Pupik

Pupik: a tummy in Yiddish.

Picture it: The Space Station arcade, circa the early to mid-80s. Working our way through the crowds hovering around the machines buzzing with Galaga, Moonwalk, and Tron, Diane and I, laden with tarnished gold tokens, big hair and small flats of the day, would meet a young man who made such an impression on us, to this day we still talk about him. Or should I say, Diane made quite an impression on him.

His name was Steve. He was a large person, clad in a sweat suit. He was short-haired, his face coated with a sheen of perspiration. He took one look at Diane, tall, silken-haired, red-lipped Diane, and fell hard.

He followed her around the small building. He finally approached her and they became engrossed in conversation. At least he was engrossed – I’m not positive about her. I think she may have been glancing around her as tactfully as possible looking for potential outs, though to no avail. Steve held Diane captive at the Space Station amid throngs of teenagers and young adults, until he had her phone number encased in his hot little hand. And when I say hot, I mean it literally.

As I remember it, their conversation consisted mostly of Steve talking about his weight-loss efforts. Though I can think of trillions of subjects more appealing to young available women upon meeting them for the first time and trying to impress, for some reason this is the one that Steve, the bachelor looking for love, chose to focus on. On and on he went, regaling Diane with information about his healthy eating and exercise habits. Then he dropped a little bomb of information, one of those TMI tidbits. Underneath his sweatshirt, he was wearing a thick band of rubber, a circle of heat-generating equipment that was meant to shrink his substantial waist. It was making him hot (in the temperature sense only, I can assure you), and that’s why he was sweating so profusely.

Well, how a girl can resist such a Casanova-like approach, I can’t imagine, and evidently Diane was no exception. She ended up handing over her phone number – out of pity, exhaustion? I’m not sure which – and after a day or two, Steve gave her a call and he took her out to a movie -their one and only date.

But alas, that next meeting almost wasn’t to be, though thanks to the industriousness of this young man and his hell bent intent to call her, the event that almost thwarted his plans did not get the best of him.

After he won Diane’s phone number written in ink on a small scrap of paper, he took his prize home with him, tucked safely between the rubber belt and his sweaty tummy. However, when he got home that night, to his horror, he discovered that the ink had actually rubbed right off the paper. When he looked down, he found that Diane’s hard-won phone number had been transferred onto the skin of his belly – and, of course, backwards! Smart Steve stared and stared into the mirror until he could decipher the backwards, smeared numbers, still managed to call Diane, and made the fatal mistake of telling her that story anytime before their 50th wedding anniversary.

Diane and I immediately came up with a nickname for ole Steve: Pupik, which we still use to this day.