Take me, Mandingo!

Back in the day my ex-wife and I belonged to the local rec center gym.

It wasn't such of a muchness, but it had a decent weight room, some stationary bikes, rowing machines and that, a sauna and steam room, and was close enough to our then-apartment to be a pleasant walk on a nice day.

Anyway, one Saturday afternoon we'd walked over to the gym for our workout. I remember it was a pleasant autumn day and the paths through the riverside park were crisp with harvest-colored leaves and a faint smell of distant smoke. We enjoyed a chaste kiss in the foyer and went to our respective lockers to change.

After my workout I showered and stopped off at the sauna to bake out the chill. I spread my towel on a corner spot and leaned back to melt in the heat.

A couple of other guys came and went, each time carefully ignoring each other or exchanging greetings with a studiedly heterosexual grunt or nod.

Until The Black Guy entered.

Now let me be clear; this was Wilmington, Delaware, not Portland, so this guy wasn't the only black guy there that day.

But he was...well, let's just say that in one respect he was THE Black Guy. He was, well, kind like THIS Black Guy.

We all grunted heterosexually. He spread out his towel, sat down, and casually flicked his penis over his thigh like Hercules tossing a stray boulder out of his path.

We all studiously looked at the cedar ceiling. Or pretended to close our eyes and absorb the heat.

But not one of us said a word.

We all sat there for fifteen minutes or so, casually sweating in an ostentatiously heterosexual way and carefully not staring at anyone's inhumanly enormous junk.

Then The Black Guy stood up, picked up his towel, casually swung his enormous tool out of his way, and walked out.

We all just looked at each other for a stunned moment and left the sauna in awed, and somewhat shamed, silence.

On the way home my ex and I chatted about the day, and the weather, and plans for the weekend. And I told her about The Black Guy's penis.

And we went on home to dinner.

Later that evening we were lounging about on the sofa. Lounging became kissing, and kissing became fondling, and pretty soon we were in the middle of some pretty serious conjugal business. And just when the temperature was about as high as it could be short of breaking out the top of the thermometer like in one of those Warner Brothers cartoons, my paramour placed her soft, wet lips against my ear and murmured in the frenzied breathlessness of lust;

"Tell me about The Black Man's penis again..."

And I can now tell you from hard experience it's damned deadly difficult to perform the Capital Act when you're both rolling around on the floor giggling helplessly.

Friday Jukebox II: Northern California Kick Ass Edition

OK, nepotism confession time; the bass player for this group - The Mermen out of San Francisco is my ex-brother-in-law Allen Whitman.But ex-family-connections aside (and losing my friendship with Allen was and is perhaps the thing I still regret the most about my detonation of my first marriage) it is more than just nepotism that makes me post this video here. These guys genuinely rock, and they are a sort of kind of odd fixture in the northern CA surfer scene.

Which is pretty amazing, because as I understand it neither Whitman nor the lead guitarist (Jim Thomas) can surf across a flat pond on a calm day.

Be patient (or forward to about 2:20 when the rocking really begins) because this song, "Casbah", is one of their more kick-ass, except for the very vivid memory I have of one show of their I went to see at some little shithole bar somewhere in the dumpy part of Santa Rosa, CA, back in the Nineties.

A typical Merman song is not quite as tight as this one - there's a lot of noodling about and long soloing. And there's not a lot of FM radio 3:40-style discipline. A Mermen tune goes...well, as long as it needs to. And there's a lot of very astral spaciness there. So there we were, just surfin' along with the Mermen (all of us with our earplugs in - these guys are LOUD) on our ride to...where-ever.

Until suddenly the boys kicked over into a beautiful, incredible, perfectly terrifying instrumental cover of the Rolling Stone's "Paint It Black".
I wish I could find you a YouTube video of that cover. It fucking blistered what was left of the dingy paint off the walls and knocked us out of our chairs. It hammered the freaky dancers who had been ambling around the tiny dance floor to their knees. It made the sun come out into the northern California night; it made the mountains tremble and the seas run red with blood.

It was everything fucking great about rock n' roll.


Damn. I miss those guys.