I just remembered something else about the place on Jack Street.
The last day I was gathering my stuff up to move out, I was experiencing a profound mixture of devastation, rage, and helplessness. I was anxious to move, but I was also breaking a lease. The landlord and I had gone back and forth about the fact that he was going to hold me to pay a month's worth of rent and some other lease-breaking and property-damage fees he came up with, none of which I could afford. He sensed this, and he was trying to coerce me into staying, promising he would put burglar's bars on the windows and that this would make it safer. (Never mind the place was now associated with something awful. It didn't matter if even the National fucking Guard showed up to protect me. Nothing was going to make it feel secure.) I felt too worked up to be rational. The whole thing felt like a terrible injustice and, since I would most likely never set foot inside of the building, it seemed like I needed to, well, to *do* something.
(I couldn't imagine doing something really awful. I knew a crazed grad-school drop-out who left Houston in a totally manic freak out, convinced that her landlord [and everyone else] was ripping her off, and so --without telling the landlord she was moving out -- she had the apartment's electricity turned off, opened up giant vats of mayonnaise-drenched cole slaw in the fridge, and left them for him to find after they had gone sour and rotted in the 100-degree heat. No, that kind of thing takes far too much planning and cruelty.)
In a moment of -- what? impotent agitation? neurotic symptom? sublime revenge? I grabbed a Sharpie marker, crawled inside the bedroom closet, stood up as tall as I could, and stared at about four inches of white wall over the frame. Here, for some really weird reason, which must have something to do with early-childhood connections between panic, fear, and the devil, I wrote, in thick black letters: BEWARE -- SATAN HERE!! 666!!! LIVE WITH EVIL AT YOUR OWN RISK!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!! And I emerged from the closet, shaking, but feeling like I had put a mark on the place that would forever curse it and prevent my landlord from making a future profit.
The strange part (well, I guess one of the many strange parts) of this is that I seriously doubt anyone, with the exception of a very tall child playing hide-and-go-seek, will ever see this message. And yet, at the time, I imagined that everyone considering tenancy would, no doubt, discover this terrifying message and run screaming out the front door. It makes the event that much more interesting to me, now, given the chain of signifiers: impotence, the closet, rage, writing, fear, and evil. And the message itself -- a warning to, most likely, no one -- a literal sign, but one that, in the end, only points back to me and my slightly bizarre moments of private acting out.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
apartmentalism (two)
I don't know how many people remember 4311 1/2 Jack Street.
Picture a shot-gun shack with a dog-leg in its structure, and you have this apartment. It was a stand-alone buiding (think cabin meets trailer) up on cinder blocks, located on the very eastern edge of Montrose, south of Richmond where Jack dead-ends into a street called Oakley. Tucked behind a duplex and next to a garage apartment, it had three concrete steps that led up to the door and a mailbox with a large Felix the Cat sticker on it. Upon entering, you would first notice that the ceiling nearly touched my head. My friends affectionately called it Chuck's Tree House because of its small size which, I am sure, was exaggerated by my own giganticism. I am a sucker for weirdness.
When I moved in (Spring 1995), I put duck tape over two pine-knot holes in the hard-wood floors in the front room (it worked like a charm!) and furnished it with a lime green couch and orange, daisy curtains from the Second-to-None thrift store (all of the windows were painted and nailed shut, which seems dangerous to me, now). A desk went into one corner near a tiny closet. There was a slender bit of wall into which was built a narrow set of bookshelves. Here is the part that makes the place not-exactly a shot gun: the tiny kitchen (not a kitchenette, but an actual kitchen, crammed with a small stove, full-size fridge, sink, and cabinets) formed a little L shape off of which was the door to a little bedroom, about the size of the front room. The smallest bathroom you've ever seen was off to the left of the kitchen. (It included a shower stall so small I had to crouch to get in it. I filled a large cup to distribute the water evenly when I washed.) The bedroom had a back door to it that led to a small patch of grass and a wooden fence, behind which ran Highway 59, whose zooming traffic, like white noise, lulled me to sleep at night. It cost $325/month to live here.
Things went swimmingly, at first. I danced around to Bjork while cooking red beans and rice. I did laundry for free in the garage next door. I wrote seminar papers on waste and whiteness. I painted my television yellow and covered it with black daisies. I met my neighbors: a gay male couple who lived above the garage, a young punk rock boyfriend-girlfriend couple who lived in the front next to Linda, a middle-aged woman who fed all the stray cats in the neighborhood. By the time the 1995 fall semester began, I felt sure I'd finish out my stay in Houston right there.
But things went wrong really fast. Oblivious to some obvious clues, I was dating a guy who was publically cheating on me (even after I specified that we should communicate about these things). I was totally humiliated when I found out, especially since he had a key to my place and was using it when I was not there. Right after we broke up, the couple upstairs from the garage became verbally and physically abusive with each other, and I could hear them fight. I woke up at night to one of the man's screams. I felt confused and alone. A window broke out and another neighbor called the police. They would quiet down, but start up every couple of nights, usually on the weekend. When I would see them during the day, it was as if nothing weird was going on, which made it really creepy.
Simultaneously, Linda, the cat lady, fed so many stray cats it became sickening. There were kittens and cats in all of the bushes, and many would fuck and breed under my apartment, making that alarming noise that only cats-in-heat and dying children can make. But Linda loved them, and sang little songs in a pretty, little, high pitched voice to them every day while setting out dishes of food and milk. She named all of them. One day, I came home and Linda was outside crying. When I asked her what was wrong she yelled "Look around you! Just look!!" Nothing. No cats. The SPCA came and took them all away.
Finally, one night I came home from getting a drink with my friend Tony Larsen, took a shower, took out my contacts, and went into the bedroom. Although everything was blurry, it was clear that something was wrong. The air-conditioning unit was on the ground. Then I realized it had been ripped out of the wall and broken glass was all over the floor, along with all of my dresser drawers and clothes. After putting on some clothes and a pair of glasses, I rushed over and knocked on Linda's door and asked her to call the police. My place had been broken into and much of my stuff (all of which was just cheap crap, but necessary for me to live) was stolen -- most importantly my cds, portable cd player, the yellow-daisy television set, clothes, some money, and dishes (apparantly, they didn't get as far as the front room). When the police arrived, the head cop whistled and asked me why I lived in such a place. He called it a death trap. He explained that the apartment used to be a drug-dealer's house and that addicts from under the freeway were looking for crack. (It struck me, then, that an unbelievable number of nervous-looking people knocked on my door -- day and night -- looking for someone who no longer lived there. I figured it was part of living in a big city.) Before he left, the cop advised me to pack up whatever valuables were left and stay with a friend and that, if he were me, he would get a gun, sit out back and wait for whoever broke in to return, and shoot them. Interestingly enough, the same cop called me on the phone about twenty minutes later and recanted, saying: "I gave you some advice when I was there and I just want to make sure you understand that I was joking, right?" Right.
I pushed the a/c unit back into the window the next day and contacted the landlord, who was this jet-setting white guy who drove a red sports car. He sent someone over to "fix" the hole in the wall, but it really was a board nailed into place. A few days later, I returned to find the unit ripped out again, and more stuff missing. I went through the same process again, only to have it happen one more time, only this time, I was in the shower when the person broke in, so that, when I came out, I realized we had both been in this little place at the same time. In addition, and most likely unrelatedly, the driver's side door of my car was, mysteriously, crimped shut, with no sign of damage to the body. (Before it was fixed, I had to enter through the passenger's door or through the window, Dukes of Hazzard Style.) Linda, the cat lady, gently suggested that this was all connected and personal, and that someone trying to scare me. This was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I gathered my stuff and camped out on my friend Sixto's apartment floor for about two weeks as I tried to find a new place and get my life together, but it was hard because I was -- without even knowing it -- severely traumatized. I slept way too much, and when I did I had terrible nightmares. My crying fits were out of control, and, at one point, Sixto came home from work, saw me sobbing on the couch, and said, pointedly, "I am really sorry your life is so hard, but I cannot help you, so you really need to find someone who can and you need to go." Unbelievably, this was exactly what I needed -- a real kick in the butt to get moving, to get over myself, and to make a change in my life. Within a few days, I signed a lease for a kooky little place on West Alabama and moved in.
The year we moved in together, Hank and I took a long walk through Montrose. One of our destinations was this old place of mine. I hadn't been back in a while, and the neighborhood had been in the news recently because it came out that, for years, a man had been buying male hustlers off the street and torturing them on the 4300-block of Jack, and that the place where he did this was known, by the hustlers, as The Freak Shack. I wanted to go back and see if my place was still there, and to look at the neighborhood to see if I could tell where the Freak Shack was in relation to my place. As we came up the driveway, I saw a woman out front, hanging her laundry from a line, surrounded by children's toys. I wanted to ask if I could go inside and check the place out again, but how would I even begin to explain? Since moving out, I have had countless dreams about this place. The one that recurs most is the one in which I still live there and, suddenly, I realize that the back door does not actually lock, and that people have been coming in and out of the apartment and taking my stuff for years without my knowledge. I didn't want to bother her, so I turned around and came back to the street. Further up the street, Hank and I stopped at what we could only assume was the Freak Shack, but, really, can you judge what goes on in a building just by looking at its exterior?
Picture a shot-gun shack with a dog-leg in its structure, and you have this apartment. It was a stand-alone buiding (think cabin meets trailer) up on cinder blocks, located on the very eastern edge of Montrose, south of Richmond where Jack dead-ends into a street called Oakley. Tucked behind a duplex and next to a garage apartment, it had three concrete steps that led up to the door and a mailbox with a large Felix the Cat sticker on it. Upon entering, you would first notice that the ceiling nearly touched my head. My friends affectionately called it Chuck's Tree House because of its small size which, I am sure, was exaggerated by my own giganticism. I am a sucker for weirdness.
