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Sun, 9 Jul 2000 For three months I've been carrying my journal from the cross-country trip around with me in my backpack, meaning to write this message. I take it to work, then I tote it home again with every intention of starting right in on it first thing, before I get sleepy. Now I've resorted to this dubious framing narrative in order to get more than ten words deep into the bastard. The problem is that there isn't much to go on in the journal itself, which I didn't even own until halfway through the trip. All of the actually good ideas are written on a napkin in some kind of pidgin dialect that doesn't seem to have any action verbs except for "mack". I want to meet the people who speak this language, but I think I'm probably the only one. Plus they're probably busy. I'll try to reconstruct what happened anyway, but I make no guarantee that I'm telling the truth about all of this. The basic premise: on December 17, 1999, Leroy King left Boston on an Amtrak for Providence, Rhode Island, with every intention of boarding a Southwest Airlines flight bound (via two connections) for Los Angeles, where he would pick up his grandfather's car and drive it back to Boston in time for the New Year's party to be held at 17 Ossipee Road, #2.
So many things can go wrong in a tipping situation that sometimes I just go hungry or walk from Boston to western Somerville at 2 am instead of taking a cab because I can't cope with it. It's also possible for mistakes to be made when you end up in a strange city with two hours to find the airport. I decided that instead of worrying about navigating all four legs of my itinerary and calculating how much would be a reasonable tip at the same time, I would just tip extravagantly without reason for the entire journey and see if that would somehow make everything easier. It did. I'm not sure there was actually a correlation there, but it was a pretty fucking good trip. I arrived in Providence, train station, 8 am. The only way to find the airport was to take a cab, so I did. When the car stopped, I gave the guy a $10 tip on a $20 fare. Then I got out, and there was the airport. I could feel my tip working for me. Inside the terminal I bought some kind of (as it turned out) awful egg sandwich from the Dunkin Donuts. The bill was something like $2.75; I stuffed a dollar into the tip cup. I walked back to my gate and got into the check-in line about a minute before they made some kind of loudspeaker announcement and everybody in the airport got into line behind me. If you grease every palm in the world, nobody but you can grip anything.
The end of the trip was the worst part. I can't tip my own family. They picked me up at the airport and we headed straight for Mammoth Lakes. I had been up for something like 28 hours. The seat wouldn't recline far enough for me to sleep. I wanted to pound my head through the windshield. But then we started talking, and somehow that turned out to be the moment where I clicked over from child to adult in the family structure. It was kind of strange. Let me explain. We were driving up the Owens Valley. It's hundreds of miles of vast, flat dustland that slopes gradually up to the Sierra Nevada. It wasn't always dry, but some time in the middle of the century (my history is a little weak here in terms of dates) the city of Los Angeles, situated in a desert as it happens to be, ran out of water to whizz into and the Owens Valley's number came up. My dad told us a story: at one point the local Owens Valley farmers banded together, took up arms, locked themselves into a pumping station and actually succeeded in shutting down the aqueduct and pumping water back into the valley for over 24 hours. This had no long-term effect. The water in question, of course, is the runoff from the Sierras. Whenever we drive up the valley, my father points up at the ridge now and then to point out some trail which he used to climb back in his early hiking days. My mother, in turn, always points up at the same place, and tells her one backpacking story, which is the one where her leg muscles turn into spaghetti. Between the two of them, they've managed to turn the Owens Valley into what I perceive as one of my ancestral hinterlands. So there we were, all sitting in a minivan in the dark, all tired. We hadn't even really seen each other yet, which meant that they didn't realize my hair was purple, except my sister, who had seen a tuft sticking out from under my ski cap at the airport. (Right in front of the parents in the terminal: "Stewart, is your hair purple?" "No." "Really? In this light it looks..." "Shut up." Parents: "What?" Me: "Nothing." I wasn't even wearing the hat to hide the hair, really, I'm fairly committed to the balls-out approach in dealing with my parents at this stage, but I didn't feel like going into it in the airport. They ended up taking it in stride - it was already in the process of fading to gray, which probably just made them feel that much closer to me - but during the car ride my sister and I had that sibling conspiracy tip going again for the first time in, oh, a few years.) And being tired, and being dark, and being the first time they'd seen me since I finally graduated from college, we just all kind of relaxed, and started rambling to each other about whatever subject came up. Maybe this is normal for some families, but it certainly felt like some kind of watershed for mine. I think my dad was really worried about my graduating. For five years solid. I'd forgotten he could chill. A little while after we passed through Mojave and started the climb, my sister was talking about gorillas. Sign language gorillas. The scientists were completely unnerved by something that happened once. They feed the gorillas plants, of course, and refer to the snack plants as "browse". One day one of the gorillas started pointing at his own head. This wasn't one of the established signs. They asked him what was up and he just kept pointing at his head. He didn't seem to be injured. Consternation ruled until somebody realized what was happening. He was pointing at his eyebrows. "Brows." He wanted browse. Nobody had taught him to do that. He just made the connection. Great apes can pun. Everybody freaked.
I didn't realize until this trip what a complete meat market ski resorts are. I realized that if I was single, and I wasn't there with my family, and if I was capable of macking on people I could totally mack out in that kind of place.
I witnessed a bizarre incident in the parking lot. These guys were loading their car, and for some reason decided to leave their snowboard laying face down in the aisle of the parking lot. Naturally a car came and drove over it. The car realized it had run over something after the front wheel ran completely over the snowboard. It paused, straddling the snowboard, for about five seconds, and then apparently decided 'what the hell', ran over the snowboard with the back wheel also, and then stopped again. Then irate snowboarders surrounded the car. By that time I was pulling out of sight.
