29 June 2008
 
Mud Bugs

 
The excitement about the party had been building for weeks, ever since Mary Margaret sent out of the invitations. Everyone loves Mary, and Joe was kind enough to put his patio up for her use to cater the affair. The Fifth floor would not have worked. the invite said "three-to-six" and meant business- it had an RSVP- and that meant we had to be prepared to pace ourselves. That was a long to drink wine in the afternoon, and was in the manner of a holiday open-house, the holiday of Summer and heat and the glittering pool.
 
The early start made us abbreviate our time in the pool, and I did not get down poolside until noon, based on some unpleasantness associated with making a living. The sun was good and strong and wrapped us in a warm blanket, but Mother Nature cooperated and clouds and a rain-squall came through around two, and drove the regulars inside.
 
I changed into a polo short and shorts, and found a bottle of wine to take downstairs, not that I wanted to start drinking wine that early in the day. Nothing but trouble there. 
 
Having been up early worrying about the project, and the possibility I would have to work through the weekend, I had not turned my attention to the impending festivities. I pulled on some short athletic socks and noted that the bed looked remarkably comfy. I thought I would lie down, just for a moment, and only the ringing of the phone roused me. 
 
It was my son, back from Brussels, concerned about how to get back from the airport. His girlfriend had parked his car somewhere in the garage under his vast new building, and in the long queue of messages that had piled up in his absence was one saying that the vehicle would be towed if the matter was not remedied.
 
I was solicitous, and said if he needed a ride back from Dulles, I could come get him. He said he would call back as things became clearer with additional phone calls. I said I would stand by.
 
Funny thing about the cost of fuel. I would not have thought twice about jumping in the car for the round trip out to Loudoun even six months ago. The Times this morning had an article saying that Cruising, the grand art of driving around doing nothing except wasting fuel, was dead, done and over.
 
It was not until he hung up, ready to go through Customs, that I realized he was a certified grownup on official business, and the Government would happily pay for his cab ride, direct, door to door. 
 
Kids can't afford it, and the solicitous parting of days past- here is a car, here is a credit card, we've got the insurance- are long gone. An American tradition is dying. Kids are not even getting their driver's licenses the instant they are eligible any more. Curious. One of the great American institutions on the rocks, and General Motors, once the world’s largest company, is said to be nearly bankruptcy.
 
I wonder what social structures will replace Cruising?
 
It certainly made Mary Margaret's party that much more attractive to the denizens of the Pink Palace. There was no motorized component to enjoyment, and everything was right here on the property.
 
I wandered down four flights of stairs, the chilled wine bottle concealed in a festive gift tote. I am a slave of my military past, where promptness is a necessary virtue. I felt bad about being fifteen minutes late, but came only to realize that this gathering was more in the nature of an elongated counter-seasonal open house. 
 
I was just making my first round of greetings when my son called to tell me the car was OK, and he had no problems, and the Dulles trip was off the table.
 
The Big Pink regulars plus a few were clustered around Joe's table, and food was arriving with each new guest. Margaret had apparently invited about forty people, or just about everyone she saw in the building. There were many new faces, some long-time residents who rarely venture beyond their doors like Maggie, and new ones like Big Red, a large flaming red-head from Oklahoma who is house-sitting and conducting a long-range war with her landlord, who is deployed to Iraq.
 
Death Junior, Marty I's associate at the Funeral Home, was there, too. She is on the second floor, and very nearly complete in all the requirements for her mortuary technicians license. 
 
You would be surprised at who is handling the dead these days. Death Junior has some spectacular skin ink, which contrasts with her sober dark-rimmed glasses and conservative hairstyle. The hues of her ink are as bright and new as Pat's anchors are old and blue and faded. Brightly colored stars adorn the skin behind her ears, a great butterfly lives atop and between her breasts, the tips of the antennae protruding modestly above her neckline, beckoning of secrets below. 
 
She told me some very unsettling things about corpses, and I will have to tell you about over a cocktail sometime. It made me think there is Something Going On.
 
