Priscilla vs. Cirilla
"The eternal feminine draws us ever onward" - Goethe, "Faust"
While driving to work yesterday I saw a woman walking up 43rd street wearing a plaid coat and large-frame glasses looking focused and resigned, a look I immediately recognized as someone on their way to work. But where? The nearby CVS, or the adult gift and sex toy store across the street known as Cirilla’s? The square building with a billowy awning on the corner of Rainbow — across from the McDonald’s, and near my parents’ church — has been half a dozen different businesses in my lifetime. It was a Taco John’s, a Brown’s Chicken, an ice cream parlor, a hot dog stand, and finally a sex shop, which it has been for now since the late 1990s. I’ve driven by a thousand times but never once been inside.
Before it was Cirilla’s it was Priscilla’s, part of a chain of adult stores in the Kansas City area that rebranded around the year 2000, I assume for legal reasons. I don’t know who Priscilla is or why she changed her name, but it only added to her mystery. Did she pronounce Cirilla with a “y” sound like if you were saying it in Spanish? Or with a flat “illa” like the way Napoleon Dynamite’s grandma pronounces quesadilla? As my friend Jeff once said, “when Victoria tells you her secrets, you listen; but when Cirilla’s on the line just cover your ears and go about your business.” I never knew what he meant by that either, and I didn’t want to know.
By the time I got to the red light at State Line the woman had disappeared from sight. I squinted in the rearview mirror and thought back to the one and only time I did go to a Priscilla’s, a now-closed location on 83rd Street where we stopped for water one time during a high school cross country practice run. Stopping at a sex toy shop for a water break was as ridiculous as it sounds and almost certainly Bruchman’s idea. Since he was the only one of us who was 18 they allowed him to stay and browse while the rest of us got ushered out once we’d quenched our thirst. Looking back, it’s unclear to me: Did they hand out little plastic cups of water? Did any of us besides Bruchman actually go in the store? I don’t honestly remember.
What I can still picture clearly is a grinning Bruchman coming out of the store with two fistfuls of tiny rubber penis erasers held triumphantly above his head and handing them out to each of us. I remember cars honking and all of us holding the tiny penis erasers (and at least one set of tiny rubber boobs) for the rest of our run and giggling all the way back to the locker room.
Maybe the coaches caught wind of this adventure and maybe they didn’t, but it went down in team history as The Priscilla’s Run, and one day I suppose I’ll tell my own son about it, except I’ll have to explain that she goes by Cirilla now, and if he asks me why I’ll have to explain that there are some things that no man, however worldy — not me, not Jeff, not even Bruchman — will ever understand.