The Days of Shag and Roses
The subject of this post hearkens back to a simpler time, when kitchens were resplendent in avocado green, an electric knife was a swell idea for a Christmas gift, and the floors of America were covered in shag carpeting. But the idea for the latter goes back to antiquity. The first shag carpets were known as Flokati and came from ancient Greece. They were hand-woven from goat hair. It makes me wonder if the goats were doubly offended, first at nearly being skinned, and second, from seeing the tacky end-product of their discomfort.
The shag rage hit America in the 1960s, when the general populous was trying to emulate the kids, who were growing their hair long, listening to loud music, and doing anything to piss off the establishment. A more practical reason for the rise of shag was the fact that wall-to-wall carpeting was a relatively new phenomenon. And what better way to max out the concept than with shaggy goodness.
It was the age of Aquarius, and in no time the media was filled with images of shag carpeting of every kind and color. Design magazines offered suggestions for covering the floor of every room in the house with shag. Yes, even bathrooms got the full-on shag treatment. If I stop to think about shag in the bathroom in the context of hygiene and cleaning, I grimace after just a few seconds. It’s downright icky.
Suddenly, shag was everywhere. Turn on the TV and the entire Brady Bunch brood was covered in it. Johnny Carson’s ashtray, at least before the networks did the ix-nay on the smoking on amera-cay, was shag-lined. No color was too loud or audacious. Bright oranges, yellows, greens, and even pinks were popular shag colors. And yes, I have to mention that there was also a dance, even a hairstyle, called the shag. The shag gestalt seemed to rule the era.
The Gaiser household was no exception to the shag craze. The home my parents bought in 1966 was filled with the stuff. The living room was wall-to-walled in a mottled brown version. What would eventually become my bedroom was styled in deep blue-green shag.
I have several distinct memories about shag on the home front. First, it was impossible to keep clean. Even the most powerful Hoover couldn’t stand up to the dense forest that was shag. Regardless of how many times I ran the vacuum, as I often did for Mom and glory, endless nits and detritus could be found in the carpet after the fact. Keeping shag clean was—and always will be—hopeless.
Then there was the odor factor. All those tiny fuzzy shaggies were veritable sponges for every environmental odor. Which means that the smoke from dozens of cigarettes enjoyed by Mom and Dad every day ended up not tabled, but literally floored. Close facial proximity to the shag was like donning a nicotine mask. The walls of the house must also have absorbed more than a tad of it. Add Dad’s appalling MJB coffee from the big green can to the equation, and it’s a wonder all of us didn’t resemble a skanked out version of Ready Kilowatt.
Things often got lost in the big shag forest. Misplace the back of an ear ring or any other small object and you may as well pack it in. Even an army of Lilliputians would be stymied in their attempts to recover your tiny but now lost forever treasure.
The strangest thing I ever lost to the shag gods wasn’t inanimate. Late in my tenure at home, I got the aquarium/tropical fish craze. At one point, I had three aquariums set up in my narrow bedroom. The largest was 50 gallons in size and took up the entire top of my dresser. No surprise it was filled with some seriously large fish, which can be a problem—and not just because they’re large. It’s because their mouths are large. And fish will eat whatever can fit into their gobs. Which means that the largest fish routinely gobbled up the smaller fish. This Darwinian buffet continued until I weeded out the perpetrator. It was a Shovel-Nosed Catfish about 15 inches long. It had a mouth like a hinge, big enough to theoretically eat anything else in the tank. I soon took it back to a local pet shop for future credit.
One of the more unusual specimens in the big tank was a Tire Track Eel, about 12 inches long. It was dark brown in color with spots. It was also very skittish and stuck to the bottom corners near the air filter and outflow tubes. Many a time the aforementioned catfish tried to make it a snack. But the eel was too quick and burrowed underneath the gravel, disappearing in a split second. But at some point after I got rid of the catfish, the eel went missing. When I went to clean the tank, I thought for sure I’d spook it from its sub-gravel hiding place. But several cleanings failed to turn up anything.
It was during the process of moving out that I found the missing eel. It was more like discovering its final resting place. There, stuck to the shag carpeting under the dresser, was the remains of the missing eel, now in a petrified state. The poor blighter had somehow managed to launch itself out of one the tiny crannies at the top of the tank where, like Humpty Dumpty, it took big fall. Fortunately, the shag carpet made for a soft landing unlike that of our egg buddy. But then the shag took its toll. It always does. Because the shag giveth and the shag taketh away.
Lately, I see that shag carpeting is making a comeback. Like everything else considered retro, shag is cycling back to take its place among other regrettable but now somehow popular trends of old like mullets, bell bottoms, and leopard print flatware. But if you’re entertaining the notion of installing shag carpeting at home, keep it to a minimum. And for god’s sake, no shag in the bathroom. If you insist, I’ll make you clean the toilet. I mean it.
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