Fireworks in the Cold Mouth

When I was a kid, I was fortunate enough to escape the Florida heat and my messy, angst-filled adolescent life there and spend summers in Denver with my Aunt Kay and Uncle Earl. Once or twice during the summer Earl would fire up his massive Ford LTD and head up to the Dolly (shoulda been Dolley) Madison Ice Cream store at University and Bonnie Brae. I guess the franchise didn’t realize they spelled her name wrong until after they did the paperwork, and then decided: Screw it. I’m not paying for that just because it's missing an E.  Earl would come back with peppermint ice cream for me, because he knew it was my favorite, and butter brickle for the two of them. I usually ate twice the peppermint compared to what the two of them consumed of the brickle.

 

I had been a picky eater all of my life, and my aunt had a way of getting me to try new things that no one else had the patience for. I wouldn’t eat apple pie until she made me taste hers. Before Aunt Kay got me to try a mixed green salad with homemade dressing, I would only pick at an undressed iceberg lettuce wedge. I never had lettuce and tomato on a hamburger until she got me to sample one. She always made sun tea with a mix of gunpowder and jasmine teas, which I would only drink with a fist full of sugar added to the glass. She reduced my sugar allotment until I discovered that it tasted so much better unsweetened. I still drink it every day. She would always say, “What’s the matter? Are you afraid you’re going to like it?” I had heard stories from my cousins about her setting the clock on the oven and standing over them with a fly swatter until they ate their vegetables. I think they always complied by eating or hiding the vegetables in a drawer at the end of the table before the timer rang. She was always much more gentle with me. It was because I was so crazy about her and loved both of them so much that I figured the least I could do for their hospitality was to be a little daring with new foods.

 

So there came a time where I had eaten all of the peppermint, and all that was left was some butter brickle. Just the word “butter” when paired with “ice cream” didn’t sit well with me.

 

“Why don’t you try some?” She offered.

 

“No, thank you!” I said politely.

 

“What’s the matter? Are you afraid you’re going to like it?”

 

Reluctantly, I took a small teaspoon of it out of her bowl and put it in my mouth, and the strangest thing happened. The clouds in the sky parted, and a flock of angels appeared, crooning Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Fireworks of brown sugar syrup exploded from my taste buds. Where can I meet the person who created this wonderful concoction so I can thank them, I wondered.

 

And just then a tiny hologram of DollEy Madison appeared on the platter of leftover corn flake chicken.

 

“Congratulations, Bill!” She chimed. “You are now one of the chosen who holds the secret of an obscure ice cream flavor. Share it sparingly, for it will not be around forever.”

 

And then she disappeared. And Earl never again had to bring home two different flavors. We all shared a butter brickle bond.

 

It was just the best stuff in the world. But Dolley was correct. Eventually her ice cream store went out of business, and the butter brickle became extinct as things like frozen yogurt and gelato, and the I-gag-when-I-think-about-it Dippin Dots took over the frozen confection world.

 

Off and on throughout the years, I tried to find a company that made my favorite dessert, but it was nowhere to be found. A few years ago before we flew out to San Francisco for vacation, I found online an ice cream shop in Oakland that served butter brickle! After the plane landed and we settled in at our one-star hotel, I couldn’t get to the BART station fast enough so I could once again, after four decades, have those wonderful exploding taste buds, and maybe once again see the hologram. Maybe this time it would be a Kay and Earl hologram! So we schlepped over there, and in eager anticipation, I ordered 3 large scoops of it, as did Other Bill, because I assured him that it would be the the culinary experience of a lifetime. What they brought out wasn’t butter brickle, and it was grey in color. It even tasted grey. It was slimy and chalky at the same time. I took a few bites and left two and a half scoops on the table. Grey matter ice cream was a huge disappointment. Even Other Bill couldn’t stomach it, and that speaks volumes. It is a known fact that he will eat rotten catfish nuggets just so they don’t go to waste.

 

The old adage “If you want anything done right, do it yourself” applies here. So this weekend we paid five bucks and a bag of avocados for an electric ice cream maker. If you think I have the patience or the youthly muscles to sit and turn a crank for 45 minutes while not watching porn, think again. 

 

Even with electricity, ice cream is a pain in the ass to make. And it is crazy expensive. To do it right, it takes 2 days to cook the milky, sugary mixture, chill it overnight, mix in more ingredients the next day and go temporarily deaf while the machine screams, whines, and churns.

