I'm sitting in the Atlanta airport and I actually switched terminals just to get Starbucks cuz fuck Seattle's Best, amiright? So I'm on the fucking gimp tram and this lady in a wheelchair is coming off and the guy pushing her has not done this enough in his life yet where he can forsee re problem of the fattie in the stroller not easily overcoming the gap between the concourse and the train. So this takes a crucial 15 seconds of door is open time and there's like 12 people waiting to enter this door. The lady finally dislodges and somebody tries to enter but the door is closing now. And it is one of those death doors that has cut people in half, there is half a body back in terminal E, in fact, this is a tram full of only lower bodies. So these are Southern folk, they are freaking out and in a large party, so when after much panic, the door decides not to crush one victim and opens, people begin to file in, myself included, like this door is gonna give us all the time in the world, but no. It begins to close again and in an effort to be a gentleman, I put my arm at risk and make the door think it has taken another life. It opens, and the process begins again, and it closes and I'm not about to hold up the whole fucking airport for these four whimsy dipshit ladies so I let it close as one of their friends is stranded outside, left in a terminal ago, and the ladies are distressed. I wave goodbye to the woman as we depart and one of the fatter women tips towards me when the tram goes forward. She apologizes and I tell her "you had to have seen that coming with the way the door tried to close twice." The very attractive
blond doesn't like this even though I've already risked limb for these cunts, so the next 30 seconds of travel are awkward until the automated voice tells us we're arriving at the fucking terminal we all could have walked to if only we weren't so fat and retarded. I point in the forward direction of the tram and tell the woman with balance issues, "You're going to go that way now." The blond scowls, the heiffer chuckles with embarrassment, and then stumbles forward, because she's stupid and didn't listen to me or really likes me and wants me to be right. The door opens and I tell the blonde, "You ladies have a wonderful day," to which, as a Southerner, she begrudgingly responds, "Thanks."
Hahaha LAYOVAS! Amiright?
Monday, November 15, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
De LA Soul
Days 99-100
I claimed my bag (for Spain) and sat outside the terminal in weather that I wanted to be more hospitable in the shade. I garnered solicitation from a gentleman and lady to help them with some charity and all I could think about was drinking a beer. This is a wonderful society. I sported a plastic bag with half a chopped beef sandwich from Saltlick Barbeque in the Austin airport as I trounced up and down the terminal's exterior cement in hopes that I could find a cheap ride to Santa Monica, only 10-13 miles up the street, a short ride by Los Angeles standards. I planned to meet Mr. Shepard for drinks over there since I intended to sleep on his living room furniture. I haggled with the Super Shuttle guy on time of departure, distance, and cost, and proceeded to speak with cab drivers who quoted me at $40 to go up the street. Damn, son! I fretted for my wallet and put the 5 hours old sandwich in my gullet, and then the gentleman who solicited my earlier came over to rest and we had a little chat. I revealed that I was eating imported barbecue and he flashed a friendly jealousy. We talked about cabs and shuttles and he gave me the peace of mind about the workings of LA cabs and shuttles I needed to just eat the $30 like a sandwich.
I arrived in Santa Monica and apparently, you're supposed to inform your driver that you'll be using debit or credit before you even take the ride, and so pulling my debit card out, the guy complained and made a big deal about it and some stranger was about to pay cash for my ride, I guess to give me the ultimate guilt trip about not knowing the rules of how to take an expensive cab ride in LA. I shooed him away and we worked the debit out, of course, because who doesn't take debit these days? Even I take debit!
Shep and I took the usual "occasionally I'm in town and we can catch up" drinks, and it got a little sloppy. We ended up at a bar called Maeve's Residuals, a purported Red Sox bar in the Valley where there are 24 oz cans of PBR, the likes of which I hadn't seen served in an establishment since Savannah, GA, a place where "Get Crushingly Drunk" is one of two options listed under the "Activities" section of the "Welcome to Historic Savannah" pamphlet, the other being "Wake Up Smelling Like Cigarette Smoke". They even invented a whole new adverb in crushingly to describe what kind of drunk is required of you there. And so, in LA, it is once again an option, not because there i nothing to do, but because it is the only way to gain access to your feelings, since I imagine they've been castrated of the ability to interact with others.
Allow me to elaborate, because as much fun as I had with Adam, we do always have a good time, the experience I had in LA was one that seemed to warn me more than ever before of what I planned to do here. It is my final destination, you know. Beyond your friends, the interactions are stunningly superficial, in a way where you can't be upset that you went through the decorum of being polite, whether your effort is genuine or not, but you can smell the rat of their falsity in polite response as you watch them go through the details of a "You're welcome" or holding a door open for you, or politely listening to whatever you have to say, only to wait for a window to interject the non-stop stream of bullshit they are about to vomit into the aural space around you. Great, you've found work as a stunt actor, that doesn't make you a hero, and it sure isn't making you a friend, I thought we were going to trade stories and joke around, but instead you wanted to talk as much as possible to strongarm me out of an unassuming conversation so you could aggressively hit on this girl who is in some non-sensical way, out of your league. There's friendly, and fake friendly, and the possibility exists for you to get one or the other at any time, and the inconsistency is what disappoints. In Boston, I can deal with every person being unwilling to smile back at my stupid grinning mug, since every person is suffering the personality disorder of the northeast. Even so, your friends are all willing participants, and the sincerity of people is a hard bottom line that I can appreciate. Flakes are everywhere, so let's except these circumstances momentarily as I say that in South Florida, people are slow and deliberate and Miami Beach is cold but direct, in a New york City kind of way with a slower pace. In Austin, and even other parts of Texas, warmth is prevalent, truth is regarded, openness and trust between people is preferred, and it's been there that I have felt most justly dealt with in everyday person to person interactions, on all levels. Whew.
I did get the chance to meet up with Debi, who I met in New Orleans, saw and hung out with in Austin, and now she lives in LA. We had drinks at Maeve's residuals since I'm basically right there, watch the Red Sox, and started talking about how I'll arrive in August and it might be a good idea to get an apartment together. I will need roommates and the situation seems ideal, but I trepidatiously enter this verbal agreement since I don't know what I'll be doing for work, or how much capital I'll be starting with. The good news is, I always have places to retreat to, and so, fearlessly into the future, knowing the past trails you until you sever yourself from it. We grab some In 'N Out, and she puts me at Jennie's place to congregate with the intention of seeing the Dodgers first night game of the season, and I do still love me some Manny Ramirez, what a clown.
So my frustration with LA and the fear of dealing with it all is getting to me, and I don't blame myself, though you certainly can choose and comment whether I should or not, I'll entertain all manner of discussions on the subject. This said, I went to the Dodgers game with my best girl-friend in California, Jennie and her husband Orrin and Jenn's sister Lisa. Jennie told me once that Lisa was in Boston and I regretfully had to work and couldn't find the time to meet up with her. In the early post game, I pedaled down Ipswitch to return to Fenway, and I saw two girls walking East. I stopped of course, interested in avoiding the lineups down by the park and leaned on these girls for a ride pretty damned hard. Finally I told them to "just get in," and they did. I began to take them down to Copley Square, and one of the girls on the back says, "My sister's friend does this."
"Oh yeah? What's his name, I probably know him," I reply, since I have seen at that point five seasons worth of drivers.
"Dan," she says.
I turned around and looked at her as the tricycle continued forward. "I'm Dan."
"Jenn's my sister," she said, trying the key in the lock.
Unlocked, "Lisa?"
"Oh my God!"
I randomly gave her sister a pedicab ride. And so, facebook friends thenceforward, we chatted for months until I finally saw her again for the Dodger game. It was a boring game, despite it's back and forth nature, and I have a hard time getting down with fans of other allegiances, I suppose the same way Muslims and Jews don't get along, without rationale for a disagreement, a false construct meant to absorb money or create power being the divide between both of us. I didn't like the Dodgers fans being so vehement in their desire to call the Diamondbacks/D-backs, the D-Bags. recently I discovered a distaste for LA Lakers fans as well. I can't believe anyone would be a fan of the Angels or the Tampa Bay Rays. Let's not get started on the Yankees and their organization. So after a lengthy seven innings, we did all take a trip down to the Short Stop, a dim tavern where I planned to have a few other friends come by and catch me there while I had my hot minute in LA. I caught longtime buddy Laurence, met his girlfriend, and sat down for a chat with old high school friend Dave, who I really hadn't spoken with since my freshman year of college. I had a bad taste in my mouth for how things went in high school, and so distanced myself from most of the people I associated with the period, but Facebook reunites people, people. I've spoken with a lot of folks that have gone completely out of memory. That site is like a pipecleaner for the folds of your friend memory, brush off the residue, they are still alive, and you might be interested to know... Dave and I caught up on all the people we used to know, the good and the sad, the surprises, the most expected failures, a check in on ourselves as well. I met his friends, and they struck me as very LA, but more genuinely friendly since a connection bound us to the same table. I was very happy Dave and I sat down together.
Jennie, Orrin, and Lisa left, so I brought my luggage into the bar, then back out to take a short cab to Koreatown and party for a bit with Mr. Kyle Graham. If there is any solid reason for me to move to LA, it is to work with this animal. He's so quick and sharp, studies improv, has begun submerging himself in work, and I think we'll be excellent mutual motivators to succeed. We always played well off of each other, and the potential for raw eruptions of laughter are always available when we begin a conversational structure. We met, embraced, and I dropped my stuff at his place before we ducked in through the kitchen entrance to a closed pub that had about 15 folks partying. Here lied the pocket of genuine people I needed to see to assuage my fears about being in the driving and traffic capital of the world. One of Kyle's friends, a fellow Irish identifier, refused to let me take it easy, a peer pressure I did enjoy as whiskey flowed down the hatch to excess, despite the fact that I had to catch a Super Shuttle to the airport the next morning between 8:25am and 8:35am, as stated by the website. We burned it late, and I didn't fight too hard since I only really had to awaken, exit, and sit down in different places for hours on end. A voiceover job cookie for a videogame got dangled in front of me to tempt me more into the relocation, stirring the old sauce about getting paid to do what I like to do again, awakening the very idea for the trip again. It swirls around again, and like a bundle of cables, it carries the power with all the other desires of different colors powering the body to do what it wants. Which one is the ground?
I sat with my eyes half opened and rolled up in the Super Shuttle, teetering between other shuttle customers, probably reeking of the Powers whiskey, the stuff that replaced my blood when I stumbled through Ireland, drank water at the airport Dunkin' Donuts, ate greasy hash browns, and took my window seat on my Virgin America airbus, only to lean against the view of the sky and sleep for 75% of that flight. Back to Boston, again. 80's night tonight. Check out my mouth, Doc, how's it doin? Good? Great, I'm just gonna go pick up $5,500 real quick and go back to Texas. 20 Red Sox games in 27 days, and a visit home in the middle. Jeremy said it best when he said, "He's not making a clean break." It's true, the roots are still there, the draw is there, but the lust for more is the cloud that follows me around these days, and it's about to precipitate.
Statistics:
$66 on transportation services
$10 for LA dodgers ticket
75 minutes or so that this guy just kept fucking talking about himself
215 minutes of sleep before my flight
9 years since I saw Dave Ross
13 innings of baseball, 6 of which we skipped out on. The Dodgers lost anyway.
5.5 hours from LA to Boston.
Drinks from...
Day 100
569 Black and Tan (with Harp) @Maeve's Residuals
570 Black and Tan (with Smithwicks)
571 Black and Tan (Smithwicks)
572 Sierra Nevada
573 Chimay White @Short Stop
574 Chimay White
575 PBR
576 Natural Ice @"Speakeasy"
577 Shiner Bock!! In Cali!!
578 Shot of Powers
579 Shot of Powers
580 Miller Genuine Draft
581 Miller Genuine Draft
582 Shot of Powers
Next: The couchsurfing marathon pedicab project begins, and the maintenance of all things Texas grows tenuous...
I claimed my bag (for Spain) and sat outside the terminal in weather that I wanted to be more hospitable in the shade. I garnered solicitation from a gentleman and lady to help them with some charity and all I could think about was drinking a beer. This is a wonderful society. I sported a plastic bag with half a chopped beef sandwich from Saltlick Barbeque in the Austin airport as I trounced up and down the terminal's exterior cement in hopes that I could find a cheap ride to Santa Monica, only 10-13 miles up the street, a short ride by Los Angeles standards. I planned to meet Mr. Shepard for drinks over there since I intended to sleep on his living room furniture. I haggled with the Super Shuttle guy on time of departure, distance, and cost, and proceeded to speak with cab drivers who quoted me at $40 to go up the street. Damn, son! I fretted for my wallet and put the 5 hours old sandwich in my gullet, and then the gentleman who solicited my earlier came over to rest and we had a little chat. I revealed that I was eating imported barbecue and he flashed a friendly jealousy. We talked about cabs and shuttles and he gave me the peace of mind about the workings of LA cabs and shuttles I needed to just eat the $30 like a sandwich.
I arrived in Santa Monica and apparently, you're supposed to inform your driver that you'll be using debit or credit before you even take the ride, and so pulling my debit card out, the guy complained and made a big deal about it and some stranger was about to pay cash for my ride, I guess to give me the ultimate guilt trip about not knowing the rules of how to take an expensive cab ride in LA. I shooed him away and we worked the debit out, of course, because who doesn't take debit these days? Even I take debit!
Shep and I took the usual "occasionally I'm in town and we can catch up" drinks, and it got a little sloppy. We ended up at a bar called Maeve's Residuals, a purported Red Sox bar in the Valley where there are 24 oz cans of PBR, the likes of which I hadn't seen served in an establishment since Savannah, GA, a place where "Get Crushingly Drunk" is one of two options listed under the "Activities" section of the "Welcome to Historic Savannah" pamphlet, the other being "Wake Up Smelling Like Cigarette Smoke". They even invented a whole new adverb in crushingly to describe what kind of drunk is required of you there. And so, in LA, it is once again an option, not because there i nothing to do, but because it is the only way to gain access to your feelings, since I imagine they've been castrated of the ability to interact with others.
Allow me to elaborate, because as much fun as I had with Adam, we do always have a good time, the experience I had in LA was one that seemed to warn me more than ever before of what I planned to do here. It is my final destination, you know. Beyond your friends, the interactions are stunningly superficial, in a way where you can't be upset that you went through the decorum of being polite, whether your effort is genuine or not, but you can smell the rat of their falsity in polite response as you watch them go through the details of a "You're welcome" or holding a door open for you, or politely listening to whatever you have to say, only to wait for a window to interject the non-stop stream of bullshit they are about to vomit into the aural space around you. Great, you've found work as a stunt actor, that doesn't make you a hero, and it sure isn't making you a friend, I thought we were going to trade stories and joke around, but instead you wanted to talk as much as possible to strongarm me out of an unassuming conversation so you could aggressively hit on this girl who is in some non-sensical way, out of your league. There's friendly, and fake friendly, and the possibility exists for you to get one or the other at any time, and the inconsistency is what disappoints. In Boston, I can deal with every person being unwilling to smile back at my stupid grinning mug, since every person is suffering the personality disorder of the northeast. Even so, your friends are all willing participants, and the sincerity of people is a hard bottom line that I can appreciate. Flakes are everywhere, so let's except these circumstances momentarily as I say that in South Florida, people are slow and deliberate and Miami Beach is cold but direct, in a New york City kind of way with a slower pace. In Austin, and even other parts of Texas, warmth is prevalent, truth is regarded, openness and trust between people is preferred, and it's been there that I have felt most justly dealt with in everyday person to person interactions, on all levels. Whew.
I did get the chance to meet up with Debi, who I met in New Orleans, saw and hung out with in Austin, and now she lives in LA. We had drinks at Maeve's residuals since I'm basically right there, watch the Red Sox, and started talking about how I'll arrive in August and it might be a good idea to get an apartment together. I will need roommates and the situation seems ideal, but I trepidatiously enter this verbal agreement since I don't know what I'll be doing for work, or how much capital I'll be starting with. The good news is, I always have places to retreat to, and so, fearlessly into the future, knowing the past trails you until you sever yourself from it. We grab some In 'N Out, and she puts me at Jennie's place to congregate with the intention of seeing the Dodgers first night game of the season, and I do still love me some Manny Ramirez, what a clown.
So my frustration with LA and the fear of dealing with it all is getting to me, and I don't blame myself, though you certainly can choose and comment whether I should or not, I'll entertain all manner of discussions on the subject. This said, I went to the Dodgers game with my best girl-friend in California, Jennie and her husband Orrin and Jenn's sister Lisa. Jennie told me once that Lisa was in Boston and I regretfully had to work and couldn't find the time to meet up with her. In the early post game, I pedaled down Ipswitch to return to Fenway, and I saw two girls walking East. I stopped of course, interested in avoiding the lineups down by the park and leaned on these girls for a ride pretty damned hard. Finally I told them to "just get in," and they did. I began to take them down to Copley Square, and one of the girls on the back says, "My sister's friend does this."
"Oh yeah? What's his name, I probably know him," I reply, since I have seen at that point five seasons worth of drivers.
"Dan," she says.
I turned around and looked at her as the tricycle continued forward. "I'm Dan."
"Jenn's my sister," she said, trying the key in the lock.
Unlocked, "Lisa?"
"Oh my God!"
I randomly gave her sister a pedicab ride. And so, facebook friends thenceforward, we chatted for months until I finally saw her again for the Dodger game. It was a boring game, despite it's back and forth nature, and I have a hard time getting down with fans of other allegiances, I suppose the same way Muslims and Jews don't get along, without rationale for a disagreement, a false construct meant to absorb money or create power being the divide between both of us. I didn't like the Dodgers fans being so vehement in their desire to call the Diamondbacks/D-backs, the D-Bags. recently I discovered a distaste for LA Lakers fans as well. I can't believe anyone would be a fan of the Angels or the Tampa Bay Rays. Let's not get started on the Yankees and their organization. So after a lengthy seven innings, we did all take a trip down to the Short Stop, a dim tavern where I planned to have a few other friends come by and catch me there while I had my hot minute in LA. I caught longtime buddy Laurence, met his girlfriend, and sat down for a chat with old high school friend Dave, who I really hadn't spoken with since my freshman year of college. I had a bad taste in my mouth for how things went in high school, and so distanced myself from most of the people I associated with the period, but Facebook reunites people, people. I've spoken with a lot of folks that have gone completely out of memory. That site is like a pipecleaner for the folds of your friend memory, brush off the residue, they are still alive, and you might be interested to know... Dave and I caught up on all the people we used to know, the good and the sad, the surprises, the most expected failures, a check in on ourselves as well. I met his friends, and they struck me as very LA, but more genuinely friendly since a connection bound us to the same table. I was very happy Dave and I sat down together.
Jennie, Orrin, and Lisa left, so I brought my luggage into the bar, then back out to take a short cab to Koreatown and party for a bit with Mr. Kyle Graham. If there is any solid reason for me to move to LA, it is to work with this animal. He's so quick and sharp, studies improv, has begun submerging himself in work, and I think we'll be excellent mutual motivators to succeed. We always played well off of each other, and the potential for raw eruptions of laughter are always available when we begin a conversational structure. We met, embraced, and I dropped my stuff at his place before we ducked in through the kitchen entrance to a closed pub that had about 15 folks partying. Here lied the pocket of genuine people I needed to see to assuage my fears about being in the driving and traffic capital of the world. One of Kyle's friends, a fellow Irish identifier, refused to let me take it easy, a peer pressure I did enjoy as whiskey flowed down the hatch to excess, despite the fact that I had to catch a Super Shuttle to the airport the next morning between 8:25am and 8:35am, as stated by the website. We burned it late, and I didn't fight too hard since I only really had to awaken, exit, and sit down in different places for hours on end. A voiceover job cookie for a videogame got dangled in front of me to tempt me more into the relocation, stirring the old sauce about getting paid to do what I like to do again, awakening the very idea for the trip again. It swirls around again, and like a bundle of cables, it carries the power with all the other desires of different colors powering the body to do what it wants. Which one is the ground?
I sat with my eyes half opened and rolled up in the Super Shuttle, teetering between other shuttle customers, probably reeking of the Powers whiskey, the stuff that replaced my blood when I stumbled through Ireland, drank water at the airport Dunkin' Donuts, ate greasy hash browns, and took my window seat on my Virgin America airbus, only to lean against the view of the sky and sleep for 75% of that flight. Back to Boston, again. 80's night tonight. Check out my mouth, Doc, how's it doin? Good? Great, I'm just gonna go pick up $5,500 real quick and go back to Texas. 20 Red Sox games in 27 days, and a visit home in the middle. Jeremy said it best when he said, "He's not making a clean break." It's true, the roots are still there, the draw is there, but the lust for more is the cloud that follows me around these days, and it's about to precipitate.
Statistics:
$66 on transportation services
$10 for LA dodgers ticket
75 minutes or so that this guy just kept fucking talking about himself
215 minutes of sleep before my flight
9 years since I saw Dave Ross
13 innings of baseball, 6 of which we skipped out on. The Dodgers lost anyway.
5.5 hours from LA to Boston.
Drinks from...
Day 100
569 Black and Tan (with Harp) @Maeve's Residuals
570 Black and Tan (with Smithwicks)
571 Black and Tan (Smithwicks)
572 Sierra Nevada
573 Chimay White @Short Stop
574 Chimay White
575 PBR
576 Natural Ice @"Speakeasy"
577 Shiner Bock!! In Cali!!
578 Shot of Powers
579 Shot of Powers
580 Miller Genuine Draft
581 Miller Genuine Draft
582 Shot of Powers
Next: The couchsurfing marathon pedicab project begins, and the maintenance of all things Texas grows tenuous...
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
The Third Wheel
Days 101-129
Sometimes I feel like I'm writing just to destroy an entire year. Maybe not, but that's what I fear when I write about the people I'm close to. Will I hurt anybody by writing this? Maybe. While extremely high for the first time in a great stretch of time, and off of only one hit (and I can get a witness), I idiotically tried to edit one of my recent posts, and I endured an extended moment of great self-consciousness and concern, as is often the case when you smoke the marijuana. It is a substance that can provide great perspective, if not sometimes the wrong perspective, but I felt concerned for my friendships and the way people will see me after I reveal the truths in my point of view and the awareness that perhaps I'm just an asshole. I asked my roommate Nick about it, and his stock answer of, "It's good man, just keep doin' what you're doin'," soothed the doubts. So I will, because it is, in my comprehensively dwelled upon opinion, more interesting that way, and those of my friends who love me for who I am will forgive me for my faults, they should know that I cherish them and mean no harm, and operate with the understanding that my actions are mine and I will be responsible for them. Thereby, I am prepared for the pain of any severances I incur through my bluntness, but not entirely prepared since I'm kind of an emo bitch. I'll miss you :-(
I touched down in Boston and felt extremely well rested, my direct flight a respite from all the extensive flight changes of the typical frugal flying that I choose. Silver line, to green line, to Shea's place. Shea had offered me her bed for a stretch of time stating she could sleep with her boyfriend, and only laid down the no sex, jacking off, or eating in her bed rules, which I can totally abide by-I mean when do I ever eat in bed? I thought to myself in a flash, "I'm back in Boston, it's nearly impossible for me to get laid here anyway, I'll have to go out on like a million dates for that to happen," and replied, "OK." I had my suitcase full of clothing, my helmet, and some cold gear for any of those shitty, rainy Red Sox shifts that I anticipated, and got. It was a Thursday and so before even thinking about the stretch of work ahead of me, and all the revolutions I would make on a tricycle, I had to hit up that old 80's night at Common Ground. This is place I've loved, hated, and been kicked out of. I've met girls here that I've dated for months, or weeks, or once. It's been a wealth of drama and enjoyment, a go to for friends on Thursdays for "the cheese," which implies cheesy 80's music. In fact, Elaine, who I'll meet in Salt Lake City to continue up to Portland with is a girl I met at Common Ground for 80's night. One of my more interesting dating sagas developed out of this place with a girl named Tammy. She approached me for our first encounter, the neon on my torso a beacon to which she guided herself, or maybe it was pheremonal, because I smelled like a bag of sweaty assholes, and she asked a rookie pedicabber and me why we didn't wear helmets. Conversation, dancing, then numbers. We had this slow flirtatious boiling that couldn't quite work, our work schedules being almost entirely incompatible. I went out of my way on a shift to give her a ride around the block while she stepped out from beers with her coworkers, just to give her a little thrill. I asked her to the Pedicab Formal last year, and she was a bit distracted as a date with work issues, she being a busy economist fused to a blackberry, and I having honestly blacked out about two thirds through on my empty stomach, the sustenance that our host, The Beehive, offered being insufficient to lay a blanket over alcohol over and expect to remember your friend's three dates' names that night or the next day. I have been told that I kept it together, classy Kerrigan. I know I walked her all the way back to the Pru since she needed to go back to work that night, and gave her a proper gentleman's goodbye. We only chilled again when one night we saw each other at Common Ground. She ended up wasted, her friends had left, and there was no way in hell I was watching her get on a bicycle to ride 5 hilly, train tack laden miles back to Jamaica Plain. We walked the mile back to my place, and I put her to sleep on the couch, and I went upstairs to my bed. It wasn't until the next morning after serving her breakfast, and laughing with her at this story about getting stuck with way too many frozen waffles, the funniest story she ever told me, that something happened. It got very, very heavy for about ten minutes until my roommate opened his door and the process was completely startled. And in what could have been the "make" of a continued relationship, I progressively lost my punctuality for the shows I had to go perform at the Boston Children's Museum, my call time rapidly approaching. For all my sensitivity about her condition the night before, and the dotted history between us of good and interesting and weird encounters, I feel like I can break it all down into that final moment where I didn't ditch out on the kids and the $52 and the accountability to work just for a great moment between us, instead, parting ways on bikes nearly at my doorstep, kissing her goodbye, and like a bonehead, only giving her verbal directions to get back home and not riding with her to a more suitable point of departure, as easy as that would have been. I later saw her at another Allston area hipster dance night, one that had ensued after a comedy show I had done at the same venue. I was missing teeth from my November bike accident, and our conversation felt like we were talking about economics, not an area I can comfortably navigate with words, no less confidently with two teeth missing. Sometimes the universe likes to hand me serendipity, and/or closure. I didn't see or hear from her again until I randomly saw her pedicabbing during this month of riding. She looked at me like I had two heads, back in Boston despite what she knew about my previous departure, me with a four month deep, fierce beard, on a tricycle with two huge passengers. And there I was, back in the spawning point of this story and many others, with my good friend Shea, drinking beers and dancing to the 80's. Welcome back to Boston, Kerrigan, don't let the old wares wear you out, don't let your ghosts haunt you.
The next day was straight to work. Ten games in a row begins on Friday, ends, then seven days later, ten more. I plan to ride all but one, and attend the one I don't ride for the Kyle Crand/Dan Kerrigan Annual All Day Bender. It's weird coming back after some travel and some big pedicab stories. The old welcome back, the big smiles, the hugs and once-overs of the people who have changed slightly since you last saw them. Ten pounds more or less, a haircut, or promotion later, good to see you, look at you, what's going on, how's it been? Now let me sign up for that tricycle. I have plenty to say on the topic of pedicabbing, as I think it might be clear from how long I've been involved in this profession, but for me this month went by like reruns of Futurama, I've seen 'em all, but I still love it, and I'm always finding new stuff inside each episode. I went to work, met the rookies, rode as hard as I could, talked my way into big tips, imparted a few words to new guys when it was appropriate, and perhaps even a few times it may not have been, and banked, banked, banked. I easily slipped back into the routine. Claw my eyelids up to my salty forehead, head into work, sign up for bike, get coffee after the most miserable 40 minutes of my life, make enough during pregame that I can foresee a happy ending to the evening, get back to the shop nearly last, go get beers, rinse, repeat, sometimes failing to rinse. The rookies are a new class, hired by the new general manager and my old roommate at 21 Bennett Street, Jeremy. They are hungry, a few natural schmoozers in the bunch, some of them making big time pedicab statements in the first Red Sox series, I'm talkin' like 700 or 800 bucks on opening day, something never done before. I'm back and I'm feeling competitive, the job always makes me that way, my primary function to hit my goals and go back to Texas and break even out of Texas to finish my trip, but inside me I wanna show everyone what's up. It's small and worth little, but my name precedes me a little bit for this small cup of pride, and so people know me before I get there and it's a shoe I have to step back into. I got scheduled for the first three games of the first ten game set, and then all the rest after being on-called in to the two I didn't originally get. The feeling of being at the doorway to ten days straight of intense pedicabbing is intimidating, a little overwhelming, but you do feel a bit like I imagine a baseball player would feel. Just take it one day at a time and don't hurt yourself. And this includes your, ahem, "performance" off the field. I'm just waiting for the day somebody emails the pedicab email list and tries to get a shift covered because they cramped up during some rough sex. No, it won't be me.
The first three games went rather smoothly, even though Sunday managed to be lazy and not quite as lucrative as I had hoped. It's better that way since I got to enjoy some beers with Mr. Keith Cardoza, a wife carrying champion with thighs like steel bridge cables, and he let me bully his mountain bike around for the month. I insisted on paying for the drinks, but think a lot of pedicabbers don't even want to consider favors as favors, it's kind of a brotherhood that way. It was nice to roll in the air again, as cold as it did get here and there, but mostly, it relieved me to not have to have the same conversation with cab drivers over and over and then pay them for it, and the ride home. If they are nice, I tell them I'm a pedicab driver and we talk about it, of course, and the same questions come up: How does it work, what do you make, where do you go, and all the other ones. It is always funny to hear a Haitian man skirt around the appropriate way to ask me how it goes when I take bigger people. Stock answer for everyone who wants to know: We just go slower. Keith gave me leave from this repetitive experience, and saved me about $15 nearly 15 times, about 15 trips to the Pour House as it goes with the hook up I occasionally see there, or plenty of PBR's at a dollar a pop in the shop.
I had already approached the thousand dollar mark for the homestand, but it was Marathon Monday that really set the tone for the pedicab tour de force. I thought I got up so early on Marathon Monday that I leisurely commuted to the shop, confident I'd obtain an acceptable bike, and underestimating the rookies and their drive to acquire the coveted Main Street bikes that are faster and more narrow for beating traffic. By the time I got in, they were all gone. I cursed my fate, a 14 hour day with an accompanying 60 extra pounds for its duration. Nuts. But I went to work. In past years, the big mistake I made in working the marathon was that I left Fenway and I swore to myself, after having worked three of them previously, that I would not make that mistake again. When I pedicab, I operate on an adaptive goal system. Tips can be low, or large, and one must always consider what is possible when aiming to earn a certain amount, and then when approaching that number, factor in how much time is left to earn the difference between what you have, and what you want, and check in with your body, and see if you need time to eat, or drink more water, or perhaps a round of ibuprofin is necessary. How long do I have to make a stop if I need to make $150 in the next 3 hours? How many rides at $20 do I need to make that happen? Just one of the next five rides has to be a tip up over $30. From here I put on a series of performances, physical and verbal to get what I need, but before any of that, you have to get people in the bike. And then sometimes I just don't think, because I don't even have time to, I just ride and balance my weight on the handlebars and just kick into the pedals for speed, and have a lot of familiar conversations with whoever is on the back, assuring them they shouldn't feel bad, even though I know they will anyway, and I'll play up the pain a little with a high pitched "Whew" after cresting a hill. I didn't start my day thinking I could do it, but by the end, I had record numbers for Boston on my mind.
I took only one trip into the heart of the Back Bay, where the marathon concluded in Copley Square. Just as I dropped a ride off on a marathon-route confused Newbury Street, two fellas up around 400 lbs each asked me if I could get them to the Westin in Copley Square. Where we were located at that moment was somewhere that on any other day would have been embarrassingly close to ask for a ride there, perhaps only 300 yards. The marathon cut any pedestrian traffic off to cross from one side of Boylston Street to the other as exhausted runners walked out their blisters, found the medical tents, ate chips, wore medals, and wrapped themselves in mylar to shine as fuckin' badass dudes all day and night long. So we took the ride. Every access point was closed and all we could do was go all the way down to Arlington Street and around the entirety of the Back Bay. I've got over 800 lbs of "deadweight" in my cab, plus the 200 of the cab, plus the 170 of me, and the fiberglass is flexing down to kiss the attached LED lights to the tire, and so I hear a grind and feel the friction for what ends up being 1.75 miles of slow going. I start up Columbus Ave and it's there that I see Tammy, sometime shortly after 5, giant men in tow, beard of an epic journey, sweating like a bastard, huge smile on my face, fake teeth filling up the gap. I bet her heart skipped a beat from the look she gave me, until she got a chance to break it down into derivatives or something like that. I got another ride up towards Fenway, and every ride after that was either to or from the park, always returning, tipping just a few kids off to the idea, scraping up rides until 1 am, exhausted as a marathoner, throwing my shoulders forward to push the weight over my leg to get gravity to force the pain into the cranks and get that Andrew Jackson paper. $1043, walked with $883. Let's ride another game tomorrow.
