Too Much Tequila, Too Little Sunscreen

It has taken me some time to acknowledge and even longer to confess, that I am a drunk. Not a grocery-cart pushing or a bar-habituating, chronic alcoholic, but a functioning, seemingly normal old-retired-guy kind of drunk.

I don’t know where the boundary is between social drinking and out-and-out alcoholism, but I’m sure I’ve crossed it. Webster says that “one who is habitually drunk” is a drunkard. And, I meet that criterion.

How did this happen? I rose through the ranks of big business, starting out in an entry level job and making it all of the way to a senior executive with stock options, bonuses and a fat six digit salary. It took twenty years or so to make the so-called big time and the big money, but I did it. And I did it with a cocktail glass grasped firmly in my hand. We all understood that our two martini lunches and our after work drunken wind-downs were part of the routine and drama of big business.

The thinking in the late seventies and early eighties was that the Japanese with all of their gung ho work ethics and their impassioned dedication to long, long hours were the major reasons they were killing the U.S. automobile and electronics industries. We had to knock off our two martini lunches and five o’clock watering-hole patronization and get back to work.

Getting rid of booze at lunch just meant that you looked forward, even more, to that first cocktail as soon as your shift whistle blew. I remember the many evenings when my wife handed me a scotch-on-the-rocks the minute I walked in the door after a long, hard day of fighting the Asian invasion from my office. This first cocktail came before loosening my tie, taking off my jacket, saying hello to my kids, or kissing my wife hello. In my case booze came first; before physical comfort, family obligations, or my romance.

I’m trying to make the case that the accepted and normal behavior of a business executive in the 70’s and 80’s was that of a functioning alcoholic.

I’m a fan of old movies, especially the early stuff done in the thirties and early forties. I recently purchased The Thin Man collection of old films. In these movies William Powell was either drunk or on his way to becoming drunk, while he poured drinks for the other cast members. These movies served as an example of what you’d do if you didn’t have to work for a living, you’d be drunk all day every day. Was this something that we working stiffs should aspire to?

OK, antiquated business practices and stereotypical old movie roles are not excuses for over imbibing in today’s world. We have to stand up and call a drunk a drunk when we see one. I’m one and I don’t know how not to be one. How do I fix this? Do I join AA, go off booze cold turkey, start smoking dope, or what?

I don’t know the answer. In the mean-time I think I’ll mix another batch of martinis and think about all of this.

© 2008 by Bob Rockwell

Somehow over the past few months and without any conscious intent I’ve become a vicious killer. How did this happen? I’ve always thought of myself as a live-and-let-live sort of guy; a guy with little or no malice toward any of the creatures I share this planet with.

My transition to the dark side began when we returned from our summer vacation to find our attractively landscaped front yard overwhelmed by a huge invasion of weeds. Not just little, kind-of-pretty, flower-like weeds but the big, ugly, mean, take-over-the-yard kind, most of which want to stick you when you try to get personal. I was tireless in my efforts to kill these living things that had invaded my space without even a by-your-leave. What made me think that this was my space and not theirs is the subject for another day?

I couldn’t wait to kill these invaders. I hopelessly pulled, hacked, and hoed but they had me out-numbered and surrounded. They retaliated by poking holes in my fingers and spreading their eye-watering and nose-running pollen. I was at war and the total destruction of the enemy was my goal. I soon progressed to chemical warfare. As I sprayed and sprayed I enjoyed watching my enemies squirm with my poison dripping from their wilting leaves. I had them on the run, so I went for the kill with a propane burner. I burned the remaining stalwarts along with the poisoned corpses of their brothers-in-arms.

I won! But what was happening to me? I really enjoyed killing this large population of invaders, and I might add, without the slightest bit of remorse.
For weeks I felt listless and longed for battle and the opportunity to kill something. The one-off, little weed that popped up now and then did little to satisfy my cravings. Pouring poison on a mini ant hill or two didn’t do much for me either. Just when I was about to lapse into a neurotic stupor, wave after wave of big, black, aggressive house flies hit our left flank. Here is a formable enemy; one with vision and maneuverability. These bastards will require a different game plan. They have vast numbers, speed and avian skills.

Our pest control guy was a worthless comrade. His only idea was an awful smelling solution that was more irritating than the damn flies themselves. Chemical warfare in the form of aerosol cans is only effective if you can get your enemy to stand still and take his poison like a man. For yet unexplained reasons my wife won’t let me use my very effective propane “flame thrower” in the house.

