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morning in North Hollywood
Saturday, June 16 2001
This Jennifer person, the girl with whom I spent the night and morning, kind of reminded me of Kristen Masson in several important ways. She had the same sort of wry, self-effacing story-telling pro-social way about her, with the same look on her face as she told her tales. She even had the same manner of speaking (though she's from Michigan, not New Paltz, New York). Working in the management of a prestigious Silverlake club means that she has all sorts of stories about musicians. There was the time, for example, when she stopped Marilyn Manson at the door of Spaceland and made him say who he was before she bothered checking the guestlist. (The guestlist said Marilyn Manson, not Brian Warner.)
Jennifer plays flute in a chamber orchestra called WACO. I got a chance to hear some of WACO, and it's a form of wacky pop music with bizarre almost electronica-styled instrumentation, though it's all done "organically" (without electronics).
Jennifer cannot drink alcohol or caffeine, and this has nothing to do with Christianity (though the book on the top of a stack near her bed was the Bible and she told me she'd graduated from a Christian University in Indiana). Her temperance is a consequence, she said, of some sort of medical condition which she never really described in detail.
For my part, I mostly told Jennifer about my various internet pranks and hoaxes. It's rare that I find someone who gets, let alone really thinks these things are hilarious, but she fell into the latter camp. I liked how straightforward and humble she was. She wasn't LA at all.
Then I got to meet Jennifer's housemate, an unemployed bleach-blond lesbian chick with a beer in her hand. She was on the phone in pursuit of innovative forms of income, such as participating in focus groups. She went through a whole protracted interview while I was there and mistakenly emphasized her fondness for American beer. Unfortunately for her, the focus group being organized was to consist of drinkers of European beer. Earlier when she'd tried to give platelets, she'd been rejected because she'd lived in England in 1995. Evidently people who lived in England at that time are at risk of carrying Mad Cow Disease. Pleading vegetarianism did nothing to salvage the lucrative donation "because it's in milk too."
Jennifer and I stopped at a Baja Fresh for tacos on the way back to my car in Silverlake. Against her protests, I paid because I'm cool like that. At my car, we exchanged numbers and email addresses and all the stuff one does in such situations.
The Punch Buggy Rust ran perfectly all the way home, though I was confused by the intersection of the 101 and the 10 and found myself having to refine my search on surface streets.
I woke up from a long nap to find my housemate John with Chun downstairs. John wanted to know what had happened, had I been in the drunk tank, but I only gave the sketchiest of details.
Later I talked to Gretchen on the phone. After fessing up about what happened last night with Jennifer, I agreed with Gretchen that I've been a slacker and need put a little more effort into our long distance relationship. I need to write more letters, even at the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. We also talked about the fickle phenomenon of memory, how memories turn up like vines draped across a forest path down which our conscious thoughts walk. Why do some thoughts trigger some memories and some memories cannot be triggered, even with effort? Why, when I tried to, couldn't I remember that the grocery store in Seabrook Shopping Center (Maryland) was a Grand Union? Why did I suddenly remember when I stopped trying? Was it, as Gretchen hypothesized, like opening a jar? Had my first attempts loosened the memory? I told Gretchen about a story she'd told me in 1988. She'd ridden on a motorcycle with a sleazeball Oberlin student named Zachary Kirby. After the ride, Zachary had commented favorably about her legs, and she figured he must have "mentally undressed" her since she'd been wearing a long skirt the whole time. I'd always thought her analysis flawed, that her long skirt hadn't afforded much visual shelter on the back of speeding motorcycle. For her part, Gretchen couldn't remember the motorcycle ride at all.
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