Swing Home Alabama.
I can hear my neighbors having sex. They’re good people—always polite in the common space, willing to hold the door. But not who you want to imagine being freaks in the sheets.
The cheetah calls from next door remind me of a month I spent at the Days Inn in Decatur, Alabama. Other than me, my boss Rick Pettit, and an IV-drug-using prostitute, the motel was empty most days. Rick was a good guy who was always doing some combination of worrying, sweating, popping pills and smoking. His Southern drawl was as thick as the opaque green sludge that filled the motel’s swimming pool.
About three weeks into my stay, I saw the hotel’s owner giving the pool a “shock treatment” of chlorine.
“What’s going on?” I asked Rick.
“The swangers are comin’,” he said out the side of his mouth that didn’t have a Marlboro dangling from it.
“Like dancers?”
“Nah, wife swappers.”
Sure enough, come Friday, I had to park in the Waffle House because the Days’s was packed with middle-aged couples trolling for some strange. “WELCOME ALABAMA SWINGERS” read the banner at the front desk.
Later that night, around 3 am, I heard some ladies splashing, squealing and snorting in the freshly treated pool. I stumbled from my bed to take a look and was traumatized by what I saw. A bloated, hairy man with the complexion of a corpse was spinning his flaccid penis pinwheel to the delight of two blubberous ‘bamans. The women were waving their hands in the air, their underarm flub billowing in the summer breeze, their breast hung to their waists.
My eyes burned for days, and it wasn’t from the chlorine.
