Shameful Reading (and straws that are too long)

Uncle Cliffy, who dispenses words of wisdom from his cabin in the woods, asked me to list "five guilty pleasures -- books you love but would be embarrassd to admit to or read in public." This oughta be good, I thought to myself. I love making an ass of myself in front of friends and people I don't really know.

True story:

[This is the first time I've ever written this story down, and there's a chance that it won't work out as well in print as it does when I tell it, because the telling involves some acting on my part that I feel deepens and enrichens ("enrichens"?) the experience. If, by the end of this anecdote you don't feel like you got your funny's worth -- let me know. I'll make it a point to meet you one day and I'll re-tell the story, complete with visual aids. If, however, the cruelty of the universe should manifest itself in our never meeting, I'll also include stage directions. It's not exactly the same, but it will have to do.]

So I'm living in Portland, Oregon, on Schuyler Street near the Lloyd Center. The Lloyd Center doesn't really figure, I'm just setting the scene -- and if any Portlanders read this they'll know where I'm talking about and they'll feel a special connection with this story. This is called "audience manipulation." Anyway, I'm living on Schuyler, it's a Friday morning, and I'm running late for work. So late, in fact, that I've got a terminal case of bedhead [at this point in the audio/visual version of the story, I hold some fingers up behind my head to represent said bedhead], only I'm not popular enough to pull off bedhead and look sexy. Bedhead on me looks regrettable. I don't remember exactly what I'd done the night before; even that day, I'm not sure I could have told you what happened the night before. I do think it involved shot after delicious shot of vodka. There may even have been some late-night weeping over this guy, Dan, I worked with who I loved but who showed no signs of loving me back. Probably because of my bedhead. [In early tellings of this story, I'd pull out a picture I had of Dan, stolen from his desk one late night at work. I no longer have the picture; but also? It never really helped. "Wait, you cried over that?" was usually the question that accompanied the unveiling of the image of my only true love. And it's not so much that Dan was unattractive; it's that Dan looked 40. And we were both in our early 20s. He had some trouble with the posture, and he shuffled when he walked. "You're jonesin' for Punky Brewster's dad," my friend Misty the Stripper helpfully offered.]

Anyway.

Normally, I'd start my mornings with a pot of coffee before heading out to my bus stop, only I was late and out of coffee so that wasn't going to happen. No problem, I thought, I'll just pick up some Texaco coffee and pray for a swift death. Yeah. That didn't work either, since the Texaco was also out of coffee that morning and I really didn't have the time to fuck around, yelling at the Texaco staff for ruining this, my worst of mornings. Instead, I grabbed a fountain sodie with one of those obnoxiously long straws, and sort of drag-limped my way to the bus stop on the corner in time to catch my bus. [You're asking yourself right now, "Sodie?" And yeah: sodie. Because here: Once upon a time, Barq's Rootbeer had some radio spots that were brilliant, all about how much "bite" Barq's had. My personal favorite involved a mother/daughter team trying to get the daughter ready for some formal event that required some big-ass hair. "I want my hahr higher, Mama!" "Try this, darlin'." "A sodie, Mama?" "A sodie, Sugarbaby." And then the commercial guy broke in and talked about Barq's great flavor and crisp finish which, I guess, okay, but then the gals come back for this brilliant finish: "How's my hahr now, Mama?" "It's standing tall like a blonde marine!" And: fin. And that's why I'll forever use the word "sodie." Live it, learn it, love it.]

Back to the straw for a minute. I'm not kidding for its obnoxicityness -- you'd need a step ladder or something to climb up to drink from it. I guess the idea was, no one drinks from the standard 12- or 16-oz. cups anymore; everyone was moving to their own personal barrel-sized cups, and they needed straws to match. Only I wasn't drinking from the barrel-sized cups. I'd gone for medium because I'm demure. [At this point in the telling, I've pantomimed climbing a stepladder, and then made some "I can't quite reach the straw" faces with my mouth. Comedy. Gold.] So I've got my bed head. I've got my normal-sized sodie with my pole-vault of a straw. And I'm getting on my bus.

I make my way unsteadily to the back of the bus where I find the last seat and I just kind of collapse in a pile of tired and backpack and hangover. It's at this point that it occurs to me that while I have vague memories of being naked in the shower, I don't recall washing anything with soap. I do remember almost washing my hair with toothpaste; but I also remember catching myself before that happened and actually brushing my teeth. However, I think I get a fail-grade on the rest of that particular shower experience. And what leads me to believe that is when I reach up to rub my eye sleepily, I feel a huge chunk of what I thought at first was rock salt, but instead turned out to be sleep. I may have sobbed a little, quietly, as I realized how unfit for human consumption I was, right at that moment, in the midst of all that humanity.

