“Come
over baby whole lot of shaking going on…”
Dateline: Greyhawkin’ breakfast with db
I’m naked.
And it’s 40-degrees
outside.
I’m almost outside, the
only thing standing between my nakedness and the 40 degrees out there is some
cold concrete cinder blocks.
And a lizard.
Not to mention the guy in
the next shower stall singing some Elton John song.
I’m not moving.
Cold and shakin’ or not.
Yep, staying put right
here in this communal bathhouse thing.
“Shake
it baby shake…”
The reason I’m shakin’ and
communal bathin’ is because I’m only 2/3 full hooked up.
I have electric.
I have water.
I have no place to put the
water though once it goes through the sink … or you know … me.
The site I’m parked on has
no place to dump, ah, hmm … ah … dumps. So
all that stuff has to stay in the holding tanks in the db/bb/rv until I can get
to a joint where I can hit the flush handle.
For both tanks.
Grey Water … which frankly
isn’t close to that color with all the cold coffee, shampoo , soap, pieces of
spaghetti, a drop or two of Tequila, and a whole bunch of other stuff that goes
down the sinks in one form but somehow magically transforms into bubbles when
it comes out the grey tube.
Black Water … don’t even
ask. Just pull the Black handle and run…come
back in a week and cap the thing. If the
Middle Ages were like this, I’m flabbergasted that there was
A-Just-The-Other-Side-Of-The-Middle Ages.
But me and the Lizard are
still waiting this communal RV’ing out.
“Shake
it baby shake…”
Now you need to know that
just because I grew up in the summer of love, I never got communally unclothed
with anyone.
Most ever happened, took
my sandals off once at a Strawberry Alarm Clock concert. And for the record, I was one of the very few
people on the planet my age who I talk to now who doesn’t say I was at
Woodstock.
During August of 1969, my
arse was in summer school trying to pass English 10 before I actually stepped
into English 12 in my senior year at Kenmore West Sr. High School near Buffalo,
N.Y.
So I saw the lines of
hippies on the NYS Thruway; I just wasn’t in it.
Here’s something else I
wasn’t in back then — Communal High School Boys Gym Showers.
I chose to be the stinky
kid in class rather than the really embarrassed/self-conscious kid in the
shower.
Yeah that’s what I really
wanted to do, get all naked up in front of 60 or 70 of my best, or worst,
friends in the world. Especially the worst ones. We had this one dude, in the
worst category, who I can’t name because I don’t know if he turned into a
spiteful suing lawyer or where he lives now in case he is living right around
the corner here, who couldn’t play any sport if his life depended on it. But by
God, he could nail you with a towel snap from 50 yards behind your arse … which is
what he always aimed for.
Except me. Me, he did this: right
midway in the snap, right when the wet towel was still curled, he would yell
out “Hey Barone,” and as I would turn, the darn towel would
reach it’s most straightened *snap* point right at the spot my arse would have
been had I not turned.
Three class periods later,
I would crawl off the locker-room floor.
“Shake
it baby shake…”
Fast forward through the
flat belly years to the….well you know….the Middle Belly Years where you can
still wear a belt but you be dreaming of those “Comfort Waist” pants
in the Sears Catalog.
I’m working at the NBC
affiliate TV station in Pittsburgh, PA. My gig, during the summer, Pittsburgh Steelers Training Camp. So one day my boss, Brian, who I won’t name,
gets this hair brain idea and calls me into his office to tell me about it.
From multiple past
experiences just about everywhere, me being called into a bosses office has
never worked out to well for me. But I
go.
“Don (pre-db) got this
idea. Why don’t you get Media-Man (his real name is Joe but for some reason he
referred to himself as Media Man) and go on out to Steelers training camp … AND
STAY THERE A COUPLE OF DAYS.”
I have no idea how they
got this to happen, but I guess BILL COWHER being in his first year as head
coach was still just only Bill Cowher, and I was the least of his concerns
(probably even more so today).
So me and the Media Man
load up one of the not too broken TV station vans and headed out to Steeler
Camp. And there we lived for a couple of
days in the same dorm as the players. We
ate with them, we goofed with them, we talked with them, we watched them work
out, and …
… we showered with them.
Big “arse” mistake!
Having never been in a
dorm hall, I’m thinking the sign on the wall pointing to “SHOWERS”
was just a janitorial printing faux pas.
I was wrong.
Showers meant showers … multiple
professional NFL football players being showered. So I, being stupid, just peal down to my
nakedness and bound around the corner to scrub up …
… and there stands the
offensive front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
And they be all naked.
All I can say is, if you
yourself don’t happen to be an NFL offensive lineman, well, hmm, ah … you know …
“Shake
it baby shake…”
One last communal
showering issue. Back a couple of years ago, my kids for a Christmas present got
Barb and myself a night over at the Mohegan Sun Casino Resort. They got us a room and
some eating coupons or something.
So Barb and I pack a
little bag and head out for a night of giving the casino a massive amount of
money in the form of slot machines in return of which we can maybe get a
“free” hamburger.
But before I go, I call the
hotel just to make sure the kids didn’t send some sort of check that had
already bounced. The kids didn’t, and
the room was a waiting.
So then I told the front
desk person exactly this, “Good, because you know me and the wife are
celebrating our anniversary.”
And left it like that.
When we get to the hotel
the front desk, lady does the punching on the keyboard and reads the screen they
never let you read. She then looks up
and says to me, “Well congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Barone.”
I try and hush her up a
bit because I can see Barb looking at me with the “What-did-you-do-now
look” wives of 30 plus years have perfected.
But as we leave the
Check-In, the lady kills me by saying, “Have a Happy Anniversary.”
All the while up the
elevator Barb is looking at me, and then when we open the door to a huge corner
Master Suite Barb asks, “What exactly did you do?”
So I come almost clean and
say, “I just told them we are celebrating our Anniversary, which I do every
time I look into your eyes. I never said our Anniversary was today.”
Being that, in fact, it was
several months away. Can’t help what the
desk clerk thought they heard.
We kept the room upgrade
though.
So we are in this fancy
room, bigger than our first apartment, and it has this two person bath thing
right in front of a picture window. The
whole hotel is a glass tower, and one of those glass things is right by the
tub.
So I tell Barb, don’t
worry, it’s one-way glass. It has to be.
And I get in it, all naked
like, and I’m soaping and conditioning and standing up dancing all around
feeling like the rich Hollywood types. Barb would have none of it.
Next morning, Barb is over
by the sink and hits this one button by mistake, and behind me in the bath tub…a
before unseen heavy SHADE comes down over the
not-so-quite-one-way mirror/window.
Yeah.
So now you know the
history of me not doing well with this communal shower thing. I prefer my naked to be on me, and your naked
be on you.
And the two never lay eyes
on one another.
Which is why me and the
lizard are staying put until the guy singing in the shower next to me leaves.
But this darn lizard is starting
to do that push up thing.
And I’m not real sure what
that means.
“Well
I said shake baby shake
I said shake baby shake.”
Whole
Lot Of Shaking Goin’ On.
Jerry
Lee Lewis
db
