THE TRUTH ABOUT TOILET PAPER BOOBIES

Wowsa.

After bitching that I never watch the Olympics, I really hate them, blah blah blah...I must confess that I did manage to catch a few minutes of them the other night simply because the wife had turned them on and I was too damned tired to wrestle the remote control from her and throw it at the television.

And it was the one part of the Olympics that is threatening some sort of controversy.

Apparently, we've got some crooked commie judges on the staff of McOlympics. Judges who made a deal to vote for a certain pair of Russian skaters to win the gold medal even when they skated like a pair of blind toddlers on the ice.

Oooooooo....controversy.

THAT'S the only reason I ever tune into the Olympics or pay them a bit of attention...when there's controversy.

Like with Nancy and Tonya. Hiring hit men to rub each other out. Now THAT'S good television.

Or the Olympics in Atlanta...the controversy over who dropped the bomb on the place? Was it Tonya? Dan Rather? The Gap Band?

Now we have a new controversy...crooked commie judges. Making deals behind the scenes to guarantee that certain skaters get that Wheaties cover and others get the Fruity Pebbles.

Amidst the Olympic stoners doing their death-defying snowboarding stunts and extended shots of that gruesome Scott Hamilton stinking up my television screen, we finally have something to watch. An expose (little thing over the e)on those sneaky Russian bastards.

Stay tuned. This has all the makings of getting interesting.

As I sat there the other night, watching this Canadian skater chick cry because she had lost her shot at gold like all the Olympic losers end up doing whether on TV or in the privacy of their Motel 6 room, I silently wished I had my X-Ray Specs with me.

Even though I've never owned a pair of X-Ray Specs. But those are the one thing I've wanted all my entire life and never had.

Which is a rare thing. I was not a poor child. We had money. We could have afforded a pair of X-Ray Specs for the fat boy.

But I never got any.

I think you know what I'm talking about. They were advertised in the backs of comic books, along with the fake vomit and whoopie cushions. They guaranteed you that if you wore them, you would be able to see through people's clothes and see them...naked.

In my fifth grade mind, there had never been a better invention created. And they were only three bucks.

Three bucks and you'd no longer wonder who had pubic hair and who didn't. Three bucks and the mysteries of a young girl's physical development would no longer be a mystery.

I had to have these X-Ray Specs.

But I couldn't ask my parents for the money.

Why not?

Simple, Simon.

...What fifth grader in his right mind waddles up to his parents and asks for three dollars to buy some X-Ray Specs so he can check out the girls on the playground?

Well...BESIDES my porn-surfing nephew?

The results would be swift and severe. My parents would say no. A few minutes later, I'd get a spanking for being a pervert (which a TRUE pervert would enjoy, but I always feared). Then I'd get sent to my room to lay on my bed and think about what a pervert I was. Then the next day I'd be sent to military school where there wouldn't be ANY girls ... clothed or not. And I'd grow up gay with a military fetish and probably be the bitch in the relationship and never receive any of my lover's benefits unless he went to work for Disney.

Sooooo...I never expressed my wishes for the X-Ray Specs out loud to my parents.

But in the sixth grade, a miracle happened.

Dean Perryman brought a pair of X-Ray Specs to school one day.

I could not keep the saliva in my mouth. I HAD to get my hands on these. Penny Hager was sporting boobies before any of the other girls and I HAD to know if they were real or toilet paper. They were pretty smooth, so I'm guessing they weren't toilet paper. Sorry gals...but toilet paper boobs are lumpy. You're not fooling anyone with those.

A group of guys had formed around Dean on the playground and Dean was letting them all look through the glasses. Each of them was whipping their heads around, trying to take in as much naked sixth graders as humanly possible and trying to avoid Henry Ziemer, the school's fattest kid. I personally think he was half pig to be honest. I fought the urge to call him Pigboy though because I was probably second in line in the fat kid department and if Henry ever dieted, I was a gonner and the Pigboy retort would come back to bite me in the ass.

I moved in with the other guys and anxiously waited my turn for a chance to gaze through these marvels of science. I was keeping tabs on Penny Hager who was playing Four Square with her popular friends. There was no way in hell I was going to get the Specs and then lose track of Penny and be stuck staring deep into Henry Ziemer's colon.

As the crowd of guys around Dean began to dwindle, some guys were walking away, hooting and hollering about who all they had just seen naked.

My palms were sweating and I could feel one of those erections that young boys get out of the blue coming on. Those erections that you'd get just from sitting in math class too long.

One of those.

"Dean," I said quietly once I got his attention. "I really need to look through those glasses."

Now Dean and I weren't the closest of friends. We had mutual friends and that was about the closest we came to actually being friends. We were in a few classes together, but Dean was a tad more popular than me. And after bringing these glasses with the hypnotic wheel design on the lenses to school he was a shitload more popular than me. He was filet mignon and I was diseased rat shit.

"I dunno Uncle Bob," he smirked. "There's a lot of guys wanting to look through them."

Looking back, I now realize the kid was waiting for a bribe. He was getting goods from every kid who he had let slap these babies across their orbs.

And I stood there in all my uncool glory, thinking that I was just going to saunter up to him and get to wear them for a minute without offering the king anything of value.

I waited my turn anyway. I was doing my best to be patient, but my patience was wearing thin.

Then...the worst thing in my life happened.

...The recess bell rang.

As kids ran off the playground back into the school, I was desperate. I fought back the tears as I pleaded "Dean!"

But Dean and his buddies took off back into the school, laughing and hooting and talking about all the naked flesh they had just seen.

Flash forward about eight years.

I see Dean Perryman at Opryland, the amusement park that I worked at for several years in high school and college.

We talk about college and stuff and I ask him about the X-Ray Specs. More importantly...did he still have them? Because I was in college now and now more than ever, I had quite a few gals I had to scope out.

Dean laughed and explained the mystery of the X-Ray Specs to me. How they worked and what you actually saw once you looked through them.

The mystery is over now. I know what I would have saw.

And ... staying true to the X-Ray Specs code of honor, I cannot share with you what happens when you put X-Ray Specs on and check out your schoolmates.

Yes, there's a code of honor involved.

So as I sat and watched that hot assed Canadian skater boo hoo hooing all over her outfit because some Russian judge paid a French judge off to make sure the Russians won the competition and wanted to check her out naked with a pair of X-Ray Specs ... I had to think for a second about what I would have seen.

...A silhouette of my television.

Hardly decent whack-off material.

I'm glad I saved myself three bucks.

But who knows? Maybe if I had coughed up the three bucks back then I could have been as popular as Dean Perryman.

...A guy who was cleaning bathroom toilets several years later at Opryland.

My.

How the mighty quickly fall from grace.