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departure beers
Monday, July 2 2001
I had a pretty stressful day at work. Things came fast and furious all afternoon and tended to be of the cognitively complex nature in the part of the day where I usually find myself getting sleepy.
When I came home, John and Fernando were preparing a final jog through the Westside streets (they're sort of training for an unspecified marathon). But then John bagged the idea, partly because I never go running and he wanted me to participate in whatever he'd be doing. This was, after all, his final night in Los Angeles.
So we walked down to McCleans, stopping impulsively twice along the way because John is often, well, impulsive. The first place was a pet store tended by a cute blond girl draped provocatively across the counter. We found a cage full of a half dozen purebred puppies of some sort of fashionable oriental breed. They were very playful and whimpered for us to take them out, which we were permitted to do, and they proceeded to race around the store while the straining air conditioning system filled the store with acrid smoke. The price for each of these puppies was a mere $850, or, as John noted, "Chun price." (Chun is interested in getting a puppy of this breed.)
The other place we stopped was a small tobbaco and pipe store. The proprietor was in some sort of assaholic mood that he seemed to think was funny, and the moment we walked in the store he asked John for his ID and proceeded to quiz him about it. When he wanted to do the same with me, I said I didn't want to go through this and walked out, as did the others. "I wanted to kick his ass," I told John. "I did too," said John, adding, "But I think he thought he was being funny." "I'll bet he feels pretty bad about it now, thinking, 'maybe I won't do that next time.'" said Fernando.
At McCleans we did a fish & chips sort of dinner followed by several rounds of pool. Our waitress was thin and heavily made-up and John was flirting with her unabashedly. The way she looked got us into a protracted conversation about whether or not skanky chicks are attractive. I've never been a big fan of the skanky look, but when I said this the others brought up the evident skankyness of Bathtubgirl. I had to agree that Bathtubgirl sort of has the skanky look going on these days, but I felt it important to point out that she didn't used to be that way, saying "When I met her she was a hip modern girl with a cool haircut."
For some reason I was lucky at pool and beat both Fernando and John, both times on technicalities. I would have been feeling sad from the looming sense that an era was ending, but one never feels miserable after drinking three Redhooks.
I went to bed immediately after we got home. When I awoke later, past 1:00am, I found that John had packed his few remaining things and hit the road. One of the odd aspects of John's departure was that he had to wait around and pick up his friend Paul from the airport first. Paul had planned for weeks to fly out to visit John, and for the course of the day Paul's arrival had been the only thing keeping John in California. The moment he arrived, John picked him up and started driving transcontinentally to New York. Instead of showing Paul the sights and sounds of Los Angeles, he was using him as his travel companion.
In its emptiness, the house has an overwhelming feeling of dread about it. I think I shall go mad here in the course of a few days. July 4th is going to be hard for me. It will bring back recollections of similarly difficult July 4ths, such as the one that happened in Charlottesville back in 1995.
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