V.D. ~ Love’s Holiday

“Would you mind if I touch, if I kiss, if I held you tight in the morning light” ~ Love’s Holiday by Earth, Wind and Fire

Valentine’s Day is not my favorite holiday. Ok, that might not be the clearest statement with which to make my point. I hate Valentine’s Day. That’s better. In fact, it is, by far, my least favorite holiday. This revelation might be surprising considering my unabashed love and devotion for sexy soul music; Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White, Marvin Gaye and the like. First of all, Valentine’s Day isn’t even a real holiday in the most literal of terms. Unless of course, you’re an ultra-devout Catholic who observes all the saint’s days on the calendar in which case, you’re certainly not swimming in my dating pool.

The point I’m trying to make is that no one automatically gets Valentine’s Day off work. If it falls during the week, or on a weekend, then the government doesn’t have it observed on a Monday to create a three day weekend. It’s no Labor Day. Nobody gets paid time and a half, double or triple time for working on Valentine’s Day. It’s no secret Valentine’s Day is a creation of Hallmark to get couples to buy cards, candies, and flowers in the middle of what would otherwise be their slowest time of year. Think about it. There aren’t a lot of cards going out for President’s Day and between New Year’s and Passover/Easter, there’s not much going on in the way of holidays.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a total curmudgeon and bare nothing but ill will towards corporate holidays. In fact, that is not the case at all. True, I hate Valentine’s Day (nothing has changed since I wrote that in the first paragraph) and don’t have much use for St. Patrick’s Day (amateur night for drinkers) despite my Irish last name, but I am all for some of the other manufactured holidays. I think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are great. Parents each deserve their own holiday for all they do, selflessly, year round for their children. If god and our founding forefathers didn’t see fit to put a holiday or two on the calendar for parents, then I’m really glad the good people that put out greeting cards took it upon themselves to step up and create a forum for the formal acknowledgment of moms and dads.

That said, let’s take a little bit of space to look at what chafes my sensitive keester about Valentine’s Day aside from the fact that it is a total corporate invention and meaningless in terms of any relation to the Valentine beatified by the Catholics. The way I see it, Valentine’s Day creates totally unrealistic expectations, not exclusively, but particularly in women, for romance… or an ideal romance that probably doesn’t exist, and, in general, cannot be achieved… at least not on February 14th anyway. In short, it is a holiday, more than any other, made for disappointment.

Valentine’s disappointment can come from anywhere. The expectations are just too high on too many fronts. For starters, there’s the card. What kind of card do you get that special someone on Valentine’s? You can go for the flowery card filled with sentiment and feeling or you can go for the cute, funny card. Get the flowery card filled with sentiment then you run the risk of having to express your feelings with some unknown corporate card writer’s words (true, often times better than anything we can come up with ourselves… it is their JOB after all). If you go for the cute, funny card, then you can be tripped up by a bad punch line, a missed joke, or the perception that you’re just not taking the relationship seriously. What’s more, what if the card you buy uses the word, “L-O-V-E” and you haven’t vocalized that word yet to the person you’re sharing Valentine’s Day with? And, how do you sign the card if you haven’t dropped the “L” word (NOT the L Word featured on Showtime) on your Valentine yet? “This Valentine’s Day, I am so thankful for the warmth and depth of the love we share. ~ Best Regards, Chris.”

Once you get past the card, then there’s the candy and/or flowers to deal with. Both of these gifts seem traditional and pretty straight forward, but don’t be fooled. As a guy, if you buy your sweetie-pie a nice box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day, then you’d better be pretty sure of a few pieces of crucial information. First, is your date on a diet? If she is, then you’re better off not even mentioning the word chocolate out of fear you’ll be exposed as an agent of evil and accused of sabotage. Next, you need to know what her favorite kind of chocolate is. Then, you get her exactly that kind of chocolate. Substitutions are not acceptable. Don’t show up with the See’s Nuts and Chews when you know your girlfriend likes the See’s Dark Chocolates. Sure, you might like the nuts and chews better, there are plenty of dark chocolates in that box, and you’re going to share, but that box is just going to remind her that your were in the right store, with the right opportunity to get her favorite, and you failed her. Valentine’s Day is all about disappointment.

The same obstacles face you when trying to buy flowers for your date. Once again, your best bet is finding out what flowers she likes best and then getting exactly that. Does this mean you’re thoughtful or just predictable? Who knows? Of course, roses are big on Valentine’s Day. Supposedly, giving red roses means love and yellow roses mean friendship. I forget what the pink and white ones mean. I think the pink ones mean cramps, but I’m probably wrong. I wonder who came up with the implied meanings attached to flowers anyway? I suspect it is another corporate creation, but it might be a cultural thing like the definition attached to male ear piercings… left is right (straight) and right is wrong (gay). From personal experience, I find it hard to go wrong with buying women flowers, but I also know it is easy not to meet expectations in that department as well. Say, the flowers wilt too quickly after they’re given, or you just pick up a bunch at the supermarket and the carnations and angel’s breath aren’t appreciated? Disappointment is the word of the day.

These are just the basic elements of my hatred of Valentine’s Day. I haven’t even touched upon how difficult and annoying it is to try to make dinner reservations for that night. Just thinking about that stresses me out. Ok, ok, it’s not that difficult if you want to eat your dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon or you really think your date will enjoy a dinner at Hometown Buffet or International House of Pancakes. Outside of that, finding a place that a) is delicious, b) has that certain ambiance and atmosphere and c) can seat you, is an unenviable task akin to spending all eternity solving Where’s Waldo puzzles. Get past that and then there is the question of gift giving (beyond the traditional flowers and candy). Sure, a thoughtful gift is appreciated, but does one have to be given on Valentine’s Day? Why not any other day? What kind of gift should you give? Is my date going to get me a gift and I’m not going to have anything to give her? Is there a point in a relationship when a gift on Valentine’s Day is expected? Will my gift be perceived as sweet and thoughtful or needy and desperate? I guess married people don’t have to worry about these questions anymore, but for single me, just typing these questions out (and the natural pondering that goes with them) is making me anxious… and a little stressed out. I can feel it in my neck and shoulders. I’ll need a massage when I’m done here.

So, let’s say, for arguments sake, that you’re a guy, it’s February 15th, and you’ve just spent what you thought was a very special and successful Valentine’s Day with that special someone in your life. She’s even looked deep into your eyes and thanked you for a wonderful time. Trust me here. You’re not out of the woods yet. What you’re forgetting to consider, or just don’t know, is this is where the real disappointment begins. The day after Valentine’s Day is an unofficial non-gift-giving holiday in which women compare just what exactly their boyfriends, husbands and lovers did for them that day. It’s not important whether or not you think you’ve met her expectations. What you’re competing against here is what every other guy she’s ever spent a Valentine’s with has done for her plus what each and every one of her girlfriends’ significant others did for them while you two were spending the previous night together. For example, you got her a cute card, a dozen red roses, a box of her favorite chocolates, and a dinner reservation at the fancy new restaurant she had only mentioned in passing that she wanted to try. At the end of the evening, you go and make sweet, steamy, monkey-biting love and spend the rest of the night cuddling in lovers’ bliss. You, as a guy, think you’ve done a darn good job at making the night special. But before you go and get too high on your internal catnip, take a moment to think about the comparisons you potentially have to live up to. Let’s say that your girlfriend’s girlfriend at the office got two dozen red roses delivered to her at work from her beau and then he left a trail of rose petals to the hot bath he had drawn for her when she got home from work. What’s more, he made his card by hand… and had gourmet truffles shipped in special, by air, from Belgium. Or, he rented a boat for a candlelit dinner for two in the harbor (I hate these guys… fucking assholes… ruining it for the rest of us). All I’m saying here is that these comparisons, fair or not, are real… and as soon as your significant other gets one-upped by something somebody has done for one of her girlfriends, co-workers or casual acquaintances the envy announces itself and a certain level of disappointment creeps in directly proportional to the amount of discrepancy between the perceived more thoughtful, romantic Valentine and the amount of effort you, yourself put forward. And if someone she knows gets a diamond on Valentine’s Day, forget about it. That sparkly rock is trump.

My usual tactic with Valentine’s Day avoidance, since it is impossible to be a single man every year when 2-14 rolls around, is an early warning system. I find it best to let my anti-Valentine’s feeling be known well in advance of the holiday… say, the week before Thanksgiving… or at least pre-Kwanzaa. That way, when Valentine’s week rolls around, the foundation has been laid for low expectations come the 14th of February. The news that you hate Valentine’s Day and refuse to acknowledge it is nothing you want to spring on your sweetheart the week of. So I don’t seem like a total hater and an unromantic slob, I should let it be known I am not totally opposed to celebrating the holiday. For me, a perfect Valentine’s Day would be a quiet night in with a nice home cooked dinner, some sexy music and a bottle of wine… just leave out the cards, gifts, dinner reservations and expectations.

“Love can be bitter love can be sweet. Sometimes devotion and sometimes deceit.” ~ Joy & Pain by Maze

This year, for me, Valentine’s Day proved to be far less than perfect. First of all, I don’t have a girlfriend, so you’d think it would have been an easy non-event holiday for me, just like any other day in the week. Not so fast. By saying I’m single, doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not getting any. Such was the case this year. Last year, for approximately 9 ½ weeks late last summer, I had a girlfriend, Katherine, who lived out in Pasadena. She broke things off with me in early October, but made it clear that she still wanted to be friends. I’m not one to put much stock in the promise of friendship from a woman who is kicking me to the curb, so I let her go and got on with what was going on in my life at the time, which included moving to Orange County to get away from LA and the gunshots which far too frequently were ringing out on my block. Katherine, however, persisted with the notion that the two of us be friends. Once she learned that I was moving and where to, she began calling more and more. We got together once over the holidays and our “just friends” status was upgraded to “friends with benefits.”

Considering my circumstances; single, car-less, living in OC, I was thrilled to be getting some. I’m definitely not the most dateable guy in OC. I know all too well that getting laid every so often goes along way towards keeping me normal(ish). Katherine and I had a long talk about what our benefits situation entailed. She made it crystal clear that we were just friends and any expectations on my part that there was anything more there were unfounded. When we got together a couple more times in January, she would always remind me, “I want to make sure we’re clear. This is just a friend’s thing.” Ok. I get it. And I’m happy to be getting a piece of it, if you know what I mean. We got together the last weekend in January, and aside from the usual friends reminder, she also threw in, for good measure that, “I never felt that spark of love for you in my heart when we were together.” When I asked what that meant, she just shrugged and said, “I dunno. I just didn’t.”

