Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part Three

I'm taking you with me.

Toukey’s Big Deluge: The Reckoning Prelude: Paradise Lost Propers

Sundown.  Expressway.  The sky is a murky post-pink peach.  Indigo clouds smear up from the western horizon, appearing very much like the monsters that awaited us at the edge of a world we once considered flat,  bringing nighttime in the hems of their gowns.  In the darkness below, snaking chains of alternating red and white lights coil around the I-94/134 cloverleaf .  They slither  this way and that across an unseen landscape.  From the lower deck of a preposterous aquatic amusement contraption, a bottom-heavy Eve regards this rush hour serpent and the darkness outside the cathedral-sized water park windows through her water-speckled Buddy Holly glasses.  She sighs and returns to her so-called “chair of delight” to weigh her options.

She has been informed that a step toward knowledge equates two of the same toward death.  She’s not jazzed on that math, but isn’t a life of ignorance a death in itself?  To walk through a life overgrown with the inescapable shadows of the unknown, the unexplained, to always fear—what kind of life is that?  She rounds the edge of the armrest of her Adirondack with her big plastic beer cup and thinks of letting it all go. She reminds herself that the earth was flat until someone decided to let go of the fear to sail headlong to the perceived precipice, and then the monsters vaporized into clouds.

A shriek tears through the chlorinated humidity; the sound claws her gaze from the window and directs it to a day-glo green waterslide.  It vomits out a doughy, pre-pubescent boy who careens on his behind through a waiting exit flume at the bottom.

She notices that this boy’s breasts are bigger than her own.  Something in his womanly scream rings out like a call to arms. She downs the last of her beer and takes her first fateful two-step toward the kiddie slides.

A Word About Fear

Fear serves a purpose: it’s the alarm that bell that assures the continued survival of the creature harboring said fear.  Fear keeps us from, say, doing the Macarena in the path of oncoming trains or dangling our legs over the edge of the pirhana tank at our local aquarium.  This is obvious.  But the point I’m trying to make that is all fear exists to keep us alive.  Even the fear of kiddie slides.  Especially the fear of kiddie slides. These stupid fears—the weird ones, the obscure ones– serve a more nuanced purpose.  In this modern age, we are hardly ever in actual danger.  Yet the creature container we inhabit still has an instinctual compunction to defend itself against its own demise.  In ordinary everyday suburban life, the only thing we have left to fight off is the awareness of our own mortality.   If you were to untangle the anxieties balled up inside you, you would find yourself holding your end of a rope that connects you to the idea of your own death.  These gnarled-up knots of modern fear are designed to distance you from your adversary, which in this case isn’t actual death, but just the idea of it.  My fear allows me to steer clear of that which reminds me I’m going to die, hence the fear of Toukey’s Big Deluge.  Why anyone would want to kill their fear of death, since it helps you stay alive in your head and in your heart is a really difficult proposition to defend, but here we are at Key Lime Cove with a twelve dollar beer in our narrative hand, invoking Christopher Columbus, John Milton, Satan, and the Tree of Knowledge in a quasi-heroic attempt to do just that.

Adam and Eve, not quite suited up for their trip down Toukey's Big Deluge

Chicken Ascendant

Given the fear of death/death of fear conundrum I’ve expressed, it’s hard not to describe the climb to the top of Toukey’s Deluge in the terms of capital punishment. It’s sadly unavoidable.

The rickety-shambles of  TBD’s pole-based architecture is just a Technicolor makeover applied to the basic concepts of your classic scaffold.  The stairs lead to corridors, the corridors lead to rope bridges, the bridges lead to more stairs–  all of which combine to usher the human body upwards toward ever greater gradations of elevation, to the summit, the end of the line.

Along the way, the condemned walks the gauntlet of parting shots:   curtains of warm, heavy liquid jets  piss down, squadron-style, creating an obligatory checkpoint of humiliation ,  chlorinated broadsides blast at  flank-level, and buckets dump unceremoniously on her head like so many chamber pots.  All the while, a roulette wheel of vessels keeps a steady tattoo of water pounding on the platform.  It sounds a lot like the drum beat accompanying a military execution, only faster and cracked-out on kids’ cereal.  It also keeps perfect time with the heartbeat of an irrationally fearful person ascending to the zenith of her terror.

Letting Go (Special Guest Star: The Voice)

I’m not afraid of kiddie slides per se; I’m afraid of hurtling. Even though I knew this waterslide would not kill me, I knew that it riding it would feel like death, or what I’ve come to believe death to feel like, and that being launched into nothingness.

The earth in its place, the sky in its place, and me, doing my voluntary- neural-systemic locomotion thing in between—I associate these things with being a living creature.  Hurtling runs completely counter to this: the sensation of the loss of control, loss of gravitational context.  So I’m not afraid of kiddie slides; I’m afraid of hurtling. Yet, kiddie slides are the world capital of hurtling, so there you go. The Voice delighted in this absurdity.

As I made my way up to the top of the same day-glo yellow slide that had expelled the chesty lady-lad, The Voice jeered me on.  It crowded the off-beats of the aforementioned exo-internal thunder-pulse of eminent doom and degradation with the alternating refrains of “DO! IT!”  and “CHICK! EN!”

