December 2011

    I hope all of you will be able to enjoy Christmas with your families. I know sharing THAT with someone is what I miss most now that I’m single. Oh well, boo hoo. Like both of my sons often say regarding the military, “It is what it is.” and enough of that.
    I was gonna write a Christmassey story all about Yuletide trees, stockings hung, Santa, gift-giving and the “Spirit of the Season”... about heart-touching memories of blazing fireplaces and glistening snowy evenings. Then I thought, This year I just ain’t in the mood for some reason LOL. So I’ll just blab about something entirely different and give it all a rest. Who knows where my head will be next year? Like I said last month, nothing is permanent. But I DID mean it when I offered y’all a Merry Christmas.
    Like I’ve mentioned in the past, I used to play in a few bands. The most recent one (a blues band) was about fifteen years ago and we practiced here in my home because the other guys had close neighbors. My house is a split-level, and we used to practice in my bar-room which has a cement floor. Our drummer would slide all over the place when playing, so I threw together an 8’ square, sturdy wooden drum-platform for the corner of the room. But eventually we had to dissolve the band because we all had “real” jobs working afternoons or nights. We were booked often, but since we could only play gigs on Saturday and Sunday evenings, we were never really “off work” and free to do other stuff.
    Well, one night after we terminated the band, I was entertaining a few people here in my bar and mentioned that I was gonna rip apart the drum-platform to burn it in the fire-pit out back. Then one of them, a woman who was a dancer, said, “Ya know, you have a great sound system down here. You should keep the platform, use it as a stage, and put a brass stripper pole on it! I can bring my girl friends over to practice.” What a great idea, I realized, surprised that I hadn’t thought of it. And her offer of bringing girl friends over to practice dancing on the pole made complete sense to me (OH YES!), so I began thinking of how to get that together.
    First, I used a bar-supply catalogue that belonged to a friend who owns a tavern to order 10’ of brass tubing and mounting hardware (they use it for bar foot-rails etc.) When it arrived, I cut it off to the proper length, sawed a notch in the center of the platform (which I had built in two pieces) for the pole and solidly secured it to the cement floor and the ceiling beams. I then found some multi-colored track/spot lights at a yard sale and mounted them on the ceiling. Then I installed glass mirror tiles on the corner walls. Within weeks the stage was set (pun intended) and plenty of fun and frolic has been had by all over the years. Bummer’s Bar soon became “Party Central”. In fact, without any prompting from me, a tradition began where women would often leave their bras hung from the ceiling beams. Over 25 bras of assorted colors, material, shapes and sizes have mysteriously appeared there, not as trophies, but as testaments to the donors’ sense of frisky frivolity.
    When I married my most recent ex-wife, she and HER girlfriends would sometimes use the pole to work out on, utilizing a pole-dance aerobics video she found somewhere (Okay, I’ll fess-up....Santa gave it to her for Christmas).

    Now, keeping all that in mind for future reference......
    An old friend of mine named Phil needed some bike parts. He was restoring a Shovelhead and I happened to have lots of parts that my son Jason (who I gave my ’74 to) has no use for and will probably never want. I bought that bike wrecked and rode it for twenty five years and I had a lot of stuff. So, I took some of the things that Phil needed over to his house one night and found him in his garage playing poker with his brothers. When I entered, I immediately burst out laughing because they were playing cards on a gynecologist’s examining table!!
    “Where the hell did you get THAT?!” I asked.
        “At a big flea-market. It’s a weight-bench.”
    “No it isn’t.”
        “Yes it is. See, the back of it tilts up and even has stirrups so you can do crunches.”
    Now, Phil wasn’t dumb, but he and his brothers were life-long bachelors. Actually, they sorta reminded me of an old underground comic book’s characters named “The Furry Freak Brothers”. They honestly didn’t know! So I just let it ride.
    “Okay, but if you ever wanna sell your ‘weight-bench’, let me know. It might look good in my bar.” (LOL) and didn’t give it another thought.
    Sadly a few years later, Phil passed away. A month or so after that Jake, one of Phil’s brothers, called me one evening when some friends and I were down in the bar having a few and listening to some great old tunes (I do have a helluva music library)......
    “Hello?”
        “Bummer... I have that weight bench for you. We loaded it onto my truck. Man that sucker is heavy! Can we bring it over now?”
    I had a buzz on and had no idea what he was talking about. But he went on to tell me that they were in the process of cleaning out Phil’s farmhouse and garage, that I had agreed to buy it, and that they only wanted the $20 they had invested in it. So I said, “Okay....bring it on over” thinking, What the hell am I gonna do with a weight-bench? And then I returned to partying with my friends. In a little while, there they were. And there "IT" was, standing in the middle of my bar-room.
    It didn’t take long for me to discover that women usually had a problem with seeing a gyno table in the middle of the bar. In fact, sometimes they ran away screaming. So I moved it to my lower basement where my furnace, washer and dryer are to fold clothes on or whatever. The really funny thing is, when I did that I noticed for the first time that the table had drawers, and when I opened one I found over $30 in quarters obviously because those guys played poker on it often. So I actually got the table for free AND made a ten dollar profit.

