This is my first mobile blog entry, as my commute is now half an hour vs. ten minutes. i nearly had a nervous breakdown with my last apartment, I am not even done cleaning. I sense that my days at work are numbered as well.
this whole move has sucked the wind out from under me.
Reliant is a word that screams frumpy. If you’re self-reliant, you’re probably just fully adjusted to having to do things yourself for one reason or another. Self-reliant isn’t sexy unless it’s within a Emily Dickinsonian context, angry double hyphens stylistically explaining that you’re alone, damnit, but there’s still a point to all this. I wonder if she ever had a clue that we’d be thinking about her hundreds of years later, as global warming sends Seattle into the mid 80’s - would she know what Seattle or the mid 80’s was? She would know Massachusetts, of course, so if she saw me driving a gigantic Pontiac down South Massachusetts Street in Seattle, she might not get the futuristic tin lizzy or the temperate rainforest metropolis part, but she’d at least see that we descended from what she descended from.
And she would know what it’s like to drive a big sedan alone packed full of boxes, even if she didn’t know what a sedan was. Moving alone was partially my own choice, but also a convenient way to avoid having to rely on people I barely know, and therefore have to see the truth about whether I’m really just a novelty or actually a person to these people. Even among those in Seattle who I became friends with, I wouldn’t put it past them to not answer their phone when it came time for me to ask the Keith Hernandez-Jerry Seinfeld question. Nobody likes moving, and I was raised in the bottom two-thirds percentile of the middle class, the people who U-haul instead of they-haul. So my values and checkbook always win out - it’s why I packed two suitcases for New York and left with two suitcases, despite amassing an apartment’s worth of melamine in between baggage claims.
Of course, I am borrowing a friend’s car, and that’s some kind of reaching out. I’m not perfect, though; I already lost the keys to both my old apartment and my new one, as well as his housekey. I hadn’t driven a car regularly in a long time, so of course I left them on the roof (and what an aerodynamic roof - this is mid 90’s Pontiac driving excitement here).
As I picked him up at 1AM, he was completely drunk (despite the fact that I picked him up from his job) and as anyone (including myself) in that situation would do, he thought of himself. He was too drunk to see that when I found out I had lost all of those keys, I was nearly in tears and extremely embarrassed. He was slurring his words as I frantically searched behind the gigantic velour bench for anything metallic, did you find my keys he asked? I didn’t even bother to elucidate how patently selfish that statement was, as the door to his house was wide open and one of his 5 roommates could easily make him a spare key. I was unable to enter my own existing apartment, I was unable to enter my new apartment, and I had his car full of my personal belongings. I would have to go explain to my roommate that my level of responsibility is worth all but 2 days, and that the kid entrusted not to mix colors of Play-Doh knows better than to leave keys on top of a car.
Finally, the friend saw that I needed to keep his car for longer, so he let me, as I retraced my steps and turned up no keys hidden in alley dust. I did find syringes and oddly enough, a Violet Crumble wrapper. It was well after 2AM at this point and I had no choice but to illegally park the car in the alley and sit in front of my apartment building waiting for someone to let me in. Not that being in the lobby meant anything but air conditioning - I would still have to break into my apartment itself.
I sat down where the homeless guys usually sit, wearing short shorts and a tanktop, as Asian girls done up like mini dragon lady caricatures and their frat boy companions heckled me. I was spared the word faggot, but clearly the excuse that it was a hot day and I was moving would not register with these people. They’re not u-haul people, they’re they-haul people, or their dads do it for them in their big Honda Odyssey minivans.
Then it dawned upon me that I could get into my own apartment by calling myself on the intercom and buzzing myself in. Smooth move, ex-lax. After I got inside, I nicely knocked on my neighbor’s door, interrupting orgasms, and they reluctantly obliged as I climbed through their window, jumped about one story down into a vestibule, and then climbed into my own hallway. I laid on the dirty carpet holding onto my ankles and just stared horizontally, like a roly poly must do when they’re temporarily upended by flicking fingers from obnoxious schoolkids. After I felt self-pitied enough, I stood up, fell asleep on my mattress, and woke up the next day.