The week leading up to Valentine’s Day I got a call from Katherine. She wanted to know what was going on in my world, how things have been, and all that. She wanted to chat. I was happy to oblige. As the conversation progressed, she ambushed me with the question (which was really more of a statement), “So am I to assume you’re not going to ask me out for Valentine’s Day?” I told her she was right, I wasn’t. That didn’t go over very well. “Just because we’re not a couple in the traditional sense doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate some romance on Valentine’s Day.” I tried to go into all the reasons why I hate Valentine’s Day and refuse to celebrate it, but it was too late. I hadn’t laid the foundation in advance for this nuance of my world view, and she was having none of it. It became very clear that if I ever wanted to experience the benefits aspect of our friendship again, then I’d better get my act together and toe the line. My plans were cemented by implied consequence.

She told me she always wanted to spend a romantic night together in a hotel and thought that would be fun way to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Ok, I’m in. I went online and made reservations for the night at one of the nicer hotels in Pasadena. I told Katherine to pick a restaurant in the area for dinner since I don’t know my way around Pasadena too well, and to make a reservation. I went out and picked up a nice card (I went the cute/funny route), a box of her favorite chocolates, a nice bottle of cabernet and made her a mix cd of some of my favorite sexy soul classics. We were planning a romantic evening after all, and who knows setting the mood better than Barry White and The Isley Brothers?

The day of, I rode the train up to LA and then the Gold Line out to Pasadena. Katherine and I met up at the hotel that evening. My first clue that this Valentine’s Day was going to be about my own disappointment, rather than hers, came shortly after we got to the room. I gave Katherine her card, chocolates and sexy ass soul cd… and she had nothing for me… not even a lousy Hallmark card. I was a little miffed. Hadn’t she been the one to make a big deal out of insisting we celebrate my least favorite holiday? Hadn’t I acquiesced? Doesn’t that get me a card? Oh well, I’m not one to make a big deal of not getting a gift on what should be a non-gifting holiday anyway, so I let it go.

Katherine was starving so we made our way out to dinner to the restaurant she picked. The place was packed, so I was thankful that we had reservations, until I found out we didn’t. We walked up to the hostess and Katherine said right away that we didn’t have reservations and how long would the wait be. The hostess smiled and told us it’d be at least two hours if she could seat us at all. This was Valentine’s Day after all, sheesh! Needless to say, that wasn’t going to work. We were hungry. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and had spent the day jockeying north on assorted modes of mass transit. I was good. I only mentioned in passing that finding the restaurant and making a reservation was her sole responsibility for the evening and she hadn’t done it. We walked around the area trying to find another place to eat, but everywhere we went it was the same story…. 1 – 2 hour wait if we could be seated at all. I was thinking IHOP and the lingonberry pancakes were in my immediate dining future when we happened past a California Pizza Kitchen. There was a massive crowd milling around the door and the hostess station, but I had spied a couple empty seats at the bar. I squeezed past the throng by the door and caught the hostess’ attention just as she finished telling someone the wait was about two hours. I asked if we could sit at the bar, and she just pointed us over and said, “Go.”

I was pretty impressed with myself. This was Valentine’s Day after all and I had just gotten us seats for dinner, at a decent place (just decent… CPK is no Mr Pizza Factory), without reservations or waiting. What’s more this was Pasadena and my powers of influence are generally limited to Los Angeles. I expected some acknowledgment and appreciation for scoring the seats, but none was offered. Instead, she flagged down the bartender and got the cocktails portion of our evening underway. After our drinks arrived, she reached over and put her hand on my arm and told me that she had packed her extra special sexy underwear for the night and that I would be seeing it later. Then she said, “Y’know, the thing about sexy underwear is that I'll only get to wear it for about fifteen minutes and then it spends the rest of the night on the floor.”

That caught my attention and got me feeling a lot better about the direction the evening was taking. I forgot all about not getting a card or a gift or that dinner reservations had not been made. I was going to be seeing the extra sexy underwear later. During dinner, the tenor of the conversation changed. She started talking about the future and how she wanted to have children. I played along mostly by keeping my mouth either shut or stuffed with food. Then she proposed the idea that if in two years we were both still single then we should have a baby together. This is the same woman who had told me a week prior that she had never felt that spark of love in her heart for me… now she’s telling me she wants to have my baby. Needless to say, I’m confused. I tried not to let it show. Truth be told, the prospect of sexy underwear in my immediate future lingering in the front of mind was probably the only thing that prevented me from totally losing my smooth.

The last thing I ever expected to be having that night with my ex with whom I shared a benefits arrangement was a discussion about having children together. She told me she thought I was smart and handsome and that we’d make an attractive, intelligent child together. I couldn’t argue with that and I didn’t though I did know for certain I didn’t want to impregnate this woman… ever. I told her I was surprised to be hearing this from her considering it was her who had kicked me to the curb a few months prior. I was really just treading water in the conversation looking for any means with which to change the subject. My out came when the check arrived. I half expected her to pick it up considering I had already paid for the hotel room and she hadn’t gotten me a gift or even bothered to make the dinner reservation, but instead she got up and headed for the restroom. I paid the bill and tried to keep my focus on the promise of sexy underwear looming in my future.

“I don’t wanna feel no clothes. I don’t wanna see no panties. And take off that brassiere, my dear. Everybody's gone. I'm taking the receiver off the phone.” ~ Love’s Serenade by Barry White

After dinner, Katherine and I took a walk around downtown Pasadena. We talked about going to a movie or to a bar for a drink, but we were both happy to be outside and neither activity materialized. Eventually we headed back to the hotel and up to our room. I opened the wine. She grabbed her bag and excused herself to the bathroom. I knew what was coming next and she didn’t disappoint when she emerged. Katherine isn’t the tallest, leggiest girl I’ve dated, but her figure just doesn’t quit. She has long legs for her relatively small size and she knows how to accent them with heels. On this night, the heels were pink platforms matching the lacey pink g-string and push-up bra combo she was wearing. She hadn’t been lying when she said she’d only get to wear these for about fifteen minutes before they’d be spending the rest of the night on the floor. She strutted her stuff around the room for a few minutes, doing her best stripper impersonation, really showing off her god-given assets before kicking off her shoes and curling up in bed next to me.

We kissed for a few minutes before she rolled over on her stomach and asked me to give her a massage. I started by rubbing her feet, which I know she loves, and then moved my way up her body, massaging her calves and legs. I was in no hurry and what I had in mind for us was going to take all night. Eventually, I climbed up on top of her and positioned my weight over her ass so I could rub her back and shoulders. It was then that I noticed she was no longer responding to my touch. I leaned in close to her cheek and I could hear her lightly snoring. She was asleep. I poked her hard with my finger to wake her dead ass up, and all I got in response was a sleepy motion like she was swatting at flies. She was out cold. Outrage doesn’t even begin to describe what I was feeling. Is indignation a better word? I had been lied to. Her snores were the proof. She was dead asleep and the sexy underwear was NOT on the floor.

I tried to be optimistic figuring she’d wake up in a few minutes. It was only 9:30, but I was just kidding myself. I sat in the cushy chair at the corner of the room and drank a couple glasses of wine. The only change in her status was that the snoring got louder. Eventually I polished off the bottle, and then I got up and took a long shower. When I came out, she had gotten herself under the covers. I checked and the sexy underwear was still not on the floor. Liar. I turned on the TV and watched Live Free or Die Hard on HBO… from beginning to end. I didn’t bother to turn the volume down. She never moved. Eventually, exhausted and outraged, I managed to drift off to sleep.

Sometime around 5:30 a.m. Katherine woke up and grabbed my cock, which of course, woke me up. Rather than apologizing for having passed out on me, she was upset that I hadn’t woken her up. By this point, she had been asleep for eight full hours. I had been asleep for maybe three. I told her I tried to wake her, but it was no use. She wasn’t convinced, but she still held onto my manhood which was awakening faster than I was. We kissed for a few minutes before she pulled me on top of her for ten minutes of what I can best describe as lame sex. This was not the all-night circus of freakiness I had envisioned. Afterwards, I went back to sleep. In the morning (the actual morning, the one where the sun is in the sky), when I woke up, I pressed her for round two and was rejected. She wasn’t in the mood anymore and had a headache. She did take me to IHOP for breakfast though. I had the lingonberry pancakes.

If I take a minute to look back through my life at all the Valentine’s Days I’ve celebrated and not celebrated, this one ranks right up there with the worst of the worst. The memory of her prancing around the room in the sexy underwear does little to temper my disappointment. Didn’t I mention earlier that Valentine’s Day is all about disappointment? Still, there is a time in my life when I can remember only good things associated with February 14th. This time is from about Kindergarten thru 4th grade. It was then that we made cards for our parents in class and decorated brown paper bags with hearts made from red and pink construction paper that we’d later attach to the backs of our chairs. All the kids in class would go around and deposit little cards pressed out of perforated paper into each and every bag at every desk along with a handful of the little sweetheart candies. “Be Mine.” “Kiss Me.” It didn’t matter whether it was a boy or girl you were giving the card to. Everyone got one from everybody. That was the rule. I wish I could remember the sentiments expressed on those little cards, but the only thing that comes to mind is the, “I Ch-Choo Choose You” made famous by the Simpsons (Lisa gave that one to Ralph Wiggum). In retrospect, it was a very socialist take on Valentine’s Day we were subjected to in the LA Unified School District, the mandated equal treatment, but there was also no disappointment. Back then, there were certainly no promises of sexy underwear spending the night on the floor being broken. Of course, that would have been gross and in violation of more cootie laws than I can possibly imagine. That kind of disappointment is for grownups and that’s what Valentine’s Day is all about.

Beta

Here’s a snippet from a recent phone conversation with my dad…

“Chris, I’m going to need your help with moving some things around when you come down to visit next time, so maybe you can make it over here a little bit earlier than usual.”
“What’s that Pop?”
“Well, one of my Betamaxes is on the flits, and I need to get it out of the entertainment center, but I can’t seem to lift it out of the cabinet and get it unplugged at the same time. The damn thing is awkward.”
“Ok Pop. No problem.” Hey, lifting heavy things is one of the three things I do exceedingly well (the other two being getting things from the top shelf and unscrewing tight lids off jars).

