theslant

It was only supposed to be a short study break. It was 10p, and I would be back by 10:45, 11 at the latest. I headed down to Grappolo's where some friends and talented musicians played jazz/funk a la Soulive and Herbie Hancock in the restaurant's downstairs bar that could easily be a broom closet. The guys, their group a loose rendition of a Soulive + DeLaSoul/Tribe-style hip hop lyricism called Fused, was purely instrumental. I found a prime spot close to the band and nestled in to a half hour's worth of an atmosphere drenched with the soul of funk.

"mufhasmjfuhm?" I heard from behind me. I had my earplugs in, so most speech that's not screamed directly into my ear was unintelligible. A young woman behind me motioned to the chair behind mine. I made a gesture towards the chair in question that indicated 'yes.'

They started into a song that was vaguely familiar. Particularly one musical phrase. I finally recognized that phrase as the line, "throw back a bottle of beer" from the song Zoot Suit Riot. But the general feel was more reggae with a mix of the group's homebase musical mode of soul. When it ended I shouted, "Dude, was that 'Zoot Suit Riot?' Patrick, the trumpet player shook his head amusedly and corrected me. "Jammin'" "Oh.. well that turnaround totally sounded like that line from Zoot Suit Riot. You know, '..throw back a bottle of beer..'" He smiled back in me with the recognition.

The guys took a break. Crap, I thought. That was only twenty minutes worth. I was going to say goodbye to the band and leave. I noticed that the woman behind was still sitting there, alone. "Do you know any of these guys?" I asked. Turns out she knew one of the emcees, and they'd grown up together. I turned and walked up to the band, and "goodbye" turned into a conversation about what we'd been doing lately with music. That woman walked up behind me, and joined in the conversation: "Where are your emcees?" "Oh, they weren't right for this crowd." Then I had something to say to Colin, the trombone player, between her and the keyboard player, Kevin, and cross talk ensued.

"The lead singer for Groundation is like a professor something, right?" "I totally grew up with that guy in Vallejo." "Vallejo! V-towwwwn! Sorry, Colin." "I'd like to work them into a second set." "It's ok. He's a professor of Rastafarian culture at Sonoma State." "Oh? Second set? You mean in a few minutes?" "Dude, Mona's best friend's brother is in that band. When she took me, I thought it was going to be punk, but.. damn, that was a good show." "Oh, I was thinking something like next week we'd have them up. Excuse me, I have to go." "So you know about Vallejo?" "Yeah, my first girlfriend lived there. You kinda remind me of her. Her dad was always trying to run for House representative on the extremely pro-life conservative ticket." "Good luck in that town. No way someone like him would be elected. I know two people on the city council. One of them totally spruced up downtown." "Really? That's crazy!" "Oh yeah, it looks nice. We just played a show there. It looked nice." "Oh? Where'd you play?" "At a field.. kinda thing. I didn't know, really. It was Dreadfest." "Who else played?" "Oh, the same people every year. Burning Spear.." "Ah." "So, this is kinda weird, but I could be related somehow to your girlfriend. She could be me." "I doubt it, unless you're married and have a kid about seven years old."

In that conversational melee, her friend came in, and to celebrate her arrival, she asked for all of us to do a shot together. "No, thanks," I said, citing final projects that needed to be done tonight as the source of my non-party mode. As they all lined up at the bar, my Male instinct kicked in: "Idiot," says the instinct. "When a girl offers you a drink, you never, ever ever say no."

Then I noticed more about her. She was short. Cool. She wasn't shy. Cool. She was laid back. Cool. She was in tune with the politics and governmental functions of her home town. Cool. She plays guitar. Blues. Cool.

Then the voice of Ameer started chiming in. When my Male instinct gets particularly powerful, he gets manifested as the voice of Ameer. He was telling me how ashamed he was of me for the last girl I didn't pursue. "Okay, goddammit. I'll take the fucking drink."

It was a kamikaze. I'm a lightweight, but heavy enough not to feel buzzed by that shot. We had a bit of small talk. "Did you see Cabaret?" "At Cuesta? Yeah! It was awesome!" "My boyfriend at the time was in it. He was the owner." "The owner! How crazy! Does your boyfriend's personality match that character's?" "Oh, no. Not at all. He's a hippe." "He's a.. wait. What was his name?" "Cisco." "He didn't happen to live on a house on Broad.." "Oh yeah, that place. With other hippies. I was there two days ago." "Oh.. is.. Leo still there?" "Yeah." "Ah." "Have you talked with him lately?" "Uhm. No, not really. I haven't talked to him in a while." "He's fucking crazy." "..." "..." "So, when you were talking about your 'boyfriend at the time,' you were referring to the fact that he was your boyfriend at the time, right?" "Yeah." "'Cause if you meant that your boyfriend was at that time in the play, then I would've said that yeah, when the play is showing would be the proper time to be in a play. 'Cause if he was in the play at any other time that it wasn't showing.. well. That wouldn't be quite right."