The only weapon left in my arsenal is a primitive flyswatter. It can be effective, if accurately applied to one stationary enemy at a time. I now spend most of the day on sentry duty with my flyswatter in hand. I’m far from winning this war but I’ve declared my back door the DMZ and I’m holding my own on my side. The enemy enjoys a free-fly zone in my backyard until Mother Nature joins my force with a good hard freeze.

My daily hand-to-hand combat with my latest enemy goes on. They haven’t ceded an inch of turf yet but my body count is way up. Where have you heard that before?

©2008 by Bob Rockwell

Radio-talk-show host, Don Imus, lost his job when CBS and MSNBC buckled under the pressure from the two self-appointed leaders of our black community. Imus’s career hit the wall when he uttered three racially inappropriate words on his simulcast talk show.

Imus’s producer was describing, in politically incorrect terms, how tough the tattooed Rutgers women’s basketball team looked in the prior night’s national championship game. Imus agreed and responded with: “That’s some nappy-headed hos there; I’m going to tell you that.”

No one questions Imus’s ignorance and lack of character in making a derogatory comment about these young athletes when he should have been applauding them for being good enough to compete for our national championship. But, how serious an offense was this anyway? Doesn’t the FCC keep close tabs on this kind of stuff?

Oprah hosted a panel to debate the seriousness of this serious “nappy-headed ho” issue. Her elite black panelists argued that Imus deserved everything he got for this and his many past demeaning racial comments. One black sports journalist was concerned with society’s seemingly double standards. A double standard that permits gangsta rap artists to use the terms “bitch” and “ho” to refer to young women who are obviously neither and punishes Imus for using a two-letter word that has become integral to today’s rap music vocabulary.

Regardless, the interesting aspect of this little episode is not Imus’s three inappropriate words but the intensity and hypocrisy of his two whistle-blowing critics. Had they not loudly cried foul, this insignificant little event would only have been noticed by the pea-brain listeners of Imus’s radio drivel.

The “nappy-headed hos” in this story are not Rutgers’s basketball team but Imus’s two self-serving, headline-grabbing opponents, the reverends Jesse and Al. I’m not talking Martin and Malcolm here; I’m talking about the two limelight-seeking hypocrites that have appointed themselves America’s racial conscience. They both jumped on this important civil rights issue with all of the zeal that a KKK lynching might warrant.

They found a racial issue, albeit a little one, but a racial issue none the less, without a champion. We, the public, weren’t as upset as we should be. Even if we knew about Imus’s “ho” calling thing, we weren’t pissed enough. Let’s hang this racist bastard!

These two yoyos, Al and Jesse, run around the country waiting to jump out in front of any parade where they can insert themselves as the grand marshal. The irony of this little story is that both of these accusing hypocrites have been recorded making far more serious racial goofs than Don Imus. Nobody thought to fire them for their racial slurs. Maybe, it’s because we never hired them in the first damn place.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson found himself in Imus’s shoes when he criticized Nixon’s war on poverty by saying: “Four out of five [of Nixon’s top advisors] are German Jews and their priorities are on Europe and Asia;” that he was “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust;” and that there are “very few Jewish reporters that have the capacity to be objective about Arab affairs.”

Later, he found himself again in deeper doo doo when he referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” Maybe “Hymie” is less offensive to New York Jews than “ho” is to young female athletes? Or maybe there is a difference?

More recently the Reverend Al Sharpton was quoted as saying to a college audience, “White folks was in caves while we was building empires … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

We’ve never heard a word of protest from a white caveman or one of “them Greek homos.” Not even one of them called for the silencing or firing of Rev. Sharpton. Here’s clearly a cause looking for a champion.

We should fire these two nappy-headed hos.

©2007 by Bob Rockwell

I retired without a clue as to where we were going to live. All we knew was it wasn’t where we were living at the time. Our house sold quickly, so we had to find something fast. After many years of owning homes we were apartment hunting again.

We made dates with a couple of apartment referral services and off we went. Our first appointment set the tone for this adventure. Two squad cars followed us into an otherwise normal looking apartment complex. While the rental agent was showing us around, the police were rounding up all of the tenants and lining them up in the parking lot. This didn’t faze the rental agent one bit; he continued with his spiel without a word about the activity going on just a few steps away. Maybe police raids are normal here?

