Jean Blues Update

I recently got around to buying some iron-on patches for the holey jeans mentioned in my last post. I followed the directions for applying them. Then I washed the jeans, and the patch came off for the most part. The parts that stayed stuck are attached to the fibers within the tear, so if I try to rip it off it'll make the rip worse. I am really bitter about this.

Jean Blues

Jeans of this breed are so rare I am almost afraid to wear them because they are so precious. I'll explain why: They neither bare your anal cleft when you stoop (jeans of today), nor make your ass look like an empty sack (jeans of the 80s/ early 90s). They don't grab you around the middle and squish your organs, like Calvin Kleins did in the age of designer jeans, and they don't have that dumbass acid wash so popular later on.

I'm going into nostalgic old lady mode now. Back in my day, one formed a relationship with jeans. You bought them just before the new school year, when they were of darkest midnight blue and they fit you with a stiff and uptight formality. As you wore them and your relationship deepened, they softened and became more comfortable. Fidelity in the relationship was easy because it was acceptable to wear them to everything except court and funerals. They were rugged enough for a camping weekend, but still okay to wear on a date.

Fashion trends make it really hard to find good jeans. I got these at Goodwill several years ago, so I have no idea how old they are. I just know they're the only ones I can depend on to fit and to represent themselves honestly. They don't have a fake fade that limits commitment to them to the short term because they'll soon be too faded. They don't have a trendy cut that will bare my ass or get caught in my bike chain. They're not too clingy because of Spandex. They're just dependable, sensible pants. Over the years I've searched in vain to find just plain jeans like this, only to find acid washed ones or baggity assed ones or bell-bottomed ones or ones that would leave me with carpenter crack.

But alas, they have a hole in the ass, ripped there during a home remodeling project. As you can see, it's in a place that's tough to repair. Next to the pocket, where it will be tough to sew a patch. Especially for me. My sewing skills are quite basic. But I need to do something so people won't be able to tell what color my underwear is, and to keep the hole from growing.

I'm so disgusted by how the jean genre has been warped by impractical fashion that I'm considering giving them up. All except for this pair. Carhartts are an option, though the women's varieties are made of less sturdy fabric and tend to sport boot cuts (I'm a straight leg fan). And the Carhartt dungaree cut does about as much for my ass as Mom jeans. But at least Carhartts aren't selling out (yet) to capricious fashion like jeans did.

Alien Planet Needs Bands

If aliens beamed me aboard their ship and said look, we want to clone some musicians so we can bring good music to our home planet, and we need you to recommend some, I'd start with this one:



That's Nick Gilder of Hot Child In The City fame. So many of his songs were good, but he's pretty much considered a one-hit wonder. He's still performing in Canada with the band he left right before he hit it big. Of course he's done some ageing but he's still in okay shape. I don't understand why he wasn't more successful.

So from girly glam we go to Texas jam. This is Joe Ely. I saw him in the mid-90s. It was the best show I've ever seen.



This was the first band I saw live, and they're definitely the most fun.



And to round things out with some moody gloomy I'd have to suggest this dramatic fellow:



Can't leave these guys out. They're my new favorite local band.



Once the aliens' culture becomes transformed by exposure to these musicians, music historians across the galaxy will be outraged that I excluded the Beatles, Elvis, Tupac Shakur and Johnny Cash. And I'll be like, "What? You can't clone the dead, assholes. And Ringo and Paul suck!" I may stowaway on a flying saucer to travel to the planet where these cloned bands rule a just society, because it might be a lot cooler than here.

Old People

When I was a kid, I remember hearing adults talk about who'd been in the obituaries lately. Especially my grandmother - she'd ask me "You remember so and so?" and I'd shake my head, and she'd get exasperated and tell me things about that person to jog my memory, to no avail. I'd be thinking, all you adults look alike to me. Then she'd go on and tell me all the details of that person's untimely demise as if I cared. She'd be so surprised about this person's death. He/She was so young, she'd say on the phone to her friends. It was as if a new and mysterious force were at work in our town, like a serial killer but formless and random, and all the adults were amazed. Meanwhile, I'd be thinking that 40, 50, and 60 years of age does not qualify one to be described as young any longer. "What do they expect?" I wondered silently. "Old people die."