 

The best thing about making your own ice cream is that you can be sure it is real, high-fat, high-sugar ice cream with no artificial ingredients. Look at store-bought ice cream cartons carefully. Most of them say, ”Frozen Dairy Desert” or “Janitor in a Drum.” It’s not real ice cream and tastes pretty nasty.

 

I haven’t had real butter brickle ice cream in probably 50 years, but tonight I again the tasted the frozen delight that Uncle Earl treated us to every summer. Again my tastebuds sparkled and an orchestra played. I thought a hologram was about to appear, but it just turned out to be my cataracts. 

 

In the end, it’s worth the cost and aggravation to have my taste buds conjure up those memories. So thank you, Dolley. And thank you, Uncle Earl and Aunt Kay.

Corona Falls

As soon as I retired, I shifted into budget mode. I asked myself what I could do to reduce costs and maybe at the same time save the environment.

Myself answered, “think about paper.”

My first idea was to stop using paper towels. My aunt Kay made hand-drying towels using old cut-up bath towels with strings attached that looped over a kitchen cabinet knob. So I set out and hacked up a bunch of ancient towels, stitched seams in them with my Viking sewing machine (the same model Kay had), and I attached loops of seam binding to them to hang on suction cup hangers in the kitchen. In two and a half months, we have gone through just two rolls of paper towels, thank you very much

But then there was toilet paper.

Do I have your attention, Corona virus losers who are now Googling “corncob wipes?” So I decided to get ourselves a bidet attachment for our toilet. This was the end of December, before the words “social distancing” became a catchy phrase.

I bought one for thirty bucks. I could have bought a used one for less, but, hey, c’mon, I have SOME dignity, don’t I? All the You Tube videos looked like it was a simple, ten-minute installation, so in just a few days, the butthole washer arrived.

True to form, I installed it with nothing more than a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. I had seriously debated earlier about buying one that was more complicated and would give our puckers a heated douche, but decided that, hey, this is Florida. The tap water here is never that cold.

So just as I was putting the tools away, nature called, so I sat down on the toilet seat and gave it a, how you say, shot. 

My life has not been the same since.

That fountain spray of water couldn’t have been aimed more perfectly. Immediately I thought, “How did the makers of this device know exactly the right trajectory that would both feel arousing in an analingal kind of way and cleanse better than a pressure washer on a sidewalk?” It was amazing. It was tingly and effervescent, as if someone was feeding my anus a Perrier with lime. I was liking it too much, and I found myself dancing around on the toilet seat so the spray could hit other areas. Think Hokey Pokey: You but your butthole in, you put your butthole out, you put your butthole in and you shake it all about. I didn’t want to even get off the toilet, but I forced myself to. I have an addictive personality and didn’t want to spend the whole day there. Plus I had to figure out the drying issue. 

I had read on a no doubt unreliable website that in Europe, people keep small towels next to their bidets to dry the drippings. I thought, well, maybe I’ll stich up some butt-drying towelettes one day, but for now, I just unrolled a few squares of toilet paper and patted my boyhole. Amazingly enough, there was no brown mark. 

There are times, as an old man, that you have poop episodes which frequently involve wiping and smearing for hours. You have to flush multiple times so as not to stop up the toilet and back up the septic tank. Sometimes you have to do the Bunny Hop out to the garage with your shorts around your ankles because you mistakenly thought two rolls would be enough. Often you think you are done wiping, but then another milky turd slips through and you have to start from “square” one. With the bidet, you can flush out your hole until eternity and only wipe once, when you are sure there is nothing more to get rid of. Score one for ecology!

Americans, as a (w)hole, don’t know what to make of bidets. They think that they shoot up dirty, bacteria-infested used toilet water into your b-zone, but the truth is, bidet water is the same stuff that comes out of the tap that you would drink from if only you weren’t some sort of giant-Lexus-SUV-driving, white-priviledged, entitled, designer-water-drinking, environmental pariah who doesn’t give a shit about the plastic problem we have on earth.

Wait, I am getting off track here.

So we have been enjoying the bidet titillation for a couple of months now, and then, out of nowhere came the Corona virus, and people are now Desperately Seeking Charmin. Since I retired and got off a lot of my anxiety meds that I needed so I wouldn’t murder my supervisor and supervisor’s supervisor and chief of police, suddenly, I am less anxious about everything.Could those meds have been making me anxious? Nah, it was just the paper-wiping holes I had to work for.

