Plastic Fantastic

I’ll segue into a not-so won­der­ful expe­ri­ence that occurred at around the same time:
I met a neigh­bor boy at a scout meet­ing on the base. He seemed pret­ty nice and asked me to come hang out at his place. I’ll call him: Sey­mour.  The husky kid with glass­es lived in the bar­racks end unit above us. I was tak­en aback when I went to his home because it was noth­ing like our place by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. He was an only kid, so it was qui­et there and it was incred­i­bly spiffy spank­ing clean. We always lived with con­stant noise and plen­ty of clut­ter. So, I think, I actu­al­ly gulped when I stepped foot in there. The couch­es were uphol­stered in a thick clear plas­tic.

The floor mats were also plas­tic and numer­ous, mak­ing des­ig­nat­ed walk­ways from room to room. He kept his head down as we walked by his mom, stand­ing in the kitchen. She was short but her hair was quite tall. She wore an aqua col­ored apron and match­ing dish­wash­er-safe rub­ber gloves halfway up to her elbows. Maybe she was germ pho­bic or the fam­i­ly was prone to infec­tion. From my pubes­cent view­point, she was a look­er. Lift­ing a pen­cil-thin eye­brow, she nod­ded in response to my “hi!” Not a word.

If that wasn’t odd enough, we went into Seymour’s ship­shape bed­room where he closed the door and piled pil­lows along the bot­tom. In filthy whis­pers he shared with me an unpleas­ant visu­al he had acci­den­tal­ly walked into the same night, a week pre­vi­ous. Get­ting home ear­ly from the Wednes­day evening scout meet­ing, he found the front room dark and could hear a loud pound­ing noise from the back bed­room. Open­ing the door, he dis­cov­ered his father and moth­er in an awk­ward predica­ment. With his khaki’s pulled down, shiny shoes still on, his father’s but­tocks heaved as his moth­er, sport­ing a blonde wig, lay stiffly below pinned to the bed. I didn’t real­ly need or want to know this, but good for them!

Like I said, it was the sum­mer of love.

I didn’t hang out with Sey­mour after that and won­dered if I need­ed to go to con­fes­sion because I couldn’t get the afore­men­tioned tit­il­lat­ing romp out of my head for weeks.  Every time I saw his mom, I pic­tured her naked sport­ing the blonde wig and those rub­ber gloves.  Yeah, I should have gone to con­fes­sion.