But now my contemporaries are dying and I'm shocked too. Last week DeJuan died at 40. We were chummy in 5th grade but drifted apart in middle school, so it's not like we were close. But he was from my hometown and was in my graduating class and was still close to people I'm still close to, so I still felt like I knew him. He started feeling bad one day last week and was dead by Thursday. A rare and whoopass form of Disease X got him. Doctors estimated that he'd had it about three weeks before he died. What was so surprising about this was not his death at an unusually young age; it was the fact that he was such a low-risk individual and many of our contemporaries have led such high-risk lives (drugs, alcohol, general volatility and impulsiveness.) It hardly seemed fair. DeJuan quit the hard living a good 10-15 years ahead of everybody else, belonged to civic organizations, and worked in a helping profession. He was a pleasant and easygoing guy in a family known for some of its, well, not easygoing and pleasant members.

So a couple of days after the funeral home visitation for DeJuan, where we all stood around and marvelled at how old we're getting, I saw this hearse. If you can't read the signs, they say "Prepare To Meet Thy God" and "After Death, The Judgement" and "The Wages of Sin Is Death, But The Gift Of God Is Eternal Life Through Jesus Christ." It puts off kind of a hostile vibe, but its owners may sincerely be trying to help people be more aware of how fragile life is and encourage them not to take it for granted. At the same time, you don't want to ruin your quality of life by quaking in fear of death at every moment. In a way, death is already here. Those children we were in school are dead; we've morphed into adults and those old lives are gone. At some point in the future, we're already dead. The trick is to use that knowledge to enrich your life now, instead of waste valuable time feeling fearful.

It's hard to be aware of death and its inevitability without getting down and afraid about something you can't change. We need to develop better lessons for how to do that.

Sado-Masochistic Violinist

So: To set the scene, I need to explain that I'd just gotten out of graduate school and had a crummy, hateful job that involved talking to demanding people on the phone all day for very little money. But I lived in a fashionably dumpy cheap apartment house with some good female friends for neighbors. We liked to make the scene in halter tops with short skirts and combat boots and drink malt liquor. We lived on the free cheese, crackers, and wine offered up at art openings.

Sometimes I saw one of our rednecky-looking (overalls and a mullet) male neighbors out in the yard playing with his young son. Both seemed kind of shy and I imagined that Mr. Mullet/Overalls was trying to live under the radar because he had kidnapped the son from his alcoholic ex wife, who had been awarded custody because she got a good lawyer. And that was cool with me.

One Sunday morning I got up feeling like I had a knife stuck in my head. I hadn't yet given up on Olde English 800 as a good cheap way to enjoy Saturday night and was suffering as a result. I took a shower thinking that would help, but it didn't. I was so knackered I couldn't even get dressed. So I reclined on the love seat in a towel with the back of my hand on my forehead like somebody in a swoon.

Then I heard footsteps on the porch and saw a shadow cross the window. There was a knock on the door and I thought, Thank God, Cosima's bringing me some coffee, and I said come in. The door opened and I heard more shuffling footsteps, then silence. Usually Cosima makes her entrances with a lot of noise. So I looked up, to see an Asian man, a stranger, standing in my living room. He wore a huge black suit that hot summer morn and there was so much gel in his hair you could still see the furrows his comb had left in it. He had what looked like a huge hickey on the front of his neck. There followed an awkward silence.

"Is this one-two-one McNever Street?" He asked when I sat up. "Yes, it is," I said. He didn't seem freaked out about my outfit, so I pretended I wasn't freaked out that he was seeing me in it. "Does Frederico DuVall live here?" he asked. "No," I said. Then followed several minutes of dead-end conversation - he'd repeat "Is this one-two-one McNever Street?" and I'd go "Yes" and he'd go "Are you sure Frederico DuVall doesn't live here?" and I'd go "I don't think so." When I finally learned that this Frederico character was a famous classical musician, I said "There's no way somebody like that lives here. Do you have a number for him? Why don't you call him? The phone's right behind you."