It's hard to write about most individual days, or individual games since when I pedicab in Boston, it becomes a routine that blends together in the same way I imagine any career blends together. Tell me about your month of work two months ago, would you? Oh, you can't really remember any specifics? Your boss exhibited some douchey qualities? You drank some coffee? You programmed html? Interesting, now something more specific, if you would. And you know what? They don't really matter, the details but they are what your day is built out of, so the also do. A lot of cruising around on a tricycle, jockeying for rides, talking people into your mobile couch. Lots of using the same lines to entertain different people. A lot of wearing neon green, tons of water, masses of food. The occasional attitude adjustment ice cream Snickers bar to make my inner fatboy happy and fun again. A lot of going to bars in a pack of neon, getting cred, cutting weekend lines with a smile and a nod, having people start the conversations with us, putting fast beers down before the bars close, leaving with that fading burn in your esophagus from a 10 oz pull from a giant mug that you have to leave a quarter of behind, while you are ushered in an sympathetic fashion from the bar by the door guy you are buddies with. A bit of that unstable bike mount, the beer entering or the shift finally leaving your legs, a tired football player kicking a pathetic penalty kick after 120 minutes of play, and scoring because the goalie guessed wrong and watched the ball roll across the line and stop short a meter from the net, never touching it. It's a liquid dream of progress and ruin for someone like me. A cycle I had to break, because I knew it could eat the rest of my healthy youth, and so in October of 2009, I impulsively booked the ticket to LA, thinking I'd score a vehicle there, and perhaps some satisfaction, but at least, warmth in the midst of friends.
The Saturday of Game 9 of the first 10, I cycled up Beacon Street towards Shea's place, and a guy behind me powered up the same hill along with me. The hill topping out, he caught up to me to mention that he enjoyed watching the cadence of my spins, I looked very motivated and serene in it from behind, and it gave him a sense of perspective and self recognizance that he, too, pedaled uphill in a similar fashion. Turns out he came from Austin. I said to him that it figured because people in Boston don't just talk to other people like that, not even in summer. We laughed off our commonalities and he invited me to a party that ebbed only blocks from Shea's place. I accepted, knowing it would be detrimental to my lazy Sunday performance of game 10, and perhaps hurt the standup show I had lined up two months prior for after the game, but hell, my heart was beating and hard, sleep wasn't close anyhow.
The next day, I kicked back with a few beers after finishing 10 games in a row, some brutal double shifts in the midst of it all, and feeling comfortable about the five beefy trips to the bank I made. I grew tired, but I needed to make myself energetically available for the show I had to perform. I just ran my mind through the iteration of "duplicate the last one" over and over. I biked fast to Central Square, a three mile zip over my favorite stretch of bikeable terrain, the astonishing view of the Mass Ave bridge, flying forwards, yet taking the dangerous seconds to crane my neck back at Boston and watch the skyline emerge in the darkening evening. Coffee, then a chat with the host, then beers as I scratched up my set list, expecting just to talk about the census and fire off another joke or two if I had time. I nearly missed my entrance. I walked back in as they were about to move on and ask me where the fuck I was? I hurried to my bag to grab the census vest, a center piece to a bit, and got in the light. Establishing stage presence, I took my time to organize the stage as I needed it to be for comfort. This process scored the first laugh, since I basically got on stage late and then proceeded to take my time as if it were no issue at all, then, the look up to recognize everyone I had to entertain. Another. Then, from calm organization, I poured out extreme energy. The first joke hit, that locomotive dragging the rest of the freight, the first laugh, the introductory energy picking up steam on a downhill stretch. My car, the census, whaling watching. There just wasn't enough time. Afterwards, Dana, the guy who taught me to love my standup, told me, "That was the best set I've ever seen you do." Humbled to hear it, I silently and proudly compared it to the one I did in Austin, and felt satisfied. Two in a row. It's hard to ignore a good thing like that, happening in two different cities. I burned that night down at old haunts, popped into the Model on the way to Shea's, and sat outside for a long drunken talk with Miranda before putting my head down to transport my life back home for a few days.
I missed my bus, but got the next one, and sat in traffic to New York City. It hurt me to feel that old slowness and squeeze the 2005-2006 educational year memories into my mouth. Taste the delay and feel the discomfort of your ass as you return to New York in traffic. Remember that you did it for a girl, and she thought you did it to pedicab. Recall that you are both better off apart, but sigh for the way she declined your friendship one year after the separation. Texting with Miranda and watching Richard Prior's standup made things better. He really tore into those white folks in Long Beach, and I watched him sweat so badly on stage, and thought, "Now this is a performance!" It seemed like 25% of it had been improvised, but all of it had the spirit of improvisation. His performances were possessed with himself on stage, deeply personal, unconscious always, done when he feels physically and mentally done. I internalized it and tried to bring it to the open mic in NYC, but only had 7 people left in the crowd for my performance, not a show I could read much into. Jay Lee attended, and had he stayed until the end, I would have made $45, enough to cover the several $7 Brooklyn Lagers I had been drinking and pay for my bus trip from Beantown, but he had to be some kind of working stiff and go personally train people very early the following morning, and so his responsible gain became my loss. Responsibility fucks me again, but irresponsibility only nets you short term gains. When you meet a struggler, watch for the clue of the one eminently irresponsible behavior that could be bringing them down. Their fatal flaw and/or their achillies heel, everyone has one, and sometimes they are not easy to spot, and are always even harder to overcome.
Being back at home, I got to see my Ma and dear grandmother, and the rest of our family who were coming in for the week, my cousins Lisa and Mark, and my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Mike, their parents and my mother's brother. We had family time. It was nice. We caught up and talked about everything, and I deftly avoided being drawn into terribly polarized politcal discussions with my Uncle who differs from me in national security issues mostly, and this stemming from a desire for Israel's defense and a distaste for Islamic extremism, positions I understand, yet extending into a wider array of topics that we have discovered are untouchable material when we spend family time together. And so as it went with my pro-Dubya senior year roommate at BC, we got along great by pretending we didn't think about those things, and agreeing on the "purple issues". The bridge of youth to adulthood energized my presence at home since I got to joke around with my cousins, not terribly far off from me in age, family folks now, but largely free for the week from the encompassing duties of parenting. It put me more at ease to divulge and play, when on an average visit I must produce interesting detail about goings on in my world. Not that it is laborious, or at all a trial, but the jazz of improvisation is absent. It's as if I were playing a game of "Questions" versus performing a long form scene. In "Questions" the two players continue a scene with questions and drop new information in the form of questions and ultimately the game ends when the action or fluidity of the scene stalls, and can be played past exhaustion, at which point the game continues, but no substance is gained. In long form, two people volunteer information and take what is spoken and acted upon and build upon it, sometimes creating masterpieces of visuals or absurd thought. There are no limits except for patience to sit and listen, and the pressing need that ultimately, we will all have to sleep at some point. Both are fully capable of being fun, and tedious, it all depends on the energy of the participants matching up with each other.
So much travel and pedicabbing stifled me from writing anything for two weeks, so I had planned to write the second full day I stayed at home. The desire to do it nearly drove me to pathetic angry glass smashing. We went to my grandmother's house and for almost an hour and a half tried to DECIDE on a suitable place to go eat somewhere, settling on some prissy tea room for sandwiches. It took nearly an hour for our server to log our orders and serve us sandwiches. I started getting a little caffeinated and really antsy to get out of that place, and I thought horrible thoughts of disrupting the tea service with broken glass, a few choice words into the air or to a child, or nudity, but kept my cool by venting frustrations to an available Miranda. I felt like nobody at the table really understood the need for me to go get writing done, how much importance it held for me, as if pouring things out could happen any time when family wasn't in town, that my commitment to it seemed frivolous and surely it could wait. This plus hunger plus overly decorated suffocating atmosphere had me boiling. I swear, if a door had started bleeding in there, I would have found an axe and gone Shining on everyone. It says a lot that on this day New Jersey ended up being the refuge I needed to take. Starbucks in an A&P. Holy shit, I never needed Jersey so much, and now I feel dirty for having typed that. Interesting New Jersey beers at my grandmother's helped me celebrate the escape from the tea room, the productivity, and lubricated potentially janky family social interaction. And now when someone is seriously getting under my skin, I say that he is "sending me to the tea room."
All the visiting west coasters wanted to get into New York City, and so did I, so I led us on a bit of a go round. The sun shone and we walked a lot. Jay caught up with us at Lincoln Center and we walked to The Carnegie Deli for an authentic New York experience, which amounts to, "Overeat here because we serve you piles of meat, you fat tourists." It's funny since everyone on this side of my family is particularly fit. So nearly everyone but me ordered giant meat piles, while I had secured a modest sandwich from a personal New York favorite, "The Lunch Box" and ordered a side of steamed veggies claiming I had dietary restrictions, but mostly desiring the sandwich of my choosing from a familiar place, and also feeling the Jewish guilt for entering an establishment with little intent to purchase. Small gains in healthy choices compensate for gaping errors of indulgence, maybe, I can pretend to agree with, sometimes.
We walked through Times Square, sat in its new closed off Broadway fold up chairs, saw the weirdos, and had a moment of "Well this is nice." As the sun lit up my skin, I screened on my interior the memories of my life in Times Square: Selling tickets to comedy clubs, driving a seven human powered circular machine entitled "The Party Bike" and shows and Thai food and working on 47th in a Broadway theatre for almost a year, these things that hurled me towards, and back towards pedicabbing. And when a memory or trigger of a sequence of events illuminates, the gun of causation goes off and you get the floating opportunity to play the game of "If" and/or "Why" until you are satisfied or too frustrated to continue, or perhaps just distracted by a Haitian man dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.
Texas weighed on me in the midst of family and New York City, most of which was devising some way to impress Violet from afar. I might have steered the entourage South into the Lower East Side, or maybe there existed in them a sort of desire to see it anyhow. My cousin Mark starting making passing references at obtaining a beer somewhere, and I certainly had a hard time disagreeing with him. We perused the shops on St. Mark's and, since the inspiration caught me in the knowledge of Vioet's car having only a tape deck, I made a point of popping in to a few music shops and asking them if they had any cassette tapes. I walked down a few steps into the cove of a music shop, and saw a tray of tapes that a large bearded man walked his fingers over. I became instantaneously competetive over the tapes. It turned into a race to see who could be most decisive about wanting certain music in the index, the fastest. I saw his taste in music as he plucked gems from the collection. I struck. Bowie. Talking Heads. Stones. Solid stuff for driving, stuff I knew Violet could make good use of on her drives up to Dallas or wherever to sustain her promising career. Think of me when Bowie gives you the chills and you love it. Victorious, I shelled out for the retro tunes, and settled in to a beer around the corner at what was, to my surprise in New York City, an Irish style pub.
We hashed out logistics for the group to get back to their car effectively, which boiled down to me hailing a cab because I knew the New York secret of how to signal to foreign drivers that us Americans of a different city needed transportation to some set of mysterious coordinates. I wished the family well and sent them off, and would remain in Manhattan to see my pops and his girlfriend, and then meet up with Lindsey, a girl that makes me ponder that there is, in some mysterious form, a universal law of interpersonal magneticism.
When I met Lindsey, the longest relationship I ever maintained had recently been severed after two and a half years. I was a wreck, and my friends urged me to go out and forget about the old and talk up something new. I wore a "uniform" which means a button down collared shirt, and rode downtown on the piece of shit single speed I had picked up earlier that summer, once known as "Hot Streak" but ultimately she had come to be known as "The Time Bomb". I rode with my shirt off so as not to sweat through the black to an even darker, damper, black. I remember talking to a few girls that night and as it always went for me in Boston, no matter how grody or cleaned up, the phone numbers I collected were generally utterly useless. Shane, a pedicabber and friend, tipped me off that a party still plodded on in Allston. I'm in Fanieul Hall, but I have a bike and a day to keep my eyes closed to follow, so I go even though I know I'll ultimately need to return to North Cambridge, a large triangle by Boston area standards. I locked my bike up to some sketchy fence in unfamiliar Lower Allston, and inside I became acquainted with Lindsey. The night played out to a fade, with the exception of a guy, Dave, who I found out had taken an interest in Lindsey for a while, randomly fell onto the table, I suspect to gain attention and sympathy, but his ploy was made of saran wrap; see through, too clingy, and ultimately disposed of, if even used. He lingered as I painstakingly explained to Lindsey why I wore "the uniform" and that I really wasn't a douchebag. She certainly took a hard line, but my story held water and as Dave sat around being annoying, we kissed and started a two week thing that involved a lot of ridiculous Cambridge to Brookline cab rides, and some cute dates. It fit the bill that termination would come with her moving to New York, just as I had suspected termination would come in my time with Meghan when I moved to New York. I visited her when I went to New York, and there existed the straw to grasp at, that just maybe, it was all happening again, that long distance nightmare worth dozing off for. But faded, it went the way of the buffalo, and went out of touch for a while.
Then I think there came a text conversation. If I could ever explain to you how fully and profoundly texting has changed our lives, let me simply serve you my stories as an archetypal example. In texts, we did a little catch up cat and mouse, and finally, on the second of January in 2009, the night before my canceled New Year's Day flight was rescheduled to depart for LA at 7:20 am, we managed to put ourselves in the same place at the same time. I think it really only took a few looks at each other's eyes to remember, and when she looks at me, I feel like there's a joke I'm telling that she gets, but always harbors some playful hostility for. We remembered that we liked the way both looked to each other, and we smiled like dopes until we kissed again. We left the bar together and I got into a cab with her, and the cab took us up to her apartment. Along the way we kissed and I explained about my flight, and how I could only catch one train to get to the airport on time. We arrived, paid the cab driver and she deepened her eyes somehow to request, "Just miss your flight."
"I can't, I'm sorry. I'll come see you as soon as I get back, I promise."
This was right around the time that I started meaning everything I said that isn't a joke. So I changed my return flight from San Francisco to go back to New York instead of Boston. The gesture was too bold. She kind of freaked out about it, and as I hurtled towards NYC on the LIRR, she stopped answering my messages, and I got hung up. Stranded in New York City, until the bus can cart me off. I don't blame her for it, I knew that once the shock of it had subsided, it still impressed as a gesture. The gears of time went round and we spoke again, and now, we meet when I'm around, and go drink together for the sake of a Wednesday, or whatever, and tease the embers of the thing that never turned the corner, and I think that suits us both fine, and we are friends from it all. So that night wrapped up with us sharing an armchair in Fatcat, drinking beer and listening to jazz, playing some table game, and I got that final bus home at 1:40, to turn around and head back to NYC to Beantown the next day, because there were 12 more days to work. And in case you were curious, when I went back to Kenmore to see if the Timebomb was still locked up outside of the Commonwealth Hotel, it had been removed. I hope someone rode it away fromthere, or better yet, a police auction and goes, "Awwww, fuck."
The freedom of a pedicab shift without a Red Sox game is special, there's an unrestricted feeling as you kick your feet up in Copley Square, beat up, hung over, tight, silly, or dour. You have tiiime. Six hours or twelve, you can spend a whole one or two or three out there mocking people. My favorite is when I spot ladies with Victoria's Secret bags and ask them, "Hey, what'd you get at Victoria's Secret?" Usually I get a sneer, often a wry smile, and one time a lady said to me, "Wouldn't YOU like to know?" It's this kind of fun that you can have with people to put yourself in a good mood. Not putting anyone down, per se, but simply giving them a good Boston style hard time. On seeing two girls with matching striped adornments, I quipped, "Is that skirt made of her bag, or is her bag made of your skirt?" Maybe lunch, maybe you suck down a coffee, maybe you make a business call, or pop into the library to drop a deuce, or maybe you are thrown into a work ethic by someone accosting you and plain old asking you if you'll take them to the North End. And you accept and start thinking about those good cheap slices of pizza you can nab if it's before 1:30, and act grateful whether they give you $15 or $40, but it's probably $20. You talk over the Nextel radios and ask how many bikes are at the flower shop, and see if anyone else is making money, or you watch the guy on a scooter windsail through Copley, and try to avoid eye contact with him. Best of all, you're never disappointed if the shift gets called due to rain, you just get your weekend night back.
When you are a pedicabber in Boston, it's perfunctory to be a baller when you are off work. My good friend Linda who I met a few years ago while playing the puppeteer for Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors" is a power player, corporate style. When I'm in town, she does like to go out to dinner, and it's turned into a special occasion date for us every now and again, and she asks me, "Where do you want to go?" I run a few places by her and they are all more costly than the best suit I own, and she tells me what she thinks, but mostly we try to come to an agreement on where it should be, and the agreement is that it will be damned good. I think that she makes in one day what it costs to go to Menton or L'Espalier, and my jaw drops every time the check comes, but some of my standard 12 hour Saturdays will also gobble up that dinner debt. Dinner is often a three hour affair, and it is course after course with wines and beers, obscure and fine stuff, some beer that you need a map to discover, followed by a code, a beer Dan Brown would write a novel about, as easy to drink as it would be to read, but in an intelligent way. The least I can do, even knowing her car isn't far off, and having found out that she has plans to attend to after the affair, is have a pedicab waiting outside for us to ride her to her car. I sent specifically for the rookie phenom who pulled some extreme number for the Red Sox home opener since I desired to process what he does that makes him so damned good, something I could clearly do in my post-deliciousness euphoria. He gave me a good enough ride, one that is just weird to think about, from Fort Point Channel through Southie to the pedicab shop in the South End. I gave him $50 including an old school $10 bill that he sold me a few days before for a new $10 bill. I like to collect that stuff.
I took myself back to Boston for this weekend to fit these kinds of things in to the rigorous schedule set in place by the Red Sox. A driver meeting had been planned for on Sunday evening, and we all thought that a local Italian restaurant would cater our event, but a major water pipeline had burst, and Governor Deval Patrick issued a boil order on all water before drinking. Of course, fancy restaurants like Menton were either boiling everything, or using bottled water to cook everything, since I'm sure their profit margins are vastly above their overhead, but not so for Maggiano's. They just couldn't whip up a few trays of chicken and pasta for us in this emergency. The disappointment came with understanding, and a collective helpless shrug, and so we drank for dinner. Pedicab trivia hosted by Carl "Hot Carl" Foss, with a fridge so full of beer, it looked like my old wallet after a doubleheader, you just couldn't believe so much had been collected in one little place! I know for sure Jon Simmons and I played on the same team, and we came up with a pretty great name for our trivia team, "Late Night With Sean Bailey," honoring the surly style with which Mr. Sean Bailey would manage a shift, and that it could only get worse as time progressed into severe drunken disasters of $3 hot-girl rides, broken chains across town, and a mysterious, mutable shop opening time that might be cryptically 20 minutes later than promised. And any good trivia name goes through a metamorphosis of meaning, and playful manipulations of the title are acceptable to the host once you've established your base name. "Early Morning With Rich Mather" was a title that evoked a similarly unpleasant experience for pedicabbers who have encountered the personality in reference, but for those without the knowledge, imagine the attempt to have a conversation with someone that seems to be listening but will not respond and is actually actively ignoring you. It makes you feel like you've violated some basic human law of behavior. It is utterly confusing and altogether unpleasant, especially when regular interaction with this person is necessary, and you come to only expect monosyllabic responses, if anything. And so went our team title for comic emphasis. The question that really won it for us was the big bet we made on knowing the title of the musical "No, No, Nanette" that was financed by the trade of Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees. In the middle of the trivia game I suggested a beer run, since we had run out of beer, a feat that only a set of pedicabbers could make easy. A few guys started talking about taking the pedicabs on the beer run. The GM explicitly warned them not to, but they did it anyway. They brought beer back and were then sent home. The next day, those two guys who took the trikes, both veteran managers, were fired. After they were sent home, we recorded our victory. We won Supersoakers, brilliant, neon-colored trophies of our trivia expertise, but the victory felt incomplete with the fate of the jobs of personalities we loved in the balance. I left mine in the shop, and I don't know who has it now. I hope he or she correctly answers the question of, "Should I supersoak that ho?" The answer, of course, being "Supersoak that ho." Relax, it's a rap lyric reference.
We all partied at T.C.'s Lounge after abdicating the shop. People started going after the porn DVD's in the skill crane, and with astounding success. Five separate drivers obtained raunchily titled video discs, a few of which I recall being, "Young Girls Luv Cum," and another called "Black Virgins". Simple and eloquent, we know what we'll get in these films, and it's not skilled editing, or special effects, and it's likely not virgins either. My trivia compadre, Jon scored the latter of the two masterpieces of American cinema, and subsequently a group of six or so pedicab drivers all feeding dollar bills into the machine, elevated Jon, and carried him about a half mile down to the Charles as he drunkenly screamed obscenities about his sexy, and racially charged victory, his second and more glorious trophy of the evening, realizing a little too late that he was going to be put in the Charles River, yet submitting and allowing it to happen like a champ.
There were a significant amount of hangovers when the second ten game Red Sox homestand began the next day. Somebody who missed the prior evenings proceedings asked Jeremy how trivia went, and his immediate answer started with, "Welp, two guys got fired..." Fortunately for the bereaved of lost drunkeness, it was hot enough to sweat it out after half a dozen rides, and I had until about 3:30 to make the knuckle dragging entrance to the shop, so I had already almost completed the recovery checklist. I cannot procure any useful information about this day, except to say that I worked, made money, I probably made someone laugh. The days washed over like the late night, salty showers after the shift, where you lean on the wall and just hope you don't knock the beer over when you reach for it, because you are fried. I stayed two nights out in Brighton, where I used to live. It might have been more, since hanging out with Jeremy is always enjoyable, but returning to Bennett St has its drawbacks. The aforementioned Rich lives there, and he's as bad with dogs as he is with humans, and you could tell that if Rich could talk to others like most normal people can release words and ideas, he'd be a real dick, just like his dog. He thinks anyone that doesn't like his dick of a dog is a dick because they don't like dogs in general. What a dick. And his major qualm with me is all the mail that still goes to that address for me. I'm not saying it's a clean thing, really, but having my mail still sent there so that my insurance company believes I'm still a Massachusetts resident is important to me, but Rich make obnoxious rusty nail complaints about how I really need to get my mail forwarded. It's not like I'm a Scientologist and I told them I'd host meetings at the house, and moved away, and they come trying to convert the remaining humans, and kids in guy Faukes masks hang out outside the house, although once Jeremy moves out, this might be a good practical joke. I left my bag in the front hallway, it wasn't hurting anybody, but Rich says things like, "What does Dan think this is, his hotel?" No Rich, I think I have a friend that resides in this house and he said I could rest my bones there for a night or two, on the leather couch I went and acquired that you still use. Didn't you get the text message about it being OK if I crashed for a night? You did, but you didn't respond? Please eat some mild poison. I still have stuff there, I'm trying to ditch it through craigslist remotely. With any luck, that will go smoothly, and I'll eliminate Rich from my life entirely. He seemed harmless at first, hurt that we almost got an apartment without him, and we all felt a little sorry, but then he turned pissy and passive aggresive. Sometimes Facebook tells me I should reconnect with him. When I hit 1000 friends, I'll defriend him. I'm actively convincing strangers to add me on Facebook so I can celebrate that day sooner. 935 and counting... The best parts about staying there was that I discovered I had left a towel in the bathroom, and so could shower and be dry, and obtained the set of jumper cables I was lent by a stranger in too much of a hurry to give me a second jump in a row. The details of this come later. My exit came with a particular glory of not just going, but bending the MBTA to my whims, and traveling from Brighton Center to Davis Square in 21 minutes. I felt like I was surfing the big one, except I had paid $1.70, and read the Metro along the way. Alas, it had little to compare to surfing, my bad, but I keep track of these things, and make silly comparisons.
I just played patient for the all day bender, that annual beast of a day where Kyle Crand and I go to a Red Sox game and ostentatiously display that we are having a special event. Jeremy planned to join us this year, and for all the threats I've made to the general manager of walking into the Capital Grille to have dinner, this time I meant business, and business equals steak. The GM and I established a relationship a few years ago where he gives me a ring from his phone when he has a pick up from his restaurant. He'd call me before calling the company. Typically it went like this.
"Hello," I'd answer in the middle of my ride, ignoring my fare.
"Dan man."
"Hey!"
"Hey, it's Chris at the Capital Grille," he'd state with a gentleman's subtle pride in who he is.
"Hey Chris," I knew who it was when I said hello. Hell, I have him programmed in, and he knew it too.
"I need two bikes in about ten minutes," he flatly stated, knowing I'd be there, there was never unavailability.
"I'll make it happen," I might have panted. "See you soon," turning to my passengers, "So where can I put you guys?"
He called me a few times while I dicked around in Texas, looking for bikes at the Grille. I had to call the company for him and arrange the bikes to go, wistful of working the Red Sox game.
So that Thursday we had a reservation for three at 5:30, and we went in looking good, but casual, except me, I wore my Red Sox shirt, and that gnarly beard that got me called homeless, and we ordered and prepared to dish out the big paper. I had my old money in my pocket, and you know what that means, and no, I wasn't broke. We ate more than our stomachs could really handle. Adam, our server brought us some recommended selections of wine to go with our steaks, and Jeremy even tried some, or I imagined him to, but I think he did. I think we ordered too much, and afterwards I understood when people would waddle out of the door that the valet opened for them, and decline a ride, burping out, "I need to walk," and nodding as if I knew what they meant. But we planned on the ride no matter what, we had to be bigshots. We usually request our driver by bike number. We try to pick out the bike that sucks the worst to ride, and our tip makes their tardiness to work and bad fortune a sudden positive. This time, we just thought Nate Gomes deserved a gift, and he arrived, and for a ride to Jerry Remy's that any pedicabber would probably get $10 from, be happy to see $15, but would most likely earn $20, we dropped $64 on the guy. Playin' like pimps, were we. Kyle threw the extra $4 just for emphasis and to make the tip amount quirky, I suspect.
There we met Jack, my host at the time, friend I met through Mike Marshall a few summers ago, and he worked the deal out for our tickets, cheap enough that we need not deal with those glorious citizens, the Fenway scalpers. We took a beer down at Jerry Remy's as the Sox started getting pummeled right away-Daisuke getting into early trouble, to settle down later, as per usual. After the bottom of the 1st, we felt the urge to actually enter the staidum. I don't entertain much in the way of religious feelings, but for me, entering Fenway Park is as close as it gets, apart from those spontaneous moments of feeling like I'm experiencing too much coincidence, or luck, or beauty. I figure only Red Sox fans will understand, or perhaps sports fanatics, and as sports fanatics go, I'm tame, not fanatical, yet fervent. It is the way religion, if there were one that is true, ought to feel: Excitement to arrive, observation is crucial, the sensation of belonging to a large crowd in one space, one world and universe, the ability for a single person to influence nearly 40,000 others with a slow start to a commonly executed chant of "Let's Go Red Sox," five particularly syncopated claps following, and the crowd allowing itself to be influenced for everyone's enjoyment and in the name of supporting what we believe in, a few guys down there playing a game so we will be entertained. And that crowd is overheard on TV, the jolt to the chant unbeknownst to potentially millions of viewers, and yet the chant so familiar, the nails still being bitten, the hope that God will reward the faithful never muted until all hope is lost. What church do you join to get that? I guess if they lose, it could be any church you feel like picking, since in my opinion, you just don't win with organized religion, only in sports. This, or I am the delusional one, or it is one and the same, any number can play. Any way you look at it you lose if you don't do for yourself. I won that day. We surreptitiously improved our seats, the Red Sox came back to win, and we scored John Nolan in a Mainstreet to return.
The bender headed to 80's night, and we were denied access in a blaze of argument. How else should it go? The best part of it was after that we went to a different bar, then Kyle left, and I thought that since I knew the name of the bouncer who refused our entry, I could go back to try again. It was an action that wore the mark of the all day bender. I'm pretty sure I ended up at the Model for "the unnecessary drink" where there's really no reason to have that last one at all.
The next day I arrived egregiously late for my day shift before my night shift, but if you're paying, you're paying, and if you're not working, you're still paying. I must admit, the details are scant about this weekend except for some numbers. I lost my phone in Vancouver, and with it, lost were many notes I made on actions I took and beers I drank. You'd be surprised how much one small record of where I had a PBR can conjure to a human mind, the location written, the people, the jokes, the time of it all available from that reminder. What a shame. All I have to use as reminders are the updates I made to my Facebook status, and in this all I find are statements like, "Dan Kerrigan: The Science of Punching Testicles." How useful. I guess back in May I didn't realize there were more important things than punching testicles, and the scientific explanations for such behavior. And truly, I had this conversation about the best direction in which to punch at the testes, and explained that it should be downward to the left OR right, as to trap the balls in their own sack, against the greater, more solid mass of the human body, perhaps hitting them so that the penis, if slightly to one side, might even be avoided entirely by the force of the knuckles, not that your penis would really care. I mean, its all very elementary.
You can't go to Boston for a month in the spring and expect to get out of it without getting the classic $5 ride, or feeling just 35 degrees Fahrenheit on your face at some point. The annoyance of it reminded me I'd left and swam in warm water on Easter, and returned to Boston for business way more than pleasure. The entirety of the second ten game set did not surpass the profitability of the first, but the feat of sustaining functionality throughout all of the games I obtained through scheduling was still no small feat. I am curious, if it existed, how close 22 shifts out of 27 days would come on a scale of difficulty where the top would be represented by respectably completing the Tour de France. I know the least of my shifts stretches about 25 miles traveled on a pedicab that is up to twenty times as heavy as your typical "tour" bike, before you stack some fatties on the back to tow around. How long are those stages? I might have some French people to sweat on soon. I used to placate my father with cycling in lieu of running as a child in need of exercise, and I'd mention the Tour as a far off goal, but the work ethic involved in attaining that kind of physical ability eluded me as a chunky, reluctant-to-exercise 11 year old SNES addict. Until my pedicabbing days, the closest I ever really came was beating Uniracers.
Time slips out from under your hands when you start paying attention, like a housefly you try to smash against a table. The moment you try to stop it, it goes just a little faster. I believe that's why dumb horses just let them fly around while they chew hay, but I don't eat hay, nor does my ass stink as badly as a horses, or so I've been told by passengers in my pedicab, or so I've told them, and they've politely agreed, regardless of the truth. The homestand drew to a close and I tried to grasp at those last chances to see my Boston friends and leave everything "perfectly". And as fantastic a last night as I had with Phil, Melissa, and Phil's sister Leah, perfect is really never an option unless you have no expectations, and this personal truth always makes me feel like I've missed someone and will inevitably have to apologize to someone. This time it fell on my very last Boston host, a guy who for all our differences and arguments has been a truly solid friend, one of the poor guys who got fired from the "Trivia Incident." Without getting a chance to say goodbye, I took the borrowed jumpers and made the meeting of myself and "Anne With The Jumpers" happen. She worked down in the financial district, so I rode Keith's bike on its last errand, and hand delivered the cables to her as she popped out of work for a moment. She asked me about Longshot and I remember being touched that she remembered the name. I took off for Game On! with a new Facebook friend and a last name to fill in for "With The Jumpers".
