We had been planning a trip to the Pizza Hut buffet for several weeks, and decided that yesterday, Tuesday, would be perfect.  We discussed the impending meal at length, both of us harvesting memories of several trips to Pizza Hut Buffet with our respective fathers, and we were very excited about it.  There was much planning involved.  We were to get up early on Tuesday, and he was to go give my little bar a thorough cleaning while I was tying up loose ends at my day job, then we would converge at noon sharp, giving us one precious hour to turboload at the Buffet before running several other errands.  Since the Buffet ends at 2, everything would have to work out perfectly, time-wise.  So at 1pm, we met at our house and piled into my car and we were off.   It was raining so hard I could barely see ten feet ahead of the car.   We had to pass by the bar on our way to Pizza Hut, and when we did, I noticed the door looked to be slightly ajar, so I stopped in the middle of the street while he jumped out to slam it shut.  Since I was about to be holding up traffic, he ran full speed back to my car and promptly opened the door into his forehead and split that shit but good, an almost 2-inch gash immediately forming above his right eye.

Even before the blood started, I really began to panic, and he found an old, dusty roll of paper towels in my car and used some to stop the bleeding while I drove erratically, hyperventilating with fear and concern.  He clearly needed stitches.  Never in my life have I been so sick with worry and panic over someone else’s injury, and this new feeling almost propelled me into a tree and several other cars in the vicious storm.

“We HAVE to go home you are BLEEDING,” I gasped.

“NO!! TO PIZZA HUBUFFAY,” he insisted, pressing the paper towel that was quickly becoming saturated with his blood and what I imagined to be bits of his brilliant brain matter.

“NO.  WE ARE GOING TO THE HOSPITAL!”

“NOOOO I AM FINE I’M APPLYING PRESSURE!”

“FINE THEN!  FUCK PIZZA HUT, WE ARE GOING TO THE GROCERY STORE and you will BUY SOME THINGS TO CLEAN YOURSELF,” I said, knowing there to be a store around the corner from where we were.  My mistake was in forgetting that the Pizza Hut was very close to this grocery store, and though I tried to slip past it very quickly, hoping the rain would shield it from my now-half-blind boyfriend, he saw it anyway.

“THAT IS TH’ PIZZAHUBUFFAY GO THERE IT IS 1:17,” he yelled.

“We are NOT GOING we are going to the FIRST AID AISLE of the ROSE’S,” yet while I was admonishing him for neglecting to put his stitches before his precious Buffet, I was simultaneously turning into the Pizza Hut parking lot anyway because, when it comes down to it, I really just want him to have what he wants at all times.

I wasn’t even finished taking the key out of the ignition before he starts bounding up to the door of the Pizza Hut, already soaking wet and holding this ridiculous paper towel to his head to keep his brains in.  I thought I was going to cry.  I followed him into the restaurant and was put face-to-face with the coldest, emptiest, most pizza-devoid stainless steel buffet I had ever seen.

“Where, we. . .um. . .we need the Lunch Buffet?” He said, confused and on the verge of crestfallen.

“Oh we don’t do no buffet no more,” the woman nonchalantly explained over her shoulder as she lumbered over to the lone, beleaguered table of patrons in the corner of the grimy, burnt-orange dining room.  Jedd Evan looked at me, defeated, but I didn’t know what to say, so we left.

All that for nothing but disappointment.  I put him back in the car and we headed to the adjacent mall containing a Rose’s which, for those of you not blessed with a Rose’s in your town, is sort of like a poor-man’s discount K-Mart, if the K-Mart was built in a shanty, super-trashy, constantly going out of business, staffed with a combination of middle-aged, divorced, obese women with teased hair and dubiously-behaving socially-retarded teenagers, and sold plus-size underwears out of a giant bin for one dollar, tax included.  I love Rose’s and knew they had a small first aid aisle, and what’s more, there was a Chic-Fil-A in that mall, too.  Score.

I left Jedd Evan in the first aid aisle and went off to the clothing area in search of a hoodie.  It took me about ten minutes but I located a gray one for six dollars and headed back to the grocery section.  I found Jedd Evan calmly surveying the shampoo situation while he continued to fold his bloody paper towel into eighths and sixteenths and thirtyseconds.  He was manning a basket full of canned soup, Band-Aids, Peroxide, A-1 Sauce, tiny superglue, more canned soup, a sweater, a pack of t-shirts and other unrelated items.  This was not supposed to be a shopping trip.  This was supposed to be a ghetto hospital replacement. 

We finally made it to the check-out, and of course the cashier knew something was wrong with Jedd Evan’s face and immediately offered the Rose’s fitting rooms as a substitute triage.  He agreed to fix himself there, so we bought all our things and he selected his tools from the pile.  Band-Aids, check.  Peroxide, check.  Superglue, check.  Wait.  WHAT?  But he was already gone.  I really took issue with the introduction of Superglue into his surgical repertoire, but I was silent as I watched him head for the fitting rooms. 

But he did not go to the fitting rooms.  No.  Instead, he plopped down in the middle of the Homewares section and used Rose’s collection of $5 full-length plastic-framed mirrors as a suitable place to patch up.  Almost immediately, the intercom sounded with a plea for security to tend to “Section E, Area 4, Code Blue,” which I could only interpret as the code for, “A Wet, Bleeding Man is Currently Repairing his Gaping Head Wound with Our Discount Adhesives in Bedroom Décor.”

With a resigned sigh I settled into an armchair in the mall and waited.  He emerged, smiling and bandaged, and we ate the shit outta some Chik-Fil-A.

Though I really did not want his wound to become infected and cause him more, very expensive trouble, I knew it was the only way I would be proven right in being so concerned and panicked.  But I, too, am wrong every once in a great while, and in this instance, I was.  It has been over 24 hours and his head looks perfectly fine, the gash reduced to a scab under an inch long.  Apparently Superglue is okay to use in lieu of actual medical attention, and he knew it.  Combined with my newfound knowledge that I am capable of going completely crazy with worry and anxiety over the well-being of another human, I consider this a successful schooling.  Real love is a sphere, he said, and he’s right.  I cannot change the way I feel even long enough to trust in his guerilla medicine, but I should have.  Instead he charms me into losing my mind over petty scratches.

Now all we have to do is find a Pizza Hut with an actual buffet.