My fear of hurtling has been lifelong. It began when I was six with a dream.  In it, I piloted my sled down a blank hillside wall of blinding white snow.  I saw myself from the outside: I gripped the handles of the planks-and-rails contraption—a Midwest Radio Flyer—my stocking hat flying cartoonishly behind me.  The tableau had all the weird visual signifiers of a Sesame Street alphabet interlude: the enormity of the hill, the liberal interpretation of the laws of physics.   It was all good times except instead of scripting an elegant S on the face of the snow, the little redhead on the sled careened into a depression concealed beneath the tundra, leaving her vehicle gravity-bound behind as she hurtled helplessly though infinite space, nothing.

I can still feel the pit of my stomach fall out when I think back on this dream.  I can still hear the winded grunt hanging in the air in the damp darkness of my bedroom in the basement of my parents’ house back in Ohio. So what began as a jerk-awake dream of a sledding accident at the age of six blossomed like a Citizen Kane rosebud into an empire of avoidance:

a pre-empted driver’s license at twenty-one, a first solo trip on a plane at the age of forty-two, and a lifelong abstention from amusement rides exceeding 10 mph.  Yet all the detours taken have led me to the top of Toukey’s Big Deluge.  The Voice is my copilot: “WE’RE HERE!” she announced through crackling, phlegmatic static.  Nuances of triumph italicized her words, for this is by far the stupidest thing she has ever put me up to.

As I stood at the apex, under the sunny yellow canvas tent-top, I savored the non-slip pebbling of the platform under my feet.  The reassurance that some part of me was grounded to a level surface of some kind steadied me, even while the rest of my body and mind was differently situated— airy and barely-there and wavering like a mirage of myself– some twenty feet above Paradise Lost, and preoccupied with the pulse-pounding business of hurtling.

Did it occur to me to feel foolish when a scrawny little ferret of a five year old cut in front of me, just 3 steps away from the mouth of that first slide?  Nope.  I was too busy trying to catch my breath in tiny panicky pants.  One moment, she was sitting in the gaping cradle of its horrible, toothless maw and the next, she was gone.  Horribly and utterly gone.

Did it occur to me to appear shame-faced and shruggy when the lifeguard  gave me a snappy, aviator-style “all clear” that positively oozed with sarcasm?  Nope.  I was too busy getting my head around the fact that soon, I, too, would be horribly and utterly gone.

The Voice was probably in her glory, but I couldn’t hear her anymore.  Nor could I hear “Some Guys Have All The Luck”, the inescapable anthem of Paradise Lost, (not by the original artist).  By this time,  I had an annoying, rubbed-raw, Kleenex-to-snotty-nose kind of relationship with this song.  It had been playing when I had initiated my climb, but it, too, was gone.

Gripping an overhead bar, I took my seat in the mouth of that greenish-yellow day-glo tube of destiny.  Water gushed frothily around my legs—my pale, white, substantial middle-aged legs.  My thoughts were too many and too frantic for me to even understand at that moment, let alone detangle and articulate in alphabet synthesis.  My brain was a buzzing beehive, and the queen was in danger.

My final, pre-hurtle breath was more chlorinated than all the others somehow, warmer, and heavier with humidity. I held onto it.  It was rich, because it contained the last of the gravity, the last of my physical autonomy, the last of my fear. I let it go.  All of it.

Geronimo!

The plan was to pretend that the water slide was a good, old-fashioned playground slide like the ones I grew up with: I would take my ride in a seated position.  This was not an option, for you see, when you ride a water slide, you are Gravity’s bitch.  You do not ride her like a parade route convertible; you capitulate to the velocity of her agenda.    She will sculpt your body to her specifications, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

First, she clotheslines you with momentum and lays you flat on your back.  Your hands and their inexpedient, foam-rustling fingers are frankly in the way.  The resistance they put up is quaint, but nonetheless an inconvenience.  Gravity folds them kindly across your chest.

A fellow pilgrim, assuming the position at Disney's Summit Plummet.

These modifications are done with the utmost elegance of the inevitable.  Fighting is out of the question.  There is no question, actually.  You are given over to a force of nature; it is enormous beyond your concept of enormity, timeless beyond your concept of time. Your internal organs, no longer dog-piled within your ribcage, flutter apart like freed birds.  Feet together, hands over your heart, you assume the position preordained within the marrow of your very bones.  You are an arrow slicing through your allotted time and space.  You are a shooting star flickering within the unblinking eye of the cosmos.  You are as you should be.

Your individual anxieties and defenses and the very consciousness that houses them?  Blown away like a teepee in a tornado.  But this is not a bad thing.  This is not a good thing.  This is a thing that is, was, and always will be, regardless of how we, as tiny flecks of living warmth, conceptualize ourselves within its incomprehensible framework.  The skull is silent, serene.

In short: you succumb.

I had embarked on this day-glo snot-colored water slide looking to confront my idea of death and I was certainly not disappointed.  Trussed up like a mummy by a mortician called momentum, I was a creature shot into the infinite from whence I came.  Careening crazily up the side of one curve after another, luge-style, I must have issued almost a dozen grunts from top to bottom.

