The Profane Drift

When I was a kid... as now... there were words you weren’t supposed to say. Words that, if spoken within hearing of one’s immediate ancestors, would result in unpleasant consequences.

I heard about “getting your mouth washed out with soap.” Never had that happen. Hell, I WISH I’d had that happen; how much worse could it have been than getting smacked upside the head? And when I was a kid, getting smacked upside the head was considered quite mild as far as parental disciplinary techniques went; presumably, my own parents suffered beatings, their parents suffered Spanish Inquisition tortures, and I’m guessing that my great grandparents were subject to loss of extremities and facial features for spilling milk at the dinner table.

So there were words that were not used. Not even to discuss what they meant, much less as an expletive, verb, noun, adjective, or interjection. GROWNUPS could use these words, but kids would suffer a swift consequence if they were so much as to be heard to BREATHE any of these linguistic tidbits. The F word, the S word, the D word, none of these were to be countenanced.

This included the H word, a parental decision that I didn’t much agree with. I mean, the word itself, “Hell,” is pretty mild as swear words go, and was even in the ancient days of my youth. What’s WRONG with it? Admittedly, it’s the final repository of sin and wickedness and the home and prison of Satan, Prince of Darkness, but if “Satan” isn’t a bad word, why was “Hell” unacceptable in schoolyard or driveway?

Didn’t matter. Even discussing the word itself or its acceptability was risky. And so I avoided using this word and the others previously discussed, as my parents wished it, and then I left home and went to college and discovered that I and everyone else I knew could barely get a sentence out without a goddamn fuckin’ sonofabitchin’ cuss word or three in there, goddammit!

Today, I work with elementary children. The word “crap” sometimes is heard on the playground; it is considered an acceptable euphemism for “shit,” and bears no consequence from the Ancient Ones, other than a sharp glance and a snarl of “Language!” from the playground monitor, who might well be me.

And it’s been so long since anyone hit me upside the head for saying, “Aw, hell,” that I’ve long forgotten the reflexive reaction, the whoopsie, the clampdown, the slapping of one’s hand over one’s mouth should such a malediction escape into the free air.

Some words just don’t have the power they used to. Some words aren’t considered cussin’ any more, and haven’t been in a while.

But sometimes, I see something that reminds me that not everyone got it all out of their system back in college.

Nine Pairs Of Slacks

I got issues.

Haircuts are one of them. I was forced to wear John F. Kennedy’s haircut from the time of my first haircut until the day I left home, because JFK was the ultimate human being ever produced, and nothing he ever did could ever go out of style. To this day, haircuts make me irritable and twitchy, despite the fact I’ve been the boss of my hairstyle since I was seventeen.

Shoes are another one. Shoe shopping was an ordeal when I was a kid, because we’d go out to buy me shoes, and then Mom would stop and shop for shoes and I’d be ordered to sit there in standby mode for three hours while she tried on shoes, and when she finally finished, then I’D have to try on shoes for three hours until Mom found something she liked on ME, and six hours is an eternity when you’re eight years old. I STILL don’t like shoe shopping, and tend to rush through it as quickly as possible.

But all of this pales before the issue of polyester.

I grew up in the Age of Polyester, the seventies, a time when man grew proud and insane, because we apparently felt that wearing clothing made of plastic was a good thing. And, naturally, I differed with my kin on this. I liked polyester BLENDS, because 100% cotton jeans weigh a metric ton and take forever to break in, but clothing made entirely out of polyester struck me as much the same as wearing the bags the clothing CAME in.

Dad loved polyester.

He loved polyester because it never needed ironing, and the trousers held a razor sharp crease. You could wash it all in the washing machine, no dry cleaning necessary. You could slap a plate of Italian food in your lap, and it would wash out effortlessly. It was light, it breathed, it was the ultimate form of clothing ever invented since ancient man tried strapping live sheep to his back to stay warm. Polyester was IT!

And I still remember the time in ‘75 or so when he decided I needed a leisure suit.

The picture here shows a typical polyester leisure suit of the era. It is somewhat like the one my father bought me, except that mine was in a rich forest green, and had lapels that were MUCH bigger than those shown... I’d swear that my lapels were roughly the size and shape of the sails on a sloop.

So I was fashionable. For a time. Kind of; rather than the dashing seventies haircut the model in the picture has, I had John F. Kennedy’s haircut, which make me look sort of anachronistic.

“You ought to LOVE that thing,” my father said. “You don’t need to wear a TIE with it. You HATE ties!”

He was right. I hated ties. I also learned that I hated wearing trousers that felt like they were made of heavily starched burlap, and having lapels that when they caught the wind felt like I was about to go airborne like the Flying Nun.

Fortunately, within a year, puberty hit with a vengeance, and within a couple months after that, I couldn’t fit into the thing any more. This pleased me immensely, and irritated my father to no end. “Can’t you just, you know, let it out a little?” Dad wheedled my mom, and was told NO in no uncertain terms because leisure suits were not made with alterations in mind.

Fortunately, my old man had by then fixated on something else: the black polyester suit coat and matching slacks. Shifting trends and fashions had rendered the loose, coarse weave of the polyester leisure suit obsolete; NOW, we had the tight, fine weave of the black polyester office ensemble!

Dad loved it. “You don’t need to iron them! They don’t need dry cleaning! They don’t wrinkle, no matter HOW you treat ‘em! And you can dunk ‘em in tomato sauce, and they clean right up, no stains! Man, clothes just don’t GET any better than this!”

And he believed it. Because I remember him going to work in those black polyester slacks in ‘77. I remember him wearing them at Christmas in ‘83. I remember him wearing them during Thanksgiving in ‘86. And Ghod help me, I remember him trying to talk me into accepting them from him in that horrible holiday season of ‘90.

