the only thing worse
than bad memories
is no memories at all..
[dismemberment plan]
10.22.2006
I Am Done with Weddings for a While.
I have gone to way too many weddings lately. About a month ago, my friend Phil took me to his friend Jason's wedding -- I used to take piano lessons at the same place Jason did like ten years ago, and it blew my mind that he was getting married already. It seemed like just yesterday he was that kid with the crooked teeth, long hair tucked behind his ears, swimming in a pair of enormous JNCO jeans. Phil dragged me onto the dance floor when there were only two other people up dancing, so I froze like a wooden Indian, feeling everyone's eyes on me, and eventually called it an early night. Two weeks ago, C invited me to his cousin's incredibly exorbitant wedding, where the official wedding song was Ozzy's "Crazy Train" and we ate really fancy steak that was called "Chateau"-something. C danced as though he were in a Will Smith music video, and all of the old ladies kept coming up to compliment him. And last weekend, J took me to his best friend's wedding where everything was vegetarian and they played a Mineral song on a boombox during the ceremony, and a minister with a Hispanic accent talked for what seemed like fucking hours. People went apeshit when the DJ (a teenage female cousin with an iPod) played Journey during the reception. Then we all went to the 700 Club, which is like a small closet on the upper level of a bar where a DJ plays 80s and 90s music, and I danced the night away in my purple dress, black thigh socks, and gold shiny heels.
This weekend, my H.D.F.T.I.N.R.D. (Hot Doctor Friend That I'm Not Really Dating -- HDF for short) was nice enough to take me to his best friend's wedding... in Canada. So we took a short trip out this weekend over to Detroit, from whence we drove a rented car into the exotic land of Windsor, Canada.
It was cold and gray there, but the trees were turning red, yellow, and orange and the leaves were falling on the bright green grass, so it was really, really beautiful. I guess when you live in NY for a few years, it's a shock to see actual environmental changes with the transitioning seasons beyond people starting to wear bubble jackets and Ugg boots. It was really pretty. I took a lot of photos of the waterfront, the bridge, the view of the city.
Windsor was an awesome experience. We went to a pawn shop that HDF used to go to and bought five very shitty CDs: Live's "Throwing Copper" and Semisonic's "Feeling Strangely Fine" (my suggestions) and REM's "Monster," the David Gray album, and a live Diana Krall CD (his purchases). "Well, these are all the CDs that nobody wants," he reminded me as we popped the Semisonic CD into the car stereo.
The vast majority of the trip was pretty much a terribly indulgent food fest. We had burgers (mine had mushrooms and swiss, HDF's had feta), fries, and beers upon arrival. HDF kept insisting that a place called The Keg was "just a chain, and will probably be horrible," but the escargot-stuffed mushrooms, his bacon-wrapped steak, and my strip steak, both of which came with a Caesar salad, hot (but not microwaved -- yes, I can tell the difference!) bread, green beans and mushrooms were fucking incredible. We had coffee (black for me, cream and sugar for HDF) and fresh donuts (chocolate, glazed, and an appleturnover) at Tim Horton's, which is pretty much on every other street corner in Windsor. I had a PLT (pealmeal [Canadian] bacon, lettuce, tomato) club sandwich with melted cheddar and he had a hot roast beef club sandwich, and we shared a salad and fries at the Lumberjack. And what really fucking killed me was a breakfast of "two eggs, two bacon, two ham, two sausages, and two pancakes" served with toast and home fries at the Champion. When I finished those off, I didn't feel like a fucking champion, I felt like a bloated, fatigued slug with high risk of stroke and a stomachache.
The wedding was great... HDF's friends are incredibly nice, normal guys who like to drink beer, do impressions of Street Fighter characters, and watch NASCAR, which is a refreshing change from the type of people I usually interact with. They wear plaid shirts with holes rubbed out in the elbows and cut-off jean shorts. They live in houses and have really annoyingly hyper dogs that jump on you and lick you inside of your mouth. They talk a little slower and say "eh?" for real at the end of their sentences ("So you're having a good time, eh?"), are really into hockey, and are unassuming. It was like being in "Wayne's World" in real life. Also, I felt like the only Asian person in the whole country. Cool.
HDF told me before we got to Windsor about the groom's dad and uncle -- Jerry and ol' one-toothed "Uncle Rocket." He described them as racist womanizing pigs, which of course intrigued me. "Uncle Rocket is the worst," he said. "And he's got like one tooth. I guess he just incises everything."