So this guy, who introduced himself as Robin, edges over to the phone and picks up the reciever. I guess it looked a little grungy because I'd spilled some coffee on it the day before and hadn't cleaned it off. "I don't use other people's phones," he said as he put it down. Okay well fine, nerdy germophobe. I told him it was time for me to get dressed and it was nice to meet him and I hope he found his friend. At the same time I was removing a towel from my head, and when my hair fell down in lank, tangled strands, Robin's eyes went wide and he sighed "Oh, your hair is beautiful." I laughed uncomfortably, wished him a good day, and locked the door behind him. Then I went back to bed.

When I got up again I wasn't so sure the whole scene hadn't been a dream. I told the neighborgirls about it and they acted like it was too wierd to be true. So I was almost shocked when I started seeing him walking down the sidewalk on my drive to work every morning. I can't remember how it started, but pretty soon it was like I had a boyfriend. A short, effeminate, overdressed, stalking and platonic boyfriend. Thirty seconds after I got home from work, I'd hear mincing footsteps on the porch and a knock on the door. We'd make some dinner, eat it, and he'd play violin while I read on the couch. He'd stick around until I told him I was going to bed.

I was fascintated with him because he was so old fashionedly polite, gracious, and weird. He wore oversized suits every day. One was black, and one was red. Later he got a purple one. I'd never had live classical music performed in my living room before. One day Robin brought me a classical CD. I was shocked to see Mr. Mullet/Overalls from upstairs wearing a tuxedo on the cover. He and the famous Frederico DuVall were one in the same. All of this was so novel I couldn't bring myself to put a stop to it, even after Robin started showing up in the lobby at work and getting the secretary call me to say he was downstairs waiting for a ride. He needed a ride to a performance. He needed a ride to the dry cleaners. He needed to go to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Let me tell you, Robin could lay waste to a buffet. He had to sit at a table all by himself to make room for the wreckage of mashed potatoes, green beans, and cherry cobbler samplings he created. He made people stare.

Let me put this in perspective. While my friends and I often complained about how strapped for cash we were, Robin always gloated that he'd made a lot of money working on Wall Street in the past and that he was currently making a lot of money working for a bank. He sneered at my shopping trips to TJ Maxx because as a store, "it's just not that hot," he said. So why the fuck did he need me to give him rides?

Over time, Robin started to wear out his welcome in other ways. He became overpoweringly smitten with my neighbor Delta Dawn, and while she was a tolerant sort, he really freaked her out. Robin hovered around her, positively hungry to squeeze her hands and stroke her arms. Though he appeared to be the biggest and most delicate virgin in the world, somebody she could beat down with no effort, it was still creepy. She told me not to bring him around her place anymore.

At about the same time, he started making curious offhand comments. Once he was bragging about how much money he was making and Cosima said "Let's take him out and beat him," and he answered with "But if you do that, I might really enjoy it." Another time we were looking at furniture through a shop window. There was a wrought-iron four-poster bed in there that appeared to be crafted in the Gothic Dungeon style, and Cosima started singing some lines from a song popular at the time: "S and M! Bring your Mamma and her friends!" Robin, who had been watching traffic, whipped around at the mention of S&M and said "Really? Where?" And the ever-present hickey on his neck came from the way he handled his violin. One night as I watched him playing, it occured to me that he was at once making tender love to the instrument and trying to decapitate himself with it. I was starting to realize that there was some wierd, dark stuff going on in Robin.

