Holy Polacks and Holy Roller Girls

August 31, 2005 - 8:36 p.m.

You would pay a thousand dollars to have the Sunday that I had, maybe even more than that. My plans for the day were nil: shop at Cub Foods, fire up the camping grill, fix Belle’s hookah that broke on the way home from Egypt. Maybe laundry and yardwork. A bunch of boring tedious shit, to be sure.

How in the hell I ended up in a Polish salt cave, and then a piñata store, and then a roller derby with sexy girlfights and exposed thong panties I will never know. God Bless America, and God Bless God. Thank you for the little unexpected blessings, and for handing me a day full of events I never even dreamed up in my best illegal substance abuse sessions.

It all started when I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to go get breakfast at Mama Kitty’s, and he said Ok, but that afterwards he wanted to stop by his friend’s house to check on him, since the dude hadn’t answered his phone in weeks. I said, naw, let’s go check on him now, on the way, because for some reason I thought the guy lived near us but I was WRONG and an hour later we were on the far northwest side in one of many Polish, I mean P-o-l-i-s-h neighborhoods in Chicago.

After banging on the door for 10 minutes, we were finally greeted by his friend who had just woken out of a Rip van Winkle nap and he explained that he no longer wants to have a phone and that’s why he couldn’t be reached.

Now we’re starving, so the dude suggests that we go down the street to an all-u-can-eat buffet, and I hadn’t been to one of those since my hick days so I was fairly intrigued.

It was like Polski Central, red and white flags, girls with their too-tight polyester pants harboring a camel hoof and an infection. Trying so hard to look so American but then over shooting by 50 yards and they look like prostitutes with their caked red lipstick, even though I’m sure they’re all very nice girls.

The buffet was the shit, a long line of deep fried dough stuffed with mystery whatsit, and I had to ask for each item to be identified. My boyfriend held a forkful of something under my nose and insisted that I try the deliciousness so I turned to his friend and asked for an I.D. and he said, “Pigs in a blanket” as he got up to return to the buffet.

“No thanks, it has pork in it.”

“No it doesn’t. I just ate it, and there’s no meat in here.”

“Oh you mean they named it ‘pigs in a blanket’ when it’s really just ‘blanket in a blanket’?”

“Yes, there’s no meat -” as he’s shoving the fork in my face.

Oh the blind trust.

I gulped that forkful like it was a cold turd, swallowed hard and said, “Thanks for reminding me what pork tastes like. I haven’t tasted that in my mouth for ten years, but yeah, that’s pork alright, and I still don’t like it.”

By the front door of the Polish Buffet, I saw a flyer that caught my eye because it had photos taken under a black light, and you really have to wonder why anyone is taking pictures with black lights – and if they were taking pictures with black lights, would they really have any money left over to purchase glossy fliers, after they bought all that weed they were smoking when they took the pictures in the first place?

I needed to find out.

But I had no idea what in the hell I was looking at, all I saw was pictures of fluoresced elderly people reclining on beach chairs in some kind of magical underwater world, with stalactites hanging from the “ceiling” of the ocean for no explicable reason. Using 15 different fonts in 17 different colors, the flyer said, “The magic world of salt! miraculous rest, health, and relax invites you to take advantage in salt-iodine cave ‘GALOS’!”

Oh, yeah. This is gonna be good.

The broken English was telling me that: “45 minutes spent in GALOS equals three days on the beech” and “Salt and Iodine invites you warmly!” and then, “GALOS may be also recommended to the pregnant women and children.”

Taking advantage of pregnant children in warm iodine caves! What kind of Polish cave of iniquity are they running in the basement of the Jolly Inn Polski Buffet??

We headed to GALOS as fast as our pork bellies could take us, and demanded a cave session from the mono-lingual Polish girl. She handed us white socks to wear and attempted to explain to us the health benefits of salt. “Breathe? Salt for breathe. Bathe? Salt for bathe. Eat? Salt for eat.”

