There’s a semi-historical, famous scene from Ocean’s 13, in which Danny Ocean (George Clooney) excoriates Willy Bank (Al Pacino) when he accuses him on reneging on a gentleman’s deal by destroying a landmark hotel-casino owned by Reuben (Elliott Gould), stating “You shook Sinatra’s hand, you should have known better.”
I normally don’t like George but I have to admit that he has a certain charm and knack for finding pretty good parts (“The Men Who Stare at Goats” not withstanding), and the Ocean’s series is light-hearted, light-weight entertainment. What I want to focus on is the act – the handshake – what it symbolizes in our collective psyches, and why it might go away for fear of disease, and liability.

In Ocean’s 13 and Jersey wise-guy parlance, a handshake is a contract – “I’ll do my part, and you’ll do yours” – no matter what the agreement may be. Well, no right-minded individual outside of New Jersey today doesn’t enter into any contract situation (social media and wireless service contracts notable exceptions) without lawyering up and getting signed agreements to protect against abuse. Legalisms aside, my end focus will be more on the symbology of the act, itself.

The act of shaking hands is “…commonly done upon meeting, greeting, parting,
offering congratulations, expressing gratitude, or completing an agreement. In
sports or other competitive activities, it is also done as a sign of good sportsmanship. Its purpose is to convey trust, respect, balance, and equality.”[1]This is a traditional definition and 20thcentury view and I agree with it. However, we now know that in the 21stcentury we are now swapping DNA every time we press the flesh, and that exchange does change our personal genomes, albeit slightly, as compared to what occurs during sexual congress, where there is a real threat of contracting an STD.

I’ve already noticed a reticence about hand shaking with strangers at times, and Purell hand sanitizer stands are now ubiquitous – just pay a visit to LX-2. With the resurrection of communicable diseases that we once thought were dead, not to mention the new ones that we are just learning about and the really scary shit to come, I can see a day where the handshake becomes a thing of the past, and where you could get sued for transmitting disease – don’t laugh, it may come to pass. It’s already happened with AIDS.

Still, it – the act of the handshake as a symbol of greeting and respect – matters.
The majority of Socotra readers I dare say have shaken hands with many a luminary – Presidents, foreign leaders, Senators, Congressmen, celebrities and sports figures from all walks of life, and then some unsung heroes of the nation. It goes with our territory.

Well, I’ve never met a sitting President or Vice, so I can’t count coup on those encounters. I’ve met a few celebrities and politicians (what’s the difference?) along the road, when they were semi-famous or on their way to being the real deal. I’ve distilled my personal list down to a select anecdotal few, since there are some good stories that go along with these encounters. And once again, as I am fond of saying, I’m not making this shit up. So, in no real priority order but building in intensity, here goes:

Hammerin’ Hank

Anyone who read my recent missive “The Green Monster” knows that I love baseball and home runs, and there was no greater player in the majors for doing that (Barry Bonds, shut up). My buddy David and I used to sit up nights listening to the Atlanta Braves radio broadcasts by Milo Hamilton, glued to the edge of our treehouse seats waiting for Hank to hit the high drive to left (going, going gone), which he did with an amazing regularity. On TV, this led to a war dance in Fulton County Stadium which would today be now known as PC cultural mis-appropriation by Chief Knockahoma. Hank hit #715 on my 18thbirthday – I thought it was a special gift to me.

Chief Knockahoma and Hank Aaron

Hank exchanged DNA with lots of folks, at least 755 times officially on the Major Leagues base paths with first and third base coaches, and countless others. He was from Mobile and the city organized a local major league player’s day over in Bienville Square one Fall weekend; I cajoled my parents into taking me over to meet Hank and other local baseball greats like the late Tommy Agee who had recently led the NY Mets to their improbable World Series title in 1969. I dutifully stood in line to get Hank’s autograph, and to shake his hand. He was, and still is a great gentleman.

The Snake

I’m going to stay on the sporting side here with my next selection, which is Hall-of-Fame NFL QB Kenny “Snake” Stabler. Snake was from nearby Foley, who were big rivals of my high school football team. I first saw Snake play in 1963, the year we moved down to LA (that is Lower Alabama for you uninitiated out there) from Jackson. We got up on Foley when Bubby Sawyer returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. After that, it was all Snake. He went on to a great career at Alabama and with the Raiders, and still is one of the few NFL QBs to win both a National Championship and a Super Bowl. Snake was a renowned character, both nationally and down in LA. He married his high school sweetheart but had an eye for younger women, and moved on. I even dated once of his later ex-wives, but that is another story best left untold.