I can remember a window of time in my life growing up when my family was what was considered by our neighbors, hi-tech. This period of time was from 1978 to about 1980 or 81 and was limited to realm of home entertainment. We were the first family in my neighborhood growing up on the glorious Westside to get a VCR. In fact, we got two. Specifically, my dad bought shiny, new top-loading, big button Betamaxes (What’s the plural of Betamax anyway? Betami?)

This is not to say that before 1978 my family was behind the times when it came to home entertainment. My dad (aka Pop) has been a huge film fan, movie nut, film-o-phile his entire life. The McC family was the only one on the block to have our own projector. Ok, ok nearly everyone back then had some sort of home movie projector that would be perfectly good for Super 8 type home movies. My dad had one of those too, but he also had a 16mm film projector and a screen. My earliest memories of the birthday parties my parents would hold for me at the house as a kid all involved pitchers of sugary kool-aid, cakes, piñatas and movie shorts run on the projector. My dad had on film at the time old Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy shorts as well as Warner Brothers cartoons and this would serve to entertain the rowdy sugar-high crowd of my playmates invited over for the day.

I was taught at a very, very young age how to thread a movie projector… a skill that proved exceedingly handy in my 2nd grade classroom at Clover Ave Elementary School. My teacher, Mrs. Freed, would always struggle with setting up the projector from the AV Room whenever an educational film had to be shown in class. Me, never being a particularly shy sort (surprised?) would always step up and do it, much to my teacher’s amazement, in no time flat (the secret is to make a good loop… lose the loop and the film flickers). Does that make me the teacher’s pet? I know she always reported to my mother on parent-teacher day that she just didn’t know what she’d do without me to help w/ the AV equipment.

We had to have two (at least two, more followed as the years went by) Beta machines in the McC household because, as my dad would quickly tell you, there’s no point at all in just having one. If you taped something off television, unless you had two machines wired together, there was just no way to go back and effectively zap out the commercials. Sure, when you taped something live you could always pause the recording whenever the station broke for commercial, but this was before the days when a remote control was included equipment with any electronic home entertainment device. Pausing the recording would require you to get off the couch, dodge the corner of the coffee table, and physically depress the large tooth-like pause button on the top of the machine and then wait for the commercials to end before depressing the button again to resume recording. All in all, the process made watching and recording a program a laborious exercise in agility and focus.

My dad quickly became the undisputed master of this little known martial art. The Betamaxes were wired together and setup in the den in the back of our house (which was actually, more in the front, but that’s a whole other story). Very quickly, Pop began his Beta tape collection. Every week, he would pour over the TV guide that came with the Sunday Los Angeles Herald Examiner and circle all the movies he wanted to record. Mostly, these were old movies that ran on local all-night movie programs like Movies ‘til Dawn or the Late-Late Movie. Like I said, Pop is a huge old movie geek. So, my dad would set the timer on the Betamax and record the movie while our family slept. Then, at some undefined point in the future, my dad would go back and pop the tape in Betamax number two in his configuration, and a fresh tape in Betamax number one, and re-record himself the movie without the commercials in it. This was achieved by synching up the two machines, and then pausing the fresh recording whenever a commercial was reached. He would then, with lightning like efficiency, backup the new recording whenever a commercial was reached to the exact spot where the station went to commercial and pause it. Then, he would resume recording as soon as the movie resumed after the break.

Is my description of this process making any sense? The important thing to know is that the end result is a commercial free recording of the movie. I can’t even venture a guess as to the number of Cal Worthington (and his dog Spot) commercials my dad personally sent to the video graveyard. Pop would then make a label for the tape on his Remington typewriter that included a) the title of the movie, b) the star(s) of the film, and the running time because often times he was able to fit more than one movie on each tape. After that, the tape was added to a numbered box and noted on “The List.” The List was my dad’s way of going back and finding a tape if he wanted to re-watch a movie in his collection. There was little rhyme or reason to it. It was purely chronological. Like I said at the beginning of this tale, hi-tech in my house was strictly in the area of home entertainment. The List was a handwritten log of the contents of each box in the collection.

That wouldn’t have been so bad if there were just a few boxes of movies in my dad’s library, but that’s just not how Pop operates when it comes to movies. He is serious about his collection. Beta tapes were bought by the box, and with 15 tapes in a box, often times two or three movies on a tape, just finding the title and correct box number on The List could require an investment of time nearly equal to the running time of the movie you were searching for. Before you could say “Ticonderoga,” Pop had filled ten boxes with movies. Ten became twenty and then thirty, and then we got cable television and, from there, the whole situation grew exponentially and then spiraled out of control. It wasn’t until the early 90’s that The List was retired and converted to an alphabetical, handwritten card catalog (Let’s not bring up computers, I did mention that the McC family hi-tech period ended sometime around 1981). By this time there were over 170 boxes of movies in Pop’s collection (15 tapes per box…. 2 or 3 movies per tape… you do the math).

My parents were pretty lenient in the discipline department. There weren’t many rules in the McC household that were consistently enforced. I can’t remember being disciplined very much as a child, not that I didn’t deserve it. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to many of my readers. However, the one sure fire way to incur the Wrath of Pop was to mess with the television or the Betamax when the timer was set to record something. That was an offense punishable, not by grounding, extra chores, death or dismemberment, but by constant reminding by Dad that you once were so stupid as to have messed with his machines and screwed up his recording.

“Look Chris, I’m setting the Beta machine to record a Hopalong Cassidy western in the middle of the night tonight on the Superstation.”
“Ok Pop.”
“Well, don’t touch it.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, last time I tried to record something, you did and I missed Three Men From Texas.”
“That wasn’t me. Besides that was a month ago and you’ve recorded two whole boxes of movies since then.”
“That’s beside the point. You’ve screwed up perfectly good Westerns for me before and you’re bound to do it again if I don’t tell you. You don’t know what a good Western is.”
“Are there any bad Westerns, Pop?” (In case you’re wondering, Pop’s answer to that question is, “Not very many.”)

My mother and father rarely argued. I thought this meant they were a happy couple… at least happier than my friends’ parents who would argue openly when there was company over. Of course, this was something I was wrong about. Among the only times I can remember my parents raising their voices at each other when I was a kid was if my mother would “accidentally” record over one of my dad’s movies with her soap operas. My mom always liked to watch her soaps, but as my family grew (I have three younger siblings), the demands on her time during the afternoons when the soaps were on became too great for my mother to be able to keep up with them. She got herself in the habit of popping a tape in the Betamax every day at noon on Ch 7 to catch All My Children, One Life to Live and General Hospital. Dad gave her a couple tapes specifically for this purpose. Mom had the system down. She’d tape her shows, and then fall asleep on the couch watching them after the kids were all put down to bed. The next day she’d simply record over the previous days episodes and the cycle of her daily ritual was renewed. The Betamax was another household appliance for her that allowed her to chauffer three screaming kids (four screaming kids if I was along for the ride) around town to various organized activities and then have her shows when she had time for them (DVR anyone?).

The Betamax was much more than another household appliance to my dad. It was the center of his entertainment world. Occasionally, Mom would mistakenly grab a tape that was not authorized by Dad for soap opera use. Invariably, this would be a tape with a movie on it that hadn’t been watched yet. When Pop would settle in to watch what he thought would be his movie and discovered instead the melodrama surrounding the goings on of Port Charles or Pine Valley the house would be filled with angry screams.

“Goddamnit Barb (Barb was my mother’s hated ‘pet’ name), you recorded over my Western with your damn soaps.”
“Well you try to getting the kids off to school, pre-school, Mommie and Me classes and t-ball and see how well you do at it.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I don’t see why it isn’t? You could never handle all the things that go into my day.”
“Well, that’s not my damn job.” (There was rarely cursing allowed in my house, but as soon as a Betamax was messed with it was open season on the damn, damned damning).

It was one thing if the soaps were recorded over one of Dad’s movies from the beginning of tape. It was a whole other thing if Mom didn’t rewind the tape all the way back to the beginning before recording “her stories.” Dad would be 20 minutes into Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddles or Deep in the Heart of Texas and then suddenly, the tape would flicker and resume with Erica Kane’s dilemma of the day in Pine Valley or the trials of Luke and Laura. That’s when things would really get heated. It was beyond Dad’s comprehension and his rage would erupt from the back of the house (which was really more towards the front, but that’s another story). This offense was always considered intentional by my father and how anyone with half a brain could do something so malicious was beyond forgiveness. I never saw it in such pre-meditated, black and white terms. You try packing a two-year old, a four-year old, a six-year old and a moody 14-year old (yours truly) around town and see how many times in a row you can a) stick the right tape in the Betamax and, b) remember to rewind it back to the beginning before you hit the record button and rush out the door. Technically, even that statement is wrong. Tapes were to be rewound in the special Beta accessory, the rewinder (ours was a Batmobile).

Fortunately, for me, one of the first movies my dad recorded off television was The Guns of Navarone starring Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. It was in Box #1. I was in about the second grade at the time, and this was the coolest thing ever. I watched this movie over and over again. I memorized it. “Remember… I speak German… perfect.” I wore out the tape. My dad had to record it again, and I think I wore out that tape too. My other favorite movie at the time, also in Box #1, was the Sean Connery, James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (I know, I know… not the most well-known or highly regarded Bond film… but it’s still a good one… check it out). My friends from the neighborhood would come over to my house to play and, because the VCR was still an exotic, “new-fangled” device, often times we would watch a movie… which I would pick and it would always be either Guns of Navarone or You Only Live Twice. It never dawned on my 2nd grade mind at the time, but my teachers at Clover Ave Elementary must have thought me quite the odd nut. I mean, how many kids, when picking sides for kickball, choose their friends by shouting out, “Your by standing days are over! You’re in it now, up to your neck!” Or, would take a sip of their chocolate milk at recess and then loudly proclaim, “Yuk! Siamese vodka!”