After fulfilling the tradition of eating a massive plate of nachos with Jeremy, I got a few beers I thought Keith would enjoy, a small thank you for the lend of his mountain horse for the month, and placed the bike with the "gift bag" in the shop bike rack. Of course, I had also purchased myself a little present since I had put a few mediocre beers in the pipes during the nacho session. I sat there in the shop joking around with Melissa, Boston Pedicab's under-appreciated adhesive, the month just processing out, relieved, and a tiny buzz on to enjoy the work well done, and the friends I'd miss. Then suddenly I realized I might be testing the punctuality of my chosen airline. I left pleasantly before I began my freak out. I walked down Tremont Street, my eyes darting wildly to find a taxi, now checking my phone compulsively and fretting for every lost minute. I had to return to my host's house and grab my belongings before going to the airport. I got all the way to Mass Ave before getting a guy to turn around for me, and he waited while I ran for the apartment, my stuff, and my flight. I got to the airport, and slid right in through the typically choked and lagging security lines of Logan International, this time not letting my Sigg water bottle fall victim to a small amount of liquid still living inside. A nap to Chicago later, I sat down for my layover at the bar to watch the Celtics take on the Cavs, talking to someone from Texas, still holding enough Boston inside to yell at a television.
The odds and ends between drinks and friends and bike rides and trike rides fell to keeping lines with Violet and Miranda. I guess for all of my absence, and for how short a stint we three have had in any one capacity up until this time mentioned, maintenance of long distance relationships is undeniably difficult, not that any long distance item in the history could possibly be summarized as easy. And to illustrate, simply read the phrase, "Oh yeah, dating that girl in Seattle while I went to school in New York was easy." Sounds foolish, right? Maybe less foolish if you suddenly make those kids rich, but please give me the license to feel singularly correct about how hard long distance can be, at least for me, as much as I've tried. Even a one week vacation from your best girl can give you the taste of what it could be. The abyss of togetherness stung more softly since my return was imminent but the stress of distance made me evaluate things in a starker light. I thought of the distance and the energy I had committed to both of these girls, and I considered the actions I took, and carefully deliberated the two different personalities that I bonded with. I talked so much with Miranda over that month, and only occasionally with Violet. Nothing about all the traded words got very deep, except the connections. I sent Violet those tapes, and a post card with a map of Boston. It was raw and cute, and didn't mention missing her, but was made of the fun we have of the childish way we interact with each other. I hoped she'd be reminded I'm awesome, because I feared losing that special thing with her. In the next moment I could trust in Miranda to talk about anything, tell her any secrets or trivialities. Miranda would mention to me once in a while that we were very different people and I knew, but we both knew that just liking each other and being open and understanding was strong enough to keep something. And retrospectively, I do see the hints that Violet dropped about the nature of our relationship, and chose to focus on the laughing, the fun, the creativity and encouragement we had for each other. To me, the things we built in conversation, in ideas, in pointless improvisations were so great that I guess I missed her hesitance to bring it along further. I started to get uncomfortable with the idea of going back and forth from one to another, and I decided, in specifically important and fundamental ways, that Violet and I were more compatible long term. It was all this self-instigated thought that led me to do what I thought would be the right thing for me, and for Miranda, and I hoped, for Violet. Sometime late at night during my stay at home, I tried to let Miranda down easy, and told her how I felt. I explained in gentle terms, and she got it, and I cried. I told her how hard it was, and how much I wanted our friendship to continue, and we kept talking nearly every day. We broke the would-be boundaries of the new terms just a few days later in how familiar we were through texts and talks, she told me how much it sucks that she actually likes me, and the pet names of "feo" and "fea" never really disappeared. I asked Violet to pick me up at the airport, a request that seemed to ask forgiveness for putting Miranda on the task last time, and Violet agreed to come. She didn't yet know that I laid a line down for Miranda, and I didn't know when I was going to tell her. Of course, for a twist of fate, something came up and Violet couldn't pick me up anymore, and Miranda was willing and free to come get me. When I walked out of the terminal to where she waited, I saw her standing there almost laughing just to see my face again, her smile giving away too much, and I knew she didn't know what to expect. Man, I was so happy to be back in Texas, I went right up to her and kissed her. The kiss slowed, and I knew I had missed her pretty bad. Was I really going to leave in a month?
Statistics:
1,955 mi from my apartment in Austin, TX to The Boston Pedicab shop, roughly.
19 Red Sox Games worked out of 20
22 shifts worked out of 27 days.
$190+ spent on the All Day Bender (A relative steal considering we went to Capital Grille)
$150 tip left at Capital Grill-Quoth our server Adam, "Guys, this is over the top."
$0 + tip for three meals at Capital Grille with sides and whatever.
13 drinks, I believe, on the All Day Bender
Red Sox 11-Angels 6 on Thursday, May 6th
7 cassette tapes sent to Violet
14 times Lugo called me a homeless man because of my beard (or thereabouts)
$5500 approximately to show for the homestand, returning to Texas.
No drink list until about Day 180 due to the theft of my phone after having been assaulted in Vancouver. Yup.
Sometimes I feel like I'm writing just to destroy an entire year. Maybe not, but that's what I fear when I write about the people I'm close to. Will I hurt anybody by writing this? Maybe. While extremely high for the first time in a great stretch of time, and off of only one hit (and I can get a witness), I idiotically tried to edit one of my recent posts, and I endured an extended moment of great self-consciousness and concern, as is often the case when you smoke the marijuana. It is a substance that can provide great perspective, if not sometimes the wrong perspective, but I felt concerned for my friendships and the way people will see me after I reveal the truths in my point of view and the awareness that perhaps I'm just an asshole. I asked my roommate Nick about it, and his stock answer of, "It's good man, just keep doin' what you're doin'," soothed the doubts. So I will, because it is, in my comprehensively dwelled upon opinion, more interesting that way, and those of my friends who love me for who I am will forgive me for my faults, they should know that I cherish them and mean no harm, and operate with the understanding that my actions are mine and I will be responsible for them. Thereby, I am prepared for the pain of any severances I incur through my bluntness, but not entirely prepared since I'm kind of an emo bitch. I'll miss you :-(
I touched down in Boston and felt extremely well rested, my direct flight a respite from all the extensive flight changes of the typical frugal flying that I choose. Silver line, to green line, to Shea's place. Shea had offered me her bed for a stretch of time stating she could sleep with her boyfriend, and only laid down the no sex, jacking off, or eating in her bed rules, which I can totally abide by-I mean when do I ever eat in bed? I thought to myself in a flash, "I'm back in Boston, it's nearly impossible for me to get laid here anyway, I'll have to go out on like a million dates for that to happen," and replied, "OK." I had my suitcase full of clothing, my helmet, and some cold gear for any of those shitty, rainy Red Sox shifts that I anticipated, and got. It was a Thursday and so before even thinking about the stretch of work ahead of me, and all the revolutions I would make on a tricycle, I had to hit up that old 80's night at Common Ground. This is place I've loved, hated, and been kicked out of. I've met girls here that I've dated for months, or weeks, or once. It's been a wealth of drama and enjoyment, a go to for friends on Thursdays for "the cheese," which implies cheesy 80's music. In fact, Elaine, who I'll meet in Salt Lake City to continue up to Portland with is a girl I met at Common Ground for 80's night. One of my more interesting dating sagas developed out of this place with a girl named Tammy. She approached me for our first encounter, the neon on my torso a beacon to which she guided herself, or maybe it was pheremonal, because I smelled like a bag of sweaty assholes, and she asked a rookie pedicabber and me why we didn't wear helmets. Conversation, dancing, then numbers. We had this slow flirtatious boiling that couldn't quite work, our work schedules being almost entirely incompatible. I went out of my way on a shift to give her a ride around the block while she stepped out from beers with her coworkers, just to give her a little thrill. I asked her to the Pedicab Formal last year, and she was a bit distracted as a date with work issues, she being a busy economist fused to a blackberry, and I having honestly blacked out about two thirds through on my empty stomach, the sustenance that our host, The Beehive, offered being insufficient to lay a blanket over alcohol over and expect to remember your friend's three dates' names that night or the next day. I have been told that I kept it together, classy Kerrigan. I know I walked her all the way back to the Pru since she needed to go back to work that night, and gave her a proper gentleman's goodbye. We only chilled again when one night we saw each other at Common Ground. She ended up wasted, her friends had left, and there was no way in hell I was watching her get on a bicycle to ride 5 hilly, train tack laden miles back to Jamaica Plain. We walked the mile back to my place, and I put her to sleep on the couch, and I went upstairs to my bed. It wasn't until the next morning after serving her breakfast, and laughing with her at this story about getting stuck with way too many frozen waffles, the funniest story she ever told me, that something happened. It got very, very heavy for about ten minutes until my roommate opened his door and the process was completely startled. And in what could have been the "make" of a continued relationship, I progressively lost my punctuality for the shows I had to go perform at the Boston Children's Museum, my call time rapidly approaching. For all my sensitivity about her condition the night before, and the dotted history between us of good and interesting and weird encounters, I feel like I can break it all down into that final moment where I didn't ditch out on the kids and the $52 and the accountability to work just for a great moment between us, instead, parting ways on bikes nearly at my doorstep, kissing her goodbye, and like a bonehead, only giving her verbal directions to get back home and not riding with her to a more suitable point of departure, as easy as that would have been. I later saw her at another Allston area hipster dance night, one that had ensued after a comedy show I had done at the same venue. I was missing teeth from my November bike accident, and our conversation felt like we were talking about economics, not an area I can comfortably navigate with words, no less confidently with two teeth missing. Sometimes the universe likes to hand me serendipity, and/or closure. I didn't see or hear from her again until I randomly saw her pedicabbing during this month of riding. She looked at me like I had two heads, back in Boston despite what she knew about my previous departure, me with a four month deep, fierce beard, on a tricycle with two huge passengers. And there I was, back in the spawning point of this story and many others, with my good friend Shea, drinking beers and dancing to the 80's. Welcome back to Boston, Kerrigan, don't let the old wares wear you out, don't let your ghosts haunt you.
The next day was straight to work. Ten games in a row begins on Friday, ends, then seven days later, ten more. I plan to ride all but one, and attend the one I don't ride for the Kyle Crand/Dan Kerrigan Annual All Day Bender. It's weird coming back after some travel and some big pedicab stories. The old welcome back, the big smiles, the hugs and once-overs of the people who have changed slightly since you last saw them. Ten pounds more or less, a haircut, or promotion later, good to see you, look at you, what's going on, how's it been? Now let me sign up for that tricycle. I have plenty to say on the topic of pedicabbing, as I think it might be clear from how long I've been involved in this profession, but for me this month went by like reruns of Futurama, I've seen 'em all, but I still love it, and I'm always finding new stuff inside each episode. I went to work, met the rookies, rode as hard as I could, talked my way into big tips, imparted a few words to new guys when it was appropriate, and perhaps even a few times it may not have been, and banked, banked, banked. I easily slipped back into the routine. Claw my eyelids up to my salty forehead, head into work, sign up for bike, get coffee after the most miserable 40 minutes of my life, make enough during pregame that I can foresee a happy ending to the evening, get back to the shop nearly last, go get beers, rinse, repeat, sometimes failing to rinse. The rookies are a new class, hired by the new general manager and my old roommate at 21 Bennett Street, Jeremy. They are hungry, a few natural schmoozers in the bunch, some of them making big time pedicab statements in the first Red Sox series, I'm talkin' like 700 or 800 bucks on opening day, something never done before. I'm back and I'm feeling competitive, the job always makes me that way, my primary function to hit my goals and go back to Texas and break even out of Texas to finish my trip, but inside me I wanna show everyone what's up. It's small and worth little, but my name precedes me a little bit for this small cup of pride, and so people know me before I get there and it's a shoe I have to step back into. I got scheduled for the first three games of the first ten game set, and then all the rest after being on-called in to the two I didn't originally get. The feeling of being at the doorway to ten days straight of intense pedicabbing is intimidating, a little overwhelming, but you do feel a bit like I imagine a baseball player would feel. Just take it one day at a time and don't hurt yourself. And this includes your, ahem, "performance" off the field. I'm just waiting for the day somebody emails the pedicab email list and tries to get a shift covered because they cramped up during some rough sex. No, it won't be me.
The first three games went rather smoothly, even though Sunday managed to be lazy and not quite as lucrative as I had hoped. It's better that way since I got to enjoy some beers with Mr. Keith Cardoza, a wife carrying champion with thighs like steel bridge cables, and he let me bully his mountain bike around for the month. I insisted on paying for the drinks, but think a lot of pedicabbers don't even want to consider favors as favors, it's kind of a brotherhood that way. It was nice to roll in the air again, as cold as it did get here and there, but mostly, it relieved me to not have to have the same conversation with cab drivers over and over and then pay them for it, and the ride home. If they are nice, I tell them I'm a pedicab driver and we talk about it, of course, and the same questions come up: How does it work, what do you make, where do you go, and all the other ones. It is always funny to hear a Haitian man skirt around the appropriate way to ask me how it goes when I take bigger people. Stock answer for everyone who wants to know: We just go slower. Keith gave me leave from this repetitive experience, and saved me about $15 nearly 15 times, about 15 trips to the Pour House as it goes with the hook up I occasionally see there, or plenty of PBR's at a dollar a pop in the shop.
I had already approached the thousand dollar mark for the homestand, but it was Marathon Monday that really set the tone for the pedicab tour de force. I thought I got up so early on Marathon Monday that I leisurely commuted to the shop, confident I'd obtain an acceptable bike, and underestimating the rookies and their drive to acquire the coveted Main Street bikes that are faster and more narrow for beating traffic. By the time I got in, they were all gone. I cursed my fate, a 14 hour day with an accompanying 60 extra pounds for its duration. Nuts. But I went to work. In past years, the big mistake I made in working the marathon was that I left Fenway and I swore to myself, after having worked three of them previously, that I would not make that mistake again. When I pedicab, I operate on an adaptive goal system. Tips can be low, or large, and one must always consider what is possible when aiming to earn a certain amount, and then when approaching that number, factor in how much time is left to earn the difference between what you have, and what you want, and check in with your body, and see if you need time to eat, or drink more water, or perhaps a round of ibuprofin is necessary. How long do I have to make a stop if I need to make $150 in the next 3 hours? How many rides at $20 do I need to make that happen? Just one of the next five rides has to be a tip up over $30. From here I put on a series of performances, physical and verbal to get what I need, but before any of that, you have to get people in the bike. And then sometimes I just don't think, because I don't even have time to, I just ride and balance my weight on the handlebars and just kick into the pedals for speed, and have a lot of familiar conversations with whoever is on the back, assuring them they shouldn't feel bad, even though I know they will anyway, and I'll play up the pain a little with a high pitched "Whew" after cresting a hill. I didn't start my day thinking I could do it, but by the end, I had record numbers for Boston on my mind.
I took only one trip into the heart of the Back Bay, where the marathon concluded in Copley Square. Just as I dropped a ride off on a marathon-route confused Newbury Street, two fellas up around 400 lbs each asked me if I could get them to the Westin in Copley Square. Where we were located at that moment was somewhere that on any other day would have been embarrassingly close to ask for a ride there, perhaps only 300 yards. The marathon cut any pedestrian traffic off to cross from one side of Boylston Street to the other as exhausted runners walked out their blisters, found the medical tents, ate chips, wore medals, and wrapped themselves in mylar to shine as fuckin' badass dudes all day and night long. So we took the ride. Every access point was closed and all we could do was go all the way down to Arlington Street and around the entirety of the Back Bay. I've got over 800 lbs of "deadweight" in my cab, plus the 200 of the cab, plus the 170 of me, and the fiberglass is flexing down to kiss the attached LED lights to the tire, and so I hear a grind and feel the friction for what ends up being 1.75 miles of slow going. I start up Columbus Ave and it's there that I see Tammy, sometime shortly after 5, giant men in tow, beard of an epic journey, sweating like a bastard, huge smile on my face, fake teeth filling up the gap. I bet her heart skipped a beat from the look she gave me, until she got a chance to break it down into derivatives or something like that. I got another ride up towards Fenway, and every ride after that was either to or from the park, always returning, tipping just a few kids off to the idea, scraping up rides until 1 am, exhausted as a marathoner, throwing my shoulders forward to push the weight over my leg to get gravity to force the pain into the cranks and get that Andrew Jackson paper. $1043, walked with $883. Let's ride another game tomorrow.
It's hard to write about most individual days, or individual games since when I pedicab in Boston, it becomes a routine that blends together in the same way I imagine any career blends together. Tell me about your month of work two months ago, would you? Oh, you can't really remember any specifics? Your boss exhibited some douchey qualities? You drank some coffee? You programmed html? Interesting, now something more specific, if you would. And you know what? They don't really matter, the details but they are what your day is built out of, so the also do. A lot of cruising around on a tricycle, jockeying for rides, talking people into your mobile couch. Lots of using the same lines to entertain different people. A lot of wearing neon green, tons of water, masses of food. The occasional attitude adjustment ice cream Snickers bar to make my inner fatboy happy and fun again. A lot of going to bars in a pack of neon, getting cred, cutting weekend lines with a smile and a nod, having people start the conversations with us, putting fast beers down before the bars close, leaving with that fading burn in your esophagus from a 10 oz pull from a giant mug that you have to leave a quarter of behind, while you are ushered in an sympathetic fashion from the bar by the door guy you are buddies with. A bit of that unstable bike mount, the beer entering or the shift finally leaving your legs, a tired football player kicking a pathetic penalty kick after 120 minutes of play, and scoring because the goalie guessed wrong and watched the ball roll across the line and stop short a meter from the net, never touching it. It's a liquid dream of progress and ruin for someone like me. A cycle I had to break, because I knew it could eat the rest of my healthy youth, and so in October of 2009, I impulsively booked the ticket to LA, thinking I'd score a vehicle there, and perhaps some satisfaction, but at least, warmth in the midst of friends.
The Saturday of Game 9 of the first 10, I cycled up Beacon Street towards Shea's place, and a guy behind me powered up the same hill along with me. The hill topping out, he caught up to me to mention that he enjoyed watching the cadence of my spins, I looked very motivated and serene in it from behind, and it gave him a sense of perspective and self recognizance that he, too, pedaled uphill in a similar fashion. Turns out he came from Austin. I said to him that it figured because people in Boston don't just talk to other people like that, not even in summer. We laughed off our commonalities and he invited me to a party that ebbed only blocks from Shea's place. I accepted, knowing it would be detrimental to my lazy Sunday performance of game 10, and perhaps hurt the standup show I had lined up two months prior for after the game, but hell, my heart was beating and hard, sleep wasn't close anyhow.
The next day, I kicked back with a few beers after finishing 10 games in a row, some brutal double shifts in the midst of it all, and feeling comfortable about the five beefy trips to the bank I made. I grew tired, but I needed to make myself energetically available for the show I had to perform. I just ran my mind through the iteration of "duplicate the last one" over and over. I biked fast to Central Square, a three mile zip over my favorite stretch of bikeable terrain, the astonishing view of the Mass Ave bridge, flying forwards, yet taking the dangerous seconds to crane my neck back at Boston and watch the skyline emerge in the darkening evening. Coffee, then a chat with the host, then beers as I scratched up my set list, expecting just to talk about the census and fire off another joke or two if I had time. I nearly missed my entrance. I walked back in as they were about to move on and ask me where the fuck I was? I hurried to my bag to grab the census vest, a center piece to a bit, and got in the light. Establishing stage presence, I took my time to organize the stage as I needed it to be for comfort. This process scored the first laugh, since I basically got on stage late and then proceeded to take my time as if it were no issue at all, then, the look up to recognize everyone I had to entertain. Another. Then, from calm organization, I poured out extreme energy. The first joke hit, that locomotive dragging the rest of the freight, the first laugh, the introductory energy picking up steam on a downhill stretch. My car, the census, whaling watching. There just wasn't enough time. Afterwards, Dana, the guy who taught me to love my standup, told me, "That was the best set I've ever seen you do." Humbled to hear it, I silently and proudly compared it to the one I did in Austin, and felt satisfied. Two in a row. It's hard to ignore a good thing like that, happening in two different cities. I burned that night down at old haunts, popped into the Model on the way to Shea's, and sat outside for a long drunken talk with Miranda before putting my head down to transport my life back home for a few days.
I missed my bus, but got the next one, and sat in traffic to New York City. It hurt me to feel that old slowness and squeeze the 2005-2006 educational year memories into my mouth. Taste the delay and feel the discomfort of your ass as you return to New York in traffic. Remember that you did it for a girl, and she thought you did it to pedicab. Recall that you are both better off apart, but sigh for the way she declined your friendship one year after the separation. Texting with Miranda and watching Richard Prior's standup made things better. He really tore into those white folks in Long Beach, and I watched him sweat so badly on stage, and thought, "Now this is a performance!" It seemed like 25% of it had been improvised, but all of it had the spirit of improvisation. His performances were possessed with himself on stage, deeply personal, unconscious always, done when he feels physically and mentally done. I internalized it and tried to bring it to the open mic in NYC, but only had 7 people left in the crowd for my performance, not a show I could read much into. Jay Lee attended, and had he stayed until the end, I would have made $45, enough to cover the several $7 Brooklyn Lagers I had been drinking and pay for my bus trip from Beantown, but he had to be some kind of working stiff and go personally train people very early the following morning, and so his responsible gain became my loss. Responsibility fucks me again, but irresponsibility only nets you short term gains. When you meet a struggler, watch for the clue of the one eminently irresponsible behavior that could be bringing them down. Their fatal flaw and/or their achillies heel, everyone has one, and sometimes they are not easy to spot, and are always even harder to overcome.
Being back at home, I got to see my Ma and dear grandmother, and the rest of our family who were coming in for the week, my cousins Lisa and Mark, and my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Mike, their parents and my mother's brother. We had family time. It was nice. We caught up and talked about everything, and I deftly avoided being drawn into terribly polarized politcal discussions with my Uncle who differs from me in national security issues mostly, and this stemming from a desire for Israel's defense and a distaste for Islamic extremism, positions I understand, yet extending into a wider array of topics that we have discovered are untouchable material when we spend family time together. And so as it went with my pro-Dubya senior year roommate at BC, we got along great by pretending we didn't think about those things, and agreeing on the "purple issues". The bridge of youth to adulthood energized my presence at home since I got to joke around with my cousins, not terribly far off from me in age, family folks now, but largely free for the week from the encompassing duties of parenting. It put me more at ease to divulge and play, when on an average visit I must produce interesting detail about goings on in my world. Not that it is laborious, or at all a trial, but the jazz of improvisation is absent. It's as if I were playing a game of "Questions" versus performing a long form scene. In "Questions" the two players continue a scene with questions and drop new information in the form of questions and ultimately the game ends when the action or fluidity of the scene stalls, and can be played past exhaustion, at which point the game continues, but no substance is gained. In long form, two people volunteer information and take what is spoken and acted upon and build upon it, sometimes creating masterpieces of visuals or absurd thought. There are no limits except for patience to sit and listen, and the pressing need that ultimately, we will all have to sleep at some point. Both are fully capable of being fun, and tedious, it all depends on the energy of the participants matching up with each other.
So much travel and pedicabbing stifled me from writing anything for two weeks, so I had planned to write the second full day I stayed at home. The desire to do it nearly drove me to pathetic angry glass smashing. We went to my grandmother's house and for almost an hour and a half tried to DECIDE on a suitable place to go eat somewhere, settling on some prissy tea room for sandwiches. It took nearly an hour for our server to log our orders and serve us sandwiches. I started getting a little caffeinated and really antsy to get out of that place, and I thought horrible thoughts of disrupting the tea service with broken glass, a few choice words into the air or to a child, or nudity, but kept my cool by venting frustrations to an available Miranda. I felt like nobody at the table really understood the need for me to go get writing done, how much importance it held for me, as if pouring things out could happen any time when family wasn't in town, that my commitment to it seemed frivolous and surely it could wait. This plus hunger plus overly decorated suffocating atmosphere had me boiling. I swear, if a door had started bleeding in there, I would have found an axe and gone Shining on everyone. It says a lot that on this day New Jersey ended up being the refuge I needed to take. Starbucks in an A&P. Holy shit, I never needed Jersey so much, and now I feel dirty for having typed that. Interesting New Jersey beers at my grandmother's helped me celebrate the escape from the tea room, the productivity, and lubricated potentially janky family social interaction. And now when someone is seriously getting under my skin, I say that he is "sending me to the tea room."
All the visiting west coasters wanted to get into New York City, and so did I, so I led us on a bit of a go round. The sun shone and we walked a lot. Jay caught up with us at Lincoln Center and we walked to The Carnegie Deli for an authentic New York experience, which amounts to, "Overeat here because we serve you piles of meat, you fat tourists." It's funny since everyone on this side of my family is particularly fit. So nearly everyone but me ordered giant meat piles, while I had secured a modest sandwich from a personal New York favorite, "The Lunch Box" and ordered a side of steamed veggies claiming I had dietary restrictions, but mostly desiring the sandwich of my choosing from a familiar place, and also feeling the Jewish guilt for entering an establishment with little intent to purchase. Small gains in healthy choices compensate for gaping errors of indulgence, maybe, I can pretend to agree with, sometimes.
We walked through Times Square, sat in its new closed off Broadway fold up chairs, saw the weirdos, and had a moment of "Well this is nice." As the sun lit up my skin, I screened on my interior the memories of my life in Times Square: Selling tickets to comedy clubs, driving a seven human powered circular machine entitled "The Party Bike" and shows and Thai food and working on 47th in a Broadway theatre for almost a year, these things that hurled me towards, and back towards pedicabbing. And when a memory or trigger of a sequence of events illuminates, the gun of causation goes off and you get the floating opportunity to play the game of "If" and/or "Why" until you are satisfied or too frustrated to continue, or perhaps just distracted by a Haitian man dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.
Texas weighed on me in the midst of family and New York City, most of which was devising some way to impress Violet from afar. I might have steered the entourage South into the Lower East Side, or maybe there existed in them a sort of desire to see it anyhow. My cousin Mark starting making passing references at obtaining a beer somewhere, and I certainly had a hard time disagreeing with him. We perused the shops on St. Mark's and, since the inspiration caught me in the knowledge of Vioet's car having only a tape deck, I made a point of popping in to a few music shops and asking them if they had any cassette tapes. I walked down a few steps into the cove of a music shop, and saw a tray of tapes that a large bearded man walked his fingers over. I became instantaneously competetive over the tapes. It turned into a race to see who could be most decisive about wanting certain music in the index, the fastest. I saw his taste in music as he plucked gems from the collection. I struck. Bowie. Talking Heads. Stones. Solid stuff for driving, stuff I knew Violet could make good use of on her drives up to Dallas or wherever to sustain her promising career. Think of me when Bowie gives you the chills and you love it. Victorious, I shelled out for the retro tunes, and settled in to a beer around the corner at what was, to my surprise in New York City, an Irish style pub.
We hashed out logistics for the group to get back to their car effectively, which boiled down to me hailing a cab because I knew the New York secret of how to signal to foreign drivers that us Americans of a different city needed transportation to some set of mysterious coordinates. I wished the family well and sent them off, and would remain in Manhattan to see my pops and his girlfriend, and then meet up with Lindsey, a girl that makes me ponder that there is, in some mysterious form, a universal law of interpersonal magneticism.
When I met Lindsey, the longest relationship I ever maintained had recently been severed after two and a half years. I was a wreck, and my friends urged me to go out and forget about the old and talk up something new. I wore a "uniform" which means a button down collared shirt, and rode downtown on the piece of shit single speed I had picked up earlier that summer, once known as "Hot Streak" but ultimately she had come to be known as "The Time Bomb". I rode with my shirt off so as not to sweat through the black to an even darker, damper, black. I remember talking to a few girls that night and as it always went for me in Boston, no matter how grody or cleaned up, the phone numbers I collected were generally utterly useless. Shane, a pedicabber and friend, tipped me off that a party still plodded on in Allston. I'm in Fanieul Hall, but I have a bike and a day to keep my eyes closed to follow, so I go even though I know I'll ultimately need to return to North Cambridge, a large triangle by Boston area standards. I locked my bike up to some sketchy fence in unfamiliar Lower Allston, and inside I became acquainted with Lindsey. The night played out to a fade, with the exception of a guy, Dave, who I found out had taken an interest in Lindsey for a while, randomly fell onto the table, I suspect to gain attention and sympathy, but his ploy was made of saran wrap; see through, too clingy, and ultimately disposed of, if even used. He lingered as I painstakingly explained to Lindsey why I wore "the uniform" and that I really wasn't a douchebag. She certainly took a hard line, but my story held water and as Dave sat around being annoying, we kissed and started a two week thing that involved a lot of ridiculous Cambridge to Brookline cab rides, and some cute dates. It fit the bill that termination would come with her moving to New York, just as I had suspected termination would come in my time with Meghan when I moved to New York. I visited her when I went to New York, and there existed the straw to grasp at, that just maybe, it was all happening again, that long distance nightmare worth dozing off for. But faded, it went the way of the buffalo, and went out of touch for a while.
Then I think there came a text conversation. If I could ever explain to you how fully and profoundly texting has changed our lives, let me simply serve you my stories as an archetypal example. In texts, we did a little catch up cat and mouse, and finally, on the second of January in 2009, the night before my canceled New Year's Day flight was rescheduled to depart for LA at 7:20 am, we managed to put ourselves in the same place at the same time. I think it really only took a few looks at each other's eyes to remember, and when she looks at me, I feel like there's a joke I'm telling that she gets, but always harbors some playful hostility for. We remembered that we liked the way both looked to each other, and we smiled like dopes until we kissed again. We left the bar together and I got into a cab with her, and the cab took us up to her apartment. Along the way we kissed and I explained about my flight, and how I could only catch one train to get to the airport on time. We arrived, paid the cab driver and she deepened her eyes somehow to request, "Just miss your flight."
"I can't, I'm sorry. I'll come see you as soon as I get back, I promise."
This was right around the time that I started meaning everything I said that isn't a joke. So I changed my return flight from San Francisco to go back to New York instead of Boston. The gesture was too bold. She kind of freaked out about it, and as I hurtled towards NYC on the LIRR, she stopped answering my messages, and I got hung up. Stranded in New York City, until the bus can cart me off. I don't blame her for it, I knew that once the shock of it had subsided, it still impressed as a gesture. The gears of time went round and we spoke again, and now, we meet when I'm around, and go drink together for the sake of a Wednesday, or whatever, and tease the embers of the thing that never turned the corner, and I think that suits us both fine, and we are friends from it all. So that night wrapped up with us sharing an armchair in Fatcat, drinking beer and listening to jazz, playing some table game, and I got that final bus home at 1:40, to turn around and head back to NYC to Beantown the next day, because there were 12 more days to work. And in case you were curious, when I went back to Kenmore to see if the Timebomb was still locked up outside of the Commonwealth Hotel, it had been removed. I hope someone rode it away fromthere, or better yet, a police auction and goes, "Awwww, fuck."
The freedom of a pedicab shift without a Red Sox game is special, there's an unrestricted feeling as you kick your feet up in Copley Square, beat up, hung over, tight, silly, or dour. You have tiiime. Six hours or twelve, you can spend a whole one or two or three out there mocking people. My favorite is when I spot ladies with Victoria's Secret bags and ask them, "Hey, what'd you get at Victoria's Secret?" Usually I get a sneer, often a wry smile, and one time a lady said to me, "Wouldn't YOU like to know?" It's this kind of fun that you can have with people to put yourself in a good mood. Not putting anyone down, per se, but simply giving them a good Boston style hard time. On seeing two girls with matching striped adornments, I quipped, "Is that skirt made of her bag, or is her bag made of your skirt?" Maybe lunch, maybe you suck down a coffee, maybe you make a business call, or pop into the library to drop a deuce, or maybe you are thrown into a work ethic by someone accosting you and plain old asking you if you'll take them to the North End. And you accept and start thinking about those good cheap slices of pizza you can nab if it's before 1:30, and act grateful whether they give you $15 or $40, but it's probably $20. You talk over the Nextel radios and ask how many bikes are at the flower shop, and see if anyone else is making money, or you watch the guy on a scooter windsail through Copley, and try to avoid eye contact with him. Best of all, you're never disappointed if the shift gets called due to rain, you just get your weekend night back.