Looking around me, there’s no way I can finish this alone. I’m in for a major ding financially for moving out of this place - there isn’t a single surface that isn’t caked on dirty from years of other people’s carelessness, and from a year of my own. Is it really self-reliance anymore when you simply admit you cannot do it alone and let the rest fall?
The leasing person is very nice here. I sense that she really pities me - she saw how I was unwittingly screwed over by my ex-roommate Sam, she was always pretty kind when I made late rent payments, and she never once complained how messy it was when she showed the apartment to people. I think she saw how much I had to do, and knew that I was pretty much alone in doing it, and so I know she isn’t expecting an immaculate move out. I think they want me gone and we both know that I need to go.
For all the pain this apartment has caused me, for all the corners of its massive rooms that I had given up on and turned into a storage room, it had a pretty view. I can see when the ferries come in fron Bainbridge Island, I can see more water than most, sometimes the mountains peak over the mid-rise apartments on Western Avenue, but it means very little to someone who was born here and who is self-reliant. Emily Dickenson never really wrote about the majestic solitude of mountains and oceans, did she? If she were alive today, this apartment would be one of the things she wrote about. Success in circuit lies, after all.
So I leave this place with an eye on better days ahead, yet I honestly don’t know what lies next, more depravity and life-ruining decisions or further covalence of intellect and style. The only thing I do know is that in order to figure out whether I’ve peaked or whether I’ve valleyed, I’ve got to move forward from this location. 2105 First Avenue imparts success, with its downtown numbering and its ordinal value - it sounds like someone who hangs out with Frasier or Niles. But 17th Avenue South is where I’m headed now, behind the Oberto Factory Outlet Store, between Amazon.com and a hair weave salon.
The scorching heat and the slamming of car doors and the thinking about one’s life while slamming car doors is how I devised most of my plans for transition in life. It was during tense summer days like these that I finally wrestled myself from the strangle of my mother’s overbearing parenting, that I parted ways with my best friend Farah after a movie at Alamo Drafthouse, walking up the hill to my car alone and leaving for New York the next day; that I drove a friend’s Pontiac Bonneville alone as I took the long way home down MLK Boulevard, which used to be Empire Way when I was a kid, which used to be run down but was anything but these days.
Good thing I remembered to bring my iPod with me, because Bryan Ferry of all people reminded me the most important thing about this move.
“This is tomorrow calling; wishin’ you were here…”
I’m moving out of an apartment that I’ve so desperately wanted to leave behind, so I am feeling somewhat optimistic about things. I failed to plan for the move portion itself, and I am paying for it dearly - gas is $4.50 a gallon, and I could only manage to borrow a friend’s car while he was at work. It’s the hottest day of the year, so I am sweating bullets, and as I ran up to my bathroom to do the #2, I realized what the discomfort was that I’ve had for the past 6 months.
A hemorrhoid! I have hemorrhoids. Do they go away? I thought only Matlock or Father Dowling got hemorrhoids - I am not even a “bottom” in gay palare. It’s simply due to my anal retentiveness, isn’t that funny? It’s almost a romantic lesion in my keister. Ephemeroids.
My new neighborhood is right on the black-asian dividing line. Both groups eyed me as I slowly drove up the wrong driveway to my supposed new townhouse. But I almost got into a car accident earlier - Rainier Avenue is named so for the fact that it has the peculiar advantage of being angled south-southeasterly towards the peak. On a sunny, 80 degree day like this, it literally takes over your screen. You can barely see anything but a big ice cream scoop 70 miles yonder.
I don’t think I’ve ever let my living situation fall to the hands of chance at this late stage. I actually became so distraught from the process that I stopped looking a few days ago, preferring to let the answer find its way back to me, letting that be the main bellwether of whether it’s worth staying here or not.
