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Before I write these little missives I've taken to making notes of what I want to mention, kind of like Janeane Garofolo in her stand-up. Here's today's notes.
And did I mention Sonya and I went and saw Rent at the Orpheum? It was so good; I was captivated. Best musical I ever saw. Got a t-shirt, too. And the soundtrack.
So here we go...
Wednesday afternoon around three or so Sonya called me.
"The Liberty Bowl Parade starts at four," she said, "I wanna go! Wanna go wanna go wanna go!" So Sonya and I scooted on over to Beale Street, stood in front of the goats at Silky's and watched the parade. The high point? Seeing Rufus Thomas drive by in a Porsche, wearing his mink coat.
"Walk the dog, Rufus!" I yelled.
New Year's Eve dawned sunny and cold. Sonya went to work for a few hours while I cleaned the kitchen and waited for the Roadrunner man to come along. Roadrunner, for y'all's information, is Time Warner's cable internet access. It rocks. You can download thousands of pornograhic images in seconds!
Sonya ordered the tickets, and the Ticketmaster people told her they would be at the Will Call window about an hour before the game.
I suggested we leave at about eleven, leaving us plenty of time to get there, park, get the tickets and find our seats.
"Nah," Sonya said, "we'll be fine. They just said about an hour."
We got to the fairgrounds around noon, with the 12:30 kickoff looming close. I parked the truck at Libertyland, on one side of the fairgrounds, and we started our trek to the Liberty Bowl, on the other side. We made it and walked nearly all the way around before finding the Will Call window...and the immense line in front of it, snaking away into the parking lot.
"I guess this is why they wanted us to be here an hour early," Sonya said in a small voice.
I was a little worried. Sonya was wearing the patch Thursday and hadn't had a cigarette since Sunday. Our line moved slowly. Sonya grumbled. I feared for the lives of those standing around us. When the lady told Sonya that her tickets weren't there I thought Sonya was going to reach through the little bitty window and slam the woman against the glass again and again until somebody's tickets fell into her grasp.
Instead, she calmly showed the lady her confirmation number. We were led into the offices while the woman printed us some more tickets.
We were near the elevators that went up to the skyboxes. I tried to get Sonya to come with me to the elevator, figuring that we could probably crash someone's party without too much trouble. She wisely refused my suggestion.
Once in the stadium we got pom-pons, Cokes and hot dogs and headed up to our seats...
And up...
And up... First up a long switchback ramp, then through our gate and up the harsh slope of the bowl itself. We were two rows from the top, tucked safely beneath the skyboxes. The Liberty Bowl's not that big, though, and we could still see pretty well. The problem, you see, was the two huge pillars that jutted up on either side of us, blocking our view of the twenty yard line on both ends of the field.
"This won't do," Sonya said decisively. After getting her hot dog out of my jacket pocket and squirting relish all over my sleeve (gut-bustingly funny, I saw her give the package a squeeze and the wad of relish flew, phlegm-globber style, right on to my elbow) we moved down a few rows and sat in some mercifully unobstructed seats to watch Tulane thump the living dogshit out of Brigham Young. 12-0, baby! There's your national champs right there. Really, it was a great day for football, sunny and kind of warm, compared to the weather we've been having.
We did all the cheers along with the green-clad Tulane fans. It was cool to be really supportive of a college team. Back at UCA I probably went to five games during my entire career as a student. Not that Bear games were any big deal. They were NAIA champs for years running, and that was kind of a thing. Shortly after I got there, though, they switched over to NCAA and became astoundingly mediocre.
UCA just didn't have an exciting football environment, really. Big bleachers on either side of a field. Big hooey. I've seen more impressive high school setups.
James and Jen came down to ring in the New Year with us. We drank far too much champagne and watched the Box, much to our bemusement. The Box has only recently been added to our cable system, and the videos they show can best be labelled eclectic.
After a flurry of kisses and pictures at midnight we popped in Star Wars and started watching it. Everyone else dropped off to sleep while I sat in the chair and finished my bottle of champagne, which I had been guzzling Jen-style. As I sat two warring urges arose within me: the need for sleep and the need to be profoundly ill. I compromised, nodding off only to wake up every few minutes and feel terribly queasy. Sonya broke this cycle, finally, by dragging me out of my chair and throwing a blanket over James and Jen before leading me off to bed.
It's not even worth it to go out on New Year's Eve any more. The bars that I go to throughout the year are suddenly jammed full of morons who haven't had a drink since college and then think they're going to drive home. Beale Street is like Bourbon at Mardi Gras, just without the beads and naked people. I drink all the time - I don't understand why it's such a novelty one night a year. If people drank more often it wouldn't be such a big deal come New Year's. It's amatuer night, man. Fuckin' amatuer night.
Addendum: After the game Thursday Sonya and I went to the Public Eye for some barbecue. Seated next to us were some guys about our age.
"Hey," one of 'em said to Sonya, "I went to school with you, didn't I?"
(I knew immediately here that he meant high school, though when someone just says "school" without any modifiers I think college usually. This guy, though...you could tell the last school he knew anything about was high school.)
(Does that sound horribly ivory-tower elitist? I don't care, really.)
"Yeah," Sonya nodded. We sat down. She told me dude's name (I've since forgotten) and we proceeded to eat pork and eavesdrop on their conversation.
It was so sad, y'all. These four grown men sat for thirty minutes and talked about:
Isn't that pathetic?
After they left, Sonya said, "you know, they could have had that exact same conversation when we were in high school. And they were the popular ones!"
I could have had that conversation when I was in high school, too. Except for the fighting part. I always knew that discretion was the better part of valor. Anyway, when you're sixteen a conversation like that is pretty cool.
When you're closing in on thirty, though, it should terrify you.
