You only get a few do-overs in life. I was underwhelming in high school and welcomed the fresh slate of off-to-college, where you can make new friends who don’t know about all-that-used-to-be stuff.
I made a new friend, from another school. One day he tells me, “There’s this lawyer, who has a party house at one of those big houses near Broad Street…his son is holding a party there tonight…I hear they have a bed hanging on chains…and those foxes from St. Louis will be there.”
The bed on chains scared me, but the foxes from St. Louis High School scared me more. A parenthesis is required for those not of my age; (“fox” was the term of choice for an attractive person back in my time.) Every school has pretty girls, but there must have been something wonderful in the water, because St. Louis had a surplus of foxy babes, and the best of the best were…
…RightThere as my friend and I entered the party house. O. Be still, my trembling heart.
Oh yeah, and O what a house! They had a disco ball, they had a dance floor, and they had black lights, which I’d never been around. Black lights highlight white: teeth are headlight white, a t-shirt is angelic white.
So my friend and I did what anybody without any confidence would do – we ran from the girls and went to the kitchen and there found the beer.
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Armed with a brew we leave the kitchen and wallflower ourselves in the main room. I am doing one arm curls with Miller ponies; my friend is a Bud man. Twenty yards away, a bouquet, the best of the best of the St. Louis foxes. Big hair, all blonde, summer tans, jeans that fit like the skin on a grape and hey…
…did one of them just look my way and smile? Sonofagun, but she did, and she’s doing it again! Now it’s three of them looking my way!
I casually turned around. Nope, nobody behind me. I glanced over at my friend. Bless his heart, he had personality out the wazoo but if those girls were eyeing the two of us, it had to be me. Me? This had never happened before, even with ugly girls! And now, these out-of-my-league girls, they’re – Look they’re doing it again! – making eyes and giggling. I took a swig and looked away, then turned right at them and every one of them was giving me the big eye and their orthodontic smiles were glowing my way in the black light!
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Part of what makes this particularly embarrassing is how my misinformation revealed my vanity. I’d been working out on weights my senior year. (I was to muscles what a training bra was to little girls: more hope than fact.) I shifted my beer to my right arm, because that bicep was a micro heftier. I squeezed the bottle, trying to get those forearm muscles to ripple.
O, I had it bad. I wasn’t some just-another-high-school guy; o no, I was a college boy now. High school girls always dig the older dudes.
There was no pretending anymore; they were all looking my way. It was about the time that I was starting to think about which flower I’d prefer out of the bouquet that I happened to glance down…
…and realized that the zipper in my jeans had separated, and There, glowing ever-so-white in the party house black light was my tighty-whitey Fruit of the Loom.
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, where we find it easy to be humble.
P.S. (Seems like forever…that nearly every Bedtime Story I’ve done lately ended up being about my father. Once he got cancer, it was hard to write anything light. And here I am, trying to write something light and here he comes up again…)
There I was on the front row of the church, the preacher beginning the funeral service, and I’m fidgeting around, because I’m gonna speak later, want to do well, and not lose my composure. I got to church early, thought, ‘Ready or not, here we go’, took a deep breath, shut the truck door and prepared to take those steps towards the House where my father had spent the night. It was one of those moments where I could have reached for the hankie, but walking across the church parking lot was a man carrying a toilet seat, and that just cracked me up.
If that light moment wasn’t enough, I found that I had a spare: fidgeting on the front row, the service now going on, cameras recording the service, with people to my left and right, my left hand passes over my lap and O my, my fly is open…
…at a funeral, at my father’s funeral, has been open while I was shaking hands with All These People before we began, and now, I’ve got to find a way to zip up, on the front row of the church, before I am called to the podium to speak…
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