I did try, though - I called lots of places looking for appropriate studios and 1-bedrooms, but anything that was remotely acceptable was either taken by the time I arrived or had too many obstacles to an easy lease. I even read one ad that stated that people with a credit score of under a certain number should not even bother applying.
The worst moment in the entire process came when I responded to an ad advertised as a 1-bedroom in the U-District for $675. Even though that price is not exactly high or low for that neighborhood, I knew that I might expect a bit of real estate creative license. I didn’t expect to have to walk through the laundry room to get to the bedroom and then open the door to a 125 square foot hallway with hot plate and stall shower. And a mysterious gigantic armoire that took up the only space wide enough for a bed.
After that visit, the subsequent apartments were only marginally less shady - I was told a higher price in person than on the phone or craigslist ad, I was told “around July 1st” instead of an actual date, I was one of 10 people in a studio built for Rhea Perlman, I was passed up for someone else. It was the most grueling housing search thus far - it’s a clear sign that Seattle still is up to its old economic hat trick, which is to peak later and bust harder and bust for longer. Seattle’s got extremely low occupancy rates and the high-rises aren’t being constructed fast enough to compensate.
Furthermore, Seattle was lily-white for the most part until the 1990’s, but has become a very popular starting point for immigrants. Add that to the fact that Seattle itself is more popular with people from out of town, combined with the reluctance of most white Seattleites to start gentrifying their margins, and you have a squeeze.
But I found a place that is very much a rewound image of my Seattle childhood. In fact, my new house is eerily similar to the one I grew up in almost exactly 3 miles away. Both are on east-facing sides of very step hills - in fact, their absolute positions are both about 250 feet from respective summits. Both houses look down on a highway; both are 2-story townhouses; both are geographically connected to one neighborhood but spiritually and topographically connected to another; both are right next to major commuter bus stops.
Whereas my childhood home was on the border of Madison Park and the Central District, this place is on the border of Beacon Hill and Rainier Valley. It’s affordable, and while my roommate was someone I met under less-than-kosher circumstances, we’re both thinking it will work out. I took the long way home after dropping off my check, and was confronted with the neighborhood that was no-go when I was a kid - the black neighborhood, the ghetto, the C.D.
Of course it’s not a bad neighborhood at all and simply has more black people inhabiting its borders - if you looked at the housing stock you’d be envious. I stopped at Ezell’s Chicken, the famous place that Oprah loves so much.
As I paid, I read a plaque commemorating the death of Ezell’s brother, who was the co-owner. I looked at his last name, looked at his face, and it hit me - my boss’ father had recently passed away. This was my boss’ father. I felt instantly closer to my city, my job, and my decision to move out into the less-gentrified parts of Seattle, but it still struck me as weird that my boss, one of the few African-American employees in our otherwise lily-white office, happened to be the daughter of one of the only “black” institutions in Seattle that non-white people even have heard of.
Moving this far out (by far out, I mean 2-3 miles) means I’ll need to get a bicycle. And maybe start acting like I did before I fell so precipitously.
Wow, they really have thought of everything to keep me on task at work.
Access to http://www.cracked.com/video_16441_behold-fox-news-creates-legal-controversy-out -thin-air.html for user OU=Users-Traffic,OU=SEA-SPOTLIGHT,OU=West Division,DC=cable,DC=comcast,DC=com\Rutledge\, Matthew has been denied for the following reason:
The Websense category “Tasteless” is filtered.
Calling IP: 10.x.x.x
Calling Workstation: 10.x.x.x
There are a lot of parts of my life that don’t seem to have much marketshare on this blog. I simply have an easier time writing hour-long novellas on childhood despair than I do writing about what websites I visit or what music I listen to. But I do love those other things, too, and so I’ve been tinkering with a way to make everything co-exist peacefully.