When you are a pedicabber in Boston, it's perfunctory to be a baller when you are off work. My good friend Linda who I met a few years ago while playing the puppeteer for Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors" is a power player, corporate style. When I'm in town, she does like to go out to dinner, and it's turned into a special occasion date for us every now and again, and she asks me, "Where do you want to go?" I run a few places by her and they are all more costly than the best suit I own, and she tells me what she thinks, but mostly we try to come to an agreement on where it should be, and the agreement is that it will be damned good. I think that she makes in one day what it costs to go to Menton or L'Espalier, and my jaw drops every time the check comes, but some of my standard 12 hour Saturdays will also gobble up that dinner debt. Dinner is often a three hour affair, and it is course after course with wines and beers, obscure and fine stuff, some beer that you need a map to discover, followed by a code, a beer Dan Brown would write a novel about, as easy to drink as it would be to read, but in an intelligent way. The least I can do, even knowing her car isn't far off, and having found out that she has plans to attend to after the affair, is have a pedicab waiting outside for us to ride her to her car. I sent specifically for the rookie phenom who pulled some extreme number for the Red Sox home opener since I desired to process what he does that makes him so damned good, something I could clearly do in my post-deliciousness euphoria. He gave me a good enough ride, one that is just weird to think about, from Fort Point Channel through Southie to the pedicab shop in the South End. I gave him $50 including an old school $10 bill that he sold me a few days before for a new $10 bill. I like to collect that stuff.
I took myself back to Boston for this weekend to fit these kinds of things in to the rigorous schedule set in place by the Red Sox. A driver meeting had been planned for on Sunday evening, and we all thought that a local Italian restaurant would cater our event, but a major water pipeline had burst, and Governor Deval Patrick issued a boil order on all water before drinking. Of course, fancy restaurants like Menton were either boiling everything, or using bottled water to cook everything, since I'm sure their profit margins are vastly above their overhead, but not so for Maggiano's. They just couldn't whip up a few trays of chicken and pasta for us in this emergency. The disappointment came with understanding, and a collective helpless shrug, and so we drank for dinner. Pedicab trivia hosted by Carl "Hot Carl" Foss, with a fridge so full of beer, it looked like my old wallet after a doubleheader, you just couldn't believe so much had been collected in one little place! I know for sure Jon Simmons and I played on the same team, and we came up with a pretty great name for our trivia team, "Late Night With Sean Bailey," honoring the surly style with which Mr. Sean Bailey would manage a shift, and that it could only get worse as time progressed into severe drunken disasters of $3 hot-girl rides, broken chains across town, and a mysterious, mutable shop opening time that might be cryptically 20 minutes later than promised. And any good trivia name goes through a metamorphosis of meaning, and playful manipulations of the title are acceptable to the host once you've established your base name. "Early Morning With Rich Mather" was a title that evoked a similarly unpleasant experience for pedicabbers who have encountered the personality in reference, but for those without the knowledge, imagine the attempt to have a conversation with someone that seems to be listening but will not respond and is actually actively ignoring you. It makes you feel like you've violated some basic human law of behavior. It is utterly confusing and altogether unpleasant, especially when regular interaction with this person is necessary, and you come to only expect monosyllabic responses, if anything. And so went our team title for comic emphasis. The question that really won it for us was the big bet we made on knowing the title of the musical "No, No, Nanette" that was financed by the trade of Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees. In the middle of the trivia game I suggested a beer run, since we had run out of beer, a feat that only a set of pedicabbers could make easy. A few guys started talking about taking the pedicabs on the beer run. The GM explicitly warned them not to, but they did it anyway. They brought beer back and were then sent home. The next day, those two guys who took the trikes, both veteran managers, were fired. After they were sent home, we recorded our victory. We won Supersoakers, brilliant, neon-colored trophies of our trivia expertise, but the victory felt incomplete with the fate of the jobs of personalities we loved in the balance. I left mine in the shop, and I don't know who has it now. I hope he or she correctly answers the question of, "Should I supersoak that ho?" The answer, of course, being "Supersoak that ho." Relax, it's a rap lyric reference.
We all partied at T.C.'s Lounge after abdicating the shop. People started going after the porn DVD's in the skill crane, and with astounding success. Five separate drivers obtained raunchily titled video discs, a few of which I recall being, "Young Girls Luv Cum," and another called "Black Virgins". Simple and eloquent, we know what we'll get in these films, and it's not skilled editing, or special effects, and it's likely not virgins either. My trivia compadre, Jon scored the latter of the two masterpieces of American cinema, and subsequently a group of six or so pedicab drivers all feeding dollar bills into the machine, elevated Jon, and carried him about a half mile down to the Charles as he drunkenly screamed obscenities about his sexy, and racially charged victory, his second and more glorious trophy of the evening, realizing a little too late that he was going to be put in the Charles River, yet submitting and allowing it to happen like a champ.
There were a significant amount of hangovers when the second ten game Red Sox homestand began the next day. Somebody who missed the prior evenings proceedings asked Jeremy how trivia went, and his immediate answer started with, "Welp, two guys got fired..." Fortunately for the bereaved of lost drunkeness, it was hot enough to sweat it out after half a dozen rides, and I had until about 3:30 to make the knuckle dragging entrance to the shop, so I had already almost completed the recovery checklist. I cannot procure any useful information about this day, except to say that I worked, made money, I probably made someone laugh. The days washed over like the late night, salty showers after the shift, where you lean on the wall and just hope you don't knock the beer over when you reach for it, because you are fried. I stayed two nights out in Brighton, where I used to live. It might have been more, since hanging out with Jeremy is always enjoyable, but returning to Bennett St has its drawbacks. The aforementioned Rich lives there, and he's as bad with dogs as he is with humans, and you could tell that if Rich could talk to others like most normal people can release words and ideas, he'd be a real dick, just like his dog. He thinks anyone that doesn't like his dick of a dog is a dick because they don't like dogs in general. What a dick. And his major qualm with me is all the mail that still goes to that address for me. I'm not saying it's a clean thing, really, but having my mail still sent there so that my insurance company believes I'm still a Massachusetts resident is important to me, but Rich make obnoxious rusty nail complaints about how I really need to get my mail forwarded. It's not like I'm a Scientologist and I told them I'd host meetings at the house, and moved away, and they come trying to convert the remaining humans, and kids in guy Faukes masks hang out outside the house, although once Jeremy moves out, this might be a good practical joke. I left my bag in the front hallway, it wasn't hurting anybody, but Rich says things like, "What does Dan think this is, his hotel?" No Rich, I think I have a friend that resides in this house and he said I could rest my bones there for a night or two, on the leather couch I went and acquired that you still use. Didn't you get the text message about it being OK if I crashed for a night? You did, but you didn't respond? Please eat some mild poison. I still have stuff there, I'm trying to ditch it through craigslist remotely. With any luck, that will go smoothly, and I'll eliminate Rich from my life entirely. He seemed harmless at first, hurt that we almost got an apartment without him, and we all felt a little sorry, but then he turned pissy and passive aggresive. Sometimes Facebook tells me I should reconnect with him. When I hit 1000 friends, I'll defriend him. I'm actively convincing strangers to add me on Facebook so I can celebrate that day sooner. 935 and counting... The best parts about staying there was that I discovered I had left a towel in the bathroom, and so could shower and be dry, and obtained the set of jumper cables I was lent by a stranger in too much of a hurry to give me a second jump in a row. The details of this come later. My exit came with a particular glory of not just going, but bending the MBTA to my whims, and traveling from Brighton Center to Davis Square in 21 minutes. I felt like I was surfing the big one, except I had paid $1.70, and read the Metro along the way. Alas, it had little to compare to surfing, my bad, but I keep track of these things, and make silly comparisons.
I just played patient for the all day bender, that annual beast of a day where Kyle Crand and I go to a Red Sox game and ostentatiously display that we are having a special event. Jeremy planned to join us this year, and for all the threats I've made to the general manager of walking into the Capital Grille to have dinner, this time I meant business, and business equals steak. The GM and I established a relationship a few years ago where he gives me a ring from his phone when he has a pick up from his restaurant. He'd call me before calling the company. Typically it went like this.
"Hello," I'd answer in the middle of my ride, ignoring my fare.
"Dan man."
"Hey!"
"Hey, it's Chris at the Capital Grille," he'd state with a gentleman's subtle pride in who he is.
"Hey Chris," I knew who it was when I said hello. Hell, I have him programmed in, and he knew it too.
"I need two bikes in about ten minutes," he flatly stated, knowing I'd be there, there was never unavailability.
"I'll make it happen," I might have panted. "See you soon," turning to my passengers, "So where can I put you guys?"
He called me a few times while I dicked around in Texas, looking for bikes at the Grille. I had to call the company for him and arrange the bikes to go, wistful of working the Red Sox game.
So that Thursday we had a reservation for three at 5:30, and we went in looking good, but casual, except me, I wore my Red Sox shirt, and that gnarly beard that got me called homeless, and we ordered and prepared to dish out the big paper. I had my old money in my pocket, and you know what that means, and no, I wasn't broke. We ate more than our stomachs could really handle. Adam, our server brought us some recommended selections of wine to go with our steaks, and Jeremy even tried some, or I imagined him to, but I think he did. I think we ordered too much, and afterwards I understood when people would waddle out of the door that the valet opened for them, and decline a ride, burping out, "I need to walk," and nodding as if I knew what they meant. But we planned on the ride no matter what, we had to be bigshots. We usually request our driver by bike number. We try to pick out the bike that sucks the worst to ride, and our tip makes their tardiness to work and bad fortune a sudden positive. This time, we just thought Nate Gomes deserved a gift, and he arrived, and for a ride to Jerry Remy's that any pedicabber would probably get $10 from, be happy to see $15, but would most likely earn $20, we dropped $64 on the guy. Playin' like pimps, were we. Kyle threw the extra $4 just for emphasis and to make the tip amount quirky, I suspect.
There we met Jack, my host at the time, friend I met through Mike Marshall a few summers ago, and he worked the deal out for our tickets, cheap enough that we need not deal with those glorious citizens, the Fenway scalpers. We took a beer down at Jerry Remy's as the Sox started getting pummeled right away-Daisuke getting into early trouble, to settle down later, as per usual. After the bottom of the 1st, we felt the urge to actually enter the staidum. I don't entertain much in the way of religious feelings, but for me, entering Fenway Park is as close as it gets, apart from those spontaneous moments of feeling like I'm experiencing too much coincidence, or luck, or beauty. I figure only Red Sox fans will understand, or perhaps sports fanatics, and as sports fanatics go, I'm tame, not fanatical, yet fervent. It is the way religion, if there were one that is true, ought to feel: Excitement to arrive, observation is crucial, the sensation of belonging to a large crowd in one space, one world and universe, the ability for a single person to influence nearly 40,000 others with a slow start to a commonly executed chant of "Let's Go Red Sox," five particularly syncopated claps following, and the crowd allowing itself to be influenced for everyone's enjoyment and in the name of supporting what we believe in, a few guys down there playing a game so we will be entertained. And that crowd is overheard on TV, the jolt to the chant unbeknownst to potentially millions of viewers, and yet the chant so familiar, the nails still being bitten, the hope that God will reward the faithful never muted until all hope is lost. What church do you join to get that? I guess if they lose, it could be any church you feel like picking, since in my opinion, you just don't win with organized religion, only in sports. This, or I am the delusional one, or it is one and the same, any number can play. Any way you look at it you lose if you don't do for yourself. I won that day. We surreptitiously improved our seats, the Red Sox came back to win, and we scored John Nolan in a Mainstreet to return.
The bender headed to 80's night, and we were denied access in a blaze of argument. How else should it go? The best part of it was after that we went to a different bar, then Kyle left, and I thought that since I knew the name of the bouncer who refused our entry, I could go back to try again. It was an action that wore the mark of the all day bender. I'm pretty sure I ended up at the Model for "the unnecessary drink" where there's really no reason to have that last one at all.
The next day I arrived egregiously late for my day shift before my night shift, but if you're paying, you're paying, and if you're not working, you're still paying. I must admit, the details are scant about this weekend except for some numbers. I lost my phone in Vancouver, and with it, lost were many notes I made on actions I took and beers I drank. You'd be surprised how much one small record of where I had a PBR can conjure to a human mind, the location written, the people, the jokes, the time of it all available from that reminder. What a shame. All I have to use as reminders are the updates I made to my Facebook status, and in this all I find are statements like, "Dan Kerrigan: The Science of Punching Testicles." How useful. I guess back in May I didn't realize there were more important things than punching testicles, and the scientific explanations for such behavior. And truly, I had this conversation about the best direction in which to punch at the testes, and explained that it should be downward to the left OR right, as to trap the balls in their own sack, against the greater, more solid mass of the human body, perhaps hitting them so that the penis, if slightly to one side, might even be avoided entirely by the force of the knuckles, not that your penis would really care. I mean, its all very elementary.
You can't go to Boston for a month in the spring and expect to get out of it without getting the classic $5 ride, or feeling just 35 degrees Fahrenheit on your face at some point. The annoyance of it reminded me I'd left and swam in warm water on Easter, and returned to Boston for business way more than pleasure. The entirety of the second ten game set did not surpass the profitability of the first, but the feat of sustaining functionality throughout all of the games I obtained through scheduling was still no small feat. I am curious, if it existed, how close 22 shifts out of 27 days would come on a scale of difficulty where the top would be represented by respectably completing the Tour de France. I know the least of my shifts stretches about 25 miles traveled on a pedicab that is up to twenty times as heavy as your typical "tour" bike, before you stack some fatties on the back to tow around. How long are those stages? I might have some French people to sweat on soon. I used to placate my father with cycling in lieu of running as a child in need of exercise, and I'd mention the Tour as a far off goal, but the work ethic involved in attaining that kind of physical ability eluded me as a chunky, reluctant-to-exercise 11 year old SNES addict. Until my pedicabbing days, the closest I ever really came was beating Uniracers.
Time slips out from under your hands when you start paying attention, like a housefly you try to smash against a table. The moment you try to stop it, it goes just a little faster. I believe that's why dumb horses just let them fly around while they chew hay, but I don't eat hay, nor does my ass stink as badly as a horses, or so I've been told by passengers in my pedicab, or so I've told them, and they've politely agreed, regardless of the truth. The homestand drew to a close and I tried to grasp at those last chances to see my Boston friends and leave everything "perfectly". And as fantastic a last night as I had with Phil, Melissa, and Phil's sister Leah, perfect is really never an option unless you have no expectations, and this personal truth always makes me feel like I've missed someone and will inevitably have to apologize to someone. This time it fell on my very last Boston host, a guy who for all our differences and arguments has been a truly solid friend, one of the poor guys who got fired from the "Trivia Incident." Without getting a chance to say goodbye, I took the borrowed jumpers and made the meeting of myself and "Anne With The Jumpers" happen. She worked down in the financial district, so I rode Keith's bike on its last errand, and hand delivered the cables to her as she popped out of work for a moment. She asked me about Longshot and I remember being touched that she remembered the name. I took off for Game On! with a new Facebook friend and a last name to fill in for "With The Jumpers".
After fulfilling the tradition of eating a massive plate of nachos with Jeremy, I got a few beers I thought Keith would enjoy, a small thank you for the lend of his mountain horse for the month, and placed the bike with the "gift bag" in the shop bike rack. Of course, I had also purchased myself a little present since I had put a few mediocre beers in the pipes during the nacho session. I sat there in the shop joking around with Melissa, Boston Pedicab's under-appreciated adhesive, the month just processing out, relieved, and a tiny buzz on to enjoy the work well done, and the friends I'd miss. Then suddenly I realized I might be testing the punctuality of my chosen airline. I left pleasantly before I began my freak out. I walked down Tremont Street, my eyes darting wildly to find a taxi, now checking my phone compulsively and fretting for every lost minute. I had to return to my host's house and grab my belongings before going to the airport. I got all the way to Mass Ave before getting a guy to turn around for me, and he waited while I ran for the apartment, my stuff, and my flight. I got to the airport, and slid right in through the typically choked and lagging security lines of Logan International, this time not letting my Sigg water bottle fall victim to a small amount of liquid still living inside. A nap to Chicago later, I sat down for my layover at the bar to watch the Celtics take on the Cavs, talking to someone from Texas, still holding enough Boston inside to yell at a television.
The odds and ends between drinks and friends and bike rides and trike rides fell to keeping lines with Violet and Miranda. I guess for all of my absence, and for how short a stint we three have had in any one capacity up until this time mentioned, maintenance of long distance relationships is undeniably difficult, not that any long distance item in the history could possibly be summarized as easy. And to illustrate, simply read the phrase, "Oh yeah, dating that girl in Seattle while I went to school in New York was easy." Sounds foolish, right? Maybe less foolish if you suddenly make those kids rich, but please give me the license to feel singularly correct about how hard long distance can be, at least for me, as much as I've tried. Even a one week vacation from your best girl can give you the taste of what it could be. The abyss of togetherness stung more softly since my return was imminent but the stress of distance made me evaluate things in a starker light. I thought of the distance and the energy I had committed to both of these girls, and I considered the actions I took, and carefully deliberated the two different personalities that I bonded with. I talked so much with Miranda over that month, and only occasionally with Violet. Nothing about all the traded words got very deep, except the connections. I sent Violet those tapes, and a post card with a map of Boston. It was raw and cute, and didn't mention missing her, but was made of the fun we have of the childish way we interact with each other. I hoped she'd be reminded I'm awesome, because I feared losing that special thing with her. In the next moment I could trust in Miranda to talk about anything, tell her any secrets or trivialities. Miranda would mention to me once in a while that we were very different people and I knew, but we both knew that just liking each other and being open and understanding was strong enough to keep something. And retrospectively, I do see the hints that Violet dropped about the nature of our relationship, and chose to focus on the laughing, the fun, the creativity and encouragement we had for each other. To me, the things we built in conversation, in ideas, in pointless improvisations were so great that I guess I missed her hesitance to bring it along further. I started to get uncomfortable with the idea of going back and forth from one to another, and I decided, in specifically important and fundamental ways, that Violet and I were more compatible long term. It was all this self-instigated thought that led me to do what I thought would be the right thing for me, and for Miranda, and I hoped, for Violet. Sometime late at night during my stay at home, I tried to let Miranda down easy, and told her how I felt. I explained in gentle terms, and she got it, and I cried. I told her how hard it was, and how much I wanted our friendship to continue, and we kept talking nearly every day. We broke the would-be boundaries of the new terms just a few days later in how familiar we were through texts and talks, she told me how much it sucks that she actually likes me, and the pet names of "feo" and "fea" never really disappeared. I asked Violet to pick me up at the airport, a request that seemed to ask forgiveness for putting Miranda on the task last time, and Violet agreed to come. She didn't yet know that I laid a line down for Miranda, and I didn't know when I was going to tell her. Of course, for a twist of fate, something came up and Violet couldn't pick me up anymore, and Miranda was willing and free to come get me. When I walked out of the terminal to where she waited, I saw her standing there almost laughing just to see my face again, her smile giving away too much, and I knew she didn't know what to expect. Man, I was so happy to be back in Texas, I went right up to her and kissed her. The kiss slowed, and I knew I had missed her pretty bad. Was I really going to leave in a month?
Statistics:
1,955 mi from my apartment in Austin, TX to The Boston Pedicab shop, roughly.
19 Red Sox Games worked out of 20
22 shifts worked out of 27 days.
$190+ spent on the All Day Bender (A relative steal considering we went to Capital Grille)
$150 tip left at Capital Grill-Quoth our server Adam, "Guys, this is over the top."
$0 + tip for three meals at Capital Grille with sides and whatever.
13 drinks, I believe, on the All Day Bender
Red Sox 11-Angels 6 on Thursday, May 6th
7 cassette tapes sent to Violet
14 times Lugo called me a homeless man because of my beard (or thereabouts)
$5500 approximately to show for the homestand, returning to Texas.
No drink list until about Day 180 due to the theft of my phone after having been assaulted in Vancouver. Yup.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Longshot
As the sequence goes, I said in October, "Fuck it, I'm not going to be cold this winter, I'm moving to California," and so purchased my ticket from Boston to Los Angeles for the 5th of January. Then I smashed my face into the rear of a car and knocked two teeth clean out of my head, and I spared no expense in repairs, in the future where I actually pay for those costs. Then I found the Longshot. I had been a part of an online community called "Freecycle," where people have things that they no longer have a use for, but in lieu of throwing them out if they might still be useful to handy or Earth friendly folks, they are put up online for grabs. Free moving boxes, reusing packing peanuts, televisions, and if you want something that somebody might throw out, you can also put the desire for an old generation of ipod out there, or a used cell phone. I've seen a PS3 go up. And I saw a car. I scoffed, "No fuckin' way." Yes, I often curse to myself. It's a longshot, but what the heck, right? Send an email! You don't catch any fish if you don't go fishing. I get a reply back that tells me it didn't work out with the first person, and I should come take a look. I guess I have to! One needs to explore these leads-if its for free, it's highly unlikely that it's worth it, but hey. My Uncle Tom is kind enough to pick my toothless ass up at the train station when I get in to Providence, and we head down to Kingston to view this car. The drivers side door has been bent backwards in an accident, and so a new one must be acquired. When we arrive, the owner has been driving the thing around already, and as it comes around the corner, I'm kind of in love. This car has some character. She said that after a year of sitting around that it started right up, which I later learned was a thick line of bullshit. Now I don't really know how to drive stick, I've only done it a couple of times, once was when I ignorantly looked for my first car, and idiotically driving his vehicle around, the owner looked at me like I just shat on his front porch and lit it on fire and stood there waiting for him to find out. This time intimidated me even more, even though I knew better. I got in this thing and whipped it around a few turns and got her going, got the hang of it all fairly quickly, I thought. The car only had 134K on it for a 26 year old car. Apparently a guy had driven it a mile and a half to work and back every day for 20 years. Glad it's not my life. It had been from Boston during Mayor Flynn's administration, to Missouri and back. I can tell by the remnants of the 20 something year old Allston-Brighton parking sticker. But the car is working, man, it's going, the engine is lookin' pretty good. Now all I have to do is find the door, another task with the odds of success being stacked against the good guys. Maggie, the owner, tells me that if I tow it away, it's mine. I tell her I'll get back to her later in the day. She's dying to unload this thing, it's clear. I call around to auto salvage places for a few hours and actually find a place that has a replacement door, and on top of that good fortune, they are the closest place, and know a towing company across the street. Of course they do. The best part is, that even if the door they have won't go on smoothly, they'll take the car as junk for $150 less the cost of the $75 tow. I can't lose. Not even on travel costs or time, because I got to visit my family in the process. They tow it over to the yard, so now its actually mine. The guy says the door is a pale yellow or brown, and I'm thinking, "Holy shit, it might actually be the same color as my car!" New news, the guy called me and tells me its the wrong door, but he's gonna make a few calls to his junkyard buddies, also I need a new axle since the car clicks when hitting the extremeties of my turning radius. OK, OK, minor setback, but he says he can put the potential door and axle in for about 60 bucks each plus labor. I wait on pins and needles starting to fabricate this trip in my head pondering the possibilities that open up by having a car. Go to Florida to work, Work South by Southwest in Texas, high-tail it to LA via Colorado and Las Vegas. Arrive with extra cash. Could it be possible to move my life from boston to LA and end up in the black? Finally he comes up with a door. He says it's "dirty green" which excites me if I get to rock Packers colors, but really it's only dirty green because of the grime that has piled on it, it's powder blue. It's done and I can get it, so I go get the bill of sale, I got proof of insurance and I went to the RMV ready to get my plates, man, I was excited. This is when they tell me my license has been suspended since 2005. It turns out that a speeding ticket I got in 2004 had never been paid, even though I thought I had covered it. That was enough to get it suspended on its own, but on top of it, it cross referenced with something else. In 2001 in New Hampshire, I was boating without a life vest, and the marine patrol came up on us and issued my friend and me tickets. We spurned them, so I hope his license is still in good standing, or has avoided driving in New Hampshire, or he has discovered the ramifications of going delinquint on the government, which is to say, you will get fucked. I had to shell out $200 in reinstatement fees plus the $250 of the actual citation costs. Damn, it was a phone call making process, transfers, hang-ups, waits from office to office, fax us this, can you fax that for me, all racing to pick this thing up the next day and actually have it registered! I finally had my name cleared, my license reinstated, and there were license plates in my hand! Time to grab this whip and bring it on home, and then move on from that home.
My Uncle Tom brought me down to Kingston again and it was getting dark. I paid the fella for his services, a modest $270 all told for a door and an axle and a tow. I got to the car, it had been running for a while when I arrived, and my uncle asked if it was OK to take off, if I'd be all right. I said sure, but I was not even close to confident about that. I turned the lights on and it died on me. I dipped my head for the good sign. I frantically ran in to see the dude again, they were closing up and had I waited another few minutes, I might have been stranded there. He brought out a jump kit and got me going again, and I braced myself to turn on my lights, thinking, "Don'tdiedon'tdiedon'tdiedon'tdie (clickclick) YESSSSSS!" Now all I have to do is drive it. I chunked it into first and we all went forward with great surprise and trepidation: Me, for being stranded, the car for its mechanical health, the future for what I was about to do to it. The first road I rolled on forgave me for my skills, it was fairly empty and the speed limit and two lanes gave me some room to experiment with my gear switches. I shifted quickly and without proficiency, the car lunging forward as I gritted my remaining teeth hoping I didn't suddenly end up in reverse, but relying on the sounds of the acceleration to cue me to change gears. I successfully stopped at a red light and started back up, and I felt bolstered by this accomplishment. I really should have had a better lesson before I took off in what might have been my Japanese manufactured metal tomb, but I merged onto I-95 N around six in the dark, New England evening.
Traffic heading through Providence suffocated me while I hyperventilated about the dips in speed and sudden downshifts, and the few times I ground a gear incorrectly, adrenaline shooting up my spine, my eyelids flipping backwards as third gear took. I peered nervously at my gas gauge, the old gas in the tank should have evaporated after sitting around for a year in my sci-fi logic, and I wonder if I have enough to make it to Boston. It's gas tank versus distance, and gas tank needs to win this one. I have a ballroom dance lesson to make at 7:30, and I'm on target to get there, even with traffic, and I just watch the gauge drop. Finally, the traffic subsides, and after a few turns that I lean into with my body for fear of my unfamiliar car rolling, I can cruise smoothly, at the speed limit, not aware of what the beast is capable of yet. I-95 to I-93 success, and I'm about 15 minutes away from class when I exit at E. Berkeley to gas up. It's the nearest gas station to the dance lesson, so I'm not thinking about getting stranded at a sketchy gas station next to a halfway house, under a highway, and yet soon I ended up thinking about exactly that, and about expensive Boston tow trucks.
Eighty minutes of driving couldn't juice this battery up enough to stand around for five minutes as I gassed her up. I gave her a start and it wouldn't turn over. Chickchickchickchick. And my first world problem is that I fret for my ballroom dance lesson. "I'm going to be late! I'll never catch up on the new step!" Chickchickchickchickchickchick. "Fuuuck." I guess that Maggie lady had been driving the yellow box around in an effort to mask that the battery is a blink away from being useless. That's when I started to take in my surroundings, and realize I don't have any jumpers, and I might be going to see where Shit Creek dumps out to. I ask the gas station attendant who is fluent in English at about a second grade level if he has jumper cables, but this is new vocabulary for him. After the lesson, he fed me the bad news from behind the bulletproof glass, not for lack of trying to locate a set in various areas of the station. I considered my options and all I could really do was start asking strangers. I ask a few people who look at me like I'm some sort of maniac who needs money, and a few of them reacted with more bitterness for a jump-start request than if I had asked them for $5, you know, for charity. Several declinations through ten helpless minutes later, I found a good samaritan. A girl not too far from my age gassed up and I made my humble request. She broke out from her truck a brand new roadside assistance kit, and unraveled a set of jumper cables. I drooled at the energy they would put into my car. As the battery took in some juice, we chatted a little bit about how I had just gotten the car and I told her that I knew right away that I'd name it Longshot as I drove it up to Boston. I said to myself, 'This thing is going to get me across the country? That's a longshot," and my eyes widened and the odds against this vehicle actually working out for me were pretty great, and the name became apparent. The car started up and anxious to move again and drive away from Sketchy Square, Boston, I turned on the lights. Poop. I panicked and looked around for the girl who had helped me and she was already pulling out of the gas station. I flung myself out of my car and chased her down. Tapping on her window in the December air, right before she tried to enter traffic, she looked at me, nearly horrified, sighed, and rolled her window down.
"It went out again," I said, embarrassed and nervous to ask the same person for the same thing twice. "Can you possibly give me another jump?"
"I'm sorry, I'm in a real hurry, I'm already late," she confessed, observing my expression, and caved, "but you can just take the jumpers if you bring them back."
"Oh, totally," I effused, shocked. "What's your number? I'll bring them back in the next day or two."
I took down her information and planned to make it happen in the next few days when I'd be heading off to her town to attend a friend's party. She gave me the jumpers and I thanked her profusely. I now had the proper tool.
I returned to asking around, and this guy, I think it was an Hispanic gentleman who had been in the military gave me the start and took off. I let the car idle at the gas station, you know, because it was a good idea. I thought it would be long enough to get things going. Then I turned on the lights. Poop.
Another few requests later, a kind effeminate man reluctantly gave me a jump from his white VW GTI, the new hip one. When I asked him for a jump he looked exasperated as he agreed to help. It struck a nerve for me in how so many are willing to help when directly confronted with distress, but we are so selfish and it does take a lot for a great deal of citizens to get past the threshold of one's own self-interests in the name of humanity. If you won't do it, someone else might, but if you don't, how are you helping the sum climate of the human experience? Not that everyone has this goal in mind, and if so, maybe only in the very back of their broader personal goals, or simply just in rare instances, but it is part of the human experience to need help and to be able to offer it and keep intact the thin strands of faith in the human race. While I grant that there are those who will take advantage of the average human's capacity for kindness, for example, some drifter kids in Portland, OR, or your long-story con man trying to get his sick wife on a train to a doctor in Connecticut, or a friendly grifter who always seems to have just gotten out of the hospital, there is a point when the refusal to help can feel despicable, and yet the acquiescence to give charity can be so affirming. And so he gave me that jump, subtly indignant in the brisk air, and I thanked him and even apologized, and you could tell he felt right about lending a hand. He went and I actually prayed, you know, to the Force. This time, I turned my lights on BEFORE I removed the jumpers, and let the car burn fuel for new energy. I resolved to drive directly home, too late to dance, and no longer caring to endure car trouble. I needed the heat of my house and my bed. I sputtered into first and hysterically smashed down the clutch every time I didn't know what to do, and crunched numbers in my head to figure out what gear I belonged in. Turning around from Storrow Drive towards my house provided a cheap and life threatening thrill, and then hitting the stop light on that hill certainly scared the piss out of me that I'd roll back into some unassuming Boston aggressive driver who was a little too far up my ass. Boy was he lucky that I didn't accidentally throw it into third, because I did that a few times in the next few days and stalled out with a thud, not knowing for the life of me what I had done wrong and white-knuckled about the climbing engine temperature on my gauge. I accelerated into my pulled e-brake to prevent the accident, and skidded forward and left, into a parking spot to get another jump tomorrow.
For all I trashed Rich in the last posting, he has an oddly generous side to him. He's willing to help with a lot of things if you ask him. He loves to build stuff, built the bar in our basement when we first moved into 21 Bennett, and dissembled it after we realized it was not a good idea to have erected a bar just feet away from the drunk living in the basement. He built the wheels to my bike with great proficiency, and even took me to a rad bike shop to get the particular spokes that would be best for the structure. He gave me a jump when I needed to go get a new battery. He laughed when he first saw the thing that I intended to drive across the country. So with his jumpers, and that negative way he does things that even carries over slightly into his good moods, we invigorated the car to reach the Autozone that gave me my new battery-which could not keep the car alive after a month of being idly parked in my Austin driveway with the car clock on. Something about this car doesn't let that function turn off, nor will the radio actually turn off, they are always sucking out just a little bit of energy, just like Rich.
I went to a place that did cheap tune-ups to get my car road trip ready. I found out why they were cheap. I was recommended another tune-up by a reputable company in Austin. I went to this place with a guy so clearly foreign that it disturbed me to keep calling him George. George told me about a place that does cheap inspections. After having been issued a ticket down in the Seaport District, I had to supply my window and the City of Boston with some proof that the car could meet the state minimums. My horn was going to be an issue. Sometimes it would speak if you wanted it to, but other times when you really wanted it to, you could beat the ever living shit out of it and it would go Quảng Đức on me, and not a peep for the fire of blows I would rain upon it. I had to take my medicine of bad drivers silently and without audible protest. Many of my made fists were shaken in rage. A good LA and Texas lesson, I figured, since any random driver may be carrying a weapon, and drive by shootings are the easiest to get away with, since you are escaping as the crime is being committed. Yet George did me right by sending me there, the horn did not speak, but the car did pass, and they did get a little something extra for the favor. A mechanic in San Francisco told me that in Massachusetts, my car would have to be taken off the road. Boston City Hall dismissed my ticket in March.