Another agent took us to an older apartment which looked like one we might have lived in thirty-five years ago. We signed a year’s lease and became the new tenants of apartment A209 at Daybreak Place. We were prepared to deal with the trials of apartment living: cramped quarters, strange noises at all hours, community laundries, loud kids in the pool etc. but our real surprise came when we met our new neighbors.

Four kinds of people live in apartments: just-starting-out couples, recently divorced men, chronic losers of both genders and whackos of all sorts. We didn’t know that our suburban phony-friendliness would grant us membership into this totally new social circle. Not the suburban country club set we had just left but a whole new gang of weirdoes. I’d like to introduce you to our new Daybreak Place friends. Oh by the way, I’d put them all squarely in the fourth category.

The Cheecoggo Gang Banger … The most memorable wacko of the bunch is Teddy, a heavily tattooed, muscular, 260-pound, gun-packing Puerto Rican from Chicago, or Cheecoggo as he calls it. Teddy is overly friendly and full of stories from his Rican gang-banger days. He’s hiding out in Phoenix because his old Cheecoggo playmates have a contract out on him.

He works two double shifts each weekend as an armed security guard all garbed up in his homemade SWAT-like outfit. His getup includes guns, ammo, mace, cuffs, nightsticks and lots of other stuff hidden in his many pockets and those hanging thingies on his gun belt. Teddy, with his linebacker body and all of his paramilitary stuff, looks like he could severely kick Rambo’s ass and secure Baghdad in about an hour.

Teddy always carries or wears his loaded .45 automatic, even in his bathing suit and flip flops. One afternoon he came over carrying his year-old daughter all bundled up in her baby blankets. When he unwrapped his daughter his loaded .45 fell out with the baby.

If these Cheecoggo bad guys ever show up at Daybreak Place, Teddy is ready for ‘em.

Our Own “Dom” … Michelle moved in with her elderly mom, our next door neighbor. She is a single, exceedingly homely, plump, thirty-something donned in a thrift store wardrobe. Sound exciting? Nope. It’s not her appearance, personality or sense of fashion that got her on our whacko list; it’s her sexual practices.

Over a third bottle of wine one night she described her dominatrix fetish and her sadistic sexual fantasies. We were to learn that these kinds of folks are simply called doms. How would we know?

Her thing is whipping men. Apparently there are lots of guys out there who crave being beaten by a really ugly fat girl in ill-fitting black leather. She’s also into bondage but only as an adjunct to hurting someone; mainly but not always men.

When our 38-year-old son visited, he and Teddy, the Cheecoggo gang banger, would sit out on the landing sipping cold ones. Michelle would hang around these two good-looking guys like a teenager in heat. She’s tried coming on to the guys by describing her fetish scenes and showing off her whips and toys. They never took her up on her offer. So they say.

One evening we encouraged her to put on all of her gear and show us her stuff. She ran around our living room clad in her leather get-up, snapping and popping her assortment of whips while we all ducked and hid behind the furniture. Was she sexually aroused? I don’t know. I was hiding under the table.

Crazy and Crazier … Talk about whackos; these two are both certified insane. Chris is a thirty-something delusional woman and Mark is her recently paroled, schizophrenic boyfriend. They met at a halfway house and have just begun their new life together, two doors down from us.

Chris was disowned by her affluent Long Island parents and claims to have a college degree. She says she worked a couple of respectable jobs before her one-way trip to la la land. Her stories about being homeless and traveling endlessly across the country with weird truckers made us teary-eyed. The peak of her insanity occurred when she wrote President Bush a six-page threatening letter; a letter scary enough for the Secret Service to track her down and arrest her. The feds found her to be harmless but whacko. They diagnosed her as delusional, treated her, and gave her meds and a disability pension.

Whatever she was taking seemed to work on her delusions but left her shuffling around like she was somewhere between her second and third martini. Starved for female companionship and parental affection she adopted my wife as her new best friend.

Mark on the other hand refused to take his meds and didn’t deal with his whacko-ness very well. He had a thing for cars. Chris told us his prison time was for joy riding auto theft. They bought a worn-out Cadillac from the Salvation Army and had wheels for the first time in their budding relationship.

Chris came looking for Mark one evening. No one had seen him. The following day we learned he was in jail and his car was impounded for shop lifting and driving without a license. Chris asked my wife to help her bail Mark out of what she thought was the right city jail. After an entire night with Phoenix’s finest my wife learned that Mark and his car were being held somewhere else.