By 1990, disco was deader than disco, and polyester formal wear was as gone as the Roman chariot races. My father did not care. The fashionistas did not dictate to HIM what was acceptable, and apparently, neither did anyone at his office, and when black polyester work slacks went out of style, well, that just made them easier and cheaper for him to acquire at garage sales and Goodwill stores. And by that holiday season of 1990, he realized that he had way too many pairs of black polyester slacks.

My father was not a salesman, but he might have been. Or perhaps not; you can just walk away from a salesman, or close your door, or threaten to kill him. I couldn’t do that with my old man, and his technique was the “Wear Them Down Until They Give In Or Die” school. He’d done this to me before in my youth, because after he learned that forcing me to do a thing was to teach me to hate it, he decided that simply talking me into it was somehow better. And when he started leaning on you to do a thing, he Would. Not. Stop. Ever.

When I came home for my birthday that year, he started leaning on me about the damn slacks. “They never get wrinkled, ever! And they keep a crease without ironing!”

“Dad, I would sooner go to work naked with barbed wire wrapped around my dangles and a KICK ME sign on my back than wear polyester slacks to work.”

“But you could dump a bowl of gazpacho in your lap, and they’d launder up in one wash! And no dry cleaning!”

I wound up leaving early. But I came back for Thanksgiving.

“They keep a crease, no matter what, no ironing! And you could dump a lasagna in your lap and it machine washes right out!”

“Dad, you have already successfully reproduced. If I started wearing those slacks around, it would pretty much finish any hope I ever had of matching that feat. The time of polyester is over and done. I will not wear your slacks.”

“Aw, what do those fashionistas know? They look great! And they never wrinkle! No ironing!”

I left after breakfast the next day. He’d brought the slacks to the table to demonstrate while I ate my scrambled eggs.

But then there was Christmas. I’d come up a couple of days early to see my grandparents, and my sister was going to be there, and had I known the cruelty of that Christmas, I’d have gone anywhere BUT.

But now he had me where he wanted me. For two days, he could talk about nothing but the glory of the goddamned black polyester slacks. Even Mom was starting to get a little irritated. But while his only son held out, he Could. Not. Stop. “You could dump a whole chocolate mousse in your lap, and it washes right out in the machine! No dry cleaning! And you don’t even have to PAY for ‘em, son! I got ‘em right HERE!”

On and on and on. For two days. What finally tipped me over was the idea that he might sneak off on the 24th and wrap the goddamn things and stick them under the tree with my name on them. And I realized: I don’t have to wear them to work. I don’t have to wear them at ALL. I don’t LIVE here. He will never know. I could pitch the damn things out the car window on the way out of town, and he would never know.

And even then, I held out. Surely, he will realize that I do not want his goddamn polyester trousers. Surely, after three days, he will relent.

And he did not relent. As we opened presents around the tree on Christmas Eve, he continued. “No dry cleaning, ever! You could wad ‘em up and leave ‘em all night, and they won’t wrinkle!”

And finally, after a large glass of heavily spiked eggnog with rum, I snapped. “FINE!” I roared. “FINE! GIVE ME THE SLACKS! GIVE ME THE GODDAMN SLACKS! RIGHT NOW! PLAINLY, THE UNIVERSE WILL COLLAPSE INTO ENTROPY AND SATAN HIMSELF WILL RETURN TO RULE IF I DO NOT ACCEPT THOSE GODDAMN SONOFABITCH BASTARD SLACKS!!!!”

And as the last syllables left my lips, I was regretful.

Mom did a slow facepalm.

My sister goggled like a koi carp who’d suddenly found himself in a pine forest.

My grandparents blinked twice and did a fine synchronized BIG slug of eggnog each.

But my father beamed like sunlight through the storm clouds. “I’ll run gettum right now. You WON’T regret it. Just TRY them!” And he vanished in a twinkling.

And I looked around at my appalled immediate ancestors. “Sorry,” I said.

They said nothing, but my mom nodded and my grandfather grinned sagely. Dad really had made a point of going on about NOTHING else whenever he and I had been in the same room for three... stinkin’ ... days. At least now it would end.

And Dad came running back in with an armload of black polyester slacks.

And after that, Christmas became ... well, tolerable. Periodically, he seemed to forget that I had accepted the damn pants, because he would burst into lyrical melody about the glories of polyester slacks, but these celestial song cues were short lived, and we could get on with the business of tolerating each other’s company.

And when I left, I stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. Dad didn’t mind. “Just you wait,” he said. “When you get ‘em out, they’ll be as smooth and unwrinkled as if you’d ironed ‘em. Just you wait.” And I stuffed the bag in the trunk of the car, and departed for the land of sanity. Those kids on TV, I thought, THEY got dads like Hugh Beaumont and Danny Thomas. Me, I got a prerecorded sales pitch on eternal loop...

And I forgot about them. They stayed in the trunk for months. Eventually, they found their way into the bathroom closet in my apartment. I kept meaning to donate them to Goodwill or something, but some small part of me was afraid he’d FIND them again, somehow, if I did that.

The last time I saw them was when I was going to entertain a woman in my apartment on short notice. The sink was full of dishes, and I had no time to wash, and I threw the essentials into the dishwasher, and the nonessentials... shit, shit, shit, where to PUT them... and I found a plastic garbage bag in the bathroom closet, and promptly flung all the remaining dirty dishes into the bag and stuck it back in there.

...and forgot about it.

I’d been married for a few months and living in my new home before I remembered about the plastic garbage bag full of dirty dishes and something like nine pairs of black polyester slacks. I immediately felt bad about the poor guy who’d had to clean my apartment after I left.

But hey, I thought crazily, I bet all the dirty dish sludge washed right out, with no dry cleaning!

And I bet they even still had a crease!