I could have just created another blog, but I really want to do something that makes the most sense - essentially, what I want to do is be able to present all information that I choose to share in either blog or wiki format, interwoven with eachother. That requires a lot of customization and a web hosting account that will let me install multiple programs. I can’t seem to find a decent host out there - I signed up with godaddy but they’re way too slow, and I am wasting money at a time when I don’t have any. Gramour Shots will remain in some form, it just may be moved somewhere or assume a personal profile within a larger scope.
I also want to network more - one of the ideas I really want to fully realize is a group blog where people who work at corporations or offices can share worst practices. I’d like to know I’m not the only twentysomething in the world who is thoroughly modern and wants the best for his coworkers and himself, but faces a lot of red tape and conservative mindsets. Everyone could use anonymous names or refer to their company with a fake name if need be.
The other thing that I haven’t exactly mentioned to many people is that I am working on a new product. Product?, you ask. Yes, a product, an invention, a new geegaw. It seems quite unlike the Matthew most people know, but before I was an adult, I used to try and create all kinds of things. It’s fitting, since Seattle was a relocation back to where I was born.
I am not sure if it’s been invented already or if it’s somehow unfeasible, but in my head, I can’t see how either are true. Those who I’ve explained it to in detail have almost unanimously told me that it’s a great idea, and I’ve gotten responses ranging from “it will make many millions of dollars” to “if you can make it happen, I won’t be able to live my life without it.”
I’ve already imagined several applications for it, as well as potential marketing techniques. (If I can get it to work, it will have one of those schticks in the form of a TV commercial or perhaps a keynote showing exactly what it can do.) It has business applications, personal applications, and has potential to connect industries as diverse as groceries, storage, shipping and mass media. Perhaps I’m full of myself, but I really think that if someone hasn’t invented this and sold it, then they sure better get on it, because I’m going to at the very least write 20 or 30 pages describing what I would like to see.
I am sure this must seem embarrassing to a senior-citizen Patrick Hernandez (and let’s not even ask his Revue?) But I don’t laugh too hard, because I’ve done at least this much self-serving danceateria-type moves in front of the mirror on the way to going out. I would definitely be surprised if cocaine weren’t a major part of this production’s budget.
There isn’t anything more demonstrative of the internet’s sheer power than the ability to see incoming searches, for example, on your own blog.
Since Google is in effect the Dr. SBAITSO of the 21st century, only with real advice, people tend to type whatever the hell they feel like typing, whether obscure, pedantic, or perverted. I willingly admit that I’ve googled testicle shaving tips and found plenty of useful advice.
Apparently, the crossroads of the internet lead to yours truly if you type the following:
Don’t be ridikulis, Cousin Larry.
(And believe it or not, i get a lot of searches for ‘gramour shots’ spelled exactly as such.)
This is similar to friend slash intellectual co-host Pete’s own search-related discovery, and both of them have to do with actors on TGIF television shows:
Helvetica Neue’s my company’s official font and is supposed to be used on all official external communications. They have a very strict but thoughtful and detailed style guide showing all of the color combinations and proportions, and about 2 pages of “do’s and don’ts”. I’m not going to show it to you because, well, if they’re that anal about 55 Light Italic vs. 64 Condensed Bold, then they’d be upset about intellectual property leaks. But I did find this, for some reason I thought Pete might like it.
Well, I tried to take over my friend Nick’s old apartment because it was cheap, but of course the notice had been put in, the rules weren’t going to be bent, and the leasing company ignored my phone calls. No harm, no foul, it just means I’m still on the prowl for a new place.