Amazingly, the entire trip from life to death and back again probably clocked in at barely over 3 seconds, max.  I was dismissed from the beyond as soon as I glimpsed its merest molecule, expelled from the tube like a time-traveling turd. Blasting on my ass through the long aqua-trough at the foot of the slide, I received a water wedgie as a reminder of my place in the universe.

The ride was over, but then again, it was ongoing.  The fact is, I had been hurtling before I ever went down that stupid slide, and I would continue hurtling, along with everything else in existence.  Even with my equilibrium restored, and everything returned to its place, all of it careened through its temporal trajectory.  All of it–the box of tubes known as Key Lime Cove and its slippery inhabitants, the teeming expressway, even the closing glow of twilight–hurtled though the unknown in an ever-expanding universe.

My feet pushed down on the floor, the floor pushed back, but that was only another one of Gravity’s creature comforts, an impersonal courtesy that is our birthright on a planet she had set spinning long ago.  I returned to my life as a visitor, just passing through, letting it all pass through me.  All that was familiar unfolded like a new frontier, all of it, each breath a once-in-an-infinity opportunity.

Trip #∞

The Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part Two

Hunting for "MONNNNN-sters"

RipTide Reef Arcade“With 8,000 square feet of fun, crafted in age-appropriate zones, there’s interactive fun for everyone.”– KLC Glossy Propaganda

After a towel-down, a wardrobe change, and a dinner of contraband homemade pizza, we took Mabel to the RipTide Reef Arcade.  All of the elements connoting the Vegas zeitgeist (minus the alcohol, hookers, and Cirque Du Make It Stop) are evident at The Rip: the onslaught of flashing lights, pulsating “ooncha ooncha” club beats, the fabulous prizes.  The mission statement of The Rip is simple: play games, win tickets, trade the tickets for unbelievably cheap, eminently breakable prizes.

Mabel’s game of choice was “Monster Hunt”:  a roulette wheel of monsters which is set in motion with a clunky, mad scientist style lever, and stopped with a pull of another just like it.  The wheel spins in a blur, blending all the monsters on the wheel into a pizza of complete obscurity.  The game talked like Bobby “Boris” Pickett, he of the ghoulish “Monster Mash” soliloquy, and it talked NON-STOP.  “Ooooh!  You’ve captured another MONNNN-ster!”  It’s an obnoxious and stupid game, yet I approved.  The monsters are of the super-cool Big Daddy Roth bloodshot-bug-eye/trip-over-their-own-tongues species, and “Monster Mash”?  Well, “Monster Mash” is FTW bomb.

Mabel two-fisted her levers with the unsettling, unhinged focus of a Dr. Frankenstein going for broke at the MGM Grand dollar slots.  Her irises glowed with spinning monsters and complete mania.  The compulsiveness that had propelled her down the Purple Little Limers Water Slide had clearly found its purpose at last.

Kate and I just tried to keep out of the way. Our tiny fiend had just netted her forth monster when she was accosted by Santa himself.  Doing the rounds at KLC with an elf named Sugarplum in tow, this Santa had no idea what he had just walked into.

[A word about Santas: In my four years as a parent, I’ve become something of a student of Santatry.  I’ve determined there are three kinds of Santas in the world: 1. The Community Theatre Santa—an aged actor who may or may not bear a passing resemblance to Santa, but who is thrilled to be cast in the role of such a universally beloved character.  They can be counted upon to ham it up at high volume.  2. The Santa Santa— The Santa Santa may look nothing like Santa Claus, but an avid love of children and the holiday compels the Santa Santa to gladly sweat beneath a stuffed coat and a fake beard from Thanksgiving until New Year.  3. The “I Look Just Like Santa” Santas grow their own white beards and sport an impressively jolly layer of fat.  Other than their uncanny "Santa is REAL!" mien, these guys tend to be pretty worthless.  Lacking a verve for the role or any affection for the holiday or children, the “ILJLSS” coasts on his looks, and expects brand recognition to do the work for him.  The best of them seem arrogant, and the worst of them, resentful of their genetic lot in life.]

The Key Lime Cove Santa was a “I Look Just Like Santa” Santa.  Not that it mattered; Mabel happens to hate all Santas.  The KLC Santa’s oddly understated, ho-ho-ho-less interruption was tantamount to a cock-block of Mabel’s winning streak.  It did worse than nothing to foster goodwill.  It was practically grounds for justifiable homicide, really.

"Have you been a good little high roller?"

Having failed to deliver the ho-ho-hos AND the jingling bells, Santa could have easily recouped public relations points by offering to take Mabel’s Christmas gift order, but instead, in a jaw-dropping act of self-destructive cluelessness, the KLC Santa decided to lead with the question “Have you been a good little girl?”

Mabel only stared at him in response, letting Santa know in no uncertain terms that he and his moralistic claptrap were not welcome here, in the RipTide Reef children’s casino.

The “ooncha-ooncha” beats hung heavy in the air.  The KLC Santa attempted to solicit a high five from Mabel, and then a fist bump. Both were rebuffed without a word. The choice was clear.  Who needs Santa, and his be-good-strings attached when you can score all the toys you want, high-roller style?  My kid may have a gambling problem, but she’s no dummy.