Other Bill still has toilet paper supply anxiety, even though he too is a proponent of the bidet by a, um, wider margin. So because I am retired and we joined Sam’s Club so we could get free drugs, he sent me off earlier this week to ensure we could get to the year 2525, if you were still alive, without having to re-purchase toilet paper.

As a new customer to the big box world, I often lose my shit (in keeping with the theme of this essay) when I go into Sam’s Club. I always get migraine auras walking through there. Horrific hot white light and tons and tons of plastic that I know isn’t going to get recycled, will end up on Plastic Island in the Pacific, where no one gets voted off. 

Normally when I’m there, in order to avoid the headache, I just beeline to the pharmacy, pick up my free bottle of antidepressants and get the hell out. But on that day I had a mission to procure rolls of old school flushable anal cleaner for Other Bill. That involved wandering around 134,000 square feet (look it up) of overlit retail space.

Because it was the early days of Corona, (well, early for Americans, because Cheeto-head initially said the whole thing was fake news), I saw that no one was leaving Sam’s Club without an Eiffel Tower of toilet paper and a pickup load of bottled water that came from the same source as my bidet but packaged prettier. I was too embarrassed to ask where the TP was, so I had to roam aimlessly to try to locate it.

Sam’s Club has no sense of organization. They have tube socks next to the coffee which is next to the 6 pound bag of feta cheese which is next to the iPad that is bigger than your living room TV, which is next to boxes of 3,000-count tampons, which is next to a 20 pound opaque tube of what they call ground beef that you can’t see but could just as easily be wet topsoil. It’s like the stock people are all on meth and just find a hole anywhere to shove stuff in.  

Weeks later, dehydrated and reminiscing about my doctor who used to give me Percocet for migraines, I finally arrived at the almost empty aisle of toilet paper, and with the help of a sweet old lady in a wheelchair, we hoisted up a shrink-wrapped load of 45 rolls of septic safe generic toilet paper. 45 rolls! Who buys that? Who has room for that? I have never bought that much toilet paper at one time in my life.

I called an Uber and had them deliver the huge package to my car. I gave her a big tip and a good review because it wouldn’t fit in my trunk, and she helped me tie it down on the roof of the Civic. When I got home, I had to shoehorn the huge package in through the garage door, and then I swallowed a fist full of free Lexapro and called Other Bill on the phone.

“Honey, you’ll have to park outside the garage in the driveway when you get home tonight. But I can guarantee you you’ll have a clean butthole for years to come.”

And after I calmed down, I thought that maybe we should get a second bidet for our other toilet. When two men in their mid-sixties with unpredictable colons live under one roof, you can never be too careful. I looked all over the place online, even at analdouche.com, and the cheapest one I could find was $47. For a used one. 

Price gouging during a state of emergency is illegal. I’m calling the cops. But not the chief of police. That bitch hates me.

I love retirement.

A Gift from God

Every day around 4 pm, I take our dog, Jackie, out for her second walk of the day. We live in an older part of the city where blocks are bisected with alleys where people can throw their yard clippings and store their garbage cans. It’s so much more civilized than having to haul cans to the street twice a week. 

Jackie and I like the alleys. For her, there is always something interesting to sniff or to attempt to snack on before I pull her away. I like alleys because I don’t feel inclined to pick up her poop with a bag. It’s an alley. It’s a wasteland. 

Or is it?

I have found many useable discards during our walks. On one walk I found two dozen big plastic storage tubs with lids. We brought them home. One day we will pack them with our possessions and move to an assisted living facility. It’s called planning ahead.

Old Handi-Cart

Another time I was very excited to bring home a big plastic wheelbarrow-like device that tilts down so you can rake leaves into it. They used to make these things out of steel, and they were called Handi-Carts. Now they are plastic and are made by, I dunno… Tupperware? My alt Mom, my Aunt Kay, had a Handi-Cart, and we spent endless hours throwing weeds and such into them and wheeling them back to her alley in South Denver. So more and more, alleys are kind of sentimental to me.

Plastic-Cart

Oh, and then there was the time I found a potted marijuana plant in the alley behind a former house-flipping neighbor whose home was frequented by the police for domestic disturbances. We won’t discuss what I did with that. Suffice it to say, like more than half of the things I buy to plant in the yard, it died.

