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Hudson Valley
Friday, July 27 2001
The skies are perfectly blue and it's amazingly cool in New York City today, yet the office air conditioning churns on in the inertia of summertime, as if to purposefully increase my discomfort. But I'm glad to note that the New York office, like the Santa Monica office, has free bagels on Fridays. I've already saved a dollar fifty in bagels and they were a heck of a lot fresher than those sold at the bagel stand I normally patronize. The difference in New York is that we also get Krispy Kreme donuts.
Gretchen had been complaining with increasing stridency about the clutter of my unsorted personal effects in her small apartment, so when I got home from work today I worked at putting most of it away. In the process, I had to dedicate an entire large drawer just to my wires. It might seem absurd to horde so many wires, but the fact of the matter is that even with the wires I do have I cannot always connect the gadgets that I'd like to have speaking with one another.
I don't know what I'm going to do with the monitor having the big United-States-Postal-Service-installed speed hole. For the time being it's in the basement, along with a number of large cardboard boxes.
The plan for the weekend was to drive the Punch Buggy Rust up to New Paltz to visit our old college chum Kristen. Gretchen had left her cell phone charger in Pittsburgh and I tried to improvise a substitute, but it didn't supply sufficient voltage.
As we loaded up my car and prepared to start our roadtrip, I notice a big dish of clear heavy glass lay smashed on the street right in front of my car. I didn't think much about it and scraped it out from in front of my car with my foot. But then Gretchen pointed out that someone had smashed out the cover glass on my driver-side headlight. Since the fragile front bumper was also somewhat bent in on that side, I can only surmise that an incompetent parallel parkmeister had somehow backed into it. This didn't leave me a very good feeling about the idea of owning a car in New York. "At least I don't drive a Mercedes," I sighed.
Traffic was already bad a few short blocks from home, my foot was tiring of riding the clutch and the damn stick shift never seemed to want to go into first, so we elected to head north on the Brooklyn/Queens side instead of taking the risk of substantially more traffic in New Jersey. Still, the drive within New York took forever. Much like a BB Gun and blindness, New York is only fun until someone has to drive.
On I-87 north of the City I became increasingly discontented with the damaged driver's side headlight, which was pointing sharply downward and causing the dotted line of the highway to flash like a police party light. So when I pulled into a Service Plaza for gasoline, I did what I could to improve the situation. In the process I encountered the usual pair of Punch Buggy Rust problems: the non-starting starter that eventually starts and the accelerator that occasionally sticks wide open. It seems as if now that the Punch Buggy Rust has successfully transported me across the continent it now just wants to die like a post-spawning salmon.
At Kristen's place in New Paltz things were pretty much the same as they had been back in late March, although it seemed now that the occupants were smoking a bit heavier. As part of her new musical effort, Kristen had bought an old upright electronic organ for $12 at a yard sale. She didn't know how to play it, but she knew for sure, that one organ, felt good beneath her hands. And it could do foxtrot, waltz and country rhythm accompaniments!
At some point Gretchen came over to my part of the couch to straighten out my hair, which was doing something she didn't like, and while she was there she started snuggling with me in a way that was perhaps a little too cutesy-wutesy for the likes of Kristen and Melissa, Kristen's housemate. New Paltz isn't the best place in the world to be a single woman and Melissa has been having particular trouble with men of late. Gretchen's sudden change in behavior had the effect of completely interrupting the conversation, and not in a way that either Kristen or Melissa found the slightest bit endearing or pleasant. Melissa looked over at Kristen and said, defeatedly, "There they go." Kristen responded in the same sad, weak voice, "Yeah." "I'll have you know," declared Melissa, only slightly in jest, "I'm never having sex again as long as I live and, furthermore, there'll be done of that here." Twelve years ago when we'd had to keep our affair a big secret, I'd had no idea Gretchen was such a big proponent of the Public Display of Affection®.
Melissa was in her pajamas watching Pollack and she didn't want to go out, but Kristen and Gretchen sort of wanted to "go out" for "a minute" (a "minute" being the smallest granularity for measuring time spent in bars).
We ended up at Kristen's longtime favorite bar, Bacchus, also known as "the Old Folks' Home," since its patrons are not confined exclusively to fresh-faced SUNY-New Paltz students. The music blaring on the stereo was some unidentifiable standard by Pearl Jam, filtered clear of its identifying guitar and vocal frequencies by the noise and acoustics of the room. Later I heard two songs by Limp Bizkit being filtered in precisely the same way and I realized their bass lines were almost identical except for tempo.
By now we'd been joined by one of Kristen's friends named Phœbe and were sitting in a window seat with a commanding view of Chestnut Street. Suddenly a member of the Bacchus staff was asking us if we could make out the license plate on a snazzy nicely-chromed sports car across the street. A couple young men had just climbed out of the car brandishing baseball bats and it seemed they were interested in someone who might have been in a nearby pool hall. While we strained to make out the license plate, the baseball bat guys quickly climbed back into their car as if abandoning whatever they intended to do with their baseball bats. At this point a number of policeman ran up from nowhere, ordered the guys out of the car one by one, patted them down, and asked them to explain themselves. I don't know what was said, but by the end of the altercation the baseball bat guys were joking happily with the cops. Before the young men drove off, the cops made them put their baseball bats in the trunk. Is it possible these cops had actually believed a line about, say, going to play a midnight game of softball?
Kristen allowed Gretchen and me to sleep in her bed while she slept out on the couch. Gretchen and I would have slept in Kristen's bed last time we were here, but we had a huge fight that night and had needed to be kept separated.
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