Maybe I was a bit buzzed. Usually I keep those little chunks of crazy safely tucked away in the overhead bins or under my seet. My tone was snydely funny with a hint of twistedness. The average person wouldn't pick up on that. By the slightly askew expression she gave me, I realized that she wasn't an average person. To help make her think that I wasn't a creepy stalker, I went to say hello to a few more friends who walked in.

After a few minutes, I realized that I should probably hang out with the girl who bought me a drink. There was no space at the bar, so I had to stand behind her, which incidentally was in the prime spot to block Kevin's view of the crowd, effectively blocking off the primary method of gauging audience's into-it-iveness. On top of that, the two friends were engaged in conversation. I sat down and busied myself with trying out my mp3's voice recording function on live music. I tried several configurations. Exposed on a table with padding in front of the band, exposed and held up above my head at the back of the room, in my shirt pocket, in my pants pocket.. Then I realized I was getting too into this and that I should make an effort. They weren't talking, instead looking around in leisurely contemplation. But there was still no space at the bar. At one point, she started to dance a little bit in the square foot of free space in front of the band. In my mind's eye, I saw myself holding out my hand to her and doing an awkwardly stiff little dance. But by that time, she was back at the bar, and there was still no space for me to stand next to the two friends.

I tried putting the mp3 player/voice recorder in my cargo pants pocket. After a few minutes, the friends gathered up their things. As they walked by, I touched the woman's arm: "You're leaving?" "Yeah, we're going to Mccarthy's." "Okay, well. Thanks for the drink." And they were gone.

I figured that I'd wait for the song to end before I headed home.

Then Ameer started clicking his tongue at me in the back of my head.

I waved goodbye to the band and headed out, into my car (not buzzed in the slightest), and headed over to the other bar. Now sometime in here I had finally got her name. You'd think that out of all the more-or-less accurate detailage I've verbosely spewed, I'd remember a moment like that, right? Anyway, her name (or is it? are any of these names really true names?) is Thora. I walked up to Thora and her friend (whom I recognized as someone else I knew, and the moment we were introduced I instantly juxtaposed my friend's name Laura with her real name). I tapped her on the shoulder. She didn't move. I tapped her on her shoulder again. "Hey!" she said! "What about studying?" "Laura" said? "Ahh.. well.." and I made up some lame excuse.

"Two things," I said to Thora. "One: Do you have a place to live in Berkeley?" (she had said she was moving to Berkeley at some point.) "Yeah, I do." "Ah, okay, 'cause I think I could've maybe helped you with that, at least temporarily. So.. Two: I want to buy you a drink."

There weren't any bar stools, so we stood there at the bar together. Well, Thora and Laura stood at the bar facing each other with their sides to the bar, and I sort of stood in their peripheral vision. "Want a drink?" Thora asked. "No, I'll get some water, and then get a drink with you. Uhm. No, actually, I'll get a beer." And thus, I was tied down to downtown until I could sober up to drive.

"Let's do a shot," one of them, most likely Thora, said. We decided on Jaeger. "But I don't like Jaeger! Well, I've never had but I'm sure I don't like it." I said, "Oh come on. Do you like black licorice?" "Ew. No." "Well it's 10,000 times better than black licorice. Look, I don't even like black licorice and I like Jaeger. Come on." Surprisingly that convinced her to get off the fence and try it.

"You're right. It does taste like black licorice." She made a face that was a mixture of emotions I was unable to decipher. I asked her, "Is that a happy face? Did Jaeger make you happy?" "Um. It was alright." I put my arm around Thora and grinned. "We broke your Jaeger cherry!" I immediately got thrown into shock. What I said? They'll be offended, for sure! But no, Thora and I did a little "Jaeger cherry-popping" hop-dance thing. Cool.