In the early 80’s, a war was declared. This war was waged not with lead and lives but with different sized video cassettes that were not compatible. This was the format war between Beta and VHS. By this point, Pop was already firmly entrenched in the Beta camp with its smaller (physically) sized tapes and higher quality recordings. My dad saw little chance for VHS to prevail, so he saw no reason whatsoever to invest in the redundant technology. I don’t need to tell any of you how that war ended up. As the years have gone by, Beta products (tapes, recorders, parts) have become harder and harder to come by. Still my dad has stuck by his Betamaxes. Considering the size of his collection, what choice did he have? In fact, his assortment of Beta products has expanded as home electronic stores liquidated their Beta products, my dad was there to swoop in and buy it all up. As of this writing, my dad has seven Betami in the house in various states of repair. At least three of the machines are working. I assume the rest are being scavenged for useful parts. He also has two Beta tape rewinders and several boxes left of blank tapes… and one VHS machine.

There have been some lasting benefits of my father’s late 70’s one-time dive into the hi-tech swimming pool. Pop has literally thousands of movies, almost all of them recorded off television, almost all of them pre-1970 titles, in his Beta collection. Ok, there may be a few (hundred) too many Westerns for my taste, but with numbers that huge, there have got to be countless major and minor classics in the lot. These days, I have Tivo. Every month, Pop pours over his cable guide and gives me two or three titles running on TCM (the BEST channel on your cable system btw) to set my timer for. He never picks major classics. He won’t call and remind me to Tivo Casablanca or Out of the Past, but he will remind me to record things like The Spiral Staircase, The Naked Prey or Jubal. Have you heard of any of these? I hadn’t, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy every one of them. We’ve been doing this for close to two years now with the classics and he has yet to steer me wrong. I wish I could explain how he’s dragged me to see Rocky Balboa, National Treasure 2 and Valkyrie in the theater on Christmas Day the last three years, but like the den in the front of the house, that’s another story.

Prior to DVD and DVR, I would often times bring him blank VHS cassettes (I made my VCR purchase after the winner of the format war was declared) and ask him to fill them with movies. Rarely, I’d ask him for a specific title, rather I’d generally just ask for a genre. “Here are three tapes. Record me some horror movies.” Then I’d get back three tapes filled with the creepiest atmospheric horror movies you can possibly imagine… all from the 1930’s or 40’s. My roommates and I, through the years, have had our minds blown with the movies he’s passed along to me. The added bonus for me is when these are old recordings from his collection and every 20 or 30 minutes the logo of a now defunct LA TV station would appear in the bottom corner of the screen… KHJ 9 or KCOP 13. It’s then I’m teleported in that moment back to that brief window in time when my family was THE hi-tech family on the block with the shiny new Betamaxes.

Cocaine By Association

Resolution: I won’t date women I meet in bars. ~ McCleary 01/01/2000

Coming to this decision at the time wasn’t too hard for me. That is not to say its practice wasn’t without difficulty. Back then, I was working quite a bit as a dj at clubs around Hollywood. When asked by friends what that job is like, I usually said the following, “Well, you get to play whatever music you want to hear all night. You get free drinks and are encouraged to let customers buy you drinks. There is always the opportunity to meet pretty girls at work. And, at the end of the night, they hand you some cash and say, ‘I’ll see you next week.’” All in all, it’s not a bad deal.

Still, for me, the job was not without its drawbacks. Around that time, there was a huge influx of cocaine back into the Hollywood bar scene that went hand in hand with a big heavy metal revival at the clubs. I was finding more and more that I was getting requests when I was spinning by coked out retro metal kids. “Do you have any Iron Maiden?” “No,” I’d answer, “not tonight.” And they would come right back with, “Well, then how ‘bout some Judas Priest?” Look, if I don’t have any Maiden in my bag, then I sure as hell don’t have any Priest. Y’know? Still, this was becoming far too regular occurrence for me. Maybe I just wasn’t up with the times. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

“If God dropped acid, would he see people?” ~ Steven Wright

My whole thing with drugs my entire adult life, well, my life going back to high school when drugs first entered my world, has been that I have to observe somebody on it before I’d ever consider trying it. I remember in 9th grade a girl in my freshman Algebra I class having to be physically removed by school administrators because she was having a bad acid trip in class. That was enough to keep me away from L.S.D. for life. I noticed that kids who messed with heroin tended to fall asleep at inopportune times in awkward places, and when they woke up, if no one was around they were very likely to make off with pieces of your stereo equipment or easily pawned kitchen appliances. “Hey, where’s Barry? And, where’s my cd changer?”

“Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blank eyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.” ~ Allen Ginsberg

My experience with cocaine was much the same. First of all, snorting blow has got to be one of the least sexy looking ways to ingest a drug. Maybe it’s just me, but sticking a straw up your nose and putting your face down to a table top or mirror to snort a rail just looks depraved. I don’t get it. Cocaine makes you crap. Also, once people are coked up all they want to do is talk (and drink), which under some circumstances would be entertaining, but coke heads only really want to tell you the same story over and over six different ways. On top of that, they only want to hear it from their own perspective so there is no back and forth in the conversation or getting a word in edgewise. If they don’t have a story to tell you then they’re more than happy to tell you how great they are and how anything and everything else is bullshit. You become, very quickly, an unwitting prisoner to whatever it is they want to talk about… unless… the person that is holding the coke leaves the room, in which case your captor who is trying to reinvent the sounding board as some form of internationally banned torture has to go find them on the chance that they’re doing more blow and leaving them out. Yeah, I know I’m a big square, but I’m just not interested.

At that time, back in the late 90’s, I was noticing that the women I was meeting in bars were leading to far too many freak show encounters either later that same evening or down the road if I managed a date with them. One instance in particular sticks with me. I was dj-ing a Thursday night at The Viper Room for my friend Dean, who was mc-ing a Pussy Cat Dolls show (the original retro burlesque incarnation, not the Pop 40 act they are these days). Dean, gods bless him, brought over a stunning redhead named Jamie to the dj booth, made introductions, and left us to our own devices. I “bought” her some free drinks during the course of the evening (I did mention the perks of my job, right?), had some great conversation about soul music, and when last call came around I invited her to hang out after hours (I did mention the perks of my job, right?!).

After hours, we had another drink while I packed up my gear and waited to get paid out. Jamie mentioned that she needed a ride home, so naturally, I offered her one. On the way home Jamie asked what I’d be up to the remainder of the evening (wee morning hours). “Well, I’ll unload my records, and then I thought I’d watch a little Perry Mason before going to bed.” “Really?” she replied. “I love Perry Mason and I’m a little obsessed with Paul Drake. Mind if I join you?” Are you kidding me? So, we go back to my place and really never got around to watching any Perry Mason if you know what I mean.

In the morning, I wake up to call in late to work. I make the call and then retreat to the bathroom to brush my teeth and splash some cold water on my face to begin the healing process from a largely sleepless night. When I emerge, Jamie is sitting on my couch, topless, cutting a couple lines of blow on my coffee table. I’m not sure I’m actually seeing this moment correctly in my head, so I rub eyes and do a double-take. No, that IS what she’s doing. I’m not awake enough to make any coherent comment on the situation so I go and crawl back into bed. Jamie does her lines and then sequesters herself in my bathroom for an undefined period of time. I presume she’s taking a crap. At some point, I hear the shower running. When Jamie emerges from the bathroom she gets back into bed with me and has to tell me with a level of detail even the most marginally sane person would find unreasonable how impressed she is that I left the seat down on the toilet for her. Yeah. “My hero!” *Sigh* How do I get myself into these situations?

I dig down and get myself motivated, out of bed and dressed. I tell Jamie I need to drive her home so I can get to work. She gets dressed and off we go. On the car ride to her place in Hollywood, I get to hear a mile a minute story about why this woman doesn’t have a car these days. Apparently, she had a car which she bought from her cousin on payments, which she fell behind on because she’s only working part-time for a florist. How did I not notice this the night before? Thankfully, although there’s no hope of me getting any comment in whatsoever during her tale, I can focus on driving making her rambling a kind of substitute for talk radio. Long story short, her cousin, who lives in the valley, repossessed the car from her without warning, but told her she could have it back, for free, if she would do a couple scenes in a porno he was producing. Classy.

When we get to her place, right away she mentions, “You know, you haven’t even asked me for my phone number yet.” “Really?” I reply, “I’m sorry. Crazy night. Yes, of course I want your number.” I come up with a scrap of paper and a pen and she jots it down for me. Then she produces her cell phone and gets me to give her my number which she keys in. I give her a kiss goodbye and get on my way to the office. When I get to the corner of her block to make my turn, I notice her number lying on the passenger seat. I pick it up, crumble it and toss it out the window before heading on my way. These are problems I do not need. Four or five days later I come home from work to a message from Jamie on my answering machine calling me every form of asshole one can imagine for not calling her. Still, I can’t help but think I got off easy.

After some reflection on my dating fiascos of the late 90’s, I decided that bad light and alcohol was not the way to go about meeting people. Making my decision about not dating women I meet in bars was not a difficult one. For the most part of the 21st century, I have stuck to my Y2K resolution. I noticed right away in the year 2000 and then again in 2001, that the qualities of the women I was dating were much more outstanding and appealing and a lot less freaky and frightening. I don’t think I went out with a single woman during that time who would go anywhere near a line… and I wasn’t complaining, so I’ve stuck to it (for the most part ~ nobody’s perfect) since.

Fast forward to this past July, and if you’ve been keeping up with my writings at all, then you know that I have had no shortage of bad, bad dates lately despite not meeting any of these women in bars. My disaster quotient for dates has got to be higher than any of my single friends. Whenever I’m at a dinner or party with friends and the topic of conversation turns to bad date stories, I can always tell the winning tale. I generally don’t have the heart to relive my worst ones, so I tend to settle on a story that is only marginally more awful than the ones told by the other guests. If someone chimes in after me with a story that is worse, then I always have an ace left in my back pocket with which to trump. As my most recent serious ex told me recently when complaining about what’s out there in the dating pool these days, “All the normal ones are taken.”

One Friday in late July of this year, I found out quite suddenly that I was being laid off from my job. Specifically, I found out at 4:00 p.m. that I was to be out by 4:30. Yeah, thanks for the heads up. Sheesh. Rather than rant and rave or cause a scene, I decided that it was for the best and that the only thing for me to do really, in the short term, was to go out that night, tie one on and howl at the moon. These jerks, my former bosses, were doing me a favor. I wasn’t happy there anyway. I was having a very good day.

