Written by Jim Pfiffer and illustrated by Filomena Jack
Our recent heat waves remind me of my teenage years when hot summer nights meant sleeping out with friends. The “out” refers to sleeping outside, be it backyards, athletic fields, campsites, parks or abandoned vehicles.
The sleeping part is a misnomer. We didn’t sleep much. We were too engaged in adventurous night-time escapades with no adult supervision. What a blast.
In the summer of ’68, my friends and I converted the third floor of a barn, behind my family home on Elmira’s Maple Avenue, into our hangout and a place for sleepouts.
It wasn’t so much a place to sleep or hang out, but more of a secluded location to bring pretty girls to try and make out with them.
Illustrated by Filomena Jack
For the record, that never happened, because pretty girls, all girls in fact, were way too smart to hang with the likes of us on the third-story of a backyard barn.
But we loved the place. We outfitted it with second-hand furniture (and even some second-foot furniture), old lamps, a well-beaten rug, cool psychedelic posters of Hendrix and the Fab Four, and an ancient Frigidaire fridge that we intended to stock with beer and Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine.
For the record, the only thing stocked in it was an old pair of my buddy’s Converse All-Star Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers. The sneakers stunk so badly they had to be sequestered and refrigerated in an airtight container whenever we were in the barn.
We spared no expense in our hang-out accouterments, including a urinal, albeit a rudimentary receptacle. We cut off the bottom of a plastic Clorox bottle, turned it upside down and nailed it to the barn wall. We ran a piece of garden hose from the bottle mouth to a knothole in the barn wall, thereby letting gravity discharge our effluent out of the barn and onto a patch of azaleas below, which never seemed to flourish.
For added effect, we posted this sign adjacent to the urinal, “Employees must wash their hands.”
We were a funny bunch.
Unfortunately, our penthouse hangout lacked rooms, which were needed for privacy when we took pretty girls there to make out with them.
Rooms require walls and we had none. We did some measurements and figured we needed eight sheets of plywood, but we had no money to buy wood.
Good fortune shone upon us one sleepout evening while on a non-adult supervised, black op exploratory mission to the nearby Cherrywood Manor apartment complex, which was under expansion construction.
We noticed a large pile of plywood stacked so high it could have easily fallen over and injured someone, maybe even poked out an eye.
Being good neighbors, we removed several sheets, and set them on the ground, because we feared the workers would just put them back on the pile the next day and face the same eye-poking hazards.
So, out of altruistic concern for the 20/20 vision of these hard-working contractors, we took the plywood to the barn for safekeeping and used it to construct walls.
Again, providence blessed us, as we had exactly eight sheets of plywood. What a coincidence.
We painted the walls with peace signs, flowers and right-on slogans like, “Make love not war,” “Outta sight,” “Can you dig it?” and “Don’t trust the Man.” It was like our own Hullabaloo Hangout A-Go-Go.
We were sure the girls would totally dig our décor and would want to make out with us immediately.
When we finished painting, we had leftover paint and didn’t know what to do with it.
Being creative, I came up with a brilliant solution. “I’ll remove my shirt and you guys can paint peace signs and cool slogans on my chest, back and belly. I’ll have to fight off all the girls. ”My friends happily obliged and bedecked me in colorful Sherwin-Williams body art. I wore it for the rest of the afternoon parading around the ‘hood and showing off my bodily frescoes.
I had to wash off the paint before supper because Mom and Dad didn’t share the same artistic standards as me. I tried soap and water, but no luck, as the paint was oil-based.
I tried Joy dish detergent, a bar of Lava soap, a bottle of Pine-Sol cleaner and even our pet’s Hartz flea and tick shampoo.
Nada.I realized that I needed a strong solvent. We found a half-full bottle of turpentine in the barn basement. I soaked a rag with it and scrubbed away. As I kept resoaking the rag the excess turpentine ran down my chest and belly.
My buddies helped scrub me down. I was so relieved that the paint was coming off. Then, I noticed something.
A slight burning in my private region, A PLACE WHERE ONE SHOULD NEVER INTRODUCE A STRONG SOLVENT. (A very important lesson. That’s why I typed it in uppercase).
That slight singe quickly grew into a three-alarm blaze. I grabbed my personal pecans, started jumping and running around and screaming “Holy s—t! My balls are on fire. My balls are on fire!”
My friends offered their help by rolling on the ground in spasms of belly-holding laughter. They knew all along what the thinner would do when it reached my manliness twins. True friends (my buddies, not the twins).
My yelping and jumping about increased as I tried to escape the fire down below. I jumped into our pool, but the water made it worse, like drinking a glass of it after eating jalapenos.
Instinctively, I held my burning embers in a tight squeeze, hoping it would somehow short-circuit the pain.
Nope.
In desperation, I grabbed handfuls of grass, leaves and even dirt, and rubbed them on the affected area, praying it would relieve the agony.
As if.
I ran into the house and into the bathroom. I emptied the medicine cabinet trying everything and anything to stop the genitalia inferno, including Vaseline Petroleum jelly, Dippity-Do hair gel, Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, Brylcreem and Bactine first-aid spray. I had a household chemistry set in my shorts. Waste of time.
The torrid pelvic flames continued to burn, as smoke began to pour out of my zipper. As a last resort, I crop-dusted myself with Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder.
Hallelujah! Sweet success, at last!
It absorbed the turpentine and reduced the sizzling to a steady, but still painful smoldering of my chicken McNuggets. The pain subsided by bedtime.
My parents never learned about my crotch conflagration. But they did wonder why I ate supper, alone in the kitchen and standing up.
Jim Pfiffer’s humor columns and Filomena Jack’s, of Filomena Jack Studio’s, funny illustrations can be found on their Facebook pages, nextdoor.com, southerntierlife.com, “Full of Wit” blog https://fullofwitblog.wordpress.com/ and “Outlook By the Bay,” magazine, outlookbythebay.com. These columns are posted weekly unless Pfiffer gets lazy and then who knows when they will be posted. He’s very irresponsible. Stay tuned.
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