2004-06-03 - 7:34 PM

Because no vacation would be genuinely complete, without a plot twist.

About a month ago, when I first realized I was going to be up the bay area, I called Amber and told her, in case we might be able to hang out. Made tentative "I'll give you a call if we can" kind of plans with her, couldn't, so I didn't call.

4 days ago, Sunday night, I'm half asleep on Billy's couch in Santa Barbara, and I notice a red light blinking in my shoe. Worried it might be a nuclear device, I pull it out. It's my cellphone. I have a messege.

"Hey. You... mister... are supposed to be... with a friend... ridiculously high with me right now, drunk probably too, at MY HOUSE, doing what I never do which is nothing, except being, well, ridiculously high and drunk and... experiencing San Francisco, which YOU'RE NOT... uurrrgh! That's okay. FYI, yeah, uh, like 5 vodka tonics and two things of unknown origin. Tomorrow... is memorial day. Uh... I know that you're up here, you better hang out with me, I'm going to be so upset if you don't. Yoouuu have an obligation. OKcallme. Bye."

I'm not up there... She had the wrong weekend! I called her back, and she was still impressively plastered, but she said something along the lines of

"I stocked the fridge with Guinness for you, and I was gonna make Filet Mignon, and it's sitting in the fridge right now, and you need to be up here!"

Mentally I evaluated the situation. There was a gorgeous, I mean aesthetically perfect human being, drunk, 350 miles north of my present location. She was prepared to cook a lot of food, and had stocked her fridge with Guinness simply because she knows it's my favorite beer. And she claimed I needed to be there.

It was at this point I determined she was right.

Fortunately, the roadtrip gods were smiling upon me. Billy and Pantea were going up to Berkeley, 32 hours from that very moment, to move her into a new apartment. I took stock of my two options for Tuesday through Saturday, at which time I needed to be in Tucson.

1) Stay in Santa Barbara. See Jerome when he's off work. Potentially see Amanda, probably see Heather, who I'd already gotten a chance to see. For the most part, spend a lot of time sulking around the house.

2) Go with Billy and Pantea. Spend time with them 24 hours a day for 2 days, hitch the BART over to San Francisco, see Amber (who I hadn't hung out with for the past 10 months), eat some Sourdough, have a breadbowl, take a cab to the airport.

In my head there flashed this visual of my weekend pack, sitting in the corner of my room in Tucson, gathering dust. It contains a can of Axe, a change of clothes, a pack of skittles, and some disposable toothbrushes, as well as a peice of paper paperclipped to the strap, that simply reads, "Go."

So I went. Two more days with Billy and Pantea. Wandered around Berkely, hung out with Thanh and Lauren, played copious amounts of Ninja Gaiden on Pantea's friend's XBox. Copious amounts. Then we saw Troy, and I got on BART, and ended up in San Francisco.

I wasn't really sure of myself in terms of what cars I was hopping onto in the system, so I asked the guy in front of me, who I absolutely had to make some sort of contact with.

He was a black dude, in a purple suit, with a black vest over it. He was wearing a swanky zoot-suit kind of purple hat, with a feather in it. He was leaning against the window, with his hand levitating in front of him, holding a portable DVD player. I asked him if I was going in the right direction, he said something like,

"You goin' downtown San Francisco? You wanna get off at Powell... I tell you when we get there. I'll let you know."

Further mild conversation revealed that he was watching Barbershop on the player. He was wearing sunglasses, though, so I'm pretty sure he was just angling himself to ogle the girl across the car from us. He smiled with lots of teeth, and wore fancy rings and a shiny lookin' watch.

I love big cities.

That was about an hour and a half ago. All I had was an address stored in a text messege in my cellphone. So I walked around until I found a map. I bought this necklace with a small stained-glass lionhead on it for Matt (I tend to buy gifts when things fairly scream out the person's name) from a rastafarian street vendor who wanted 35 bucks. I gave him $20 and a cigarette.

Waiting for a cab, I met an old fella named John. John wore a tweed bowler cap and a beaten blue overcoat, sort of a wool-looking blazer type deal, because it kept him warm and buses were cold. John mumbled a lot, laughed at things that weren't funny but mildly amused him because he was so affable, and you couldn't help but laugh too, because John kicked ass.

"They say," he confided in me, "That San Francisco is the most beautiful city on the world."
"I believe it," I nodded solemnly,"A lot of cities are pretty ugly."

He rolled back his head and laughed good and hard, for him, which amounted to a mild chuckle for the average person.

"You know," he grinned and mumbled, so I had to lean in to hear him properly, "I think of all cities, San Francisco has the most people who are... mentally below par. I don't wanna say crazy, so, mentally below par."

He grinned conspiratorially at me as a hoarse male voice screamed profanities from across the street at nothing in particular. Just then my cab came, so I got in and John disappeared from view. I got out at the address specified, and saw 2 doorbells. One for apartment A, one for apartment B. I checked the text messege. No mention of an A or B. Panic, sheer panic! It was the stupid sort of panic. I knew Amber was at work and her roommate (Who I hadn't actually met) would be answering. But what if I guessed the wrong apartment, and I explained my identity to the totally wrong person? What if I couldn't figure out if the roommate was oblivious or it wasn't even her roommate? What if nobody answered and I had to sit and wait 3 hours for the shift to end? Oh my god, what would I do?

It was like expecting an answering machine and getting a live human being. Sometimes people simply aren't prepared for nested if-then situations, multiple branches of possibility. Occasionally we're supposed to throw something out into the world, and it's supposed to catch it, and then you're done and it's up to the world for a while. I was utterly panickstricken by something completely arbitrary. It was kind of awesome.

So I hit a button. A girl walked out. I said I didn't know which button to click, I'm a friend of Amber's, are you her roommate. "Oh... you must be Alex. The writer. I'm Catherine!" She opened the goofy gate door thing and walked me inside. Catherine goes by Cat, and is really pretty, and is sort of a southern california personality, which is weird since she's born&raised here in SF. The house smells faintly like coconut. They have a grip of VHS's but don't own a dvd player, have newly obtained DSL, and the floors are hardwood. Amber's cat is terrified of all men, and has been hiding under the bed an awful lot since I walked in, which was... an hour and 15 minutes ago. Amber has this painting of the bay, right next to the computer, and it's sort of absolutely amazing, it's the same feeling I got hearing "Fallen from Grace" for the first time, sort of awe that such artistic potential exists inside someone I've so fondly wasted so many hours with.

Catherine (I'll just refer to her this way, so as not to confuse her with the Cat I oft refer to) referred to me as "the writer" and has a cute smile and a casual sway when she walks, and kills braincells playing Age of Empires. I kinda dig that. Between her, the bargaining rasta, John, and the purple pimp of the bay area transit system (I can only assume, that brother had mad bling), today's been full of those personalities like Slim or LA Joe or Gabriella. Those fabulous cameo personalities that give Travel it's capitol T.

Words can't express how jazzed I am with how this all turned out. It's like I found my thumb again, and I've got full rights to suck away to my heart's content.

Yeah, you heard me. I said suck.

-Alex

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