One evening I decided I needed a break from him and I went to see a movie at Fergus'. It was a great Hong Kong historical action flick called "Peking Opera House Blues." One of the heroines was costumed in a black suit the whole time, even though her contemporaries were dressed in the traditional frou-frou outfits of the age. At one point in the plot she's tied up and tortured. The way the scene is shot eroticizes the violence - it's done in slow motion and soft focus, with close ups of her face as she's getting whipped bloody and afterwards as the torturer takes a handful of sand and rubs it into her wounds. That's when an epiphany hit me: "This is the kind of thing Robin thinks about all the time." The words arrived unbidden in my consciousness as if they'd beamed in from the planet GetAClue. But I dismissed the thought.

Afterwards, as I walked back to my house in the dark, I could hear violin music drift down the street on the cool fall air. Robin stopped playing and stood when I came up the steps. We exchanged pleasantries and he asked what I'd been doing. "I went to watch a movie called 'Peking Opera House Blues,'" I said. "Is there a scene in it where a lady gets whipped?" he asked eagerly.

Our friendship ended when he asked me for $150 so he could take a bus to Winston-Salem and get his bow re-haired. First off, I was still getting my ass chewed out all day for a meager living, and it hadn't been too long since he'd been bragging about how well-off he was. Second, he laid out the reasons he needed the money so meticulously that it sounded like he'd been up all night making up bullshit reasons so he could soak me for $150. So it was awkward, but I said no. Instead I gave him a buckeye for good luck. He didn't seem to appreciate the gesture.

From then on, whenever I ran into Robin he'd show me the back of his head. He turned mean in a big way and started being obnoxious to people in general - everybody who worked at businesses in the neighborhood hated to see him walk in the door. The change was so abrupt, I thought maybe he'd stopped taking Prozac or Lithium or something. But maybe it was just sudden poverty that made him cranky.

I think he probably came from a really bad situation. One time when I was cheauffering for him, I explained that it was unreasonable to expect to be driven to a dry cleaners a half hour away and still make it to the performance that was to start in 20 minutes. I added that he seemed to have a poor idea in general of how time works and how much activity you can fit in allotments of it. That's when he explained how when he was growing up, he was punished for things like wearing clothes and being on time.

That was such a ridiculous idea to me, I assumed I misunderstood what he was saying. "What? Punished for being on time? I'm confused," I said. "You're confused," he answered ironically, with an emphasis on the you're. I guess Robin had a lot of trouble living in the mainstream world because it wasn't as weird and crazy as what he was used to.

Third Grade Jail Trip

Wyatt and I went to see Public Enemies on Sunday. It was okay. Has a lot of jailbreaks and so forth. At dinner we were talking about the movie, and he said he'd seen something on TV once about how prisoners can make weapons out of toothbrushes. "Oh yeah," I said. "They grind them to an edge on the floor to make it sharp. And you can melt them with a lighter too to get the edge started."

"How do you know so much about this?" He asked.

That's when I remembered how my third grade class toured the county jail on a field trip. Upon reflection, I surmised that maybe it was not an age-appropriate activity for us. It was downright fucked up. On the other hand, it was so freaky that it's the only field trip I remember in any detail.

Our elementary school classes took the trips everybody takes - To the History Museum in Greensboro, for example. All I remember about that is Dolly Madison's dress. All I remember about about Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill is that the seats were comfortable and it was rumored that B.S. kissed R.S. in the dark there. The jail trip was a whole 'nother memorable matter. The drawings of naked women on the wall of one of the big cells definitely made a big impression. It confused me, because if somebody wrote a swear word on the bathroom wall at school, there was always big fuss. The offending graffitti was removed immediately and there was a large scale interrogation conducted into Who Did It. Surely full frontal female nudity, poorly done at that, is worse. How come you get away with more in jail? I thought. And how come that wasn't cleaned up before we got here? Didn't they know company was coming? Along with the confusion, I felt uneasy about seeing nude women's body parts in the company of boys my age. It's rude to subject a guest to that, I thought. What kind of place is this?

There were some scruffy guys in their late teens and early twenties in the cell with the drawing. I compared them to other scary males I knew - the eighth graders who rode my bus. To me it seemed that once they hit middle school, guys must get more obnoxious and frightening with age until a certain point when they just get old and turn into Dads, and become too tired to be a problem anymore.