Cab Ride #1:  I overslept one morning in my Freshman year of high school.  My mom took this as an opportunity to teach me a lesson about responsibility, so instead of driving me to school, she made me call a cab and pay for it myself.  I’ll spare you the details about my stuttering and inability to remember my address while I was on the phone with said cab company.  When the taxi arrived, I stumbled outside, close to tears.  I had a giant guitar with me since my music teacher wanted us to bring random instruments to fill up the space created by her failure to concoct a lesson plan, so I’m sure the cab driver was amused at the juggling act I performed all the way down the sidewalk.  I approached the front passenger door and wriggled my guitar, bookbag, purse, armload of texts, and loose papers full of shitty poems about dragons and medieval wars (a “book” I was “writing”) into the seat.  The cab driver snorted a little and asked me if I wanted to put my shit in the back.  But I did not trust this man, so I told him no.  It wasn’t until halfway down my street that I remembered a movie I saw where a whore flagged a cab and put her spangled, spandexed butt in the front seat.  The driver said, “You know what it means to be in the front seat, honey.”  And she proceeded to give him a blowjob while he drove through the rainy meat-packing district.  I spent the remainder of the ride with my face plastered against the window, my plaid skirt bunched up in my fists and dragged down to cover my knees while the cab driver attempted to hurl pleasantries at me.  Every word out of his mouth, I construed as a proposition.  I still feel bad about this.

Cab Ride #2:  Fast-forward twelve years.  My parents were living in New York, and at the end of one my visits, they accompanied me to the airport via taxi.  It was 4am and we hailed a cab and (thank god) piled into the backseat.  The driver was a very foreign man, and, peering at us in the rearview, said, “VAIR?”  We said, “JFK, please.”  And he looked at us again and said, “VishTirg Nu Plmbbrklq.”  Assuming he was asking us to repeat our destination, we responded in over-enunciated tandem and at a higher decibal, “J. F. K. AIR. PORT.”

What happened next has haunted me for years.  The man looked close to tears as he screamed at us, “YOO STOOPEED FUCKS!  I TRYING TO BE NICE MAN, ASK YOU HOW IS YOUR MORNEENK AND YOU YELL.  NO HALLO, NO GOOT MORNINK.  NO RESPECT, FUCK!”

My dad immediately responded to the man as though I was eight again, and he was protecting me, which I loved.  “STOP THE CAB, SIR, WE WILL NOT BE NEEDING YOUR SERVICES,” he said in the whitest way imaginable.  We exited the cab like a load of sleepy clowns, and the man sped off without asking for payment or even waiting for us to close the door.

The reason it haunts me is I keep getting flashes of the cab driver readying himself in the darkness of 2am, thinking of his family back at home far away and all the dollars he’s going to send them, combing his hair and straightening his collar, and practicing English in the mirror.  “How do you do?” he asks his reflection.  “Goot mornink,” with a little head bow.  And then he gets to work, and the first white family he picks up responds to his salutations by yelling the name of an airport at him.

While I realize that this is simultaneously an unbelievably compassionate and fantastically racist way for me to imagine the situation, I still cannot seem to shake this image, and I’m pretty sure I’ll feel bad about it forever.

Anyway, I feel like I can, in fact, go through the rest of my life without riding in a taxicab again.  Maybe someday I’ll tell you the story behind the reason I will never subject my future child to schoolbus rides.  It’s a really harrowing account, and it involves genitalia and substitute drivers.  I bet you can’t wait.

The last time I rode a bicycle, it was my old roommate’s, and I quickly realized with horror that the last bike I owned only had two speeds:  However Fast I Can Pedal and Stopped.  And to stop the bike, I only had to pedal backwards for a split second.  There were levers and cranks and buttons and baubles on this bicycle, and since I possessed knowledge of none of their functions, I promptly ate asphalt within 90 seconds.

Something very similar happened to me at the party I just attended.

At the risk of sounding bitter and lonely (which I’m not), I’m going to share a phenomenon I have experienced since buying the bar.  I rarely get invited to parties, and I think it’s because everyone assumes I’m already going to other parties.  Every single Monday, at least three customers (always in their early 20s) ask me “how the parties were this weekend,” and they look alarmed when I say that I didn’t go to any, that I sat at home with my precious boyfriend and tried to find the source of the eight fruit flies in my bathroom.  Why are they there?  There’s no food in there.  I don’t keep food in there.

I live on the end of a dead end street, and three days ago I realized that four of my bar regulars live two doors down from me, in one of the other five houses on the entire street, which was weird because why did we not ever notice that? Anyway, these guys are part of a collectively adorable group of young friends whose presence I always appreciate at the bar.  They are intelligent and talented.   So when they announced on Facebook that they were having a party, and I was invited, because everyone on Facebook is invited, I got very excited. Jedd Evan walked there with me, which was cool just in case I didn’t know anybody else.

A couple minutes later I found myself standing in a room full of Zog’s regulars, and I was completely off of my own turf.  Standing behind the bar of my own bar gives me a certain confidence I’m always sure will translate into real life should I ever be required to participate in a social capacity other than being the beer opener, but it never does.

I’m very good at the bar.  I’m quick and funny and I use poly-syllabic words and I treat my friends to good stories and charm dollars easily out of people I don’t know.  And when I am alone or with Jedd Evan or Billy or my parents or something, I can tell jokes and recount tales and issue advice and do creative things.  But when I’m not on my own turf I forget how to be a functional person.

I parked myself across from the fridge and started talking to two guys I knew and two guys I didn’t know.  Almost immediately, someone opened said fridge and I watched as a full gallon of milk freed itself from the top shelf and onto my flipflopped feet.  I made a couple of jokes about crying and silently congratulated myself when they all laughed politely.  All of a sudden the following sentence exited my mouth:  “Hey three of you guys have glasses and guess what my old roommate just moved out and he left three giant bottles of contact solution do any of you guys ever use contacts do you guys want them because I can just go run home and get them.”  And then suddenly, propelled by my good intentions, I was walking the fifty yards to my house in my milkfeet, wondering WHY THE FUCK I just opted to distribute bottles of contact solution like party favors at an ophthalmology mixer.

