21st Century Bogatyr: Riding a Wave

"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."

Vladimir Nabokov

This is the eleventh part of a work in progress. Links to the rest can be found at the bottom of this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

Gas was cheap and all the cars ran on that stuff back then. Day labor was plentiful and they could pay you in cash, which not only was legal to have but was widely used by everybody for most transactions. We would pick up an odd job for a day or two and have folding currency in our pockets. Money put gasoline in the tank and that internal combustion engine would power the car, with us in it down the road.

Lots of free food could be found in dumpsters behind grocery stores and restaurants. That was before the poisoning of disposed food or the locking of dumpsters. That was long before they began pressing such excess into building blocks for public housing projects.

We camped and sometimes slept in the car and occasionally rented a cheap room, because back then camping was widespread and even encouraged and there were lots of cheap rooms.

We were in the flow and everything was going our way. At highway rest stops families would invite us to picnics and sometimes birthday parties.

We found change every time we passed a payphone or a vending machine. I found a quarter - the most widely used coin in the days when coins were used - on the floor of a casino, where we stopped to use the pisser. I dropped that quarter down into the nearest slot machine and lights and bells and bouncing coins were, in our eyes, the obvious natural phenomena attached to our very being, and we left there with a bucket full of quarters.

Restaurants often accidentally supersized our orders, bringing us extra food at the price of the smaller order. Pizza guys would give us whole pizzas free. Gas station attendants would overrun the amount paid half the time.

If there was a concert or a festival, we always got in for free. Every town we hit had plenty of day labor, so we had work whenever we needed money. The weather had been persistently pleasant.

All told, we felt blessed by the universe and we were quite convinced that we deserved to be blessed so, and that surely it would go on forever, like an endless summer and perpetual youth.

We were at least somewhat cute and women would regularly take pity on us. We were fed, cuddled and coddled. Older women would baby us. Younger women would experiment on us. All of them would tell us secrets about their boyfriends or husbands, their fathers and brothers and their brothers' friends and the boys in their schools or the men at their jobs.

They would show us the secret places where skinny dipping occurs.They would all claim to be monogamous or virgins or religious, and therefore have limits as to how far they would go with us. These various and arbitrary sets of limitations resulted in rules and promises and rule breaking and white lies and some very creative and interesting interpretations of commitments and responsibilities.

During that carefree road trip we met all sorts of lovely companions of varying shades and shapes and sizes and degrees of sweetness and saltiness. They had a range of accents and customs and habits. We experienced and learned much along the way.

So all was well and we were having lots of luck and more fun than any two young men could ever deserve. We found our way to a small college campus in Georgia and we sat in the shade of the grand trees there to eat lunch, drink a beer and watch the world go by, soaking it all in.

When a couple of pretty coeds approached us, we just assumed that this was the way our life would continue to unfold because a cornucopia of blessings was our destiny. The trajectory of our fate, however, was shifting dramatically and we were totally unaware of what fate had in store for us.

The girls chatted and joked and babbled and bubbled and flirted with us and we returned the nonsense in equal or greater proportions. They batted their eyes and rearranged their skirts and flicked their hair and they weaved their webs and we buzzed happily right into the webs.

They said that they could sneak us into the Sorority House. They said that we could bathe and eat and sleep. We thought we were being dipped in honey or maybe some better fate than that. Fate takes its own course.

We were fed delicacies and magic potions, or maybe it was just junk food and odd combinations of drugs. The sorority sisters were all being very nice to us. There were a whole gaggle of them coming and going and giggling around us.

We thoroughly let our defenses down. When we were told that we each had a bubble bath waiting for us, it seemed to be the course of nature and gracious divinity at work. We were led in separate directions by giggling coeds.

I was brought into a large bathroom with a comfortable tub filled with water complete with a froth of soap bubbles. The young woman guiding me giggled some more, hugged me briefly and skipped out of the bathroom, leaving me alone.

I undressed and climbed into the bath. I sank under the water while contemplating my fate. I was very self assured and believed sincerely that I was having very good luck. Only the very young can be so very sure of themselves and their circumstances.

While I soaked, two sorority sisters in revealing bikinis wriggled into the bathroom and sat themselves down on the edge of the tub. Without speaking to me they played through Rock-Paper-Scissors best out of three. I could certainly not tell you which was the 'winner'.

One of them took a gentle bite of my right ear and then whispered that she was going to wash my back. She climbed behind me with a leg stretched forward on each side of me and proceeded to soap up my back with some fruity bar of soap.

This was all a little embarrassing, but certainly enjoyable to begin with. The remaining coed on the side of the tub gabbed and gossipped and prattleled and rattled. It was all quite confusing and distracting and then went on to be even more so.

The girl in the tub let go of that fruity bar of soap and it slipped off my left shoulder. It slid down my chest and dropped into the water above my lap. It sank under all those bubbles of the bubble bath. The soap disappeared from sight.