But now it seems I might be trying to take over his job? What appears to be his old job title has made itself known on craigslist, and I’m mighty tempted. I just can’t decide if I should do it just for the sheer irony, that weird misfortune that tends to place me in the vapor trail of friends I adored seconds too late, people who left my life right when I was starting to need their presence instead of merely enjoying it. From vapor trails on airplanes to paper trails in converted loft offices. It makes sense. I’m taking over in Seattle as he goes to New York, keeping the spirit alive that made us friends in the first place, the crestfallen sigh that signifies that we’re just too different from everything else. We’re like two dads who are chaperones at a girl’s 6th birthday party, talking calmly about sports, cars, sports cars, promotions and hedge fund techniques 6 feet in the air while our daughters and their friends scream about Barbie and Ken and Dora the Explorer as taffeta and jelly shoes are thrown back and forth by ersatz ballerinas burrowing down near the carpet. We hear the clatter of the juvenile world, we don’t understand it, but we’re reponsible to be with it and among it.
I feel like some of my friends in New York “took over” parts of my essence that lingered like the dust from a cartoon exit. Hearing how close they still are with the friends they met through me, and noticing that they are a now regular listener of a band that they learned about through me, I feel a bit empty. It’s copyleft at its most basic, and I’m all about what Geddy Lee is about too, the spirit of radio and all that jazz, and it’ll have to do since I lack intellectual property of my own.
My contributions to most things in the “artistic” world seem a bit peculiar, like the tropical paint jobs on Hanseatic-style townhouses in the Netherlands Antilles. I’m like a big offshore tax haven, an exotic and peculiar portal through which Europe and America conduct their transactions. My gift is just putting a spin on what other people have done, I guess. So I can’t be too mad, because it’s neither really mine (unless context is something you can trademark as your own), nor is it really theirs, either. And it’s always good to know that nobody does it better than you when it comes to your mix tapes, your television shows, and your soft indulgences like shopping for office supplies.
And I have a habit of wanting to be other people, too, just like I wish I could be the next Daryl Hall or Bryan Ferry. That’s why I had to question whether I wanted to be my friend when I saw his job posted on craigslist.
I don’t want to be my friend Nick, I just want to be more like him. I want more people to be like us.
I’ve been crying a lot lately. I don’t know if it’s one of those heavy puddles that merely turns things slightly damp and dark, like what would happen to the sod and the pavement when I would forget to turn the water hose off. I never was able to squeeze that tight chipped blue metal flower spigot tight enough. And then there was a hole in the hose and a kink in the hose and you wondered what sharp things could possibly be discarded underneath the tall blades of bermudagrass. So you tip-toe expecting rocks or a cap from a beer bottle but instead see ants and those floating white specks that came inside the soil of every K-mart 99 cent zinnia planter.
Then you realize that you cut the holes in the hose yourself, stupid, because last summer you wanted to go to a real waterpark, but tried to poke holes and hang the hose from the tree trunk in an attempt to tolerate a makeshift slip and slide.
I remember those summer afternoons, the front wheels of my mother’s front wheel drive car parked somewhat over the grass/asphalt barrier parked with the emergency brake up, positioning the hubcaps askew to match up to the stepping stones. Washing her car was supposed to be fun, she said, she always seemed to believe it herself, as if she were giving me an opportunity that she only foregoes due to being an adult. I was supposed to like playing with water, getting up close to the real thing, not those 80 or 90 die-cast replicas of Chevrolet Monzas, Ford Topazes and just maybe a Mercedes 300E.
But it was usually just me out there, all alone to do a task that my mother didn’t particularly enjoy, as I lug a big bucket of Palmolive and a leaky Armor All spray bottle that she bought in 1986. But I’m still a kid and don’t think of anything practical, as my soles develop leathery muppet/canine-type patches on my heels from the dirt and scorching hot plate driveway. The cleaner your mother’s car gets, the dirtier you get, but that’s okay for a kid, it’s okay to be a dirty when it’s the car, because the car is part of the family! Just like the dog can kiss your face and moms and dads and kids eat off each other’s plates.