New Year's Day was pretty quiet, itself. I went to my mom's for some food with the family, which was nice. The obligatory black-eyed peas were consumed. Me, my mom and my auntie played Scrabble. I won.
My auntie is a sweet lady. For Christmas, she gave us this long tube made of pink and white gingham fabric. It had a loop on one end and holes in both ends.
I held it up, puzzled.
"It's a bag holder," my grandmother explained, "to put your plastic shopping bags in to save them. I got one, too." I couldn't tell if my grandmother was being nice or truthfully liked the thing. She loves her daughter-in-law and would never hurt her feelings, so I couldn't tell.
It was a sweet gesture on auntie's part, really. Three things, though, were against this gift from the start:
I repeat, though, that it was nice of her to think of us.
Fast forward a few hours to late Friday night. Sonya has spent the day playing Apieron and not smoking, I've been reading. I mention to Sonya in passing that I'm a bit hungry. She tells me she has a craving for hot potato chips.
A few minutes later Sonya says, "I'd really like some hot potato chips."
I get up and amble over to the window. Rain is pounding down and blowing in sheets across the city.
"You want me to go out in this," I point at the window, "for hot chips?"
Sonya nods. "You told me if I want something to ask. I'm just asking."
She had me there. We have an ongoing debate about...about my motivation for doing things, I suppose. James and Jen and Ward and Kathy have this debate, too. The nucleus of the discussion is something like this: one person in the relationship will do anything the other person asks. Unfortunately the other person feels that if they have to ask for something it is no longer worthwhile to have. This miffs the first person, as he is sorely lacking the ability to read minds.
In this scenario I am the first person.
As I was dressing to go into the teeth of the storm I said, "I deserve, like, double-sex for this."
"You don't have to go," Sonya said diplomatically, starting a new game of Apieron.
"I know," I grinned, opening the door, "I'm just askin'."
I left, my parting zinger making me feel all warm and tingly.
Oh yeah...while I was at the Exxon, getting the hot chips, I saw some gang girls.
The particular Exxon I went to is at the corner of Poplar and Danny Thomas. This is not the best neighborhood in town. It's a block from the jail and about three blocks and several economic zones away from my apartment.
All the Exxon stations in Memphis have been torn down over the course of the last year and rebuilt as clean, airy, well-lighted corner markets. This is a huge improvement for this particular store, which used to remind me of a bank vault surrounded by gas pumps. It had bullet-proof glass, sliding transfer drawers and locked doors after dark. It's also next door to a homeless shelter, so that made every stop there an adventure as you tried to set the speed record for gas pumping before you were assaulted.
Now, though, it's a fairly happy place. I went bopping in, cruising down the aisles until I found some hot chips. As always, I was amused by the stickers on the freezer that say "Try Some Beer!"
At the counter, I found myself in line behind the gang girls.
Picture it, if you will. Three girls, each weighing well over two-hundred pounds. Each dressed in amazingly huge jeans and cheap work shirts. Each one with a bizarre hairdo composed of tightly packed ringlets of hair bobby-pinned against the scalp, capped off with a frothy pineapple-like spray of hair on top. Each one wearing a blue bandanna around their heads.
I was bemused to find myself confronted with this direct evidence of youth crime, but I was not afraid. While the Exxon is reformed, the neighborhood is not. Therefore, at all times there is a uniformed and armed off-duty police officer wandering around. I looked back at him as I stood behind the gang girls.
He was talking to another man, but his hands were hanging loose at his side and his eyes never left the gang girls. I felt safe.
Later, as I drove through McDonald's I noticed the crude jailhouse tattoos on the arm of the girl that gave me my quarter pounder.
It's a world of crime out there.
Saturday's High Point of the Day
Sonya and I were walking through Toys R Us, trying to find some games and stopping occasionally to play with the toys.
"You wanna get a Mr. Bucket?" Sonya asked.
"I'm unfamiliar with Mr. Bucket," I admitted, "what does he do?"
"His balls come out of his mouth."
"Well that's a cool trick!"
I have two New Year's Resolutions. I think I can do 'em, too.
First, I want to run a 5K. I ran two miles last night, no problem, so I think I'll be able to do this in March, which has been my target month all along. If I do a decent job in the 5K I will reward myself by getting a nipple pierced. I think I deserve it.
My other goal is to write another novel, since the publishing industry didn't seem quite ready for my last piece. I haven't written one word of it yet, but I know it's going to be about a young, upbeat, pretty, petite professional woman who is also a savage cannibal. I figure the public'll eat that one up.
No pun intended.
My bedroom is terribly cold. I don't think the window is sealed well, and it has definitely gotten worse since last winter. Saturday night Sonya and I (and Roxy) slept pinned beneath the weight of numerous comforters and still shivered and shook all night long. Sunday I pinned a blanket over the window and stuffed the exposed spot along the sill with a towel. We've started to sleep with the all the doors open to the rest of house so that the heat from the cozy living room will slip around the corner and into our meat-locker bedroom. We've been a little more comfortable since.
Getting dressed in the morning is still done as fast as possible, though.
Yesterday morning I took the dog out for her morning walk. Roxy, being an antiestablishment hound since birth, likes to use the bathroom in the grass in front of city hall.
The grass in front of city hall is raised about a foot off the surrounding pavement and surrounded by a narrow stone curb. Roxy like to stroll along this curb before venturing into the grass.
Yesterday morning, though, she leapt up on to the curb and slid gracelessly into the grass. She sat there for a second, looking confused.
"What's the matter, dog?" I laughed, jumping onto the curb next to her, "take a bad AWWWWWKKK!"
My foot on the stone slipped and skittered into the grass while my foot still on the pavement twisted awkwardly to keep me from falling. Roxy grinned at me and continued sniffing around for a place to pee.
It's called ice, dumbass. You fall on it.
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