Bare City

"C'mon. You need a break. You sneaked away on your birthday, but now you're back. Let's go to Great Wolf Lodge Spa," my girlfriend said. It's an indoor water park loaded with life-sized mechanical moose and bears. "There isn't enough wine in the world," I said to my friend. "There's always enough wine," she replied, and booked space for us, and our girls.

Towns that house Great Attractions always seem stuck in 1963, except for the occasional almost-goth, not quite punk gang roaming about with one skateboard to share. Every house looks like it could use a bath, every yard a lawn service. (One front yard might have been decorated for Halloween, but we couldn't tell.) All the incoming money gets poured into and just as quickly out of the Great Attractions and the people that live around the GAs work these establishments at service industry pay scale. As my father used to say about the ghostly New York side of Niagara Falls, it had had a carnival atmosphere, a fun fair mostly about illegal fun. Once the prostitution and gambling got shut down, the carnival closed. Even when the GAs are legal, however, there is no escaping the carnival atmosphere. It shows up in lawn decorations, window treatments, and pastel pallets.

As Lexi, Edit, and I drove towards the lodge, we passed a huge, aluminum industrial complex. "This must be it," I said, not expecting much and thinking that all the inside waterworks would require such a structure. But as I drove on, looking for an entrance, I spotted the over-sized Yellowstone ranger lodge around the corner. This was more like it. At least we weren't getting tetanus just walking through the front door, I thought. Nope, we were getting mechanical howling wolves, talking moose, and one neurotic tree.

"Wait," my friend said. "I'll get us a bottle."

Everyone needs a friend like her. Everybody should be tight with someone who can come up with "I tried Rogaine on my eyebrows, and nothin'." Or "I just polished off a whole bag of goldfish in the bathroom, gross," with her disgust aimed at the fact that she ate the big lot of it, not the location of the consumption. When I think I am in the middle of something outrageous or stupid or both, she has already been there. Exponentially. She makes me feel as close to normal as is possible, but I'm not sure what role I play for her: an apprentice? Perhaps an Ethel or girly Poncho Sanza, except she is no screwbally redhead or Don Quixote. She lives quite rooted in reality, albeit a reality that requires a staff.

"Oh, do you have an organizer, too?" she asked in all seriousness, when I told her I was working hard to get my house in shape. I meant garbage bags, Ikea boxes, and a mop. She meant someone with a notepad.

After we spent hours standing in stairway lines mostly naked, waiting for a chance to ride each water slide, she uttered, "Slim balls. It's like a gastric bypass in a pill. You swallow one and it fills up your stomach. Fifteen pounds the first week." Then she laughed at herself for buying into what is most certainly a scam. I could barely get past envisioning what happened to these balls after they deflated, but I was so impressed that I managed to form the phrase, "Me want some." But there wasn't even time to dream about being the Olsen Twins. We had to find a place inside that would serve martinis. "Wait," I said, as the group was about to head out of the hotel suite. "I have to put on mascara." "What for?" she replied, forcing me to look up and about at the collection of wet heads and unadorned and consider our manless circumstances.But what she really meant was, "Hurry up already," because my friend was on more than a martini and dinner mission. The next night she and her husband were going to a Halloween party as Eliot Spitzer and escort, and she was facing a terrible wardrobe malfunction. A CO2 laser treatment to her chest gave her a sunburned decollete and white cleavage line of demarcation. She figured a tattoo of flowers or thorns along the line would soften the difference. We had to stand in line with the six and seven-year-olds, waiting her turn to ask the young spray paint artist to fix her breasts.

The kid, dressed in a pirate's costume, never broke a sweat. A true professional. And you knew he still lived at home with his mom, in one of the cottages we passed by on the way to the water park.