Handshakes

Hey gang, Donnie Drunkard here, comin’ straight at you from Bob’s Beer and Billiards. (Ok not quite straight at you, ’cause I am blasted, but you know what I mean).

Ok, so the other day, this big dude walks into the bar and he is real friendly and all, and he walks over to me and says “Hi, the name’s Hank” and then he sticks out his big paw to shake my hand. I lean over from my bar stool to grip his hand and he clamps down on me real hard and pulls me right off the bar stool!  So I am sitting on the floor, thinking.. man this guys has some ugly shoes and then I get up and ask him “WTF was that?!”. He just looked at me and smiled with one of those big gap-toothed grins and says: “You gotta learn how to shake hands like a man.”.

Shake hands like a man? What the hell did he think I was shaking like… a giraffe? So I tell him: “Hey hombre you gotta chill with that hand-ripping thing, some of us have been on the sauce all day and we aren’t that stable”. He just laughed and said: “You are beyond help.”

At this stage of the conversation, I have pretty much had enough of this dude, so I tells him: “I don’t need no advice from you on how to shake hands, I been doin’ it all my life!” and then I got back up on my bar stool and ordered another beverage.

But now that I think back on it, he did have a point: A good handshake is the sign of a real man. You don’t want to have someone think you are some kind of a limp ass, so you gotta make the effort to grip and pull (I am still talking about handshakes). My old man used to say: “A good handshake makes you look strong!”. He used to practice gripping a tennis ball in the evenings to keep his grip strong. As for me, I do it by hanging on to the bar rail, so I don’t fall down. Hey, whatever works.