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Hooters, jockstrap of America
Friday, October 15 1999
I turned around to look behind me and there were three Schteveish-looking guys wearing dark polo shirts some steps behind me walking casually. I'd seen these guys on several occasions before, and having been told there was a rumour about the FBI having an interest in me, I asked them if they were in the FBI. They looked at each other dumbly and shrugged. Then one of them confessed that yes they were. Evidently they had to tell the truth.
I went home and drank a vodkatea, and when it was gone I poured myself another, this one twice as big as the first. I sat out on the street thinking about my life and how odd it's been. Suddenly a bunch of identical nondescript American cars pulled up. A woman got out and directed the various men in the other cars to handcuff me and take me away. I knew I'd done nothing wrong, so I drunkenly joked with my captors as they hauled me away.
It was such a preposterous turn of events that I knew it couldn't be real. So I forced myself to awaken from the dream. I lay there, amazed by the intensity of it all. Suddenly I was inspired to write a book about a guy who murders people in his lesser personality but is curious why he is a murder suspect in his other, more dominant personality. I would have written the book then and there but I knew I had to go to work tomorrow, so I just went to the crapper and typed out a few notes on my Psion while seated on the can.
As stated in an earlier entry, today was to be Dan the Man's last day at work, so as a token of appreciation for his months of devoted service, a group consisting mostly of Product & Engineering types took him out to lunch at the place of his choice. For perhaps obvious reasons, whenever a guy really wants to treat himself in our workplace, he goes to the nearby Hooters for lunch. So that's where we went. It's only a short ways away, but we all drove of course. I rode with Bill, the new Visual Basic developer, in his rough little yellow Jeep. Hooters isn't the sort of place where women feel especially comfortable, but we still managed to get a girl to come along, that being Karin our fearless & thoroughly over-involved queen of member support.
I'd never been to a Hooters before and assumed it was a place where topless women serve mediocre overpriced food to mediocre men in a mediocre environment. My assumptions, I was to learn, were rather generous. Hooters, it turns out, is a celebration of everything appealing to the guy who aspires to be a regular average American. The walls of its restaurants are festooned with sports paraphernalia and decorations featuring typical guy-talk humour. For example, a large sign on the men's room reads "Used Beer Dept." The waitresses aren't topless after all; they're all clad in what someone thought up as an outfit attractive to the great American Regular Guy. They wear busty tank tops and short short pants. The uniform isn't really very different from what both sexes used to wear back in my early 80s gym classes. It's certainly not stylish, sophisticated or even especially feminine. The resulting Hooters ambiance isn't sexy at all, at least not to my tastes. It actually has much of the unpleasant quality of waking from a day dream in a hammock only to find you've actually been sleeping in an enormous and slightly unclean jockstrap. Testosterone and its effects seem to pervade everything, even the waitresses themselves. When they brushed against me as they served our crowded table, I felt slightly revolted by the contact, despite the fact that they were conventionally attractive women. If it had been much worse (and I don't really know how this would have been possible), I would have refrained from breathing through my nose (even though there were no obviously repulsive odours in the air).
My male co-workers, by contrast, seemed to be lapping it all up with completely non-ironic interest. They were actually trying to make the most what they mistakenly took to be feminine charms moving amongst us. This added to my revulsion; it was like watching a drunken friend foolishly falling for a transvestite.
Interestingly, the one source of rational energy in the whole place was Karin the over-involved member support girl. I'm not trying to describe a sexual thing here, just a sense of rational femaleness as an important antidote to the excesses of masculine expression. Karin is a genuine woman, not puddy molded by testosterone. Her presence was enormously comforting.
Following an example set by the Director of Engineering, no one ordered any alcoholic beverages. This was in keeping with my plan to refrain from alcohol until I'd caught up on my writing, so I stuck with water. The food took a long time to come out, and when it did, let's just say, it was nothing special. Indeed, given the ambiance of the room, my chicken sandwich seemed, on some level, to have been seasoned with jism.
After I was done with inhaling my sandwich, I couldn't stand it anymore. I plunked $13 down on the table and quickly excused myself, walking back to work.
In the evening, I finally completed all the writing necessary for the recent New Orleans trip, so I could at last reward myself with alcohol. This neatly coincided with a developing situation across the courtyard over in the apartment belonging to Jason the "Redneck Surfer" (he hates that term) from Malibu. His mother was visiting, and whenever she's around, the two drive each other into a social frenzy, inviting people over non-stop to the point where everyone feels obligated to visit. Kim sensed that the more we put off tonight's visit, the more damage we'd be doing to the social fabric. So she and I headed over, eventually joined by first Steph and then EJ. We drank a little free booze and did what we could to earn it, socially taxing though that was. Jason's latest kick is that he finds Steph extremely attractive and he's trying to get to know EJ so he can learn a few tricks and perhaps start having success with girls who are "like" Steph.