Drunkenness test number 32:
Participants: You (the tester), and two friends, at least one should be female. If you notice that your friends are leaning in to shout in each other's ears and laughing laughs that seem to ring with tinges of drunkness, perform the following. First, you should find a natural placement such that when they face each other, perpendicular to their line of vision, is a table on which to place drinks. Stand opposite the table, so that you have to place your drink between theirs. In a natural motion and rhythm (read: DON'T BAIT OR WAIT FOR IT) take your drink, drink it, and set it back down in place. If, over the course of your drink, the two friends lean in to talk to each other when your arm is between them, then there's a good chance that one or both of your friends is at least moderately inebriated.

Thora went into her purse to pull out some cash to pay for the shots. I noticed she kept all her cash in a checkbook-like thing. Perhaps it was a checkbook. "Doesn't your money fall out of that?" "No. Well, yeah."

Around this time, my mind had gotten in a lather over the All Powerful Friends' Exes Code. Namely, you do not date a friend's ex-anything. Perhaps if you had said friend's explicit consent, a psychic ability to tell whether or not he really means it, and if he does mean it, whether or not he really means it, or thinks he means it only to wind up resenting you later. Oh, and a philosopher's stone. Don't forget that. So.. yeah. By that code, which I have yet to break, there's no way I can possibly have a chance to get involved with this girl.

Crap.

I tried not to talk to Thora as much. To ensure that Code-breaking does not occur. I saw another friend, and caught up with him. I didn't feel too bad since she got a call on her cel and answered it. Catching up with this guy is amazing. Everytime I talk with him, I find out something new about him. He's a person with an old soul, and I feel privileged to know him. Our conversation was cut a bit short when Thora called me back in for another shot.

I was definitely getting too drunk. Before I realized it, I had ordered a black & tan. We were taking drunken pictures of ourselves. Fucking Code. When Thora and Laura became involved in a conversation, I turned to meet a guy who said he was in the army. His story was pretty complicated, and sounded real. Part of it involved the fact that he was in a well-respected infantry division, the one that mans the white house and other presidential-level ceremonial positions. I asked him about the extremely strict requirements. He said he was 6'1", and that he had the appropriate weight and test scores. He said he was posted at the tomb of the unkown soldier. He said that he had done three tours, one in Somalia, one in Iraq. He said that the army was paying him to go to school and that he wanted to be a physicist. He also said that he was going back to Iraq. Dunno. Maybe it's true, maybe it wasn't. But even if it was all a lie, it was an entertaining lie.

And we all know that being entertained is better than knowing the truth.

As I was talking to the guy outside, I noticed that Laura had come out, and it looked like she was with a couple of girls. The ducked into an alcove and looked like they started talking. Thora soon came out, with her coat and purse. I looked over to where Laura was. She was facing me, looking at what I assume to be the two girls facing each other. I only saw one, standing just outside the alcove. And then that one leaned in while Laura looked on. Maybe they were kissing. The look on Laura's face lended some credit to that hypothesis.

I broke off conversation with the army guy and his friend to join Thora and "Laura." (I still didn't know her real name.) The bartender, Hank, came out for a smoke, just in time to see Thora off. Hank was cool, and Thora was buds with him. "You're leaving?" he asked. "Yeah, I'm lame dot com. Are you going to be here tomorrow?" They worked out when Hank was working next, and vowed to meet then.

"Hey," I said to Thora. "Did you just say, 'lame.com'?" "Yeah. That's my thing." "That's so hot." I was thrice sufficiently buzzed at this point. I don't bust out into Hiltonisms until after a certain drunken chakra level is attained.

They started walking off. Thora looked back at me. "Can I walk with you, to walk off some of my drunk?" "Sure, we're going to Woodstock's for some pizza."

After some drunken stumbling, and drunken looking out for cops looking out (decidedly not in a drunken style) for drunken stumbling, we made the half-a-block trek to Woodstock's. We all ordered slices, all different. "Laura" stumbled off to a table and put her head down. Thora paid for the slices. When we sat down with the slices, Laura asked, "How much was it?" Thora: "Oh, it was free." I picked up on the charade and joined in. Laura was either too drunk to realize or played along with the lighthearted farce to perpetuate it.

Somewhere around this time, I said something that was most likely oozing with jackassery, and Thora said to me, "That's so hot." At the time, my heart skipped a beat. As I'm thinking about it now, maybe she was saying it sarcastically. I say some really, really horrible things.

Also around this time, Laura said something which warranted Thora to say, "That's hot dot com." Laura and I laughed. I said, "What? You haven't heard of it?" Thora continued, "Yeah. If you go to it, there'll be a picture of you, me, and him there." These two incidents are so similar, that they could very well be the same thing.