It starts out fun, because you do love cars and plan on getting a hardship license, but then you get tired of gliding carelessly across the hood (or the bonnet) and the rear quarter panel windscreen (or the hatchback). You never could reach three specific spots on a late 1980’s Nissan: 1) the very top, with that sharp gradient from clear to a dark black digital mesh of carefully-embedded defrosting coils and luxury internal antennas, 2) the leaf-trap area near the wiper, the part that the wiper can’t get either, the unibrow middle where the furrowed brow sits on top of round eyes, one for each door. You just accept it and move on, every car’s wipers can’t get the part above the middle, it’s the part of the windshield that only a Mercedes can wipe clean, with its Bosch mechanics powering just one single gigantic helicopter blade, allowing it to do the job of two Michiganders for the price of three Cadillac Cimarrons. Kind of the “look ma, no hands” frivolous electromechanical geegaw, the one that has to eat every last pea on the plate and refuse indulgent dessert, the show-off brat that was aware quite early on that it was special, with its own set of headlight wipers by age 6 and seat warmers and its own chest of drawers with mahogany. And the jigsaw puzzle automatic transmission, the grown-up switches, the gauges showing all the extra credit it not only did but can do and will continue to do for the rest of its 450,000 miles.
But this isn’t that kind of car I got to wash - I got to wash my mothers car, who incidentally owned a Mercedes, but before I was old enough to hold a sponge to clean out its matching color hubcaps. Those days, we went through the gas station car wash, driving the extra light to go to the DIY place where you can shake out your mats without fear of hogging the line. It was the place with the cartoon picture of the elegant fancy Bentley and the Great Depression Marquee Font, evoking the concept of value, how cars are priceless antiques that even flapper girls could soap themselves with some economox brand borax soap, guaranteed to suds them up until they find a job with the WPA!
And they had their own air freshener machines, with a red flavor that looked like Kool-Aid, stored in these gigantic clear cylinders. They only cost 50 cents, they only cost enough to buy a coke or something, come on, why won’t you do the orange for me just this once? We already did extra bubbles and the 2nd drying, and we needed to vaccuum twice, why not just do the air freshener?
6 years or more of saying no, she said yes, and it smelled like generic Sweet Tarts. The new car smell had been officially killed not by Christmas trees or taking my socks off or carrying the dog to the vet, it was killed by some terrible automotive Crystal Light that really, I promise, won’t put on an extra pounds. Then my mother started smoking again, and it didn’t matter anyway, because it smelled like the occasional burns in the floormat that was the birthmark of any of my mother’s cars, whether pre-owned, one owner, a creampuff, a jalopy, or just a coupe with a cassette deck.
But as I got to be a big kid, it was Saturday afternoon and time to wash the car. No repeats of the flapper-girls swinging their pearls outside the four-dour imaginary convertible as the effete tires get gassed up and the derby-wearing mechanic waves them off with a sign of accomplishment and longingness. Not longing to be carefree flappers in a four-door imaginary convertible, but longing to be down in the spokes of that car’s tires for just a bit longer.
I spent too much time scrubbing between the spokes of my mom’s red barchetta hubcaps, even though I hated washing her car to begin with, but back then, I couldn’t just slack off and make an excuse - I did what I was told and that meant the spokes. By now, the lawn was soaked and drowned and the crumbs from the soil due to my mom’s shitty potting job were oozing into the muck, thanks to our lack of family trowels. Trowels are things that nuclear families buy because there are always projects with nuclear families. With just a mom and her kid, a trowel would be a good ice cream scoop if not for the fact that it’s used to plant zinnias.
I hated those hubcaps, because they were the kind that were meant to impart the image of alloy wheels that required the LX package, and so I had to scrub with sharp plastic edges to consider that contained way too much dirt that would not come clean no matter how hard you scrubbed. These economy car hubcaps had a set time to look the part of alloy wheels, and after that, they were just dentures and not those great shiny attention-grabbers.
