2009 – Bear and Bee
Addresses: 52nd and SE Clinton, NE 27th and Buxton
The Oregon Legislature passed a ban on smoking in bars, effective January 1, 2009.
A joke I would tell: “What did the French clerk at the mustard store say when he was asked if the store made a certain type of mustard?” Oui, we do do Poupon.”
2009 was the year I signed up for twitter. It came to define how I consume media, and how I think about consuming media.
I Accidents
I sold marijuana in 2008 and 2009. Weed was illegal but I sold it anyway, the same as I had for a summer after college. It’s profitable to sell weed, especially when it’s illegal. It was mostly easier to smoke regularly when it was already paid for.
Taylor didn’t know a lot about selling weed so much as smoking it, but learned the ropes as I got her into the business of giving comedians a bag when they’d stop by and putting their money in the large plastic jar, formerly filled with mixed nuts, where I kept my re-up money and pre-measured bags. Once, she sold Richard Bain a $40 sack for just $20, and we all had a nice laugh, before I mocked an attempt at intimidating him and he laughed, and gave me the $20 difference.
I’d moved from Pennsylvania with a microwave that my mom and grandmother had bought for me as a send-off into adulthood. What better way to celebrate my budding maturity than to ensure I would have a tool to reheat countless slices of pizza, cook many packets of ramen, or be destroyed by my new wife. Taylor was and probably still is much smarter than me. She’d managed to graduate college, unlike me, and she held down a pretty decent office job in a psychiatric clinic. But one other anecdote from this time is worth re-telling, even if it doesn’t reflect well on her judgement. One morning, we were supposed to meet up with Danny and Jenn, and Taylor wanted to microwave herself a cup of tea. Apparently, she had no idea that microwaves react quite poorly when metal is cooked inside them. She placed a metal, plastic-insulated cup in the microwave with some liquid inside, and about 45 seconds in, the microwave my mom bought me was on fire. She yelled for help, and stood paralyzed and staring at the fire she’d started. I quickly grabbed water, unplugged the microwave, doused the flaming plastic-metal cup, and pulled the glass tray out of the microwave, placing it outside. This would be the last time Taylor would use that microwave for the rest of our marriage.
I found a pair of Italian running shoes in a free box on the street. They fit perfectly.
I ate breakfast regularly at either the Cricket Café, Cup and Saucer, or Petite Provence on Division. I consumed approximately 3 Eggs Benedicts each week, and approximately 4 large Mocha espresso drinks in the same amount of time. Occasionally, I would order more than I could eat and have to bring my leftovers home, but mostly I was gorging myself on decadent breakfasts, and enjoying working a hard physical labor job that kept me slim.
One day, while sitting at my desk, I realized my new Italian running shoes smelled disgusting. It was tragic, but I needed to throw them away, because the smell was starting to overpower a corner of mine and Taylor’s small one-bedroom apartment. I miss those shoes.
A week after that trash was long since hauled away, I smelled the smell again. It turned out that I had left a Cricket Scramble in my gym bag, which I kept right next to those running shoes, weeks prior. There was a rotting egg, meat, and vegetable dish in a cardboard box, creating a smell something like sweaty feet.
I went to my doctor for a physical. The blood work was troublesome. I’d been working nights a few years in a city without much sun, my skin was growing more pale, and my Vitamin D levels were dangerously low. I was prescribed 50,000 UI of Vitamin D, to be taken weekly until my levels reached normal. Far more deadly, however, was my cholesterol. When I wasn’t eating Benedicts, or drinking Mochas, I was at work. Regularly, sometimes three times every evening, I would consume a cheeseburger or hamburger quickly to keep my energy up. It is not an overestimation to say that some weeks I would consume more than 10 hamburgers. So I assumed, given my family history with heart disease and cholesterol, and my diet, that I would have elevated cholesterol. An average 24 year old should have cholesterol under 160. A 65 year old should be below 200. In March of 2008, my cholesterol was 324.
II Dead Man’s Furniture
Taylor and I were ready to move out of our apartment complex. She was an expert house hunter, so I left her to it, but I was home more often during the day and was around to let the landlord show our apartment, which happened about twice a week in our last month in the space. Between comedians running in and out to buy weed, and prospective tenants knocking to see the space, we had quite a few visitors. None, however, so memorable as when the landlord came by unannounced, on his own. The man who lived in the next apartment over was an old veteran. He had died. He had no family, and had lived in the unit for more than a decade. The landlord knew we were moving, and asked if we wanted to take any of the dead man’s furniture before he took it all to the curb.