I made some calls and decided the only place for me to go that night was the Burgundy Room in Hollywood. I know bartenders and the dj there and that a few of my friends would be going. Also, their mixed drinks are large and effective. I get home, have dinner and throw back a couple beers while watching the Angels game. I shower and get myself dolled up, check the mirror to make sure I’m happy with what I see before heading out to Hollywood at bar time on the subway.

At the Burgundy Room, I quickly locate my friends at the shallow end (closest to the door) of the bar. It takes me all of a minute to tell them my unexpected layoff story and have a cocktail (Stoli tonic) and a shot (Jagermeister) placed in front of me. Post time. And they’re off… I was having a very good day. Shortly after downing my shot and starting my cocktail, I notice a pretty young woman who I don’t know hanging on the fringes of my circle of friends, but is definitely checking me out. She’s a tall, maybe 5’7”, but it’s hard to tell because of her heels, slim, brunette and wearing jeans and little white top that tastefully reveals her cleavage. I work my way over to where she’s standing, say hi and introduce myself. She tells me her name is Victoria and that she’s friends with one of the bartenders there I really don’t know that well. I run through the names of my friends that work there or are regulars and we quickly discover we know a lot of the same folks.

Soon after this, she’s distracted by some of her own friends and drifts away from our conversation. I go back to my friends, down my cocktail, order another and then go out front to have a smoke and chat with my friend, Torrance, the doorman. While I’m out there, Victoria appears to have a smoke and right away we start chatting again. I can tell there is chemistry working between us. The attraction is definite and present. Victoria lets me know that she just popped in that night to say hello to a friend and that she has to be on her way. I don’t even consider my rule about not meeting women in bars, let her know I’d like to see her again, and ask for her number. She smiles and gives me the digits which I key into my cell phone. I was having a very good day!

The night continues and the cocktails flow from the glass to my stomach and into my bloodstream where they do their work… most effectively. Before I know it, I’m quite drunk. At around a quarter to one in the morning I realize it’s time for me to start thinking about heading home. The last train from Hollywood to Koreatown leaves around 1:05. I start saying my goodbyes and making my way to the door. Once outside, I need to say goodnight to Torrance, but he’s distracted by a group of people he’s holding court with. While I’m waiting for Torrance to finish talking to whoever he’s talking to, I notice another couple girls hanging out front, and one of them, once again is definitely checking me out. Well, this is more like she’s undressing and raping me with her eyes. This woman is very petite, Asian, wearing tight leather pants, three inch heels and a little tank top. Wow.

Rather than wait for Torrance to finish, because often times there’s no telling when you can grab his attention, I decide to bolt and head for the train. While I’m walking up the block my internal monologue becomes a dialogue and starts fighting with me. “I need to get home.” “No, you need to go talk to that Asian girl.” “I already got a promising number tonight.” “So go get another. What if Victoria doesn’t work out?” “I’ll miss my train.” “Oh c’mon, you’re a resourceful mofo, you can find a ride.” At that point, halfway up the block I stop dead in my tracks, turn on my heel and head back to the bar. What the hell? So what if I have to take a cab home. Wasn’t I having a very good day?

Inside I quickly locate the sexy Asian girl and her friend and make my way over. I’m greeted by a huge smile. Introductions are made, drinks are bought, rather, free drinks are “bought” all around, it turns out we all know the same bartenders and have many of the same friends. LA is a small town in more ways than you’d think. The Asian girl, Roni (short for Veronica) and her friend, Mandy (short for Mandingo, ok maybe not) are out with the same intentions as I am that night, to howl at the moon, and from what I can make out, they are doing as good, if not better, a job at it than I am. As if on cue, the dj shifts the music from punk rock to 80’s dance and electro. Roni and I quickly find some open space in the tiny, crowded bar and start getting down. We spend the better part of the last hour the bar is open dancing very, very close to each other. Our hands are all over each other. It’s on and I’m into it. I was having a very good day!

At last call, I let the girls know that I am without a ride, and if they could swing by Koreatown on their way home, then I’d really appreciate a lift. What’s this? A ride? No problem. After last call, we are allowed to stay after hours at the bar while they close up (one of the perks of having friends that work there). Roni and I have another drink, which for me, was totally unnecessary, but certainly passed the time. Mandy had stopped drinking an hour or so earlier as she’s now the driver. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., Roni gets a text message letting her know there is an after hours party going on in West Hollywood at one of her friend’s places. It takes her and Mandy all of 5 seconds to decide they’re going. Would I like to come with? Well, lemme see… I can take a cab home… or I can continue partying with this girl I am very attracted to… hmmm, that’s a tough one.

Roni, Mandy and I make it to the party in WeHo and right away I can tell that this is not exactly the place I want to be. I recognize quite a few folks from the cocaine crowd that hangs around the Burgundy Room, including a dealer. Still, I’m out to party that night, there’s good music playing and I’m with a pretty girl. Things could be worse. I manage to locate a couple beers for Roni and I (Mandy is taking her driving responsibility seriously) even though I’m totally blasted at this point. Hey, I’m out having more than my USRDA of fun. At some point later on, we’re all sitting in the living room, well Mandy and I are sitting, Roni is sitting in my lap, when Roni leans into my ear and whispers, “Do you wanna go in the bathroom and fuck?” Have I mentioned I was having a very good day? “Yes,” I quickly reply, “Let’s go.”

We go to a bathroom in the back of the house and lock the door behind us. Roni goes to the sink and starts digging in her purse. I come up behind her, put my hands on that part of her little hips right above her ass and turn her around. We start to kiss for a few seconds before I reach up and cup one of her breasts. Right away, as if jolted by electricity, Roni pushes me away. “What are you doing?” Before I can answer there comes a knock at the door followed by an “it’s me!” Roni opens the door and lets Mandy in. I take a seat on the edge of the tub and start thinking, “Am I in for a three way?” Sadly, I wasn’t. Roni gets into her purse and produces a baggy of coke which she and Mandy share. At least they were polite and offered me some… I declined as delicately as possible considering the close quarters. “Thanks, but that’s not really my thing.” It was then that I realized what Roni had said in my ear was not “do you wanna go in the bathroom and fuck,” but “do you wanna go in the bathroom and do a bump.” I’m sure it was just a case of my intoxicated subconscious playing a cruelly unnecessary game of wishful thinking with me.

After that, I was pretty much ready to go, but that was not in the cards. I was out after hours with the cocaine crowd, and all they were really interested in was doing more blow… and talking shit. At the party, I found myself, once again being the sounding board for any number of people really only interested in the sound of their own voice. Eventually, it got late enough and the girls were ready to take me home. I think it was around 5:30 in the morning at this point. I’d finished that last beer around 3:30, shortly before Roni led me to the toilet. After that, there was no more alcohol in the house to be had, not that I really needed it. I was done.

“I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.” ~ Keith Richards

Mandy gets behind the wheel, Roni grabs shotgun and I pour myself into the back seat. We start heading south on La Brea, and at the corner of Melrose, we have to stop at a red light right next to a cop. When the light goes green and we pull away, the cop doesn’t even wait until we’ve crossed the street to light us up. Mandy pulls over and starts freaking out. “Oh my god, what do I do?” Roni reminds her to tell the cops, if they ask, that she hasn’t been drinking. In fact, at this point, it had been more than 4 hours since her last drink, so she was probably fine. The cop who comes to her window tells her she’s being pulled over because her windows are too tinted. What bullshit. Of course, he then asks where we’re coming from and if she’s been drinking. She says yes, but nothing since 11 o’clock, which isn’t entirely true, but she should have just straight up lied to the cop and said no.

The cops of course now have cause, so they get her out of the car to perform a field sobriety test. Roni starts freaking out. She’s sure Mandy is going to jail. I try to be the calming voice of reason from the back seat. I tell her that Mandy is fine. She hasn’t had a drink in hours. She’ll pass the test and we’ll be on our way. Then a couple minutes turns into 10 and then 15 minutes and Mandy still hasn’t come back. It’s then that I start worrying. I’m telling Roni that cops are just being pricks trying to scare her, but I can no longer help but agree that this situation isn’t looking good. Eventually, one of the cops comes to the window on the passenger side and lets us know that Mandy blew a .09 in the field breathalyzer and has been arrested. The cop then asks if either of us is sober enough to drive her car home so he won’t have to have it impounded saving Mandy an additional hassle with an already horrible situation. I’m shocked Mandy blew that high, but right away I volunteer to drive her car, provided I don’t get arrested too the second I put the key in the ignition.

The cop tells me, “No problem. I can give you the breathalyzer test before you drive to make sure you’re under the limit.” Really? Then he asks me, “How much did you have to drink tonight?” “A lot,” I reply. I also let him know I was drinking way later in the night than Mandy. Then I step up and blow a .03 on the machine. That’s less than half the legal limit. I can’t believe it. I almost want to ask him if I can blow again. The cop tells me that different people’s bodies process alcohol at different rates. I almost want to protest my drunkenness. I was on a mission that night. Now I felt cheated. Then again, once when I was in my early twenties I got pulled over for suspected DUI on a night I wasn’t drinking. I told the CHP officers who pulled me over that I wasn’t drinking, but when I blew in their field breathalyzer, I blew a .032. The cops told me that this proved to them, that while I was below the legal limit, I was lying to them which gave them cause to impound my car and take me to the hospital for an official blood test. Thankfully, that night it was just a scare tactic. The cops sat me along the side of I5, handcuffed, for about 20 minutes before cutting me loose and telling me to drive safely. Now, on this night, I’m wondering how I can have drink after drink and blow a BAC less than I did on a night I was stone sober. I’m convinced DUI, while dangerous and wrong, is a big money scam for law enforcement. The cop hands me Mandy’s keys and I go about getting Roni and myself home. She tells me on the drive east, “Thank god the blow is in my purse and not hers. She really could have been in a lot more trouble.” Hey, what are friends for, right? Needless to say, all those sparks that were flying earlier are now gone. Was this a very good day?

That Saturday, when I come to, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach and punched in the face. 30-something McCleary doesn’t have the powers of recovery the 20-something version did. My hangover lasts all through Saturday and well into Sunday. .030? Seriously? Maybe it had something to do with not getting to bed until nearly 7 a.m. and it wasn’t as much about the boozing. Sunday evening, I realize that all was not lost. I have a hot number burning in my phone from Friday night’s debauchery. I give Victoria a call and leave her a message. I don’t hear back from her until Monday night, but when she calls she tells me that her and some girlfriends are meeting at Safari Sam’s to have a drink and see a band. Would I like to come out and meet them? Yes I would, provided I can get a ride home at the end of the night. No problem. Maybe that Friday was a very good day after all.