EJ had been down a few blocks south of Newport Street to check in with his friends in Harmony 24; they were playing at a party down there. EJ said the music had been good and loud and we should check it out. Eventually Steph, Kim and I joined him on a walk to the party.
But by time we arrived the party was languishing. The cops had come and shut down the music and people were tightly controlling access to the beer. Fortunately, there were a few people there who Kim and I'd met recently at the Victoria Rose Consortium in Mexico, so we had people to talk to. I was talking to one of the guys I'd met at the consortium, Darin, about how the shutting down of music by police is more about the deliberate destruction of certain kinds of subcultures than it is about protecting neighbors from disturbance. Darin was telling me about how "time is up" for Ocean Beach, that the place is quickly losing its funky edge. He pointed out how landlords routinely raise the rent $300 from year to year in an effort to drive out slackerly undesireables. Darin went on to talk about the Ocean Beach power lines, and how they've traditionally restricted hotel development by limiting the height of buildings. But apparently the powerlines are soon going to be moved to buried lines, at which point Ocean Beach will quickly become yet another Schteveish Pacific Beach, its funky spirit snuffed out for good. "That's what happens."
On that depressing note, Kim and I headed back home. But we were far from done for the evening. On a whim, it seemed, Kim decided we should head down to Little Italy and get some dinner. At first we were going to take a cab, but then Kim decided she was "good to drive."
In Little Italy Kim tried momentarily to go the wrong way down India Street, thereby, she feared, drawing excessive attention to herself. As usual for this time on a Friday night, we were somewhat intoxicated, but that wasn't the main issue driving Kim's paranoia. Far worse, in her estimation was the fact that she no longer has a valid driver's license. Her Michigan license has lapsed, you see, and she has yet to successfully obtain a California license. The other day when she went to take the written exam, she funked it, thereby wasting several hours of her life, a fairly common situation (I'm told) for first time driving test-takers in California. So the most important thing for Kim these days while driving is to avoid being pulled over. She was rehearsing in her head what exactly she'd do if she were to actually be pulled over and she concluded that it would probably be a bad idea to tell an officer that she'd actually have a license if only she hadn't flunked the stupid test. Obviously, she can't stop driving just because she has no valid license; her life depends on being able to drive. So for the time being she's trapped in a strange, slightly illegal, state of affairs.
To avoid any further trouble, Kim parked the car and we walked to the first restaurant we came upon,
Fillipi's Pizza Grotto. There was a security guard at the back door guarding what appeared to be an Italian grocery store. Kim asked the guy what place was the best for taking a date and he, blushing at the importance Kim was placing on his opinion, recommended the very place he was guarding. Sold, we went in.
A good half of Fillipi's really is an Italian grocery store, but it's interfingered with a restaurant. Happily, the restaurant part was still serving food even at 11:30 pm.
The restaurant, what with its vintage 70s wood paneling and low musty ceilings, had the humble, living-room-ish feel of Deutsch Haus. Adding to the reassuring humble quality of the ambiance was our waitress, who bore a strong "slightly parochial child of a European immigrant" quality familiar from Kim's days in "Downriver Detroit."
The food was excellent, especially the sausage and anchovy pizza, which was like a slice of symphonic perfection as it seemed to melt on my tongue. It's important to note, however, that I had a serious case of the marijuana-induced hungries by this point in the evening. Towards the end of the meal Kim experienced some sort of allergic reaction to the imported Italian chianti, which came in a basket-covered bottle.
We were the last to leave, and as we did so Kim gave our waitress a $10 bill as a tip. She was unusually pleased.
As we were leaving, we thanked the security guard in the rear parking lot for his recommendation and asked if he knew of any other good restaurants. He started telling us about another place some blocks away and then stopped for a moment, asking if we were from around here. Since we'd been so inquisitive, it didn't seem polite to admit that we'd been living in San Diego for an entire year, so Kim lied and said we were new in town. This seemed to clear everything up with the security guard. The only thing that could possibly bring a hip fashionable young couple such as ourselves to Little Italy would be gross naïvité. So he advised, "The place you really ought to go is the Gaslamp District downtown." We'd come full circle. There was no way we could explain how we'd come to Little Italy precisely because it's not the hip & happening & just slightly phony Gaslamp.
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