We interrupted her. “Yeah, yeah. Just open up this cave already.”

She opened up a round wooden Hobbit door and led us into a room with walls made of salt and a ceiling that looked like asbestos spray painted white and dripping from the ceiling like stalactites. My jaw dropped to the floor as my brain struggled and a scream caught in my throat: WHY WHY WHY??? Why would someone build a room like this?

There were lawn chairs set up in a circle around the edges of the round room. Dolphins and seahorses made of salt swam the brick walls along coral and starfish. It was excruciating to walk along the floor of salt rock in our new white socks.

“Ow! Whut the FUK! I thought it said FOOT MASSAGE?”

The Polish girl said, “Thank you enjoy very much” as she ducked out of the room and shut the cave door.

We immediately burst into hysterics as if we had just been locked into a nitrous chamber. It was all too much. We were nearly turning ourselves inside out with the shock and ecstasy of such a ridiculous place and the thrill of experiencing it was almost unbearable.

The room simultaneously looked like an ice igloo with its white brick walls, a cave with its stalactites and rock floor, and the sea (I guess) because of the coral and starfish. With some lawn chairs thrown in and - oh yeah, soft fleece blankets on the lawn chairs.

The feel of the room, however, was that of a cheap cardboard closet in a mobile home, stifling, stale, with the floor covered in mothballs.

The pilot immediately sat down and reclined on the lawn chair but I darted around the room like a maniac, yelling “ow, ow” like a hot coal walker with each painful step.

“How can you lay there with your eyes closed when we only have 30 minutes to stare at this shit and take pictures??”

He breathed deeply and said, “I’m trying to relax in the therapeutic properties to valuable health improving elements in this maritime microclimate.”

I thought to myself that maybe he had a point, and noted that the GALOS brochure claims to treat NEUROSES along with 100 other diseases, so maybe I oughta sit my ass down and get treated.

But no. I chattered incessantly, harrumphing and spitting over each little thing as I photographed it.

While we were in there, I got a text message from Belle but there was simply NO TIME to text back: DUDE IM IN A POLAK BLACK-LIT SALT CAVE OMFG LMAO.

Finally the pilot caught my excitement and he jumped up and we took as many pictures as we could while over the loudspeaker we heard a calming voice speak in Polish over sounds of the ocean. Five long minutes of Polish narrative followed by 20 seconds of an English translation. “You will now join us. In relaxation. In the Baltic Sea.”

There was a bright gold crucifix hanging beneath a conch sconce (I can’t believe I just wrote that) because what would a seashell salt igloo be without fuckkin CHRIST? Nothing, I’m sure.

We left before our time was up because we had gotten as much benefit as a neon broom closet has to offer after about 15 minutes. We went out into the reception area, peeling off the white socks and stealing Dum-Dums and the manager lady came out, looking upset that we had ended our cave session early. She was worried that we were not pleased with our iodine inhalation experience and she chased me out the door, holding a blue fabric bag with a bow in her extended hands. “For you! Salt! Salt for eat! Salt for face! Salt for all things! Please!”

Of course I snatched it, tossing a thank you over my shoulder as we spilled out into the parking lot, stumbling this way and that and holding our bellies with laughter.

The have a shockingly sophisticated website here.

They must be raking in the cash if they can pay someone to Flash their fucking caves.

Click here for Flickr:

On the long drive home we passed DULCE LANDIA which I think literally means Candyland and I was like, “Ooo! Ooo! I’ve always wanted to go there!” So the pilot screeches to a halt and I jump out of the car barefoot, as I had just broken my shoe at the Polish Buffet. Don’t ask.

We go inside and it’s more of a piñata store, with floor-to-ceiling candy to fill the poorly rendered cartoon characters, who sit on the floor patiently, waiting to be properly identified by the far stretches of the imagination. My boyfriend says, “Honey, what is this?”

“It’s yellow…and it has a beak…I think it might be Tweety.”

and,

“It’s purple. So it has to be Barney.”