Once again, I get all gussied up and take the subway up to Hollywood. I find Victoria and her friends at the bar and settle in for some live music and a couple beers. This is the first chance at any extended conversation the two of us have had. Victoria tells me that she is 32 years old and is recently divorced from an eight year marriage. She has a two year old son from that relationship. She thinks she got married too young and the two of them grew apart as they matured, but now she is interested in dating again because, as she said, “Now that I’m not married, I need something in my life to complain about.” I laugh on the outside, but internally I don’t register this as a good sign. Victoria, once again, looks gorgeous. She’s wearing a nifty little black dress and heels that really show off her legs. Hey, what can I do? I’m a man… and us guys are visual… I like what I see, so I decide to ignore the warning signs and shift to offense. I make sure to laugh at her jokes, ask leading questions that show an active interest, and, whenever possible, start to breakdown the physical space between us by reaching out and touching her every so often to accent whatever point either of us was making.

Victoria’s friends were all very cool and funny. One of these ladies even went to Hamilton (that’s where I went to high school), so there was no shortage of things to talk about even if I didn’t have my date's undivided attention. Her friend’s band was wild as hell, so all in all it was a good time. After the band finished its set, I get Victoria to give me a ride home and was very pleased when she accepted my invitation to come up stairs for a nightcap. We settled in on the couch with our drinks. I put some T-Rex on the turntable and started thinking that while there might be some things here that I’m not going to like, that right now, in this moment, things could very well be ON between us. After a couple songs, I see a nice opportunity, so I lean in and give Victoria a slow, sweet, somewhat passionate kiss. She kisses back for a few moments and then pulls away. She looks deeply into my eyes and says, “Y’know, I thought those bumps I did earlier tonight at the club would keep me awake, but I’m just really tired.”

Are you kidding me? I mean, are you kidding me?! This woman has a two year old and she’s going out on a Monday and doing blow. How on earth do I find these women, over and over? Then she asks me if it’s ok if she spends the night because she lives out near Pasadena and has to come back this way for work the next day anyway. Her kid is with his dad. Well, ok. I give her some sweats and get myself changed and into bed while she’s in the bathroom presumably doing the same. Quite possibly, she’s taking a crap. I grab my phone and delete her number. She comes out of the bathroom and slides into bed next to me. We talk a little bit while drifting towards sleep. Meanwhile, my internal dialogue starts its arguing again. “Go to sleep.” “You should try to hump this woman in bed next to you who you're never going to see again.” “Go to sleep.”

Gunfight at the RWST Corral

9/25/08

"Sweating in any form just makes me feel so alive." Lines like that in an email tend to catch my attention and drag it (merrily, merrily, merrily) into the gutter. I'd "met" this woman online and although we hadn't actually met in person yet, we were very much into the e-flirtation part of the courting process, which is so much a part of 21st century dating.

For my married and recluse friends, let me breakdown the differences between dating in the 20th century vs. this one. In the 20th century, it was boy meets girl. They fall in love. Boy loses girl, but can't get over it, so he begins stalking her. Girl files a restraining order. Nowadays, things are a little different. You just can't go up to a woman and say hello without running the risk of being looked at like you're an A#1 creep-ola. So, boys and girls meet online because, and this is going to sound strange, it feels safer. You send emails back and forth for an undefined period of time, and if both parties are comfortable with the subject matter, levels of wit, spelling, grammar and punctuation, eventually phone numbers are exchanged. From that point, you can pretty much refer back to what dating was like in the last century.

Another thing meeting women online has forced me to do is expand my dating perimeters. For those of you who know me, then you probably know that for a long time I limited my dating radius to women who reside in the 213, 323 and 310 area codes. I wouldn't take my show on the road to the Valley, the I.E. or behind the Orange Curtain. Now I just exclude women who list their favorite book as either Catcher in the Rye (I haven't read anything since high school) or The Da Vinci Code (I only read it because everyone else did, or I just the saw movie and really think the films of Ron Howard are more than just populist crap).

Let's get back to sweating and how alive it makes one feel, eh? Well, this woman, Allison, was talking about how much she likes to workout, so get your minds out of the gutter. She was, however, definitely flirting too, and that's always appreciated. After the appropriate amount of e-flirting back and forth, eventually we exchanged numbers and began chatting on the phone. Allison lives in San Dimas and that might as well have been on the moon as far I'm concerned. I still don't drive. All I know is there is a major water park (Raging Waters) there and the town is the primary setting for the 80's classic, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure ("Strange things are afoot at the Circle K").

"Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city." ~ Dorothy Parker

By some twist of fate or miracle of serendipity, the fact that I don't drive doesn't seem bother Allison in the least. Rather, she finds my urban lifestyle choices fascinating. She tells me, "LA just seems so exotic to me. I've lived here all my life, but I've only been out there a couple times to hangout, and then just Santa Monica at the beach." Apparently, she grew up in the HB (Huntington Beach for those not up on their OC lingo) and moved to San Dimas a few years ago to attend nursing school. I share with her some of the magic and mystery that is Koreatown and before I know it, a date is made. She wants to come out to LA and for me to take her around and show her a good time. I can do that.

On the evening of our date, I'm debating whether to take her to Korean BBQ (there are no meats she excludes from her diet) or Korean Sushi (not the place with the still living lobsters I wrote about a few months back). I've already decided not to take her to either of these places on the subway. Allison arrives at my place, and right away I'm stunned… in a good way. This woman is prettier than her picture, and lemme tellya, she's got some eye-catching pics posted on her page. She's wearing heels, a skirt and a sleeveless top that shows off the muscle tone in her arms. Have I mentioned how alive sweating makes this woman feel?

I'm almost thankful she excuses herself to the restroom (and extremely thankful I had cleaned it earlier that day) when she gets here to freshen up after the long drive. It gives me a moment to collect myself. All I can think is that I hope I don't screw this date up. When she emerges, we start talking about where to eat. She tells me, "I've had the strangest craving for pizza all week. Is there any place good around here to get some pizza and maybe a glass of wine?" Can anyone say, Mr. Pizza Factory? Love for women? "I know just the place," I respond quickly then begin fearing this just might be the point where I screw things up. Korean pizza may be good for fashionable Koreans and weird white guys like yours truly, but I'm not so sure about pretty young ladies from suburbia more accustomed to BJ's or CPK.

We drive over (she drives, naturally) and she is immediately taken by the décor, the ambiance and the whole surreal experience that is Mr. Pizza Factory. I order us a salad and a bottle of white wine to share. As for the pizza, I go Nude. Shrimp Nude, that is. I'll spare you all the details as to just what's on that pie. Ok, ok, I'll tell you this much: shrimp, corn niblets, cheese Danish crust. Thankfully, Mr. Pizza did not disappoint. Love for Women! The food was, as it always is there, absolutely delish and Allison was completely enthralled with the whole experience. She thinks my world, K-town, is equal parts Blade Runner and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The conversation and the laughter flowed easily and naturally during our meal, so much so, I wasn't overly eager to have the check arrive and dinner end. On the way back to my place, Allison insisted on taking the leftovers back to San Dimas because, as she said, "My friends just aren't going to believe this shit!" We get to my place and I invite her up for a cup of tea before she heads back home. "Do you have any chamomile?" she asks. I do. "Well, then I'd love some." Perfect.

We head up stairs and I'm thanking my lucky stars I didn't screw this evening up by taking her to one of the two or three strangest restaurants I know. Feel free to ask me for the others… I put the teapot on the stove and some Isaac Hayes on the turntable (he had just passed at the time) and we settle in on the couch. Allison is telling me about how she is working as well as going to school to help support her parents because her father needs a surgery and can't work at the moment. Prettier than her picture and a saint too? Pinch me.

It's at around this time that the teapot starts to whistle, so I dash off to the kitchen to make the tea. It's shortly after this that I hear, very loud, very close outside, "Pop!" and then, "Pop! Pop-Pop!" I know right away what the sound is. As I dash back to the living room I see Allison heading over to the window saying, "What is that?" This is almost drained out by whole other slew of "Pops!" and "Bangs!" in rapid succession. There is a full-blown gun battle going on in the street outside my apartment. I scream at Allison to get the fuck away from the window. I'd guess there was between 20 and 25 shots fired total. From outside, we hear tires screeching and, "We're ROCKWOOD muthafuckas!" And then, "RockWOOOOOD! RockWOOOOOOD!"

Rockwood Street Gang is the name of the Latino gang that calls my block its home turf. For the most part, they're pretty quiet other than loud music and hanging out on the stoops of the buildings the gang bangers live in down the street (not in my building). They like to leave their tag RWST as large as possible on the wall of the church on the corner as often possible. They tag and then the church paints over it… and then they tag… and so on and so on. I did a little research on these murderers and future inmates and found they have a myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/lostangeles79. Click on it if you dare. When I first found the page, they had a great picture of my block taken from one of the rooftops here. Whoever it is took that pic down, but he's interested in meeting girls with whom he can talk without any "drama." Ladies…? Whaddya say?

"When I hold you in my arms and I feel my finger on your trigger I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun." ~ John Lennon

Allison is noticeably, understandably freaked. She's now on the couch shaking, telling me that she's never heard gunshots so close and that stuff like this just doesn't happen anywhere she's ever lived. From outside, I can hear the sounds of screaming coming from the street, and this isn't someone screaming, "Rockwood." Allison is telling me she needs to get out of my apartment and now. I'm trying to tell her that it would be better to let things cool down outside before she tries to go anywhere when a whole armada cop cars come and block up most of the street.

Allison and I now go to the window to check out the goings on. We quickly identify the source of the screaming as coming from one of the gangsters who was shot in the leg and is lying in the street. A group of six cops, guns drawn, go to him, handcuff him and drag him to the sidewalk in front of my building where they deposit him. They also apprehend one of his homies who they bring up the street to the top of the block where they put him in a squad car. Eventually, an ambulance and two fire trucks arrive to join the dozen or so cop cars that are now blocking my street. We watch from the window as the cops interrogate the wounded gang banger in front of my building for about 15 minutes before finally taking him to the ambulance.