Sugarplum,  a dyed-in-the-felt Community Theatre Elf, shimmering with flop sweat, attempted to smooth over the tension with some skittish pleasantries dished out with an odd approximation of a Cockney accent, but it was no good.  I pocketed the tiny candy cane that Mabel refused to accept and waved the duo away. She went on to win five hundred tickets which she redeemed for a an armload of toys (street value: approximately seven bucks).

Christmas at The Rip

Paradise Lost: Slight Return

• Dog Paddle  Mabel practices her swimming in the Sport Pool, and I help her along, guiding her by the strap of her KLC-issued life jacket.  She does the dog paddle, barking like a puppy while I do my best to avoid our getting hit/splashed by the red, white, and blue novelty-sized basketballs hurling off the back boards lining the pool’s edge.  We are more or less under siege.  I can’t decide where to attribute the symbolic subtext this situation: to the brutality of patriotism or the savagery of sports. Nonetheless, this is certainly no place for anyone with glasses.  Mabel is oblivious to our peril and continues to pump her skinny little arms and legs, chin above water,  happily barking.
• Everywhere There are long spine boards everywhere: strapped to the wall by the Sport Pool, tucked in amid the fake tropical vegetation, within spitting distance of the exit orifices of the 4 indoor/outdoor/indoor tube slides.  These six-foot-plus wooden planks with padded head frames are frankly a buzz kill.  They loom around the KLC pool party like the awkward safety-first cousins of the surfboard, invited out of necessity and nothing else.  They stand straight up, like people, like life-size advertisements for “this could happen to you.”  I notice my first one standing watch in the emerald foliage on the perimeter of Toukey’s Big Deluge.  And then I see them everywhere.
• Hotcha Gotcha Hot Tub  The KLC hot tub is designed to accommodate 36 people, aged 18 or older… 36 very sleazy people.  I don’t say this to judge.  I say this as a matter of fact, for if you set foot into a Hot Tub, you instantly become Very Sleazy, whether you like it or not.  The hot tub is the sexual watering hole of American Skank Culture, and by now, everyone knows it.  When you so much as dip your toe into a hot tub, you enter into a hotcha-gotcha social contract that mandates the surrender of your perceived virtue in exchange for the luxury of lounging in gloriously warm water.  Hell, even I know it and I don’t even watch any of the hot-tub hook-up reality shows that have made it so.  So for about 20 minutes of my militantly married, top-button-firmly-affixed life, I, too, was every bit as sleazy as any cast member of The Jersey Shore, all thanks to the KLC hot tub.  I didn’t dip into that hot tub with any intention but to warm my fragile granny bones and just unwind, but to my fellow Skanko-Americans– the swinging couples, the tramp-stamped girls gone wild, the stag dudes with agenda-vision– I was a librarian cougar on the prowl who liked “to party.”  Either that or an overcooked carrot cowering on the simmering perimeter of a monstrous soup intent on eating itself, which is how I felt.
• The Voice The Voice was delighted to see me sitting by myself, avoiding all eye contact behind my steamed-up glasses in the KLC hot tub.  But the feng shui of Paradise Lost conspired against me and any chance of her forgetting about Toukey’s Big Deluge.  Resting my head on the edge of the hot tub, it seemed that TBD practically curved above me to look back at me.  Even when I sat with my back to it, the screams and the periodic roar of the eponymous deluge somehow became louder.   To The Voice, the KLC hot tub was just a cheap house in a nice neighborhood.   “DO IT.  CHICKEN.  DO IT.”
  

  Fake palm tree, real dust.

The Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part One

At Crossroads Of The Crossroad's Crossroads

We are lost under layers of winter wear. We scurry headlong into oncoming squalls churned up in a dark, frigid place so lonely and terrifying that the wind itself had to flee it, screaming. We look directly at a counterfeit sun, coin-sized, washed-out, and utterly worthless.  It is summarily dragged down like the token at the end of a cosmic window shade. We make our way home into a premature darkness and we know we’re on our own. We exhale clouds of warm, damp life—so quickly dissipated in this climate of unrelenting mortality. In the outlying fields, where the suburbs and the jolly Christmas lights end, the furrowed rows of plowed-over cornfields are braided with wisps of snow and sinister black soil. Even the barren trees seem given over to dark thoughts:   the grasping neuron-like branches wave helplessly in the wind, clutching shreds of  dappled winter sky. It is winter in the Midwest, and make no mistake: it is a bitch.

Because I’m especially sensitive to the whole bundled-up, sun-forsaken death trip that is winter in the Midwest, measures must be taken. Almost every light in my house must be on, for example. Every sweater in my family’s wardrobe belongs to me by ad hoc right of eminent domain. (Even my daughter’s, whose tiny cardigans make righteous ski caps in a pinch.) Funk music– which pulses, grunts, and somehow even reeks like a living creature– must be played, and clumsy, rigor-mortisy dancing must ensue.