I returned with the contact solution, let the guys pick what they wanted, and gave Jedd Evan the pre-opened, rejected one, which he employed as a conversational tool by replacing random objects around the room with the contact solution.  As in, he’d slyly leave the contact solution in place of the hot sauce in front of ten people chewing things that needed hot sauce.  Everyone laughed because he is funny.  He tried to talk to one girl, Audrey, about six times before he gave up, so I directed my attention elsewhere.  Some guy came up and told me he liked all my earrings, so I immediately slapped my ear a few times in response.  Why did I do that? Then I talked a mile a minute about when you touch your own hair when someone notices you got a haircut, and I hit myself in the head a half dozen more times to illustrate my point.  No one said anything.  Or laughed.  But a few kids did rescue me by launching into a full Q&A about Zog’s, which I took part in for close to twenty minutes.  It was painful, and not because of them.  They were delightful.

It was me.

They asked legitimate questions, such as, “How does someone in their early 20s buy their own bar,” (I’m 30), “Do you feel bad kicking out drunk people,” (no), “Do you ever have to cut off your friends,” (I almost exclusively have to cut off my friends), and, “What does that ___________ tattoo mean?”  About halfway through this exchange, I realized I was being potty-mouthed and very boring and I could sort of see it on their poor faces. They had the look I get when I want to end a conversation I’m having with someone but I don’t know how.  I felt so awful for them.

Then I released them from my small-talk grip by simply shrugging and saying, “Whatever,” thereby relinquishing my monopoly on the conversation, and instead of asking them questions about themselves, which is what you DO at a party, I just sort of shut up and stood there until they floated away.  I tried to interject witty remarks into other people’s conversations.  Here are some examples of things I ACTUALLY SAID:

“Oh, Elvis is still alive?  Wait.  Costello?”

“Yes, yes, I got all the milk out of my shoe.”

“I don’t give a fuck about most drunk people.”  (This is false.)

“My parents got divorced and that’s how come there’s a treadmill in my living room.”

After a while I just stopped saying anything.  What was heartbreaking was that no one was being even slightly rude to me.  All the dumb shit I was saying and all the awkwardness I introduced to the situation—it all came from me.

It was all me.   But the sore, palpitating crux of shame came when, after being silent for a while while Jedd Evan performed beautifully with the group he was regaling on the other side of the party, I decided to step up to the girl Audrey and take her shoulder and lean in and whisper to her.  I said, “Audrey.  I don’t mean to be a downer but I never get invited to parties and I’m really nervous and I really don’t know how to talk to people.”  I don’t know why I did it.  I guess because Audrey had been to the bar before and I liked her and we had a nice rapport and I just needed to say it to someone but it’s really not the sort of thing you tell a virtual stranger at a neighborhood cookout.  It was time to go.

I went out on the porch with Jedd Evan and sat in a chair next to a headless model of the human skeleton wearing a vest, and I clutched my tepid bottle of Fat Tire and stared into the street and tried to tell Jedd Evan funny stories while I thought about all the nice, welcoming people inside the house and how I’ve not had enough practice at parties and even though (or especially because) I’m almost a decade older than most of them, I’ll probably not get any better at this point, even with practice.

I’m probably just being paranoid.  But, see, that’s the problem.  The problem is that I’m thinking about it at all.  As Jedd Evan and I trudged home, we passed Rich’s house, and Rich is a bicycle mechanic in Carrboro.  I waved to him and then glanced over at my old roommate’s forgotten bike under my carport.  Maybe I’ll bring it in to Rich for a tune-up tomorrow and see if I can’t get the hang of it again.

You know I’ve never claimed to have a firm grasp of domesticity.  I own an iron but it’s only used to seal shit that I screenprint.  I am mentally incapable of stocking up on toilet paper so every couple weeks I have a panic-stricken three minutes where I almost pee myself scrambling around in search of any forgotten stack of Christmas-themed dinner disposables or piles of Wendy’s napkins.  Every time I pay a utility bill, it comes laden with a reconnect fee.  And there’s that famous oven-hole in my kitchen, and we all know that holes in the wall don’t bake shit, but at least I have somewhere to store my hundreds of dollars worth of unopened Tupperware Party trappings.

However.

I am very good at laundry.

I love doing laundry.  I love doing my laundry, I love doing other people’s laundry.  I love folding people’s clothes, I love how washing machines are basically magic.  When my dryer broke, I spiraled into a fit of debilitating depression at the thought of having to spend Laundry Time at a laundromat.  I somehow passively finagled my parents’ dryer away from them when they were divvying things up after their separation, and this is very telling because if I had been presented with some other appliance, say, their crockpot or their can opener to store in my house as a constant reminder of the demise of the only relationship I held sacred in my life, I would have rejected it with a fervor.  But a dryer?  There was no question it would be mine.

Since my epic firing from my stupid burrito shop job has left me with only a part-time position at the local ArtsCenter and my very own bar that belongs to me and only needs to be tended to at night, I have plenty of time during the day to play Boz Scaggs as loud as possible while I parade around in my underthings with a fifth of whiskey and several craft projects in progress.  I don’t usually get drunk during the day but as an adult, I’m allowed to say, “Fuck it,” and do what I want, which, last Thursday, was to get smashed and clean the five sets of filthy clothes I’d been collecting on my bedroom floor.

So imagine the thrill I got when I went to go put in the first load and I found the washing machine full of someone else’s shirts and socks.  There was a whole wardrobe in there for me to clean and dry and fold!  On closer inspection it was revealed that you were the one who had unintentionally abandoned your duds and unwittingly left them for me to handle.  This made more sense than if they had been Idaho Billy’s clothes, because Idaho Billy takes all his things to the dry cleaners, which is a mysterious and grown-up place, the inner workings of which I can’t quite fathom.

I got to work immediately, putting your clothes in the dryer, trying to decide what things I was going to fold first when they were done.  “Should I start with socks?  Or work from the biggest to smallest and tackle the hoodies and pants first,” I asked myself in my growing whiskey haze.  My plan was interrupted when I grabbed your favorite slacks, the ones with a rip that starts at the crotch and ends somewhere six inches down so that your naughty bits are constantly threatening to free themselves with every step you take.  I know by now you have no intention of repairing the pants, though you constantly want to discuss the fact that they are unraveling at an alarming rate.  Even though I know you wouldn’t give a flying fuck if the pants propelled you into the realm of indecency in the middle of the grocery store, Jack Daniels insisted that I could save the day by sewing the peep-hole shut.