I left Boston for Los Angeles on January 5th, Anne's jumpers still in 21 Bennett Street's closet. All the Longshot has to do now is drive across the country and be reliable in LA traffic...
Statistics:
$650 in total to get my license reinstated and my car registered in Massachusetts
153 days between receiving the jumpers and returning them
$213 for a bogus tune up
77.3 harrowing miles from the junkyard where my car was to that gas station
6.3 anus puckering miles from the gas station to 21 Bennett St.
$125 for 6 ballroom dance lessons at Boston Center for Adult Education
5 total jump starts in 2 days
$270 total to tow the car, replace an axle, and put on my mismatched door.
5 years that my license had actually been suspended. How about that? Sure did get away with one there.
$10 claimed as the sale price of the vehicle, 0 actually paid to the previous owner for the title.
My Uncle Tom brought me down to Kingston again and it was getting dark. I paid the fella for his services, a modest $270 all told for a door and an axle and a tow. I got to the car, it had been running for a while when I arrived, and my uncle asked if it was OK to take off, if I'd be all right. I said sure, but I was not even close to confident about that. I turned the lights on and it died on me. I dipped my head for the good sign. I frantically ran in to see the dude again, they were closing up and had I waited another few minutes, I might have been stranded there. He brought out a jump kit and got me going again, and I braced myself to turn on my lights, thinking, "Don'tdiedon'tdiedon'tdiedon'tdie (clickclick) YESSSSSS!" Now all I have to do is drive it. I chunked it into first and we all went forward with great surprise and trepidation: Me, for being stranded, the car for its mechanical health, the future for what I was about to do to it. The first road I rolled on forgave me for my skills, it was fairly empty and the speed limit and two lanes gave me some room to experiment with my gear switches. I shifted quickly and without proficiency, the car lunging forward as I gritted my remaining teeth hoping I didn't suddenly end up in reverse, but relying on the sounds of the acceleration to cue me to change gears. I successfully stopped at a red light and started back up, and I felt bolstered by this accomplishment. I really should have had a better lesson before I took off in what might have been my Japanese manufactured metal tomb, but I merged onto I-95 N around six in the dark, New England evening.
Traffic heading through Providence suffocated me while I hyperventilated about the dips in speed and sudden downshifts, and the few times I ground a gear incorrectly, adrenaline shooting up my spine, my eyelids flipping backwards as third gear took. I peered nervously at my gas gauge, the old gas in the tank should have evaporated after sitting around for a year in my sci-fi logic, and I wonder if I have enough to make it to Boston. It's gas tank versus distance, and gas tank needs to win this one. I have a ballroom dance lesson to make at 7:30, and I'm on target to get there, even with traffic, and I just watch the gauge drop. Finally, the traffic subsides, and after a few turns that I lean into with my body for fear of my unfamiliar car rolling, I can cruise smoothly, at the speed limit, not aware of what the beast is capable of yet. I-95 to I-93 success, and I'm about 15 minutes away from class when I exit at E. Berkeley to gas up. It's the nearest gas station to the dance lesson, so I'm not thinking about getting stranded at a sketchy gas station next to a halfway house, under a highway, and yet soon I ended up thinking about exactly that, and about expensive Boston tow trucks.
Eighty minutes of driving couldn't juice this battery up enough to stand around for five minutes as I gassed her up. I gave her a start and it wouldn't turn over. Chickchickchickchick. And my first world problem is that I fret for my ballroom dance lesson. "I'm going to be late! I'll never catch up on the new step!" Chickchickchickchickchickchick. "Fuuuck." I guess that Maggie lady had been driving the yellow box around in an effort to mask that the battery is a blink away from being useless. That's when I started to take in my surroundings, and realize I don't have any jumpers, and I might be going to see where Shit Creek dumps out to. I ask the gas station attendant who is fluent in English at about a second grade level if he has jumper cables, but this is new vocabulary for him. After the lesson, he fed me the bad news from behind the bulletproof glass, not for lack of trying to locate a set in various areas of the station. I considered my options and all I could really do was start asking strangers. I ask a few people who look at me like I'm some sort of maniac who needs money, and a few of them reacted with more bitterness for a jump-start request than if I had asked them for $5, you know, for charity. Several declinations through ten helpless minutes later, I found a good samaritan. A girl not too far from my age gassed up and I made my humble request. She broke out from her truck a brand new roadside assistance kit, and unraveled a set of jumper cables. I drooled at the energy they would put into my car. As the battery took in some juice, we chatted a little bit about how I had just gotten the car and I told her that I knew right away that I'd name it Longshot as I drove it up to Boston. I said to myself, 'This thing is going to get me across the country? That's a longshot," and my eyes widened and the odds against this vehicle actually working out for me were pretty great, and the name became apparent. The car started up and anxious to move again and drive away from Sketchy Square, Boston, I turned on the lights. Poop. I panicked and looked around for the girl who had helped me and she was already pulling out of the gas station. I flung myself out of my car and chased her down. Tapping on her window in the December air, right before she tried to enter traffic, she looked at me, nearly horrified, sighed, and rolled her window down.
"It went out again," I said, embarrassed and nervous to ask the same person for the same thing twice. "Can you possibly give me another jump?"
"I'm sorry, I'm in a real hurry, I'm already late," she confessed, observing my expression, and caved, "but you can just take the jumpers if you bring them back."
"Oh, totally," I effused, shocked. "What's your number? I'll bring them back in the next day or two."
I took down her information and planned to make it happen in the next few days when I'd be heading off to her town to attend a friend's party. She gave me the jumpers and I thanked her profusely. I now had the proper tool.
I returned to asking around, and this guy, I think it was an Hispanic gentleman who had been in the military gave me the start and took off. I let the car idle at the gas station, you know, because it was a good idea. I thought it would be long enough to get things going. Then I turned on the lights. Poop.
Another few requests later, a kind effeminate man reluctantly gave me a jump from his white VW GTI, the new hip one. When I asked him for a jump he looked exasperated as he agreed to help. It struck a nerve for me in how so many are willing to help when directly confronted with distress, but we are so selfish and it does take a lot for a great deal of citizens to get past the threshold of one's own self-interests in the name of humanity. If you won't do it, someone else might, but if you don't, how are you helping the sum climate of the human experience? Not that everyone has this goal in mind, and if so, maybe only in the very back of their broader personal goals, or simply just in rare instances, but it is part of the human experience to need help and to be able to offer it and keep intact the thin strands of faith in the human race. While I grant that there are those who will take advantage of the average human's capacity for kindness, for example, some drifter kids in Portland, OR, or your long-story con man trying to get his sick wife on a train to a doctor in Connecticut, or a friendly grifter who always seems to have just gotten out of the hospital, there is a point when the refusal to help can feel despicable, and yet the acquiescence to give charity can be so affirming. And so he gave me that jump, subtly indignant in the brisk air, and I thanked him and even apologized, and you could tell he felt right about lending a hand. He went and I actually prayed, you know, to the Force. This time, I turned my lights on BEFORE I removed the jumpers, and let the car burn fuel for new energy. I resolved to drive directly home, too late to dance, and no longer caring to endure car trouble. I needed the heat of my house and my bed. I sputtered into first and hysterically smashed down the clutch every time I didn't know what to do, and crunched numbers in my head to figure out what gear I belonged in. Turning around from Storrow Drive towards my house provided a cheap and life threatening thrill, and then hitting the stop light on that hill certainly scared the piss out of me that I'd roll back into some unassuming Boston aggressive driver who was a little too far up my ass. Boy was he lucky that I didn't accidentally throw it into third, because I did that a few times in the next few days and stalled out with a thud, not knowing for the life of me what I had done wrong and white-knuckled about the climbing engine temperature on my gauge. I accelerated into my pulled e-brake to prevent the accident, and skidded forward and left, into a parking spot to get another jump tomorrow.
For all I trashed Rich in the last posting, he has an oddly generous side to him. He's willing to help with a lot of things if you ask him. He loves to build stuff, built the bar in our basement when we first moved into 21 Bennett, and dissembled it after we realized it was not a good idea to have erected a bar just feet away from the drunk living in the basement. He built the wheels to my bike with great proficiency, and even took me to a rad bike shop to get the particular spokes that would be best for the structure. He gave me a jump when I needed to go get a new battery. He laughed when he first saw the thing that I intended to drive across the country. So with his jumpers, and that negative way he does things that even carries over slightly into his good moods, we invigorated the car to reach the Autozone that gave me my new battery-which could not keep the car alive after a month of being idly parked in my Austin driveway with the car clock on. Something about this car doesn't let that function turn off, nor will the radio actually turn off, they are always sucking out just a little bit of energy, just like Rich.
I went to a place that did cheap tune-ups to get my car road trip ready. I found out why they were cheap. I was recommended another tune-up by a reputable company in Austin. I went to this place with a guy so clearly foreign that it disturbed me to keep calling him George. George told me about a place that does cheap inspections. After having been issued a ticket down in the Seaport District, I had to supply my window and the City of Boston with some proof that the car could meet the state minimums. My horn was going to be an issue. Sometimes it would speak if you wanted it to, but other times when you really wanted it to, you could beat the ever living shit out of it and it would go Quảng Đức on me, and not a peep for the fire of blows I would rain upon it. I had to take my medicine of bad drivers silently and without audible protest. Many of my made fists were shaken in rage. A good LA and Texas lesson, I figured, since any random driver may be carrying a weapon, and drive by shootings are the easiest to get away with, since you are escaping as the crime is being committed. Yet George did me right by sending me there, the horn did not speak, but the car did pass, and they did get a little something extra for the favor. A mechanic in San Francisco told me that in Massachusetts, my car would have to be taken off the road. Boston City Hall dismissed my ticket in March.
I left Boston for Los Angeles on January 5th, Anne's jumpers still in 21 Bennett Street's closet. All the Longshot has to do now is drive across the country and be reliable in LA traffic...
Statistics:
$650 in total to get my license reinstated and my car registered in Massachusetts
153 days between receiving the jumpers and returning them
$213 for a bogus tune up
77.3 harrowing miles from the junkyard where my car was to that gas station
6.3 anus puckering miles from the gas station to 21 Bennett St.
$125 for 6 ballroom dance lessons at Boston Center for Adult Education
5 total jump starts in 2 days
$270 total to tow the car, replace an axle, and put on my mismatched door.
5 years that my license had actually been suspended. How about that? Sure did get away with one there.
$10 claimed as the sale price of the vehicle, 0 actually paid to the previous owner for the title.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Text-iles
Days 86-99
If it's gone from my memory, it should be gone from my memory. This is a new Irish expression that I just invented because I am partly Irish and qualified to do so as somebody who has blacked out drunk before. Perhaps some drunk had invented it before, but forgot all about it. I reveal this revelation to rationalize my way out of certain details that have escaped, perhaps a moment in time will unearth them from the recesses of my grey matter curtains, but until the second or third draft of these entries, we shall all have to deal with the idea that perhaps some of the full picture has been omitted, and that this is the most resolute picture we will receive. So welcome to my incomplete life, I hope it mostly satisfies.
I don't know how delirious I became after the marathon of census hours I logged in woods and parking lots, and this very well might be out of order in sequence, in fact, it's abundantly clear that it happened the day before. It seemed to me that a few short hours later we were back to work trying to enumerate far less volatile locations. I only slept for four solid hours before opening my eyes in red urgency. Three something. I made phone arrangements for the next assignment and it boiled down to meeting at my house for an enumeration operation that took us down the block to a crack-cocaine heavy area, swimming in alcohol and grifting. We, the four youngest members of our training group, sat mocking ourselves, all with a beer in my run down neighborhood, the front yard recently mowed by a crackhead with a probably stolen weedwhacker. He did a good job for the twenty bucks we sent down the street to his dealer.
My group which was made up of Violet, myself and a young UT student named "Lyons", was designated to an area very close to my house, a place I commonly refer to in jest as "hooker East", since on my way home, the whores on the corner of 12th and Chicon cat call to me as if I'll hit the brakes on my bike when I suddenly realize that skanky STD sex with an absolute mess of a cracked out human is exactly what I need on my way home from ANYWHERE. Yes, there are several, and they all hang out by a convenience store that has "That's What She Said Mart!" spray painted on the outer wall of the second floor above the actual mart. I shuddered while rolling past a lady putting some lipstick on while sitting on a dilapidated section of masonry that led to no significant or worthy structure, only to be greeted in hopes that I would pay money to fuck her. I'm just two blocks East of this, enough space to feel safe, but just close enough that occasionally I'll notice in the periphery of my headlights as I turn onto my small block, a delusional or hallucinating person who is perhaps lost, or sleepwalking, or extremely high, having a conversation alone in the dark, unadulterated by the sudden presence of light. It is in this area we are to conduct census work, and we sit waiting for a mobile food van to arrive so that we can interview the hungry, the high, those that have accidentally found themselves there. While we waited, a young man with an angular face and intense eyes asks us for change so he can catch the bus, but Violet and I regretfully informed him that we have none. He tramped around the territory for the duration of our stay, a grifter in poverty, and I think it is unwise to ask his peers to help advance his cause when they too are in need, and where, for all the brisk walking he does with that determined go-getter expression, he might walk somewhere that would yield improved results, or reach the place his "bus" might take him. I think better and figure the bus he's trying to get on is probably crack, and he's always only a few dollars away from getting high, and shamefully young for it. We interview him, and he's kind enough to respond in a way that appeared truthful.
We talked to a man so hopeless to himself in his self loathing of his homosexuality that he could do nothing but get drunk. He was a perfectly sweet man, and we spoke with him for ten or fifteen minutes about all kinds of things. He whittled his day away at a bus stop, drinking, talking through the time, telling us of his family, too prideful to let them help him, too diseased with alcohol to help himself. We inform the government that he exists with a piece of paper.
We tired of sitting on the ridge of a vacant lot waiting for the food van to arrive, and so decided to wander around the area to collect more information than we may otherwise gain, actions not directly authorized by the government, but a tribute to the zeal we felt for being a part of an operation whose success we were at the root level responsible for. Let's take a walk around the crack block!
We approached some people with our badges and bags and pale-ass skin and were just outside of a building that seemed to have a lot of action going on inside. I thought it might have been a bar, but it seemed too busy at this hour for that kind of establishment and so my thoughts immediately turned to drug related circumstances. An older gentleman gave us a line of bullshit that just cracked his ass up, but he counted whether his name was Alotta Fagina and his birthday was today's date, or whatever he actually told us. We moved up the block where a yard sat between two houses looking like it used to have a house on its lot, but the house disintegrated or was sold piecemeal for crack. There must have been 10 or 12 people in this yard, and across the road from it, a few more. We spoke with quite an articulate fellow there, an artist, and philosophical type, a brilliant mind mired in a cesspool of drugs, crime, and the downtrodden. While we conversed, a man sat drunkenly lobbing cynical sentences our way, mocking our new friend, and on the other side, an obese girl smoked crack. The man offered me a drink from his bottle, and I declined, only to be criticized for claiming to be a drinker. If I were a drinker, I'd wake up and be ready for a shot. We filled out forms, and the information didn't matter so much that the girl wasn't actually 16, or anything, so much as they were counted. We made an attempt at entering that yard, but got shouted down, likely looking like three white brats with no business in a ghetto like this. Our new friend drew us a picture to remind us of him and wrote down his email address on one of our census forms. I emailed him and never received a reply. It's an eye opener to see capable sober minds become the hardened gum stuck on the sidewalk. They might just want things that way.
That night, Violet came over to my place. We watched about thirty minutes of a horrible movie called "How To Stuff a Wild Bikini", some 60's beach flick with Buster Keaton as a witch doctor and a plot that made no sense at all. It surprised us both that it tried to be a musical, and Mickey Rooney played a businessman in it and inexplicably there was a scooter race where people teamed up in pairs. A lot of running into hay and antics. We laughed at how abysmal the construction of the movie was, watched some comedy and drank beers, just enjoying a night in, stuff that felt a lot like comfort in a relationship. She spent the night and in the morning she told me she didn't feel right about how things had happened. It was too quick and she didn't know if she was using me, and it didn't feel like the right way to start something. I replied with my logic, words about being interested in satisfying the discomforts she revealed to me. Yes, of course let's do more dates and courtship, and I meant it all, because now to the best of my ability, when I say something, I plan on it being the thing I do, and I did what I said I would because I already knew that she was a person worth spending time with. I think I know these things faster and stay cooler longer than I used to, but I also know myself and my tendency to let my heart rule my head, but I made those statements rationally and with control. She conceded in the discussion, I guess time being the concession, and we proceeded with business as usual, as unusual as our business became.
Later that evening, I connected with Chad and Berto. Berto's birthday party commenced that evening, so attendance was mandatory. I had an OK time, ate a bunch of his cheese plate, but mostly struggled through some awkward conversations and it pressed me as one of those get-togethers where new people meet and don't understand why any others are there and have no interest in continuing any sort of friendship whatsoever, not even in a virtual way on Facebook. Chad and I bailed after a few beers and made a sort of South Congress round of the bars within a block. For Thursday, it could have been a lot bolder, but the night as a musical piece translates into ambiance and sleepiness.
Here's where things start smashing up into a magnificent and intense week of edginess, danger, and honesty. Before going in to pedicab, I met up with Violet for a bit of a date I promised her, and it seems to me that I'll somehow die every time I drive to her place, either because I'm lost and will starve to death, or because the exit to her place is perilous since I have about 70 feet of road space to slow from 50 MPH across three lanes to make a right angle right hand turn. Every time I experience this pattern, I feel like screaming, "AAAAAHHHH WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIII-WHEW! That was close." Arriving alive, we walked to the nearby "Whip In", a place I am a fan of because of its excellent beer selection. They serve delicious American style Indian food there (eg: curry panini), and we ordered a stout little meal and each have two beers while music tracks the background to our cute musings. A gentleman, I picked up the tab, and we walked back to her apartment. She showed me a recent piece of art she created, a naked girl on top of a dead, naked man. The girl is startled, in fact you've caught her in the act of eating the man's heart while she fucks him. Her eyes are hollow like an ancient Greek statue's eyes, but also filled with light as if her pupils hadn't adjusted. The curves are sexual and appealing and the juxtaposition of the nudity and sexuality of the style versus the cannibalism of a body hits me in the gut. I loved it. We talked about it and she made a gift of it to me on the spot.
I went home to retrieve my mountain bike and experienced a downhill ride with the wind all the way to the pedicab shop. I attached the trailer to the bike in that cumbersome process that I began to loathe. Each time I clasped the deadweight onto the seat post, the screws damaged the metal tube, another cost to make money. This weekend, an event called the Texas Relay took place, and for some reason that meant that 6th Street and most of downtown was gonna get real hood up in he-yah. I stayed over by where people are gayer and did OK for the evening, but riding that bike trailer scared the shit out of me. I missed the tricycle, especially bikes 13 and 16, and started formulating a plot to switch companies from Red Devil Rides to Capital Pedicab. I was proud of myself for navigating a double ride through the 2:30 am traffic that piled up after the bars closed all the way down E 7th Street. The trip time deserved more than $20, but I guess that's the new lay of the land in acceptable tips. On my way back to the shop, some fancy moves had to be pulled through some flashy traffic. Some cars had doors that opened vertically, and while in traffic, they stayed open so people could observe the entirety of the bodies contained in the car, or that's what I figured was the cause for that mechanical function. I witnessed on that ride, as I pointed out to my bemused customers, several cars with people in the front that contained baby seats in the back seat, sans baby. Model parents, I'm sure. People sat nearly outside the cars in traffic, with their butts on the bottom of the fully rolled down window frame, looking for a last stab at a chance to connect with a human. "Hey girl, hey ma, baby, baby, what's goin on, what's good, where you goin?" I witnessed my first pair of truck nuts, but far too large, and on a car that, if I were to be the driver, I'd deserve castration. This comes from a man who drives a 1984 Toyota Corolla with a mismatched door. I stopped to take a picture, only to get yelled at by some other pedicabber anxious to move through traffic the wrong way to return to his shop. I pocketed my camera-phone because he wanted to be a real dick about it, but watched in moral rectitude as he got stuck elsewhere in that mess, and began to yell at some vindictive driver for pinching him in a spot where the driver easily could have had patience and let him go. I knew the feeling and also felt that he got what he deserved for being a fucker about me taking a picture of the car nuts.
Back at the shop, I counted out and had a High Life to cool the pedicabbing fire, that energy of endorphins and feeling of gambling and winning colliding with a satisfying workout. I texted Miranda that I finished up with work and she still wanted me to come over, despite the time being 3:30 am. I loved it because after the shift, you just don't cool off that quickly and there's all this unwinding to do. Many nights I've pedicabbed in Boston and gotten home at 3:30 or 4 and didn't go to sleep until 6 in the morning, only to claw my eyelids away from each other to watch myself get ready and pedal back to work. This evening is better because the freedom of the next day being open is on my mind, so spending my last few waking hours relaxing with Miranda, beer in hand, air conditioning blasting, and her and her sweet, but hungry to chew things up dog Jag nearby, soothed me into serenity.
The next day before work, I tried to orchestrate a rendezvous with Violet at the ever elusive taco truck on South Congress. I want to blow this thing up and steal their recipes. Never has a food truck inspired so much ire in me, or perhaps in the history of ire-inspiring food trucks, but then again, I haven't yet seen Portland, OR. I had the mind to collect my trailer and meet her down at this truck, but instead she came towards me and we went to Tacos Selene, a very, very fine taco truck that inspires no such ire, but awe, and sits just blocks from the Red Devil Rides shop. I showed Violet the pedicab shop after we ate and gave her the first pedicab ride of her life. I didn't have all the tricks of a tricycle, but I imagine that the ride satisfied as a first.
The following night of work handed me great disappointment. Whenever the goal of a night of pedicabbing is only to make $100, I feel like I'm failing myself and that there is just no point. I took one ride and got a flat tire. Violet had already gone off to do something excellent downtown and I didn't have a repair kit. Meanwhile, a wedding party exited a building and I declined the ride because of my flat. Another pedicabber grabbed them and scored $50 to go around the corner. Fuck my life. Then when repairs finally showed up, since I didn't have a kit of my own, I sent him off to grab a ride from the same wedding, and changed out the tube, to pump it up with a hand pump about 8 inches long, taking perhaps 5 or 8 minutes to fully pump up the tire, only approximating what is proper, and pinching the flap of skin between my thumb and forefinger over and over through the process. Anger and pain. A little turn for me, a girl named Ryan came by and got something out of her car and I pre-sold her a ride to Congress Ave after she changed into her little dress back at her catering company. I took this one ride, and maybe another two, one having gone up this little ugly hill on 5th street from West to Guadalupe, a hill I know to avoid when I have a heavy load, or challenge when I have potentially big tippers on the back, and discovered I may have been riding on a flat tire the whole time. I ended up on West 6th Street waiting for repairs again, this time for the opposite tire, and feeling damned that there was not enough money in my pocket. I used the same pump to do the job. Pain and anger.
The only thing that made me happy the whole night was the moment I ended up in a short race with a girl from another company, super skinny, sporting a mohawk, wearing skin tight gold. Our rides started cheering us on and I'm hurtin' to keep up because I may have had a flat and riding the trailer is bullshit difficult, and I just barely pull it out to win, embarrassing if I let this stick girl beat me, but impressed that she, even though having the tricycle advantage, can make a match of it. I turned left to drop my ride and she proceeded East on 5th, then turning back to my riders and declare in earnest under a heavy breath about to burst out, "That was so hot for me." The next ride I got puked on my cab. The poor logic of her being in the center of three people riding infuriated me, but I ought to have made it clear that she should be on the end and that if she puked it would be $100, yet I failed to direct or disclaim. I earned $20 for the inconvenience of removing something from my cab that formerly rested inside of her, digesting, swimming in booze, that amateur. Gross, take me home. It was only a little consolation that she did also puke on her friend's pants a bit. Another High Life at the shop to take the edge off.
Here's where it gets kind of intense. The next morning is Easter Sunday and I previously spoke to Violet about going to something called body choir, and had been anticipating going swimming in some watery hole or another. Instead of making it there, I woke up to texts about body choir costing money and that Violet would pay if I came. I didn't at this moment have the get-go to quite move anything yet, so I only double over upwards at around noon to utter a word that has for good and bad reasons been the first waking word I breathe out, "Fuck." Fuck, I missed that thing, fuck I'm tired, fuck I'm hungry, fuck I'm horny, fuck I have to go to 80's night tonight, fuck the Red Sox play the Yankees tonight, fuckin' A MAN, I am waking up before I'm ready to go get coffee with an amazing girl and we are going swimming today! I manage to establish contact and meet Violet down on South 1st where this super cheap coffee shop also does reasonably priced foodstuffs and for less than nearly everywhere will refill my tasty iced coffee. I met her friends Katie and Rachael and they are sweet and hippie types, but to summarize is to overlook complexity, which I qualify by learning much more eventually, but impressions are impressions and they did come from something called "body choir" where people just dance around and do contact improv and act like free spirits, and some particular types like to dance sketchily with young nubile hippie women. Sounds like my kind of place! In seriousness, I felt modestly remorseful that I missed it just for the kick of trying it, and Violet likes a lot of fun things and I could always keep my mind open to try certain things that she deemed worthy of her time, so it personally disappointed, but here and now, folks.
We had our brunch or lunch, all part of the plan, and made off for McKinney Falls, a state park with several swimming holes. On the way Rachel and Katie sat in the backseat since Violet held permanent shotgun and everybody seemed to have an understanding for that, without me needing to even lift an eyebrow. It's the vibe that people can read in Austin, more nonverbal communication occurs here that one is more finely attuned to the subtle. I consider it a mixed blessing since I occasionally suffer episodes of unconscionable thickness. I opened the passenger door for Violet, and continue to seem like a gentleman, though my ulterior motive was to have her unlock my door for me since I have no key that will accomplish the job, the door being foreign to the original vehicle. She gets it and my embarrassment about it combined with my decorum of opening her door for her and stiffening up with my heels clicked together, be-sandaled as they are, respectfully nodding and bleating, "Ma'am," and it made a blushable moment for both of us.
On this day, despite a smidge of fatigue, I experienced awareness, and acted expressively. I've had coffee, and I'm just alert and looking to crack jokes about anything. I wanted to impress Violet's friends, but also know that overtly trying to do so is a recipe for failure.
Recipe for Failure to Impress
1 pt fawning
1 pt offensive joke
2pts self absorbency
pinch of desperation
More of a chemistry model, or 18th century, pre-Fannie Farmer recipe, but an oldie and a goodie.
So I kept cool. I drove us all there and apologized for the Longshot since the topcloth, that thing that sags off of its no longer adhesive life partner, the roof, is now reeeally peeling off of the rear part of the car's ceiling, and brushing the girls in the face, and flapping almost uncontrollably in the 4th gear wind from the roll down windows. They dealt with it, and graciously accepted the circumstances under which my car is mine, and we laughed.
We arrived at the park and skip over small streams of water that have carved their way into the life of the boulders we momentarily took for granted. We found a nice log to hang out by and put our stuff down, some guy they know has joined us to hang out and he can play a little guitar and they make some music since Violet has brought a small drum, and it's nice, I'm just glad to be in the sun and I respirate and damn the Boston winters with a smile, it's April and I'm going swimming, damnit. And we swam. It was certainly cold, and I hesitated to take the plunge, as I tend to do about 75% of the time, the shock of it all being unwelcome, but moving as quickly as you can for a minute always makes things OK, indicative of my lifestyle, I suppose. We swam and played like children, and climbed up through this smooth hole in the mountainous rock. People were jumping off of it into the water, and I wanted a chance as well. We ended up at the point of ascension, surrounded by rock, masked from nearly every other point of view, and shared a deep, wet kiss. In retrospect, I let myself be totally taken by that moment, overwhelming to me, just my kind of romantic movie moment, and I think she might have been there with me for a second, but I have been wrong so many times on things not fact or formula based. It's a kiss I'll never forget, one of the better in my life time, central to the progression of our existence as lovers and friends, and my trip, even with Violet's ensuing bashfulness of its almost public display. Happy Easter, Jesus. I watched her climb up to jump off the rock, assuring her that she had me as a safety net should she lose her grip on the wet rock.
Violet found garbage in the woods to her disappointment, and in tune with her idealistic side, tried to pick it up and collect it for proper removal. She is also a sort of activist, and she had created a fun and brilliant mermaid costume out of plastic six pack rings, "Thank You" plastic bags, and various other discarded plastic items to raise awareness for wasteful plastic and the great plastic wasteland that is three times the size of Texas and floating in the Pacific. I frowned for her because I know how helpless it can feel to be one isolated person fighting a bigger battle. Evil can win in this world. Just beyond in time I saw a mother giving her toddler Coca Cola through a straw and boiled underneath my skin. For me, it always comes back to education. Lady, you're doing a good job to create an obese person with diabetes, but calories be damned, you don't even know that he'll throw a tantrum for Coca Cola because he's too young to understand his addiction to caffeine, do you?
It was early afternoon and Boston was on my mind. I knew that I needed to keep apprised of the Red Sox, and thought of pedicabs flying up and down an open and paved Ipswitch Street, uncontested by cabs or construction, pulling $20 a ride to Little Steve's and Bukowski's. I let the feelings bleed out of me into conversation, and made it clear that I had this game high on my priority list. Violet talked about cooking something and I made mention of some food items I had purchased several days ago, I considered calling them trash at this point. She rejected my attitude and we swung by my house to pick the stuff up, have a beer, and head back to her place so she could construct something out of the ingredients we collected. Back at her place, I found and listened to the game on the radio, kitchen sounds in the background, and enjoyed a beer while a smart, funny, beautiful girl cooked for me. I had it all right there. In the evolution of one's personal navigations of interpersonal relationships, things become clearer as experience grows, and I don't spew this truism to try and sound qualified or official, but to illuminate exactly where I mentally stationed myself sitting on that couch, surrounded by art and the smell of dinner and the sounds of baseball and cleverly constructed hilarious conversations, absorbing alcohol into my bloodstream. I thought to myself, "This is pretty fuckin' sweet. This girl is an unbelievable catch, her willingness and desire to maintain honesty with me is rare, her acceptance of me as weird and as quirky as I am is soothing to those everyday insecurities, as little as I expose them, yet exposing them to her feels natural. I'd be very open to exploring a more serious, monogamous version of this. And she's cooking dinner right now, so let's wait until it tastes good to pass judgements." I didn't actually think the last sentence of that, but looking back from here it makes a pretty good joke. Dinner was fantastic.
The Red Sox fought a good fight, especially since the Yankees represent the Evil Empire, but even though I committed to support my red-stockinged troops, Violet said that her friends were throwing a party, somewhere not far off, so life must go on, we all must make sacrifices, the Sox were down, and plus I get updates on my phone, how adamant must I be as a fan? The party explodes with food, but the environment certainly maintained a chill vibe. I didn't know anyone and chatted with random people, friends of Violet's, let myself be a free body so she could politic with her group. Tame, though I got excited when my phone would vibrate and text me the Red Sox had come from behind to win. We made a slow, courteous exit, and took off for 80's night at Elysium. I knew Miranda would be there, and she is anticipating my presence.