I became aware of my legs one morning in our condo. Laying in bed. I think it was because of my brief tae kwon do career, although I admit the gorilla conversation may also have been a factor. You have to understand that I've been skinny and more or less tottering around the landscape my whole life. Now instead, it suddenly felt like i had two huge, muscular arms with which to grapple the floor. It was actually quite exhilirating, and months later I can still recapture it when it occurs to me to do so.
Driving back down the valley four days later in broad daylight, the aqueduct passed directly under the highway and I had this Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance moment. I saw the deserted valley and the unimaginable volume of water in the same glance, and somewhere near the base of my skull I could see the earth sloping away towards the city on the coast, I could feel the vacuum of the city sucking the water down the pipes, and it made me want to cry for the world and kill everyone and live alone in empty cities even as the weeds and dirt grind them back down into hills and caves, and it made me stick my head out of the window of the car and breathe the air while there was still water and pollen in it and not just dust and nylon fibers looking to fertilize some discarded lightbulb. Then I pulled my head back in and resigned myself, and shut the window, and looked out across two hundred miles of valley where the wind kicked up salt to hang over the lakebed like mist.
That's all I can reconstruct six months later. There were good things about the car trip, but they don't tell well, except for something about the Shinarump Dr. Oatman Highway, and I can't quite decipher the note. Travelling on Christmas Day is easy because there is no traffic, but difficult because all of the fast-food restaurants are closed except for Burger King. There was a comprehensively weird stampede in the parking lot of the In'N'Out - a constant ebb and flow of people pulling into the lot, parking, getting out, walking up to the door, yanking on it, making defensive and frustrated remarks loud enough for the next suckers to hear and pulling out of the lot again. We did it too.
We (my sister and I) did make it back to Somerville in time for New
Year's. It was sort of anticlimactic. As the millennium approached, I
found myself getting more and more sleepy. I did manage to do one thing:
I think I composed the 20th century's final haiku. I had planned to do
this all along and then forgot about it until the countdown hit :07, so it
ended up going something like this:
I also visited London in March with Chloe, Lisa and Holly. I will spare you the details, except to pass along the following e-mail, which some of you received the first time around. It was composed on a pay terminal under about three different kinds of pressure (money, time, blood loss) so forgive it the subtleties. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>From lking [at] medianstrip . net Wed Apr 19 16:49:48 2000 immediately, lisa starts talking about how i'm more likely to get cancer now while holly takes a picture with her digital camera. in fact, that is the only picture she has taken so far. later we will discuss the possibility that this will be the only picture she returns with from her trip to london, and what people will think. 'what, did you guys just stay in your hotel room performing surgery on each other all weekend?' she says, in the voice of the hypothetical observer. i laugh bitterly. we go out to a drugstore, but it's closed. finally we find some antiseptic cream and band-aids at a safeway. lisa does the honors in the middle of a courtyard filled with loutish british adolescents on bicycles, which are identical to loutish american adolescents on bicycles only with accents, which is somehow quite comical. 'man, this little sucker isn't really holding on by much,' she says. 'stop talking about that!!' chloe screams, and runs away. i'm having a pretty good time otherwise though. how are you?
As it turned out, that was indeed the only picture Holly took while she was in London. If the idea of a high-resolution close-up of my bloody, messy mole injury appeals to you, you can see it: http://medianstrip.net/~thingy/surgery.jpg I warned you. Lisa has a similar, slightly less revolting shot: http://medianstrip.net/~slipshod/london/slkback.jpg ... and also a picture of me in our hostel room eating a piece of chocolate cake with one of our complimentary Virgin Atlantic plastic shoehorns, with no shirt on: http://medianstrip.net/~slipshod/london/slkshoehorn.jpg The /london/ directory has all of her pictures; most of the rest are pictures of english shop signs fraught with double entendre, so get on the horn.
In the midst of a late-night conversation about psychoactive substances and their influence upon shopping at Star Market came the following (mostly paraphrased):
Dave: "I'd be worried that the employees would notice me standing
there staring at something for five minutes."
Mike: "No, old ladies do that all the time anyway."
Me: "Yeah, I do that."
Mike: "I'd probably want to turn the lobsters loose."
Me: "Yeah! Set them free."
Dave: "Oh yeah, free to get run over in the parking lot."
Me: "We could race them."
[ brief conversation about racing animals. ]
Me: "I guess a piranha race would be if you put them all in a tank,
and the winner is the first one to be bloated and lonely."
[ long pause ]
Dave: "I'm bloated and lonely."
I don't know, maybe it doesn't translate, but if you had been there it would have been perfect.
There was a third trip - New York, on business of all things. I spent most of my time working, hung out with Julia a few times. She mentioned that she once ran into Ben Lima at a random subway station. I wanted to look up Ben, and Helen, but didn't get myself together enough to do it. In the end I was sitting in my window seat on the Delta Shuttle. I had been pretty early in line, so to entertain myself as everyone filed onto the plane I started searching every face to see if there was anyone I knew. It was ludicrous, in a city the size of New York. Ben appeared. It was so surprising I couldn't pull the trigger. Whenever I see someone at random, I can never say anything because my face recognition isn't particularly good and I never trust myself enough to be sure it's them in a world this size, even though in fact I always turn out to be right about who it is. I let him walk by. When we disembarked at Logan this almost-Ben, who by now had pretty clearly established himself as definitely Ben, waited near me at the curb for the subway shuttle. We sat perpendicular in the back corner of the bus, knees nearly touching - he was talking to someone else from the flight - at which point I started to feel like less of a loser because he hadn't seen me yet either, or at any rate was doing the same thing I was doing. I let it go until we were getting off the bus and then said "hey Ben." It was indeed Ben. We talked on the subway. As he left at Harvard Square, he told me through the closing doors that I should send more messages to my mailing list. So hi, and thank Ben. s.
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