I ran, RAN into the craft area and started wildly digging through my sewing drawers, holding all different shades of navy embroidery floss up to the ruin to find an appropriate color match.  I pricked myself with four different needles in my haste to find the right one.  I located my teensy, tiny thread scissors and my red plastic thimble.  I found my needle threader, which was quite a feat.  The fervor with which I was tackling this project shot some sort of adrenaline rush into my brain, where it mingled with the alcohol and together, they convinced me that this was the best idea EVER.  I was so ready.  There was only one problem.

I can’t sew worth a SHIT.

Doesn’t matter!  I brought all my treasures onto the front porch and the stray neighbor cat jumped into my lap and started playing with my thread.  Matt was across the street letting his dogs out and plodded over to the porch when he saw me.  Wonderful!  Now I had something ELSE to distract me from the delicate surgical procedure I was about to inflict upon your poor clothes.

Once Matt and I started talking and the cat started rolling around on the pants in my lap, I started sewing with abandon.  I felt good about it.  I felt so confident I even stopped watching what I was doing.  I was creating intricate patterns with the navy floss.  I was pioneering new sewing techniques, namely the one where you sew like a deranged spider weaving a web while on some serious hallucinogenics.  “Whatever!,” I told myself.  “it does not need to be beautiful!  It only has to hold Jedd’s weenis in his pants!”

After about twenty-three minutes I looked down and realized I had been connecting two flaps of fabric that were definitely already connected with a sturdy machine-made overlock in a brilliant angry orange. Okay, so I reinforced it I guess.  I pretended not to panic as I righted myself and started from a different angle.  I swigged some more whiskey and furiously attacked the pants with the jankiest, most retarded-looking whipstitch I could muster.  I sewed the rest of the rip this way, then doubled back on it “just to be sure.”  The result, when I turned the pants right-side-in, was a half-closed hole with a gaping area that would have lined up perfectly with exactly what it should not have once the pants were being worn.  I tried again.

It was during this third attempt that I was struck with a very distinct sinking realization that I had not ever bothered to ask you if you could sew.  Perhaps you preferred your pants this way.  Maybe they lent easier access at times when you only had four seconds to pee.  It was possible that you like your clothes a little beat up.  It was also possible that you are a brilliant seamster, a secret tailor, even, and that my plebeian foray into the world of crotch mending was, while well-intentioned, decidedly ill-advised.  I pushed these thoughts out of my head with another shot of whiskey, finished the job, and surveyed the damage.  The pants actually looked worse than when I started.  I folded them carefully, and discreetly hid them under the detritus of your half-unpacked bedroom.

It has been almost a week and they are still there; I check on them once or twice a day.  I can only hope that when you finally discover them, you will not notice the lack of refreshing breeze traveling past your nether regions, and if you do, please realize that everything I do in the name of domesticity, I do it with a full heart and good intentions, and if there’s a problem, I’ll be waiting in the next room, seam ripper in hand, at the beck-and-call of the pants I accidentally destroyed.

Best,

Mandolina.

Right now I’m the sole customer at Bageltopia, where my new roommate, Jedd Evan, works.  It’s weirdly grimy in here and the lighting is wanly inconsistent and none of the accessories or furniture or trimmings match, and the acoustic tiles on the ceiling are stricken with patches of water stains and mild rot.  The walls are painted the color of what white walls look like in a room that allows smoking.  There is an unplugged, antediluvian ATM in the corner where I am sitting, and on the wall to my right is, inexplicably, a cheaply framed, warpy print of a chef somberly whisking ingredients in a bowl, the French moonlight glinting off the left curl of his ridiculously long handlebar moustache.  The layout is questionable; the wall bisecting the restaurant flagrantly disrespects all tenets of Feng Shui, and the seemingly centrally located booth where I am sitting manages to only afford me a perfect view of the condiment area and trash can.  The tablecloths are real fabric and look as though they were plucked from a very dead grandmothers’ estate sale reject pile.  I love the tablecloths. I absolutely love it here, in general.  I don’t know why.  Well.  Maybe I do.

Jedd Evan is pacing back and forth behind the counter keeping busier than anyone ever employed by Bageltopia in its 13 years of existence, I’d be willing to bet.  Chopin is blaring from the back, but it’s fine because even if you blare classical music, it’s still peaceful.  Jedd Evan’s coworker, a tall, slouchy, slack-jawed Post Office Kid in his mid-20s, is expounding on the particularly good parts of the funeral march, and if I was still the sort of person to judge others’ intelligence by the way they dress, I’d be surprised.  But I’m not, so I’m not.  One of them is whistling every note of the Chopin arrangement perfectly.  I’m not sure which of them it is, and I decide not to look up and find out.

The Post Office Kid comes and sits by me and we talk about several different things such as mutual acquaintances, lucid nightmares, his broken windshield wipers, Mexican potlucks, billiards, Band of Horses, and the unsecured wireless network of the Karate school next door to Bageltopia.  He tells me he is a perfectionist and I believe him mainly because the word looks so ludicrous coming out of his mouth.  I like him.  He’s smart.

I’m trying my best to ignore the fact that when my roommate’s at work, he wears his hat backwards and I guess the combination of the humidity from the rainstorm in the parking lot and the heat from the bagel ovens in the kitchen makes his hair flip up on the sides, because it doesn’t really do that, normally.  I’m listening to two high school girls act their ages diagonally from where I’m sitting and it’s driving me almost insane.  They’re theater-types and they’re speaking so fast and with such deliberately impeccable enunciation that it sounds like a different language entirely.  They’re dressed ridiculously and I want to judge them really badly until I remember:

1.   I’m fucking 30, and

2.   At their age, I thought combat boots were best worn over jeans and the only t-shirt you could possibly pair with yellow fishnets, mismatched argyle socks, a gold taffeta skirt, and black lipstick was the “Satanic Army” Marilyn Manson one, or, if that one was dirty, the “got weed?” one, or, barring that, a simple black bandeau top that made me look like the absolute slut that I certainly wasn’t, and

3.   They’re 15 and adorably having a great time doing exactly what they should be doing in High School, which is embarking on a lotta bullshit that seems superly important at this moment in time but will reveal itself to be a worthless, useless, and really fun memory later.

I just realized my Bageltopia table is about a half a block from East Chapel Hill High School, which would explain the clientele thus far.  I’ve only seen one customer over the age of 15, and Jedd Evan is alarmingly patient with all of them.  He’s not completely moved all his things in yet, his toothbrush and alarm clock and laptop charger or favorite coffee cup, and I’ll tell you what a shitty roommate I already am: I set my alarm clock for 6am so Bageltopia would open on time, and when it went off, instead of trying to wake him up, I disemboweled the entire alarm clock and went back to sleep.  When I woke up staggering around the kitchen for water and a hairbrush (which I needed), he was somehow gone and my alarm clock was in angry little pieces.  It still is.

