Sometimes, I wonder what song will be playing when I pile into the back of an eighteen-wheeler, and the kindly ambulance men and women have to pick my face off the wipers. Will it be Orbison’s candy colored clown which achingly ups-and-downs the scales as I breathe my last, or Notorious B.I.G’s **** her ‘til her **** ******?
I hope it’s this last – something strong and defiant. Something rude to send me off.
Actually, it’s beyond rude.
Speaking of rude, we used to love The Blue Lagoon. How we loved it! I mean, who didn’t love Brooke Shields? Her impossible beauty, her gorgeously even spray tan, her sandy limbs and before-their-time, untweased brows. Aside from the fact she made me feel shit about being me, I loved old Brooke.
But I didn’t love her as much as her co-star. It doesn’t matter what his name was. We knew him for his willy. That was the thing we knew him for. The little pink bobble that came momentarily clear through the bubbles of some Fijian-ish waterfall. Yeah, we loved it; we pressed ‘rewind’ until the button seized and the ribbon snapped.
But what’s not to love? Nubile young people splashing about in the buff, a story about infatuation; first, fumbly sex on a beach.
But times change, and there’s something other in our water these days. Now old Biggie’s talking about something else entirely. And me, I’m slapping the steering wheel in time. What is going on?
Saw Saltburn last week.
“Don’t,” Zoe and Willy (my son) said. “Definitely don’t see that.”
But because I tend to err on the side of disobedience, the first chance I got I was hunting down the remote and flicking through. What on earth, I wondered, could account for this parental control exercised by my children.
Sure enough – bar the bathwater and a bit of period blood – a willy was causing the commotion. I understood it: It was bigger than that little knob of old, and it got more screen time, bobbing and flinging through some pompous pile with gay abandon.
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” I said when Willy (my son) came home from the office, dumping his briefcase and keys on the hall table.
“Did you?” said Zoe over her reading glasses, knowing full well that their efforts to censor and protect had been in vain.
But I will offer that I was semi-careful when they were little in the back seat. And as they sucked on their Jujubes and right before B.I.G. ‘sings’ what he ‘sings,’ I’d snap down the volume like I was slapping a small hand from a flame. That’s what I mostly did when the kids were in the car…for that line at least. Because then I’d turn it up and we’d pump along, strong and defiant. Feeling good.
In all honesty, now that they’re “grown,” I seem to have stopped that little bit of censorship. I don’t tweak down the volume anymore; I let Biggie rip. And with my daughter in the car?
So maybe it will be that, the beat that pumps me into hell. Because, really, listening to that sh*t, I’m pretty much there already.
AB - 1.2.24
Let Biggie rip. Xo
My children said the same thing about Saltburn.