Cooked Goose

I peed next to Hugh Hefner. It was a few years ago. I walked up to the only open urinal at an LAX men’s room, and assumed the awkward lean. Whilst keeping the appropriate eye-level visual field, I caught in my periphery the diminutive figure to my right. A feeble old man slouched over some focused work. “That sure looks like Hugh Hefner,” I told myself. Double take. “That’s definitely Hugh Hefner.”

The Playboy himself. He was gray and disheveled. The brash purveyor of men’s fantasies in his clichéd silk robe, the pipe and slippers? Well, he was nowhere to be found. The dark, slicked hair was gone. Gone too was the “Can you believe how good I have it?” smirk. The old man was ashen, grim. And since he was there when I pulled up, and still there when I backed out, it appeared the plumbing had gone the way of everything else. The man who had not denied himself a thing his eyes desired, peered down at his limp spigot thinking, “What I’d give to take a good leak?”

Have you ever stood next to greatness? I have. But it wasn’t that day in that LAX men’s room peeing with Hugh.

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