And then we’re done, with all the water wasted. The result is a lot of effort on the part of a well-meaning but indentured kid, but there’s no sense of accomplishment like the next level in Nintendo or the highest grades in the class. Even I know that it’s still just a dirty car that was all my mother could afford at the time, that turns on when the key is inserted, that cheerfully peeps in a Japanese finger wag, bukuru yu seatabelta. It still reverses cassettes and has something called “auto logic”, it has BASS and TREB and you have to PULL for BAL. It has my mother’s favorite stations programmed in, 1 to 6, for some reason programmed to roughly follow the 89.9-107.7 routine, 1 being a low channel, 2 being a 95.x channel, 3 4 and 5 being the 101, 102, 103 channels that regularly swapped its formats from “alternative rock”, “country rock” and “classic rock” to “the best rock”, “Austin’s only rock”, “Seattle’s NUMBER ONE rock”, and finally, the fuzzy channels that represented a failed oldies format, NPR (what’s that?), and finally, the channel that misprounced Edie Brickell’s name and angered me so.
It was just my mom’s stinky Marlboro lights bucket-seated cassette with stock speakers car inside, as it would be after it was totalled in a car crash by yours truly several years later. But even when I was crumpled, I stared at that radio dashboard, with its preset stations 1 through 6 still in my mother’s original image, long after that had become my own presets. But I was different, I didn’t listen to music that was on anyone’s preset.
The car that I always hated to wash but did anyway ended up being my own, and I dented it at Wan Fu on Oltorf with Eric, I dented it here and there, I knocked the suspension off but blamed the speed bumps. I drove it so hard that it began to lose its fuel efficiency, going from about 35 to 30 to finally 28 and 26 when the A/C was on full blast and I was late for work.
I started to wear the car out, the one I never enjoyed much anyway and always had to pretend was good enough. But it did what it was told - just like I did what I was told in washing it, but after a while, it started to do what all old things and old people do - smell funny. It took on that decayed plastic smell that every used car eventually gets, except for Mercedes.
I was not sad to see that car go, and I was not sad to see all those car washes and wet lawns go, even though I had nothing to replace them with - my hands were not creative ones, as I sat trying to go on AOL without attracting anger from hogging up the phone line instead of turtle waxing the bumper.
I can’t say the exact summer my mother stopped making me wash it, but I do remember it was sometime around high school, because I remember talking to Farah down the street and standing in the curb of the road was a slow drain of brown soapy water from our driveway. I remember because I had my dog with me, and he just stood there in the curb letting the stream of water hit his asphalt paws, while Farah and I both hopped up into the median next to Mr. Mullen’s house. I remember those two things distinctly, but I don’t remember if it was on the same day. Either way, dogs and car washes, sometime in the 90’s. It was really all summer was for me until I learned to play the saxophone and got the bright idea to insist that my rich grandpa pay for trips to visit him in Washington. I got to where I am in Seattle today, better or worse, from those summers.
I think there’s a point to all of this - my mother loved me, and she never really got why I had no friends or was such a loner. She always said it was because I was a genius - something that made me feel uglier and worse, because “genius” was not the kid with spiky hair who wears umbros every day. He just got to wear umbros and have such shiny tan legs with little fuzzy blonde hairs. My mother didn’t really understand how to get through to me, so she recognized that I loved cars and that it was also Saturday and tried to put the two together.
But she was a tired single mother, she was a registered nurse with problems that only began with me. So she laid down on the couch for most Saturdays and definitely most Sundays of my life, drinking lots of beer and watching lots of cable television, while I was outside to give her some sense of “there, I fixed that!” It was a lazy but well-intentioned way to get me out in the sun, where hopefully I’d do what all other kids do, and that’s find another kid his age on the block to go “play with”. Get wet in the grass. Have a water fight with the holey garden hose, pretend to drive a stick and shout zrrrm zrrrm zrrrrm in increasingly lower gear ratios, even though it was an automatic that she clearly had to pay an extra $20 a month on the car note for.