Like I said. In a UFC match between A Lie and Being Entertained, that crazy BE will rock a lie like a hurricane.

So apparently Laura has a curse. It's pretty bad. This is what it is: No matter how drunk she gets, no matter how ridiculously out of character the acts she commits, and even what drinks she has.. she remembers it all the next day. Creepy, eh?

I said to her something along the lines of: "That's not a curse. It's awesome. You can write a web journal that chronicles your adventures and the "recipes" of liquor you consume before those adventures." Thora was on her cel, and she started pointing her phone at me. I continued, "Your journal will be in "cookbook" form, and that cookbook will be populated with recipes of what quantities of alcohol and in what order consumed are necessary to brew up crazy drunken adventures--" "--like watching lesbians kiss." "Dude, so many people would read that."

Thora took the phone back to her head and said, "Did you get any of that?"

A few minutes later, when Thora was off the phone, and we were all talking. Thora let out a decent sized burp. It lasted two seconds. After a second of awe, I dreamily said, "That. Is so hot." I think she smiled. I hope she smiled. Dammit. Stupid retardedly selective memory.

"Laura" had to go the bathroom. We were worried that she might not find it or make it, but we trusted in her drunken kung-fu bathroom finding chi. I finally got the chance to ask Thora what her friend's name was. It was Caroline. (Or was it?!@! HAHAHAAAHAAA!!) I told her about my name juxtapositioning. (It's juxtapositioliscious!) We talked about other stuff. but. Well. Who's to say that any of what I'm remember really happened? Maybe through that seemingly benign small talk we had alone together, we made some kind of connection like a weak nuclear force. Maybe my issues with relationships made her think that I wasn't interested in her. Maybe the person she was talking to on her cel was her boyfriend. I think I brushed some hair out of her eye. Maybe it was our worry for Caroline that made us stop talking. But we gathered up everything and went to see about her.

After a few minutes, and no sign of them, I put my ear to the women's bathroom door. I thought that I heard someone in there, touching the door as if they were just about to open it. I pulled back. Nothing. I put my ear back to the door. Rinse and repeat. I knocked on the door. "Everything okay in there?" The door opened a crack, and Thora's eye appeared. We'll be out in a second." "Okay, I'll just wait." I turned. "No, come on in."

If I didn't turn down a drink that night, I might as well not turn down an invitation into the ladies room with two ladies. Caroline was hunched over, hands on her knees. "Are you alright?!" She mumbled a string of words, something like "and men wo see that light's fair wave has changed.. and men.. no. wave has changed.. something.. something.. argh!" "..." Thora lifted a gold shiny-ink pen up from the door and pointed to lines of verse written in the very same gold shiny-ink. Caroline said through gritted teeth: "Emily Dickinson. I swear, I know this poem." I didn't do this or say this, but inside my head, I cocked my head to one side, let my face fall into a perplexed bunch of wrinkles, and absent-mindedly say, "Huh." My eyes panned over from the almost-finished poem to what Thora had just written. It said:

Caroline
+
Thora
= rage.com

I dropped the two of them off next to Thora's place. I was most likely extremely capable to drive. Thora and I hugged goodbye. "So.. see you next Wednesday at Grappolo's, yeah?" "Sorry.. I have that Nine Inch Nails concert." "Oh. Okay." She started to get out of the car, and was already halfway out when I clumsily blurted out: "So.. Number?" There was a pathetic two-hand motion thing, but I'm happy that I blocked whatever that was out. She agreed.

I took out my notebook and as luck would have it, I ran out of pages. I found a page and scribbled in her number and my number in the blank spots. I think she might have said something about how she would do something, but that she wanted to get Caroline safely to bed. Be entertained.

She got out of the car, but reached back in to grab her purse. As she got hold of it, the purse opened up momentarily and in that split second I saw 1) loose paper money everywhere, and 2) a guitar tuner. "Is that a guitar tuner?" "Yeah." "In your purse?" My astonishment that she would take such a thing around numbed all of my senses. "Yeah." "That is so hot."

Don't remember what happened next. Numbage and all. If she said anything before she shut the door, it was probably goodbye.

As I turned on to Santa Rosa, I saw a shooting star. I decided not to make a wish.

I walked into the house to find Kevin (roommate, no relation to keyboard player) watching Rescue Me. Poor Kevin. First I got him addicted to Firefly, and now Rescue Me. I'm a horrible horrible pimp, and TV shows are my ho's.

Small talk. And then, "So where have you been?"

"Oh. A girl."

"Had a feeling you did."