We joked that I should pretend to be a mail-order-Asian-bride that speaks broken Engrish and giggles shyly behind her hands while twirling a parasol, just to hear what kind of awful things Uncle Rocket would say. "Me no rikey Crunkle Locket!" became a one-liner HDF and I said to each other over and over while cracking up. "He a bad man!"
But when I actually met this fragile, thin man with wispy, baby-soft white hair wearing a carefully pressed suit, he struck me as a lonely, bitter man who is divorced and lives with his mother in a shed-sized house. When I talked with him, he told me about his glory days of being a hockey star (hence the nickname "Rocket" -- though I had imagined a backstory much more lewd than that) and how he started working again a few years ago (even though he's 67 years old) at a wood shop (at least, I think that's he said... It's hard to understand a man who has only one tooth, you know). "You American girls are so beautiful," he said to me. "I want to get married again." He groped my left hand. "I don't feel a ring!" His one tooth glistened.
HDF had warned me that he is a bad dancer. And he was serious -- HDF is a terrible dancer, which is completely fine by me because I am awful as well and stepped on a lot of feet. HDF wore a black suit (he forgot to give the cleaners his pants, so I had to iron them about an hour before the wedding) with a black shirt and no tie. "Fuck ties," he said. "I hate them." I quoted a Mitch Hedberg joke: "It's like being strangled by a really weak guy." The joke is about turtlenecks, but I figured it fit the occasion. "And when I wear a backpack, it's like a weak midget, trying to take me down."
The second song played during the reception was, of all things, "The Chicken Dance" -- yes, that song that you danced to at rollerskating birthday parties in the 2nd grade, where you pinch your fingers, flap your wing-arms, twist your butt around, and clap, all three times each. "Wow," I thought. "Well, this was completely unexpected."
We shared a table with HDF's good friends, whom I all really liked. I took dozens of photos of all of us, getting progressively wasted over at the open bar on "CC" -- Canadian whiskey. The food was amazing and all made from scratch: Swedish meatballs, roasted chicken, rolls, salad, seasoned potatoes, green beans and baby carrots, pierogies, pork loin in mushroom gravy, cabbage rolls, and an entire table of diabetic-coma-inducing pastries and a gigantic wedding cake that the bride had made herself. Holy shit.
Hours went by quickly, and even though I kind of felt kind of miffed when HDF ended up over by the bar talking to his ex-girlfriend for what seemed like half of the entire fucking wedding, I had a great time hanging out with his friends and with Crunkle Rocket.
Then, as the party started to wind down and people began filtering out, leaving the very gay DJ and his "wife" to too-fluidly dance together to the last few songs of the evening -- better than anyone else had the entire night -- I went back to our table in the back to gather my things, only to find that my camera was missing.
It was a really nice digital camera that my ex let me keep after we broke up (in exchange for the subsequent months of self-loathing and bitterness that followed said break-up, perhaps), and it's going to cost several hundred dollars that I don't have for me to replace it. This is in addition to the fact that I also need several hundos to fix my shitty, broken laptop. Not to mention the fact that I lost more than 100 irreplaceable photos that I had in there, or the fact that I NEED this camera for my goddamn Photojournalism class (I have an assignment due this Thursday). Fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK!
So it's funny how a fun wedding with great people that I really liked suddenly becomes an intense episode of Columbo or a really shitty game of Clue. I kept trying to figure out whether it was Professor Plum in the library that took my camera, while scratching my head pensively, just above my one glass eye. Suddenly, HDF's ex, who I had tentatively decided was "pretty nice, I guess" seemed to resemble an incredibly shady piece-of-shit-good-for-nothing-ho-bag to me. Maybe she wanted to steal my camera for all the photos I took of HDF, so she could reminisce about the good times. Or maybe she stole it to spite me out of jealousy. Maybe it was that guy Chad, the one with the goatee, weird hat, and silver chains around his neck who had appeared out of nowhere, was overly friendly to me and kept asking me questions about my camera. After all, he did disappear for a long time with no explanation. Or maybe it was one of those old ladies who was clearing the tables, those silly old sluts! It could have been anyone! A billion wild scenarios whirled in my mind.
HDF kept telling me that it probably was accidentally taken. I find this incredibly unlikely, since it had my enormous harmonica-sized hairclip clipped onto the wrist-cord. Somebody fucking *stole* it. And after Crunkle Rocket, HDF and I scoured the godforesaken place to no avail, I went outside into the cold, unforgiving rain, and shook my fist at the sky. "FUCK!!!!! FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!" I screamed. "FUCKING FUCK FUCK!"
