Soap

[My submission to this week's topic in the writing group I'm in. "Soap" is the topic]

You ever used Dr. Bronner’s?  Sorry, I don’t wanna talk to you like you’re an idiot or anything, I just wanna make sure that you know what the fuck I’m talkin about before I get started.  Dr. Bronner’s is soap.  It usually comes in liquid form but they also sell bars of it.  The bars kinda suck though.  If you find it on the shelf in the soap aisle, the label that covers the cylindrical bottle has about a thousand little quotes and facts and who knows what all crazy shit written all over it.  So yeah, the packaging alone would catch all the weirdos’ attention.  But it’s also natural or organic or something and the company that makes it isn’t a bunch of assholes or something, so the weirdos buy it.  

Dr. Bronner’s comes in a bunch of different flavors.  I don’t know if it still does, but somewhere amidst all the oddball shit on the bottle used to declare that one can use the soap as a mouthwash.  And you can.  That said, you can use any liquid as a mouthwash.  Christ, you can gargle with Drano if you feel like it but don’t.  Don’t rinse your mouth out with Dr. Bronner’s either.  Out of the two, I’d definitely go with the liquid soap though.  Drano might clean you out a little more than you need.  Still, the only time you should swish soap around your mouth is if you call your big sister an asshole in front of your dad when you’re 7 and he’s in a lousy mood.

Anyway, Dr. Bronner’s comes in peppermint, almond, eucalyptus, lavender, hemp and maybe one or two more that I either forget about or which I never knew about in the first place.  My favorite one is peppermint cos it smells nice and it makes my scrotum buzz.  Just gotta love a buzzing scrotum.  Unless the buzzing is from flies zooming around your crotch, but they shouldn't be cos you just washed your junk with peppermint soap.  I’m not a big fan of the almond or eucalyptus.  I like lavender but if I’m buying I go for peppermint.  I was showering next to a guy once who had the eucalyptus stuff and teased me for using my girlfriend’s lavender stuff.  He called me a “girly man”.  I told him that at least I didn’t smell like a goddam cough drop.

That little mental and verbal sparring match took place outside the camp showers at a blueberry harvest in Maine.  A bunch of my friends would go out there for the month of August to toil in hot miserable fields all day.  Some of us would walk away with thousands of dollars in our pockets.  Others of us would stagger outta there at the end of the month with maybe a grand and a terrible hangover.  I generally fell into the latter group.  The company we worked for provided us with a campground and with hot showers, but we were expected to supply ourselves with all the other necessities and niceties.  That year, I was there with my longtime girlfriend.  We had been traveling in our van and were well prepared to set up a really nice camp.  In fact, I think that that was the coolest camp that I’ve ever personally set up.  It was a good summer.

We had carried most of the stuff in our van up to our camp.  A lot of rakers don’t have vehicles and if even if they do it makes sense to carpool, so if you owned a van and weren’t some kinda prick your old Econoline would likely be jammed full of dusty, blue-stained, filthy blueberry rakers with their dogs and their grimy water bottles and whatever kind of squished-up insanity they had crammed into their bags for lunch.  We did have a milk crate with some odds and ends in it behind the driver’s seat.  I forget what all was in that box, but that’s where we kept one of the bottles of lavender Dr. Bronner’s.  The other bottle was up in the camp for whenever we needed it.  You can wash dishes with the stuff.  You can do your laundry with it.  The shit’s absolutely amazing!

My girlfriend gladly took on the chore of picking up weirdo soap at the hippy store.  Back then Dr. Bronner’s wasn’t as easy to find as it is now, but they always had it at co-ops and places like that.  Hippy stores always get on my goddam nerves.  I try being nice, but most of the people seem to look at me like “how the fuck did this guy get in here?” and then I glare back at them like “I can do any goddam thing I want, ya snotball bastard and right now I want some fuckin peppermint soap and maybe gimme a couple of those stupid honey-filled straws that you morons have by the counter”.  I can handle sourpuss jerkoffs like that, but who the hell wants to deal with a bunch of horseshit just to get some soap?  