When I moved in (Spring 1995), I put duck tape over two pine-knot holes in the hard-wood floors in the front room (it worked like a charm!) and furnished it with a lime green couch and orange, daisy curtains from the Second-to-None thrift store (all of the windows were painted and nailed shut, which seems dangerous to me, now). A desk went into one corner near a tiny closet. There was a slender bit of wall into which was built a narrow set of bookshelves. Here is the part that makes the place not-exactly a shot gun: the tiny kitchen (not a kitchenette, but an actual kitchen, crammed with a small stove, full-size fridge, sink, and cabinets) formed a little L shape off of which was the door to a little bedroom, about the size of the front room. The smallest bathroom you've ever seen was off to the left of the kitchen. (It included a shower stall so small I had to crouch to get in it. I filled a large cup to distribute the water evenly when I washed.) The bedroom had a back door to it that led to a small patch of grass and a wooden fence, behind which ran Highway 59, whose zooming traffic, like white noise, lulled me to sleep at night. It cost $325/month to live here.
Things went swimmingly, at first. I danced around to Bjork while cooking red beans and rice. I did laundry for free in the garage next door. I wrote seminar papers on waste and whiteness. I painted my television yellow and covered it with black daisies. I met my neighbors: a gay male couple who lived above the garage, a young punk rock boyfriend-girlfriend couple who lived in the front next to Linda, a middle-aged woman who fed all the stray cats in the neighborhood. By the time the 1995 fall semester began, I felt sure I'd finish out my stay in Houston right there.
But things went wrong really fast. Oblivious to some obvious clues, I was dating a guy who was publically cheating on me (even after I specified that we should communicate about these things). I was totally humiliated when I found out, especially since he had a key to my place and was using it when I was not there. Right after we broke up, the couple upstairs from the garage became verbally and physically abusive with each other, and I could hear them fight. I woke up at night to one of the man's screams. I felt confused and alone. A window broke out and another neighbor called the police. They would quiet down, but start up every couple of nights, usually on the weekend. When I would see them during the day, it was as if nothing weird was going on, which made it really creepy.
Simultaneously, Linda, the cat lady, fed so many stray cats it became sickening. There were kittens and cats in all of the bushes, and many would fuck and breed under my apartment, making that alarming noise that only cats-in-heat and dying children can make. But Linda loved them, and sang little songs in a pretty, little, high pitched voice to them every day while setting out dishes of food and milk. She named all of them. One day, I came home and Linda was outside crying. When I asked her what was wrong she yelled "Look around you! Just look!!" Nothing. No cats. The SPCA came and took them all away.
Finally, one night I came home from getting a drink with my friend Tony Larsen, took a shower, took out my contacts, and went into the bedroom. Although everything was blurry, it was clear that something was wrong. The air-conditioning unit was on the ground. Then I realized it had been ripped out of the wall and broken glass was all over the floor, along with all of my dresser drawers and clothes. After putting on some clothes and a pair of glasses, I rushed over and knocked on Linda's door and asked her to call the police. My place had been broken into and much of my stuff (all of which was just cheap crap, but necessary for me to live) was stolen -- most importantly my cds, portable cd player, the yellow-daisy television set, clothes, some money, and dishes (apparantly, they didn't get as far as the front room). When the police arrived, the head cop whistled and asked me why I lived in such a place. He called it a death trap. He explained that the apartment used to be a drug-dealer's house and that addicts from under the freeway were looking for crack. (It struck me, then, that an unbelievable number of nervous-looking people knocked on my door -- day and night -- looking for someone who no longer lived there. I figured it was part of living in a big city.) Before he left, the cop advised me to pack up whatever valuables were left and stay with a friend and that, if he were me, he would get a gun, sit out back and wait for whoever broke in to return, and shoot them. Interestingly enough, the same cop called me on the phone about twenty minutes later and recanted, saying: "I gave you some advice when I was there and I just want to make sure you understand that I was joking, right?" Right.
I pushed the a/c unit back into the window the next day and contacted the landlord, who was this jet-setting white guy who drove a red sports car. He sent someone over to "fix" the hole in the wall, but it really was a board nailed into place. A few days later, I returned to find the unit ripped out again, and more stuff missing. I went through the same process again, only to have it happen one more time, only this time, I was in the shower when the person broke in, so that, when I came out, I realized we had both been in this little place at the same time. In addition, and most likely unrelatedly, the driver's side door of my car was, mysteriously, crimped shut, with no sign of damage to the body. (Before it was fixed, I had to enter through the passenger's door or through the window, Dukes of Hazzard Style.) Linda, the cat lady, gently suggested that this was all connected and personal, and that someone trying to scare me. This was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I gathered my stuff and camped out on my friend Sixto's apartment floor for about two weeks as I tried to find a new place and get my life together, but it was hard because I was -- without even knowing it -- severely traumatized. I slept way too much, and when I did I had terrible nightmares. My crying fits were out of control, and, at one point, Sixto came home from work, saw me sobbing on the couch, and said, pointedly, "I am really sorry your life is so hard, but I cannot help you, so you really need to find someone who can and you need to go." Unbelievably, this was exactly what I needed -- a real kick in the butt to get moving, to get over myself, and to make a change in my life. Within a few days, I signed a lease for a kooky little place on West Alabama and moved in.
The year we moved in together, Hank and I took a long walk through Montrose. One of our destinations was this old place of mine. I hadn't been back in a while, and the neighborhood had been in the news recently because it came out that, for years, a man had been buying male hustlers off the street and torturing them on the 4300-block of Jack, and that the place where he did this was known, by the hustlers, as The Freak Shack. I wanted to go back and see if my place was still there, and to look at the neighborhood to see if I could tell where the Freak Shack was in relation to my place. As we came up the driveway, I saw a woman out front, hanging her laundry from a line, surrounded by children's toys. I wanted to ask if I could go inside and check the place out again, but how would I even begin to explain? Since moving out, I have had countless dreams about this place. The one that recurs most is the one in which I still live there and, suddenly, I realize that the back door does not actually lock, and that people have been coming in and out of the apartment and taking my stuff for years without my knowledge. I didn't want to bother her, so I turned around and came back to the street. Further up the street, Hank and I stopped at what we could only assume was the Freak Shack, but, really, can you judge what goes on in a building just by looking at its exterior?
Saturday, July 22, 2006
apartmentalism (one)
Remember 1738 West Alabama?
It was a strange, mutant apartment complex with a wild, jungly courtyard tucked back from the busy road, and I lived in an apartment over the garage that looked like it was built inside out. You stepped down into the apartment, and there was a wrought iron railing you could grasp as you came into the front room, which had, to your left, a white-painted brick wall with two electric candle lights embedded in it. I lived in this building for years -- in fact, I spent most of my twenties there. I wrote my dissertation there. It was next door to a funeral home and across the street from a head shop (the beloved Smoke'n'Toke -- the residents joked that there was a secret tunnel that led from our place under West Alabama into its bong storage room). My rent was $410/month when I moved in (1996), and $525 when I moved out (2004). My apartment had a six-sided kitchen with a mosaic tile floor. It jutted out at an odd angle into the trees. The bathroom was pink tile with a sliding glass door. There were built-in bookshelves made of beautiful blonde wood, wooded walls in the front room, and tons of closets and drawers and cabinets; electric plugs on the ceilings, light switches that turned on nothing, and hand crank windows; cubby-holes, mirrors at every turn, and glass shelving tucked into its corners.
None of the apartments resembled any of the others, and there was actually a sixth apartment that was underneath my own that had what my landlord (who, at 78, was the epitome of Incredibly Bizarre Old Lady who wore wigs, tight jeans, and red high heels and smoked like fiend) called the "ha ha room." The "ha ha room" was a small room that had, off to the side, a frosted glass shower door and, when you opened it, there was [suprise!!] a toilet inside, instead of the expected shower. Not many people ever got to see this secret apartment, although a few people tried to live in there over the years.
Every once in a while, the landlord would find some vagabond and let them stay in that place if they promised to "keep up" the premises. I don't know how she met these people, but one was a man named Joe who moved in with his wife, Rusty. They cooked nutria and squirrel in the kitchen and, to me, it stank to high heavens. They also did a lot of drinking and fighting, and she finally called the cops on him one day and they took him away and she moved out. (One night, after watching Channel 2 local news coverage about registered sex offenders, I decided to go on-line and check out my neighborhood to see who lived in the area. The first name that came up was Joe's, and the site listed our apartment building as his address, accompanied by his information that he had recently been arrested for aggravated sexual assault.)
A few years after Joe and Rusty moved out, a guy whose name I can't remember moved in. He was a laughing sort of guy who spent several days fixing my broken toilet, and every time something went wrong he would say, "Whooops! Looks like it's time for the 611!" It took me a while to figure out that the 611 is a gay bar near Pacific Street, notorious for its seediness and rough-and-tumble clientelle, and that he was a regular customer there. This guy moved out after not too long, and I wouldn't even be able to recognize him if I bumped into him at the grocery store.
I met a lot of wonderful and unusal people who moved in and out of this place during the time I was there, almost too many to count. Many moved out because my landlord was too insane to deal with, and since the place was so old there were problems with leaks and flooding when it rained. I felt blessed that I was in apartment 6, since it was pretty sturdy and it only started leaking towards the end of my time there. There were times that the whole upstairs was vacant, and I would open my door and let the incense drift out onto that awesome porch (which had, when I first moved in, a roof with little tiny white Christmas lights woven into its beams, but was, after a year of my stay there, actually torn off and blown away by a hurricane), and I would sit in the doorway and look up at the moon and stars, cigarette in hand, lost in thought. I would think about everything, intensely wonder about my future, and if anything would ever change or if this was basically it and life had already reached its zenith.
