Vic Socotra

31 July 2009

Hazy Lazy Crazy

(Nat King Cole’s Greatest Hit)

This is20more like it. The air is heavy with moisture, and sweat beads the forehead and rolls down under the shirt. Sit in the car for anylength of time and our back becomes a great dark blob of sweat.

The feeling of the air conditioning in the public places comes as a shock to the system, and the sweat lingers in the soaked once-starched collar, and abrades the soft skin of the neck.

The bow tie wilts. The throat develops a rash.

It is summer in Washington, finally.

I was delighted to get home from shimmering asphalt and out of the tortured working clothes and back into swim trunks and wife-beater t-shirt. I swam with Jiggs, and the water was blessedly cool, dropping a degree or so a day from the high-water mark that could have cooked shrimp.

Jiggs is almost giddy about what is about to happen to him at the hands of the Docs, and is living each day to the fullest. The smoke drifting over the fence at the north end of the pool from the community grill made my stomach begin to growl.

Above the scent of Chlorine, I could dis cern chicken and something else- maybe ribs? I could not tell for sure. There was a knot of people down clustered around, which is unusual. There is no picnic area near the grill, and the intent in our eccentric but staid building has been to scurry out, quickly sear the main course, and then vanish back into the warren of units.

Not any more. Along with the humidity, there is change in the air. Jeremy and Chad have brought a new sensibility to Big Pink. Every place is a place for a party; an auto parked in the lot alongside the grill provides tunes; all may come, all are welcome.

Well that is not precisely true, but the terminal bummer who smokes in front of the building did not find us, though his distracted and very pregnant wife did.

We climbed out of the water just in time. The old Creole was in the process of stripping to his tiny Speedo and the big Brazilian butterfly-stroker was just putting on his goggles to thrash the pool. It was un-beauty and the beast, and the water would soon be churned up too rough for comfortable treading.

I picked up my glass after toweling down and wrapping the soggy cloth in a sarong around my waist. I thanked Cuba the Polish Lifegua rd for the coolness of the water and drifted back to where the smoke billowed from the grill.

The Darlings were there, with The World’s Cutest baby. Jeremy and Chad were moving things around on the surface of the Grill. Diana and her Banana were there, and me and then Jiggs, and Maeve the pale blonde colleen who is married to the Vietnamese Major on the fifth floor, and Sarah 1 and The Visiting Dog appeared from across the parking lot.

There was a bottle of vodka, some fruit juice, six pounds of green beans, two dozen Hebrew National dogs about to smolder next to a pork loin and a great jug of Sweet Baby Rays’s original hot barbeque sauce.

There was not place to sit down, but it did not matter. The hatchet seemed to be buried between The Boys and Jiggs, which is good, and naturally enough, conversation soon turned to the personal lives of everyone who was not there.

We agreed the Controversy of The Third Floor seemed to be at a watershed. Dr. Gates and the President had an icy-cold beer with the cop who arrested the Harvard Professor at the White House, and right here a crazy lawyer was bringing an official complaint against an African American man who stood accused of having sex in the safety and comfort of his own apartment.

We all were in favor of the sex, since if it was too loud, it must have been because the lawyer was listening through the wall with a stethoscope. We and were also in favor of grilling and chilling. It was good to be outside under the lowering rays of the sun. I blinked as I looked around. Big Pink used to be composed of older people, and it was quiet and sedate.

Now there was music. Our little group had a nuclear family, a gay couple, two African Americans, three veterans, an employee of The Greatest Show on Earth and one dog.

It was not the America I grew up in, but nobody seemed to mind.

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