The perky theater girls are discussing their past repertoire of roles in various “important” stage productions.  I immediately remember why their infuriating voices sound so familiar.

They sound exactly like the Chip ‘n’ Dale cartoons.

It’s not like I’m sitting here, creepily watching Jedd Evan and the Post Office Kid do their jobs, but, I mean, I sort of am.  I like that at Bageltopia I can put my feet up on the vinyl booths.  I like that the owner looks like he’s totally over it, but he still tucks in his shirt.  I like that I can watch Jedd Evan make a pot of coffee and, while he waits for the drip to subside, he’s suddenly behind me reattaching a chair seat to its frame because at Bageltopia, he’s a man of many, many backwards baseball hats.

Love,

Mandey

It is entirely possible that I have just eaten a hash brownie unwittingly.  In my epic attempt be the most non-grocery-shoppingest adult on the planet, I have given birth to and raised the most successful and healthily understocked pantry at least on my street and in, quite possibly, America.  An inventory of my food cabinet just revealed that I am the proud owner of four different types of steak seasoning, a bottle of Mexican vanilla flavoring, a half-gone box of spaghetti noodles, and an open bag of marshmallows of questionable age.

I am supposed to readying my house for Idaho Billy, and those of you who’ve stuck with me through the years of writing him letters through this blog can attest to the fact that it is completely unreasonable that we have not made good on my promise to convert to an All-Billy, real-and-in-person lifestyle.  Well, I’ll just go ahead and announce it now–  supposedly, he’s moving here in two weeks and my whole life will change.  Fact is, I live like a 22-year-old boy in that my house is a gallimaufry of tiny living room adventures and abandoned art projects, of coffee-stained sheet music and babydoll heads, of too many books and not enough bookshelves, of dirty dishes and dirtier towels and tennis shoes that match no articles of clothing in my possession.  I like my house the way it is, but no one, not even my delightfully slobby roommate, agrees with my current lifestyle.  I can’t stop accumulating things.  They’re all important things.  I have no need for most of them now, but I know that as soon as I throw them out, I will commence a project which will require these precious objects, these twisted coat hangers and paint-crusted brushes, these cinderblock chunks and bits of fabric refuse.

So every day since last week I have woken up with the full intention of weeding out the unnecessary bullshit, of making way for Billy’s suits and polished shoes, for his weights and his computer desk where he spawns brilliance on the internets, for his razors and vitamins and the keys to his probably perfectly maintained car.  I know in my soul that it is quite possible that he never smells weird, and he laughs perfectly in person, and his posture is probably impeccable.  I also know that I have created this physical entity entirely in my mind, and the reason I know that this will work is because I will graciously accept a stinky, slouchy Billy with an embarrassing laugh just as quickly as I will accept whatever I made up in my head.

But instead of making my life and my house look like I am worth a shit, I decided to teach myself how to play Mr. Bassman on piano.  In the midst of all the unwashed plates and the unrecycled beer bottles and the detritus of bachelorhood, I managed to ignore all my responsibilities in order to revisit my childhood (which I apparently spent entirely at Showbiz Pizza ) and teach myself to play a Rock-afire Explosion song.  For you, and you only, I have made a video of my 25-YEAR-OLD record playing Mr. Bassman.  I wish I could say that I had to abandon my blog-writing and dig the record out of a box labeled “Amanda, Dorky things, 1985,” but I cannot, because, at age 30, Mr. Bassman is perpetually set up in my little Telex record player, ready to go at anytime.  I listen to it almost every day and I dance around the living room like an ass because I can’t help myself.  For serious, though, it skips twice in the video, and this is because the record is the actual one given to me by my parents at age 5 since the first time I heard the Rock-afire Explosion live and in animatronic person I almost lost my mind and I wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Fatz the keyboardplaying gorilla until I could have him at my fingertips at all times.

Isn’t it magnificent??

So, back to my original point.  I taught myself Mr. Bassman on the keyboard instead of cleaning my house, and then I worked up an appetite for a sweet thing, and I rummaged through the freezer and found a nasty, frost-bitten brownie, and I ate it with a quickness.

Then I remembered, that was no brownie.  It had sprinkles on it just like the ones in the dregs of the batch forgotten in the freezer last October.  Which means. . .

I’m. . .gonna. . .go. . .

Wish me, luck,

Mandey.

Tomorrow I will go to a roller-rink birthday party.  This is exciting to me.  We are all adults, and roller-rinks are more fun for us now.  When I was a kid, Skate Country was just about the greatest place on earth.  Skate Country had everything.  The 30-something self-loather dressed in a referee costume, the giant fuzzy dice, the strobe lights and the disco ball and the arcade with Whack-a-Mole that would spit out tickets you could redeem for stupid trinkets like those little rubber finger monsters or Pixie-Stix or Fun-Dip.  The laser pointers and the Barbie knockoffs cost more tickets than were feasibly earnable, but we didn’t care.  We had those things already.

I fancied myself the fastest skater in all the land.  I’m pretty sure I was.  But I had to exit the rink floor when they played the Couples’ Skate song.  I say “song” as though there was only one, because there was.

Timmy T‘s “One More Try,” was the intensely negative force in my life that kept reminding me that, at the world-weary age of 9, I would never have a boyfriend and I would always be alone.  “One more try,” he would sing, and I’d think, “I never even got ONE try.”  “I didn’t know how much I loved you,” Timmy would croon, and my thoughts would spew angry, lonely hellfire that manifested themselves in the words, “YOU NEVER LET ME SHOW YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE.”  I wanted to be the most important thing in someone’s life, and Timmy T and his stupid Couples’ Skate song was keeping me from that.

So I set my sights higher than the 4^th grade boys who played football badly and made fun of me for my ability to win spelling bees.  I decided my one true love was no other than Joey McIntyre, my very favorite New Kid on the Block.