Ms Gabby broke off her monologue and her face went most serious and determined when she gave me a direct stare and said, "Don't worry. I will find it." Then she thrust her arm through the frothy suds groping about until she found something and clasped it firmly. She certainly had not found the soap. I let out a gasp or a whimper or a sigh or some combination. Whatever was going on, I was baffled.

When she was done, they both were done with me. One sat on the toilet seat and the other sat on a hamper. They chatted and squeaked to each other as if I was totally inconsequential or not there at all. What they didn't do was go away. By then I was beginning to wish for a modicum of privacy.

I cleared my throat and um-hummed and such until they looked in my direction. I told them that the water had gotten cold. My bathroom attendants called me a "silly boy" and told me to get out of the tub so they could dry me off. Evidently, they had further plans for me.

So, I guess it still felt mostly like a game as they towelled me down and even as they doused me with perfume from every conceivable orientation. I was not keen about the pink bathrobe nor the fuzzy bunny slippers, but I was not sure if, as a guest, I should complain, and all told, my visit had been fairly pleasurable so far.

When I got back to the common room I found Greg to be attired similarly and reeking of perfume as well. We were seated in the middle of that room and we were surrounded by the sorority sisterhood.

They used a deck of cards and a couple of dice to make decisions about the parlor games that they had in mind. The games all seemed to be loosely based on Blind Man's Bluff and Musical Chairs and Twister and Truth or Dare. The eroticism was intriguing and some of it was quite enjoyable.

I did not start to get really bothered or concerned until they used the ropes to tie our hands behind our backs and our legs to the straight back chairs. There we remained for a couple of days, without food or a bathroom break.

We had weird concoctions of liquor and drugs poured down our throats. We were poked and prodded with varying objects from multiple angles, resulting in some bruising and small cuts and burns. All told, all of the fun for us had long since passed although some of the coeds still seemed to be enjoying the sport of it all.

I could not tell you exactly how long this went on, but at some point we were alone except for one sentry and she had fallen asleep and was snoring peacefully and comfortably on a sofa. Greg managed to wiggle his hands free. He untied his feet and then freed me.

We found our clothes piled in a corner and quickly dressed. We tied some sheets together and used them to scale part of the way down the Sorority House wall. We dropped the rest of the way and landed unceremoniously in the hedges.

The sun was just coming up when we found the Chevy. We drove as fast and as far as we could go before the adrenalin began to wear off and we realized how well done, cooked, burnt and decimated we truly were.

In the very way that everything had been going our way before, every demon and difficulty in the universe was coming directly at us by then. Dogs barked at us. People threw rocks and trash in our direction. We were threatened with guns by farmers and gang bangers. We were shot at a couple of times. Something fell off of a truck and it cracked the windshield of the Chevy. The jobs dried up. The weather was nasty. The Salvation Army refused to feed us. The dumpsters were all empty. The police tossed us repeatedly. Women sneered at us and their boyfriends cussed at us. We were caught shoplifting and ran away, chased from a grocery store by a security guard. We pawned everything of value that we had including my father's watch, the jack and the spare tire from the car. We were hungry, broke, sad and dispirited.

This was our condition and rolling the car was like a perfect topping on the shit sundae that our very existence had turned into.

After that accident, the car was leaking all sorts of fluids and exhaust fumes were coming up through the floor. We hobbled on.

The hippie hitchhikers were trying to get to some commune of sorts in the foothills of Tennessee. We drove them there. It certainly didn't seem to be much more there than some broken down trailers and cars. My nearly destroyed Chevy blended right in, backfiring as I turned off the engine.

While they were thanking us for not getting them killed and eventually getting them to their destination, the dog pissed on my leg. By that point, I didn't even react. Dog piss was about what I was expecting out of life.

It was late and dark and we were exhausted, but at least it had stopped raining. We grabbed our camping gear and went off to sleep in the woods. I might have cried myself to sleep if I had the strength to muster up tears. I think I just passed out.

That night we were bit by mosquitoes, chewed on by chiggers, sucked at by ticks, exposed to poison ivy and sprayed by a skunk. Then it rained cats and dogs. Our tent leaked. We both woke in foul moods.

We came stumbling out of the trees with twigs sticking out of our hair and clothes, wet and stinky, pulling ticks off of our arms and feeling very sorry for ourselves.

Walking towards us was a man in a floppy hat, a long wooden walking staff in one hand. His beard was almost white and it nearly reached his belt. His pot-bellied torso was wearing a light blue robe that reached down to his black hip boots. A sabre hung from his belt.

The man had a smile from ear to ear. "Why does a tea kettle whistle?" he yelled at us. "Because it doesn't know the words!" he answered himself.

He then laughed and laughed as if he had just heard the wisest and funniest thing ever, perhaps a message from another planet somewhere in the Milky Way, or perhaps beyond. He was letting us in on a grand and cosmic secret that had been whispered to him alone. This was Dave. He offered us the Grand Tour of Woodpecker Flats.