The complex is gone, now. If you drive past, there is just a dirt lot surrounded by a fence. I was shocked into tears when I drove past and saw it being bulldozed one day, and I remember saying that I felt like my memories were being destroyed, since so many of them were in those walls, up and down that winding iron staircase. The owners of the funeral home purchased the building and the landlord moved into a home for senior citizens ("I'm only going," she said to me before she moved, "if they let me do the breakdancing"). Even though some of the residents lived there for a little while longer (including my friend Chickpea, who moved into my apartment but had to move out once they started storing coffins in the garage), they eventually evicted everyone and tore it down.
Before it was demolished, I went in to visit one last time. The building looked really beat up, sick. The windows were broken and there was cast off furniture lying around the grounds and up on the porch. I felt a pang of grief when I saw that the daisy curtain I hung in the front door window (when I first moved in) was still there, but the window itself was smashed in and the door starting to splinter. There were newspapers all over the floor (someone's bed?) and beer cans tossed in a corner. The door to the bedroom was pulled shut, and I really didn't want to open it and disturb anyone who might have been squatting in there, so I stayed quiet and just kind of poked around the front room, peeked into the other apartments, and then left. There wasn't much to see.
A few months ago, I learned that one of my favorite and colorful neighbors, Colonel, had passed away during Christmas 2005. Colonel (yes, pronouned "kernel") was a handsome down-on-his-luck chef-turned-waiter who lived in the biggest of the apartments with his boyfriend, Miguel. I remember when I broke the news to him that I was moving out he said, "I've got to get out of here, too. I don't want to be the last rat to jump this sinking ship." And, around 2003, it did seem like the ship was sinking. The landlord couldn't keep residents. The rooms remained vacant for months and months. Everything was in disrepair.
After I moved out, I ran into Colonel every great once in a while, but he seemed more and more distant, more and more sad, although he wouldn't say what was wrong. He was losing weight. He had broken up with Miguel. Finally, he just disappeared. Much to my surprise, I found out later that he was really sick (Colonel was so public about so much of his most personal habits, but so private about this particular matter -- and who could blame him?), his HIV had advanced to full-blown AIDS and, apparantly, he moved back to New York state where he lived with his parents until he finally passed away, as they say. I don't know what happened to Miguel, although I worry about him.
It was ironic that the end of the building was also the end of Colonel as well as the end of the landlord's independent life. But there were many years there where it really felt like such a lovely little community. We left our doors open and wandered in and out of each others' places as if they were our own. We cooked for each other. We brought all of our friends over and had them meet each other at parties. We welcomed newcomers and threw goodbye parties for those who moved out (if they were cool. We also made it difficult for anyone who was mean, snobby, or a jerk so that they would move out quickly.) We shared our stories, food, worries, politics, plants, pets, problems, questions, and noise.
After Hank and I moved in together, I was confused by our non-relation with our upstairs neighbors, who came and went without ever coming inside and asking me if I could help them do X or if I wanted to go to the grocery store together so we could cook up a big batch of Y. At 1738, I was so used to neighbors who were friends (no matter how much this did drive me crazy), I felt like something was missing in this place on Hawthorne. Of course, after two years, I am used to it, and I think some of the communal eating I have done with Miah, Raj, Kayte, and Carl, David Embry, etc. has helped.
It was a strange, mutant apartment complex with a wild, jungly courtyard tucked back from the busy road, and I lived in an apartment over the garage that looked like it was built inside out. You stepped down into the apartment, and there was a wrought iron railing you could grasp as you came into the front room, which had, to your left, a white-painted brick wall with two electric candle lights embedded in it. I lived in this building for years -- in fact, I spent most of my twenties there. I wrote my dissertation there. It was next door to a funeral home and across the street from a head shop (the beloved Smoke'n'Toke -- the residents joked that there was a secret tunnel that led from our place under West Alabama into its bong storage room). My rent was $410/month when I moved in (1996), and $525 when I moved out (2004). My apartment had a six-sided kitchen with a mosaic tile floor. It jutted out at an odd angle into the trees. The bathroom was pink tile with a sliding glass door. There were built-in bookshelves made of beautiful blonde wood, wooded walls in the front room, and tons of closets and drawers and cabinets; electric plugs on the ceilings, light switches that turned on nothing, and hand crank windows; cubby-holes, mirrors at every turn, and glass shelving tucked into its corners.
None of the apartments resembled any of the others, and there was actually a sixth apartment that was underneath my own that had what my landlord (who, at 78, was the epitome of Incredibly Bizarre Old Lady who wore wigs, tight jeans, and red high heels and smoked like fiend) called the "ha ha room." The "ha ha room" was a small room that had, off to the side, a frosted glass shower door and, when you opened it, there was [suprise!!] a toilet inside, instead of the expected shower. Not many people ever got to see this secret apartment, although a few people tried to live in there over the years.
Every once in a while, the landlord would find some vagabond and let them stay in that place if they promised to "keep up" the premises. I don't know how she met these people, but one was a man named Joe who moved in with his wife, Rusty. They cooked nutria and squirrel in the kitchen and, to me, it stank to high heavens. They also did a lot of drinking and fighting, and she finally called the cops on him one day and they took him away and she moved out. (One night, after watching Channel 2 local news coverage about registered sex offenders, I decided to go on-line and check out my neighborhood to see who lived in the area. The first name that came up was Joe's, and the site listed our apartment building as his address, accompanied by his information that he had recently been arrested for aggravated sexual assault.)
A few years after Joe and Rusty moved out, a guy whose name I can't remember moved in. He was a laughing sort of guy who spent several days fixing my broken toilet, and every time something went wrong he would say, "Whooops! Looks like it's time for the 611!" It took me a while to figure out that the 611 is a gay bar near Pacific Street, notorious for its seediness and rough-and-tumble clientelle, and that he was a regular customer there. This guy moved out after not too long, and I wouldn't even be able to recognize him if I bumped into him at the grocery store.
I met a lot of wonderful and unusal people who moved in and out of this place during the time I was there, almost too many to count. Many moved out because my landlord was too insane to deal with, and since the place was so old there were problems with leaks and flooding when it rained. I felt blessed that I was in apartment 6, since it was pretty sturdy and it only started leaking towards the end of my time there. There were times that the whole upstairs was vacant, and I would open my door and let the incense drift out onto that awesome porch (which had, when I first moved in, a roof with little tiny white Christmas lights woven into its beams, but was, after a year of my stay there, actually torn off and blown away by a hurricane), and I would sit in the doorway and look up at the moon and stars, cigarette in hand, lost in thought. I would think about everything, intensely wonder about my future, and if anything would ever change or if this was basically it and life had already reached its zenith.
The complex is gone, now. If you drive past, there is just a dirt lot surrounded by a fence. I was shocked into tears when I drove past and saw it being bulldozed one day, and I remember saying that I felt like my memories were being destroyed, since so many of them were in those walls, up and down that winding iron staircase. The owners of the funeral home purchased the building and the landlord moved into a home for senior citizens ("I'm only going," she said to me before she moved, "if they let me do the breakdancing"). Even though some of the residents lived there for a little while longer (including my friend Chickpea, who moved into my apartment but had to move out once they started storing coffins in the garage), they eventually evicted everyone and tore it down.
Before it was demolished, I went in to visit one last time. The building looked really beat up, sick. The windows were broken and there was cast off furniture lying around the grounds and up on the porch. I felt a pang of grief when I saw that the daisy curtain I hung in the front door window (when I first moved in) was still there, but the window itself was smashed in and the door starting to splinter. There were newspapers all over the floor (someone's bed?) and beer cans tossed in a corner. The door to the bedroom was pulled shut, and I really didn't want to open it and disturb anyone who might have been squatting in there, so I stayed quiet and just kind of poked around the front room, peeked into the other apartments, and then left. There wasn't much to see.
A few months ago, I learned that one of my favorite and colorful neighbors, Colonel, had passed away during Christmas 2005. Colonel (yes, pronouned "kernel") was a handsome down-on-his-luck chef-turned-waiter who lived in the biggest of the apartments with his boyfriend, Miguel. I remember when I broke the news to him that I was moving out he said, "I've got to get out of here, too. I don't want to be the last rat to jump this sinking ship." And, around 2003, it did seem like the ship was sinking. The landlord couldn't keep residents. The rooms remained vacant for months and months. Everything was in disrepair.
After I moved out, I ran into Colonel every great once in a while, but he seemed more and more distant, more and more sad, although he wouldn't say what was wrong. He was losing weight. He had broken up with Miguel. Finally, he just disappeared. Much to my surprise, I found out later that he was really sick (Colonel was so public about so much of his most personal habits, but so private about this particular matter -- and who could blame him?), his HIV had advanced to full-blown AIDS and, apparantly, he moved back to New York state where he lived with his parents until he finally passed away, as they say. I don't know what happened to Miguel, although I worry about him.
It was ironic that the end of the building was also the end of Colonel as well as the end of the landlord's independent life. But there were many years there where it really felt like such a lovely little community. We left our doors open and wandered in and out of each others' places as if they were our own. We cooked for each other. We brought all of our friends over and had them meet each other at parties. We welcomed newcomers and threw goodbye parties for those who moved out (if they were cool. We also made it difficult for anyone who was mean, snobby, or a jerk so that they would move out quickly.) We shared our stories, food, worries, politics, plants, pets, problems, questions, and noise.
After Hank and I moved in together, I was confused by our non-relation with our upstairs neighbors, who came and went without ever coming inside and asking me if I could help them do X or if I wanted to go to the grocery store together so we could cook up a big batch of Y. At 1738, I was so used to neighbors who were friends (no matter how much this did drive me crazy), I felt like something was missing in this place on Hawthorne. Of course, after two years, I am used to it, and I think some of the communal eating I have done with Miah, Raj, Kayte, and Carl, David Embry, etc. has helped.
