It was a simple challenge from our friend Chris: give up the use of our favorite curse word for two weeks. And no, it really wasn’t one of the big four – shit, bitch, fuck, screw. We chanted them like a magical incantation. We shook it up with a bit of rhythm. And we did it so fast and so casually that after a while, nobody thought about what we were saying. Besides the rest of the jive idiocy we were involved in attracted much more stunned attention than our tendency to spice everything with mere profanity.
Need
But Chris and her husband Bob provided our one secure place to crash whenever our duties as Pius Itinerants took us to Baltimore. Often. So we needed to cooperate with our hosts, or find another place to crash. Then when Chris offered a real genuine Baltimore style crab boil we were salivating.
The conditions were that we had to stay in town, and all our friends were notified of the ban. Being that they would participate in the crab boil, they had an interest in making sure that our language was monitored. The prize would be no mere trinket or token prize.
To remind ourselves not to use it, we decided on a hand signal to warn the other not to say it. The hand sign appeared in our conversations often. When one used it, the other knew exactly what was meant.
So it went for two weeks. To avoid being tempted, we even cleared up the rest of our vocabulary. Entire paragraphs rolled off our tongues without profanity. Of any kind – we were scrupulous!
So at the end of the two weeks, we all gathered for the big crab boil. My friend Bill Had painted a picture of the hand sign we had been using. He placed it prominently on Bob and Chris’ bookshelf where everyone could view it. While we tore into the crab feast, it drew attention. Bill and I, however, kept silent as to the meaning. Eventually, Chris asked about it.
All is revealed
Calling for silence, Bill promised everyone an explanation of the painting. He mentioned that to remind ourselves not to spout off with the term, we would instead put up this signal:
One of the guests asked, “But Bill, does it mean anything?”
Bill then explained that shooting someone the middle finger meant to go fuck yourself. Giving them the little finger meant that they were incapable of getting it up. The third finger was for those who did not deserve the very best. The first finger? It was for those who deserved the most demeaning of sexual curses. A curse so foul that we deliberately left it undefined and open. We only signified it with a low growled Bug Fuck! Chris promptly jumped up and accused us of having cheated, but the howls of laughter and the number of upraised first fingers showed that the ploy had been appreciated.
About a year after Bill died in a car crash. We were both off the road and starting other phases of our lives. I lived in Boston, and he had settled in Baltimore. But his death left a big hole in my life. One day in the shop, instead of pulling out my carving tools, I dragged out my acrylic paint and brushes. I’m a carver, not a painter, but I did the painting of the hand raised in the single finger salute so I’d have a reminder of some of the wild stuff we had done together.
I’ve pretty much given up the term we invented, but I am reminded daily when I see the painting on the shelf.
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What a colorful life you’ve lived, darlin! Your stories and recollections always tickle me, so don’t ever stop… hugs
Colorful…that’s one way to describe them!
I had to find a safe word, lol… hugs
This is a good one, it’s great that you ave the painting.
Wow! Thanks for sharing this.
Glad that you enjoyed it.
It’s wonderful. Is that what Jesus is doing in Leonardo’s Last Supper?
Our friend Chris was a good catholic girl; she’d have been really pissed at that sort of blasphemy. What Bill and I assumed he was always doing was asking for the check. An alternative is a really twisted sort of three way, or trinity, type of sex. either way lots to p.o your religious types.
I was wrong. Thomas had his finger raised, you know, Doubting Thomas.
I’m not sure whether that was Aramaic or Italian finger raising. Of course, it could have been another Syriac interpretive gesture. These semiotic objectifications are redolent with enough symbolic freight to make a stuctural anthropologist blush.
Yep. I remember other paintings — one was supposed to represent John the Baptist saying Jesus was the one? another that John the Baptist would be decapitated? (In the painting he was a baby) I don’t know. “Symbolic freight” exactly.