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planes landing backwards
Thursday, December 31 1998
On this morning of the last day of 1998 there's a surreal feeling of dread in the air, literally. The airplanes, always a feature of Ocean Beach, on most days can be seen and heard climbing over my neighborhood on their way to destinations throughout the world. Today, though, they're descending. I've never seen that before. Their engine noises are completely different as they're coming down. And thin streams of smoke come from their jets indicating incomplete fuel combustion. The weather must be especially strange this morning. Yesterday morning and evening I saw all kinds of creepy species of fog. In the morning, there was the grey kind that forms a shallow backdrop to everything, turning every view into a sublime Romantic painting. And in the evening a thick fog hung only one foot deep over the grass near Dusty Rhodes park, making it look more like a frozen pond than dry land.
The new Brazilian girls are as spontaneous as anyone I ever knew from the days of Big Fun. Their fast friendship with Kim is fascinating but (for some reason) perfectly natural. In the afternoon the first two of them (Ludmilla -I've learned that her name more than just Milla- and Andrea) came over with all the makings for sangria, and after a brief flurry of activity of kitchen, they departed as quickly as they'd come, leaving a hefty pitcher of the stuff in their wake.
Kim and I had so many options to pick between for New Year's Eve that inevitable conflicts developed. Co-worker Al was on the phone trying to get me to go to an impromptu party thrown by our web development boss, but to Kim this was an impossible party to fit into our schedule. She resented how I handled the situation over the phone when I said that she was the one who wasn't allowing me to go, even though that was pretty much what was happening. I have very little control over my social life these days.
In my continuing project of sampling the non-professional personalities of my various co-workers, I called up Eric, one of my web development colleagues, and invited him over. Eric's social life has been down in the dumps for the last couple of months, ever since his girlfriend of four years proclaimed her lesbianship and took up with another woman. He showed up around 6pm.
Eric is a very bright 20 year old programmer dude who, in addition to his full-time classes and colleagueship with me, owns his own web presence company. He knows his shit inside and out, and has the arrogance to say so. At the same time, when he's impressed by something someone else has done, he's unreserved in saying so. I'd been concerned that I'd invited Eric over too early and that the time we'd have to kill with conversation tonight was far too large. But that didn't prove to be the case. Eric came across as charming, interesting and intelligent, and Kim was delighted. He reminded her of a friend from the good old days, so she felt like she already knew him. This is an interesting and relatively undocumented social mechanism; I've often connected instantly with people based only on my similarity to someone they already knew.
We drank sangria and otherwise prepared for the evening. I showed Eric my art and other aspects of my personality, fleshing out my true personality a bit more. I wanted him to know that I was more than just the eccentric ASP/HTML guy who writes irritatingly left-justified code and pulls completely undescriptive variable names out of thin air. I got a kick out of his sense of wonder, the sort to expect from a 20 year old when you've shown yourself to be an adult with an interesting life, a cute girlfriend, and indications of a checkered past. It was the same narcissistic thrill as I got from gradually revealing myself to Kim or I'd get from meeting a classmate from my old high school these many years hence. "My Gus, there's so much I didn't know about you."
At about 8:30pm we all headed down south to the Brazilian girls' house. We were a little on the early side and the girls were all still lined up waiting to use the shower. It said something about their instilled mores that they freaked out when we saw them wearing only bathrobes and towels.
Some vino and sangria later, the girls were all decked out for the evening. They'd put their heads together with Kim and all of them ended up in fancy black dresses designed with maximized cleavage in mind. In the case of Ludmilla, maximized cleaveage was a great deal of cleavage indeed.
Al showed up, slicked-down and looking like a western pimp. Eric and I started feeling rather underdressed, but no one really cared.
Pretty soon the Brazilian girls were playing their Brazilian music and dancing Brazilian dances in formation. Naturally, Kim (ever the chameleon) joined right in, and for the rest of the evening she acted pretty much as if she'd been Brazilian her entire life. The Brazilians are fond of Kim because she is much friendlier, warmer and extroverted than most Americans. The Brazilians were dismayed to find that Americans are, for the most part, cold, introverted and obsessed with their careers. So it's not surprising that they connected immediately with Kim (and other Kims of this land) when they went in search of camaraderie. By the way, Kim is also an excellent complement to someone like me who is basically an introverted observer who likes to be socially connected and engaged. She provides the interface and I can sit back and focus on whatever it is that I do best, like whining and complaining about how little time I have to do the things she plans for me.
The original plan was for all of to head to downtown San Diego to attend a gallery party being thrown by a friend of the editor guy at my workplace. But the Brazilian girls didn't have much interest in going, preferring instead to go directly to a party in Pacific Beach being thrown by Jeffe, the owner of Ocean Beach's most famous piercing parlour. As you might recall, Andrea (the second Brazilian girl) has a massive crush on Jeffe. What's more, the Brazilian girls couldn't comprehend why anyone would take a taxi cab on New Year's Eve. In Brazil, everyone drives everywhere no matter how drunk they get. If you have a car, you drive it. Al tried to explain the concept of road blocks and sobriety check points, but they weren't convinced. "We will say we are tourists and no speak Anglaise!" Andrea proclaimed in broken English.
Next scene: Kim, Al and I were in a cab headed toward downtown while the Brazilians hung back, continuing to drink, primp and preen. When the cabby said it was fine for us to drink in the cab, I popped open the champagne and we passed it around. Suddenly Kim realized she needed to talk to either Jeffe or Giacomo and that there was no way it could happen if we went downtown. So we ended up in Pacific Beach after all.
