In A Girl's Bathroom

Steve Earle--"Sparkle and Shine" (mp3)
Chris Kirby--"Come Clean" (mp3)

You may have heard this before: I had a mentor once, an older faculty member with three daughters, who counseled me after a night when his family of three daughters had been babysitting my oldest daughter that is would become essential for me to have a bathroom of my own. He called his "The Coach's Room." There was a sign on the door. And all of his family respected the fact that it was his room. The Coach's Room.

I am not a coach; I get no such respect. In a week during which I lost my basement mancave to my daughter, I also found myself, as a result, in addition to having no place to land, without a place to shower on a Saturday morning. Normally, I shower in the basement, in a bathroom off the mancave, where my things are. But come Saturday morning, there were four girls sleeping down there and no chance of my connecting with my favorite, and the best, shower in the house.

No big deal, I thought, I'll just shower on the first floor, where my daughters shower. I knew going in that the water pressure wouldn't be as good as downstairs, but there were adjustments I could make to help with that. So, taking my clothes off while I waited for the water to warm up, I pulled back the curtain and stepped in. Not bad, not bad at all. It would take a little longer, but it would work.

But there was no soap. I looked everywhere for the soap.

My daughters have a huge basket of supplies that sits right on the floor of the shower, with plastic mesh sides so most of the water can flow out. I rooted around in there a bit without success. I peeked out of the curtain, to see if someone had left the bar of soap by the sink. No. I looked down below the pile of towels to get a fresh bar to unwrap. No. Surely, I thought, these women are not showering without soap. All of my daughters' friends had just showered in here just the night before.

I could do what I've been known to do, which is to hustle out of the shower wet and grab a bar of soap wherever I could find one and hurry back in before anyone sees me, but my daughter's three friends somewhere in the house, that didn't seem like a good idea.

Something told me I had better check in the basket of supplies again. After looking through the products again, I realized that if I wanted to wash my body, my only option was Nivea Touch of Sparkle Cream Oil Body Wash. Now, I'm a Dial soap guy; I don't get much more sophisticated than that. So the prospect of of a "diamond powder & white calla blossom scent" which promised to be both "illuminating and nourishing" offered an embarassment of hygiene riches that I didn't fully understand. But when I smelled it, I suddenly knew why my daughters smelled the way they did. And now I was going to smell just like them. Working quickly, I washed only the areas and parts that seemed essential, hoping that if I washed rapidly and selectively, a scented aura would not surround me.

And I still had to wash my hair. Now, having inherited my father's fine hair, I like shampoo that is the equivalent of paint stripper--take even the slightest bit of any kind of nutrient from my remaining hair to give it the greatest chance of having a little volume, however flyaway that might be. Imagine how my heart sank when the shampoo I picked up read "Totally twisted 2 in 1 curls and waves shampoo and conditioner with a fusion of french lavender twist and jade extracts." I've got nothing against the lavender and jade; it's the conditioner which becomes the equivalent of spraying olive oil on my hair.

The combo shampoo even had a message for me: "I'm totally bent and wonderfully hydrated," the bottle read. It's a come-on, isn't it? A seduction? Imagine if a woman said that to you in a bar. You'd let her rub herself all over your hair and everywhere else.

But me, I was doomed. Or, my hair was. Because hydrated hair is flat hair.

Out of desperation and because there were so many products in the basket, I thought I'd just check and see if there was anything else in there that I might use. And there, in a blue-tinted bottle, it was: degunkify. This "tingling deep cleaning shampoo," in spite of its " fusion of icy pineapply and cotton leaf," was going to strip my hair of any kind of oil that it had picked up over the previous day and night. I was saved.

Now, I'm no genius of hair or anything else, but while I was lathering up and massaging my scalp, since this shampoo promised "cleaning so deep it makes you tingly all over," I started to put two and two together. Wait a second, I thought, as this hair Viagra did its work, if someboy is using this shampoo to "degunkify," then isn't what they are degunkifying from the stuff that the other shampoo does to their hair? Isn't it some kind of vicious circle? And then, in a moment of even greater epiphany, I suddenly understood America's drug companies and how they had convinced doctors to prescribe drugs to us that would undo what other drugs were doing to us and then I realized that I'd better rinse even the degunk out of my hair, dry off, and walk out of the room with stripped hair and a confusing smell of pineapple, white calla blossom, and cotton leaf.

I had been in the girls' bathroom and, like Clint Eastwood says in Heartbreak Ridge, I had "improvised, adapted, and overcome." I was clean and I smelled herbal and floral and perfumey and God knows what else those scent factories in New Jersey had come up with.

All that remained was to locate my wife's deodorant up in her bathroom, and then I could get dressed.

Steve Earle and Chris Kirby are available at Itunes.