Doug and I circled the block for the 20th time. Still no parking. Jesus fucking christ, was every queen in the Oakland hills having an Oscars party? Finally, after getting stuck backing out of the third dead end canyon road in a row, I pulled into a driveway.

"Honey, I don't think we're going to be going to this party."

Doug sighed, "Yeah, this is getting stupid. But they can't be mad at us, we've been trying for almost an hour."

"Well, let's at least not make this a wasted trip over the bridge."

"Oh, come on. You can't be serious. We're wearing tuxes!" Doug said.

Which we were. But twenty minutes later, the front desk clerk at Steamworks, the bathhouse in Berkeley, hardly raised an eyebrow when he checked us in. On the way over, we had called our friend Ken and invited him to join us. Ken had been dying to make his first visit to a bathhouse, but was too chickenshit to do it by himself. A slow Monday night seemed like a good opportunity for him to check the place out without getting completely freaked out, as Ken tended to get completely freaked out by all the little things in life...even like being in unfamiliar Safeway.

"Oh my GOD, look where they have the soda!"

Since the place was basically deserted when we arrived, Doug and I asked for our favorite room, 333. The fact that we HAD a favorite room at the baths may seem a bit silly, but anyone whose ever been to a bathhouse knows that the second most important selling point one has at the baths, after one's body, is one's room location.

If your room is in a brightly lit, or very heavily trafficked area...then no one will want to come into your room, not with everybody watching. On the other hand, you don't want to get stuck down at the end of some dead end corridor. Room 333 struck a perfect balance, being on the dark side of a busy hallway.

The first thing Doug wanted to do was sit in the hot tub, something we never did. As Doug put it, the idea of sitting in a boiling tub of bacteria floating off a bunch of men fresh from having sex...well, that idea didn't appeal to our dainty sensiblities. But since it seemed we were pretty much the only ones in the place, he was pretty sure that the hot tub remained sanitary.

Which it was. And then some. There was so much bleach in the water that we started to get dizzy from the fumes the moment we sat down. After 30 seconds, we sprinted to the showers to lose our Eau de Clorox, where we saw the first other customer since we'd arrived.

He was tall, extremely muscular, with an expanse of chest hair that seemed to burst with fury and industry out of the center of his chest, but give up half-heartedly before it quite reached the sides. It sort of looked like a chest murkin.

He appeared to be Eastern European, pale skinned with heavy black eyebrows, and he openly sneered at us as he made quite a production of lathering up his huge, probably formerly Communist, cock. Doug and I agreed on the way back to our room that he was definitely from one of the former Soviet republics that ended in "stan". So that's what we named him.

Less than a minute after we were back in our room, there was a knock at our door. It was Stan.

He sneered at us, again, and growled, "I zee you zee me in da shower....and I know you want for me to geeve you the baby," punctuating his message by groping himself.

I said, "Get OUT of here!" and I pushed the door shut. Doug looked at me in disbelief.

"What?" I asked.

"I kind of did want him to give me the baby," he said.

"Well, go follow him!" I said, opening the door for Doug. And standing outside was Ken, too completely freaked out to knock on door 333, even though we had called to tell him that's where we were. Doug went off to find Stan, and I took Ken on a brief tour around Steamworks.

I walked Ken up and down the empty hallways, pointing out various notable locations....the gym, the steamroom, the maze of extra dark hallways with carpeted walls. As I walked Ken around, I noticed he was becoming increasingly distracted, sometimes stopping to touch the walls.

"Honey, are you on something? Did you have to take an ecstasy just to come here?" I asked, pulling his hand off the wall.

"Oh, no. I didn't. No! I mean yes. Sort of."

"You sort of took something? What did you sort of take?"

"Just a little acid," he said, reaching back to feel the wall.

"You took acid. To come here. Oh, this WILL be interesting."

A couple of minutes later, we finally came upon a couple of other patrons, who were eyeballing us from the far end of a long hallway. They were too far away to tell if they were fuckable, but Ken was uncomfortable with walking right up to them to assess their potential hotness.

"What if I don't like them?"

"Then don't fuck them."

"What if they follow me?"

"Then ignore them."

"What if they try to come into my room?"

I explained to Ken that at the baths, the social code was fairly rigid about starting an encounter and that there'd usually be a least a couple non-verbal messages exchanged before anyone would try anything. A smile, a nod, or grabbing your own crotch was the observed protocol before a guy would dare enter your room. Because, woe, the embarrassment, to be rebuffed at that stage.

"But what if they try to come in anyway?" Ken persisted.

"Then you just say 'I'm resting'. Which means 'Ew, get out of my room, you freak!' But in a nice way."

The other guys were still at the end hall, perhaps having their own discussion about our fuckability. Finally, I nudged Ken and we moved towards them. At the same time, they started walking towards us. Ken and I made silly small talk as the four of us moved down the hundred foot long hallway, each duo only momentarily illuminated by the widely spaced overhead spotlights, then falling back into murky shadows.

Halfway down the hall, Ken stole a glance and murmured, "They look OK."

Then a second later, "OK, I really like the short one. The short one is hot."

I shushed him, but Ken said "Oh, yuck. His friend is skanky. The short one is hot but his friend is totally skanky."

I went to smack Ken to shut him up, but realized we were now standing right in front of the two guys. The two guys who were US, that is, becauseall this time we'd been staring down the hallway at a huge mirror.

Ken stepped back, "Oh my god. I'm the skank. I'M the SKANKY one! I'm the skanky one!"

I hugged him, "Yeah honey, but you're our skank."

In truth, Ken wasn't skanky in the least, but I guess it was a good thing that he was on acid right then, otherwise that moment of self-assessment might be haunting him to this day. I took him back to my room and got a couple of dollars for him to get a soda, thinking that maybe the sugar might cut back his highness. What do I know from acid?