Jeffe's party wasn't exactly hopping, but Jeffe had gone out of his way to put together a good spread of food and alcohol. The attendees at his party, aside from us, were just a small group of professional body piercers and members of the local body modification subculture. They all had faces full of metal. Most of them had large hollow plugs in the lobes of their ears demonstrating a long-term commitment to the cause. One guy had dyed and bleached his hair into a leopard skin pattern and had somehow inserted small horseshoes under the skin on the back of each hand. As a group, they've very much set themselves apart from the mainstream world and this no doubt brings them all very close together. It's natural for them to be cliquish and defensive, and so for a brief period we (the largely unpierced contingent joining them) felt a kind of funny for being there. But Jeffe was warm and generous, and soon enough we were turning up the beers and eating from the very non-vegetarian selection of food. There was a huge hock of ham and a whole tray of disembodied chicken wings no longer struggling to be free. Before long, all three Brazilian girls arrived, as did Giacomo the pimpish Italian dude. He was dressed in a tuxedo and had spent most of the early evening hanging out with a group of Point Loma strippers.
I kicked back and listened to the music on the stereo, which was excellent. It featured distinctly surf guitar in combination with goth vocals, a marriage that's perfectly natural but which I've never heard before. Occasionally I'd take a few pictures. Giacomo wanted to be photographed with all the ladies, and I managed to take a picture with just him and every girl then in attendance.
When he wasn't laughing warmly, talking dirty to his new girlfriend (Juliana, the third Brazilian girl), or telling jokes, Giacomo was being very protective of the girls present, especially Jill, a spare blond with lesbian predilections. I overheard Giacomo telling Eric at one point "You're not talking to her, are you? No, you're not." He'd get defensive about talking to Kim and then (only half-jokingly) chastise me for talking to his girlfriend Juliana. That sort of dynamic created an interesting and hazardous social minefield for the dateless young men present: Eric, Al and a handsome blond guy from Nappa Valley. They all dealt with the situation differently. Al chose to be miserable, stalking around with a cloud over his head, all but writing on his face, "I'm a frustrated horn dog, why will no woman love me?" For a naïve young man like Eric, usually wrapped up as he is in his work and other pressing needs, the unusual weirdness of the environment was too distracting for a bad mood to have any foothold. Besides, he didn't enter the evening with such clearcut short term goals as Al. As most people will attest, such goals almost always lead to failure. And despite the adversity, Eric worked the Jill angle for all it was worth, even slipping her his phone number at one point.
As the midnight hour approached, we all went down to the beach of Mission Bay near the wretched outflow of a sewer and uncorked several bottles of champagne. Small camps of gutterpunks, hippies and other transients could be seen gathered around bonfires father down the beach. Kim and the Brazilian girls all went down to the fragrant water's edge and did a very pagan-appearing dance. It was a sublime vision to behold four women dressed entirely in black dancing in a circle against the low Mission Bay ripples glimmering in the light of the strong San Diego full moon.
Within a minute of 1999, we all began to count arbitrarily down from 39 (my idea). I felt sorry for the dateless guys when the kissing moment came. Songs followed. Then more dancing followed, some of it on top of picnic tables and possibly involving the baring of breasts. "Conga, conga conga!" filled the air. A group of completely unrelated Brazilian men dragged two large Christmas trees to the waters' edge, set them up vertically, drenched them in gasoline, and set them ablaze, but they were too green to burn for long.
Kim and I proved to be the most outlandish, decadent couple of all of us, appropriating a bottle of Champagne each, singing loudest of all and dancing wildly. Poor Al stood, sat, and moped. I felt sorry for him, but this feeling was tempered by the realization that Al was getting out of this evening exactly what he was putting into it.
Back in Jeffe's place, the drunken wildness continued, though the details are hard to pluck from the fog of my memories. Kim gave one especially fat piercing dude a deep shoulder massage, and he took a definite liking to her thereafter, flirtatiously showering her with glitter and doing his own expedient massaging. I'm never the jealous boyfriend in these situations. This guy obviously needed what feminine attention Kim was giving him and (another thing) it was 1999.
Kim, Al, Eric and I took the cab back to Ocean Beach. A thoroughly disgusted Al walked sullenly home while Kim drove Eric and me back to our place. We three sat around reflecting pleasantly on the weirdness and intrigue of the evening as Eric gave Kim a foot massage (yeah, I know what that means, but it's allowed, see). Being as drunk as he was, Eric ended up crashing on the couch (the Matt Rogers memorial couch, that is) while Kim and I had a good round of drunken noisy sex off in the bedroom. It was 1999.
the nature of reality is...
...like that Latin reunion language that Giacomo occasionally speaks with the Brazilian girls.
...like what Al once said: show me the most beautiful girl in the world and I'll show you a guy who's tired of fucking of her.
some links recently leaked to me:
(actually I get paid to put these in here)
a super-secret page revealing aspects of an online journal-keeper's sordid inner-self. Yes, he masturbates in the company washroom.
Matt Rogers has moved from Ypsilanti, Michigan to the wilds of Oregon and is staying with his weird artistic father. Among the father's claims to weirdness is his friendship with an acting troupe of transvestite bear hunters. See the page Matt made celebrating his father's art.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?981231 feedback
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