Anything connoting warmth, sun, and life will do: even a weekend trip to a cheesy-ass indoor water park. To my four-year-old daughter Mabel, our visit to Key Lime Cove in Gurnee, Illinois is a surprise Christmas present. To me, it was a chance to run around in my swimsuit and pretend December never happened: a delusional indulgence made possible by my partner Kate, who brilliantly scored a deal online, thus killing two proverbial birds with one budget-conscious stone.

Our Hotel Room

“Our ultimate tropics-inspired décor features bright colors, fun lamp fixtures, distressed whitewashed Chinese birch furniture, and exotic accent pieces so that you feel as if you are staying in the Florida Keyswithout ever having to leave the Midwest!”—KLC Glossy Propaganda

Unintentionally Erotic KLC Glossy Propaganda with Unsolicited Reader Response

A Hemingway bungalow aesthetic loosely guided the interior design of our room.  And by this I mean Papa, tanked on rum and disgust, wandered away from the drawing board at some point between the occurrence of the window-shutter-replicant bathroom door and the installation of the big screen tv.  The table lamps are modeled after pineapples.  A framed print on the wall depicts a boldly colored shore side shack accompanied by a solitary palm tree, which seems to be the suggestion of what our room might look like from the outside, except there seems to be no corresponding visual image that would account for the cry of “Which one of you kids shit yourself?” on the other side of our door.

Mabel extracts the Gideon’s Bible from the nightstand and pronounces it “The Book of This Apartment.”  She pretends to read aloud from its pages.  It’s some pretty grim stuff.

The Lost Paradise aka Paradise Lost Water Park

 “The fun-shine starts here — at our 65,000 square foot indoor Lost Paradise Waterpark.”—KLC Glossy Propaganda

Aside from the wince-worthy wordsmithery of “funshine”, the real stand out element of this sentence, cribbed directly from KLC’s “Passport to Paradise” brochure, is the figure sixty-five thousand square feet.  Just for the hell of it, I Googled that figure, and came up with a list of results that included a website for a Bellagio spa in Vegas, a press release touting a “footprint increase” for a M Massachusetts marketing firm , a list of “Superstores” , and a web page devoted to a Canadian “Megamansion” .  It just so happens I find all of these enormous, carnivorously commercial megalithic things loathsome to the max.

The KLC Lost Paradise Waterpark is every bit as loathsome as its titanic brothers, only worse somehow because within its gigantic confines is encrypted the very matrix of my daughter’s fondest dreams.  We took her here last year as a part of a Rainbow Families outing, (ostensibly to expose her to other families like ours) and we’ve heard of nothing but waterslides and swimming pools and “apartments” with “tiny refrigerators” ever since.  On December 17, 2011, we returned to the scene of our well-intentioned crime against the basic foundations of child psychology, hat in hand, and penitent.

The Gastric Technicolor Spew of Dishonor

Presented in patented Gaytheist bullet point format: my observations of said Lost Paradise—which I’ve nicknamed Paradise Lost because Milton would have wanted it that way.

• Fencing In The Fantasy The walls of Paradise Lost are painted to evoke the vacation dreamscape of our collective working class consciousness: the blue sky hosting a gentle white cumulous stampede, the placid Pacific upon which awaits a distant island—the geological contours of which are etched with cool indigo shadows.  A rickety picket fence stands between us and this duo-dimensional Escape Horizon: an honest-to-fudge barrier that has been hammered into the wall and white-washed and festooned with corny signs designed to aid and abet the psychological scam we’ve all decided pull on ourselves.  “NO DIVING cannonballs always welcome” and the inevitable “Surf’s up!”  The fence separating fantasy from reality is located within spitting distance of the Tiki Bar, just in case anyone gets carried away.

• Nice Guy Sky God  A teenaged lifeguard attempts to clean a trail of vomit off the floor by the cabana tables.  He gingerly lifts each of the towels covering this gastric disaster, and sprays the area before sweeping it up.  Settled into my “Chair of Delight” (glossy propagandaspeak), I sip my plastic cup of Blue Moon and watch.  His rubber gloves are a dreamy, mile-high shade of blue; they look like they were cast from the atmosphere just a few feet away from the 30 foot tall “HMS Parrot-dise” cruise ship, painted on the north wall.  He flails his empyreal hands at passersby, waving them away from potential pedestrian catastrophe.  After a few more sips, I feel a physical and emotional warmth bubble up from my stomach, and I see him as something more than a scrawny kid with a shitty job.   He’s a nice guy sky god come down to the Isle of Good Times to eradicate all evidence of unpleasant reality.  Upon his protruding scapulas rests a massive responsibility.  Under those towels festers a poison that would taint and destroy the illusion that sustains KLC and all its jolly castaways.  To stumble on this Slip and Slide of sick would invariably mean to land on our asses on the fact that we are not glamorous good-timers in paradise, but rather aging suburbanites wearing the physical evidence of a lifetime of bad dietary decisions gussied up in unflattering swimsuits.   If it were not for this kid, this is beautiful tropical vacation getaway would revert to a massive and cheaply-built box of tubes on a windswept Midwestern tundra.  The lifeguard’s heavenly hands sweep the dangerously slippery  Cheezits of our corporeal limitations
  

  Trip # 10

  and fragile dreams into a garbage bag and I want to weep with beery gratitude.  I see him shaking open yet another garbage bag and casting a weary glance to the teal rafters, and appealing in an “I shall be released” kind of way.  Who is the God of the Nice Guy Sky Gods at KLC, I wonder.

