Grandma was wearing a hat...

When I stopped, as the old man used to say, "putting my feet under his table",  I moved into a rat's nest of an apartment with two friends. The apartment was over a bar, you got to it up a dark staircase, one bulb hanging on a wire. On the lower level it smelled like stale beer and at the top it smelled like bad cooking, dirty underwear and whiskey. Those smells came from the apartment across the hall from ours. Oscar, our alcoholic, next door neighbor was a retired power plant worker. Oscar lived alone and spent most of his time at the bar downstairs. When old Oscar wasn't on his stool at the bar, he was cooking up stuff that really smelled bad, bad enough that if I was hungry when I came home from work, I'd lose my appetite.

It was in the mid 60's when my pals and I moved in that summer. We had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and one bath. The second bedroom was  interesting, you had to go through the bathroom to get to your bed and the bedroom had no door. The other bedroom had no door either, my roommate Tom found a door, it had 8 glass panels. I opted to sleep in the living room.

Think about that...

One weekend, both my roommates were gone somewhere, I think Tom went home and Don, who knows where the hell he went. I had the place to myself. I had big plans.

Did I ever...

I invited my girlfriend over so we could play house, for the entire weekend, just the two of us. She came over on Friday night. Young Miss B was as glad to be away from her roomies as I was to be away from mine.

Over dinner, in my car at the Kegs, I explained we had only one thing we had to do on Saturday, a late breakfast with my grandparents. She was fine with that, me too because I loved and needed free meals. Grandma also thought Miss B was such a sweet girl which was in my favor.

Friday night, Miss B and I killed a 5th of Smirnoff and a quart of orange juice while we danced the night away to Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave and her favorites, the Righteous Brothers. Sometime during the 5th or 6th play of "Unchained Melody" We tumbled onto my hide-a-bed with the scrub blue operating room sheets, we did what ever we could manage and passed out.

Saturday morning I heard a knock on the door, not thinking clearly, I said, "come on in, it's open." The lock was broken, Don had kicked it in one night when he lost his keys.

The door opened and standing there is my grandfather in a nice, gray summer suit, smelling of aftershave. Next to him is my grandmother, in a pale blue summer dress and a hat with little white flowers. 

Think about that...

Miss B and I are naked under the blue operating room sheet. Not only are we naked, we're hung over and we're sweaty because it's about 95 degrees in the apartment. Miss B was so frightened, she pulled the sheet over her head. I sat up and said, as nonchalantly as possible under the circumstance, "Gee, what time is it?" Grandpa shot his sleeve, looked at his watch and said, "15 minutes late for breakfast." Grandma said nothing, she just looked like she was going to cry. Grandpa continued, "We'll meet you two down in the car in ten minutes."

Miss B and I, scrambled around, I showered first, while I shaved she showered. She pulled her hair back in a wet pony tail. We both got dressed and went down the filthy staircase, crossed the street and climbed in the back of grandpa's Caddy. We were scared to death.

During the drive, My grandmother, turned to us, smiled and sweetly said, "What have you two been up to?" Miss B's pretty face lit up, "I'm going to summer school, last night we were studying and it just got so late, we're listening to music and I've got a paper due..." She was talking a hundred miles an hour, grandma is smiling and listening to Miss B's free association chatter. 

I catch Grandpa's eye in the rear view mirror, he gives me a smirk. 

We had a nice breakfast, we made polite conversation. Nothing was said. I think I had pancakes and bacon, Miss B kept talking between bites of her Denver omelette, she never stopped and grandma never stopped smiling. 

After we were dropped off, Miss B dropped her happy girl act, "Do you think they'll say anything, I mean, my Dad knows the judge."

"Honey, if anything was ever going to be said, we would have heard it all when the door opened." 

They never said a word, to anyone. Years later I told this story to my mother, she got pissed at me and started in about my behavior, what an embarrassment I was to my family, etc. I felt like I was 16 years old again.

I told Mom, "The statute of limitations has long passed on this, so dial it back." She did, started laughing and said, "I can just see Mamma in her little hat, standing in the doorway."