Monday, July 17, 2006
home (but how do you know?)
I remember, late one night, several years ago, hanging out at Tim Murrah's Metropol (which was downtown, in a basement under the Montague Hotel) and running into Hank, who I knew very well, but with whom I was not in a relationship with at the time. As close friends do, we struck up an intimate conversation about what was foremost on our minds, and hashed out some ideas over several drinks (probably rum and coke, which I was drinking at the turn of the century because I liked the way the caffeine mixed with the booze). I was, during the last few years of graduate school, struggling with the concept of home, and I remember asking Hank if it was easier for someone who lived in Houston all his life to feel at home in the city. I was trying to figure out if my struggle, and often times failure, to maintain a sense of belonging was a result of having moved here from somewhere else, or if one could be native to a U.S. city and still feel that dislocation. I was going on at length, imagining alternative realities in which I had made the decision to stay in Philadelphia, only I would have been doing exactly what I was doing in Houston, but in a much more familiar cityscape. Fishing for a simple, "I think you're right, Chuck," I finished my description. Hank looked at me, patted me on the shoulder, and said something like, "You might have to ask yourself if you have *ever* felt at home, even when you were, presumably, most at home."
It was a difficult truth to face. I remember being super-irritated when he said it. In fact, it stopped the conversation, if I remember clearly. But I have thought of it often since then, and it has been on my mind since returning to Houston, which feels very much like home to me, now, and so the latter part of the response is haunting me: ". . . even when I am, presumably, most at home."
Someone famous (and I can't remember who) once said that feeling at home is all about the act of forgetting. When a place is strange to you, you must go through a process of forgetting, which begins when you actively remember its details so you don't get lost, so you can get your bearings. You *must* remember: The street will have tattoo parlors. You will take seven steps up the walk. The key will turn in the lock like this. The room will be painted an early morning sky blue. There will be little green vines on the windows. The back burner of the stove will not work.
You must remember enough so that you can begin to forget that you are remembering. The more you forget that you have remembered, the more familiar a place becomes, until you get to the point that you have totally forgotten because, in fact, you now know it. (I know this sounds like that passage from Faulkner's Light in August, but that's totally different -- isn't it?)
Is it possible to know a place so well, that you can actually feel its, um, energy? A few weeks before we left on our trip, I came home through the back door, as I always do, and had an immediate, acute sense that someone was (or recently had been) in the apartment. I called out, "Hello?" Leaving the back door open for quick escape, I slowly walked into all the different rooms, looking. I opened some closet doors. I pulled back the shower curtain. Finally, I noticed the front door to the apartment (which leads to the building's front door) was locked, which was unusual since Hank and I always keep it unlocked. I stood there, with my hand on the doorknob, wondering if it was actually possible that Hank or I locked it that morning. I made a mental note to ask when Hank got home. When I turned around to stretch out on the futon, I saw a mysterious envelope on the coffee table. I picked it up, and it read "Upstairs APT -- 1 Key." Everything settled back into place. The landlord, who rarely comes by, let himself into the apartment, dropped off a key so we could show the upstairs apartment, and locked the door on the way out.
There are two, interrelated, and perhaps obvious inspirations for this post: 1) Listening to and watching Melanie as she endeavors to find a place of her own, and as she learns about the city for the first time, has been a form of remembering what I once learned to forget. 2) Likewise, it has been an equally as uncanny sense of "Who's here?", since she has temporarily set up a home-base on our futon.
It was a difficult truth to face. I remember being super-irritated when he said it. In fact, it stopped the conversation, if I remember clearly. But I have thought of it often since then, and it has been on my mind since returning to Houston, which feels very much like home to me, now, and so the latter part of the response is haunting me: ". . . even when I am, presumably, most at home."
Someone famous (and I can't remember who) once said that feeling at home is all about the act of forgetting. When a place is strange to you, you must go through a process of forgetting, which begins when you actively remember its details so you don't get lost, so you can get your bearings. You *must* remember: The street will have tattoo parlors. You will take seven steps up the walk. The key will turn in the lock like this. The room will be painted an early morning sky blue. There will be little green vines on the windows. The back burner of the stove will not work.
You must remember enough so that you can begin to forget that you are remembering. The more you forget that you have remembered, the more familiar a place becomes, until you get to the point that you have totally forgotten because, in fact, you now know it. (I know this sounds like that passage from Faulkner's Light in August, but that's totally different -- isn't it?)
Is it possible to know a place so well, that you can actually feel its, um, energy? A few weeks before we left on our trip, I came home through the back door, as I always do, and had an immediate, acute sense that someone was (or recently had been) in the apartment. I called out, "Hello?" Leaving the back door open for quick escape, I slowly walked into all the different rooms, looking. I opened some closet doors. I pulled back the shower curtain. Finally, I noticed the front door to the apartment (which leads to the building's front door) was locked, which was unusual since Hank and I always keep it unlocked. I stood there, with my hand on the doorknob, wondering if it was actually possible that Hank or I locked it that morning. I made a mental note to ask when Hank got home. When I turned around to stretch out on the futon, I saw a mysterious envelope on the coffee table. I picked it up, and it read "Upstairs APT -- 1 Key." Everything settled back into place. The landlord, who rarely comes by, let himself into the apartment, dropped off a key so we could show the upstairs apartment, and locked the door on the way out.
There are two, interrelated, and perhaps obvious inspirations for this post: 1) Listening to and watching Melanie as she endeavors to find a place of her own, and as she learns about the city for the first time, has been a form of remembering what I once learned to forget. 2) Likewise, it has been an equally as uncanny sense of "Who's here?", since she has temporarily set up a home-base on our futon.
Friday, July 14, 2006
there, and back again (part two)
The day we left New Orleans, one of our hosts took us through the garden district and the french quarter, where we ooo-ed and ahhh-ed over the houses and apartments with lacy wrought-iron work, long floor-to-ceiling windows, and the pinks, turquoises, lavenders, oranges, greens, and yellows each one is painted. The smell of garbage mixed with sweet jasmine and magnolia was everywhere, so that the city really does become its very own perfumed body in a dank bar.
But our host was melancholy, not just because he was driving us with a wicked hangover, but because the city is in pain. As if seeing the city again for the first time, he repeatedly told us who was missing: "Normally, this street would be packed. Normally, this restaurant has a line of people waiting for their cafe ole that wraps around the block. Jackson Square used to be teeming with astrologers, fortune tellers, buskers, pick pockets, street kids, tourists, punks, stilt-walkers, clowns, mimes -- but no more. This place, here, shut down. This place also shut down. This entire block is no longer in business."
Melanie had said that she was leery of doing any kind of disaster tourism, and I agreed. It seems ugly and disrespectful to be a non-native (white) person boarding a bus and taking photos of disaster as if it were Graceland or Niagara Falls (yes, there really are such tours, although I don't know much about their theories of operation). Such an approach turns history into spectacle, an easily consumable experience of the "real" that can be seen, smelled, and photographed from a safe distance before the bus hightails it out of there and the tourist is on his or her way back to the luxury hotel. I know, for example, that I would not be in a car on its way to the Ninth Ward if it had not been destroyed. If it was even spoken about (which most likely it would not have been), it would have been described as an area for white tourists to avoid at all costs, and there would not have been an explanation for how such extreme impoverishment came to exist in an all-black urban neighborhood in a former slave-selling city. But our host asked us if he could show us the Ninth Ward, and since the ride was already haunted by the missing, it seemed fair to say "Go ahead," and so we drove over the bridge.
One of the first buildings I saw was one that housed the Common Ground collective, a community based volunteer organization that is helping New Orleans to heal (www.commongroundrelief.org). This is an organization I first read about on Houston's Indymedia website, and one I recommended to people who were looking for organizations to which they could donate money. When I saw the house, I wished we had more time to stop, more time to work, more time to listen; more time, and more time, and more, more, more time.
Rather than supply you with details of what I saw in the Ninth Ward, I'll make a note, instead, of the silence in the car and the terrible emptiness -- how it kept going and going and going. Endless.
But our host was melancholy, not just because he was driving us with a wicked hangover, but because the city is in pain. As if seeing the city again for the first time, he repeatedly told us who was missing: "Normally, this street would be packed. Normally, this restaurant has a line of people waiting for their cafe ole that wraps around the block. Jackson Square used to be teeming with astrologers, fortune tellers, buskers, pick pockets, street kids, tourists, punks, stilt-walkers, clowns, mimes -- but no more. This place, here, shut down. This place also shut down. This entire block is no longer in business."
Melanie had said that she was leery of doing any kind of disaster tourism, and I agreed. It seems ugly and disrespectful to be a non-native (white) person boarding a bus and taking photos of disaster as if it were Graceland or Niagara Falls (yes, there really are such tours, although I don't know much about their theories of operation). Such an approach turns history into spectacle, an easily consumable experience of the "real" that can be seen, smelled, and photographed from a safe distance before the bus hightails it out of there and the tourist is on his or her way back to the luxury hotel. I know, for example, that I would not be in a car on its way to the Ninth Ward if it had not been destroyed. If it was even spoken about (which most likely it would not have been), it would have been described as an area for white tourists to avoid at all costs, and there would not have been an explanation for how such extreme impoverishment came to exist in an all-black urban neighborhood in a former slave-selling city. But our host asked us if he could show us the Ninth Ward, and since the ride was already haunted by the missing, it seemed fair to say "Go ahead," and so we drove over the bridge.
One of the first buildings I saw was one that housed the Common Ground collective, a community based volunteer organization that is helping New Orleans to heal (www.commongroundrelief.org). This is an organization I first read about on Houston's Indymedia website, and one I recommended to people who were looking for organizations to which they could donate money. When I saw the house, I wished we had more time to stop, more time to work, more time to listen; more time, and more time, and more, more, more time.