• Number of Trips Made By Mabel On The Little Limers’ Purple Slide In The First Hour: 17.
• Toukie*’s Big Deluge From my “Chair of Delight”, I marvel at the engineering achievement that is the massive contraption known as Toukie*’s Big Deluge.  A Rube Goldberg journey into the outer limits of arcane cause and effect grown gargantuan on Cap’n Crunch and countless viewings of The Goonies, Toukie’s Big Deluge is a house of hydro-horrors.  It bullies its willing victims with water: water flung centrifugally from spinning discs big enough to seat a family of four for a cozy pizza dinner, water dumped unceremoniously from rope-tugged buckets, water showering down in abruptly drawn curtains, water riotously hosing out of mini cannons.  Presiding over this nautical naughtiness is a 250 gallon bucket gussied up to resemble a pineapple-cupped tropical mixed drink, paper umbrella and all. The pineapple cup teeters with the tremors created by the concentration of such unhinged mischief and tips over, drenching its each and every denizen with foaming white chlorinated judgment from on high.  After its scrambling denizens are sufficiently punished, Toukie’s Big Deluge dispatches them, screaming like torpedoes, out of its three curling colorful colons, I mean waterslides.   It is a horrifying thing, like something Hieronymus Bosch would dream up, if he were reincarnated as a dull-eyed suburban twelve year old.
•  Enter The Voice A dark, phlegmy voice inside me suggests I take a closer look at this insane tower of showers.  “Do it!” The Voice bubbles with the soft suggestiveness of a delicious bong hit.  It’s not a proposition as much as it is a dare.  Because The Voice, being a denizen of the subterranean regions of my psyche, knows damn good and well I’m scared of Toukie’s Big Deluge.  The Voice specializes in putting me up to doing things that are dangerous/destructive/just plain dumb.  The Voice has cheered me on to former victories such as my first cigarette, and that time I hugged Vanilla Ice in the nineties.  To its credit, The Voice has never urged me to do needle drugs or take up with a stripper; it’s not as interested in destroying its host as much as humiliating it with its own ridiculous flaws, fears, and predilections.  Most recently, it told me to douse an entire Healthy Choice meal– cherry “crisp” and all– with Frank’s Hot Sauce.  And now, to climb Toukie’s Big Deluge.  The Voice knows I’ve never ridden a waterslide before, because it is well aware that to do so would mean confronting a litany of fears I would prefer not to go into at this time.  “Chicken!” roars The Voice.   My attempts to ignore it are met with a disconcerting chunky rumble of arrogant, nicotine-stained laughter.  “This isn’t over, Four Eyes!” it taunts.  Incidentally, The Voice sounds exactly like that belonging to the late actress Suzanne Pleschette.

*A hateful toucan tribute to the shades-and-Hawaiian-shirt oevre of the wretched Jimmy Buffet: The Official Mascot of Key Lime Cove

How To Have A Right-On Civil Union

"Purple Gays, all in my brain! Lately, things, they don't seem the same!" -- Jimi Hendrix

On September 30, I entered into a civil union with Kate, my partner of nine years and mother of our four year-old daughter Mabel. We were able to do this not because we love eachother or because we have a demonstrated commitment to one another, but because we were lucky: lucky to live in one of a handful of states that allows some vestige of equality in marriage rights. Not everyone is as lucky as we are. It is my hope that one day, everyone will have the option to do as we did, and celebrate their respective partnerships in a Right-On Civil Union. The following is a list of suggestions compiled from our own Right-On Civil Union (plus money-saving Hard Times Bonus Tips!).  I humbly present the following list to those of you who may wish to follow in our footsteps and/or learn from our mistakes.

 Pick the right partner. The search for Mrs. Hellraisin made David O. Selznik’s search for Scarlett O’Hara look as effortless as ordering from the McDonald’s Value Menu. Not just any woman has the capacity to endure my super-caffeinated marathon tirades, or the unassailable personal dignity to be seen in public with me on Marvin Gaye Crochet Hat Tribute Day, or the iron-clad sense of restraint to resist the urge to force-feed me my own cell phone after I’ve left it in the refrigerator for the third time. It took me two decades and almost a dozen candidates to find my beloved Katherine. Thanks to her, I’ve done things I’ve never considered myself capable of– great things: things like the parenting our daughter, the writing this blog, and the wearing of khaki for profit. She’s saved my life, every day, in ways both large and small, and has made it worth living for nine years. I still cannot believe my luck.

 If you think your partner of nine years and mother of your child is going to let you show up at your civil union, wearing a tux/purple granny glasses/inverted crucifix a la Axl Rose in the “November Rain” video, think again.

"$#@%!"--Axl Rose

 Hard Times Bonus Tip #1: There ain’t no shame in wedding shoe shopping at the Payless Shoe Source. There ain’t no sexy there, either. Just so’s ya know.