Speaking of the Departed, Old Jack Malarky was there, too: Margaret had taken a large framed photo of him and placed it at the table as a sort of benediction from the Great Beyond. No party was complete without the irascible little guy for fifteen years, and his passing has left a hole.
 
It is in the nature of things that those holes are filled, but Mary Margaret is thoughtful to a fault. There is a new generation of residents, many of them brightly inked. Big Red has Chinese characters on her left foot, which she claims to have carefully researched for accuracy. They mean "beautiful feet," which is something I might not want to take to the grave, or the oven, as the case may be.
 
Joe had made a gigantic batch of Sangria with sliced fruit floating in it. It was strategically positioned in a large fish-bowl sized glass dispenser with a valve at the bottom.
 
Death Junior had her family with her, step-brother in a powered wheelchair, a Stepfather and Mother.
 
Pat looked on benignly. His place is on the third floor, where a lot of our more dignified residents congregate. He is retired from the Commerce Department and the Navy, a real double-dipper, and does not look his eighty years. He keeps his baseball hat screwed on tight to protect his face from the sun since the melanoma episode last season. He told me Hospice was taking care of his wife now, rubbing the ancient blue ink of his World War Two tattoos.
 
Ms Hamilton made an elegant arrival direct from her couchette by the pool. She had left the deck when we did, but returned with the first rays of the sun. Her tan is magnificent this season, and the consequences of her regimen as a personal trainer have left her lithe mahogany body rippling with definition.
 
Marty 2 was conspicuous by her absence, since she is bigger than life. She was in the middle of things anyway, having contributed to the Summer theme of the party with a fifty-pound insulated box of cooked crayfish. She had it flown in direct from the annual harvest in Louisiana. The box had more mud-bugs than I had ever seen this far east of the Mississippi.
 
There were piles of them on platters, all mixed together with their flaming red heads connected to the little lobster-like tales and all spiced like only the Cajuns can do.
 
Those that were not freaked out by the fierce little mud-bug faces and tiny claws were snapping them in half, and doing the two-handed Blackberry shuck with the thumbs on the tiny tails, tossing the remains mostly into into bowls Mary Margaret had thoughtfully placed in strategic locations.
 
We all hoped Marty 2 was doing well, since she apparently has been feeling poorly and keeping to herself this season. She has not been to the pool at all. Fedex Jack, her jovial companion, has been sighted only once. He was a mainstay of last season.
 
I hope they are OK. I hoped my son was, too, since he called again to say that the car had a flat tire, and wondered where the instructions to replace it might be. I told him the owner's manual was a good place to start, and if that was not sufficient, there was a large decal on the inside of the trunk lid that showed the process in cartoon fashion for his convenience.
 
Of course Jiggs and Mrs Hitler, Uncle Bill, Chuck the Handyman, and Gale were all there. Chuck has a lot of earrings, and a great tan, and Gale wore a neat print summer dress, which was sensible. The sun filtered brightly through the green canopy and it was humid as the Mississippi Delta. We discovered that there was a pregnancy in our midst, an affirmation of new life on the fourth floor, and it was a cause of general celebration.

People who came and went along the walkway were invited to join in, and some did. 
 
Gale is an African American mom who is always at poolside watching her daughter Nyad, who logs more pool-time than anyone. She brought over sixty pigs-in-blanket, premium ones made personally by herself. She never goes in the water. Ann, Empress of the Dogs, brought deviled eggs, and we made a little platter for Jakob the Czech pool guard. It was important to treat him well, since we all knew exactly where this was going to wind up. 
 
I imagine it was the heat and the Sangria that got everyone going. Sweat was running down my brow, and everyone at intervals, discretely tugged on sodden clothing to pull it away from sticky skin. Jiggs had brought his boom-box and was playing Doo-Wop music from the nineteen-fifties. The younger people did not react to it like the older folks, and looked on with mixed amusement and horror as we began to croon in atrocious parody harmonies.
 
“He’s soooo fine,
Wish he were mine,
That handsome boy over there
The one with the wavy hair….”
 
I think we made the Red Book at the Concierge Desk the last time we cranked up the volume on the music, but this was early enough that no one should have been sleeping, and besides, the windows are all shut tight to keep in the air conditioned coolness.
 