If ever a scene should have inspired me to quit smoking much earlier, it was the walls, and the smell, of his apartment. The walls in the complex were supposed to be white. His were brown, and not with paint. He’d spent a decade sitting on his couch, chain smoking, leaving butts in an ashtray that was duct taped to the arm of his couch. The walls were a hazy brown, like his lungs assuredly were the day he breathed his dying breath. The ashtray was surrounded by burn holes, and one large burn, which made it apparent that he’d fallen asleep, while smoking, many times in that seat. His bed was in a similar state, pock- marked with burns. In his refrigerator was a log of summer sausage, some Velveeta cheese, and some expired buttermilk.
Taylor and I took his dining room table and his large, tube-based television.
We moved to NE 28th and Buxton. When we met the landlord, he was surprised I had filled out the rental application with my arrest protesting the most recent Iraq War. He acknowledged that my credit was bad, and as an extension of marrying me Taylor’s had gotten worse, but he liked my attitude. “That war was bullshit,” he said.
III Mom, Meet My Wife. Wife, Meet My Family
It was either immediately before or immediately after moving that we took a trip to the East Coast. We visited New York City, where I met many members of Taylor’s family, several of whom lived there.
It’s an odd thing to meet your family. Normally plenty of meetings happen before a wedding, and then the wedding where everyone meets everyone. Not so much when you are together for less than half a year. I met my mother-in-law, grandparents-in-law, sister-in-law, cousins-in-law. They were all kind enough people. While in NYC, we went to the fancy restaurant in the middle of Central Park, and had a nice meal. We paid for a picture to be taken of our dinner party, and received the photo before leaving. Taylor’s South Carolinian grandfather made a remark about how I looked like I was a part of the wait staff – but aside from that, the relatively conservative nature of her family members didn’t shine through.
We visited Beth DeTal, who lived and worked in NYC. I hadn’t seen her since leaving Edinboro. When I was down and out in Edinboro in 2003, I asked to sleep on Beth’s couch one too many times and she told me, “sometimes you just gotta go home to mama.” This was not advice I would end up taking.
It had been a few years in the Portland bubble, and I’d grown used to having very little confrontation over politics, but Taylor had properly prepared me to keep it down. I spent a fair amount of my time – three to four nights per week – yelling comedy about politics in Portland’s finest dive bars. Mostly my opinions were validated by laughs and applause. Only on a few occasions did I have angry audience responses.
I love New York City with an undying, ceaseless appreciation for its bigness and its relevance. I will never not love New York. I barely know it, but my every experience in New York is amazing and mundane at once.
Then we took a train ride to Erie, and a visit to my family. At the train station in New York, I spend something like $20 on a pack of Newports to take with me on the train, because I believe the falsehood that trains have smoking cars. The train has a dining car, but no smoking car. The Great Lakes Express is an amazing, beautiful train ride that skirts Buffalo and the great lakes to reach Erie, and I recommend it as an alternative to anyone who is going to be making the 8 hour drive from Erie to NYC or vice-versa. For the same 8 hours, you can move freely about the cabin, eat an overpriced hangar steak in red wine sauce, and step off the train in Buffalo to smoke. However, in stepping off the train, I must have dropped my cigarettes. I smoked one of them, for the price of a New York pack.
My friend Mason picked us up at the Erie train station and gave us a ride back to Meadville, where my family is located. Mason and I used to rap together when I lived in Edinboro before moving to Portland – he appeared on one of my records under the pseudonym OnPoint. It was good to see him, but I wasn’t really focused on my old friends. I was rather more than a little excited, because my brother and his wife had just had a child and I was going to meet her for the first time. She was an itsy bitsy baby, and she was adorable. This was the first time I’d ever, as an adult, met a baby who was my flesh and blood. She looked a little like my mom with her chubby cheeks (my mom has one of those apple-cheeked faces), and baby Erin had dark hair and eyes. Definitely part of the family. I loved her.