Before I explain this, I've informed both parties of the existence of the other person I'm seeing. Both parties have explicitly stated that this is acceptable to them. In fact, Miranda is also seeing someone else. Violet says it doesn't bother her because it keeps our relationship at ease for her, and is even open to meeting Miranda. I don't know why, but I feel like with all the facts I had collected and what I know of each person that introducing them to each other is going to go swimmingly. I foresaw this meeting happening since I'm interested in seeing Miranda and dancing with her to 80's music, and we had both amped ourselves up for it for a few days. For some reason I didn't tell her Violet would accompany me, I just said to myself, "The more, the merrier." Violet and I entered and danced a little and I looked around for Miranda, but I couldn't find her. I thought maybe she didn't yet show, but as it got later, I got confused by the lack of her presence. Violet and I danced a little, and the music didn't really satisfy my cheesiness craving, the real synthetic, passionate stuff I wanted, but we let ourselves not care. I got my second drink and finally, I spotted her. Miranda had dressed herself up a bit, teased her hair out, and really gone to town for 80's night. She looked goood. I walked up and said hey, we hugged, and I greeted her friends, and we all headed for the floor. I guess I was wrong to blindside her, I have never been in this bountiful situation of doubly dating, but I introduced them on the floor. Violet took the introduction amiably, and Miranda quickly, but not lacking tact. I thought it went fine at first. Miranda went off to dance with her friends and I raised an eyebrow that we couldn't unite parties. Violet looked exhausted, her eyes could barely stay open, and so we made ready to leave. I said goodbye to Miranda, and took off. Not too much later, I got a text saying, "Dude what the fuck was that? You could have warned me. You embarrassed me in front of my friends." Back at Violet's we slept, but I ran concerned thoughts through my head with my eyes closed until I exhausted my brain to sleep.
I texted Miranda back in the morning, telling Violet that Miranda didn't approve of the encounter and that she was pretty upset. I chose to let very little of my distress about it on. How good was it all while I just had the balance? I texted
Miranda regarding the night before and got no response. After Violet and I parted ways, I had a freak out and went directly to Miranda's. I let myself in as is the custom there and she was sleeping. Her dog, Jag, growled at me and woke her up. She seemed nonplussed by my presence, not surprised I'd show my face. "Oh, it's you," she said. We talked about what happened and I didn't understand how I embarrassed her, though I knew what it was that did it. I explained to her that I had no intention of hurting her feelings and that I am honestly that naive that I would think it would be peachy keen for the worlds to collide and we could all live in harmony. Meanwhile in the back of my head is the thought that Miranda frequently pines about wanting to be with a girl and in several circumstances confesses to me that she wants another girl with us. I'm not an idiot, I do not squander these opportunities, but as is the case in my life, good things do have a great way of blowing up in my face. My grandmother says in her steady and wise German tone, "The wheel goes round and sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down." I feel only slightly ashamed to use the expression in reference to a potential threesome, but it applies to so much more as this all unfolds.
Miranda took me back as a friend, but the boundaries were not clear. We still flirted, we still made each other laugh, and the comfort level is the same. I tried to kiss her and she went cadaver on me. Not that I didn't deserve it, but I grew accustomed to this freedom, and its revocation hadn't become a clear reality for me. Parting as friends after issuing my apology for the overstepping of bounds, I took off to write.
Violet is an extremely dedicated artist. I've never watched a person complete tasks so efficiently like she does. She always has an iron in the fire, and is constantly juggling a multitude of commitments. She drives three hours to audition, and always comes back upbeat. Going to Dallas, going to Houston, hanging out in Denton. This girl is made of Texas. She told me about a scene she got tapped for that would be filmed for a directing class, and said the director needed an actor. She forwarded to him the small amount of stuff I have online, and he wanted me to work on the scene for him. Neat, a project!
Meanwhile, my census work reached its last full week of billable hours, and Fletcher handed me a project to oversee by myself. I didn't feel very much on top of my processes, so when people were suggested to me regarding who could assist on the enumeration tasks, I picked only a few of them since the amount of work was scant to begin with, and I picked a person based on their ability to oversee my work, and ensure that we completed it in the proper fashion, t's dotted, eyes crossed and all. Ike, one of the people I didn't choose, called me on the phone shortly after he discovered that I had not offered him work despite the recommendation that he needed work. Ike participated in the Vietnam war. I respect any man who can serve our country, and the fact that I didn't call him had to do with the fact that a few people already talked to me first, and nothing else. It's not like I was trying to pull some crazy ass threesome shit. As an actor, when I see a strange number, I pick up. It could be opportunity!
"Hello?"
"Hey yeah, Danny? This is Ike."
"Hey, Ike. What's up?"
His bluster kicked in. "Yeah, how come you didn't pick me for your project?"
I knew I might get a little heat from somewhere, so I stayed cool, "Ike, I didn't really have that much work for people."
He had been waiting for my first fluent sentence to react, "That's bull shit! Fletcher told you that I needed hours!"
"Well I got emails from Jed and Lily first, and Amy has experience," I reasoned.
And with gusto, savoring every vowel sound and stomping out the consonants, Ike had his royal flush to beat my quadruple nines, "Well you can suck my dick!"
He hung up. Well I never!
I immediately called Fletcher and told him that Ike told me to suck his dick. Fletcher was on my side and in the middle of our conversation, Ike called Fletcher to complain about me. Upon returning to our line, Fletcher elaborated that Ike had served in Vietnam and sounded like he'd been drinking. Doesn't make me want to give him much more work, I'll tell you that! Not the way to obtain more hours, no sirree, Bob! The work itself is not really worth mentioning, not much got accomplished, some people were helpful, others were not, some people got counted, some did not. Drop this off here, let them know you will be back soon. Go get things, be disappointed in how they can't follow instructions. There's got to be a better way.
I got to visit Milena, my favorite sweetheart UPS Store clerk to print out the script I needed for the Kramer vs. Kramer scene I'm planning to do with Violet. Our first encounter was one of subdued flirtation. I needed to print out a document for licensing that I could rewrite into something that my notary public at Chase bank would sign once I could sign it in his presence, and so after asking if they had somewhere to print out documents, she led me to her office computer. It felt almost forbidden because I got to sneak behind the counter into the back to operate. She gave gentle and patient instructions, and I still struggled to make the papers I wanted pop out, but finally figured it out. I fiddled around on my email waiting for my important hard copy documents to get hard while she went up to the front of the store to handle some of her affairs, and after grabbing the sheets I started looking at the comics she had taped to the wall in the back room. I read a few and emitted a low laugh. She caught me reading them. Being caught was better than anything I could have ever said to her, an action that created chemistry, a total bonding moment. She said, "You like my comics?" I smiled. "Yeah." She let this smile loose looking like a first, and clean paint stroke on a blank canvas. We sort of talked about what I was printing and I explained my notary public debacle and this shy girl behind the counter who only bleats the small scripts of the transactions her job forces her to make replied, "I'm a notary public." Whoa. "Really," I blurt in surprise. I'm thinking, "You're too cute to be a notary public!" Said my facebook status that day, "Well it's a good thing that random notary public was around!" I paid for my papers, and the clunkiness of performing a transaction through flirting made both actions better. I didn't have enough stuff to exceed their $5 minimum so I paid with a dollar, and got my coins back. In a moment of supreme cuteness, I wrote my number down and slapped it on the counter before hastily exiting in bashful retreat. It screamed high school antics, and I said bye, and before reaching the door I hear, "Bye Dan." I gave a quick throwback smile, embarrassed I didn't just ask, but afraid that I was so un-smooth that there was no alternative. So I'm back, even though she didn't call, but I have more documents I need to print, and my presence is a moment of function. She led me to the back for the computer, and out of curiosity I looked at her comics again. She caught me again, but informed me, "I haven't gotten any new ones." Smiles. I bring the papers up and she asks if I'm an actor and there is more small talk, and the confession is volunteered when she blurts, "I lost your number."
I wanted her to shoot it out of the air, that flying pink elephant in the room, and with beaming eyes say, "I'll write it down again, but are you gonna use it this time?"
"Yeah."
"Talk to you soon," I said, collecting my documents and myself a little less nervously this time.
And she sounds like she's actually going to call me in the way she says, "Bye, Dan."
I smile more confidently over my shoulder out the door this day. I've got more than I need already. Either way, she hasn't called. Small tragedies are everywhere.
Violet had a show coming up on Thursday and asked me if I'd like to open for her improv troupe. How can I say no? I'm not prepared though, and in my head, the bullet of that thought ricochets all over as if it would not lose velocity, doubt taking over in my ability to adequately perform to open up for her troupe. My last performance of stand-up happened on January 3rd, a half-chubber of a show, if I say so, not terrible, got it out there, but didn't really slay it. A half-chubber beats a limp-dicker, I can say that much, some sets in my memory being so bad I'd rather be taped to the floor and drooled on by a pervy Earth science teacher with halitosis. The limp dicker, the feeling of being not just in your underwear, but your manhood out, flaccid, and making eye contact with everyone like you're supposed to be erect, but it's not gonna happen, the supreme performance anxiety, or certain motivator. Also, sub-in girl parts for universal understanding. I'm sorry family, I'm writing crudely, let us talk about buttfucking instead, shall we? Wait, no. I fear awkwardness from Thursday. My stomach dropped thinking about performing comedy in front of Violet since I respect and regard her talents, so I desired to show her my best, spurred to succeed by the ramifications of a limp-dicker, and anyways it was high time I got back on that horse.
We rehearsed on Tuesday night and my lines were not there yet and I struggled for character and delivery, and it served as a stern reminder of the professionalism I'll need to develop when I start doing this kind of thing in LA. You're at work, so treat it like work, because people like to work with people who are pleasant to work with that don't suck at working. Still, I treated it too loosely. The rehearsal ran short and following the cursory meeting, I asked Violet if she wanted to join me for a drink at Little Woodrow's, where I could watch the Red Sox and Yankees play. I started attempts to indoctrinate her as a Red Sox fan, though our crew leader Fletcher disagreed with me and swore her a soon-to-be Dodgers fan. Probably not a seductive idea in either direction for an artist. I do let these things go, but I see myself in reading back on my own entries and wonder what some of my smaller actions mean in a larger sense, if they carry meaning at all, or if I'm simply an idiot.
Wednesday arrives. Early on, I go get a late lunch or early dinner with Miranda. We're hanging out and communicating again, her flip out on me boomeranged back to her as an overreaction. We went and had a cute little meal at Starseeds, one of her favorite little places to eat, when she eats, which is not quite often enough or with regularity. I've been around when she can't sleep unless she burrows herself into her closet surrounded by her clothes that pile up in the floor. This is a comfortable place for her sometimes and it's sad, but I also know it is what she needs to do to get comfortable. It is sometimes at these moments at 7 am that she'll spring up hungry and eat a cheese plate that Starbucks has allowed her to take away before it is no longer suitable for corporate sale. We meet and dine, and sat outside while she smoked. We talked about her class that she has failed four times and how her mother, a found Christian, will dye her hair blue if Miranda succeeds in finally passing a basic English class, not a thing of shame, but a problem of continued focus. The outlook is good and I encourage her through texts to get to her classes on time and turn her papers in when I wake up early at Violet's. We parted, still chemically reacting for each other, and it felt like a comebacker, or it never left, just hit a bump.
These are two drastically different girls, and yet I act the same natural self, a naked personality with each. This phenomenon has it's own level of appreciation in both exchanges, or so I judge the case. Miranda thinks I'm weird, absorbs a lot of what I say when I ramble, and likes the spectacle of my asininity, Violet appreciates the dorkiness I embrace, a familiar function to her, and plays with it. I show openness and understanding in the presence of both situations and they experience it differently, sometimes it comes across as too soft, or sometimes too sympathetic, but I cannot imagine being a different man. It was all so seamless for a while. When not with one, with the other, when one is busy, the other is free, coffee with one, drinks with the other, interchangeable, smoothly the guy to both women, nothing but fun and beer and jokes and sex everywhere. I wanted it back.
I parked my car on the long commercial strip of Guadalupe Street known as "The Drag" to meet Violet for an in class presentation of the scene we're doing. We were allowed to hold our scripts during the scene, and performed it for about 25 to 30 directing students. Our director manages to get us in first so we can proceed with other plans we've made for that evening. Right before the scene I find my deliveries, I hit all my lines the way I want to, and the scene ends, after which we were subjected to the feedback of a bunch of uninformed students. I didn't appreciate the criticism from them, as open as I tried to be to constructive critcism, which I found a little of. I found it unprofessional of the teacher not to release us from their presence immediately and let OUR director gives us the notes, not everyone in the room who hadn't read or analyzed the scene. It made me grateful for my own education. Holy shit, Dad, it's been valuable! Just kidding, just kidding.
We left and I griped a little to Violet, but we were heading for the "improv shootaround" at the New Movement theater, the second time I've been there. We both adequately improvised our way through a few scenes, nothing monumentally impressive, but just fun, keeping the dust off our generators. I discovered that the following night, they have an open mic and I talked to the right guy about getting on, and going first, so I can brush something up just before needing to show up for Violet's show. After the show, we separated as I made plans to meet up with my former roommate Eruch down in the warehouse district. The show for Violet's improv troupe happens the next day.
I stood around outside of bars on a Wednesday, waiting like a chump, thinking they were in a particular place and caring less than an $8 cover to go meet him until I found out were he is for sure, but it turns out that he very much lived in his typical character and arrived egregiously late. I sort of enjoyed seeing the bad from the street level precepice, a group of rejects in dorky gear, some name like "The Geeks". They had headgear, or helmets, mouthgrear or something that made them look ultra lame. A cute gimmick, something that Eruch might have appreciated, having been in a gimmicky "cock rock" band himself. I saw him walk by and nearly shit myself that he wasn't where I thought he was. My old impatient East Coast self. We went over to the Six Tap Room and as we sat, Miranda headed down to join us. It felt like my skin was echoing catching up with Eruch. He told me about how he and his bandmate Mike kicked our other old roommate Robbie out of their band. Robbie may have been the worst individual I've ever met. When we lived together, he got so drunk on his birthday that when I, the person in charge of collecting rent and bills for distribution to the appropriate collectors, asked him for his late rent, he broke a bottle and attempted to rush upstairs to kill me. He later confessed to me that he drank into a blackout and he learned from his bandmates that he had said, "I'm gonna murder him, that'll be fun." I tried to play a good friend for politics and roommate relations. A few weeks later, a clip full of out of print money went missing from my room, and it couldn't have been anyone else that took it. His band had come back from playing a pretty positive show, and I had come back from 80's night, all a little tipsy, all a little uninhibited, and we spoke frankly, me in front of the three of them, willing to take all arguments in defense of why he should still live there. I won all arguments. It played similar to breaking up with a girl you kinda like, but she's fucking crazy and might kill you, it just has to be done. This is the person that Eruch had cut out of his life, the cancer cured, after disrespecting Eruch's family in his own home in Mexico. I remember being proud of him.
Miranda showed up and the booze did loosen us. We changed venues and ended up alone at another bar, "The Ginger Man," the original bar that started the franchise that I've entered in New York City,and bullied the jukebox to play us our songs in a large establishment with only six or seven folks, like pennies in a sad piggy bank. The Gingerman hosted the rekindling of our fling, as temporary as it would be. "My place or yours?"
The next day Miranda forced me out of hanging out because she ended up almost crashing two meetings into each other, me and her ex-boyfriend Steven. The last time he saw her with someone else, he got really upset, and she apparently really cared about that, and didn't think much about what I'd think about her not telling me and rushing me out the door. And I wouldn't have cared if she had kind of warned me, but she started acting all weird and nervous and pushing me away. I pried the truth out of her, and she started to understand that she upset me, and I guess it transformed into a tradeoff for that 80's night business, and so, knowing we'd work it out later, I got in my car and started the engine and watched her go inside as Longshot warmed. Then Steven showed up. And I just watched. Checked him out, that's the guy. How about that skinny dude. That's the guy whose magnum condom wrappers I've found behind the bed looking for my hat. That's the guy that's in love with Miranda, and she just doesn't want it that way anymore. Time to go.
Enumerative tasks were at hand that Thursday and kept me occupied between other circulating thoughts of two standup comedy shows. I got excited by the idea that after a four month hiatus of performance that I'd do two shows in one night for the first time in my life. I organized my thoughts into stories and worked out a joke that Miranda actually invented, her sense of humor being both cynical and accidental, both of them the right kind of shocking. A happy accident about confusing whaling with whale watching, a standby joke I have now that is dorky enough to work for my face. The rest of my set contained stories of the census variety and regaling the experience of wearing our bright orange vest. I remember going on first at New Movement. Most of what I said tanked, or merely entertained as story, it lacked hits, punchlines, or perhaps the punchlines did not crack, but patted the audience on the arm with eyebrows raised, asking, "get it?" I was running out of time and so unleashed the whaling joke. It caused the first and only real eruption of laughter in my set there. A comfort to leave on, but a little confusing. I guess they just wanted dorky jokes. I have a bunch of em, but oh well. I left after watching the first snippets of a very clever comic who exploited his accent for huge comic rewards.
I biked over to the next show, a whole 2 minutes away, and dismounted with my usual one footed, hand brake hop off, locking up my horse as Violet's friends half viewed me through their warm-ups. I awkwardly stood on the periphery awaiting instruction or introductions, and after the latter, tilted into the slight maze inside. Several familiar faces popped up in the crowd, and I pumped up my anticipation for their enjoyment, despite my insecurity for the impending quality of my performance. "I'm about to try for you all", I think, and almost think "y'all," but focus on the words I think I'll say, ones that will mostly come to me in the moment. Before I really have enough time to think too much about it, Violet goes up on stage and starts to introduce me. Oh, damn, I guess its time to get up and be funny. I'm pulled up by the introduction, thrown into the fire of silence that I need to fill. There's a little dialogue between Violet and I as we play with the air and it comes around that I should talk about my car. I had just recently watched George Carlin do a bit on cars, and how his old style was not curses, anger and cleverness, it was jolly physicality, and somewhere in me the 40 oz of beer and the blood released it all from my brain. I acted out being a participant in traveling by my car, and while singularly unimpressive, the action I lent to it pushed everything I revealed over the edge. I revealed the process of how I need to unlock my car from the passenger side first and climb over to the driver's side to pop the lock, and how often I hit my head, and it started my set with such intimate detail of the environment I described that everything after that flowed in a flood. The only thing that came out of my mouth that didn't go over was my whaling watching joke. I followed it with a humbled, "That worked five minutes ago," and got my follow up laugh that acknowledged the awkward silence. I bowed off stage to give Violet's improv troupe the stage. After their fun performance, Violet offered me the stage again, and so put on the spot, I went up and did another solid five minutes of the old jokes, the stuff that you have in the drawer, the stapler you reach for when you need to bring shit together, except like six staplers. I can confidently say that the whole of this performance, parts one and two, was the best I'd ever done. It truly gave me an epiphany about how I performed on stage, and I later learned that it had been videotaped. I freaked out over that! The thing was not just a fleeting moment, but substance gained!
After the show, a crew of people were going to the nearby Long Branch Inn, a place I'd gone once with Miranda just to check out since we did like to go see various establishments we had never entered. This time with Violet and some friends, it was cozy and I was still kind of in the comic zone, and hanging out was just a great wind down. I'm on an emotional high from the success, but I'm nearly certain that when I'm with Violet, I couldn't be any smarter, and it transcends just this night. I'm not in love with this girl, but I could see myself letting it happen, but at this point, I love her in the way that I love my favorite beer, which is to say, I am amazed that something this good exists and would like to have more of it, please. I feel completely aware, total prescience, almost as if everything inside my sponge is available to me all at once to draw upon. My sentences are better articulated, my jokes own multiple levels more often, and my expressions communicate more with doing less. I remember this only being moments for me, but it was in her voice or eyes, or laugh that sparked me to compress the gunpowder in my head and start firing, yes it feels continually explosive. It's even affecting other aspects of my general demeanor, or maybe it's just being in the South, but to play with someone on your wavelength can be an addictive thrill.
It's Friday, finally, and in dread, I thought about how I'm due to go pedicabbing on the death trap trailers. All day I feared the impending job I will have to do, and come closer and closer to cracking and just quitting the company. I'm on the verge of massive amounts of Boston Pedicab Red Sox dollars, and so I don't feel so bad about it, and the money I'm pulling in from Austinites over two weekend nights is not enough to even cover my rent for a month, and that started to get to me. The closer work time came, the more anxious I got. It reminded me of the time last October when I got hired by the Cambridge Brewing Company as support staff. I trained on a Friday lunch shift and made myself unavailable for the following weekend to pedicab, and as it approached my next shift, a beautiful Wednesday, 70 degrees, nothing really happening, just flat out gorgeous, I sat in my room dressed for work, black shirt, jeans, black shoes, ready to bike over, eyes darting towards the light outside, fretting to friends over that time vampire Facebook that sometimes I think I might just quit. The seconds ticked one at a time like Chinese water torture about to crush my soul at the determined start time of 4:30. It's 4. 4:05. 4:10. 4:11. I called Chris, my boss, a very nice guy and laid it out.
"Hey Chris, it's Dan."
"Hey Dan, what's up," he fed me back with the seasoning of the feeling that something was, in fact, up.
"I gotta be honest with ya, I don't think this is gonna work out," I confessed, falling on the financial sword of this job security, for better or worse.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, I'm sorry to put you in this position," actually feeling sorry for doing it, but knowing that I needed to not work there that day so badly that it didn't matter. "I can still come in and help out tonight if you're gonna need the help."
"Nah, it's OK," he said hollowly. I imagined him rolling his eyes at me, but I stayed sorry since it bought me my freedom.
"Thanks for everything, and sorry again."
"Yeah, take care."
I hung up and tore off my black shirt as if it had diseases and insects sown into it, perhaps it was made of the textile version of shame, and recovered myself with the neon green, a color I've worn so much that I'm surprised it hasn't soaked into my skin. I've even considered how well it would tattoo into me. I breathed and laughed and bragged about quitting to any and all, and proceeded to go pedicab and make twice as much as I would have made at the Cambridge Brewing Company, all the while feeling at total peace with myself. This is nearly the same relief I gave myself after pushing out the words to tell my awesome boss Phil that I didn't want to work that night. To my surprise, he let it all roll off his back since I hadn't really signed up for a shift that week anyway. He wished me luck in Boston and said he'd see me when I got back. Little did he know I didn't plan on riding for him when I returned, seeking tricycle piloting to sustain myself, knowing that I never wanted to ride a trailer ever again.
That night I went out with Chad, his job was sending him to Fort Lauderdale for a while, and so his ex-girlfriend, who came to town since Chad wanted to bring the togetherness back, joined us and we went all over the place. I wore my neon green headband made of a pedicab shirt sleeve and got hit on relentlessly by Dustin, a sweet guy, friend of Berto's and Chad's who joined us in the bar hopping, to give it up. (The headband.) I finally gave in and bequeathed to him my sacred pedicab shirtsleeve, and thereby consummated out friendship. Shortly after, Miranda showed up and it ended up a regular old night of chillin' out and chattin. Miranda and I dropped into Qua, a place that has live sharks in the dance floor, and decided to just go back to my place, it got lame to be out. In retrospect and retrotextive, I start to see that Miranda really was the rock for me being in Austin. Not that Violet was unanavailable, but communications with her were not the same. Miranda I traded nothings almost constinuously. She cared about my randomness, and me for hers, the easy outlet of stabbing at our routines with words to someone, and in so doing, relieving ourselves of the drudgery by communicating our discontents, errant thoughts, desires to see each other, and obtaining sympathy at the push of a few buttons. The following is our conversation on this day, April 9th. My remarks are offset to the right, iPhone style.
Buenos dias feo.
Boner Dias. Sup?
... I cut all my hair off...
Not all of it, I bet you missed a spot
... Fuck...
Haha. I bet you still look cute.
Dude no. My ma and I did it. ... Fuck...
Lol! Oh well! Hurrah for desrtuctive impulses!
What's so bad about it?
Are you bald now?
Naw, not that bad. Lol. Its very grunge rock. I'm actually startin to dig it. Yay for living in the capital of weird too.
And by grunge rock i might actually mean 5 year old kid from the early 90's...Anyways anyways...
Yeah I'm sure you will own it. And you already looked like a 5 year old...
And you aleady look like testicles... Biyitch. Pah!
What are you doing, squeeb?
Bout to go to work. You?
Gonna try to write. Then pedicabbing tonight.
Wanna meet up at some point? It's cool if its late.
Sure. Think you'll be up? Or just play it by ear?
Ear.
Butt.
Dragon. Butt dragon.
Butt gator butt
Took the night off work. You done?
Oh. Yah. Dying my hair right now...
Wanna get a beer in a bit?
I'll be done in 30. Whaddya think?
Yep, I'm out, called out of pedicab in person.
Whur you at?
Going to Rain, actually :-)
Hahaha! Awesome.
Should I meet you there you wanna get a beer later or you wanna raincheck
Get the fuck down here! Come meet my friends!
Allmost done. Sorry.
Whenever. My phones almost dead. so if you can't find me in my grey megaphone tshirt, we've gone to Gingerman. It should last tho.
Ok, we are now at gingerman. Sorry for the miscue.
Wheresat again?
Btwn 3 and 4 on lavaca. We bullied the jukebox here the other night
This is just a slice of it all, those little thrills you get on a cardboard day from someone you like to hear from, coming every day, at any time, requesting one and receiving when you need it, being asked for one and dispensing, and building a conversation of text messages that lasts for months. It's a beautiful poetry in many ways, the navigation of interpersonal communication via texting. One must account for one's own subtext and any potential implied subtext, the degree of intimacy you have with the receiver of your texts, and how well she knows your personality to either infuse your words with the intonation you yourself desire, or know that the text is meant for her to interpret in the style of her particular personality, and know that she will. Then there's being so comfortable that none of this even matters. The rock, the shirt I feel comfortable wearing.
And yet, the very next day I let my imagination run wild about Violet. I had lunch with Miranda at Whole foods and my God, did she look beautiful. It was a sunny day, her haircut was actually fantastic, the dye job perfect for her, and I tried to take a picture, but she refused, embarrassed, and claimed she didn't look good in pictures. In my opinion, it is the embarrassed face that sours the picture, but I showed people her face in this half baked snapshot anyway, and told my friends in Boston all about her.
I planned on going back to Boston on the 15th of April since the trip started-I have a dental examination, and I knew I'd make some money riding 10 Red Sox games in a row, if I could obtain them. So without getting too elaborate right here, I had booked a return flight to Boston from LA, figuring I'd be done with my trip and I would need some cash to get started in LA. But what's happened has been what has happened, so I booked a flight from Austin to LA to catch my immutable Virgin America flight from LA to Boston, having altered my originating January 5th ticket to Austin, not LA from Boston. In the moment of mentioning the trip, Miranda told me she'd miss me, and so I asked her if she would give me a ride to the airport. She said she would, and it made her happy and I knew I could rely on her.
I left Miranda to do some census work in the middle of the day at Fletcher's and on the way home from it, there surfaced between Violet and I some kind of argument. I think I may have gotten too dramatic about something before dropping her off, I can't even remember what it was, and truly that means, especially now, that it didn't really matter. Probably something I said harshly, ascerbicly, thornily, a tendency I try to fight. I really wanted to see her and in messages, she is cool, all is controlled, but I begin to psych myself out. I talk to Chad's girlfriend sarah about my issues an her tactics for controlling my situation are nothing short of Machiavellian, and it turns into an ongoing discussion, and then later, an outright argument wearing the disguise of civility. I can't even take the stress of navigating the early loose or game-playing stages of relationships, and I freak out every time I start to invest. Being out later, I convinced myself that I saw Miranda in a club called Kiss and Fly, another gay bar in the warehouse district, and out of my mind, call her out on it. It ended up a happy accident since she thought it was funny and I confessed to her that I'm just totally mental that day, melting down, something she empathized with, genuinely cared to know why, and forgave me outright when I offered deep and crazy apologies, feeding back to me in a text, "Come to my bed motha fucka!" This is some chick.
Chad and Sarah started heading to Beauty Bar, a weakness he has for shitty hipster dance parties to music that sounds like insects fucking other insects that want to fight and/or kill them to eat them. I said I'd meet them over there, I had rode my bike, so they departed, and at that 1:15 am moment, as if my life is sometimes written by a bumbling screenwriter, Violet calls me as she said she would, and we talk. I apologized for being dramatic, and she thanks me for that. I call her out on the inconsistencies of her words versus her actions and she apologizes and I thank her for that. We talk openly and honestly and I tell her about how Sarah told me to proceed in my course, which I rejected and Violet rejects abhorrently, and we laugh about it because the air has been cleared. I'm on the level again, I have the peace I desire, and instead of traveling to a shitty hipster dance party, I pop into nearby Fado, an Irish pub that has a location I've imbibed at in Washington, DC. I speak to that old hospitable friend that is there for the sociable, the bartender, and he tells me the meaning of Fado, the Gaelic word that begins most Irish tales, meaning, "A long time ago." I burned the last of my night down in there, submerging my thoughts in Guinness and gab until ten after two, then biked to Miranda's. The word appearing to me now just seems so appropriate that at some point this entire chronicle will be fado, and here I write from memory 60 days after the fact. That distance is only due to grow as the journey picks up yet again in just 8 days from the present.
Sunday was the day we designated to film the Kramer versus Kramer scene, and Violet had been dumpster diving. She invited me to dine with her friends on salvaged goods, and I accepted, of course. We drove to her friend Sierra's place and the few ladies cooked dinner while I wrapped up a little census business while drinking a beer. Billable hours at dinner hanging out. Violet picked some wild onions she had found and made scallion pancakes out of them with sweet potato fries that came from the dumpster. One of her friends, a guy named Brad, apparently had an aversion to food that may not have come directly from a store, and the whole meal was shadowed by the fact of his not knowing. Before he arrived, we joked for 20 minutes about the best possible time and way to reveal to him that he'd been eating food from a dumpster. Hey Brad, you ever put your mouth directly on a garbage can? (Stops eating) I can NOT believe this food was all so fucking free! (stops eating) Isn't this delicious for dumpster food, Braaaad? (stops chewing) It particularly amused when he really enjoyed the meal and complimented the ladies on their creations. As Violet and I drove to the filming location for our scene, we kept laughing about it. The idea was to let him digest a good bit and enlighten him long after the meal so to spare his rage a little, but the cat had to exit the bag, and Violet texted him that he had something interesting in his stomach. As selfish as it may have been considering we were not the ones to deal with the aftermath of Brad's annoyance that we fed him such trashily procured foodstuffs, it helped pass our time between takes. The shoot itself went well, and acting with Violet thrilled us both to feel things in front of each other. I loved the exercise of it all, and I need a lot more film acting experience or far greater detail in direction, and more preparation. For my character, giving the camera little felt like the right thing to do, and I think the performance comes across as more loaded than flat, and Violet does a fine job in everything I've seen her act in. And inside this block of time, and this day together is where its sinking in that Violet fucking rules, and I'm passing the point of no return. In between takes, she texts me that I'm cute, and as nervous as I get overthinking things while we're apart, in her presence I'm not afraid to unleash my undomesticated dork, and let him run around the yard and chew up old boots. After we wrapped our shoot, Violet suggested her place as the venue change, and I accepted the invitation because I wanted it the whole time. It's a moment that cracks me wide open when you lay next to somebody, looking into their eyes for a while and just say, "Hi," and you smile, and they smile back, because you've gone so much further than greeting, and with bright eyes reflecting at you in any kind of light and say it back to you, "Hi." I don't care to greet just anyone like that, just every once in a while...you know you can. And so here it was, "Hi," and the next month it was "Oh, hello."
Violet and I planned for dinner that night, a real date sort of thing, so I polished up a few date ideas and had followed through with executing a more ritualistic time of courting her for whatever it was we were entertaining. I was ready to take her down to Saltlick Barbeque in wherever the fuck it was 35 minutes away is where, and the idea was sound, but Violet hadn't realized how much time needed to be budgeted for this excursion, and needed to be at her improv show at 8. So in haste, we went somewhere local, my disappointment known, but the dateness of it not being lost, and so after a delicious mess of ribs, we drove up to the Coldetowne Theater, and I sunk a little deeper into the Austin comedy scene. I watched damned good free improv and drank the beer I bought at the gas station there, and met a lot of Violet's contemporaries, great people, cool kids just having fun in this great scene, learning and laughing. It hurts a little not to grow the roots I want to grow here, but this is the way of the traveler I am, that sad cowboy that has to go into the sunset. We weathered the flurry of socializing that followed the show, and I as Violet's ride home, tried to give her the space to be just herself with her improv friends, but I struggled in that parking lot to be either funny to her friends, or failing that, not awkward, maybe just tired.