I had the orange plastic lunchbox.  I had the puffy-paint tee-shirt.  I had the neon-green plastic earrings.  I had the bedsheets and the pillowcases and the Teen Beats and the board game.  My dad taped all their TV appearances for me on Betamax, and I watched them until they wouldn’t play anymore.  I had conversations with Joey during which I would spill secrets I didn’t even tell Jesus.  I had (and still have) all their cassette tapes.  Posters.  Trading cards.  Lunchables with their five faces on them.  Katie Smith and I would run home after school every day and practice the “The Right Stuff” dance where you hook your thumbs into your belt loops or the elastic in your Jams and kick your skinny legs out from side to side (see minute-marker 1:19 in below video).  We perfected the parts in “Hangin’ Tough” that sounded eerily like the Wicked Witch’s Palace Guards’ chant from the Wizard of Oz, and watched the part in the video where they air-guitar with baseball bats about a thousand times.

And then, in 1990, my aunt appeared like a dream at my house with three tickets to the goddamn New Kids on the Block concert.  She was going to take my cousin and me, and we would go to it and then we would be complete humans, not the sub-par, barely-carbon-based, non-NKOTB-witnessing idiots we were before the concert.

When we got there, all decked out in our stupid boy-band paraphernalia, I thought I might lose my mind.  I am pretty sure I peed in my hot-pink overalls.  My side ponytail was hiked up high enough to make me look like a bona-fide cheerleader.  I looked good, and I wanted to make sure Joey saw me.  This was my only chance.

My aunt presented us with NKOTB cassettes that we did not own yet, which was enough to send me over the edge and bring on spastic fits of excitement that had to be distilled in no way other than screaming Joey’s name at the top of my tiny lungs.  We were in Row LL, which was 38 rows away from the stage, so I yelled loud.  And hard.  I screamed.  I jumped.  I panicked when he didn’t stop mid-Roger-Rabbit to single me out and whisk me away to live in his condo that he shared with Boy George (I seriously believed this unlikely roommate situation to be true).  I tried so hard to get him to notice me that I did not pay attention to my body screaming out in protest.  Three hours later I was in the hospital.

I had overexerted myself in my attempt at lifelong happiness and, as a result, I gave myself a hernia.

I shit you not.

It was the first (and last, at this point) time I had ever gone under the knife.  I didn’t care.  My parents brought me more Teen Beats than I had ever seen in one room and they brought my Nintendo to the hospital and bought me Paperboy and I played that shit till I mastered Saturday.

I thought for sure this stunt would get me on Joey’s radar, and I’d love to say that it did, but I can’t.  He’s still out there somewhere, and I will always love him, Timmy T style, and if he’d only give me One More Try, I could honestly say that I have more to show for my devotion than a 21-year-old scar that’s still numb to the touch.

Love,

Mandey.

You don’t know his name, but you feel like you should. He’s familiar to you, and why? There’s no reason for things like this.

You know you’ll never meet him.  As it stands, he is an intriguing fixture, with a brain not to be picked or realized. He is scenery, environment. But he is the scenic route as well, and if he was cosmically chosen to haunt your lunchtimes and the shows you go to, then that’s completely fine with you.

You are downtown, driving, parking.  You’re terrified of parallel parking and you will circle the block fifteen times until you can attempt it without holding up traffic. You pass up three perfectly good parking spots because of this and then realize it was all by default. There was no one behind you that whole time. But now you have to make the block. You get back onto Franklin Street, pass up that first good spot for no good reason, and spend twenty-two minutes backing into a space.

You exit the vehicle. You are fumbling for quarters, locking the door, and you glance up to see. . .

. .him. . .

. . .the Mystery Boy. Your fucking heart drops and shatters on the pavement. Soul Meets Body is thundering in your head, and you become annoyed at the whininess of Death Cab. A nickel falls to the ground, and you somehow have the coherency to leave it there because meters don’t take nickels and then you wonder why you’re even thinking about loose change at a time like this.  It’s not as though you can talk to him. And then:

“MANDEY!! MANDEY!!”

You look up and there is the girl you met at the Centromatic show. The one who, when you sat next to her, launched immediately into a story about how she spilled her life story guts onto this random broad in the bathroom of some random bar, and the Centromatic girl is freaking out because “Oh my god, I didn’t even KNOW this woman!!!” And you’re thinking, “You don’t even know me.” And you laugh. The girl’s name is Mary, and she is hysterical, and when you say “hysterical,” you actually mean both “funny” and “a maniac.”

But anyway, there she is, calling your name in broad daylight, and with her is your Mystery Boy, and this is too much to handle. Mary introduces you to Him, tells you to swing by the Cave Bar for a beer. You agree, with no intention of actually showing up because you don’t want to destroy your Mystery Boy; you have drawn conclusions and built his personality for him, and should he speak, he may not fill the shoes you have tailored and created.

You think, “If you weren’t a terrible parallel parker, you never would have met up with them. If you would have just parked, you would have been long gone.” You go to the Cave.

The light outside was a dwindling brightness and the Cave inside is dark.

You do not remove your movie star sunglasses because you feel that if you can’t see people clearly, they can’t see your sub-par complexion, your ill-concealed awkwardness, your bumbling posture. It’s like when your dog shit on the carpet and then stuck her face in between two pillows as though if she couldn’t see you, you couldn’t see her either, and she would not be reprimanded. You look like a complete tool with your enormous shades, staring into your purse, looking for nothing, forgetting how to order a beverage.

The bartender is looking at you. He speaks slowly, clearly, carefully, “WOULD. . .You LIKE A BEVerage, Mandey?” You get a High Life and you stare at it. You snap out of the funk.  You turn on the clever banter and the endearing sweater removal. You tell Mary and Mystery Boy stories about back home, about your favorite movies, about whatever, ever, anything to keep them there. Your mind is a holding cell for contradictory social responses. Mystery Boy is definitely clever, and undeniably antsy. He wants to leave, and you can’t blame him. You’re too frenetic, too wound up, too greasy from eight hours of work. His name is Joey Battles, and he is leaving the bar to go have dinner next door at Fuse. You are feeling a mixture of utter relief and profound disappointment.

You chug the rest of your beer and follow him with waiting for an invitation. You spend two hours sitting outside, two tables away from him, smoking way more than you usually do, thinking about how it’s funny that when a guy and a girl break up, the girl is automatically crazy. Ask a guy what happened with his ex, and he’ll undoubtedly reply, “Oh man. She was fucking craaazy. Woooh!”