It absolutely kills my soul to think of how easy it would have been to prevent all of this from happening. My camera was so small and easy to snatch, yet so very expensive and valuable to me -- and I had left it on the goddamn table. I want to fucking snap a twig over my knee in exasperation or maybe punch a cat in the face. If you are reading this and have felt this kind of helpless rage before, and if there happens to be a really obnoxious cat slinking around pretending that you don't exist, please -- for me -- pick it up and punt it into the sun like a football as hard as you can. Not that I think that it would help matters much -- certainly not as much as, say, giving me a thousand dollars would *cough* -- but this awful feeling of misery is kind of like seeing some disgusting photo on the internet or having a terrible stomach virus or maybe even sort of like that video cassette in the movie "The Ring" -- you just have to spread it around and share it with everyone you know.
So if you're drinking a 40, pour a little out for me, your homie. Think of a time that really made you feel miserable, and say out loud, "Goddamnit, that really fucking sucked. I wish that had never fucking happened to me." Then, break a bottle on the edge of the bar or on a tabletop and stab that no good fucker standing next to you sipping on a disgusting "apple-tini" with the sharp end, or kick an empty can really, really hard while calling it a "stupid piece of shit." And if you've got a digital camera that is sitting in your desk drawer that you've been meaning to put on eBay for the past three years and just haven't "gotten around to it," for heavens sake, let me know about it, eh? Fuck.
I have never really had a bad cab experience before (with one exception, as told here -- remember Mohammed Crazy?). Steve once told me a horror story about a cabbie fighting another cabbie while screaming "I KILL YOUR FACE!!! I KILL YOUR FACE!!!" and clawing at each other; Colao told me that he got into a cab while drunk, woke up with two men up in the front seat, driving him to a place far away from his home -- they intended to rob him -- so he kicked out the back window, jumped out, and ran away. Yikes.
But most of the time, I love talking with cabbies. Many of them are from a foreign country, much more highly educated than I ever will be, with family across the sea. They're always quite nice, and sometimes tell me that they're glad to have someone to talk to -- that no one really thinks to talk to them, and that it's a lonely job at times.
Well, anyway. I was having a pint of Guinness with my friend up in Kips Bay (around 29th Street on the east side of NY) tonight, and he insisted on putting me in a cab. I protested, since the bus runs regularly, but he hailed a cab, gave the driver a $20, and told him to take me downtown.
"Water and Fulton, please," I said. He smiled in what I took as a friendly way, and immediately turned on his Bluetooth wireless headset and chatted away in a foreign language.
Then, several minutes later, I realized that his meter wasn't on. Christ. I *KNOW* that is not following procedure, and that this guy is trying to pocket the $20 without recording the stop. ASS! (Yes, I do realize that this was my friend's money, not mine. But it's dishonest to pocket it, and plus, I can treat my friend to a pint the next time I see him with that money, y'see.)
"Excuse me, sir, but your meter isn't on."
Immediately, the driver got incredibly defensive. "YOUR FRIEND, HE GIVE ME THE TWENTY TO DRIVE TO YOU DOWNTOWN," he said.
"But he wasn't giving you the whole $20 for the whole ride, it doesn't cost that much!" I replied.
"I AM NOT A BAD MAN! IT IS YOUR FRIEND'S FAULT! HE GIVE ME THE MONEY!"
I told him to give me $10 back for change, roughly the cost of the ride. "NO! I GIVE YOU FIVE!" he said.
"YOU WANT ME TO TURN AROUND AND START THE METER AND THEN COME BACK?" he shouted. "Sure!" I said, cheerfully. "That sounds like a good idea."
I told him that it was his responsibility to turn the fucking meter on and get paid however much the ride costs, not mine. And that I wasn't drunk and I knew what he was trying to do.
The thieving fuck kept yelling at me, so I did what any mature, rational adult would do -- threaten to tattle on him, like a little cowardly cockslap. So I told him I was going to write down his driver ID and call the agency. I loudly read out each number and letter of his ID, and his name as my shaking hand boop-beeped it into my cell phone. Suddenly, $10 was thrust in my face, along with a stream of angry retorts... but by then I was already home.
I expected the cabbie to pull away with the tires squealing, with half of my arm still caught in the door or something, but the only thing that he did was shout, "THIS VERY BAD! I NOT A BAD MAN!" at me and drove away slowly in defeat.
I know cabbies may have it rough, but who doesn't have it fucking rough these days? Stupid dickwad.
[Peek-a-Foo]