Rather than supply you with details of what I saw in the Ninth Ward, I'll make a note, instead, of the silence in the car and the terrible emptiness -- how it kept going and going and going. Endless.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
there, and back again (part one)
The apartment smelled kind of weird when we opened the door. My first thought was that it was a gas leak, but all of our checks proved that wrong. Perhaps the bug bombs we set off before leaving? General stuffiness? Mildew from the bathroom? By the time we unloaded the car and lit a stick of incense, the a/c was humming and the place seemed fresher. This morning, as I write this, it smells like Melanie's toasted everything bagel and coffee.
We got in last night just before midnight, after another long day in the car. Six hours from New Orleans to Houston, but we were stuck in our one and only traffic jam on the way out, and so we sat on the roasting highway for another hour and a half. Later, half-way back to Texas, we stopped in Cajun country in Louisiana, right outside of Lafayette, and Hank and Melanie ate fish while I watched and drank water. When we spied a Subway and declared it the source of my dinner, I was really, really, happy to know we were almost home. So much bread and cheese, and the smell of Subway is now gross to me. I have been craving garlic and broccoli, ginger and kale, collards, fresh spinach, dandelion and beet leaf salad, lettuces that are not iceberg.
New Orleans was okay, but I was glad, as I always have been, to get out. Everyone I have known who has lived or lives in New Orleans has loved booze and boozing even more than my barfly friends in Houston. Perhaps surprising to some of my readers, it is just too much for me. More on NOLA in a minute.
On our way out of Memphis, we stopped at the National Ornamental Metal Museum, where we not only checked out an awesome array of metal work housed in a former yellow fever clinic, but where Melanie managed to commission six of her worry beads for the gift shop, which was really cool. We drove out from Memphis and headed south into Mississippi (I kept thinking about the time I saw Charro interviewed on some lame talk show, and she kept repeating "I am not from Missy Pee Pee! I am not from Missy Pee Pee!" Feel sorry for my car-mates who had to listen to me say that over and over in my Charro voice.).
After some "Yes, we should" and "Wait, no, we should not" and more "Yes, we really should since we are here", we got off the highway and headed east to Oxford, Mississippi, home of Rowan Oak, the house where Faulkner lived and wrote for most of his life. Also in this tiny town is the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, which went through a troubling (and bloody) struggle for integration. This university was also the first university I ever interviewed with at the MLA, way back in 1998, when I barely had a chapter of my dissertation written and I was a 26-year old basket case. I would have been their Southern Literature specialist. Unfortunately, I spent too much time talking about Karen Finley shoving yams up her butt to seem like a qualified candidate. Perhaps if I had done my Charro impression, it would have worked better.
The Faulkner house was beautiful, really. Such a contrast to one most spectacular homes in the U.S. -- Elvis' Graceland (which I haven't written about). It was more the atmosphere of steam and tall cedars and pines, vineyards, magnolias than it was the house itself, although I know the two have to be combined to work. Very different from Melville's house -- Faulkner's house was a self-guided tour and you couldn't actually walk right into the rooms, whereas a tour guide took us through Melville's home. Faulkner's family did not want any sort of gift shop to be part of the house, whereas Melville's house had an extensive set of things for purchase.
If Melville is Hank's author, then Faulkner is mine. I took a class on Faulkner, Morrison, and Abjection as a junior at Syracuse and it made me think very differently about reading literature and very differently about the psychic value of filth -- how it structures so much of what we believe about ourselves. I couldn't help smiling about this as I peed in the downstairs bathroom, which was open to the public.
Speaking of filth, I should get to the New Orleans visit. (I spent some of my grad school years visiting with some friends who lived/squatted in a place called the Nest on the 4300-block of Magazine, and the last time I was there I swore I would never go back. I have lost touch with all of those people, and I learned while I was in NOLA that the Nest was recently condemned. For this reason, I was nervous about returning to a city that hold that history for me, and also about the post-Katrina devastation -- did I really want to see it?)
We got in last night just before midnight, after another long day in the car. Six hours from New Orleans to Houston, but we were stuck in our one and only traffic jam on the way out, and so we sat on the roasting highway for another hour and a half. Later, half-way back to Texas, we stopped in Cajun country in Louisiana, right outside of Lafayette, and Hank and Melanie ate fish while I watched and drank water. When we spied a Subway and declared it the source of my dinner, I was really, really, happy to know we were almost home. So much bread and cheese, and the smell of Subway is now gross to me. I have been craving garlic and broccoli, ginger and kale, collards, fresh spinach, dandelion and beet leaf salad, lettuces that are not iceberg.
New Orleans was okay, but I was glad, as I always have been, to get out. Everyone I have known who has lived or lives in New Orleans has loved booze and boozing even more than my barfly friends in Houston. Perhaps surprising to some of my readers, it is just too much for me. More on NOLA in a minute.
On our way out of Memphis, we stopped at the National Ornamental Metal Museum, where we not only checked out an awesome array of metal work housed in a former yellow fever clinic, but where Melanie managed to commission six of her worry beads for the gift shop, which was really cool. We drove out from Memphis and headed south into Mississippi (I kept thinking about the time I saw Charro interviewed on some lame talk show, and she kept repeating "I am not from Missy Pee Pee! I am not from Missy Pee Pee!" Feel sorry for my car-mates who had to listen to me say that over and over in my Charro voice.).
After some "Yes, we should" and "Wait, no, we should not" and more "Yes, we really should since we are here", we got off the highway and headed east to Oxford, Mississippi, home of Rowan Oak, the house where Faulkner lived and wrote for most of his life. Also in this tiny town is the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, which went through a troubling (and bloody) struggle for integration. This university was also the first university I ever interviewed with at the MLA, way back in 1998, when I barely had a chapter of my dissertation written and I was a 26-year old basket case. I would have been their Southern Literature specialist. Unfortunately, I spent too much time talking about Karen Finley shoving yams up her butt to seem like a qualified candidate. Perhaps if I had done my Charro impression, it would have worked better.
The Faulkner house was beautiful, really. Such a contrast to one most spectacular homes in the U.S. -- Elvis' Graceland (which I haven't written about). It was more the atmosphere of steam and tall cedars and pines, vineyards, magnolias than it was the house itself, although I know the two have to be combined to work. Very different from Melville's house -- Faulkner's house was a self-guided tour and you couldn't actually walk right into the rooms, whereas a tour guide took us through Melville's home. Faulkner's family did not want any sort of gift shop to be part of the house, whereas Melville's house had an extensive set of things for purchase.
If Melville is Hank's author, then Faulkner is mine. I took a class on Faulkner, Morrison, and Abjection as a junior at Syracuse and it made me think very differently about reading literature and very differently about the psychic value of filth -- how it structures so much of what we believe about ourselves. I couldn't help smiling about this as I peed in the downstairs bathroom, which was open to the public.
Speaking of filth, I should get to the New Orleans visit. (I spent some of my grad school years visiting with some friends who lived/squatted in a place called the Nest on the 4300-block of Magazine, and the last time I was there I swore I would never go back. I have lost touch with all of those people, and I learned while I was in NOLA that the Nest was recently condemned. For this reason, I was nervous about returning to a city that hold that history for me, and also about the post-Katrina devastation -- did I really want to see it?)
Monday, July 10, 2006
long and hard is the road of the transgressor
This will have to be short.
Nashville reminds me of Niagara Falls, only with a country music and blues twist.
I was really hungry when we arrived, and rattled and tired from getting lost. I was in charge of navigation and ended up being unreliable which means, in the micropolitics of the car, that I had kind of fucked up, which made me very anxious. Somewhere around the Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, we got off the highway we were on, and spent more time on Kentucky backwoods roads than we cared to. The signs on the roads were all ominous: Hell Is Real. Thou Shalt Not Kill (under a photo of a hand-sized baby). Long and Hard Is the Road of the Transgressor. I felt like I was in a Flannery O'Connor short story. The hilly, winding roads made map-reading dizzying, almost nauseating for me. Were those people in the horse-drawn carriages Amish or Shakers or Mennonites?
It is interesting to consider how one might record uneasiness and tension between travelers. I might have to figure that one out later. The view out the window as well as the details of the car's interior become a good focal point for eyes that need something to look at while things blow over. Melanie's car, Astrid, is a two-door hatchback, and it is packed to the gills. Those of us over six-feet tall must pretzel ourselves or accordian ourselves for the drive, and so discomfort, plus hunger, plus exhuastion, plus stupidity equals . . . hm . . . Over drinks every night: "Is that going to be in the blog?"
Once we got into Nashville, we checked into our Best Western and went wandering in search of food. This is the part of the country where it is difficult to find vegetarian food. (Again, those who know me also know that, without food, my body begins to shake, and will eventually shut down, which is a real joy for other bodies in search of sustenance, I know.) The waitress in the sports bar-music video restaurant was not the first person who wanted to know where we were from, and what we were up to: "Where are y'all from? O, really? Huh. So -- what are y'all *doing*?" She was very kind when I asked if I could get my salad without bacon, cheese, and eggs.
We did get to listen to some fine music last night, and, after the Maker's Mark Distillery Tour yesterday (blue laws on Sunday prevented us from getting any!), we were craving its wooden mellowness. The bourbon was on ice, the music was by request, and Hank was like a living juke box. Again, the long day and the road seemed to melt with the drinks, and I couldn't have been more happy to be with my beloved companions.
Today we are headed to Memphis, to see Graceland and some more music. Melanie and Hank are looking forward to some soul food, so I have done my research: apparantly there is a vegetarian restaurant near the University of Memphis, so I'll head over there for some food later this evening and see if it is wired.