Snake was a larger-than-life local legend and a huge party guy during the off-season. I first ran across him personally when he and Jimmy Buffett (yeah, I shook that asshole’s hand, too) were holding court at a dive bar in Gulf Shores called Sam and Shine’s. They had young girls lined up outside the bar just dying to meet them. Pretty incredible how shallow that all was, looking back.

I met Kenny personally the next summer, outside of Hudie Green’s Summerdale Supper Club, on a hot Saturday night. My brother and I, both Grand Hotel lifeguards at the time, had gone over there for dinner and lots of drinks. I was dateless, but my brother had snagged one of our long-time hotel guests, the daughter of a Fortune 500 investment firm partner, who was pretty damn good-looking. We drove my car, since he was canoodling with her in the back – I was on the prowl, so to speak. We had a nice steak dinner, and I retired to the bar on the hunt. My brother and his date disappeared…

Hudie Green’s, Summerdale, Alabama

Things weren’t going well (surprise, surprise?) for me so around closing time I went looking for my brother and his hottie to head back to Point Clear. I went out to where I thought I had parked, looking for the car, and it was gone! It turned out my soon-to-be-dead brother had made a spare car key, and that motherfucker stole my car so he could go scrog his girlfriend. So, there I was – more than half drunk, it’s hot and sweaty, and I’m car-less in the middle of Baldwin County, Alabama, a 20 mile walk from home. Fuck! There was no Uber at the time, much less any taxi cabs at midnight in Podunk, Alabama. I’m standing in the middle of the parking lot contemplating how fucked I was, and trying to figure out what to do next. Then, help arrived from an entirely unexpected quarter.

Out from the bar shambled this big guy, with two equally big friends. I happened to be standing by his pick-up, cussing out my low-life brother when he walked up and held out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Kenny Stabler. This here’s my running buds Zeke and Danny.”
Wow – I shook his hand, and then with the other guys.
“You look a little bit lost, what’s your deal?”
“My fucking brother stole my car so he could go fuck his girlfriend, and stuck my ass out here in Summerdale.”
For some reason, Snake and his friends thought that was funny as shit and started laughing their asses off; after a minute, he got semi-serious.
“Can I give you a lift, where do you live?”
“Point Clear.”
He thought for a moment.
“Shit, that’s not far from my house in Foley (he lived in a big Ranch-style house he built after signing with the Raiders off of HiWay 98 – everybody down there knew where he lived). I’ll give you a ride home. But you’ll have to ride in the back of the truck with Zeke (no four-door, double-cabs back in the day) since there’s not enough room for all of us up front. Feel free to help yourself to a beer.”
In LA, you always rode around with an ice chest with cold Bud in the back, and a shotgun or two in the gun rack hanging on the back window – try doing that in Maryland today. Hell, I’ve got a friend who is reading this now who used to drive an old white Caddy station wagon with an ice chest full of beer in the back seat, a bottle of scotch under the front seat, and a loaded gun in the glove compartment. Zeke and I mounted up, Snake and Danny got in the front. He fired up the truck, and then we were off on the backroads of LA. Life was looking pretty damn good about now, and I started to relish the thought about how hard I was going to kick my brother’s ass for dumping me in Summerdale.
Kenny stuck his head out of the window.
“Hey, hand us up a couple of cold ones.”
After about ten minutes, the first beers were finished – and then the fun began.
Snake, true to his QB roots, hurled his empty bottle at one of the road signs and nailed it (he was left-handed so easy from the driver’s seat). Donny missed his first toss, and started taking shit from Snake. Zeke and I finished our beers and started hunting signs to hit. I got mine, but Zeke whiffed. Snake was on Danny’s ass, and on his game.
“Get us another two.”
I handed them fresh beers and about five minutes later, we were again looking for signs. This went on for the half hour it took to get to my house. We were laughing our asses off at every delivery, whether on target or not.
As we got closer, I guided Snake into our driveway. I jumped down, handed him a couple more beers, and shook his hand one final time.
“Thanks for the ride home, Snake, appreciate it.”
“No problem Slick, see you later.”
He peeled out and was gone in a white cloud of oyster shells, hootin’ and hollerin’. He lived life like he played football – it was all fun and he never took himself too seriously. I never saw him again.

George Corley Wallace

Bet you didn’t see this one coming.