    Now, back when my place was “Party Central” I used to have an annual Halloween costume party. One year when they were decorating for the party, the “Decorating Committee” decided to cover the walls of the room that the gyno table is in with black plastic. We also installed a fog machine, candles, a black light, and we hung whips on the walls and chains and hand-cuffs over the table. In short, we made that room into a class AA dungeon for the Halloween party.
    A few days AFTER the party, my furnace needed work and my regular guy (a good friend) was out of town, so I phoned the local heating company. I was in my garage doing something when this old guy shows up to work on the furnace (I call anybody older than me an “old guy”). I was right in the middle of tearing something apart, so I just told him to go on in and to keep going down the stairs and he’d eventually find it.
    Within minutes I realized what was happening and thought, ‘OH MY GOD! What is this guy gonna think!!’ Here was this elderly dude...a straight-laced, complete stranger, passing through a completely decorated full bar where he couldn’t help but notice the bras hanging from the ceiling, the stage WITH a brass stripper pole in the center, and even spot lights. AND THEN going further downstairs to find a gyno table surrounded by whips, chains and handcuffs!!!
    I immediately dropped what I was doing and literally RAN downstairs. I then casually tried to initiate a conversation with the guy.......
    “How ya doin’ today?”
        The man wouldn’t even look at me. “Good.”
    “Ya got the furnace under control?”
        “Yup.”
    “Everything gonna be okay?”
        “Yup.”
    After a few more attempts, I just gave up and returned to my garage assuming he’d go back to his shop to exclaim, “You should see what I just saw! This long-haired weirdo biker fella has a bar with bras hanging all over the ceiling, a f&%k#ng stage WITH a stripper pole, whips, chains and yadda-yadda-yadda-!!”

    Well, fast forward to yesterday....
    I never drink anywhere but home these days, and finding a companion of the opposite sex is, to say the least, difficult for a bearded and long haired kinky fat guy who smokes like an old locomotive. Those of you who are men know that a biker event is usually the WORST place to meet a woman. I simply don’t go that many other places that would help in that regard, and whenever I try the old “Drop a jar of mustard on her foot” ploy at my local grocery store to meet someone, all I get is yelled at. “Ouch!! You clumsy idiot!! What the hell’s wrong with you?!”
    I know my friends have gotten sick of me asking THEM to introduce me to someone. Hell, I even threw a hint out to y’all in a column last year with NO replies. So I just figured that the internet might do it. But almost every time I DO try computer dating, things just turn out weird.
    Well THIS time, a woman who first contacted me online just happened to be coming to my small town anyway, so I invited her to come over sometime for coffee to allow us to actually meet in person. She surprised me by phoning a few hours later and telling me she was on her way! So that I wouldn’t appear to be some kind of “player” I immediately hurried down to the bar to at least take down the bras. I stuffed them in a bag and waited somewhat nervously for her to show up. When she did and we got a bit more comfortable with each other, I showed her around and explained the history of the “Brass Pole”. She laughed all the way through the story that even included the gyno table! And then she suggested that I put it in a column since she had read a few from the state website. So, here it is.
    In truth, I despise dating strangers, even though this wasn’t exactly a “date”. And this particular woman and I probably won’t even see each other again due to the facts that 1. I might have shocked her a bit, and 2. She simply didn’t seem interested. And I’d understand both reasons. After all, she seemed very conservative and it does take some amount of interest to want to invest the time (the longer the better) to actually get to know ANYONE. Even then do we ever really? Most of us have even been married to someone for years, only to wake up one day and ask ourselves, ‘Who the hell IS this person I’ve been sharing my life with?’ But that’s not even the point of all this.
    I guess the point (if there IS a point) is that whenever I even think about changing how I live, who I am, or even how I act, I soon find that the best thing for everyone concerned is to just be myself, because like Simon and Garfunkel sang in “The Boxer”, ‘After changes upon changes we are more or less the same’.
    I’ve also found that although it might have taken me a while to learn and understand this... I LIKE "ME". I like who I am and how I live. I just don’t like being single and living alone. But I’d rather be alone than living a frustrated lie. And being me is sure a hellova lot less strain, hassle and work than trying to be someone else.
    On the other hand, now that I think of it, it might be kinda fun to be Fritz the Cat.

                                Bummer

PS...Be careful if ya go out on New Year’s Eve. Watch out for dummies, and don’t YOU be one.