What do you mean by that?

11/18/07

A couple of months back, the news report indicated that Senator Larry Craig was arrested for "soliciting gay sex in the men's room of the Minneapolis airport", nabbed for using a "well known solicitation phrase."

Let's ignore the redundancies (what other bathroom is a man going to use at an airport? And since he's in the men's room, what other kind of sex would he be soliciting?) and focus on this supposedly "well known solicitation phrase." The media covered this story as if Larry Craig's desire for a hummer was the cause for global warming, yet that well-known phrase was never explained.

I don't know what that phrase is---and that's the trouble. As far as I'm concerned, that a closeted senator is desperate or stupid enough to find public toilets an aphrodisiac isn't really news, but that there is some combination of words that isn't as direct as, "Hey, anyone feel like fucking?" and yet IS clear enough that someone who feels like fucking will know to raise their hand like a kiss-ass student who has the right answer in Anatomy class makes me wonder what the hell that phrase is.

I only fly cross-country---we're here, family is way over there, and the only reason to stop in between is to use the john. (Wait, bad choice of toilet slang.) Now I can't use an airport restroom without worrying that either I am going to naively and accidentally utter this supposedly well-known phrase, or someone is going to say it to me and my answer is going to make me seem like that Anatomy class eager-beaver. (Wait, bad choice of slang---no sense bringing beaver into this discussion.) While I generally do not strike up conversations in the bathroom (nothing that is done in a bathrooms is, in my eyes, a social activity), I am a personable person and courtesy requires me to respond when addressed.

I imagine myself standing at the sink washing my hands and recognizing a fellow passenger from the Portland-to-Atlanta leg of the journey---and he says, "Damn, this is a long one."

Is that the phrase? A normal response might be, "I know. I was aching to stretch since Montana", but there's no way I'm replying to a comment about a "long one" with a comment about "stretching." Instead, I'll be forced into square mode (which, I should note, appears to an outsider to be astonishingly similar to my "normal mode") and reply, "Before I respond, by 'long', you mean in duration, correct? And by 'one', you are making reference to the flight?"

Don't get me wrong, I have no issues with mano-y-mano sex, and while I have never said yes to a restroom tryst, I have also never said no. Sadly, no stranger has ever broached the subject with me---at least not that I was aware of. But knowing now that there is some secret code to which I am not privy, I wonder if I have been propositioned and I was too naive to catch on. In the crowded bathroom in Cleveland when the guy said to me, "Are the all the stalls full?", was that opportunity knocking? Frankly, if a charming guy gets the notion that he wants to kneel at my particular altar, I'm likely to let the man pray. (Though I am too much of a germophobe to be a praying man myself.) But unless he's explicit about his spirituality, I'll likely mistake him for an athiest with peculiar vocabulary.

Because quite simply, I am comically dense when it comes to anyone coming on to me. When I worked in automotive, a beautiful woman from Texas had her car break down in Portland. My shop was going to fix it, and since it was the end of the day and she was now without a vehicle, I offered to give her a ride to her hotel. We got along well, and since she was curious about Portland, we drove around and looked at the lights, stopped to get a drink, chatted for an hour or so, and then I dropped her at the door of her hotel. The next day, my horn-dog coworker Dave asked what we talked about, and I told him---Portland, Dallas (her home), how Dallas is full of fake boob jobs but hers were real, how...

"What?! She talked about her tits? What did you do?"

"What do you mean, what did I do? I didn't do anything."

"WHAT?!?!" He looked at me like I had refused to pick up a sack full of twenty dollar bills because, as a rule, I prefer to pay with debit card. "What else did she say?"

"She talked about kissing, and if I thought it was shallow that she liked kissing."

At this point Dave was literally banging his head on the counter, raving at the injustice: Here's this gorgeous, buxom blonde in a strange city, willing to sit in a bar with a strange guy and ask him if he thinks kissing is "shallow" ("what the fuck would that even mean, Billy?") and she winds up with Richie fuckin' Cunnigham.

As I watched him stomping with frustration, I suddenly felt like Richie fuckin' Cunnigham. "You think that was an invitation?"

He stormed out of the room making a strange growling noise, a sound I interpretted as, "Yes, Opie. It was."

THAT is why I'm mad at the media for their incomplete coverage. Unless someone says to me, "Good afternoon, I wish to engage in some form of sexual activity, and with you, and now would be ideal timing", I'm probably not going to know what they're after. So knowing there is this body of slang that exists that I might inadvertently utter that will make me seem like I'm hip to it all is quite disconcerting. Thus, I'm going to be the guy in the restroom in Minneapolis who, if he says anything at all, nervously says, "Damn, this bathroom had no paper towels. And by paper towels, I mean the actual paper towels that go in the dispenser, and by dispenser, I mean...wait, 'dispenser' wouldn't be a double entendre, would it? Fuck, this whole...wait, NO, not fuck, not fuck at all, I just meant the paper towels" before scrambling out to the terminal with dripping hands as a family from North Dakota wonders why I look so panicked. I'll look at them, and down at my hands, and blurt, "No, it's water, I swear."

Thanks, Mr. Craig. You've ruined airport pissing forever.