Passion Skank

She is smiling at me as I take her hand for a slow dance to the guitarist now playing Willie Nelson when the Passion Skank clamps her paw onto Simone's wrist, insisting her to come meet So-And-So, who Simone had surely already met.

"Okay, well, bye!" Simone says, waving, smiling. Hauled off by the Passion Skank.

I nod, smiling as toothy as I can smile. Sweet fuck-all... I trudge back toward David's pup tent.

On the course of my trudge, a couple is swinging high on the playground swings. She's in cut-off jeans and a t-shirt. He's in cargo shorts and a polo. Both of them are wearing glasses, like normal folk with vision disabilities, and a basic sense of humility. They are the anomaly, pumping their way on the swings up to that altitude where losing your grip could result in fractured ankles, or even a broken neck.

I join them, say hello, barefoot in the cool Indiana soil, clutching tight the chains on the swing. To my meat-hooks, the chains feel like ferrous DNA strands holding my ridiculous life together. It is comforting.

"I doubt I'll ever get tired of this," I say, "and I'm forty-something."

"No shit," says the bespectacled guy. "I won't get tired of this until I cross over The Edge."

"Go on?" I say.

"My parents have been bringing me here since I was five years old. This culture is second nature to me," he explains.

I do not sully his sentimental moment by telling him that I was only referring to swinging on a swing set. Instead, I ask for his name.

He is Frankie, and his also-bespectacled wife is Theresa. He's a middle school teacher. Theresa teaches preschool, who adds little to the conversation, but she is aglow with the joy of swinging... and maybe she also got high up in this bitch.

Back at our tents, I whip open Taryn and David's flap. They are supine and snuggling. I deliver to them a headline regarding Passion: "Cotton-Candy Hair Girl Wins Skank Award, Chris Evades Imminent STDs."

Taryn laughs. David smirks. They hand me a perfectly rolled joint, which I smoke whilst watching the trees thresh in the breeze, occluding all vision of stars, moon, and any other celestial goings-on. Yet heavenly bodies are abundant, all within a stone's throw. This place is like the Big Bang of corporeal delicacy.

Next morning, everyone packs up their shit and flees. It is quiet, sunny... Except for the Passion Skank, who is thirty yards away, yelling at Martin about her missing cotton-candy hairbrush. Her drama ricochets from pine to pine.

"Good fuckin grief," says David, shaking his head.

We emerge into the parking lot, phlegmatic clouds drifting through the blue, crisscrossed by chemtrails.

"You are covered in glitter," Taryn says...

The drive home takes me past the stunning array of windmills that span a hundred square miles on the pancake flats of Indiana. I scan through the radio stations, which yields only a series of bible-belting talk shows. A HELL IS REAL sign looms ominously at mile marker 69. This is the Heartland of America, whose cockles boast mostly of Cracker Barrels and kitschy country boutiques lining the artery of U.S. Interstate 65. No liquor stores or dildo shops round these parts.

But nestled within the brambles, there is the Sunderosa Club—a geographical blister of sexual rapaciousness—erupting from the sandy soil of northern Indiana. And it is sandy. Sand under our bare hooves, almost too sandy for tent stakes to take hold.

"The glaciers brought all this sand down here," David had told me. "There are dunes forty feet tall, about thirty miles north. A group of kids were hiking there and one kid got swallowed up."

"Tragic," I said. "But what a romantic way to go out."

...On pulling into my driveway, I wince at the sight of my son's tricycle, toy trucks, and other neon-colored plastic shit strewn across the lawn. Goddammit. The wife is home. And the Slip 'N Slide is bunched into a muddy knot.

# # #