 Don’t forget to bring your ID to the courthouse. The legal system suffers from trust issues of pandemic proportions. Why anyone in their right minds would want to fake an identity funk on me and Kate on the occasion of our civil union is beyond me, but it is rather flattering to think someone would be insane enough to want to trade places with us.

 Make sure your mom’s ringer is turned up good and loud so she doesn’t miss the call when you need her to break into your house to get your ID while you’re en route to the courthouse.

 That’s right, I said “courthouse.” We got civil unionized in the same place that people get sentenced to jail. Outlandas De Amor no more! Love justice is served! What a courthouse ceremony lacks in romance, it more than makes up in police presence. So butch! If I had my druthers, our ceremony would have been attended by a contingent of lady cops, yelling “This is a love bust!” and issuing spread-eagle pat-downs to the entire wedding party, but nobody wants that. Because nobody’s awesome like me.

 Having the same first name as your fiancé is a great idea. That way your idiot judge won’t mess up your names THREE TIMES like he did when he performed our ceremony. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have made us matching “Hello, My Name Is Shaniqua!” nametags. Shaniqua loves Shaniqua. True Love Forever.

 An adorable child, dressed to the nines, is a classic element of any commitment ceremony. Carrying baskets of flowers, bearing rings, or (as was the case with own adorable child) simply glaring a thousand flaming thumbtacks at the idiot judge, a child’s contributions are often the most cherished memories of any Big Day.

It would probably be a good idea to remember to trim your nails, though.

 If you’re looking to have a civil union, you are a non-traditional couple. Why would you settle for traditional rings? I say keep the subversive good times a-rolling with a handmade beauty from an independent artisan! Stick it to the diamond industry! I’m not talking about “blood diamonds” or third-world government corruption. I’m talking about the unmitigated evil/BS consumer culture in which love is supposedly measured by the size of an outrageously-priced shiny rock. And who says which shiny rock is the best expression of love, anyway? Diamonds are not the only shiny rock, you know! Diamonds are not forever, if you ask me. Diamonds are for fuck you. The joke of the diamond industry is only slightly less hilarious than the price of gold. So get your gay ass to Etsy, and be free. (Hard Times Bonus Tip #2)

 Have a food photographer take your wedding pictures. You will look yummy!

 Hard Times Bonus Tip #3: Make your own cake toppers! My beloved Kate is not only beautiful, intelligent, and a consummate badass, she is also crafty as hell. She made this adorable duo

...so I guess you could say they look just like us!

with Sculpy and her own innate brilliance. What’s especially nice about our tiny effigies is how they make us look tall, thin, and elegant in comparison. Nobody has ever accused us of being any of those things before, so that was a treat.

 Last, but not least, the key to having a Right-On Civil Union is to live in a state in which you CAN have a Right-On Civil Union, or better yet, an actual marriage. How do you do that? Moving to a state that recognizes civil unions or gay marriage is one answer, but it’s not the solution. I would suggest you look up your local gay rights organization and get involved. Pound that pavement, stuff those envelopes, ride that bus, knock on those doors. Or email your congressman; call his office. Or speak out, Gaytheist style, with a smartass blog of your own. Anything worth having is worth fighting for, or shooting your mouth off for, at the very least. Your life, your love, and your family is worth it to me, let it be worth it to you. Let us burn the mother down, shall we?

Hard Times Tip #4: If someone else is buying, select the biggest beer possible. Cheers!

Meisters Forever

Meister and Meister: Labor Day Weekend 2011

I wasn’t always middle-aged. I wasn’t always a mom. I wasn’t always trapped in the suburbs, fighting for air in a cubicle 5 days a week. I used to be free, dangerous, and utterly idiotic. I did amazing things. I once set up camp in my car, just a few blocks away from the French Quarter during a full-blown Mardi Gras hellraiser riot. I drove to the top of the highest mountain I could find, just to cry at the distant, cloud-shadowed beauty of the world I left behind. I shut down bars. I broke hearts. I smoked a pack a day. I was indestructible. In short: I was young.

Meister was not only there with me, but many of those amazing things were her idea. She, too, was free, dangerous, and utterly idiotic. For a short, yet memorable span of time during the Clinton era, we embarked on what could best be described as a bromance with boobs. The only girly thing about our friendship was our penchant for non-stop talk about everything, (except that time we cried on the mountain). Otherwise, it was Dude City. We busted each other’s chops. We pushed each other’s buttons. We put each other up to a lot of stuff we’ll never live down. We had each other’s backs during a time when hardly anyone else knew what the hell to make of either of us.

We went our separate ways a long time ago, but somehow the planets align in such a way as to occasionally reunite us in both space and time. The parking lot at the Denver Phish concert on Labor Day weekend was one such collision; we joined forces to make grilled cheese sandwiches and give them away to concert-goers.

“You gotta put a lot more butter on, Meister! Pick up the pace, dammit!”

“I AM, Meister!” I protested, “Watch me now!”

Meister is Meister to me, I am Meister to her. We were given these doppelganger nicknames by a client who lived in the group home where we used to work. Meister worked the evening shift; I worked the nights. In the morning, this client would be the first one up for his meds, singing Meister’s praises to me. “She’s a hot babe, that Meister,” he’d say to me as he sprinkled his Lotrimin over his poor old turtle-head-looking toes, “You two make a good pair, Meister.” That we deliberately called one another by the same nickname is probably a good starting point in explaining why hardly anyone knew what the hell to make of us. But we didn’t care.