The arrival of armed authority in force has done little to settle Allison down. "Look, I just can't be around this. This isn't right. I need to get out of here. Now." I can see that there is nothing I can do to save what had been, up to that point, a near perfect evening and even less that I can do to get her to stay. While she gets in her car, I go to the cop whose black & white is blocking my alley and tell him that my girlfriend needs to leave to go to work and that we only heard the shots and didn't see anything. He lets her pass and she's gone without giving me so much as a hug. I give her a call the next day and then send her an email and don't hear anything back.

Thanks RWST. Sweating makes her feel so alive… and gunshots scare the living crap out of her.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

9/1/08

"So, do you have time for that lunch we've been trying for today?" Lori asked me. The lead up to the question had thoroughly extracted me from the somnambulistic reveries I surround myself with while I'm at the office. I was a thousand miles away, and then, suddenly, present chatting with the foxy cougar, Lori Lopez-Lopez, in my office who had stopped by my desk to catsup.

"Yeah, today works. What time you wanna go?" I ask eager for the chance to expand on the limited banter we share every so often around the office.

"How 'bout now? I'm starving." I'm in and we're off to the elevator lobby and on our way out for a bite. Lunch was going to be something simple. I had just had some dental work done and neither of us had a lot of time that day to really luxuriate away from our duties in the office, so we just went downstairs here in the building and found something easy.

Look, before I start getting a bunch of emails and comments chastising me for dating at work, let me just say that it is not something I do… anymore. I learned (re-learned) my lesson by making that mistake with a co-worker about 6 years ago. Things were great for a couple months with this woman and me and then, suddenly, things were far, far less than even mediocre with us for a couple months, which led, ultimately, to our breakup. This wouldn't have been so bad, we did have some laughs at the beginning, but now we still worked together and I was no longer laughing. Basically, she initiated a series of awkward, inappropriate and uncomfortable moments in the office over the next two years I worked there. Lesson learned.

Still, if the foxy cougar in my office today asks me to lunch, you better believe I'm going to say yes because even if she's not exactly swimming in my dating pool, that doesn't mean I'm not the kind of guy who wouldn't enjoy lunch and conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex… and I hate my job, so further on down the road, who knows? Right? And, besides, where would I get the material for these little diatribes if I didn't accept an invitation here and there? You people, my so-called friends (ha!), are so lucky I am willing to suffer so that I might share later!

My primary goal at lunch that day was to keep the topics of conversation away from anything related to the goings on at work and to have some laughs. I can be, when inspired, amusing. After picking up some protein, fat n' fiber wrapped in a tortilla (we went for Mexican) and grabbing some seats, I managed to ask how Lori's weekend was. It seemed like a safe enough question at the time. She hedged quite a bit with her answer at first, when she simply replied that it was fine, nothing exciting. Of course, I couldn't just let it go at that, so I pressed a little for details. I asked, "Really? Nothing?"

And then Lori takes a deep breath as if she's downloading extra verbiage from the air between her head and the ceiling and launches into it. "Well, I have dogs. I have two dogs. The German Retriever is 14 and a Spritzing Spaniel who is 12." At this point I know I'm in trouble. There's no turning back. There is no escape. I'm going to hear all about it. And now, you, my (so-called) friends and (sometimes) readers are too.

"I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts." ~ John Steinbeck

Clearly, Lori's dogs are getting up there in pet years. A 14-year run is pretty good for any pet I'd say unless you're the owner (keeper) of a tortoise or a parrot. Naturally, at that age, Lori's dogs are having problems. The Retriever has arthritis and the Spaniel has cancer. She tells me that her dogs are better off on a special diet which supplements the medications her veterinarian has ordered for them, and in the case of the Spritzie Spaniel, takes the edge off the animal's chemotherapy.

It's at this point I start thinking about the cats from my last entry here (Korean Sushi – Dait Bate). In reality, this encounter with Ms. Lopez-Lopez happened just days after I posted that story, so they were fresh on my mind. Sorry, I've been slow on the blogging. You can pay me half this month what you usually pay me for these stories! Specifically, I'm thinking if I should bring up the cats as an amusing aside or counterpoint to her sick doggies, but Lori is getting on a roll and I can tell now is not the time to try to steer the conversation anywhere other than where she's going with it.

"I spent a couple hours Saturday afternoon shopping at Ralphs and then Trader Joe's for the ingredients for the dog's meals for the week," she tells me. Can you tell where I'm going with this? "And then I went home and spent the evening chopping, prepping and cooking for them." Yes, she prepares and cooks all her dog's meals. In her defense, what she was cooking for the dogs didn't sound too bad. It was some kind of beef, vegetable and grain stew. I think there was bacon in it too. Maybe I'm just projecting. Ok, I hope there was bacon in it too. What man or beast can resist bacon? I could do without the special fish oil she had to go to three stores to find.

Here I am, trying to remain active in the conversation, but I'm still quietly thinking about the cats. Now I'm thinking telling her about them might not be the best idea, but I really want to get them in there somehow. Originally, I was going to frame it in the context of the troubles a (crazy) misguided, well-meaning pet owner can cause to an otherwise healthy animal. Then I tried looking at it in terms of the folly of spending thousands of dollars at the vet, but I can't come up with a way to inject it into the conversation without sounding judgmental in relation to Lori's dog situation. I decide to let sleeping dogs lie (sorry, I couldn't resist squeezing that idiom in here somewhere).

Instead, I ask, "So what did you end up making yourself for dinner that night?" Her answer comes quickly, "Oh, I just heated up a can of lentil soup from Trader Joe's." Even more quickly comes my retort, "Let me get this straight. You spend hours cooking for the dogs, yet your dinner comes from a can." Damnit, I was trying not to sound judgmental. Smartass. I'd have been better off bringing up the cats.

Lori dives further into the care her dogs require. Apparently, she won't let them be left alone for more than 4 – 5 hours at a time. She has a neighbor go to her house everyday at lunchtime to see they're fed their special diet and medicated. She goes straight home from work every night to care for their needs. She uses much of her sick time from work to taxi them to and from the veterinarian for their various ailments. The Spritzer needs his chemo after all. She sums up her current relationship with her animals by telling me that if she ever felt the special care for her dogs wasn't helping their suffering or taking too big a chunk of time out of her life then she'd consider having them put to sleep, but she hasn't reached that point yet. Clearly, there's still some fun left in her puppies, but, like the cats, I keep that thought to myself.

Korean Sushi: Dait Bate

6/13/08

"Maybe it would just be easier if you told me what you willfully exclude from your diet." Getting to this point had not been without its challenges. These are the questions you need to ask if you want a date in this town. I'd been trying to get together with Cheryl for dinner, coffee, cocktails… whatever… since I met her at a friend's party about three and half weeks prior.

"Well, I'm a vegetarian, but only sorta kinda," was Cheryl's reply. At that party, Cheryl had been a lot of fun, very cute and not without her own special brand of charming neurosis. In short, I was very attracted to this woman. We had spent a great deal of time bantering back and forth, making eye contact and flirting within the group dynamic of the party. At some point later (many cocktails later) in the evening, we'd found ourselves alone together in the kitchen. Cheryl had said something to me along the lines of, "you just seem so cute and kissable," so I did what seemed natural in the moment, which was to move over close to her, put my hands on that nice part of the hips where the ass merges with the waist and kiss her. At first, it was just a semi-sweet kiss on the lips… no tongue, but not entirely without randy intentions.

"I said you looked kissable, not that I wanted to kiss you," was her reply after our lips parted. This led immediately led to an irresistible spark of electric chemistry between us and a full blown make out session… right there in the kitchen. Cheryl boosted herself onto the counter so she'd be a little closer to my height and we lost ourselves, alone there in the kitchen for more than a few delightful moments. Eventually, we were interrupted. It was bound to happen. The kitchen was where most of the booze was and we were at a party after all. Cheryl scooched herself off the counter and we went out to rejoin the ruckus. On the way out of the kitchen, I spied a lime wedge smashed onto the ass of Cheryl's blue jeans from our little make out moment. I laughed and swatted it off for her. Thankfully, she laughed too… and gave me her phone number before she left. Talk about your first impressions.

Since that night, we talked quite a few times on the phone and got along what I thought was pretty well. There was no shortage of laughter during our conversations and I always consider that a good sign. Still, we were unable to get our schedules together to make plans largely because of: a) the massive time commitment her job requires; b) a friend of hers having really bad timing for when she'd be in need of an intervention; and c) the amount of care and attention demanded from her by her cats. We'd tried for drinks, live music and/or happy hour on a few occasions only to have something come up at the last minute and postpone our plans. Now it was a dinner, Friday night, I was driving at.

"So, what does a sorta kinda vegetarian eat?" I asked with a bit o' apprehension. Cheryl replied that she eats eggs, because those are unfertilized (personally, I eat them because they're delicious and good for you) and sometimes fish because she just can't relate to (chew, swallow, digest) god's creatures that have four legs or feathers. What, no bacon? The horror! Then she makes everything easy for me and tells me what she's really been craving lately is sushi. Cool. I can handle that. I tell her I know a tasty place in my neighborhood for Korean sushi. Very fresh! Perfect. Plans are made.

That Friday rolls around and Cheryl is running late. She got hung up at work, but assures me she'll be by just as soon as she runs home to feed her kitties. The kitties had already been their own source of problems as far as Cheryl and I making plans had gone. One of her cats, Cosmo, had been in a sickly way for the better part of 8-10 weeks. Cheryl had had him for a number of years already, so naturally she was quite attached. She had taken him to a couple different vets already and neither of them was able to diagnose exactly why it was the cat was not eating. One of them even kept the cat at the clinic for several days and did an exploratory surgery on the animal to make sure its digestive tract wasn't obstructed. This procedure had effectively cancelled one of our planned rendezvous. Instead, I got to hear, on the phone, all the tearful details on how the cat (I'd never even met, but was told was just toooooo precious for words) was doing. The last I'd heard prior to that night was that her other cat had stopped eating too and she was afraid the problem was kitty contagious. God forbid!

