I am about to take you on a journey of skeeze. If you are not well aware of what "skeeze" is, just picture Kevin Federline, with his goatee smeared with lard, wearing a home-confinement bracelet (that bitch totally made up the domestic violence charge) and a shirt that says "Git 'Er Dunn", winking at a girl who is walking home from middle school. That's skeeze. And so our journey begins.
I have two jobs. I work at a small store in the Portland Airport selling lingerie and body products, and I also type polygraphs (read: lie detector) exams on convicted sex offenders who are on probation or parole, as I have done for the last 5+ years. Because of the former, I have endured many a cheesy pick-up line ("Hey, my wife is about your size... can you model this nightie for me so I could see how it fits?" *wink wink*). Because of the latter, I have heard in brain-sloshing detail the dirty habits of my sexually deviant peers for the better part of a decade. I am no stranger to skeeze by any measure. And yet the skeeziness of the skeeze I encountered tonight has become the One Lost Sock in the Laundry Room of my Life. Side note: The cleverness of that metaphor has yet to be seen. Stay tuned for the next few paragraphs.
I was at my lovely airport store, minding my own business on a very slow night. I was checking NFL scores on my Blackberry and rocking out to The Best of Cat Stevens on the store speakers, and a nice gentleman wandered in.
Nice Dude: "This is Cat Stevens playing. Did you choose the music?"
Me: "I sure did, I love Cat Stevens!"
We proceeded to discuss Cat Stevens and his musical glory, and even expanded this conversation to include Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, and James Taylor. We swapped MUST-SEE YouTube look-ups and cemented our random musical assimilatude with a Post-It note trade-off for must-hear ditties. Then... Shit. Got. WEIRD.
Me: "Wow, we totally have the same taste in music. I will definitely look up that video of Bruce Springsteen covering U2's "With or Without You." It sounds killer!"
Nice Dude: "Oh you should. It's really very good. I think you'll enjoy it. (pause) So I have one more question for you."
Me: "Sure!"
Nice (ahem, Creepy) Dude: "Could I give you ten dollars for your socks?"
Okay, I need to pause from the dialogue for a moment. Partly because I just pooped my brains out of my butt and partly because a statement as such deserves an awkward blog-pause.
Pause.
Me: "Uhhm. You mean the socks. That I'm wearing. Like on my feet. Right now?"
Creepy Dude: "Yeah. I'll give you ten dollars for them."
Me: ".... Well... uhhhm... these are kind of my favorite socks. So... uhh... (*brain exploding*) I don't think I can take them off my feet and give them to you."
Creepy Dude: "Oh, okay! (*shakes my hand*) Well, wow, it was really great talking to you!" *exits store*
That.
Just.
Happened.
If you have ever seen Tenacious D: The Pick Of Destiny, I had the exact facial expression of Jack Black as he first experienced Kyle Gass's guitar playing. It's the same expression you'd produce if your father said to you, "You know, I always knew your mother was a trifling-ass whore, and now I have the DNA evidence." It is a look of bewilderment and confusion with a dash of I-knew-it-all-along.
This is what pisses me off about this whole situation: Creepy Dude did not follow through on his skeeziness. He just bounced out at the height of skeeziness, leaving me no time to verbally respond, or even to vomit uncontrollably. I found myself confounded and in desperate need of a Skeeze-Drain-O to cleanse my system. I have thus hit a mental mind-block. I care not about my bank balance, my paycheck, the State of the Union, my health, the weather... I am all-consumed by why a random man finds my used, smelly, worn socks to be worthy of ten dollars worth of US currency. I am also all-consumed by why his inability to attain these socks from me is of so little consequence to him. He didn't even ask twice. I semi-shot him down, and he gave up. Are my smelly socks of so little calibur that in his strange perversion he couldn't even cough up, "...Are you sure?"
Why are my used socks so appealing, and yet so forgetable? Eff you, Presumable Foot-Fetishist Guy. You've bruised my smelly foot ego.
What ever happened to asking a girl out for dinner? When the hygeniency of my smelliest extremities is a source of sexual curiousity, I resign to a lifetime of spinsterhood.
Sexually perverse male gender, I just can't quit you.