Away from the music, the crowd re-hashed the results of the Board meeting, which is much bigger news than Iraq or the stolen election in Zimbabwe. Democracy had spoken last Wednesday. The vicious eighth floor dog that had attacked Ms Hamilton’s pet had been banned from the Big Pink property, effective the last day in July.
 
What tore the matter was the evidence that the animal had lunged at little Desha, the world’s cutest little girl in the lobby.
Doggie Dachau is the answer, unless the owner can find some other arrangement far from here.
 
Mrs. Hitler mentioned that the Asshole on the seventh floor who tagged my apartment doorway was mentioned in public forum along with several complaints about his jerk friends. That was not a place you want to be, since the Board actually can make things very unpleasant for you, should they be forced to do something.
 
In a signal triumph, the pool hours had been extended for the two weekends in September after Labor Day, and Peter the Pool Czar had been alerted to provide manpower, per the standing contract. The motion was adopted by acclamation, which meant we did not have to run another petition drive.
 
My son called to say that the little emergency tire was flat, too, and would not fill with air. I told him that was something that needed to be addressed periodically, and that if he jacked the car back up and took the weight of the car off of it, it would probably inflate just fine.
 
Uncle Bill was pretty hot on the whole pool thing. If this had been Joe's party, and not Mary Margaret's, there would have been more of a Union feel to it. Uncle Bill has passed trough the V.I. Lenin phase of growing his goatee, and with his wire-rimmed glasses now is a full-on likeness of Leon Trotsky in his pre-ice-pick days.
 
He confided to me that he considered Czar Peter to be a scum-sucking oppressor of the working man, since he had outsourced his lifeguard almost entirely to the Czech Republic, and even had Tomas, a special Slavic minister of his work force to keep them content in the group home he rents for them in Rosslyn, the young men piled up in the place, riding their pool-company provided bicycles to their twelve-hour shifts at the twenty-odd pools around the County that Czar Peter manages. 
 
I nodded in agreement, saying the whole thing had a lot in common with Cesar Chavez, and the United Farm Workers movement, except that our Czechs could complete the requirements for a master's degree on-line while they sweltered on the pool deck. 
 
“Surfing the web in the shade is not the same thing as harvesting lettuce,” I said. Uncle Bill conceded the point, but still thought it was a symptom of something fundamentally wrong with the social contract.
 
Anyhow, by the time the light was starting to lower, I had enough sweat. The pool glittered invitingly. There was about an hour left in regulation time, so I slipped away and got back into my trunks.
 
By the time I got back down, Mrs. Hitler, Jiggs, Gale and Chuck were seated on the edge of the pool deck, dangling their feet in the water. There were a couple other families in the pool, and a half dozen kids, who watched in amazement as Marty 1 jumped in, fully clothed, followed in short order by Joe with a lean racing dive and a large splash by Death Junior.
 
We must have looked for all the world like mud-bugs swirling around in the pool.
 
With her shirt off, Death Junior revealed a stunning tattoo.  It started at the small of her back, bright green and red, flowering and flowered into the image of a languid Aubrey Beardsley-style maiden in a tangled bower reaching up to a blazing solar disc just above her left shoulder-blade.
 
Then Jiggs, Gale, Uncle Bill and me were all in there, and everyone else except for Margaret, who preferred not to sacrifice her Sergio Zelcher high heels to the chlorine.
 
Jakob looked on stoically from his life-guard station as the pool heaved with energy. The number of violations of the rules was beyond counting.
 
Thankfully, Big Pink Management was represented by the Building Engineer. He had also discretely changed into swimwear. Despite the general anarchy, we got everyone out of the pool enclosure not too long after the official closing. Mardy 1 attempted to negotiate extended hours, to no avail.
 
“Best Summer party ever!” said Death Junior owlishly, and we all agreed. We managed to clean up the wreckage of the party and the scattered bits of mud bug pretty well before the great thunderstorms of evening rolled through.
 
They were much louder than we had been, and the lightning was spectacular. I think we are covered, just in case the party comes up at the Board meeting next month.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com