Eventually, Cheryl makes it to my place and is well worth the wait. She looks absolutely fetching in her vintage yellow summer dress and heels. There's a flower in her hair and a smile on her face at the door. "Let's eat. I'm starving," she says in way of hello and we head out the door and around the corner to Ginza Sushi (Wilshire and St Andrews) for dinner. I'd been to Ginza a few times, but never on a weekend… and it is packed. Fortunately, just as we get there, a couple seats open at the end of the sushi bar, so we grab them rather than wait for a table.

Once we're seated, Cheryl launches into all the updates on her cat situation. This isn't exactly my preferred topic of conversation, but I'm attracted to this woman, so I do my best to feign some interest… y'know, throwing in little aside comments every so often like, "really?" and "oh my gosh" and then asking questions that show I'm actively listening, but still keep the story moving forward. At this point, her cats are not my favorite. I don't care how cute she thinks they are.

We order our miso, sake and sushi. Cheryl drives ahead with all the details surrounding the Cosmo situation. I'm doing my best to roll with it because, obviously, this woman has spent a lot of time and energy worrying about her animal and thinks it important I know all about it. To condense it into a cube, the animal suddenly stopped eating and started dry hacking sporadically. Cheryl got worried and took him to the vet. No problems were found, but the vet gave the cat some medicine that didn't fix anything and maybe even made it worse. This led to more concern, more vet visits, and eventually the exploratory surgery on the animal. All this led to no answers. Then, her other cat started exhibiting similar symptoms and she freaked and rushed him to the pet ER. She tells me it just breaks her heart to see any animal suffer.

Then, she reveals to me the following crucial pieces of information:

a) That since she considers herself a vegetarian, she decided her cats should be vegetarians too and had started feeding them only vegan, dry cat food a few months prior.

b) Cosmo hated the new cat food so much that he just flat refused to eat it, which was the sole cause of all the weight loss, hacking, vet visits, etc…

c) Cheryl had spent over $5000 on her cats at the vet in the time since she decided to make her animals vegetarian like her only to be told the answer for her sick kitties was just to give them plain ol' normal, moist cat food from the supermarket.

Are you getting sick of hearing all about this woman's cats yet? I know I was… and I knew that she had just revealed several pieces of information to me that there was no chance I would ever be able to get past. I don't care how hot n' sexy you are. Paying $5000 to vets when the problem is the lifestyle choice you're trying to make for your pet is just too much stupid for me to excuse.

It was about at this time, that the first of what turned out to be several orders of live lobster sashimi appeared at the sushi bar. Yes, I said LIVE. Very fresh! I wouldn't have even noticed what was going on behind the sushi bar had the order not been placed a foot from my head when ready to be picked up by the waitress. The first indication I had that something had suddenly gone very weird was the look of abject horror creeping across my date's face.

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." – Hunter S. Thompson

"That thing is still moving," she had to look away before she could get the words out of her mouth. I looked and she was right. That thing WAS still moving… quite a bit. In fact, it looked like it was going to crawl right off the tray into my lap. Very fresh! I was shocked, but not horrified. When the waitress came and whisked the platter away to a waiting table, I noticed the still living lobster was just a garnish for a very large plate of sushi and sashimi.

Finally, I had my means to change the topic of conversation away from her gotdamn cats. Luckily (ha!), that was not the last to be seen from the still living lobsters. It wasn't more than a few minutes later that I noticed one of the sushi chefs grabbing another one from the tank. I tried to draw Cheryl's attention to the preparation of the dish, but she was too horrified and grossed out in general to look.

Basically, while the lobster is still living, the chef removes its tail and claws, sets the head aside (still living), sashimis the tail and claw, combines it with more sashimi and sushi on a platter of ice, then takes the hollowed out tail and the still living head and rejoins them atop the platter to give the illusion that the lobster (now a garnish) is still whole. Very fresh! The lobster, still living of course, now is faced with the prospect of spending its last breaths watching itself be eaten by fashionable Koreans.

Have I told you that things are never a moment away from going weird in K-town?

Cheryl, my date is not coping with the freak show sushi well. At least she's not talking about her cats anymore. Thank god. Instead, she switches to all the factors that went in to her deciding to become a vegetarian in the first place. I have a feeling live lobster sashimi has now been silently added to that list. Very fresh! Our sushi arrives and Cheryl seems to be over her hunger. Aside from the California roll and some of the kimchi appetizer, she barely touches the food. During the meal, at least three, maybe four more of the live lobster platters come out of the sushi bar, right next to my head. Each lobster is greeted by my date with a mix of horror, sorrow and pity. Apparently, this is a popular dish with large Korean dinner parties… and not with sorta kinda vegetarian white girls.

After dinner, which I enjoyed and Cheryl barely touched, we walked back towards my place. Cheryl announced that she has to leave early, so I walked her to her car and got a very limp handshake that half turned into an awkward sort of hug. I knew I would not be hearing from this woman again. For that I am eternally grateful to the lobsters that bravely gave up their deliciousness and then their lives. Very fresh!

Bread and Butter

4/29/08

In a lot of ways, 2008 for me, thus far, has been about reflection on the choices I have made and my place in the world, in particular, my place in Koreatown now and moving forward. What happens often times when one spends too much time looking inside oneself for answers and direction is that person is stricken by an inexorable desire to flee their comfortable environs and seek adventure and truth in the unknown.

For me that opportunity arrived in the form of wedding invitation this past February. My college friend, Steve "Monster" Clermont had proposed and was tying the knot with his longtime girlfriend, Ruth Miller. I'd been dying to travel all year and any opportunity to visit a state (or states) that don't both start and end with the letter "O" and have a "HI" in the middle are welcomed in earnest.

Steve and Ruth were to be married on a colonial plantation near their home in the Washington DC suburbs of Virginia on 4/19. Ok, I'm in. I took the opportunity to tack a couple extra days on the beginning of my trip to visit friends in NYC (I hadn't been there in nearly a decade – too long). My friends out in NYC were terrific hostesses. In half a nutshell, my visit there featured drunken Rangers fans, fried chicken dinner, Central Park, Penn Station, East Village, Chelsea art galleries, Circles and Squares, record stores, pints, subways, Radio City, a Mets game and the "World's Greatest" pastrami at Carnegie Deli (that was nowhere near as good as Langers is here). I had a great time in New York, but as I was boarding the train to head for DC to meet up with Jonah in advance of the wedding that Saturday, I couldn't help but think that the greater moment of truth I was seeking had yet to shine its light.

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware." ~ Henry Miller

A little background on my friend Steve… Steve is an argumentative person by nature. Many of his longtime friends are contrarian to the core. It makes for lively gatherings. Steve earned his nickname, "Monster," in college when he would douse his argumentative nature in an assortment of grain alcohols mixed with Hawaiian punch. This he would generally conceal in a Dixie party cup. I'd like to say that Steve isn't the kind of person who will get in your face and raise his voice in the heat of debate, but he is. Sometimes the "Monster" would be frightening. Monsters are just that way. The years and the experience (both in life and boozing) have mellowed the Monster considerably, but for those of us who have known him awhile, we can easily recognize the simmer just below the surface. In short, Monster is a mad, beautiful, passionate man.

Steve's wedding featured all the trappings one would expect at a wedding; open bar, hors d'oeuvres, a baseball signing, a plantation tour, meat house, dinner and dancing… oh, and a beautiful bride. This trip was my first time meeting Ruth, the new Mrs. Monster. I spent a lot of time at the reception swing dancing with my friend Dave's wife, Allison. She's taken swing dance lessons and knows I can dance, so the two of us spent a lot of time out on the floor, cutting a rug and showing off a little. Hopefully, pictures will materialize at some point.

After one song, Steve comes up to me and tells me how impressed his mother is with my dancing and would I come over and meet her and ask her to dance. Well, yes. Certainly. So, we go over and Steve makes the introductions and I ask his mother for a dance. While I am still shaking her hand, she starts shaking her head "no" and then turns to Steve and says, "No, Steve. I wanted to meet your tall, handsome friend." (meaning Steve's friend, Ben, who we also know from college, but hadn't even been dancing) Steve, of course, is horrified. He starts trying to point out to his mother how rude she just was. She turns to me and tries to be apologetic and offers to still dance with me. I say, "I don't want your pity woman" and walk away.

"For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

It was at that moment, thunderstruck and buzzed teetering on the edge of the dance floor that the greater truth was revealed to me. Personal humiliation is my bread and butter. Stick with what works.

So, naturally I trotted that story of humiliation from an unexpected source (have I really been shot down by women ranging in age from 22 to 72 this year?) around to all my college friends and their wives in attendance, and my suspicions (as to what side my bread is buttered on) were confirmed in the tears of laughter I got in response. Does this mean that I am at my finest when forces beyond my control step forward to knock me down a peg or twelve? Am I really the man for this job? Am I destined to have to turn ridicule and humiliation into sources of amusement for you, my (so-called) friends (you bastards!)?

I'll have to chew on that one for awhile… speaking of chewing, have I ever told you about what a wild trip Korean sushi is…?

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The wedding reception wrapped up with Jonah, Ben (you handsome devil!) and I being given the task of transporting a number of the table centerpieces and the last of the already opened wine from the bar back to the hotel. We gathered what we needed to carry and then realized that everyone had left without us. We didn't have a car. Calling a cab proved challenging. We'd been drinking and trying to explain that we were somewhere on this plantation just wasn't getting us anywhere. We decided that our best shot to get a cab would be to walk out through the woods to the main road (no short hike) to find landmarks for whatever cabbie would be unfortunate enough to pick us up.

After starting off down the drive from the plantation to the main road, Ben pointed out what a bunch of losers the three of us guys were. Here we were, three single guys at a wedding, and none of us could get a ride back to the hotel with a bridesmaid or anyone else and now we'd been roped into not only lugging wine, but centerpieces as well. I realized right then and there that the time for hard choices had arrived. I grabbed a centerpiece and launched it into the woods. Smash. Jonah said, "I'd like to see you do that again." I didn't hesitate and launched another. Smash. Muy satisfying. Jonah and Ben joined in. Liberated from the burden of the centerpieces, we then drank all the remaining wine before getting a cab back to the hotel.... totally shitfaced. When we re-joined the group (at a bar), they were a little lost as to how we had gotten so drunk and unruly in such a relatively short amount of time. At some point, Ruth (the new Mrs. Monster) asked after the whereabouts of her centerpieces. I think the answer I slurred out was, "Collateral damage."