Roggie A. was ahead of me in line and right in front of the cell. He asked the fat uniformed man leading the tour if he could ask the prisoners questions. One of the prisoners said "Sure, we'll talk if you give us some peanuts." Then they all laughed, and it was like they were laughing at us, and it was unpleasant. But looking back on it, that was an appropriate comment to make. This was being presented like a trip to the zoo.

Then the cop took us downstairs to an office and talked while he showed us his framed collection of shivs. Modified toothbrushes, bedsprings, and similar items. It was basicly a lesson on how to make weapons out of everyday stuff. All they same, they didn't look very dangerous to me. And they were ugly, so it didn't make sense to me why they were framed in a box. And maybe I was a dumbass but I couldn't figure out why anybody would need weapons in jail.

On the way downstairs to the kitchen, the cop told us about the trustees in the jail, good prisoners who they could trust to have more freedom and do jobs. In the kitchen we saw a scrawny hippie mechanically take plates out of a sinkful of steaming, soapy water. He held them pinched between the thumb and forefinger of each of his raw red hands. Then he dipped them each a single time into rinse water before he put them in a drainer. He moved like he was handling bomb components and his watery blue eyes stared ahead blankly. He never looked at us. Clearly, there was something wrong with that guy. And he's one of the trusted ones? I thought. If I'd thought in profanity at that age it would have been more like What the Hell? Those clowns in the cage upstairs seemed more like normal people.

Yesterday I asked Mike if he remembered that field trip. He did, and he thought it was a lot of fun. Maybe he enjoyed looking at those breasts drawn on the wall. All I remembered getting out of it was a feeling of unease and wondering why we were there. Maybe it was discussed in class, but if so I don't remember it. I can't imagine that any third graders would be taking any trips like that these days without a lot of parents raising all grades of Hell.

Recent Awkward Guy Events

On Friday the daughter of a good friend of mine died. I was a little shell-shocked by the news, even though she's been sick for a long time and everybody knew it was coming. I wasn't sure what to do - in those situations you want to be helpful, but you also don't want to intrude during a time when somebody might need some peace and quiet. Nadine, the surviving mother, has plenty of local family and a large circle of friends. Maybe she shouldn't have to entertain guests like me at a time like this, I thought.

But what I thought I should do was go by and tell Ben what had happened. Ben's known their family for 30 years or so. He doesn't answer the phone, and he doesn't have e-mail, so I thought I'd go by and tell him. Ben's also hard of hearing, doesn't have a doorbell, and sleeps irregular hours, so I usually get his attention by shouting for him in the kitchen.

So I was strolling into the dark house shouting. I saw movement near the back of the room. Then Ben turns to face me and he's stark fucking naked. You'd think in such a situation a man might cover his parts with his hands, or stand sideways. But Ben gripped the hair on the sides of his head, his eyes squinted up and his teeth clenched, and he made this growly noise that communicated great frustration. I guess he figured he'd already been seen so it made no sense to hide.

"Oh, you're nekkid," I said. "Put some clothes on and come out here. I got something to tell you."

"Oh, OK."

So a few mintues later he comes out and I tell him that Celine died a few hours before. When I saw the look on his face, I wished I'd stayed home. And it reminded me how upset I was about it myself. The news was so heavy there was no temptation to get sucked into an eddy of awkwardness over what had just happened, thankfully.
*************
Last week I mentioned how I conspired to make friends with my neighbors because they put up a pool in their back yard. I finally got to reap the benefits of my hard work this past Saturday.

They put a table next to the pool and covered it with chicken wings, cheese bread, and a vegetable tray. You could just hang over the edge of the pool and chow like a pig from a trough. It was divinely decadent.

Sr. Toledo, the pool owner, was the only man in the water. Me and three other neighborgirls were in there with him, and he started talking about the difficulties of maintaining healthy pool chemistry. "We don't want to be causing any vaginal infections," he said. "And if any of you ladies get one, let me know as soon as possible so we can correct the situation in here."

Sure thing!