His dumbest car trick was when he drove a new Pontiac Firebird off a car lot without the salesman and joy rode for a half a day before regaining his senses and returning the car. The dealership was so happy to have their car back they didn’t press charges. Mark was so hyped by his joy ride that couldn’t remember where he had left his own car. My wife spent hours combing the neighborhoods with Crazy and Crazier’s noses pushed against the windows looking for their lost car.

The morning we left Daybreak Place for the last time we found Mark sitting alone in the parking lot staring off into space talking to himself. I said goodbye to him and he mumbled something back without looking my way.

I hope they make it.

The Jew and the Junkie … I know it’s not politically correct to label someone by their ethnicity, but we met the poster girl for all of the stereotypically bad qualities that Jews have been accused of over the years. She is a homely, chunky, exceptionally loud, know-it-all from New York, where else? She talks or yells about herself incessantly at constant volume, even when discussing her most embarrassing personal things.

We later learned that she suffers from bipolar disorder and has radical mood swings when she’s not on her meds. The loud obnoxious mode we’ve seen is her high. During her lows she stays in bed and yells at her live-in boyfriend. Wonderful!

We nicknamed her boyfriend The Junkie, not because we ever saw him using controlled substances but because he is as flakey as you imagine a strung-out doper to be. He also suffers from bipolar disorder and is on meds. Can you imagine these two together during a pharmacist strike?

He is an unemployed computer nerd with thousands of dollars of pirated software. For a couple of beers he upgraded my system and installed some new packages. While we were waiting for an excessively long download I inadvertently clicked on an email with an attached photo of an exceptionally beautiful nude girl. Guys are normally reserved when sharing something even mildly pornographic with strangers. Not The Junkie, he just moaned and began licking the photo on my computer screen.

The Mayor of A Complex … John is a normal-looking forty-something business person who at first glance doesn’t belong at Daybreak Place. He’s either a wacko, a loser or both. You decide. We labeled him The Mayor because he thinks he sees everything, knows everybody and somehow believes he is actually in-charge of the goings on. He governs all of us by spending every minute he’s home in the pool, on the deck or hanging over the rail from his second story apartment.

His apartment is furnished with an air mattress, a card table and two folding chairs. Two chairs? He’s never had a visitor, male or female, that any of us has ever seen. My guess is, he thinks he already has enough stuff and his need for companionship is satisfied by his mayoral activities.

His coolest trick is floating on his back on an air mattress in the pool while reading a library book suspended above him at a full arms length. He does this all day long. Have you ever tried holding something up over you for more than a few minutes? One dark morning- it was five AM- I went out to load our car and was surprised to see John floating in the pool, arms extended, reading his book by the underwater pool light.

Our Latin Drag Queen … One of our daily treats was seeing how our resident Drag Queen would dress for the evening. His/her daytime attire was flamboyant bell-bottom hip huggers with mesh lower legs, stiletto heeled boots, and a matching oversized shoulder bag. One evening he/she strutted down the stairs with spiked purple hair and clad in an exotic long flowing garment that could have be some sort of robe, caftan or Liberace’s old shower curtain. I nudged the Cheecoggo gang banger and asked what was going on in town tonight. He thought for a moment then said “Ozzfest.”

I miss these folks.

©2007 by Bob Rockwell

Damn it’s hot. My wife and I are well into our second day of sweating through the Sonoran desert in our VW Beetle when we catch our first glimpse of the Sea of Cortez. A sea doesn’t belong here: it is completely out of place in this barren wasteland; a sea with beaches, sea weed, waves and all of that other ocean stuff right here in the middle of this desolate desert.

We decide on the spot to check into a beachfront hotel. The hotel is wonderfully Mexican with lots of tile, adobe and an exotic foreign feel to it. We unpack and explore. The bathroom is totally open with a wall-less shower and a bidet. My wife had never seen a bidet before, and being a man of the world, I offer to demonstrate it. I showed her how you mix the hot and cold in the little bubbler until you get the right temperature, and then you turn the third knob until the pressure is just right to wash your bottom. She was intrigued until I made a small turn of the volume knob and the water blasted to the ceiling. She looked at me as water rained down on us and said, “There’s no way in hell you’ll get me on that.”

After my bidet disaster I suggest we go check out the beach. We got together our beach stuff and headed for the Sea of Cortez just a dune away. We reached the water’s edge and found an empty beach with a lonely unmanned lifeguard tower prominently flying a large red flag. Puzzled, I looked at my wife for an explanation. In California, the lifeguards fly red flags on their towers when the tides are dangerous and they don’t want you in the water. But that wasn’t the case here; the water was like a mirror, devoid of any waves or tidal action.