We decided to buy the red blob that resembled Elmo for his little nephew’s birthday. We had to fill it with something.

The candy was so completely Mexican I couldn’t imagine any white kids ever choking that shit down, but dammit, those kids need some culture, so too bad if they are disappointed when Elmo explodes and they are showered with Corn Lollipops, Tamarind Chili Pepper Enchiladas, and Gustinos, a wheat snack that you have to remove from the package and deep fry it in oil before you give it to your kids. Gelatin pillows filled with liqueur, sweet potato, cough drops, egg nog, Mexican flags made of coconut.The kinds of things that honkey suburbanites dream about, no doubt.

We left with Elmo, confetti, and food-flavored candy, all for $30 and a clique of bad-ass hoodrats made fun of me for limping down the sidewalk with a broken hooker shoe and dirty fuck hair from 20 hours earlier.

Down the road we again stopped, this time at a Cult Temple with dowdy women in long floral skirts who worship this fat dude with a name like Amu Abbi Ama. We always wondered what went on at that cult church so we stopped in and got a talk and I don’t remember a goddamn thing about it other than they were selling a sex-ed book for children under 6 and it had full pictures of hairy pussies, wieners, and mommy and daddy making love in the bathtub. I was horrified, and I’m a Grade A Pervert.

Finally, we’re home and we have a nap before we decide at the last minute to go see the Windy City Rollers tear it up at the Congress Theater. ALL GIRL ROLLER DERBY and lemme tell ya, they did NOT disappoint.

They were so much sexier and cutthroat than I ever could have asked for. Their uniforms were short and revealing with special panties underneath, kind of like figure skaters but so much more WHORY. Ladies vilified their opponents at every turn. Shoving and tripping would ensue, sometimes leading to an all-out brawl.

The first fight was the best one, because we had no idea that fighting would be allowed, but there they were, and the refs were quite slow to make their way over and break it up. It was a big girl wearing a short blue dress, pounding on some broad that we couldn’t see because a large red lamé thong was taking up our entire field of vision. It was the big girl’s ass, clad in red fishnets, with shiny red material slithering up her ass crack.

I shrieked: Buttocks! Buttocks! And the spectators were on their feet at once, bringing the house down with their cheers.

The bare ass cheeks and fist fighting made it all worth it for me. And their bad-girl stage names like Broken Cherry, Ellen Degenerate, Betty Larceny and Jackie Trip’her. Their next match is September 11 at the Congress if you wanna see it for yourself.

Also, I’m leaving for vacation this weekend, our “fall” vacation that we’ve been planning since spring. The pilot and I are going to Bolivia, and recent experience has taught me that Americans have no idea where that is. It’s in South America, southwest of Brazil, along the Andes Mountains. But more importantly it’s where you will find LAKE TITICACA! The highest lake in the world, full of leather-skinned natives that reside atop man-made sponge islands.

Why are we going to Boliva? His words: “Because nobody would ever go to Bolivia for vacation.”

We’re trying to get away from the likes of you.

We’re going backpacking and camping in the mountains. The air has no oxygen at 14,000 feet so I’m expecting heart failure and bleeding of the brain, but whatever. It’s been a good life.

DO YOU WANT A POSTCARD?

Send me a mailing address and I’ll send you a postcard. I still have the addresses of ya’ll who asked for one from Egypt so you’ll get one for sure. I feel like such an ass about the whole Egypt thing, 40 out of 40 postcards that NEVER showed up. I know you think I’m a liar. I know you don’t believe me. But I sent out 40, including one to MYSELF and no one got JACK SHIT.

FUCK KNOBS!

I wanted to prove that Egypt has a terrible postal system, and BOY DID I! And the scariest part is that I mailed out the postcards from different locations all over the country so they are thoroughly, 100% FUCKED.

Hummuna.

I’m off to see indigenous Hispanics. And llamas, and ALPACAS! Sure to be my new favorite animal, cousin of the camel. And I will name him Sacapla, because I’m stupid like that.

*heart*

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