2004-04-13 - 1:40 PM

The thing I love about having no class on Mondays is... Well... That I can completely circumvent the Garfieldian "monday" complex. And Adventures seem to occur on monday.

Case in point, yesterday Doug needed a ride to the airport. Eddie gave him a ride, with Kylee tagging along to be all girlfriendy with Doug before he left for a week. I got a call from Eddie.

"Hey, we're taking Doug to Pheonix. You wanna come?"

10 minutes later, I'm in the car, and we're listening to a "Heh, that's neat" mix I made Kylee.

Fraggle rock, a little bit of Me First... then one of my favorites, Carmen Sandiego. Yes. The gameshow theme music, by Rockapella.

Just as we're in the middle of the song, a jeep pulls up next to us in the left-hand lane. Contents? Two incredibly cute girls. The kind I would have been terrified of in high school.

Surprised, I quickly turn to Eddie.

"Dude..." I say, in a low, serious tone. "Turn it up. Whatever you do, don't laugh. Watch for a reaction."

RIGHT then, by divine providence, the last line of the chorus hits. The other 3 in the car belt out, "Where, in the world, is" in that high pitch, and I take the low note. "Carmen Sandiego."

We were going probably 40 with the music blaring, but I swear we could still hear them laughing all the way from the jeep. Over the next 5 minutes, with alternatingly slowing and quickening lanes, we passed eachother a few times. They couldn't look us in the faces, they just kept on laughin'.

It just got worse with the next track... "Gummi BEARS, boouunncing here and there and eeeeverywheeerre..."

We're such studs.

Had In-n-out in Pheonix. Total let-down. All the ingredients are the same, but it's a letdown, expectations are too high... What's that line? It's like asking a question in a letter.

Later that night, we're outside an emergency room with Eddie's family, gathered in a carefully maintained advanced stationary panic. Eddie's grandma... Kidney failure, severely dropped heart rate. Blood in her stomach, they don't know where it's coming from. Nobody's giving the family straight answers, so I call people who might know. Chances, consequences, decisions. Mom says she doesn't know if this is the sort of thing people pull through or not, but the combination is "not encouraging."

Not good to hear from an idealist.

She told me to send Eddie her love, and say she was praying for his Grandma. The cellphone was intentionally loud so he could hear. I looked over. Sometimes, I've discovered, weak smiles are the most genuine.

Eddie's cousin Chucky has a mullet and looks like an 80's porn star. Meagan's friend Jen bears terrifying resemblance to SB next-door neighbor, the cute cokehead psuodo-skank Lindsey. The cafeteria has free coke refills, a Haagan-daaz stand opens up around 11 PM.

Everyone's making small-talk, or listening to it. They have to, the silence is deafening. The grandma's direct family (husband, children, spouses thereof) are huddled outside smoking. I wonder if they saw the irony. Then again, would they care? I didn't.

Nikki was there, a friend of Eddie's I've gone a-wondering with a few times. We talked about dork-humor and Scrubs and tomatoes vs. ketchup and avacados vs. guacamole (somehow, it's possible to like the processed but hate the original).

It was a weird role that I haven't had to really play before, and I got the feeling she was similarly playing it by ear. One the one hand, it's a family affair. On the other, we're there to support him. So it's sort of a continuous bounce from background to foreground. Subtle. We'd go to the cafeteria for coke refills or hot chocolate, or one of us would show the other where the bathrooms were. Back and forth, back and forth, wherever we figured we should probably be. Billy and Jerome and Coral, they did that for me once, for 2 entire days. I never forgot them for that.

At one point Eddie was showing the family the whole concept of "the wave" achieved by lightly punching the side of a well-developed stomach. I like to think I have a rather impressive wave, but I was completely outdone by Eddie's father, a man of belly who'd left the 250lb mark behind decades ago. If I had a wave, he had tsunamis, brave and bold and majestic. Frown-set faces broke into broad smiles and laughter, and for at least a moment they were okay again. Good, I thought... whatever happens, they'll pull through this.

Eventually all the doctors could say was that tests were being run, and she would be stable through the night, results would be in tomorrow morning. So the family petered off to go and try to sleep.

I hit my pillow around 1 in the morning, and didn't look back.

-Alex

|

Slide back | Stumble forward