Meisters at the Great Divide: 1996

It was Meister’s idea to tailgate at the Phish show this weekend, and invite everyone in the parking lot to join us for free grilled cheese sandwiches. I offered to support her in this endeavor, which meant flying out to Denver and steeling myself for the inevitable sting of her lash. Meister is a Taurus: a dust-pawing force of brute physical will. I’m an aquarium of dreams and make believe, otherwise known as a Pisces. Whether or not you buy the astrological alchemy, we do tend to piss one another off at times.

“Dammit, Meister! Keep ‘em coming!”

I gouged my butter knife at the tub of Country Crock sitting on the open tailgate of Meister’s Honda Element and I smiled. I couldn’t really be mad; it was just like old times. Once, I was so furious at Meister I tried to kick her ass right in the middle of the street somewhere in New Orleans. To this day, neither of us can remember the precise flashpoint of this completely uncharacteristic outburst of mine. I’m assuming that she probably said something unflattering and truthful about me, very likely at a particularly inopportune moment. She had a talent for this.

Just a few minutes before, a cloudburst had rolled in like a buffalo stampede across the Colorado sky, so we packed up the “Phish Kitchen” and waited out the storm in the car. We talked about everything while the blues on the radio vied for our attention. Just like always. I remember Meister’s smokey green glasses, glinting off the naked lightbulb in the living room of her old place. I remember her ranting, shaking her fists and knitting her brow. “THE BASTARDS,” she howled. She had gone and waved her torch of unflattering truth up the wrong tree, at the wrong time, and had barely escaped from the conflagration that consumed our boss’ tree house of lies.  Meister had a lot of anger back then, and she was beautiful with her lanky, unwashed hair and hilarious “Beef Satisfies” t shirt.

The rainy grey daylight came in through the windshield and threw shadows on our faces.  I noticed a crease between her eyebrows, and I knew without her telling me, she’s still torching tree houses. Time and growth has had its way with her, as it has with me. She’s a married mom, too, and has also cleaned up her act.  But she’s still my Meister.

The rain was short-lived, and I returned to our posts: me, hastily coupling obscenely over-buttered bread with cheese and she, frying them up for the masses.

Munchies For Your Love: the Phish kitchen as captured by a reluctant Blackberry

The autumnal breeze rendered my shorts and tank top an ill-advised folly, but I soldiered on. Meister used to “feed the unwashed and unworthy” on a regular basis. She was there for the last hurrah of the Grateful Dead in the early 90’s, and the emergence of Phish. From what she tells me, these days were essentially the comet’s tail of the 60’s. As such, subversion of the status quo was de rigor: naturally, sharing and giving comprised the tacit currency of this “dirty hippy” remnant community. It was completely not unusual or uncommon for people to set up a camp stove on a card table and give away grilled cheeses from the backs of their cars.

We soon realized that we were the only people giving away food in the parking lot of the Phish show.

In exchange for our troubles, we garnered quite a few baffled “Whoa—‘s“, some incredulous “Awesome!’s”, and a couple of offers of illegal substances, which we laughingly turned down. It seemed that what people wanted more than free food, was an explanation. I can’t pretend to be in Meister’s skull to know what it felt like to come home to a place of personal significance, only to find that no one knew what the hell to make of her, yet again, but I decided it would be unwise to slow down production to attempt to console her.

“We’re giving these sandwiches away to offer you the mindfuck experience of receiving something good, absolutely free, which you don’t deserve. There is no obligation, nor the acceptance of a return favor. You get the pure experience of receiving ,” Meister would answer. I sensed the edge in her voice, and I was pretty sure what she meant was, “We’re giving away these sandwiches as a souvenir of a long lost subculture, destroyed by apathetic assholes not unlike you, Mr. Frat Boy Party Person.”

The clouds had cleared, and in the distance, I could see the Rocky Mountains heroically standing up to the sky, a perfectly-cast allegorical landscape for the moment. I nudged Meister, and pointed it out to her. “Look at that,” I said, “You’re lucky you live here. You get to see these every day.” And draw the strength to keep fighting for the things you believe in and never let THE BASTARDS win, I wanted to add, but we had a customer.

“What do you have against butter, Meister? More butter next time!”

“Screw you, Meister!”

She laughed and swatted me with her spatula.

We weren’t always middle-aged suburban moms. Once, a long time ago, we were just ourselves. The thing about getting older is, you never stop being the person you once were. Cut down the oldest oak you can find*, and you will always be able to count on its stump each layer of time and growth to the sapling that had lived within. This is true about people, too. Under the layers of maturity and responsibility—the grey hair, creased brows, the mortgages, the marriages and sensible clothing, our younger selves peer out and wonder how we got here, and why nobody recognizes us anymore.

But I see Meister in there, and she sees me.

Meisters in New Orleans: 1996

*Please don’t literally cut down an actual oak tree.  You’ll just have to take my word on this one.