So this afternoon, Jackie and I were strolling down the first alley south of our house.  Every other day we walk down the second alley south of the house so she has more time on her feet. And she knows when it’s the second alley day, because if I try to trick her into walking down the first alley, she pulls on the leash and gives me a dirty look.

As we approached the end of the alley (and she still hadn’t pooped and had therefore forfeited her end of walk treat), I looked to my right and saw a banana box filled with Whitman’s Sampler boxes. Lots of them.

Continuing with the alley sentimentality theme here, a Whitman’s Sampler is a box of assorted chocolates. I don’t know why they are called Samplers, but it has something to do with embroidery and the fact that they have been in business since 1842. Sentimentally, my father always used to give my mother a one-pound Whitman’s Sampler box on Valentine’s Day. Dad was a very practical guy, so I’m told, and he told my mom, “Why piss away money on a heart-shaped box draped in satin ribbon and only get a half pound of chocolate, when, for the same price you could get a pound of chocolate, for Chrissake.” My mother, who ate candy like a child on Halloween when she gave up smoking, did not disagree. And my family, all of them, loved the word “Chrissake.” And I still do. I especially like that Spell Check can’t figure it out, for Chrissake.

So still stunned by what I saw, my first reaction was that someone had thrown away a bunch of empty Whitman’s Sampler boxes.  I used to keep my mother’s empty Valentine boxes to stash gumball prizes, favorite Hot Wheels cars, Super Mini-Balls, and my hand made Creepy Crawlers. At first I thought maybe I found a collection of vintage toys, but again, the boxes were all unwrapped. 

I peeled off the cellophane of one box and opened it to make sure it wasn’t filled with exploding manure, making me an overnight YouTube sensation. True to form, it looked like my Dad’s Valentine gift to my mom: glistening milk chocolates of all varieties. Only this was a 12 ounce box instead of a pound. It’s like now when you can get a 4 ounce six pack of Coke and can think it’s not bad for you. I counted the boxes. There were seventeen boxes of them. I was looking at almost 13 pounds of free chocolates. Needless to say, I didn’t do the math until I started this paragraph.

This was like one of those awful “Only in Florida” or “Flori-Duh” website offerings, I thought. How could this happen? “Man Wakens from Diabetic Coma Begging for Gumball Toys.” Am I dreaming? What do I do now? The thing is, time was of the essence. If I left the box there, I risked having someone else take possession of it. Naturally I thought, “You can’t eat this.” The chocolates looked normal, but what if it was laced with crack or PCP or cocaine or that stuff that killed Michael Jackson or even worse, CBD oil? What if it was really a box of Coronavirus? 

But then I though, “WWOBD?” What Would Other Bill Do? And then I knew what I had to do. I hefted up the box, which was easily 20 pounds. Banana boxes are double thick and heavy. Plus I had a 40 pound dog yanking on the leash, sending me tripping back up the alley in my flip flops until we finally made it home. I dropped the box in the foyer. Okay, so it’s not really a foyer. It’s a walkway where everyone sheds yard waste and tiny palm nuts when they come in. 

I was sweating like a rotting peach and jumped into the shower. Not long after I got out and dried off, I heard the garage door hum open, and Other Bill came inside, home from work.

I kissed him and said, “Come here, I want to show you something.”

“Is it something bad?” he asked.

“No. Well, maybe,” I said.

He looked down at the banana box, and his bright blue eyes bulged. He knew there were no vintage toys inside.

“Where did you get this?” 

“I found it when I was walking Jackie.”

“Who would do this?” he asked. The humanity! And then I realized I had done the right thing by schlepping it home.

Without even pausing, he dug into the tiny pleated cupcake holder of chocolate covered peanuts and snarfed them down. Didn’t even think about it being poison or contaminated. An hour later, he ate another. An hour after that, I had one. 

As of this writing, we are both still alive.

You Take Me to the Nicest Places.

Now that I’m retired, I get to repeat the phrase I’ve always longed to say: I’m living on a fixed income. It is a built in excuse for being cheap. Sorry about this cheap bottle of wine I brought to your party, but I’m living on a fixed income. I would love to contribute more than $10 to your campaign, Mr. Buttigieg, but I’m living on a fixed income.

I will be the first to admit I’ve always been cheap. And anyone who has ever known me will not disagree. When my father died when I was a pre-schooler, the first thing out of my mouth wasn’t “what happened?” or “how did he die?” but instead was, “how are we going to pay for everything?”

