It wasn’t until I began scaling a stone wall behind a
stranger’s hotel room in the desert darkness of the Arizona night that I became
confident that the Tucson Conference’s hot tub party was, at best, a myth and,
more likely, some elderly academic’s idea of a hilarious snipe hunt. My
severely under-dressed body was frozen stiff and my feet had been worn raw and
I made myself swear that any future backcountry swimsuit trekking would involve
a less hilarious swimsuit that protected enough of my delicate and precious
inner thighs to defend against an assault from the Arizona desert scrub and
chaparral. Nonetheless, Mike and I gritted our teeth and clutched our beers
tighter and pressed onward while all hope seemed lost and our bubbling beacon
of chlorinated comfort shone dimmest.
I broke the silence. “Lo!” I declared into the obscurity,
“Paradise, Shangri La, the New Zion! Our deliverance and our delight await.
Yonder, among the saguaro and the jackalope.”
Mike remained mute. His silence was largely predicated on
the fact that I didn’t actually say any of these things. Although I didn’t let
this fact stop me from holding his speechlessness against him. Resentful as I
was, and despite my lack of arcane exclamations, we did manage to find what we
had already exhausted ourselves looking for.
We approached our destination and found one last obstacle in
the form of a wall of impenetrable steam. This final obstacle shrouded what turned
out to be an unlocked and open gate to a six-foot, black iron fence topped with
decorative yet intimidating spearheads designed, no doubt, to prevent the
onslaught of what one must assume to be a formidable population of
desert-dwelling, Jacuzzi-bound vagrants. Without any effort of our own, our
obstacle slowly parted and our destination was revealed to be everything we had
imagined and nothing we had hoped: a small pool of hot water that effectively
compensated for its lack of size with a surplus of shirtless, middle-aged men
drinking brandy out of plastic hotel cups and comparing the respective sizes of
their intellectual man-parts.
We jumped headfirst, with neither hesitation nor
reservation, in the steaming hot awkwardness. We made our introductions with
all of the grace available to gentlemen of a certain youth who have been
intimate with the finest available craft brew. That is to say, we may have been a
little loud and we may have lacked our typical coordination and we may just
have failed to properly appreciate the strange tailoring of one of our
companion’s swimsuits. But, as quickly and certainly as vigilance can be lost
to gentlemen of a certain youth, it can return with remarkable haste when
presented with the proper circumstances.
There are many of this type of circumstance but fortune was
merciful and visually assaulted us with only one. Specifically, this
circumstance was the one in which a grown man stands up, boldly, proudly, with
neither trepidation nor shame, to reveal publicly that his oddly tailored
swimsuit was, in fact, a pair of traditionally tailored and vaguely white but
soaking wet Hanes briefs, straight out from under the pleats of his Dockers.
No earthly force could induce me to avert my eyes from the
scene before me. The entire hot tub fell silent in reverence for the
overwhelmingly macabre spectacle. If awkward were sacred then our Jacuzzi was
Jerusalem but suggesting such a metaphor only makes this man’s public nudity
all the more inappropriate.
He was Michelangelo’s David as interpreted by Salvador Dalí
and he stared us in the eyes with a poignant melancholy before he turned,
revealing an equally upsetting sight, and left. That is, he left insofar as
anyone can truly leave when his image has indelibly branded our retinas.
Nonetheless, our visual assailant was no longer physically present and that
provided some measure of relief.
This may have been just our first night and awkward may have
peaked early but it was far from departed. The weekend proceeded as predictably
as possible with unending opportunities for me to stand in a corner and conjure
completely transparent pretexts for not speaking with any of the nearby
strangers. The stakes were high because failure of my artifice was followed
immediately by a limp, professorial handshake coupled with the ceremonial shoe
gazing. A fate as miserable as it was interminable.
It was at times torturous and at times hilarious and I felt
sympathy as often as I did discomfort. I learned to sit and watch and to wait
and hope that a situation arose to mitigate the awkwardness but, ultimately, I
learned to surrender to the truth that awkward might be your only souvenir and
forgetting it can be every bit as traumatic as remembering it.
No comments:
Post a Comment