There is a sprig of mint as garnish next to the pie you don’t remember ordering, and you pop it into your mouth, swallow it, and then ask everyone at the next table if it’s safe to eat the plants that decorate your food. No one’s sure why you’re asking, because you’ve already eaten it, and you decide that if you are fated to be dead within the hour, then so be it. At least you had the greatest culinary sendoff imaginable, because Fuse handmakes all their pies.

The crowd dwindles, and you look up to find that Joey Battles has made his way over to you, and you are talking, but not really connecting, about music. You decide to leave the vague emo bands behind you. You will ask him his favorite band. Your favorite band is Tool, which makes people cringe because that’s like saying your favorite band is the Beatles. It’s too broad. You harbor images spiked with Technicolor clarity of sitting in Jessy’s bedroom after school, having just smoked a Marlboro Light under the bleachers of the playground down the street from her house. You are young, and you know you’re not supposed to be smoking, yet you really love that your uniform shirt smells gross like that. Jessy is fumbling with some CDs and asks if you have ever heard of the band Tool, and you say no. She puts it on, and Tool makes you feel like hidden cigarettes do. . .it’s a totally guilty pleasure, and they say curse words, and you know this is not something you should be hearing.  You fall in love with the band, and carry them with you through all of the phases, personalities, changes, and surreptitious experimentation that come with adolescence. Tool is your favorite band because you’ve never grown out of them, and it’s okay that people roll their eyes because you feel that your thirteen years of unwavering devotion lends an acute credibility to the response.

So you ask, “What’s your VERY favorite band?”

He says, “Tool. You can go ahead and roll your eyes. You’re totally judging me right now, aren’t you?”  Because when he says this, you are smirking into your hands, which are covering your face, and it looks like you are trying not to laugh. But really you are just smitten. Completely. He understands your point, exactly.

You and Joey Battles are back at the Cave now, in the exact spot you were when you were staring into your purse five hours ago.  The shelf behind the bar is stocked with various questionable snack items, including chips with a logo so retro you wonder about the last time the delivery truck passed through. There is beef jerky and there is citrus flavored gum. Underneath all this is a shelf of canned goods. Soups. Bomb shelter type items. You find yourself staring at the soups, knowing you have seen them a hundred times before, yet you had never questioned their existence. Where’s the microwave? There is no can opener. Why the soups? You’re about to brush it off when Joey Battles says, “Look at all the soups. Why the soups? What is the common factor with all these soups?”

“I don’t know, they all begin with C?” you guess. Chicken Noodle, Beef Consomme, Chicken and Stars, Clam Chowder.

“No. Sodium. They all have really high sodium content.”

And he may be a mind-reader, bringing up the soups like that, there is so much junk behind the bar and yet you both chose to single out the Campbell’s. You are thinking of the Counting Crows  and that one line in Anna Begins that goes, “Every time she sneezes I believe it’s love.” And you wonder if you’re reading too much into these shared thoughts, the favorite band being Tool, the soups. Does it mean anything? A coincidence? Do you believe in coincidence, or is it fate that you’re counting on?

You bring him home. He warns you that his house is shaped like a penis, and when you get there, it sure as shit is. It is a Quonset Hut.  There’s a squarish area in front, and then a domed sort of hallway that sprouts the kitchen and the living room, and then a ball-sack-shaped bedroom area behind that. The overall layout is undeniably phallic. The first thing you notice is a built-in bookshelf and a very furry white rug. You are in love with this house, if nothing else. He excuses himself so he can change his clothes, and you are left with his Boy-Roommate, with whom you attempt to perfect the High-Five. Boy-Roommate’s girlfriend has the most fabulous hair you have ever seen. You become considerably self-conscious of your filthy locks, having come from work, needing a shower intensely. Joey Battles emerges from the ballsack of the penis-house, and you try not to stare at his outfit, an inside-out T-Shirt and a very short batik sarong. You realize that, while you cannot yet be in love with Joey Battles himself, you can definitely be in love with the idea of him. It is that sort of love that grows from profound endearment. But you will not do him the injustice of believing it’s love if he sneezes.

You spy a gigantic cock-a-roach climbing next to Boy-Roommate’s head. You and Girl-Roommate immediately dive under a fleece throw.  “If you cannot see it, it cannot see you, you will not be reprimanded.” The boys spring into action, grabbing various weapons, and they kill and smear the cock-a-roach right onto the wall there. You and Girl-Roommate are hyperventilating, and Joey Battles and Boy-Roommate are breathing open-mouthed and prehistorically, having reclaimed their house as their own, and with their loincloths and long hair, are now going to retreat to their respective caves. You are reminded of why you love boys in general so much

The next night, you find yourself back at the Quonset Hut.  Joey Battles hands you a beer and asks if you want to take a walk. There are lot of woods and gravel roads around, and even though you’re wearing a skirt and platform heels, this is not the sort of wilderness opportunity you want to pass up. For three hours, you walk through the woods with him. These are the things the two of you do:

1. You look into people’s windows, the people who are awake and watching TV at this time of night, and you come up with life stories for them. You have created: a girl who is sleeping on the couch, her boyfriend awake and spooning her, and he has been watching the DVD menu screen for quite some time. They were supposed to do it but she fell asleep and now he is disappointed and horny and doesn’t know how to excuse himself for the bathroom without waking her up. You have created: an elderly widow stricken with insurmountable insomnia, which she combats by watching television way too late, waiting for him to come back home from the dead, or to die herself. You are impressed at Joey Battles’ ability to do this sort of thing because YOU do this sort of thing and you often wonder if anyone else ever does. They do.

2. You find a parking lot with an unsettling apartment complex on its edge. There is an eerie, dilapidated truck in the corner. The front license plate says something in Spanish, and there is something proudly displayed on the front windshield in Old English lettering. A sticker on the back says Chihuahua, and there is a blanket draped over the back seat with little hearts all over it. You take several pictures of the truck, mostly because you want to make sure you’re not hallucinating it.

3. You sit at a bus stop to rest, you have no idea where you are, but Joey Battles does, and that’s enough. Trusting him to not get you lost in the woods is a great precursor to this leg of the journey, because you end up talking about relationships and trust and loyalty and people who cheat, and you say you do not cheat. You do not ask him if he has ever cheated. You do not want to know, really. Not just yet. Past the bus stop is an administrative building with a little courtyard smoking area built onto the side about fifteen feet above the ground. There is a gate surrounding the courtyard. You ask Joey Battles if he is a good climber, because it is very easy for you to imagine him scrambling up trees without incident. With barely a word he is jogging to the raised courtyard, and, of course, he seamlessly scales the brick wall, the fence, and is over and into the courtyard, raising his fists, clenched together, over his head in a sign of victory. Or was that you, being victorious for him? Who knows?