IV 620KPOJ
Christian at Holman’s had imparted one other thing upon me, as a cook: my love of progressive talk radio. I listened, day in and day out, to the local Air America affiliate. I was under a constant indoctrination spell of Mike Malloy, Ed Schultz, Randi Rhoades, Nicole Sandler, Ron Reagan, Alan Colmes, and Norman Goldman. Over my time in kitchens I had grown used to the voices, and it was a familiar way to pass the time while I chopped potatoes, or made soups, or flipped burgers. I was at home with some radio liberal telling me that I was right – Republicans were bad people, Democrats wanted to do better but those darn Republicans were just too tricky and evil. AM Radio buzz is a special kind of hypnotic
This was of course while Barack Obama was refusing to prosecute anyone responsible for the financial crisis – which infuriated me. Refusing to prosecute people for torture, for warrantless wiretaps, for Guantanamo Bay, for any of the shit I spent my previous 8 years apoplectic over. The tears I cried for his election bothered me, as I realized I’d been tokenizing him. My desire to defend him from an increasingly racist Republican base was best encapsulated in JR, the conservative veteran who hung out at Suki’s, mostly kept to himself until his fourth or fifth whiskey. He loved to talk politics, as did I, and he was one of the few people who wouldn’t laugh at my jokes about Republicans on comedy night. Here’s a typical joke:
“And now the news. Our top story, a political thinker believes the President is a Muslim. Here’s the head of the think tank. (voice like a hillbilly) WHURRZUR-BURZUR-TYPICUR? (a play on the refrain, popular at the time among white supremacists, ‘where’s the birth certificate?’)”
I was clearly a smart man. Smarter than those dumb hillbilly racist Republicans. JR would eat up the talking points of right wing ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and local antihero Lars Larson, and show up at the bar and drink with me after my shift, and we would argue loudly and boisterously. I’d eventually agree with him that guns are awesome (because they are) and he’d eventually agree that healthcare isn’t like other commodities and should be free (because it isn’t and it should).
V – Orgies
Taylor and I watched Gonzo, a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson. She often compared me to Hunter, and this wasn’t always flattering but it was sometimes. I have long been overly social, into experimenting (socially, with drugs, or otherwise), and very sexual. A little crazy, unpredictable, and curdumgeonly. Taylor saw how I would flirt with people in order to up my tips, and she was threatened by it. At one point in Gonzo, Hunter’s ex-wife references a party Hunter threw when she was away. She came home, and opened the door to what was essentially an orgy. And all she could say was “who are all these people?” That became a joke between Taylor and I – that between the many many sex workers I knew, the many people I interacted with through comedy, and the many many sexy weirdo swingers I hung out with at work, an orgy seemed imminent. Taylor and I would joke when we were out at a strip club, or when one of us would get hit on, “who are all these people?”
This joke was telling of the distrust she had for me.
VI – King of Shit Hill
I was made manager of the kitchen after a successive string of failures. I missed being in charge, like I had been back at Taco Bell, and the previous guy was a rowdy drunk who made a lot of people uncomfortable. He was no longer allowed to drink at the bar after work anymore, but he would stick around and be obnoxious no less. So I replaced him and he was 86ed – kicked out, no longer available. I took a dollar an hour raise. And kept the place from going under when it seemed all but inevitable that the next health inspection would be our last.
Lots of blame could go around about the management henceforth, but suffice it to say that the owner wasn’t a born restauranteur, so much as he inherited the hotel and bar from his father, Suki. Suki was a funny old man, who liked to drink top shelf tequila, sing karaoke, and stay after hours at his own bar, drinking his own liquor. Once, after everyone had left, only Suki and his table of 40-something metalheads remained. It was 2:30, and I needed to pull drinks, and I did so – without dumping them of course, because as soon as the doors were locked he would have the drinks back at his table. But Suki looked incredulously at me, his son’s underling, and said, “Do you know who these people are?,” gesturing to his tablemates. “You know KISS? These are roadies for KISS!”
This was supposed to move me into letting them stay and drink. It didn’t, but I had no control over it. Suki and the roadies were there well into the early morning.
I was the only guy who would mop the entire floor, so I got to be the kitchen manager. There’s an old Buddhist adage about this. Before enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water. I got a raise and did just a bit more than I had been before.
VII – Buzz
Taylor and I had pet names for each other – I called her a little bear (she was short, cuddly, and I bought her a pair of slippers that looked like bear feet), and she called me a bee, or a buzzer (because I love colony insects and when I’m in a social situation, I buzz from person to person – “who are all these people?”).
That year for Halloween, I dressed as a bee and she dressed as a bear.