Bathhouse Stories
The manager at the bathhouse said a guy staggered up to the front desk one night and said, “I don’t feel so good.”
“What’s the matter?” he asked him.
The guy said he swallowed a lot of loads.
“How many?”
“A lot,” the guys said.
Then he puked it all up on the floor.
“What’d it smelled like?” I asked.
He made a face.
“Have you ever,” he said, “put a boiled artichoke in a bowl of bleach? And then threw in a handful of sourballs?”
“No,” I said.
“Me, neither,” he said.
*****
I arrived for my shift at the bathhouse one night after “Bears, Bath, and Beyond,” the monthly bear party.
The place was mostly empty. A lone Latino staff held a running hose over the half-empty jacuzzi.
“What happened?” I asked.
He said in a tired Mexican accent, “Bears displace a lot of water.”
*****
One night when I worked in the ER, they brought in a guy from the bathhouse. It happened once a month.
The nurse told me she cut the guy’s clothes off and there was this thing.
“What thing?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He had this…metal thing around his whole, you know.”
“Like, around his balls and cock?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “We were all standing around trying to figure out what it was. We didn’t know if we should take it off.”
“It’s a cockring,” I said.
She was a traveling nurse from the South, as were most of the nurses on shift that night.
“Welcome to the Bay Area,” I said.