I bet Melanie is done with her shower by now, and Hank must have snuck by me and hit the Continental breakfast (this one is the best so far -- it includes oatmeal and has a waffle maker). Wish us luck in Memphis. We'll be headed to New Orleans after Memphis, and will stay with some friends of Melanie's and visiting an old friend of ours from Syracuse.
Nashville reminds me of Niagara Falls, only with a country music and blues twist.
I was really hungry when we arrived, and rattled and tired from getting lost. I was in charge of navigation and ended up being unreliable which means, in the micropolitics of the car, that I had kind of fucked up, which made me very anxious. Somewhere around the Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, we got off the highway we were on, and spent more time on Kentucky backwoods roads than we cared to. The signs on the roads were all ominous: Hell Is Real. Thou Shalt Not Kill (under a photo of a hand-sized baby). Long and Hard Is the Road of the Transgressor. I felt like I was in a Flannery O'Connor short story. The hilly, winding roads made map-reading dizzying, almost nauseating for me. Were those people in the horse-drawn carriages Amish or Shakers or Mennonites?
It is interesting to consider how one might record uneasiness and tension between travelers. I might have to figure that one out later. The view out the window as well as the details of the car's interior become a good focal point for eyes that need something to look at while things blow over. Melanie's car, Astrid, is a two-door hatchback, and it is packed to the gills. Those of us over six-feet tall must pretzel ourselves or accordian ourselves for the drive, and so discomfort, plus hunger, plus exhuastion, plus stupidity equals . . . hm . . . Over drinks every night: "Is that going to be in the blog?"
Once we got into Nashville, we checked into our Best Western and went wandering in search of food. This is the part of the country where it is difficult to find vegetarian food. (Again, those who know me also know that, without food, my body begins to shake, and will eventually shut down, which is a real joy for other bodies in search of sustenance, I know.) The waitress in the sports bar-music video restaurant was not the first person who wanted to know where we were from, and what we were up to: "Where are y'all from? O, really? Huh. So -- what are y'all *doing*?" She was very kind when I asked if I could get my salad without bacon, cheese, and eggs.
We did get to listen to some fine music last night, and, after the Maker's Mark Distillery Tour yesterday (blue laws on Sunday prevented us from getting any!), we were craving its wooden mellowness. The bourbon was on ice, the music was by request, and Hank was like a living juke box. Again, the long day and the road seemed to melt with the drinks, and I couldn't have been more happy to be with my beloved companions.
Today we are headed to Memphis, to see Graceland and some more music. Melanie and Hank are looking forward to some soul food, so I have done my research: apparantly there is a vegetarian restaurant near the University of Memphis, so I'll head over there for some food later this evening and see if it is wired.
I bet Melanie is done with her shower by now, and Hank must have snuck by me and hit the Continental breakfast (this one is the best so far -- it includes oatmeal and has a waffle maker). Wish us luck in Memphis. We'll be headed to New Orleans after Memphis, and will stay with some friends of Melanie's and visiting an old friend of ours from Syracuse.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
are we there yet? (no.)
The Karma Cafe in Louisville, Kentucky, where we are currently waiting for our food, has punk rock kids for waiters, and the Amazing Grace health food store across the street makes it feel like we are in a cool city.
Again, I must point out the difficulty of finding places to log on and keep-up this blog. And time is a factor, too, since I feel like we have been on an amazingly efficient and ambitious schedule. Our trip to Seneca Falls was fascinating, although the old woman with her two daughters on pink leashes that wandered through our tour distracted us from our tour-guide's politicized narration of the National Park. Crossing the border into Canada was blessedly easy for us (I was told to keep my mouth shut), and the falls are, of course, spectacular (the tour guide did not know how many dare-devils died after plummeting over the edge in a barrel). But Niagara reminded me of any built-up tourist place, with too much noise and See The Incredible Endless Maze! and Hard Rock Cafes littering the landscape. Hank and Melanie and I finally settled on a touristy, but not-too-crowded Mexican Restaurant for late-night drinks (which struck us all as an uncanny experience of borders). The restaurant (which I think was called Tacos and Tequilla, or TNT) had, on its walls, painted caricatures of Mexican men with bottles of booze and guns and Mexican women with large breasts. We drank a lot of Canadian beer at the Mexican restaurant.
We left Niagara and travelled to Columbus, Ohio, but first stopped in Mansfield to check out the Ohio State Penitentiary, which was opened in the mid-nineteenth century as a reformatory for wicked boys, and finally closed in 1990 (after have been deemed unfit for habitation in 1970). It is modelled after European castles (to frighten the boys, according to the architect), and so incredibly dank and dilapidated inside, it reminds one of a horror film. If you've seen The Shawshank Redemption, you have seen parts of this prison, since it was filmed there in the mid-1990s. A video by Godsmack was filmed in one of the cells. The amount of peeling lead paint was over-whelming, and the two-hour tour included a trip to the roof and guard tower the overlooked the other prisons adjacent to the one we were in. Currently, both prisons (one max security and the other intermediate) are overcrowded.
There's not much to say about Columbus, and I want to skip ahead to last night's arrival in Louisville, since it was here that Hank and I met, for the first time, Melanie's Aunt Pearl, who is a 74 year old woman who welcomed us into her home. Pearl and her daughter Amy took us to a lovely dinner, and the conversation about art, religion, politics, decarceration, Moby Dick, and The 400 Blows lasted for nearly six hours. More cousins showed up when we returned to the house, and we sat and drank beer and enjoyed a conversation about Jewish atheism. We were all impressed when Pearl claimed that a belief in a watchful God was "bullshit."
The other cool thing was the presence of tiled murals created by Melanie's semi-famous Uncle Harold (Melanie's great-uncle, by blood on her mother's side). Harold's mosaics appear on the house, inside the house, and cover an entire bathroom wall. In addition, Harold's mosaics appear in the Jewish Community Center, and at other various locations in and around Louisville. He is Kentucky's "only mosaic artist," as one report I read claimed. The mural at the JCC was an incredible memorial for the Holocaust inspired by the work of Salvador Dali, so that the historical event is rendered as a fluid (but, of course, tiled) shifting from bloodshed and death to survival, community, and life. It was enormous.
I want to write more, but now my breakfast is cold, and I know others want to get on-line. Today we head to the Maker's Mark distillery, and then down to Nashville.
By the way, kefer is fermented milk, kind of like yogurt. We've been eating it with Grape-Nuts, honey, and blueberries.
Again, I must point out the difficulty of finding places to log on and keep-up this blog. And time is a factor, too, since I feel like we have been on an amazingly efficient and ambitious schedule. Our trip to Seneca Falls was fascinating, although the old woman with her two daughters on pink leashes that wandered through our tour distracted us from our tour-guide's politicized narration of the National Park. Crossing the border into Canada was blessedly easy for us (I was told to keep my mouth shut), and the falls are, of course, spectacular (the tour guide did not know how many dare-devils died after plummeting over the edge in a barrel). But Niagara reminded me of any built-up tourist place, with too much noise and See The Incredible Endless Maze! and Hard Rock Cafes littering the landscape. Hank and Melanie and I finally settled on a touristy, but not-too-crowded Mexican Restaurant for late-night drinks (which struck us all as an uncanny experience of borders). The restaurant (which I think was called Tacos and Tequilla, or TNT) had, on its walls, painted caricatures of Mexican men with bottles of booze and guns and Mexican women with large breasts. We drank a lot of Canadian beer at the Mexican restaurant.
We left Niagara and travelled to Columbus, Ohio, but first stopped in Mansfield to check out the Ohio State Penitentiary, which was opened in the mid-nineteenth century as a reformatory for wicked boys, and finally closed in 1990 (after have been deemed unfit for habitation in 1970). It is modelled after European castles (to frighten the boys, according to the architect), and so incredibly dank and dilapidated inside, it reminds one of a horror film. If you've seen The Shawshank Redemption, you have seen parts of this prison, since it was filmed there in the mid-1990s. A video by Godsmack was filmed in one of the cells. The amount of peeling lead paint was over-whelming, and the two-hour tour included a trip to the roof and guard tower the overlooked the other prisons adjacent to the one we were in. Currently, both prisons (one max security and the other intermediate) are overcrowded.
There's not much to say about Columbus, and I want to skip ahead to last night's arrival in Louisville, since it was here that Hank and I met, for the first time, Melanie's Aunt Pearl, who is a 74 year old woman who welcomed us into her home. Pearl and her daughter Amy took us to a lovely dinner, and the conversation about art, religion, politics, decarceration, Moby Dick, and The 400 Blows lasted for nearly six hours. More cousins showed up when we returned to the house, and we sat and drank beer and enjoyed a conversation about Jewish atheism. We were all impressed when Pearl claimed that a belief in a watchful God was "bullshit."
The other cool thing was the presence of tiled murals created by Melanie's semi-famous Uncle Harold (Melanie's great-uncle, by blood on her mother's side). Harold's mosaics appear on the house, inside the house, and cover an entire bathroom wall. In addition, Harold's mosaics appear in the Jewish Community Center, and at other various locations in and around Louisville. He is Kentucky's "only mosaic artist," as one report I read claimed. The mural at the JCC was an incredible memorial for the Holocaust inspired by the work of Salvador Dali, so that the historical event is rendered as a fluid (but, of course, tiled) shifting from bloodshed and death to survival, community, and life. It was enormous.
I want to write more, but now my breakfast is cold, and I know others want to get on-line. Today we head to the Maker's Mark distillery, and then down to Nashville.
By the way, kefer is fermented milk, kind of like yogurt. We've been eating it with Grape-Nuts, honey, and blueberries.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
stop. pause. rewind. fast forward.
Melanie, Hank, and I just arrived in a Microtel in Seneca Falls, New York. I can smell the day's travel emanating from my body, but I am so happy to have free internet access, and red wine in a blue plastic cup, that I'll postpone the shower for a little while.