Now, sitting across from me on the bus that morning was the World's Most Beautiful Man. He had teeth that shone like 1,000 suns and hair that fell perfectly into place when he ran his fingers through it. His skin had that clueless-about-acne quality, like his pores thought that the word "pimple" was a cute euphemism for something they didn't understand. "A puppy?" his pores would ask, "doing something cute?" And then his pores would giggle or something. His clothes looked recently laundered and freshly pressed. My clothes? Only barely passed the sniff test, and that was after spraying my pants with lemon pledge. He also knew enough to mix patterns and fabrics into interesting and fashionable combinations. I'm still waiting for Garanimals for adults. To wrap this paragraph up: he was a God. I still smelled vaguely of booze and furniture polish.

Go get 'em, tiger.

The World's Most Beautiful Man looked up in time to catch me staring both blankly and openly at him. Rather than make a disgusted look, or change seats, he smiled at me. And not one of those pity smiles, you know? Not, "Gee, guy: sorry times are tough for you." Or, "I may have a couple quarters if you need 'em to pick up a hot meal at the shelter." Or, "It smells like someone has a drinking problem." This was one of those nice, open, and dare I say it, a touch flirty smiles. "It's nice to see you," that smile said. "I'd like to see you again, and then I'd like to marry you and you'll never have to work again because yeah, I'm on the bus, but that's only an eccentricity that I have because I'm insanely wealthy -- but that's as far as my insanity goes, so you don't have to worry about anything, it's not like I collect Franklin Mint dolls that I sit at the dinner table for meals and shit. And once I marry you, you'll never have to work again." I may have embellished a bit on the smile. But he did smile. And there was no pity or awkwardness in it.

The smile caught me off guard. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with the smile. Granted, I was so hungover at this point that the person next to me could have been on fire, and I'm not sure I would have necessarily known what to do. Clearly, I could have smiled back. That would have been the simplest thing to do. Instead, though, I panicked a little. Instead of trying to smile, I decided to take a drink from my sodie. And that wasn't the best idea.

Remember how that straw was three yards long? Imagine two of those yards going right up my nose. Yeah: not just a little bit. We're talking full-on nasal penetration. You could see the outdent of the indent that straw was making. Horrified, I looked up to see that The World's Most Beautiful Man was staring right at me, witness to my straw faux pas. Again, I was caught off guard. Do something! I remember screaming in my own head. Yougottafixthis yougottafixthis yougottafixthis. And so I did. I pulled the straw from my nose and started drinking from it, all, "What? What's the problem here? There's no problem here. Haven't you seen anyone drink from a straw before? I mean, dude, it's a straw. Also: impolite to stare."

He got off at the very next bus stop. I died inside and wished I was home and that I didn't have an electric stove.*

And that's the straw story, friends and neighbors. One of about eleventy million where I appear like a douche or an ass. And since I love telling these stories, I really don't have a lot of shame. Which means that I'm not really going to be able to answer Uncle Cliffy's question satisfactorily.

That's not the only reason, though. Last night at dinner, I asked Zach if he could think of any books I've read that I should be embarrassed about. I'd come up with Jurassic Park and If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? by Erma Bombeck. But even those I'm not so ashamed of. They show an alarming lack of taste, sure; but it's not like I'd scurry with them all troll-like to some dark corner.

"Where you should be ashamed," Zach said, "is in your appallingly appalling bad taste in movies. But books, you're always reading that 'good for you' shit written by someone in a bustle and a corset."

So, sorry, Uncle Cliffy. I wanted to debase myself better. I'll try harder next time.

______________________________

* So there's a postscript to the straw story. The next week, on a Wednesday I think, I'm back at my bus stop and this time I've got my game together. Clothes, though stridently unstylish, were freshly laundered. I'd spent a full 15 minutes in the shower lathering like it was nobody's business. (Which it wasn't. A man's lather is his own personal castle.) I wasn't late. I'd been able to have my coffee at home before walking leisurely to the corner.

So I get on the bus, make my way to the back, sit down, pull out my book to read, look up, and guess who it is sitting across from me?

Yeah. I know.

"So what," he asks me, "no soda?"

I got out at the very next stop and waited for another bus.