Pillow Talking

The other night in a trendy Manhattan restaurant, the conversation turned to pillows. Seems that Oprah just did a feature on bugs in bed pillows and, apparently, they’re more common than anyone thought. Who knew? But, I’ve got to tell you, as an owner of two beach rental properties with 40 pillows, I’m more concerned about stains. You might not see bugs in your pillows, but there’s no hiding an old soiled pillow.

As conscientious landlords, we make an annual pillow-purchasing pilgrimage to the Kmart for the pre-Memorial Day, two for one $5 pillow special. You should see all the gay boys loading up, especially when the “grandfather” pillows are on sale. Oh, they might look expensive, tarted up in classic blue and white striped Martha Stewart fabric, but underneath, they’re still just cheap poly-foam. What do you expect for five dollars?

This year the Kmart featured crisp white Joe Boxer brand pillows. This confused me. I remember Joe Boxer brand boxer shorts and boxer briefs from back in the 80’s. They were quite trendy for awhile among the Dupont Circle fabby boys. The yellow Joe Boxer smiley face with his tongue hanging out always looked kinda lewd to me, like he’d just finished giving a really great blowjob. When the hell did they start making cheap pillows? A use for the leftover material perhaps?

Anyway, about a mile into our return trip from the Kmart, we realize we had an incident brewing. The pillows were no longer quietly sitting in the back of the truck. Oh no, they were jumping around and threatening to fly out of the bed at any moment and out onto Route One. But I couldn’t stop. And I wasn’t going to stop. There was too much traffic. And there’s no way in hell I was gonna dart around through traffic just to snatch up a $2.50 pillow. Me, well, I’d just leave the damn pillows in the highway to get hit and smashed and run over and ripped up and pushed back and forth by all the cars and trucks until they all finally migrated into the median strip where they’d eventually be retrieved by someone from the county government or some resident of a Dewey Beach flop house.

In the end, I just eased back on the gas pedal and the pillows settled down. Another truck-related incident averted.