The Slippery Saga of Humectress Man...

Back in 1988, I got the bright idea to go visit scenic Athens, GA on vacation, with an eye to living there, decided I loved the place, and came back 7 months later with all my worldly possessions in a U-Haul trailer attached to the back of my friend Martin's Mitsubishi Montero...and spent the next 8 1/2 years there, vacillating between "I LOVE this place!" to "Get me the FUCK out of this hellhole NOW!!!" (Athens is the kind of place that tends to provoke that reaction; I'll get more into this some other time.) I've often heard Athens called "Berkeley with a southern accent", and considering that the Bay Area and Athens-Clarke County are both home to some of the fucked-up people you'll ever meet (or, in some cases, wish you hadn't met), I'll buy that; but Deep South depravity, in spite of or perhaps because of the suffocating weight of so-called Christianity ("so-called" because something tells me there's no way Jesus would recognize any of the assholes at the Prince Avenue Baptist Church as followers of his...but I digress) has a special kind of flavor--quite literally in some cases.

(A quick example: if you ever happened to see the documentary Athens, GA Inside/Out, you might remember a band called the Bar-B-Que Killers, fronted by one Laura Carter, who resembled nothing so much as a seriously pissed-off and drugged-up 13-year-old boy. Well, Laura's post-BBQ Killers band was called Felch, and their very first band flyers, posted all over downtown Athens, depicted exactly that activity...somehow I don't think the 40 Watt Club was terribly happy about having to pay the fine simply because they'd booked the damn band in the first place. Anyhow, at one of Laura's live performances--which usually involved some degree of nudity by the end of the set--she had apparently stuffed the better part of a sack full of Mardi Gras beads up her hoohoo, and proceeded to pull them out, one or two strands at a time, and throw them into the audience...certain members of whom actually proceeded to put them in their mouths and suck away gleefully. One friend of mine told me that was the very first show she ever saw in Athens shortly after she moved to town; frankly, I'm just amazed that she didn't run screaming all the way to Hartsfield International to catch the first plane home to Toronto, but I guess she was made of stronger stuff than that. )

I could go on, but I promised you a different story, and it's time I started telling it...)

Humectress Man was none other than the SO of a housemate of mine in Athens; at the time the events to be described took place, he was involved in the operation of a music venue in town. I had thought he was being friendly to me simply because he was a nice guy, and perhaps he was, and thought I was reasonably cool (at least, that's what he claimed once), but his main motive was to get into my housemate's panties, at which he was eventually successful. Too bad he already had a girlfriend at home--somehow he neglected to mention that particular fact until the housemate was already quite on the hook, the schmuck--so his extracurricular activities tended to be conducted either backstage at the venue, or when the GF was out of town...

One time, after the evening's entertainment was over, he made a booty call to invite her to the now-empty club...at some point during the late-night entertainment, he decided that showing her some of his girl/girl porn magazines might be just the trick to get her terribly hot and bothered. (Apparently it didn't occur to him that most straight women find fake lesbians boring, stupid and not at all arousing.) Not one to waste an opportunity for good clean fun, and more than willing to take matters into his own hands, he disappeared into the venue's shower (which his female business partner tended to use to clean up before heading home), returned several minutes later from the club's shower with her bottle of Nexxus Humectress conditioner, and proceeded to jack off in front of the housemate while reading the magazine, using the Humectress as lube. (I imagine it worked pretty well, especially if you happen to like having nice, soft, coconut-scented pubes, although I'd bet his partner would have been PISSED to find out what he was using her expensive conditioner for...) Needless to say, after my incredulous housemate told me the tale the next day, I immediately dubbed the wanker "Humectress Man", and that he shall remain, at least in our personal mythology.

(One more tale of HM's boundless creativity: One fine weekend, he had the housemate over to his own personal love shack (the official sweetie was, of course, out of town), but unfortunately Little Elvis just wasn't in a partying mood that evening due to rather too much Bolivian Marching Powder snuffed up earlier in the evening. Being an inventive fellow, though, he disappeared into the kitchen and triumphantly re-emerged with a ziplock bag half-full of Wesson Oil...which he then proceeded to use to attempt to fire the Surgeon General while she watched. Of course, she had to tell me the tale the next day, and was damn near rolling on the floor by the time she got to his go-round with the baggie.

"My," I observed dryly..."that certainaly puts a whole new spin on "Wessonality", now doesn't it?")