We went back South towards Violet's house and got some ice cream to wrap our little date. I did want to introduce Violet to Chad, and we popped in at the last moment of the last night he'd live in Austin, to introduce, say hello, say goodbye, and tape that package shut and ship it off. I disliked the appearance of Sarah and Violet in the same space, mostly due to the residue of the argument we had a few nights prior, but I knew I proceeded in the morally just method, and that it could not be extracted as incident from the stop in we made. So they met and were friendly, and everyone got tired, and we all left each other somberly and sleepily, and back to Violet's for the second night in a row, feeling assured to sleep next to her the night before I left.
I took off when Violet did, and went to pack my shit up for a month of tricycles. I handed my census badge in, and my only regret about working for the US Census, was that when I handed my badge in, I didn't say, "You can count me out." Miranda went to get her new tattoo before she planned to pick me up, so I waited at home for the ink to dry, ready to go. It became apparent to her that it was going to take longer than they had planned, and she wouldn't be able to give me a ride. She texted it to me. I got really upset with her, and started to panic. I waited just a little bit to see if it would work out or not, and lamented that I always have issues getting to this fucking airport! I relented to myself and texted Violet to ask for a ride. She indignantly came to get me, I think she felt hurt that I didn't ask her for the ride to the airport to begin with, in fact mentioning that I could have, but who should it have been anyway? Then again, words are easy to say.
She kissed me goodbye, and drove off. Then Miranda texted me that she was all done, did I still need a ride? We bittersweetly spoke over the phone, and confessed we'd miss each other, and that we'd stay in touch, and could just chat whenever just like we had been. I feared for my relationships in Austin, and how they would be affected by my month long absence. Nowhere and nothing else has made me realize the heartbreaking nature of nomadism, the burden that a transient traveler suffers, that your relationships can't be properly maintained, that you always have that loneliness to carry. It doesn't just exist in you, but on your back, tensing your shoulders as if to keep the frigid wind out of your jacket, shrugging out and off settled feelings. I had Saltlick Barbeque by myself at the airport, ate half of it in Austin, the second half in California. I tried to write in the sky and got a single paragraph out. I landed at LAX and texted Miranda first.
Statistics:
$223 in travel adjustments
Unlimited texting by the month
95 days from my last standup set to the day when I first went on twice in one evening
1 guy told me to suck his dick
4 total shifts riding a trailer pedicab
21 years ago was the end of the decade of music I prefer to dance to.
21 year olds and younger have no real appreciation for the 80's, fuckin babies. *shakes fist*
22 is Miranda's age
24 is Violet's age
6 is the optimal number of fist shakes when performing aforementioned action. Go ahead, try it.
Drinks from...
Day 86
483 Ranger IPA @home
484 Fin Du Monde
485 Ranger IPA
Day 87
486 PBR @Chad's
487 PBR
488 Tecate @Berto's
489 PBR
490 PBR
491 Rio Blanco Pale Ale @Boticelli's
492 Rio Blanco Pale Ale
493 Live Oak Wood Beast @Snack Bar
494 Lonestar @Continental Club
Day 88
495 Racer 5 IPA @Whip In
496 Live Oak IPA
497 Miller High Life @ Red Devil Shop
Day 89
498 Ranger IPA @home
499 Dogfish Head 60 min IPA
500 Miller High Life @Red Devil Shop
Day 90
501 Dogfish Head 60 min IPA @home
502 Ranger IPA @Violet's
503 Ranger IPA
504 Ranger IPA
505 Fin Du Monde @party
506 Miller High Life
507 Shiner Bock @Elysium
508 Miller High Life
Day 91
509 Stash IPA @Mellow Mushroom
510 Stash IPA
511 Mudslinger Ale @home
512 Lonestar
Day 92
513 512 IPA @Little Woodrow's
514 512 IPA
515 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @home
Day 93
516 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @home
517 Shiner Bock @Starseeds
518 Ranger IPA @New Movement
519 Ranger IPA
520 Ranger IPA
521 Live Oak IPA @Six Tap Room
522 Live Oak IPA
523 Ranger IPA @Ginger Man
524 Fireman's 4
Day 94
525 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @Kari's
526 Widmer Pitch Black IPA
527 Schlitz 40 oz @New Movement
528 Brooklyn Lager @Long Branch Inn
529 Fireman's 4
Day 95
530 Lonestar @Red Devil Shop
531 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @home
532 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA
533 Absithe @Peche
534 Shiner Bock @Rain
535 Shot of Patron
536 Ranger IPA @Ginger Man
537 Live Oak IPA
Day 96
538 St. Arnold's Bock @Whole Foods
539 Broken Halo IPA @ Fletcher's
540 Lonestar @home
541 Some Pilsner @The Good Knight
542 Stone IPA @Shangri-La (Thanks, Eric!)
543 Lonestar
544 Lonestar
545 Lonestar @Blind Pig
546 Jager shot (WHY?!?)
547 Shiner Bock @Kiss and Fly
548 Stash IPA @Frank
549 Guinness @Fado
Day 97
550 Ranger IPA @Little Woodrow's
551 512 IPA
552 Rio Blanco Full Moon Rye Pale Ale @Film Shoot
553 Lucky U IPA @Violet's
554 Lucky U IPA
556 Lucky U IPA
Day 98
557 Shiner Dark @Artz Ribhouse
558 Corona
559 Shiner Bock @Coldtowne Theater
560 Ranger IPA @Violet's
Day 99
561 Ranger IPA @home
562 Ranger IPA
Flight
563 Racer 5 IPA @Library Ale House
564 Lagunitas IPA @Finn McCool's
565 Lagunitas IPA
566 East India IPA @Fox and Hound
567 East India IPA
568 PBR 24 oz can at Maeve's Residuals
If it's gone from my memory, it should be gone from my memory. This is a new Irish expression that I just invented because I am partly Irish and qualified to do so as somebody who has blacked out drunk before. Perhaps some drunk had invented it before, but forgot all about it. I reveal this revelation to rationalize my way out of certain details that have escaped, perhaps a moment in time will unearth them from the recesses of my grey matter curtains, but until the second or third draft of these entries, we shall all have to deal with the idea that perhaps some of the full picture has been omitted, and that this is the most resolute picture we will receive. So welcome to my incomplete life, I hope it mostly satisfies.
I don't know how delirious I became after the marathon of census hours I logged in woods and parking lots, and this very well might be out of order in sequence, in fact, it's abundantly clear that it happened the day before. It seemed to me that a few short hours later we were back to work trying to enumerate far less volatile locations. I only slept for four solid hours before opening my eyes in red urgency. Three something. I made phone arrangements for the next assignment and it boiled down to meeting at my house for an enumeration operation that took us down the block to a crack-cocaine heavy area, swimming in alcohol and grifting. We, the four youngest members of our training group, sat mocking ourselves, all with a beer in my run down neighborhood, the front yard recently mowed by a crackhead with a probably stolen weedwhacker. He did a good job for the twenty bucks we sent down the street to his dealer.
My group which was made up of Violet, myself and a young UT student named "Lyons", was designated to an area very close to my house, a place I commonly refer to in jest as "hooker East", since on my way home, the whores on the corner of 12th and Chicon cat call to me as if I'll hit the brakes on my bike when I suddenly realize that skanky STD sex with an absolute mess of a cracked out human is exactly what I need on my way home from ANYWHERE. Yes, there are several, and they all hang out by a convenience store that has "That's What She Said Mart!" spray painted on the outer wall of the second floor above the actual mart. I shuddered while rolling past a lady putting some lipstick on while sitting on a dilapidated section of masonry that led to no significant or worthy structure, only to be greeted in hopes that I would pay money to fuck her. I'm just two blocks East of this, enough space to feel safe, but just close enough that occasionally I'll notice in the periphery of my headlights as I turn onto my small block, a delusional or hallucinating person who is perhaps lost, or sleepwalking, or extremely high, having a conversation alone in the dark, unadulterated by the sudden presence of light. It is in this area we are to conduct census work, and we sit waiting for a mobile food van to arrive so that we can interview the hungry, the high, those that have accidentally found themselves there. While we waited, a young man with an angular face and intense eyes asks us for change so he can catch the bus, but Violet and I regretfully informed him that we have none. He tramped around the territory for the duration of our stay, a grifter in poverty, and I think it is unwise to ask his peers to help advance his cause when they too are in need, and where, for all the brisk walking he does with that determined go-getter expression, he might walk somewhere that would yield improved results, or reach the place his "bus" might take him. I think better and figure the bus he's trying to get on is probably crack, and he's always only a few dollars away from getting high, and shamefully young for it. We interview him, and he's kind enough to respond in a way that appeared truthful.
We talked to a man so hopeless to himself in his self loathing of his homosexuality that he could do nothing but get drunk. He was a perfectly sweet man, and we spoke with him for ten or fifteen minutes about all kinds of things. He whittled his day away at a bus stop, drinking, talking through the time, telling us of his family, too prideful to let them help him, too diseased with alcohol to help himself. We inform the government that he exists with a piece of paper.
We tired of sitting on the ridge of a vacant lot waiting for the food van to arrive, and so decided to wander around the area to collect more information than we may otherwise gain, actions not directly authorized by the government, but a tribute to the zeal we felt for being a part of an operation whose success we were at the root level responsible for. Let's take a walk around the crack block!
We approached some people with our badges and bags and pale-ass skin and were just outside of a building that seemed to have a lot of action going on inside. I thought it might have been a bar, but it seemed too busy at this hour for that kind of establishment and so my thoughts immediately turned to drug related circumstances. An older gentleman gave us a line of bullshit that just cracked his ass up, but he counted whether his name was Alotta Fagina and his birthday was today's date, or whatever he actually told us. We moved up the block where a yard sat between two houses looking like it used to have a house on its lot, but the house disintegrated or was sold piecemeal for crack. There must have been 10 or 12 people in this yard, and across the road from it, a few more. We spoke with quite an articulate fellow there, an artist, and philosophical type, a brilliant mind mired in a cesspool of drugs, crime, and the downtrodden. While we conversed, a man sat drunkenly lobbing cynical sentences our way, mocking our new friend, and on the other side, an obese girl smoked crack. The man offered me a drink from his bottle, and I declined, only to be criticized for claiming to be a drinker. If I were a drinker, I'd wake up and be ready for a shot. We filled out forms, and the information didn't matter so much that the girl wasn't actually 16, or anything, so much as they were counted. We made an attempt at entering that yard, but got shouted down, likely looking like three white brats with no business in a ghetto like this. Our new friend drew us a picture to remind us of him and wrote down his email address on one of our census forms. I emailed him and never received a reply. It's an eye opener to see capable sober minds become the hardened gum stuck on the sidewalk. They might just want things that way.
That night, Violet came over to my place. We watched about thirty minutes of a horrible movie called "How To Stuff a Wild Bikini", some 60's beach flick with Buster Keaton as a witch doctor and a plot that made no sense at all. It surprised us both that it tried to be a musical, and Mickey Rooney played a businessman in it and inexplicably there was a scooter race where people teamed up in pairs. A lot of running into hay and antics. We laughed at how abysmal the construction of the movie was, watched some comedy and drank beers, just enjoying a night in, stuff that felt a lot like comfort in a relationship. She spent the night and in the morning she told me she didn't feel right about how things had happened. It was too quick and she didn't know if she was using me, and it didn't feel like the right way to start something. I replied with my logic, words about being interested in satisfying the discomforts she revealed to me. Yes, of course let's do more dates and courtship, and I meant it all, because now to the best of my ability, when I say something, I plan on it being the thing I do, and I did what I said I would because I already knew that she was a person worth spending time with. I think I know these things faster and stay cooler longer than I used to, but I also know myself and my tendency to let my heart rule my head, but I made those statements rationally and with control. She conceded in the discussion, I guess time being the concession, and we proceeded with business as usual, as unusual as our business became.
Later that evening, I connected with Chad and Berto. Berto's birthday party commenced that evening, so attendance was mandatory. I had an OK time, ate a bunch of his cheese plate, but mostly struggled through some awkward conversations and it pressed me as one of those get-togethers where new people meet and don't understand why any others are there and have no interest in continuing any sort of friendship whatsoever, not even in a virtual way on Facebook. Chad and I bailed after a few beers and made a sort of South Congress round of the bars within a block. For Thursday, it could have been a lot bolder, but the night as a musical piece translates into ambiance and sleepiness.
Here's where things start smashing up into a magnificent and intense week of edginess, danger, and honesty. Before going in to pedicab, I met up with Violet for a bit of a date I promised her, and it seems to me that I'll somehow die every time I drive to her place, either because I'm lost and will starve to death, or because the exit to her place is perilous since I have about 70 feet of road space to slow from 50 MPH across three lanes to make a right angle right hand turn. Every time I experience this pattern, I feel like screaming, "AAAAAHHHH WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIII-WHEW! That was close." Arriving alive, we walked to the nearby "Whip In", a place I am a fan of because of its excellent beer selection. They serve delicious American style Indian food there (eg: curry panini), and we ordered a stout little meal and each have two beers while music tracks the background to our cute musings. A gentleman, I picked up the tab, and we walked back to her apartment. She showed me a recent piece of art she created, a naked girl on top of a dead, naked man. The girl is startled, in fact you've caught her in the act of eating the man's heart while she fucks him. Her eyes are hollow like an ancient Greek statue's eyes, but also filled with light as if her pupils hadn't adjusted. The curves are sexual and appealing and the juxtaposition of the nudity and sexuality of the style versus the cannibalism of a body hits me in the gut. I loved it. We talked about it and she made a gift of it to me on the spot.
I went home to retrieve my mountain bike and experienced a downhill ride with the wind all the way to the pedicab shop. I attached the trailer to the bike in that cumbersome process that I began to loathe. Each time I clasped the deadweight onto the seat post, the screws damaged the metal tube, another cost to make money. This weekend, an event called the Texas Relay took place, and for some reason that meant that 6th Street and most of downtown was gonna get real hood up in he-yah. I stayed over by where people are gayer and did OK for the evening, but riding that bike trailer scared the shit out of me. I missed the tricycle, especially bikes 13 and 16, and started formulating a plot to switch companies from Red Devil Rides to Capital Pedicab. I was proud of myself for navigating a double ride through the 2:30 am traffic that piled up after the bars closed all the way down E 7th Street. The trip time deserved more than $20, but I guess that's the new lay of the land in acceptable tips. On my way back to the shop, some fancy moves had to be pulled through some flashy traffic. Some cars had doors that opened vertically, and while in traffic, they stayed open so people could observe the entirety of the bodies contained in the car, or that's what I figured was the cause for that mechanical function. I witnessed on that ride, as I pointed out to my bemused customers, several cars with people in the front that contained baby seats in the back seat, sans baby. Model parents, I'm sure. People sat nearly outside the cars in traffic, with their butts on the bottom of the fully rolled down window frame, looking for a last stab at a chance to connect with a human. "Hey girl, hey ma, baby, baby, what's goin on, what's good, where you goin?" I witnessed my first pair of truck nuts, but far too large, and on a car that, if I were to be the driver, I'd deserve castration. This comes from a man who drives a 1984 Toyota Corolla with a mismatched door. I stopped to take a picture, only to get yelled at by some other pedicabber anxious to move through traffic the wrong way to return to his shop. I pocketed my camera-phone because he wanted to be a real dick about it, but watched in moral rectitude as he got stuck elsewhere in that mess, and began to yell at some vindictive driver for pinching him in a spot where the driver easily could have had patience and let him go. I knew the feeling and also felt that he got what he deserved for being a fucker about me taking a picture of the car nuts.
Back at the shop, I counted out and had a High Life to cool the pedicabbing fire, that energy of endorphins and feeling of gambling and winning colliding with a satisfying workout. I texted Miranda that I finished up with work and she still wanted me to come over, despite the time being 3:30 am. I loved it because after the shift, you just don't cool off that quickly and there's all this unwinding to do. Many nights I've pedicabbed in Boston and gotten home at 3:30 or 4 and didn't go to sleep until 6 in the morning, only to claw my eyelids away from each other to watch myself get ready and pedal back to work. This evening is better because the freedom of the next day being open is on my mind, so spending my last few waking hours relaxing with Miranda, beer in hand, air conditioning blasting, and her and her sweet, but hungry to chew things up dog Jag nearby, soothed me into serenity.
The next day before work, I tried to orchestrate a rendezvous with Violet at the ever elusive taco truck on South Congress. I want to blow this thing up and steal their recipes. Never has a food truck inspired so much ire in me, or perhaps in the history of ire-inspiring food trucks, but then again, I haven't yet seen Portland, OR. I had the mind to collect my trailer and meet her down at this truck, but instead she came towards me and we went to Tacos Selene, a very, very fine taco truck that inspires no such ire, but awe, and sits just blocks from the Red Devil Rides shop. I showed Violet the pedicab shop after we ate and gave her the first pedicab ride of her life. I didn't have all the tricks of a tricycle, but I imagine that the ride satisfied as a first.
The following night of work handed me great disappointment. Whenever the goal of a night of pedicabbing is only to make $100, I feel like I'm failing myself and that there is just no point. I took one ride and got a flat tire. Violet had already gone off to do something excellent downtown and I didn't have a repair kit. Meanwhile, a wedding party exited a building and I declined the ride because of my flat. Another pedicabber grabbed them and scored $50 to go around the corner. Fuck my life. Then when repairs finally showed up, since I didn't have a kit of my own, I sent him off to grab a ride from the same wedding, and changed out the tube, to pump it up with a hand pump about 8 inches long, taking perhaps 5 or 8 minutes to fully pump up the tire, only approximating what is proper, and pinching the flap of skin between my thumb and forefinger over and over through the process. Anger and pain. A little turn for me, a girl named Ryan came by and got something out of her car and I pre-sold her a ride to Congress Ave after she changed into her little dress back at her catering company. I took this one ride, and maybe another two, one having gone up this little ugly hill on 5th street from West to Guadalupe, a hill I know to avoid when I have a heavy load, or challenge when I have potentially big tippers on the back, and discovered I may have been riding on a flat tire the whole time. I ended up on West 6th Street waiting for repairs again, this time for the opposite tire, and feeling damned that there was not enough money in my pocket. I used the same pump to do the job. Pain and anger.
The only thing that made me happy the whole night was the moment I ended up in a short race with a girl from another company, super skinny, sporting a mohawk, wearing skin tight gold. Our rides started cheering us on and I'm hurtin' to keep up because I may have had a flat and riding the trailer is bullshit difficult, and I just barely pull it out to win, embarrassing if I let this stick girl beat me, but impressed that she, even though having the tricycle advantage, can make a match of it. I turned left to drop my ride and she proceeded East on 5th, then turning back to my riders and declare in earnest under a heavy breath about to burst out, "That was so hot for me." The next ride I got puked on my cab. The poor logic of her being in the center of three people riding infuriated me, but I ought to have made it clear that she should be on the end and that if she puked it would be $100, yet I failed to direct or disclaim. I earned $20 for the inconvenience of removing something from my cab that formerly rested inside of her, digesting, swimming in booze, that amateur. Gross, take me home. It was only a little consolation that she did also puke on her friend's pants a bit. Another High Life at the shop to take the edge off.
Here's where it gets kind of intense. The next morning is Easter Sunday and I previously spoke to Violet about going to something called body choir, and had been anticipating going swimming in some watery hole or another. Instead of making it there, I woke up to texts about body choir costing money and that Violet would pay if I came. I didn't at this moment have the get-go to quite move anything yet, so I only double over upwards at around noon to utter a word that has for good and bad reasons been the first waking word I breathe out, "Fuck." Fuck, I missed that thing, fuck I'm tired, fuck I'm hungry, fuck I'm horny, fuck I have to go to 80's night tonight, fuck the Red Sox play the Yankees tonight, fuckin' A MAN, I am waking up before I'm ready to go get coffee with an amazing girl and we are going swimming today! I manage to establish contact and meet Violet down on South 1st where this super cheap coffee shop also does reasonably priced foodstuffs and for less than nearly everywhere will refill my tasty iced coffee. I met her friends Katie and Rachael and they are sweet and hippie types, but to summarize is to overlook complexity, which I qualify by learning much more eventually, but impressions are impressions and they did come from something called "body choir" where people just dance around and do contact improv and act like free spirits, and some particular types like to dance sketchily with young nubile hippie women. Sounds like my kind of place! In seriousness, I felt modestly remorseful that I missed it just for the kick of trying it, and Violet likes a lot of fun things and I could always keep my mind open to try certain things that she deemed worthy of her time, so it personally disappointed, but here and now, folks.
We had our brunch or lunch, all part of the plan, and made off for McKinney Falls, a state park with several swimming holes. On the way Rachel and Katie sat in the backseat since Violet held permanent shotgun and everybody seemed to have an understanding for that, without me needing to even lift an eyebrow. It's the vibe that people can read in Austin, more nonverbal communication occurs here that one is more finely attuned to the subtle. I consider it a mixed blessing since I occasionally suffer episodes of unconscionable thickness. I opened the passenger door for Violet, and continue to seem like a gentleman, though my ulterior motive was to have her unlock my door for me since I have no key that will accomplish the job, the door being foreign to the original vehicle. She gets it and my embarrassment about it combined with my decorum of opening her door for her and stiffening up with my heels clicked together, be-sandaled as they are, respectfully nodding and bleating, "Ma'am," and it made a blushable moment for both of us.
On this day, despite a smidge of fatigue, I experienced awareness, and acted expressively. I've had coffee, and I'm just alert and looking to crack jokes about anything. I wanted to impress Violet's friends, but also know that overtly trying to do so is a recipe for failure.
Recipe for Failure to Impress
1 pt fawning
1 pt offensive joke
2pts self absorbency
pinch of desperation
More of a chemistry model, or 18th century, pre-Fannie Farmer recipe, but an oldie and a goodie.
So I kept cool. I drove us all there and apologized for the Longshot since the topcloth, that thing that sags off of its no longer adhesive life partner, the roof, is now reeeally peeling off of the rear part of the car's ceiling, and brushing the girls in the face, and flapping almost uncontrollably in the 4th gear wind from the roll down windows. They dealt with it, and graciously accepted the circumstances under which my car is mine, and we laughed.
We arrived at the park and skip over small streams of water that have carved their way into the life of the boulders we momentarily took for granted. We found a nice log to hang out by and put our stuff down, some guy they know has joined us to hang out and he can play a little guitar and they make some music since Violet has brought a small drum, and it's nice, I'm just glad to be in the sun and I respirate and damn the Boston winters with a smile, it's April and I'm going swimming, damnit. And we swam. It was certainly cold, and I hesitated to take the plunge, as I tend to do about 75% of the time, the shock of it all being unwelcome, but moving as quickly as you can for a minute always makes things OK, indicative of my lifestyle, I suppose. We swam and played like children, and climbed up through this smooth hole in the mountainous rock. People were jumping off of it into the water, and I wanted a chance as well. We ended up at the point of ascension, surrounded by rock, masked from nearly every other point of view, and shared a deep, wet kiss. In retrospect, I let myself be totally taken by that moment, overwhelming to me, just my kind of romantic movie moment, and I think she might have been there with me for a second, but I have been wrong so many times on things not fact or formula based. It's a kiss I'll never forget, one of the better in my life time, central to the progression of our existence as lovers and friends, and my trip, even with Violet's ensuing bashfulness of its almost public display. Happy Easter, Jesus. I watched her climb up to jump off the rock, assuring her that she had me as a safety net should she lose her grip on the wet rock.
Violet found garbage in the woods to her disappointment, and in tune with her idealistic side, tried to pick it up and collect it for proper removal. She is also a sort of activist, and she had created a fun and brilliant mermaid costume out of plastic six pack rings, "Thank You" plastic bags, and various other discarded plastic items to raise awareness for wasteful plastic and the great plastic wasteland that is three times the size of Texas and floating in the Pacific. I frowned for her because I know how helpless it can feel to be one isolated person fighting a bigger battle. Evil can win in this world. Just beyond in time I saw a mother giving her toddler Coca Cola through a straw and boiled underneath my skin. For me, it always comes back to education. Lady, you're doing a good job to create an obese person with diabetes, but calories be damned, you don't even know that he'll throw a tantrum for Coca Cola because he's too young to understand his addiction to caffeine, do you?
It was early afternoon and Boston was on my mind. I knew that I needed to keep apprised of the Red Sox, and thought of pedicabs flying up and down an open and paved Ipswitch Street, uncontested by cabs or construction, pulling $20 a ride to Little Steve's and Bukowski's. I let the feelings bleed out of me into conversation, and made it clear that I had this game high on my priority list. Violet talked about cooking something and I made mention of some food items I had purchased several days ago, I considered calling them trash at this point. She rejected my attitude and we swung by my house to pick the stuff up, have a beer, and head back to her place so she could construct something out of the ingredients we collected. Back at her place, I found and listened to the game on the radio, kitchen sounds in the background, and enjoyed a beer while a smart, funny, beautiful girl cooked for me. I had it all right there. In the evolution of one's personal navigations of interpersonal relationships, things become clearer as experience grows, and I don't spew this truism to try and sound qualified or official, but to illuminate exactly where I mentally stationed myself sitting on that couch, surrounded by art and the smell of dinner and the sounds of baseball and cleverly constructed hilarious conversations, absorbing alcohol into my bloodstream. I thought to myself, "This is pretty fuckin' sweet. This girl is an unbelievable catch, her willingness and desire to maintain honesty with me is rare, her acceptance of me as weird and as quirky as I am is soothing to those everyday insecurities, as little as I expose them, yet exposing them to her feels natural. I'd be very open to exploring a more serious, monogamous version of this. And she's cooking dinner right now, so let's wait until it tastes good to pass judgements." I didn't actually think the last sentence of that, but looking back from here it makes a pretty good joke. Dinner was fantastic.
The Red Sox fought a good fight, especially since the Yankees represent the Evil Empire, but even though I committed to support my red-stockinged troops, Violet said that her friends were throwing a party, somewhere not far off, so life must go on, we all must make sacrifices, the Sox were down, and plus I get updates on my phone, how adamant must I be as a fan? The party explodes with food, but the environment certainly maintained a chill vibe. I didn't know anyone and chatted with random people, friends of Violet's, let myself be a free body so she could politic with her group. Tame, though I got excited when my phone would vibrate and text me the Red Sox had come from behind to win. We made a slow, courteous exit, and took off for 80's night at Elysium. I knew Miranda would be there, and she is anticipating my presence.
Before I explain this, I've informed both parties of the existence of the other person I'm seeing. Both parties have explicitly stated that this is acceptable to them. In fact, Miranda is also seeing someone else. Violet says it doesn't bother her because it keeps our relationship at ease for her, and is even open to meeting Miranda. I don't know why, but I feel like with all the facts I had collected and what I know of each person that introducing them to each other is going to go swimmingly. I foresaw this meeting happening since I'm interested in seeing Miranda and dancing with her to 80's music, and we had both amped ourselves up for it for a few days. For some reason I didn't tell her Violet would accompany me, I just said to myself, "The more, the merrier." Violet and I entered and danced a little and I looked around for Miranda, but I couldn't find her. I thought maybe she didn't yet show, but as it got later, I got confused by the lack of her presence. Violet and I danced a little, and the music didn't really satisfy my cheesiness craving, the real synthetic, passionate stuff I wanted, but we let ourselves not care. I got my second drink and finally, I spotted her. Miranda had dressed herself up a bit, teased her hair out, and really gone to town for 80's night. She looked goood. I walked up and said hey, we hugged, and I greeted her friends, and we all headed for the floor. I guess I was wrong to blindside her, I have never been in this bountiful situation of doubly dating, but I introduced them on the floor. Violet took the introduction amiably, and Miranda quickly, but not lacking tact. I thought it went fine at first. Miranda went off to dance with her friends and I raised an eyebrow that we couldn't unite parties. Violet looked exhausted, her eyes could barely stay open, and so we made ready to leave. I said goodbye to Miranda, and took off. Not too much later, I got a text saying, "Dude what the fuck was that? You could have warned me. You embarrassed me in front of my friends." Back at Violet's we slept, but I ran concerned thoughts through my head with my eyes closed until I exhausted my brain to sleep.
I texted Miranda back in the morning, telling Violet that Miranda didn't approve of the encounter and that she was pretty upset. I chose to let very little of my distress about it on. How good was it all while I just had the balance? I texted
Miranda regarding the night before and got no response. After Violet and I parted ways, I had a freak out and went directly to Miranda's. I let myself in as is the custom there and she was sleeping. Her dog, Jag, growled at me and woke her up. She seemed nonplussed by my presence, not surprised I'd show my face. "Oh, it's you," she said. We talked about what happened and I didn't understand how I embarrassed her, though I knew what it was that did it. I explained to her that I had no intention of hurting her feelings and that I am honestly that naive that I would think it would be peachy keen for the worlds to collide and we could all live in harmony. Meanwhile in the back of my head is the thought that Miranda frequently pines about wanting to be with a girl and in several circumstances confesses to me that she wants another girl with us. I'm not an idiot, I do not squander these opportunities, but as is the case in my life, good things do have a great way of blowing up in my face. My grandmother says in her steady and wise German tone, "The wheel goes round and sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down." I feel only slightly ashamed to use the expression in reference to a potential threesome, but it applies to so much more as this all unfolds.
Miranda took me back as a friend, but the boundaries were not clear. We still flirted, we still made each other laugh, and the comfort level is the same. I tried to kiss her and she went cadaver on me. Not that I didn't deserve it, but I grew accustomed to this freedom, and its revocation hadn't become a clear reality for me. Parting as friends after issuing my apology for the overstepping of bounds, I took off to write.
Violet is an extremely dedicated artist. I've never watched a person complete tasks so efficiently like she does. She always has an iron in the fire, and is constantly juggling a multitude of commitments. She drives three hours to audition, and always comes back upbeat. Going to Dallas, going to Houston, hanging out in Denton. This girl is made of Texas. She told me about a scene she got tapped for that would be filmed for a directing class, and said the director needed an actor. She forwarded to him the small amount of stuff I have online, and he wanted me to work on the scene for him. Neat, a project!
Meanwhile, my census work reached its last full week of billable hours, and Fletcher handed me a project to oversee by myself. I didn't feel very much on top of my processes, so when people were suggested to me regarding who could assist on the enumeration tasks, I picked only a few of them since the amount of work was scant to begin with, and I picked a person based on their ability to oversee my work, and ensure that we completed it in the proper fashion, t's dotted, eyes crossed and all. Ike, one of the people I didn't choose, called me on the phone shortly after he discovered that I had not offered him work despite the recommendation that he needed work. Ike participated in the Vietnam war. I respect any man who can serve our country, and the fact that I didn't call him had to do with the fact that a few people already talked to me first, and nothing else. It's not like I was trying to pull some crazy ass threesome shit. As an actor, when I see a strange number, I pick up. It could be opportunity!
"Hello?"
"Hey yeah, Danny? This is Ike."
"Hey, Ike. What's up?"
His bluster kicked in. "Yeah, how come you didn't pick me for your project?"
I knew I might get a little heat from somewhere, so I stayed cool, "Ike, I didn't really have that much work for people."
He had been waiting for my first fluent sentence to react, "That's bull shit! Fletcher told you that I needed hours!"
"Well I got emails from Jed and Lily first, and Amy has experience," I reasoned.
And with gusto, savoring every vowel sound and stomping out the consonants, Ike had his royal flush to beat my quadruple nines, "Well you can suck my dick!"
He hung up. Well I never!
I immediately called Fletcher and told him that Ike told me to suck his dick. Fletcher was on my side and in the middle of our conversation, Ike called Fletcher to complain about me. Upon returning to our line, Fletcher elaborated that Ike had served in Vietnam and sounded like he'd been drinking. Doesn't make me want to give him much more work, I'll tell you that! Not the way to obtain more hours, no sirree, Bob! The work itself is not really worth mentioning, not much got accomplished, some people were helpful, others were not, some people got counted, some did not. Drop this off here, let them know you will be back soon. Go get things, be disappointed in how they can't follow instructions. There's got to be a better way.