4.  You settle into a gravel-covered clearing and attempt to discuss the coincidences surrounding your meeting. Only, the words come out broken, and you are terrified of sounding like a stalker weirdo. You try to assess whether he is someone who won’t care that you’re sufficiently knowledgeable in everything but an expert at nothing.

You go back to the Quonset Hut and end up on the floor with him, a cereal box, and an unabridged dictionary, and the two of you are finding words in the cereal’s ingredients that that you cannot define, and you look up each word in the dictionary. Niacin, Riboflavin, Thiamin. They are all members of the elusive Vitamin B Complex. Maltodextrin is not in the dictionary. Not even the unabridged dictionary. You keep thinking about how you sit around at home looking up words in the dictionary, and you try to learn a new word every day, and if you skip a week, then the pressure’s on to learn seven all at once. And when people call you and ask what you’re doing, and you say, “Um. Reading. The um, the DICtionary,” they will undoubtedly acquire a reason to get off the phone. Who reads the dictionary? Now you know the answer.  Joey Battles reads the dictionary. So as not to sound contrived, you don’t bring up the fact that reading Webster’s is a favorite pastime of yours, and you are content with the thought that now you have your own personal sarong-wearing, dictionary-reading, soup-can-noticing, wall-scaling roach smasher.

Define: happiness.

The night is over, it is 6am, and you have been sleeping next to the dictionary for five minutes. He wakes you up, he extricates you from his life for the night, you say goodbye, and you leave.

Thus begins your life after meeting Joey Battles, and you have no idea what will happen next, and you’re not sure what you did with your life before him. It is not a question that should be answered, much like his was not a brain to be picked and then realized. But he’s letting you, he’s letting you pick and realize, slowly but surely, and you have no doubt that in time, you’ll pick and realize exactly what you did before him, and you’ll decide to forget whatever it is that that was.

It is 8:30am on a Sunday, and I am in my purple martini pajama pants sitting at the bar, blasting Sade’s “Diamond Life,” and watching adorable boys in bandannas and flannels bustle about with wires and lights and cameras and gadgets.  Their rappel hooks are clinking against the tools in their belt loops and I can’t identify the equipment they’re tinkering with and their hair is all mussed and they’re all thin and wildly focused. The girls in the art department are beautiful and hip and too big for this tiny town in their short-shorts and Keds while they mix batches of fake brains in the bathroom and change the decorations in the bar to fit the scenes.  They’re shooting that movie again at Zog’s, and even though my brain doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of any time before 11am, these people are awake and chipper and no one’s drinking the coffee I made, which is startling to me.  I’m waiting for the lead actor to show up in his leather blazer, because I know he will drink some because he already has a favorite mug here, even, and I’ll feel better about myself for being this worthless this early. He’s quite disarming and since my first impression of him was when he was in crazy-intense character, his actual personality is warped in my mind. For the first couple of hours, he made me nervous and I couldn’t look him in the eyes until I realized he’s just a really good actor.  His beard is the color of apple juice.

Apple juice, coincidentally, is the same color as Wild Turkey 101, so we filled up an empty 101 bottle with juice for the Hitman to drink out of.  It looks so real, but that’s movies for ya.

Hobbling over the cement cobblestones haphazardly leading away from The Viking’s purple cinderblock house felt surreal so early this morning.  I thought I’d never reach my car even though I only had to travel 50 feet.  I’m not used to wearing ill-fitting tank-tops this time of year, and I vaguely worried if any old people were peering out their windows thinking I was doing a Walk of Shame, which I wasn’t.

Right now the actor with the apple juice beard is poring over a ton of guns splayed out on the third pool table.  I’m supposed to be the Assistant Art Director, but I sincerely hope they don’t credit me as such because, aside from me having decorated the bar before the fact, no one has asked me for my art opinions about anything and I don’t want to take credit for things I haven’t done.  I play a bartender in the movie.  I don’t even have to act, which is helpful.  I’m tired of acting, generally, in life.  They asked me to wear makeup.  I don’t really have any.  I hope they brought some.  I hope someone knows how to put it on me.

I guess my hair’s the color of apple juice, too.  I’m just noticing it as such.  I used to think it was the color of day-old iced tea, and I might be right, still.

The first movie set I worked on was almost a decade ago and it was in a tiny, creepy town deep in Louisiana bayou country.  It was the type of place that will haunt you; things are a little too quiet and ghosts are everywhere in the crumbling bricks and Spanish moss and kudzu chokes whatever’s still alive.  The basecamp was set up in an abandoned grocery store.  It looked like people were either setting the store up or taking it away and they just sort of. . .stopped. . .halfway through.  Why wouldn’t they finish the job?  Want pictures?  Here’s one:

Abandon Production, Leave your Ladders.

That was the summer I mildly befriended Dave Matthews, who played a part in the movie.  I learned three things about him:  He drinks quad lattes with no sugar, he smokes, and he owns a fuzzy blue sweater that he will claim he wore for your enjoyment if he thinks it will make you feel special and regarded.

Show me the way, leave me one candle.

The next movie set I worked on was the one where I accidentally cussed out Jude Law for asking me where the fried chicken table was.  I didn’t know where it was, and I clearly wasn’t fucking manning it.  I was, however, manning an espresso station with a broken fucking espresso machine.  I told him as much without looking up, and it wasn’t until he lightly grabbed my arm and gave me a piercing, reassuring smile that I realized who I was treating how.  I didn’t care, though, because he’s a cheating bastard and I totally judge him for that.

So now it’s Monday morning and I’m back at the bar for the next chunk of the shoot and I’m being incredibly helpful by sitting in the corner writing a blog.  But every time I walk anywhere or try to help anyone, I run into a tripod or throw away a carefully-placed piece of prop trash or stand in the way of the dolly tracks.  They did let me do the very first clacky black-and-white slate-thingie, though, which was thrilling.

I think that’s about it from my end.  I wanted you to be the first to know that I didn’t write a blog about being lonely this time.  High-five that hot wife of yours for me.  I’ll see you soon.

'scuse me, what aisle is creepiness on?

mandey