding ground for entire rat families to enjoy. Because they were lightning fast and super smart they were able to evade most of our clumsy attempts at destroying them. No matter how many we killed, thousands came back and took their place.

They swaggered between houses using the entirety of the block to fearlessly move between yards, picking up anything of interest: some lettuce from next door, chives from two places down, a small child. When we’d pick one up out of the trap that had snapped its neck we found it hard not to notice it’s ” thick shiny coat and bright eyes“. Our rats were healthy, you had to give them that.

Having never reached our goal of complete self-sufficiency, we now had to contend with that failure on top of the disgusted looks of the many good people now trying in vain to fend off a superior rat population.

I can feel myself burning with shame and horror when I see them moving in proper rat formation through what should have been our side salads and then chewing through a fence to get at someone elses hard work. I hate them.

I look so much like him, I probably don’t need this breast plate and cape.

Father and son , minus the holy spirit- who was some sort of bird or flame or a bird on fire or an angry phoenix- like viper who blinds or smites you.

Or something like that.

Back when we were small, powerless and impressionable some jokester decided it would be a great idea to put paintings, stained glass murals and bold statues all over our school depicting Jesus as a blond-haired blue-eyed nordic holy man. Like a 70s hippie or a reject from a Swedish knock off of the  Eagles, he was there in all his glory beckoning us to hang out and talk about love and understanding while he strummed his guitar and lunched on humus. He always had his hand extended and he was usually within a stones throw of his mom, Mary. She of the lovely pale skin and flowing honey locks partially hidden under the blue and white flowing robes and the hauntingly familiar gladiator sandals. ( seriously, I had a pair in high school).

This never sat right with me.

When I finally got a clue that I could rebel without drowning in a pit of man-made despair on earth followed by a long stint clawing my way out of a stew of human misery in hell, I actually questioned the historical accuracy of this depiction. One day I asked someone why Jesus looked like Thor.

Their response was to ask me what I though God (real god) looked like and why did I think no one ever tried drawing a picture of him.

If I were being honest I would’ve  told him that I’ve always pictured God looking like a Titan version of George Washington with a trident (for style) and long flowing white hair. Jesus, however, was always blonde.   The image was further enhanced and disturbingly embedded when a grade school nun talked about how she was “betrothed” to Jesus and loved looking at his “beautiful blue eyes” when she was asked why she wore a wedding band on her right hand when she wasn’t allowed to get married. This also served as a warning that she had descended into absolute madness.

This was painful and wrong.

Anyway, years later I was walking down a New York City street with my boyfriend – a fervent Catholic and big believer in everything bible related - when we came across a most interesting street preacher. He was a massive African-American man dressed in a white floor-length toga and sporting a plastic crown of thorns. He was wailing about the “big cover up” and stopped us to make sure we knew that Jesus was a dark-skinned man with black hair.

This guy got it, and I was just about to strike up a discussion with this truth spreader when my boyfriend dragged me away.  Apparently, it was more important to get into a seedy bar with our pitifully inadequate fake I.D.’s than it was to help rewrite the history of the Catholic Church. Excuse me.

Even the most rabid Catholic should be open to new ideas but because everyone I knew at the time couldn’t half-ass it with their beliefs I found myself in a raging debate with a guy who would not bend. No matter how many times I tried to reason with my beau on the walk down to our destination he insisted everything we’d been taught was truth absolute.

No exceptions.

Well, it should be noted he was all over bending the rules on premarital sex and birth control,  but that was my ass on the way to getting smote, not his. 

Not too long ago I got the opportunity to see David Sedaris read a short story he’d just written on the unrealistic portrayal of Jesus in paintings and books. He complained about the same stuff I did: the super attractiveness, the height, the gentle blue eyes. He talked of replacing him with a short slovenly version that people couldn’t rally behind, because people really LIKE good-looking people and it would really test their faith if they had to summon the same kind of devotion for an ugly dude.

People would come around, and soon we’d all have destroyed our ideas of divine perfection looking only one way. Diversity Divinity.

So there.

http://www.culturebrats.com/2012/08/tom-hardy-and-bang-bang-chicken-both.html

Fully understanding that it takes an extra step to click this link (a step, if I’m being honest here- that I wouldn’t take) I leave you in the capable hands of Culture Brats and all their greatness.

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” .