I got to visit Milena, my favorite sweetheart UPS Store clerk to print out the script I needed for the Kramer vs. Kramer scene I'm planning to do with Violet. Our first encounter was one of subdued flirtation. I needed to print out a document for licensing that I could rewrite into something that my notary public at Chase bank would sign once I could sign it in his presence, and so after asking if they had somewhere to print out documents, she led me to her office computer. It felt almost forbidden because I got to sneak behind the counter into the back to operate. She gave gentle and patient instructions, and I still struggled to make the papers I wanted pop out, but finally figured it out. I fiddled around on my email waiting for my important hard copy documents to get hard while she went up to the front of the store to handle some of her affairs, and after grabbing the sheets I started looking at the comics she had taped to the wall in the back room. I read a few and emitted a low laugh. She caught me reading them. Being caught was better than anything I could have ever said to her, an action that created chemistry, a total bonding moment. She said, "You like my comics?" I smiled. "Yeah." She let this smile loose looking like a first, and clean paint stroke on a blank canvas. We sort of talked about what I was printing and I explained my notary public debacle and this shy girl behind the counter who only bleats the small scripts of the transactions her job forces her to make replied, "I'm a notary public." Whoa. "Really," I blurt in surprise. I'm thinking, "You're too cute to be a notary public!" Said my facebook status that day, "Well it's a good thing that random notary public was around!" I paid for my papers, and the clunkiness of performing a transaction through flirting made both actions better. I didn't have enough stuff to exceed their $5 minimum so I paid with a dollar, and got my coins back. In a moment of supreme cuteness, I wrote my number down and slapped it on the counter before hastily exiting in bashful retreat. It screamed high school antics, and I said bye, and before reaching the door I hear, "Bye Dan." I gave a quick throwback smile, embarrassed I didn't just ask, but afraid that I was so un-smooth that there was no alternative. So I'm back, even though she didn't call, but I have more documents I need to print, and my presence is a moment of function. She led me to the back for the computer, and out of curiosity I looked at her comics again. She caught me again, but informed me, "I haven't gotten any new ones." Smiles. I bring the papers up and she asks if I'm an actor and there is more small talk, and the confession is volunteered when she blurts, "I lost your number."
I wanted her to shoot it out of the air, that flying pink elephant in the room, and with beaming eyes say, "I'll write it down again, but are you gonna use it this time?"
"Yeah."
"Talk to you soon," I said, collecting my documents and myself a little less nervously this time.
And she sounds like she's actually going to call me in the way she says, "Bye, Dan."
I smile more confidently over my shoulder out the door this day. I've got more than I need already. Either way, she hasn't called. Small tragedies are everywhere.
Violet had a show coming up on Thursday and asked me if I'd like to open for her improv troupe. How can I say no? I'm not prepared though, and in my head, the bullet of that thought ricochets all over as if it would not lose velocity, doubt taking over in my ability to adequately perform to open up for her troupe. My last performance of stand-up happened on January 3rd, a half-chubber of a show, if I say so, not terrible, got it out there, but didn't really slay it. A half-chubber beats a limp-dicker, I can say that much, some sets in my memory being so bad I'd rather be taped to the floor and drooled on by a pervy Earth science teacher with halitosis. The limp dicker, the feeling of being not just in your underwear, but your manhood out, flaccid, and making eye contact with everyone like you're supposed to be erect, but it's not gonna happen, the supreme performance anxiety, or certain motivator. Also, sub-in girl parts for universal understanding. I'm sorry family, I'm writing crudely, let us talk about buttfucking instead, shall we? Wait, no. I fear awkwardness from Thursday. My stomach dropped thinking about performing comedy in front of Violet since I respect and regard her talents, so I desired to show her my best, spurred to succeed by the ramifications of a limp-dicker, and anyways it was high time I got back on that horse.
We rehearsed on Tuesday night and my lines were not there yet and I struggled for character and delivery, and it served as a stern reminder of the professionalism I'll need to develop when I start doing this kind of thing in LA. You're at work, so treat it like work, because people like to work with people who are pleasant to work with that don't suck at working. Still, I treated it too loosely. The rehearsal ran short and following the cursory meeting, I asked Violet if she wanted to join me for a drink at Little Woodrow's, where I could watch the Red Sox and Yankees play. I started attempts to indoctrinate her as a Red Sox fan, though our crew leader Fletcher disagreed with me and swore her a soon-to-be Dodgers fan. Probably not a seductive idea in either direction for an artist. I do let these things go, but I see myself in reading back on my own entries and wonder what some of my smaller actions mean in a larger sense, if they carry meaning at all, or if I'm simply an idiot.
Wednesday arrives. Early on, I go get a late lunch or early dinner with Miranda. We're hanging out and communicating again, her flip out on me boomeranged back to her as an overreaction. We went and had a cute little meal at Starseeds, one of her favorite little places to eat, when she eats, which is not quite often enough or with regularity. I've been around when she can't sleep unless she burrows herself into her closet surrounded by her clothes that pile up in the floor. This is a comfortable place for her sometimes and it's sad, but I also know it is what she needs to do to get comfortable. It is sometimes at these moments at 7 am that she'll spring up hungry and eat a cheese plate that Starbucks has allowed her to take away before it is no longer suitable for corporate sale. We meet and dine, and sat outside while she smoked. We talked about her class that she has failed four times and how her mother, a found Christian, will dye her hair blue if Miranda succeeds in finally passing a basic English class, not a thing of shame, but a problem of continued focus. The outlook is good and I encourage her through texts to get to her classes on time and turn her papers in when I wake up early at Violet's. We parted, still chemically reacting for each other, and it felt like a comebacker, or it never left, just hit a bump.
These are two drastically different girls, and yet I act the same natural self, a naked personality with each. This phenomenon has it's own level of appreciation in both exchanges, or so I judge the case. Miranda thinks I'm weird, absorbs a lot of what I say when I ramble, and likes the spectacle of my asininity, Violet appreciates the dorkiness I embrace, a familiar function to her, and plays with it. I show openness and understanding in the presence of both situations and they experience it differently, sometimes it comes across as too soft, or sometimes too sympathetic, but I cannot imagine being a different man. It was all so seamless for a while. When not with one, with the other, when one is busy, the other is free, coffee with one, drinks with the other, interchangeable, smoothly the guy to both women, nothing but fun and beer and jokes and sex everywhere. I wanted it back.
I parked my car on the long commercial strip of Guadalupe Street known as "The Drag" to meet Violet for an in class presentation of the scene we're doing. We were allowed to hold our scripts during the scene, and performed it for about 25 to 30 directing students. Our director manages to get us in first so we can proceed with other plans we've made for that evening. Right before the scene I find my deliveries, I hit all my lines the way I want to, and the scene ends, after which we were subjected to the feedback of a bunch of uninformed students. I didn't appreciate the criticism from them, as open as I tried to be to constructive critcism, which I found a little of. I found it unprofessional of the teacher not to release us from their presence immediately and let OUR director gives us the notes, not everyone in the room who hadn't read or analyzed the scene. It made me grateful for my own education. Holy shit, Dad, it's been valuable! Just kidding, just kidding.
We left and I griped a little to Violet, but we were heading for the "improv shootaround" at the New Movement theater, the second time I've been there. We both adequately improvised our way through a few scenes, nothing monumentally impressive, but just fun, keeping the dust off our generators. I discovered that the following night, they have an open mic and I talked to the right guy about getting on, and going first, so I can brush something up just before needing to show up for Violet's show. After the show, we separated as I made plans to meet up with my former roommate Eruch down in the warehouse district. The show for Violet's improv troupe happens the next day.
I stood around outside of bars on a Wednesday, waiting like a chump, thinking they were in a particular place and caring less than an $8 cover to go meet him until I found out were he is for sure, but it turns out that he very much lived in his typical character and arrived egregiously late. I sort of enjoyed seeing the bad from the street level precepice, a group of rejects in dorky gear, some name like "The Geeks". They had headgear, or helmets, mouthgrear or something that made them look ultra lame. A cute gimmick, something that Eruch might have appreciated, having been in a gimmicky "cock rock" band himself. I saw him walk by and nearly shit myself that he wasn't where I thought he was. My old impatient East Coast self. We went over to the Six Tap Room and as we sat, Miranda headed down to join us. It felt like my skin was echoing catching up with Eruch. He told me about how he and his bandmate Mike kicked our other old roommate Robbie out of their band. Robbie may have been the worst individual I've ever met. When we lived together, he got so drunk on his birthday that when I, the person in charge of collecting rent and bills for distribution to the appropriate collectors, asked him for his late rent, he broke a bottle and attempted to rush upstairs to kill me. He later confessed to me that he drank into a blackout and he learned from his bandmates that he had said, "I'm gonna murder him, that'll be fun." I tried to play a good friend for politics and roommate relations. A few weeks later, a clip full of out of print money went missing from my room, and it couldn't have been anyone else that took it. His band had come back from playing a pretty positive show, and I had come back from 80's night, all a little tipsy, all a little uninhibited, and we spoke frankly, me in front of the three of them, willing to take all arguments in defense of why he should still live there. I won all arguments. It played similar to breaking up with a girl you kinda like, but she's fucking crazy and might kill you, it just has to be done. This is the person that Eruch had cut out of his life, the cancer cured, after disrespecting Eruch's family in his own home in Mexico. I remember being proud of him.
Miranda showed up and the booze did loosen us. We changed venues and ended up alone at another bar, "The Ginger Man," the original bar that started the franchise that I've entered in New York City,and bullied the jukebox to play us our songs in a large establishment with only six or seven folks, like pennies in a sad piggy bank. The Gingerman hosted the rekindling of our fling, as temporary as it would be. "My place or yours?"
The next day Miranda forced me out of hanging out because she ended up almost crashing two meetings into each other, me and her ex-boyfriend Steven. The last time he saw her with someone else, he got really upset, and she apparently really cared about that, and didn't think much about what I'd think about her not telling me and rushing me out the door. And I wouldn't have cared if she had kind of warned me, but she started acting all weird and nervous and pushing me away. I pried the truth out of her, and she started to understand that she upset me, and I guess it transformed into a tradeoff for that 80's night business, and so, knowing we'd work it out later, I got in my car and started the engine and watched her go inside as Longshot warmed. Then Steven showed up. And I just watched. Checked him out, that's the guy. How about that skinny dude. That's the guy whose magnum condom wrappers I've found behind the bed looking for my hat. That's the guy that's in love with Miranda, and she just doesn't want it that way anymore. Time to go.
Enumerative tasks were at hand that Thursday and kept me occupied between other circulating thoughts of two standup comedy shows. I got excited by the idea that after a four month hiatus of performance that I'd do two shows in one night for the first time in my life. I organized my thoughts into stories and worked out a joke that Miranda actually invented, her sense of humor being both cynical and accidental, both of them the right kind of shocking. A happy accident about confusing whaling with whale watching, a standby joke I have now that is dorky enough to work for my face. The rest of my set contained stories of the census variety and regaling the experience of wearing our bright orange vest. I remember going on first at New Movement. Most of what I said tanked, or merely entertained as story, it lacked hits, punchlines, or perhaps the punchlines did not crack, but patted the audience on the arm with eyebrows raised, asking, "get it?" I was running out of time and so unleashed the whaling joke. It caused the first and only real eruption of laughter in my set there. A comfort to leave on, but a little confusing. I guess they just wanted dorky jokes. I have a bunch of em, but oh well. I left after watching the first snippets of a very clever comic who exploited his accent for huge comic rewards.
I biked over to the next show, a whole 2 minutes away, and dismounted with my usual one footed, hand brake hop off, locking up my horse as Violet's friends half viewed me through their warm-ups. I awkwardly stood on the periphery awaiting instruction or introductions, and after the latter, tilted into the slight maze inside. Several familiar faces popped up in the crowd, and I pumped up my anticipation for their enjoyment, despite my insecurity for the impending quality of my performance. "I'm about to try for you all", I think, and almost think "y'all," but focus on the words I think I'll say, ones that will mostly come to me in the moment. Before I really have enough time to think too much about it, Violet goes up on stage and starts to introduce me. Oh, damn, I guess its time to get up and be funny. I'm pulled up by the introduction, thrown into the fire of silence that I need to fill. There's a little dialogue between Violet and I as we play with the air and it comes around that I should talk about my car. I had just recently watched George Carlin do a bit on cars, and how his old style was not curses, anger and cleverness, it was jolly physicality, and somewhere in me the 40 oz of beer and the blood released it all from my brain. I acted out being a participant in traveling by my car, and while singularly unimpressive, the action I lent to it pushed everything I revealed over the edge. I revealed the process of how I need to unlock my car from the passenger side first and climb over to the driver's side to pop the lock, and how often I hit my head, and it started my set with such intimate detail of the environment I described that everything after that flowed in a flood. The only thing that came out of my mouth that didn't go over was my whaling watching joke. I followed it with a humbled, "That worked five minutes ago," and got my follow up laugh that acknowledged the awkward silence. I bowed off stage to give Violet's improv troupe the stage. After their fun performance, Violet offered me the stage again, and so put on the spot, I went up and did another solid five minutes of the old jokes, the stuff that you have in the drawer, the stapler you reach for when you need to bring shit together, except like six staplers. I can confidently say that the whole of this performance, parts one and two, was the best I'd ever done. It truly gave me an epiphany about how I performed on stage, and I later learned that it had been videotaped. I freaked out over that! The thing was not just a fleeting moment, but substance gained!
After the show, a crew of people were going to the nearby Long Branch Inn, a place I'd gone once with Miranda just to check out since we did like to go see various establishments we had never entered. This time with Violet and some friends, it was cozy and I was still kind of in the comic zone, and hanging out was just a great wind down. I'm on an emotional high from the success, but I'm nearly certain that when I'm with Violet, I couldn't be any smarter, and it transcends just this night. I'm not in love with this girl, but I could see myself letting it happen, but at this point, I love her in the way that I love my favorite beer, which is to say, I am amazed that something this good exists and would like to have more of it, please. I feel completely aware, total prescience, almost as if everything inside my sponge is available to me all at once to draw upon. My sentences are better articulated, my jokes own multiple levels more often, and my expressions communicate more with doing less. I remember this only being moments for me, but it was in her voice or eyes, or laugh that sparked me to compress the gunpowder in my head and start firing, yes it feels continually explosive. It's even affecting other aspects of my general demeanor, or maybe it's just being in the South, but to play with someone on your wavelength can be an addictive thrill.
It's Friday, finally, and in dread, I thought about how I'm due to go pedicabbing on the death trap trailers. All day I feared the impending job I will have to do, and come closer and closer to cracking and just quitting the company. I'm on the verge of massive amounts of Boston Pedicab Red Sox dollars, and so I don't feel so bad about it, and the money I'm pulling in from Austinites over two weekend nights is not enough to even cover my rent for a month, and that started to get to me. The closer work time came, the more anxious I got. It reminded me of the time last October when I got hired by the Cambridge Brewing Company as support staff. I trained on a Friday lunch shift and made myself unavailable for the following weekend to pedicab, and as it approached my next shift, a beautiful Wednesday, 70 degrees, nothing really happening, just flat out gorgeous, I sat in my room dressed for work, black shirt, jeans, black shoes, ready to bike over, eyes darting towards the light outside, fretting to friends over that time vampire Facebook that sometimes I think I might just quit. The seconds ticked one at a time like Chinese water torture about to crush my soul at the determined start time of 4:30. It's 4. 4:05. 4:10. 4:11. I called Chris, my boss, a very nice guy and laid it out.
"Hey Chris, it's Dan."
"Hey Dan, what's up," he fed me back with the seasoning of the feeling that something was, in fact, up.
"I gotta be honest with ya, I don't think this is gonna work out," I confessed, falling on the financial sword of this job security, for better or worse.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, I'm sorry to put you in this position," actually feeling sorry for doing it, but knowing that I needed to not work there that day so badly that it didn't matter. "I can still come in and help out tonight if you're gonna need the help."
"Nah, it's OK," he said hollowly. I imagined him rolling his eyes at me, but I stayed sorry since it bought me my freedom.
"Thanks for everything, and sorry again."
"Yeah, take care."
I hung up and tore off my black shirt as if it had diseases and insects sown into it, perhaps it was made of the textile version of shame, and recovered myself with the neon green, a color I've worn so much that I'm surprised it hasn't soaked into my skin. I've even considered how well it would tattoo into me. I breathed and laughed and bragged about quitting to any and all, and proceeded to go pedicab and make twice as much as I would have made at the Cambridge Brewing Company, all the while feeling at total peace with myself. This is nearly the same relief I gave myself after pushing out the words to tell my awesome boss Phil that I didn't want to work that night. To my surprise, he let it all roll off his back since I hadn't really signed up for a shift that week anyway. He wished me luck in Boston and said he'd see me when I got back. Little did he know I didn't plan on riding for him when I returned, seeking tricycle piloting to sustain myself, knowing that I never wanted to ride a trailer ever again.
That night I went out with Chad, his job was sending him to Fort Lauderdale for a while, and so his ex-girlfriend, who came to town since Chad wanted to bring the togetherness back, joined us and we went all over the place. I wore my neon green headband made of a pedicab shirt sleeve and got hit on relentlessly by Dustin, a sweet guy, friend of Berto's and Chad's who joined us in the bar hopping, to give it up. (The headband.) I finally gave in and bequeathed to him my sacred pedicab shirtsleeve, and thereby consummated out friendship. Shortly after, Miranda showed up and it ended up a regular old night of chillin' out and chattin. Miranda and I dropped into Qua, a place that has live sharks in the dance floor, and decided to just go back to my place, it got lame to be out. In retrospect and retrotextive, I start to see that Miranda really was the rock for me being in Austin. Not that Violet was unanavailable, but communications with her were not the same. Miranda I traded nothings almost constinuously. She cared about my randomness, and me for hers, the easy outlet of stabbing at our routines with words to someone, and in so doing, relieving ourselves of the drudgery by communicating our discontents, errant thoughts, desires to see each other, and obtaining sympathy at the push of a few buttons. The following is our conversation on this day, April 9th. My remarks are offset to the right, iPhone style.
Buenos dias feo.
Boner Dias. Sup?
... I cut all my hair off...
Not all of it, I bet you missed a spot
... Fuck...
Haha. I bet you still look cute.
Dude no. My ma and I did it. ... Fuck...
Lol! Oh well! Hurrah for desrtuctive impulses!
What's so bad about it?
Are you bald now?
Naw, not that bad. Lol. Its very grunge rock. I'm actually startin to dig it. Yay for living in the capital of weird too.
And by grunge rock i might actually mean 5 year old kid from the early 90's...Anyways anyways...
Yeah I'm sure you will own it. And you already looked like a 5 year old...
And you aleady look like testicles... Biyitch. Pah!
What are you doing, squeeb?
Bout to go to work. You?
Gonna try to write. Then pedicabbing tonight.
Wanna meet up at some point? It's cool if its late.
Sure. Think you'll be up? Or just play it by ear?
Ear.
Butt.
Dragon. Butt dragon.
Butt gator butt
Took the night off work. You done?
Oh. Yah. Dying my hair right now...
Wanna get a beer in a bit?
I'll be done in 30. Whaddya think?
Yep, I'm out, called out of pedicab in person.
Whur you at?
Going to Rain, actually :-)
Hahaha! Awesome.
Should I meet you there you wanna get a beer later or you wanna raincheck
Get the fuck down here! Come meet my friends!
Allmost done. Sorry.
Whenever. My phones almost dead. so if you can't find me in my grey megaphone tshirt, we've gone to Gingerman. It should last tho.
Ok, we are now at gingerman. Sorry for the miscue.
Wheresat again?
Btwn 3 and 4 on lavaca. We bullied the jukebox here the other night
This is just a slice of it all, those little thrills you get on a cardboard day from someone you like to hear from, coming every day, at any time, requesting one and receiving when you need it, being asked for one and dispensing, and building a conversation of text messages that lasts for months. It's a beautiful poetry in many ways, the navigation of interpersonal communication via texting. One must account for one's own subtext and any potential implied subtext, the degree of intimacy you have with the receiver of your texts, and how well she knows your personality to either infuse your words with the intonation you yourself desire, or know that the text is meant for her to interpret in the style of her particular personality, and know that she will. Then there's being so comfortable that none of this even matters. The rock, the shirt I feel comfortable wearing.
And yet, the very next day I let my imagination run wild about Violet. I had lunch with Miranda at Whole foods and my God, did she look beautiful. It was a sunny day, her haircut was actually fantastic, the dye job perfect for her, and I tried to take a picture, but she refused, embarrassed, and claimed she didn't look good in pictures. In my opinion, it is the embarrassed face that sours the picture, but I showed people her face in this half baked snapshot anyway, and told my friends in Boston all about her.
I planned on going back to Boston on the 15th of April since the trip started-I have a dental examination, and I knew I'd make some money riding 10 Red Sox games in a row, if I could obtain them. So without getting too elaborate right here, I had booked a return flight to Boston from LA, figuring I'd be done with my trip and I would need some cash to get started in LA. But what's happened has been what has happened, so I booked a flight from Austin to LA to catch my immutable Virgin America flight from LA to Boston, having altered my originating January 5th ticket to Austin, not LA from Boston. In the moment of mentioning the trip, Miranda told me she'd miss me, and so I asked her if she would give me a ride to the airport. She said she would, and it made her happy and I knew I could rely on her.
I left Miranda to do some census work in the middle of the day at Fletcher's and on the way home from it, there surfaced between Violet and I some kind of argument. I think I may have gotten too dramatic about something before dropping her off, I can't even remember what it was, and truly that means, especially now, that it didn't really matter. Probably something I said harshly, ascerbicly, thornily, a tendency I try to fight. I really wanted to see her and in messages, she is cool, all is controlled, but I begin to psych myself out. I talk to Chad's girlfriend sarah about my issues an her tactics for controlling my situation are nothing short of Machiavellian, and it turns into an ongoing discussion, and then later, an outright argument wearing the disguise of civility. I can't even take the stress of navigating the early loose or game-playing stages of relationships, and I freak out every time I start to invest. Being out later, I convinced myself that I saw Miranda in a club called Kiss and Fly, another gay bar in the warehouse district, and out of my mind, call her out on it. It ended up a happy accident since she thought it was funny and I confessed to her that I'm just totally mental that day, melting down, something she empathized with, genuinely cared to know why, and forgave me outright when I offered deep and crazy apologies, feeding back to me in a text, "Come to my bed motha fucka!" This is some chick.
Chad and Sarah started heading to Beauty Bar, a weakness he has for shitty hipster dance parties to music that sounds like insects fucking other insects that want to fight and/or kill them to eat them. I said I'd meet them over there, I had rode my bike, so they departed, and at that 1:15 am moment, as if my life is sometimes written by a bumbling screenwriter, Violet calls me as she said she would, and we talk. I apologized for being dramatic, and she thanks me for that. I call her out on the inconsistencies of her words versus her actions and she apologizes and I thank her for that. We talk openly and honestly and I tell her about how Sarah told me to proceed in my course, which I rejected and Violet rejects abhorrently, and we laugh about it because the air has been cleared. I'm on the level again, I have the peace I desire, and instead of traveling to a shitty hipster dance party, I pop into nearby Fado, an Irish pub that has a location I've imbibed at in Washington, DC. I speak to that old hospitable friend that is there for the sociable, the bartender, and he tells me the meaning of Fado, the Gaelic word that begins most Irish tales, meaning, "A long time ago." I burned the last of my night down in there, submerging my thoughts in Guinness and gab until ten after two, then biked to Miranda's. The word appearing to me now just seems so appropriate that at some point this entire chronicle will be fado, and here I write from memory 60 days after the fact. That distance is only due to grow as the journey picks up yet again in just 8 days from the present.
Sunday was the day we designated to film the Kramer versus Kramer scene, and Violet had been dumpster diving. She invited me to dine with her friends on salvaged goods, and I accepted, of course. We drove to her friend Sierra's place and the few ladies cooked dinner while I wrapped up a little census business while drinking a beer. Billable hours at dinner hanging out. Violet picked some wild onions she had found and made scallion pancakes out of them with sweet potato fries that came from the dumpster. One of her friends, a guy named Brad, apparently had an aversion to food that may not have come directly from a store, and the whole meal was shadowed by the fact of his not knowing. Before he arrived, we joked for 20 minutes about the best possible time and way to reveal to him that he'd been eating food from a dumpster. Hey Brad, you ever put your mouth directly on a garbage can? (Stops eating) I can NOT believe this food was all so fucking free! (stops eating) Isn't this delicious for dumpster food, Braaaad? (stops chewing) It particularly amused when he really enjoyed the meal and complimented the ladies on their creations. As Violet and I drove to the filming location for our scene, we kept laughing about it. The idea was to let him digest a good bit and enlighten him long after the meal so to spare his rage a little, but the cat had to exit the bag, and Violet texted him that he had something interesting in his stomach. As selfish as it may have been considering we were not the ones to deal with the aftermath of Brad's annoyance that we fed him such trashily procured foodstuffs, it helped pass our time between takes. The shoot itself went well, and acting with Violet thrilled us both to feel things in front of each other. I loved the exercise of it all, and I need a lot more film acting experience or far greater detail in direction, and more preparation. For my character, giving the camera little felt like the right thing to do, and I think the performance comes across as more loaded than flat, and Violet does a fine job in everything I've seen her act in. And inside this block of time, and this day together is where its sinking in that Violet fucking rules, and I'm passing the point of no return. In between takes, she texts me that I'm cute, and as nervous as I get overthinking things while we're apart, in her presence I'm not afraid to unleash my undomesticated dork, and let him run around the yard and chew up old boots. After we wrapped our shoot, Violet suggested her place as the venue change, and I accepted the invitation because I wanted it the whole time. It's a moment that cracks me wide open when you lay next to somebody, looking into their eyes for a while and just say, "Hi," and you smile, and they smile back, because you've gone so much further than greeting, and with bright eyes reflecting at you in any kind of light and say it back to you, "Hi." I don't care to greet just anyone like that, just every once in a while...you know you can. And so here it was, "Hi," and the next month it was "Oh, hello."
Violet and I planned for dinner that night, a real date sort of thing, so I polished up a few date ideas and had followed through with executing a more ritualistic time of courting her for whatever it was we were entertaining. I was ready to take her down to Saltlick Barbeque in wherever the fuck it was 35 minutes away is where, and the idea was sound, but Violet hadn't realized how much time needed to be budgeted for this excursion, and needed to be at her improv show at 8. So in haste, we went somewhere local, my disappointment known, but the dateness of it not being lost, and so after a delicious mess of ribs, we drove up to the Coldetowne Theater, and I sunk a little deeper into the Austin comedy scene. I watched damned good free improv and drank the beer I bought at the gas station there, and met a lot of Violet's contemporaries, great people, cool kids just having fun in this great scene, learning and laughing. It hurts a little not to grow the roots I want to grow here, but this is the way of the traveler I am, that sad cowboy that has to go into the sunset. We weathered the flurry of socializing that followed the show, and I as Violet's ride home, tried to give her the space to be just herself with her improv friends, but I struggled in that parking lot to be either funny to her friends, or failing that, not awkward, maybe just tired.
We went back South towards Violet's house and got some ice cream to wrap our little date. I did want to introduce Violet to Chad, and we popped in at the last moment of the last night he'd live in Austin, to introduce, say hello, say goodbye, and tape that package shut and ship it off. I disliked the appearance of Sarah and Violet in the same space, mostly due to the residue of the argument we had a few nights prior, but I knew I proceeded in the morally just method, and that it could not be extracted as incident from the stop in we made. So they met and were friendly, and everyone got tired, and we all left each other somberly and sleepily, and back to Violet's for the second night in a row, feeling assured to sleep next to her the night before I left.
I took off when Violet did, and went to pack my shit up for a month of tricycles. I handed my census badge in, and my only regret about working for the US Census, was that when I handed my badge in, I didn't say, "You can count me out." Miranda went to get her new tattoo before she planned to pick me up, so I waited at home for the ink to dry, ready to go. It became apparent to her that it was going to take longer than they had planned, and she wouldn't be able to give me a ride. She texted it to me. I got really upset with her, and started to panic. I waited just a little bit to see if it would work out or not, and lamented that I always have issues getting to this fucking airport! I relented to myself and texted Violet to ask for a ride. She indignantly came to get me, I think she felt hurt that I didn't ask her for the ride to the airport to begin with, in fact mentioning that I could have, but who should it have been anyway? Then again, words are easy to say.
She kissed me goodbye, and drove off. Then Miranda texted me that she was all done, did I still need a ride? We bittersweetly spoke over the phone, and confessed we'd miss each other, and that we'd stay in touch, and could just chat whenever just like we had been. I feared for my relationships in Austin, and how they would be affected by my month long absence. Nowhere and nothing else has made me realize the heartbreaking nature of nomadism, the burden that a transient traveler suffers, that your relationships can't be properly maintained, that you always have that loneliness to carry. It doesn't just exist in you, but on your back, tensing your shoulders as if to keep the frigid wind out of your jacket, shrugging out and off settled feelings. I had Saltlick Barbeque by myself at the airport, ate half of it in Austin, the second half in California. I tried to write in the sky and got a single paragraph out. I landed at LAX and texted Miranda first.
Statistics:
$223 in travel adjustments
Unlimited texting by the month
95 days from my last standup set to the day when I first went on twice in one evening
1 guy told me to suck his dick
4 total shifts riding a trailer pedicab
21 years ago was the end of the decade of music I prefer to dance to.
21 year olds and younger have no real appreciation for the 80's, fuckin babies. *shakes fist*
22 is Miranda's age
24 is Violet's age
6 is the optimal number of fist shakes when performing aforementioned action. Go ahead, try it.
Drinks from...
Day 86
483 Ranger IPA @home
484 Fin Du Monde
485 Ranger IPA
Day 87
486 PBR @Chad's
487 PBR
488 Tecate @Berto's
489 PBR
490 PBR
491 Rio Blanco Pale Ale @Boticelli's
492 Rio Blanco Pale Ale
493 Live Oak Wood Beast @Snack Bar
494 Lonestar @Continental Club
Day 88
495 Racer 5 IPA @Whip In
496 Live Oak IPA
497 Miller High Life @ Red Devil Shop
Day 89
498 Ranger IPA @home
499 Dogfish Head 60 min IPA
500 Miller High Life @Red Devil Shop
Day 90
501 Dogfish Head 60 min IPA @home
502 Ranger IPA @Violet's
503 Ranger IPA
504 Ranger IPA
505 Fin Du Monde @party
506 Miller High Life
507 Shiner Bock @Elysium
508 Miller High Life
Day 91
509 Stash IPA @Mellow Mushroom
510 Stash IPA
511 Mudslinger Ale @home
512 Lonestar
Day 92
513 512 IPA @Little Woodrow's
514 512 IPA
515 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @home
Day 93
516 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @home
517 Shiner Bock @Starseeds
518 Ranger IPA @New Movement
519 Ranger IPA
520 Ranger IPA
521 Live Oak IPA @Six Tap Room
522 Live Oak IPA
523 Ranger IPA @Ginger Man
524 Fireman's 4
Day 94
525 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @Kari's
526 Widmer Pitch Black IPA
527 Schlitz 40 oz @New Movement
528 Brooklyn Lager @Long Branch Inn
529 Fireman's 4
Day 95
530 Lonestar @Red Devil Shop
531 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA @home
532 Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA
533 Absithe @Peche
534 Shiner Bock @Rain
535 Shot of Patron
536 Ranger IPA @Ginger Man
537 Live Oak IPA
Day 96
538 St. Arnold's Bock @Whole Foods
539 Broken Halo IPA @ Fletcher's
540 Lonestar @home
541 Some Pilsner @The Good Knight
542 Stone IPA @Shangri-La (Thanks, Eric!)
543 Lonestar
544 Lonestar
545 Lonestar @Blind Pig
546 Jager shot (WHY?!?)
547 Shiner Bock @Kiss and Fly
548 Stash IPA @Frank
549 Guinness @Fado
Day 97
550 Ranger IPA @Little Woodrow's
551 512 IPA
552 Rio Blanco Full Moon Rye Pale Ale @Film Shoot
553 Lucky U IPA @Violet's
554 Lucky U IPA
556 Lucky U IPA
Day 98
557 Shiner Dark @Artz Ribhouse
558 Corona
559 Shiner Bock @Coldtowne Theater
560 Ranger IPA @Violet's
Day 99
561 Ranger IPA @home
562 Ranger IPA
Flight
563 Racer 5 IPA @Library Ale House
564 Lagunitas IPA @Finn McCool's
565 Lagunitas IPA
566 East India IPA @Fox and Hound
567 East India IPA
568 PBR 24 oz can at Maeve's Residuals
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