It is a Sunday in June and my daughter is away at camp. It's been so long since I've been truly left to my own devices on a weekend that I have no idea what to do with myself.
The weather is fine, and the streets are beautifully underpopulated, so I head over the Capitol Hill to have crepes at 611 Supreme. I'm sporting that Northwest look I usually avoid in favor of pressed shirts: cargo shorts, sandals, etc. Sexy, sexy stuff.
Passing down the street on my way back to my car, I look off to my left, and there is Babeland, the sex toy shop of renown. At 46, I have never been in a sex toy shop. I cannot account for the fact that I haven't. I just haven't. So I think: oh, why not?
Next thing you know, I'm standing in a crowded room with people who are infinitely more fuckable than I am. The slender young man with chestnut hair and a shirt half-unbuttoned who is wise-cracking with easy charm with the two pretty young women with whom he entered the shop. The intoxicating lesbian to my right with a flawless face and a dimpled chin and raven hair and a perfect hard ass. Beginning to feel like a creeper in decay, I'm thinking I'll slip furtively out onto the sidewalk when I notice that there's a wizened oldster to my left. Facing the modest display of handjob lubricants that promise to make "your dick as slick as an Alabama councilman". I find a modest measure of encouragement in his presence that offsets, if only a little, a feeling of desuetude that evokes the lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
I've also registered the unsettling frequency with which I forget to zip my goddamn pants nowadays. I have no idea what that's about. I wonder: do I actually fail to zip them or are these jeans just such crap that the zipper slips down again? Anyway, it's pretty embarrassing, and I'm willing to bet it's a meager earnest payment on the unending mortgage of disgusting, pathetic old dude behaviors to which I will treat a dismayed world as I go to rot.
Would you permit me a somewhat abrupt changing of narrative gears as I note that I love the word lubricious. Always did. A beautiful, euphonious, five-dollar word. From dictionary.com: "arousing or expressive of sexual desire; lustful; lecherous." Once, as a senior in college, I sat next to a woman I liked and told her that I had a story to tell her later but that it'd have to wait until after lunch because it was "too lubricious to tell in church." (We were in church).
Meanwhile, back in Babeland, I review the line of flavored lubricants and I think: I bet no one has registered the trademark "Lubricious" for a line of flavored lubricants. Hard to believe, really. It'd be so perfect. But they haven't. I've since googled it. Very odd.
Very odder still: the fact that the flavored lubricants tend to the tart rather than the sweet. It's true, and it's baffling. Green apple. Pomegranate. Mesquite Pulled Pork. (OK, I made that one up). I've never had a penis in my mouth, thank God, but if I did, I wouldn't want it to taste like a crab apple. Lemon? No, really: They. Have. Lemon. If the purpose of a flavored lubricant is to make an imminently exploding penis less offensive to the palate -- the epiglottis can fend for itself, I guess -- why in the name of the apostles would I want something that makes me pucker like the mouth of a balloon?
Ah, but they also have Chocolate Orange. Directly in front of me. Oh. OK. Now we're talking.
The signage on the shelf invites you to try it, so I reckon I will. And I do. But beloved, as I gently squeeze the container, I'm telling you, it goes off like an overstimulated sixteen year old boy! JESUS HEMORRHAGING CHRIST! Like Peter North! Everywhere! So now, I've got this flavored snot webbed between my fingers and I'm looking around for tissue in a darting-eyed panic. Wizened oldster looks over, and rolls his eyes -- mother fucker. After what seems like an eternity, I look around, dreading the walk from the wall to the register where I will have to ask the pretty blonde register woman how to clean myself up. But in the very instant that I make peace with walking that terrible green mile, I notice that the impossibly beautiful, raven-haired lesbian is looking at me, has taken in my splendid confusion, and appears about to snicker to herself like the aforementioned footman. Then, inconspicuously, she points me to the tissue box right behind my turned head and just above my eyes.
I wipe up my hands and get the hell out of there.
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