|
|
|
downtown barbecue
Sunday, May 9 1999
Unusually, Kim had to go to work on this Sunday, and I came along, hoping perhaps to attend a daytime barbecue party next door to her workplace. This party was being hosted by Rocky, a friend of Steph and EJ's whom Kim and I randomly met at a party on Cape May Avenue here in Ocean Beach. I hung out for awhile at the V!ctoria Rose with Kim and one of her colleagues, eating Chinese take away and reading the want ads in the San Diego Union Tribune, marveling at how underpaid I am. It was a fairly calm Mother's Day at the place of massage, and the only people on the schedule were mothers. I looked out the window at the brewing party next door and didn't see anyone I knew. I decided not to go there any time soon. So Kim let me take her car home.
I took advantage of my wheels and drove up north to the PC Club computer store, the place where I bought my present 15 inch monitor, and proceeded to buy a 45 dollar 8 Meg AGP video card and a 64 Meg DIMM for $74. I needed both these things to take advantage of the AGP slot and 124 MHz bus speed of my new motherboard. Back at home, I had no difficulty installing these things, but the motherboard wouldn't completely boot Windows 98 when set any faster than 112 MHz, though my 350 MHz AMD K6 worked just fine at 416 MHz for a brief period. That's all there is to say about any of that stuff. I'm sure I'll look back with fondness on all of these numbers some future day. I can still smell the 80s every time I reflect on spending that $80 for a special 32 K memory card for my VIC-20 back in 1984.
I went to pick Kim up at about 5:00 pm, and after the usual Byzantine V!ctoria Rose mystery, politics and intrigue, she and I went to Rocky's barbecue. A band called Harmony 24 was playing its final song, and it was nothing remarkable. The scene, caught in the glow of the sun gradually sliding down towards the hazy western ridge of Point Loma, was typical of a barbecue party in its final stages. The kegs were running empty. there were plates with half-eaten half-cooked half-burnt chicken. There were half-drunk plastic cups of beer, some of which were now ash trays. Most of the people there were drunk.
I rapidly ramped-up my beer intake so as to avoid being left in dust of sobriety. I guess my ploy worked, because only a short span of time passed before I was saying things to people that I didn't remember until being reminded the next day. There were a few amusing incidents, best narrated in list format (pictures follow):
- I came upon a group of party people sitting by the keg, and they were just talking about how everyone they'd just met was from Maryland. "You're not from Maryland?" the girl jokingly asked me. "I was born in Maryland," I replied truthfully, "in Silver Spring." Naturally, they were delighted.
- Some guy said something to me, I forget what it was, and I responded with a casual homosexual pick-up line, just because I could. It was so blatant that he felt the need to proclaim to everyone around us at the time that he was straight. I got a real kick out of that one.
- One extremely cheesy-looking Schteve with long blond hair and a loud shirt somehow decided that Kim was to be the intended trophy of day's meat hunt. She kept fleeing from him, but he was never far behind. Whenever she was cornered, she'd talk to him nicely and even play along with his mistaken notion that I was her brother. Kim and I were so immersed in our brother-sister deception at one point that I had to actually my drunken self that she was actually my girlfriend. About the only thing I ever heard the Schteve say was a cheesy pickup line he addressed to me in a voice loud enough for Kim to hear, "Funny, I'm not attracted to you [that would be me], but I'm really attracted to your sister."
- After the band had been quiet for awhile, Rocky got up and gave a spirited address to the party people, thanking them for coming and for, one year ago, giving him moral and financial support following a "hospitalization." Rocky has some impressive scars on his head and body, and I'm sure he has a fascinating tale, but I don't know what it is. Just from the little time I've spent with him, I've found him to be an interesting combination of calm and charismatic.
- Kim's friend Lawrence, the underachieving janitor dude she first met as a client at the V!ctoria Rose, was there as well. I like him in a Matt Rogers sort of way, though I don't really know him. I was in a strange drunken mood, feeling this need to open up to him in a confessional way. But since I didn't really know him, I just sort of went with this weird story about how I didn't really love Kim and that our relationship was a sham. He'd just been telling me he'd hit on Kim upon first meeting her, and I guess in part I was trying to explore that with him in my own perverse way.
Eventually Kim got pissed off at me for allegedly ignoring her, threatening to leave me there by myself. About that time my co-worker John the Senior Editor showed up. He was being his usual super-nice self, somehow distracting Kim and me slightly from our contentiousness. He'd seen us from his window and had decided to come on over. We ended up going to his place, then to one of his friend's places, where we watched the Simpsons. But I was so drunk that I was experiencing the spins. I certainly don't recall much about what was going on around me, except for this one video excerpt of Homer Simpson stripping off his clothes, perhaps claiming at that point to be "Homer Erotic." Kim told me later that John and his friends were laughing almost continuously to the latest Simpson antics.
| |
|
|
|
Stephanie (of Steph and EJ fame) talking with Kim and drinking cheap keg beer
The blond scary guy on the far left is a cheesy Schteve trying hard to pick up Kim, convinced that I'm her brother. The large scary guy in the right foreground is guitarist for the band Harmony 24.
Rocky, thanking people for coming to his party and for lending support during his hospital-ization.
The various faces of Kim's friend, Lawrence.
Kim dancing and such. Lawrence is in there too.
|
|
|
|
|
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990509 feedback
previous | next |
