The Steamer's Inventor

Last week, I went out to some stupid-ass bar where dumb girls hang out. I started spitting my game at this 8.5, and she was immediately receptive. After about an hour and a half of witty banter, the deal was sealed. We exited the doors, hailed the first cab, and were on our way back to my pad for the inevitable coitus. Sweet coitus.

On the way, she apparently decided she wanted to “get to know me” a little better, so she started making small talk. When she asked where I’m from, I told her I grew up in Cleveland, but I’ve been living in SF for about four months now. Upon hearing that, a look of terror crept over her face, and she commanded the (surprisingly well-groomed) cab driver to stop. After muttering something about not wanting “Some fucking freak from that hell-hole taking a shit on her chest because where he comes from, that’s sexy,” she stormed out of the cab and into the night.

Foiled again by the Cleveland Steamer.

The whole notion of the Cleveland Steamer is really confusing to me. I grew up in Cleveland and went to college with thousands of other people from the Greater Cleveland area. Not once in my childhood or my collegiate career did I ever hear of anyone who craved the introduction of feces into the act of coitus, let alone anyone who ever attempted such a foul deed. How, then, did the Cleveland Steamer get its unfortunate moniker?

The Steamer Hoodie

After performing some research, I have determined that the Mistake on the Lake can consider its name cleared. The true culprit for the Cleveland Steamer’s unfortunate name is none other than our twenty-second and twenty-fourth President, Grover Cleveland.

Big Grover was a bachelor when he entered the White House in 1885, and like his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton, quickly made his first order of business running through all the D.C. harlots he could get his hands (or anus) on. Despite being the son of a Presbyterian minister, Cleveland had a number of bizarre sexual peccadilloes. It was he who perfected the position now known as the “Ape Hanger,” where the woman (necessarily much smaller than her partner) wraps both her arms around her partner’s neck and legs around his waist, permitting him to raise her off the bed and bang her like a porch swing. He created the name for that one himself. A large and hairy man, he liked to pretend that he was actually a gorilla while engaged in the sacred act of coitus. After completing a session of the Ape Hanger, he would beat on his chest and scream. But I digress.

Cleveland, a native of New York and New Jersey, invented the Cleveland Steamer on a cold winter night in December 1885. He and his flavor of the night were busy defiling the Lincoln Bedroom after a large dinner. She dismounted in the middle of their coitus session, telling Cleveland that she needed to run to the outhouse to freshen up. The President grabbed his fuckbuddy, and told her that he was feeling cold and he wanted her to “warm him up.” When she asked how, he explained.

A specimen of the original

Aghast, she refused at first, but he kept his grasp on her. Recognizing that she had little choice in the matter, she complied, squatting above him and dropping a warm mass directly onto his chest. The hot stool’s contact with the cold night air produced a putrid steam that emanated off the (then) twenty-second President’s chest. The Cleveland Steamer had been born.

The Washington rumor mill began churning at full blast, and within weeks, the whole town spoke of the President’s “steamer.” A Republican Senator even considered appointing a commission to investigate the President’s lurid acts until one of Cleveland’s henchmen let the Senator know that doing so would force the White House to leak evidence of the Senator’s far-more-disgusting deed—sharing a bed with a black person. For the moment, the controversy associated with President Cleveland’s Steamer had ended, but the act lived on in as a tale of bizarre sexual folklore into the following century. Today, the details of the Steamer’s origin may have left the popular consciousness, but the existence of the Cleveland Steamer is something known to all frat guys and Tenacious D fans.

So next time you’re at a bar (or brunch) with your buddies and the topic of conversation turns to the Cleveland Steamer, don’t perpetuate the myth that people from Cleveland enjoy being shat upon by members of the opposite sex. Instead, let them know the unfortunate truth that the Steamer’s inventor merely shared his last name with the name of our hometown. Besides, whenever Clevelanders really want to get shit on, they can just turn on the most recent Browns game.