When my grandchildren asked me if I would join them in a game of hide and seek I was happy to oblige, despite the fact that, at the ages of sixteen and eighteen, they both seemed a bit too old for such shenanigans. In their teen years, my grandsons had grow more and more distant from their old grandpa and seldom came to visit these days. My daughter, Suzie had asked me if I could have them both over for the week while she gave birth to an illegitimate child that had been fathered by a wandering gigolo who referred to himself as "The Mexican Humping Bean" and I happily agreed.
Young Jimmy volunteered to be the first "seeker" and said that he would give me a head start to find a hiding place since both boys were younger and more agile than me. Moving as quickly as I could, I made my way up into the attic with a flashlight in tow and shut the hatch behind me, at which time I heard the latch click shut, locking me inside the dark, cave-like space above my living room. "Hmmm that's odd", I thought. I couldn't figure out how the latch could have actually locked without being manually maneuvered by a human hand. The next thing I knew, my frantic bashing on the hatch and cries for help were drowned out by loud rock and roll music coming from my living room below. Moments later I smelled refer smoke seeping into the attic from between the floorboards . I'd been around enough jazz musicians in my day to know the smell of refer smoke and I'll be damned if my house wasn't full of it a few moments after I was "mysteriously" and "accidentally" locked in my own goddamn attic
As I wandered about the musty loft looking for an escape route, I came upon my old prop trunk from my days on the vaudeville circuit as a baggy pants comic. It had been tucked away under the eaves to rot. I brushed away the cobwebs and unlatched the trunk's lid as a flood of memories, as well as a few rats, poured from the old chest. Before I knew what had come over me, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia, recalling the smell of the grease paint and roar of the crowd. Oh those were the days! The days when I had sent many an audience into roars of laughter taking a splash of seltzer water in the face or performing a wacky pratfall on a banana peel. I reached into the mildewed trunk and took my battered old bowler hat and cane in hand, dusting them relatively free of their fuzzy growth of mold. As if not a moment had passed since my vaudeville glory days, I easily segued into my old soft shoe routine. Fondly, I recalled the time that W.C. Fields had spit on me in a drunken rage, calling me a "scene-stealing son of a whore", and the time that the ever-kinky Mae West had urinated on my face in her dressing room. Oh that Mae West was a spit fire! I tell you what! Wooooooo!
It turned out that I still had a few pratfalls left in me as well, as seconds later I fell through the ceiling of my living room in a shower of Sheetrock and particle board. When I finally lifted myself slowly and painfully from my living room floor, dusting plaster from my eyes and hair, I found myself surrounded by several long-haired teenagers...hippie types...all red-eyed, all puffing refer cigarettes. Slowly but surely they began to roar with laughter at my accident and at the bloody bone protruding from the skin of my now-broken right arm....and then the stoned youngsters broke into hearty applause, each telling me that what they had just witnessed was probably the goddamn funniest thing they'd ever seen.
It was nice to know that I was still a crowd-pleaser.
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