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company Christmas party
Friday, January 8 1999
Some mornings as I pedal under the Midway Drive bridge crossing the San Diego River and its parallel bike paths, I come across a man going through the morning ritual of packing up his primitive campsite. He's not your typical Mission Bay bum; he's a well-dressed black man, apparently doing his best to prepare for a day at work. I like to imagine that he has a good white collar job somewhere up Mission Valley and that he's made the admirably weird decision to be homeless despite his high income. [However, some days later when I passed him, I heard him carrying on a conversation with a mound of sand, so I must conclude that he is completely (or at least mostly) insane.]
In the evening after work, I rode with John the editor dude to his apartment downtown, in convoy with Al (his sidekick). John lives only two houses from the Victoria Rose, the massage place where Kim works. Since my workplace was planning a seasonal office party for tonight and since I had to pick Kim up from her workplace, this was the ideal way to go about doing things. I took John and Al into the Victoria Rose so they could see the Victorian splendor on the inside. John had always thought the place was a brothel, but I assured him that, for the most part, he had been badly mistaken. There's always a bit of Melrose Place-type tension in the Victoria Rose, and tonight was no exception. Ah, the stories that can be told now and those better left for times of greater hindsight and removal.
John was the perfect host in his generous studio apartment within a rambling complex of old Victorian buildings. His brother materialized soon after we opened our Karl Straus beers, so soon we were in a cab destined for the Olé Madrid, a Spanish restaurant in the festive Gas Lamp Quarter of downtown San Diego.
It was one of those darkened helium-balloon decorated bar scenes with black-clad swarthy waiters and $20 pitchers of Samuel Adams. The dinner, as paid for by the company, was a buffet-style spread of jumbo shrimp and chicken paella. Eventually we were each granted a ticket good for one free drink, but of course that was long after we'd begun drinking.
As usual for situations such as this, Kim thought I was paying her far too little attention. She also expressed resentment on my admitted lack of social grace, for example, walking into the restaurant some 20 feet ahead of her. She has very traditional notions of how a woman is to be treated by her boyfriend in public. For my part, of course, no one has ever educated me on these protocols.
Kim and I snuck out with one of my co-workers to a nearby boarded-up construction site to sneak a marijuana break. In the reflection from overhead mirrored-glass we could see everyone walking by on the sidewalk outside. Still, the co-worker was nervous we'd get caught. I had the feeling that he'd done anything so expediently undignified since his high school days.
Kim and I were being outgoing and social, getting along well with everyone from sales people on up to the Grand Pooh Bah himself. I was talking to the Grand Pooh Bah about what he does, that is, raising investor money, and in the spirit of classless non-hierarchy, I said,
"Somebody's gotta do it;
I don't want to do it."
And he said,
"That's it: team work." As drunk as I was, it all made sense.
Some expressed surprise that Kim looked so different from the only other time they'd seen her, Halloween. Like total duh.
In my intoxicated state, I noticed a strange social problem manifesting in my speach: an almost Turrette's Syndromesque propensity to say the worst possible things to the worst possible people. For example, at one point I caught myself essentially ratting on the member support girl to the Grand Pooh Bah while attempting to enthusiastically praise her.
Drinks were so expensive that I mostly relied on Kim to score free sangria from the waiters, with whom she instrumentally flirted shamelessly.
There was a jazz band playing and suddenly I got the idea to start dancing. So I pulled Kim up in font of the band and we began swirling around in a tight duality. It was no big deal really, and soon we were joined by the Grand Pooh Bah, his girlfriend (another co-worker) and two of my more extroverted colleagues. For some reason the band took this as some kind of challenge and launched into a limping odd-beat meter. I responded with more physicality, tossing Kim around like a dance prop but keeping her from real harm. It was like real dancing, so perhaps it actually was; everyone seemed to think so, even people like Kim who should have known better.
A group of us left the party together, off to ride back to our cars with Dave the Web Developer dude. On the way out the door, I made a loud obnoxious show of inhaling helium from a balloon and heckling the yuppie couples going by in horse-drawn carriages. The pure helium imparted to my voice the most thoroughly insipid fetal tambour you can possibly imagine. No matter what I said, it was immediately comic.
On the ride back to the Victoria Rose, there was a confusing disparity between the directions given by Al and Kim. It led to consternation and bitter emotions, resulting in our fleeing the scene on the insincere pretext of heading to bed early.
Kim and I ended up with Ludmilla the Brazilian girl at the Pacific Shores bar in Ocean Beach, but things didn't go nicely there. Immediately Kim launched into a jealous fit about the elegantly meticulous bartender lady, about whom I once wrote complimentary things. For some reason she didn't understand how my admiration for this bleach blond bartender could possibly leave any room in my life for her.
We didn't straighten up that little matter until after we made it home, but not before ruining the better half of an evening whose start had been so promising.
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