I've been composing imaginary posts for the last several days, including thoughts on: my T-ride from Mission Hill to Cambridge with Hank and Stephen, where we trekked around Harvard and stopped in at Hank's old co-op; Melanie's kefer, which is kind of like breakfast and a pet at the same time; the MassMoMA in North Adams and the incredible, politico-dada works of Huang Yong Ping, the carnival graveyards of Carsten Hoeller, as well as the most astonishing all-black painting by Kerry James Marshall; and our evening trip to a baseball field to see fireworks, which was capped with a brilliant, booming display that we watched shivering in the pouring rain. (July 4 is also always special because it marks three years of moving in and through a relationship for Hank and me. This is the second year in which we passed the occasion outside in a storm. Last year we were camped in a tiny, waterlogged tent in the middle of a furious, all-night lightening and thunder storm at a rural Oklahoma campground. I prefered this year's chilly fireworks-lit raindrops.)
Earlier today, we visited Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, MA. This was a particularly important stop for Hank, who not only looks like a young Melville (thanks to our friend David Embry for pointing this out to us), but reads and studies his fiction on his own. I, for one, feel proud of the fact that I not only read Moby Dick over a Winter Break several years ago, but was actually seduced by the narrative, slowly and lovingly reading each page and feeling beams of white light shining out of the top of my head during the cetology passages. And, let's admit it, any material culture that actualizes the stuff of U.S. literature is going to make me feel like something good is happening in this country.
I enjoyed the picnic we had outside (the weather has been remarkably clear, sunny, and cool -- O, fresh breeze, how I have missed and needed you!). We've been subsisting on our travel food, which includes Melanie's kefer, of course, as well as avocados, apples, cheese, bread, crackers, tomatoes, mixed-nuts and dried fruit, hummous, and some other traveling basics. (Those who know me well also know that this isn't very different from my everyday eating habits, but I was also really, really happy to have some pizza at Cosmo's Cafe, a classic Syracuse joint that we stopped at first thing off the throughway. See next paragraph.)
From Melville's house, Hank drove us to Syracuse, New York. This was very exciting for me, since I have not been in Syracuse since I graduated in 1993. Perhaps predictably, the return was quite disorienting, and a little anxiety-ridden. New construction on campus prevented me from understanding where I was and, once I felt like I got my bearings, I wasn't sure what to say: "This is where I would smoke cigarettes before my class on Gender and the Culture of Television"?, or, "Here's the cool mural that memorializes the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti," or "I remember the time I dropped acid and made out with that statue"? There were memories emerging at every turn, but it seemed sort of silly, and self-indulgent to go on and on about them: "I remember the time that I was walking to class with Gretchen Murphy and saw Robyn Wiegman and Tom Yingling sitting on *that exact bench* and I was wearing blue nail polish and was secretly pleased that Robyn noticed and made a big deal about it." Right?
When Melanie and I found the houses we lived in our Junior and Senior years (707 Maryland and 846 Lancaster, respectively), the streets looked really, um, run-down. And I know those places were really run-down when we lived in them (we were college students, and it was over ten years ago, after all), but, as Melanie pointed out, they didn't seem that way then. They were, to me, places of real experimentation with living, thinking, socializing, writing, theorizing, and learning. Every day was so exciting to me. Syracuse was the place I learned to think more deeply and live more creatively than ever before. For four years, I studied feminist theory, historical materialism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, film theory, ideological and institutional analysis, and critical race studies with much seriousness, and it bonded me to others who were interested in similar ideas. I joined my first direct action groups while on campus there, and made connections with other campus radicals. I came out of the closet (first as a gay person, then as queer) in Syracuse, and believed it was a political act. It felt like it was the most important work in the world to be doing, and I knew, absolutely, that it would be a lifelong commitment.
As we left the gothic beauty of SU's Hall of Languages, Hank suggested that we head out to Seneca Falls rather than spend the night in the somewhat shabby motels of Syracuse. It was a great idea. Tomorrow, we will see the Women's Rights National Historic Park and The Elizabeth Cady Stanton House. It feels right after the personal and institutional flashbacks of college life.
My blue plastic cup of wine is nearly gone. Melanie and Hank have been making travel plans on the bed. There is some Miles Davis on the lap-top. The motel room window is open and I can hear police sirens and other traffic from the highway. Tomorrow, we head out to Niagara Falls. We will cross the Canadian border and see what happens next.
I've been composing imaginary posts for the last several days, including thoughts on: my T-ride from Mission Hill to Cambridge with Hank and Stephen, where we trekked around Harvard and stopped in at Hank's old co-op; Melanie's kefer, which is kind of like breakfast and a pet at the same time; the MassMoMA in North Adams and the incredible, politico-dada works of Huang Yong Ping, the carnival graveyards of Carsten Hoeller, as well as the most astonishing all-black painting by Kerry James Marshall; and our evening trip to a baseball field to see fireworks, which was capped with a brilliant, booming display that we watched shivering in the pouring rain. (July 4 is also always special because it marks three years of moving in and through a relationship for Hank and me. This is the second year in which we passed the occasion outside in a storm. Last year we were camped in a tiny, waterlogged tent in the middle of a furious, all-night lightening and thunder storm at a rural Oklahoma campground. I prefered this year's chilly fireworks-lit raindrops.)
Earlier today, we visited Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, MA. This was a particularly important stop for Hank, who not only looks like a young Melville (thanks to our friend David Embry for pointing this out to us), but reads and studies his fiction on his own. I, for one, feel proud of the fact that I not only read Moby Dick over a Winter Break several years ago, but was actually seduced by the narrative, slowly and lovingly reading each page and feeling beams of white light shining out of the top of my head during the cetology passages. And, let's admit it, any material culture that actualizes the stuff of U.S. literature is going to make me feel like something good is happening in this country.
I enjoyed the picnic we had outside (the weather has been remarkably clear, sunny, and cool -- O, fresh breeze, how I have missed and needed you!). We've been subsisting on our travel food, which includes Melanie's kefer, of course, as well as avocados, apples, cheese, bread, crackers, tomatoes, mixed-nuts and dried fruit, hummous, and some other traveling basics. (Those who know me well also know that this isn't very different from my everyday eating habits, but I was also really, really happy to have some pizza at Cosmo's Cafe, a classic Syracuse joint that we stopped at first thing off the throughway. See next paragraph.)
From Melville's house, Hank drove us to Syracuse, New York. This was very exciting for me, since I have not been in Syracuse since I graduated in 1993. Perhaps predictably, the return was quite disorienting, and a little anxiety-ridden. New construction on campus prevented me from understanding where I was and, once I felt like I got my bearings, I wasn't sure what to say: "This is where I would smoke cigarettes before my class on Gender and the Culture of Television"?, or, "Here's the cool mural that memorializes the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti," or "I remember the time I dropped acid and made out with that statue"? There were memories emerging at every turn, but it seemed sort of silly, and self-indulgent to go on and on about them: "I remember the time that I was walking to class with Gretchen Murphy and saw Robyn Wiegman and Tom Yingling sitting on *that exact bench* and I was wearing blue nail polish and was secretly pleased that Robyn noticed and made a big deal about it." Right?
When Melanie and I found the houses we lived in our Junior and Senior years (707 Maryland and 846 Lancaster, respectively), the streets looked really, um, run-down. And I know those places were really run-down when we lived in them (we were college students, and it was over ten years ago, after all), but, as Melanie pointed out, they didn't seem that way then. They were, to me, places of real experimentation with living, thinking, socializing, writing, theorizing, and learning. Every day was so exciting to me. Syracuse was the place I learned to think more deeply and live more creatively than ever before. For four years, I studied feminist theory, historical materialism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, film theory, ideological and institutional analysis, and critical race studies with much seriousness, and it bonded me to others who were interested in similar ideas. I joined my first direct action groups while on campus there, and made connections with other campus radicals. I came out of the closet (first as a gay person, then as queer) in Syracuse, and believed it was a political act. It felt like it was the most important work in the world to be doing, and I knew, absolutely, that it would be a lifelong commitment.
As we left the gothic beauty of SU's Hall of Languages, Hank suggested that we head out to Seneca Falls rather than spend the night in the somewhat shabby motels of Syracuse. It was a great idea. Tomorrow, we will see the Women's Rights National Historic Park and The Elizabeth Cady Stanton House. It feels right after the personal and institutional flashbacks of college life.
My blue plastic cup of wine is nearly gone. Melanie and Hank have been making travel plans on the bed. There is some Miles Davis on the lap-top. The motel room window is open and I can hear police sirens and other traffic from the highway. Tomorrow, we head out to Niagara Falls. We will cross the Canadian border and see what happens next.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
white courtesy telephone, please
I am currently watching Hank pace the floors of Melanie's apartment as he listens to the muzak (Tears for Fears?) coming over the cell phone. He's on hold with USAir's Baggage Claim, waiting to see what the status of our missing luggage is. This is the last of a series of misadventures that began early yesterday morning when we both awoke with a start at the sound of our friend Raj knocking on our back door, ready to take us to the airport while we were both still asleep. Raj was so patient as we rushed around and bumped into each other getting the luggage in the car and putting the garbage out, finally turning off the lights and locking the doors.
When we arrived at the airport, we were late, but not that late, but it also turns out that the July 4 weekend is a very popular day of travel, and we were not the only ones who set their alarms for 5pm instead of 5am. The lines inside the airport were amazingly long, and everyone had that "I'm about to panic" look on their faces; or, if not that one, the "Can you believe this?" incredulity that sometimes invites conversation or at least a little smile from fellow travellers. We stood in one line outside, only to discover that the line we needed to be in was inside and so, by the time we got to the check-in counter, our plane was already in the air. We were bumped to the next flight on Continental, but our transfer in Philadelphia put us on a different airline, the notorious US Airways, and this also meant that, once in Philly, we had to go to baggage claim and re-check and re-connect with our flight.
