I’ve misplaced time, perhaps when I do laundry next there will be soggy hours stuffed into pants pockets, minutes shredded in my shirts. I think this guy I know insulted me, he might have insulted himself, we don’t have many conversations and I can’t remember one that was direct. I can’t think of a single reason for him to insult either one of us, and yet … perhaps he didn’t understand the reference he was making; Like mistaking the Count Of Monte Cristo for a redemption tale instead of a revenge.
Another friend believes part of my recent bout of troubles are migraines. I see my useless doctor next week. I’ll ask for a referral to an ENT. If I told him my trouble he’d probably send me to a neurologist. I don’t think I’m smarter than doctors in general, and I’m sure I don’t know as much about medicine as my doctor (who I believe and am smarter than), I just don’t trust the agenda of medicine practice in this town. A neurologist would decrease my medication and then say there is nothing else to be done. Ideally I think doctors should listen to their patients most of whom are familiar with their own bodies.
My plan has been eye doctor, ENT, god forbid, dentist, and if all that fails getting one of those to order the brain scan sans the neurologist. I’m tired of whining about this shit, I just thought I’d demonstrate that the first sentence is not all frivolous word play.
The Michigan summer has started early. It’s very humid and rain has been scarce. I had a happy childhood here and, like any kid, looked forward to the three months off from school, and played long and hard; I never liked the humid heat. There wasn’t anyplace to play baseball inside and if stationary bikes were available at that time, well, they weren’t available to me. Even older and less capable I still think a stationary bike is silly when a real one can take you places.
Oh, I just remembered this. A friend of mines father who was very much into cycling and taught four of us how to work on bikes and even build them from scratch (he even had a truing machine, if you are adding spokes to a rim you can’t just tighten them and expect the wheel to be true any more than you can string a guitar and expect it to be in tune) he had this indoor cycling device. It was two sets of rollers spaced the distance between his wheels (though a quick release would allow the rollers to be set anywhere on the bar) and he could ride his real bike(s) inside. The trick was getting up to speed without tipping over, same for the dismount. I think he made it himself and I have never seen the like anywhere else.
Long after I had fallen out of touch with his son I met the father on one of the stranger nights of my young life. I might have told this story before, but it’s been a while, certainly before the birth of prosebox.
It was February and I was coming into town at dusk. I had been East for while and was most recently coming in from Boston. A friend of mine picked me up where the freeway meets the city streets. It was a happy coincidence, not planned. He was overly happy to see me and, a bit at a loss for meaningful words, I asked him what he’d been up to. “Fucking Carol (I just decided right this moment not to use a real name, I don’t know why)” and he started crying. She was an ex-girlfriend of mine, the meaning of which seemed to disturb him a lot more than it did me. So to struggled with his own demons he took me to her house. To shorten all that awkwardness he gives her and I a lift to a bar in downtown east lansing. It no longer exists, but it did at the time. Lizards. It was underground and had a kind of popart/art deco mural of two lizards on the wall behind the bandstand that were either fucking or fighting depending on how much you had to drink and what kind of person you were.
We drank a lot and she got sentimental. I wanted to go home. She got handsy and sentimental so I made up a chore. Ok, the chore was real but I was expecting her to not want to go on it. This guy I knew owed me money and he was working in this gas station the next hamlet over. We took a bus. The bus stop was about a quarter mile shy of the gas station (the gas station is now gone, there’s a tux rental and dry cleaner in its spot) we had to pass this old graveyard to get there. Drunk, young, sentimental — we had sex in the graveyard. I’m always sort of a gentleman, my mood that night wasn’t gentlemanly; I was on top. A lot of snow went up her ass crack.
So we go into the gas station, dude is all like “what the fuck?” I’m all like “where’s my twenty bucks?” and Carol is all like “We jes had a manager aw tray with a dead guy.” The conversation went around and around until pulled a twenty out of the till (he lost the job) and kicked us out, locked the door and called a cab.
The cabby was the bike guy, my old friends father. When we got to a stop light I told him I was glad to see him, gave him the twenty and asked him to please take her wherever she wanted to go. That was the last time I saw him. When I saw the gas station guy and Carol next they were living together in West Springfield, SW a few hours from Boston, and announced to me their plans to get married. It’s sort of like the guy who might have insulted me or himself, I’m not sure why I had to be the first to hear the news, it seemed like one of us should have been insulted.
The gas station guy a few years back, I discovered that by accident, I was looking for his brother; he’s dead too. I heard that Carol moved back to where she was from (oh, they were divorced within three years, with a fat little baby named Dylan, I assume that baby has since grown up) a little town on the Lake Michigan shoreline a few minutes from the IL/MI border.
I can tell that story much better, but, each time I tell it I wonder why bother telling it at all. It’s certainly not one of my finest moments, in fact I’m pretty ineffectual at getting anything I want done. The only reason it’s memorial at all is that it’s one of those stories where the road sort of bleeds into home. It’s important to be both flexible and vigilant on the road; it’s both how to have a proper adventure and how to stay safe. Given that thought it’s important if the events ever need to be retold like, say, to a cop, the guy who is me in the story didn’t do much to incite or prevent or anything at all. I prefer those stories to have me entirely invisible in.
Ok, that’s long enough for me at a computer screen. Let me know if you see any of my time blowing across your lawn.
Loading comments...