How could this still water have dangerous tides? I told my wife that this was Mexico and that the flag was probably left from the last storm or whatever and I didn’t see any danger here at all. I dove in and swam in this lovely bath-temperature water for a couple of hours. It was wonderfully calm and almost too warm. I swam further and found if you lie on your back out about 100 yards you can float in slightly cooler water with very little effort. After enough of this we went back to our room to dress for dinner.

During dinner we began a conversation with another American couple at an adjacent table. We chatted about the hotel, the food, the weather and agreed on everything until I mentioned the beach. I described my swim and how magnificent the water was. They were shocked. She hesitantly asked, “Was that you we saw swimming this afternoon?” I said yes and it was wonderful. I dropped my fork when she said, “You’re really brave to swim when the shark flag is up.”

©2007 by Bob Rockwell

I am an asshole. Sure, there are lots of them around and many are more so than me, but I’m one just the same. I’ve tried hard to identify those things that put me in this oh-so-common category of older folks.

Assholes generally come in two basic age groups; teenagers who don’t know anything and don’t know they don’t know and geezers that are anxious to tell everyone they meet what they know for damn sure. I’ve recently joined the latter group and I want out.

Earlier in our lives our relative status was obvious by where we went to school, what we did for a living, how much money we made, where we lived, what we wore, and on and on. In retirement those clues aren’t immediately evident so we must establish our importance by constructing elaborate verbal resumes, creating anecdotes for every conversation and go through the rest of our lives playing “I can top that” with everyone we meet. It’s the geezer version of “mine’s-bigger-than-yours” played out verbally.

Booze amplifies the size of your asshole status to mega proportions. I’m a minor league asshole sober, but I’m just a couple of drinks away from becoming the flaming variety. All of the things I dislike about myself go off the charts with a bit of booze. Many Sunday mornings my wife’s first words to me are, “You asshole, you know what you did last night.”

How do I fix this? I don’t like the person I now think I’ve become. Maybe I’ve been one all along and my recent elbow bending with other geezers has really brought this asshole image home. What I see when I look in the mirror is:

I am a drunk … Yeah, a lot of people drink more than I do but that doesn’t change the fact that I drink far too much. If I’m serious about being less of an asshole I have to cut back on the booze.

I try too hard to make a good impression … I don’t really converse with people; I mostly preach, teach or brag. I constantly play one-ups-man-ship by interrupting others to interject my superior knowledge and richer sets of experiences into our conversations.

I converse in I, I, me, me centric conversations … Have you noticed that most people can’t really converse unless they are talking about themselves. If you change the subject to something like the weather and say, “nice weather we’re having”, they respond with something like, “I enjoy this weather; it reminds me of when I growing up in Kansas.” There, they got in two I’s and one me in response to your little comment. Well, I’m one of these assholes and I don’t like it.

I try to be funny … I almost always use humor, sometimes inappropriate risqué humor, as a conversational ice breaker or as a way of getting the spotlight aimed at me.

Things piss me off … not people, things. The pickle jar I can’t open, the cable that won’t attach to the TV, the price tag that won’t come off of my new purchase, the packaged goods that are open-proof and hundreds of other things that don’t work, break, won’t fit together or are just poorly designed.

I judge at a glance … My first impression of people is always negative. I judge all those I haven’t gotten to know by some internal yardstick. “That blouse doesn’t go with that skirt … what was he thinking when he got that haircut … I can’t believe she’d wear that bra with that blouse … have you ever seen uglier shoes … etc.”

I’ll bet if I met a bombshell like Angelina Jolie I’d immediately tag her as an air-head with ugly tattoos and a dead fish demeanor. Yet, I’ve learned that in most cases I like everybody I take the time to get to know. What’s wrong with my first impression thought process? I’ve got to get over this.

Wow, that’s quite a list. Maybe, even more than I can even dream of overcoming. Let’s see, we’ve got booze reduction, anger management, knocking off that snobby judgmental thing, and learning to converse without all of the baggage I discussed above.

I was taught that the best way to make a good first impression to strangers is to be interested not interesting. This “be interested and not interesting” concept might be the fix for all of my asshole conversational faults. It just might be another way of saying what we all know and don’t practice, listening.

If I just cut back on the booze, learn to deal with all of the little, imperfect things in life, take people as they really are and try my damnedest to be interested not interesting I can lick this.

See, this is going to be a snap.

©2007 by Bob Rockwell