This is where the day got really long. As a result of our first missed flight, we also missed our connecting flight. We stood in a couple of different USAir lines, all of which ended at counters that were remarkably understaffed. These lines were impossibly slow since so many travellers, or so it seemed to me, were missing flights and being put on stand-by. But crowds are full of fascinating bodies, and so I was never really bored, because the pageantry of humanity is endlessly entertaining. I started counting the number of women who buy into that Hollywood-inspired pornographic femininity (women with tan colored skin, tan-colored hair, blue contact lenses, very expensive-looking bits of clothes covering silicone breasts and anorexic-looking waists, and a cellphone glued to their ears on which they have loud, public conversations about how much xanax they should take and when). I wondered alound if they were all going to be okay. Another thing to do was to "ding!" audibly, like a bell, to signal to Hank that a gay stereotype was walking past us, but then I got confused about the difference between these men and sophisticated looking Europeans. Hank wondered when the baggy-style of basketball shorts would finally become uncool and men would return to wearing those 1970s style gym shorts that end high up on the thigh and come together under the crotch.
We were finally put on stand-by on three different flights: 5.30pm, 8pm, and 10pm, all headed from Philly to Boston. Our baggage got a special hot pink tag to signal "stand-by" and the theory was that luggage workers would know when to toss them on and when to send them to the next flight.
Stand-by: Waiting for stand-by was a nail-biting experience. You assume they just call your name and in you go, but actually (at least yesterday) it is an intense rollercoaster ride of anguish and hope. After everyone boards, Hank and I, along with the ten other stand-bys jockying for position, would stand really close to the worker who called the names for boarding. As the Final Call is put out over the intercom, we would all sort of nervously look at each other, shifting our weight from foot to foot, feeling the tension, not wanting to speak since it might jinx our chances. A couple of us stretched. If a late arrival showed up and joyfully proclaimed that she couldn't believe she made the flight, we'd shoot her a dirty look, since she just cut the number of open seats down; and when an entire family of six showed up, I swear I saw one stand-by spit on the father's back. We had Melanie's number on the cell, and Hank's finger hovered in anticipation over the Send button, so that we could instantly contact her with the news that we were indeed boarding. Even though we couldn't (and shouldn't) get our hopes up, it was hard not to imagine the ecstatic "yes!" we would yell in triumph as we pushed past the others to claim our tickets. Unfortunately for Hank and I, we did not make the cut for the 5.30pm flight to Boston, and that really took the wind out of our sails. The next flight was at 8pm, which meant that we had to go to another terminal and kill time.
Hank took a nap. I found pizza and fruit, plus a Swatch watch store, at which I had an amusing conversation with the saleswoman, who laughed at all of my jokes about temporality. She sold me a nifty-looking $45 dollar blue and brown man's watch, which I really, in fact, needed. At this point, I found out that guests at Melanie's going-away party were beginning to arrive, including many people I haven't seen in quite some time: my oldest friend Stephen (who I met in Mrs. Klopstein's kindergarten class and have known ever since), my old roommate Gretchen Lembach and her partner Dan, Gretchen's sister Ingrid, Sylvia Boyle, and Kassie (who is Melanie's oldest friend and whom I met when I visited Melanie years ago in San Francisco). So, when it came time to jockey for position for the 8pm flight, I felt it necessary to beam a line of control directly into the brain of the woman who was giving the stand-bys out. (We were informed that there is no hierarchy to the stand-by list, it is random every time it comes out, and so there is no "Well, you've been on stand-by the longest, so . . . ".) But the waiting, once more, was excrutiating. The flight was scheduled for take-off at 8pm, but hadn't even started boarding until 8.30. Another hour dragged past. The stand-by crew was growing impatient, taking huge audible sighs. One or two actually left. At 9.35, my mind-control trick worked. Our last names came over the loud-speaker and we jumped for joy. Unfortunately, I decided to temporarily put a half-empty bottle of water in the bag that carries my laptop and, when I went to safely store it in the overhead, I forgot about it, and so now my laptop has a wet battery and only works plugged in (but at least it is not totally fried -- I imagined it was and had an honest-to-goodness psychic break in the cab ride from the airport. But at this point, could you blame me?).
When we arrived in Boston, our luggage was missing, which is where I began this post and just about where I want to end it. We didn't get into Boston until about 10.45pm, and got into Melanie's apartment around 11:30pm. Offically, a several hour trip turned into one that last over sixteen hours. But it was good to be in fresh air and I was looking forward to beer. Her party was nearly over, but I did see some of the faces of the people I mentioned above, who stuck around to hug me.
When we arrived at the airport, we were late, but not that late, but it also turns out that the July 4 weekend is a very popular day of travel, and we were not the only ones who set their alarms for 5pm instead of 5am. The lines inside the airport were amazingly long, and everyone had that "I'm about to panic" look on their faces; or, if not that one, the "Can you believe this?" incredulity that sometimes invites conversation or at least a little smile from fellow travellers. We stood in one line outside, only to discover that the line we needed to be in was inside and so, by the time we got to the check-in counter, our plane was already in the air. We were bumped to the next flight on Continental, but our transfer in Philadelphia put us on a different airline, the notorious US Airways, and this also meant that, once in Philly, we had to go to baggage claim and re-check and re-connect with our flight.
This is where the day got really long. As a result of our first missed flight, we also missed our connecting flight. We stood in a couple of different USAir lines, all of which ended at counters that were remarkably understaffed. These lines were impossibly slow since so many travellers, or so it seemed to me, were missing flights and being put on stand-by. But crowds are full of fascinating bodies, and so I was never really bored, because the pageantry of humanity is endlessly entertaining. I started counting the number of women who buy into that Hollywood-inspired pornographic femininity (women with tan colored skin, tan-colored hair, blue contact lenses, very expensive-looking bits of clothes covering silicone breasts and anorexic-looking waists, and a cellphone glued to their ears on which they have loud, public conversations about how much xanax they should take and when). I wondered alound if they were all going to be okay. Another thing to do was to "ding!" audibly, like a bell, to signal to Hank that a gay stereotype was walking past us, but then I got confused about the difference between these men and sophisticated looking Europeans. Hank wondered when the baggy-style of basketball shorts would finally become uncool and men would return to wearing those 1970s style gym shorts that end high up on the thigh and come together under the crotch.
We were finally put on stand-by on three different flights: 5.30pm, 8pm, and 10pm, all headed from Philly to Boston. Our baggage got a special hot pink tag to signal "stand-by" and the theory was that luggage workers would know when to toss them on and when to send them to the next flight.
Stand-by: Waiting for stand-by was a nail-biting experience. You assume they just call your name and in you go, but actually (at least yesterday) it is an intense rollercoaster ride of anguish and hope. After everyone boards, Hank and I, along with the ten other stand-bys jockying for position, would stand really close to the worker who called the names for boarding. As the Final Call is put out over the intercom, we would all sort of nervously look at each other, shifting our weight from foot to foot, feeling the tension, not wanting to speak since it might jinx our chances. A couple of us stretched. If a late arrival showed up and joyfully proclaimed that she couldn't believe she made the flight, we'd shoot her a dirty look, since she just cut the number of open seats down; and when an entire family of six showed up, I swear I saw one stand-by spit on the father's back. We had Melanie's number on the cell, and Hank's finger hovered in anticipation over the Send button, so that we could instantly contact her with the news that we were indeed boarding. Even though we couldn't (and shouldn't) get our hopes up, it was hard not to imagine the ecstatic "yes!" we would yell in triumph as we pushed past the others to claim our tickets. Unfortunately for Hank and I, we did not make the cut for the 5.30pm flight to Boston, and that really took the wind out of our sails. The next flight was at 8pm, which meant that we had to go to another terminal and kill time.
Hank took a nap. I found pizza and fruit, plus a Swatch watch store, at which I had an amusing conversation with the saleswoman, who laughed at all of my jokes about temporality. She sold me a nifty-looking $45 dollar blue and brown man's watch, which I really, in fact, needed. At this point, I found out that guests at Melanie's going-away party were beginning to arrive, including many people I haven't seen in quite some time: my oldest friend Stephen (who I met in Mrs. Klopstein's kindergarten class and have known ever since), my old roommate Gretchen Lembach and her partner Dan, Gretchen's sister Ingrid, Sylvia Boyle, and Kassie (who is Melanie's oldest friend and whom I met when I visited Melanie years ago in San Francisco). So, when it came time to jockey for position for the 8pm flight, I felt it necessary to beam a line of control directly into the brain of the woman who was giving the stand-bys out. (We were informed that there is no hierarchy to the stand-by list, it is random every time it comes out, and so there is no "Well, you've been on stand-by the longest, so . . . ".) But the waiting, once more, was excrutiating. The flight was scheduled for take-off at 8pm, but hadn't even started boarding until 8.30. Another hour dragged past. The stand-by crew was growing impatient, taking huge audible sighs. One or two actually left. At 9.35, my mind-control trick worked. Our last names came over the loud-speaker and we jumped for joy. Unfortunately, I decided to temporarily put a half-empty bottle of water in the bag that carries my laptop and, when I went to safely store it in the overhead, I forgot about it, and so now my laptop has a wet battery and only works plugged in (but at least it is not totally fried -- I imagined it was and had an honest-to-goodness psychic break in the cab ride from the airport. But at this point, could you blame me?).
When we arrived in Boston, our luggage was missing, which is where I began this post and just about where I want to end it. We didn't get into Boston until about 10.45pm, and got into Melanie's apartment around 11:30pm. Offically, a several hour trip turned into one that last over sixteen hours. But it was good to be in fresh air and I was looking forward to beer. Her party was nearly over, but I did see some of the faces of the people I mentioned above, who stuck around to hug me.
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