After that, and my mother took over, being cheap was pretty much hammered into me at every turn. I was told to order the cheapest thing on the menu, to walk home from school instead of paying a dime for the bus and to always buy used, never new. I bought clothes from the thrift store after I got my first job and Mom stopped paying for them, and I still do today.

But nothing drives cheapness home like when I am forced to find overnight lodging. When I was a kid and we had the rare opportunity to travel, motels were $20-$30 a night. The $30 ones sometimes had Magic Fingers bed vibrators, which I loved, but we usually had to settle for beds that didn’t jiggle.

And today, I can’t understand why a place to stay overnight costs ten times that. Look, Other Bill and I love to visit San Francisco, but try finding a room for less than $250 or $300 a night. You can’t find one on line. You have to go to my own personal Dark Web of Lodging Dives to find it. We have always stayed at a place that doesn’t link to travel websites. When we first started going, we could get in for around fifty bucks a night, but it has been slowly rising, and I’m sure it’s close to a hundred now, if not over.

One time we arrived there in the middle of the night and got to the room, and there was only a single bed. We went down to the front desk to address that, but the clerk said she wasn’t allowed to leave the desk unattended, but if we wanted, there was a mattress in the basement we could schlep up to our room. So we did. Fortunately it was still in the plastic wrap, but we had to fold the flimsy mattress in half to get it into the tin can of an elevator.

There are no frills at the places we stay. And by frills I mean things like bath soap, ice, swept floors and washcloths.

The next time we stayed there I noticed that the bed was unusually firm. After a week we took the sheets off to wash them (you were expecting, maybe, maid service?), I realized that for the past 7 days I had been sleeping on a box spring.

A few years ago we stayed at a cheap motel in Tampa. I grabbed the phone book to look up an address (you were expecting, maybe, Wi-Fi?), and a hypodermic syringe fell out. Other Bill looked horrified, and I tried to cover by saying, “Oh, it was probably just a diabetic who left it behind,” but the trace amounts of blood left in it proved me wrong.

Our shabby accommodations rarely feature “free breakfast.” If it does, breakfast consists of a Little Debbie snack cake and a canister filled with Cheerios that you can scoop out with a paper cup. (You were expecting, maybe, a spoon?)

We recently took a trip to Wildwood, Florida. That’s where I got my first speeding ticket when I was 18. The sheriff had radar, but fortunately not much of a nose, because I was drunk at the time. Anyway, take a look at this picture, and pay attention to the scale. I used a quarter so you could understand the size of the white thing.

You probably think that this is a sliver of soap that a normal person would probably throw out, but you’re wrong.  This is actually what a national budget hotel chain considers a bar of soap.  This is not an optical illusion, and this soapette is brand new, unused, right aout of the bag. We considered ourselves lucky. Oh, and they had washcloths, too!

We’ve been to this chain more than once, mainly because they allow you to bring your dog in the room.  And if your olfactory bulb is even half alive, you’d know that as soon as you walked in the door. Here’s a picture of the door of a neighboring room in Wildwood. Looks like a dog was left out all night and was scratching to get in.

But the room was $50, and it had two perfectly fine beds, a TV, a spitting shower, and a great view of the drug dealing and prostitution in the parking lot of the adjacent truck stop, so we didn’t really need a TV. Still no Magic Fingers though, except maybe in that parking lot.

It’s nice that Other Bill puts up with this. Other men, I’m guessing especially straight men, don’t have this luxury of understanding spouses, because let’s be clear: most of these places are not in the nicest of neighborhoods. But Other Bill makes friends with the homeless people in the neighborhood and actually bought one of them a pair of shoes. How do you not love a guy like that? Even I wouldn’t do that, because, well, see paragraph 2.

Before I retired, people would say, “Wow, I guess you can finally live a little, travel, stay at nice places?”

It’s a nice fantasy, but I doubt I’ll be able to change my ways. 57 years of Life Without Father still has its skinflint claws embedded in me. It’s one of the several characteristics about myself I hate. I still pick up a penny in a parking lot, even though it hurts my knees to stoop down. I hang clothes on the line instead of opting for the more convenient and slightly costlier electric dryer option. I never run my car through an $8 car wash when I can do it for free by hand in my driveway. It would take years of therapy to change this, and there are still no guarantees. Every time I catch myself choosing price over comfort, I ask myself, why, Why, WHY?

Because I’m living on a fixed income. I have an excuse now.