My girlfriend liked wandering around in those kinda places, largely cos she liked natural products and whatever kinda nonsense they stock their shelves with, and not least because she was a decent shoplifter.  She’d also buy things in bulk and change the codes on them to reflect the prices of less expensive items so that she’d be buying organic virgin olive oil for the same price as the eco-friendly dish soap, etc.  They usually have semi-translucent, 16 ounce squirt-bottles in which to fill with whatever liquid, but you can refill your old ones if you keep them.  There weren’t any crazy labels on the empty bottles that they sold, but my girlfriend  labelled them well enough.  So yeah, 5 bucks later she’s proudly exiting the store with a priceless trove of overpriced hippy crap where I would be waiting, smoking cigarettes and having glaring contests with any of the store’s patrons who looked like he or she might be up for one.

We had driven a few folks with us to the showers late one afternoon, shortly before dinnertime.  The showers weren’t that far from the campground, but far enough if you’d been stooped over in the heat raking blueberries all day.  Plus, it was still hot in the sun at that time of day and you’d have to carry your towel and then your grungy, smelly blueberry clothes back with you so yeah, fuck walking to the showers unless you were trying to prove that you’re weirder than everybody else.  My girlfriend had already walked into the women’s shower from the van while I finished a brief conversation with somebody in the parking lot.  When I went to find my towel and clean clothes, I noticed that the bottle of soap had rolled under the bed that we had built in the back of the van.  Probably some dirty knucklehead or his dog had accidentally kicked it out of the milk crate where it was supposed to be.  I grabbed it, grabbed my towel and some clean undies and went to take care of business.

They had nice showers there.  Well, they were hot and the water pressure was adequate anyway.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s nice and anything beyond that is extra credit.  They even had five shower stalls with doors on them just in case you were shy or in case you had bigger plans than to simply get clean while you were in there.  I got the water going how I like it, stepped in, squirted soap in my hand and began lathering up.   I wasn’t getting much of a lather, though the soap went on smoothly enough for me to know that it wasn’t watered down.  I poured a little more, soaped up my junk and was moving down to my legs when I noticed that it wasn’t foaming up at all.  I’m certain that I had succumbed to the placebo effect because I had been smelling the lavender scent this whole time, though it wasn’t very potent.  I stopped, stood up straight, snatched up the bottle and sniffed it.  It didn’t smell like anything.  

So exactly what the fuck, then, had I been slathering all over myself?  I tasted it.  Fucking olive oil.  I shouted goddammit and jesus fuckin christ and all this, then I started laughing.  I shouted to whoever was in the stall next to me to please lemme use his soap.  This wasn’t an uncommon request in those showers, but whoever it was asked me didn’t he see me with a bottle a minute ago?  I was still a little pissed off that somebody didn’t label the goddam bottle or something but it was cracking me up, too.  I hollered back that no, that what he saw was a bottle of oil masquerading as a bottle of soap.  He asked if I had used any and I shouted back an exasperated “yes”.  The men’s side of the showers erupted in laughter, friends piping up with jokes that were funny but which would’ve been a lot funnier had they been about some other putz who had just made himself all slippery and gross.

Cleaning that stuff off was a bitch.  I was both giggling and cursing under my breath watching the water bead up on my skin.  It was still beading by the time I finally said “screw it” and got out of the shower to dry myself off.  Exxon and BP have demonstrated on a titanic scale how difficult it is to clean oil from water, but I tried my own home experiment and I’m certain that I didn’t get all that shit off of myself.  I probably had nice, soft skin though, which my girlfriend wouldn’t have noticed cos she was all bent outta shape about me dumping all the goddam olive oil on myself in the shower and now we're almost outta oil and all this, while I was trying to act like I wasn’t a total dumbass, that maybe she should label shit better and anyway why the hell is there a goddam bottle of olive oil under the bed in the first place? and whatever else might make it sound like I wasn’t a big fat idiot.  Actually, I was more of a skinny, greasy idiot.