My step-dad was an interesting guy. He was the son of a Baptist minister, profane as the day was long (he taught me a lot about that), would get down on his knees to pray, and otherwise was a country lawyer from Shebudah, Mississippi, and then moved to the big town, Jackson. He wound up being a Mississippi Supreme Court Justice, and later the campaign manager and Chief-of-Staff for Governor James P. Coleman from 1956-1960. After Coleman was defeated for re-election, my step-dad went to work for what would later become the largest title insurance company in the US. He was selected to open their branch office in Mobile so we moved south down to LA in 1963. It was not unusual for him to entertain state and regional politicians at our home on fishing trips and fish fries out on our pier on Mobile Bay.
I first really realized how big a wheel he was in southern regional politics the day that I got to shake George Wallace’s hand. When he was Governor of Alabama for the first time, Wallace had an open-door policy – that any citizen of the state of Alabama could go to the capitol and ask to see him, personally. He never turned anyone down. Obviously, that changed after 1972, when he was nearly assassinated by Arthur Bremer at a campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Since both were judges in their respective states back in the mid-50s, no surprise that they were acquainted.

We had to go pick up my oldest sister at the School for the Blind in Talladega[2]at the beginning of the summer of 1964, and had to drive through Montgomery to get there. We got an early start, and my step-dad said he was going to take a side trip to see an old friend. It was a hot Friday morning. We pulled up in our pink Buick station wagon and parked right in front of the capitol; windows down, and left the keys in the ignition – it was a different world back in the 60s. We went in and up the wide marble staircase, took a left and walked down the hallway to the Governor’s office.

When he found out that my step-dad was there, Wallace interrupted his work and came out of his office. Seeing that there were six of us there (four kids), he asked if we minded meeting him in the cafeteria in about 15 minutes. We went back downstairs and were treated to some ice cream for lunch. On cue, Wallace came down wearing his signature black suit, white shirt, and black tie and introduced himself. I shook his hand gravely and frankly, in a little bit of awe. He went over and got a cup of black coffee for himself, and then sat down to talk for about a half hour. I found him to be remarkably intelligent and gracious, not the fire-breathing George Corley Wallace cartoon character he was made out to be by the media. However, I will always remember him in B&W, just as he was on the tube at the time before we had a color TV.

The Gipper
I saved the best for last. I said I have never met a sitting President, and that much is true. However, I met a soon-to-be President one pre-Summer day in Mobile.

It was the Spring of ‘76, and the presidential election campaigns were in full swing. There was Jimmy Carter headlining the Democratic primaries, and Reagan challenging Ford for the Republican nomination. We life guards at the Grand Hotel were not tied up in politics, but rather more interested in entertaining our female pool guests, and looking for fun in all of the right (and wrong) places. One of those was the Mobile Municipal Auditorium (MMA), where they would host national acts, like the Doobie Brothers or Beach Boys, for example. However, since there was no TicketMaster at the time, much less smart phones, you had to actually go to the box office and pay cash to get your tickets. I volunteered to get tickets for the latest rock concert, and stopped off a little after noon on the way back to my life guard job in Point Clear from the University of South Alabama, where I was attending college.

The MMA was a multi-functional facility and hosted conventions, luncheons, and campaign events. It was the latter that figures in here. So, there I was standing in the main hallway outside the box office, getting our Beach Boys tickets. Just as I was pocketing my change, I heard a commotion over to my right. The big floor-to-ceiling doors were opened, and out strode a tall man in a dark gray, $2000 suit – applause was bursting out behind him in the side chamber where the fund raising luncheon had just concluded. As I was the only would-be voter in sight, he made a bee-line in my direction, walked right up to me, looked me in the eye, and held out his hand. I took it. His handshake was firm, sincere, practiced, and perfect. I was instantly hooked by his charisma.

“Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan. I’m running for President and I want your vote.”
Alone for the moment and unexpectedly face-to-face with greatness, I was nearly speechless, and then mumbled something lame like:
“Good to meet you sir. And I will.”
He was moving fast and his entourage and the TV cameras, reporters, and other assorted paparazzi were hurrying to keep up. It was like a tsunami of humanity that washed over me. I was dazed. Later, I got my commissioning certificate signed by him. And yes, he got my vote – three times. Fuck, I’d vote for him tomorrow if I could.
Yes, I shook Reagan’s hand. And I know better.

Copyright 2019 Ptloma

www.vicsocotra.com

[1]Source: Wikipedia.com.
[2]She was born prematurely in 1951 and placed in an incubator where the highly concentrated oxygen burned out her optic nerves. Not to fear, she grew up to be a concert pianist and opera singer, with perfect pitch – never having seen the world. She hears and touches it.