She could never have expected that I was such a loner, yet such a stark and serious child, that I could possibly see her car for what it is - an economy compact coupe with nothing but getting to daycare, school and work on time on its agenda. But that’s 90% of why I hated washing her car. I hated to pretend that things were going okay when they were not, just like I would never pretend to drive a stick when I was 4′9″ and we clearly had a 4-speed automatic with overdrive. But I did it. And anyone who stopped to look in our yard those summers would have seen what they see today - somebody who does what they’re told, despite the unwillingness to pretend or reimagine their future. They would see somebody too scared to tell their mom they hate this, too scared to say hello to the neighbor kids, and left holding a leaky garden hose wondering what the hell God put him on earth for?
I always said to myself, as I drew on manila paper, when I grow up, I am going to be this, or I am going to be that, but they were always austere things like “owner of a chain of grocery stores” or a “television commentator”, being the only 3rd grader to know what a commentator was. I wanted to be a grown-up so bad, and I believed I was in a sense. While I was never fooled about the car washes and the playing in the lawn or the birthday parties I had to attend for stranger boys I never met and never would again, I was fooled by being allowed to pick up the car brochures, I was entirely tricked when my mother let me pick out which VCR that we would buy my aunt for her graduation, I was totally being played on when I got to hold the camcorder for the filming of her graduation party.
Looking back at that tape, it was filmed at mid-level and you saw more of my mother’s butt and the back of the couch than the lackluster mandatory party that my aunt had to pretend to enjoy. My shrill, wordy, bossy chattering that interrupted the mumbles and television hiss was a clear foreshadowing of the fact that I was clearly gay, clearly lonely and dare I say probably brilliant at times. But like all of the times that gave away the most about me, nobody was paying attention. I don’t think I’m exactly washing a car right now in my life, but I am certainly filming a very telling tale with the details happening right off screen.
But there was one great moment about my mother’s car, and being a lonely two-person family. It meant annual road trips to Oklahoma to see the only other family we had within a 7,000 mile radius, just me and her ready to blaze through Texas in time to arrive at my great-grandmother’s house by Lawrence Welk elevenses. Roonie, as my great-grandmother was nicknamed, was an odd duck just like me, English-born but Oklahomy-raised, 90-something, Democrat, will only buy Magnavox, generic lemon-lime, and loved the Dallas Cowboys. Going up to Oklahoma in my mom’s car with me was a treat, because everyone loved me up there. All my aunts and uncles and cousins would actually listen to me as I blabbered on like I am now, about how grandpa let me stay with him at the Hyatt (!) or how I would go on about how Austin is near Schlitterbahn, and how it’s actually like California out there with all the hills. When we went up there, I was a a genius, but I was our family’s genius, the one of us who would succeeed multimillionaire uncle Tommy with his invention. His invention was enough to earn him a company with a fancy logo and kit airplanes and a house just east of Taliesin East. I felt great going up there with my mother, because to them, I was some miracle, that an unplanned pregnancy from a heavy metal chick could have resulted in a quirky encyclopedia that was going to “make BIG BUCKS someday”.
But I never made big bucks, and I didn’t get to go to Roonie’s funeral as it was my third week of work in New York City. It wasn’t the ego boost that made those car trips in that jalopy Nissan so great, it was the time spent alone with my mother, the one that made me spend too much time in that car as it is.
It was special because she knew I loved cars. She knew I loved highways and road signs, and that I loved trips, and that I noticed when the state line was approaching, and noticed how the Oklahoma road signs have their own style, and how at each county line, the asphalt changes colors and textures - I asked her, why don’t they just keep on paving and share the costs together? I could never tell if we were going into worse pavement or better pavement, the thump from Tarrant to Wise county was simply an indication it was time to stop for ice cream at Braum’s in Decatur. But those thumps signalling highway workers turning back around made you wonder why they were so unfriendly. Then I thought about the lawns in my neighborhood and how you can see the hedgelines between each neighbor’s connected lawnspace. The thump between counties is there for exactly its intended effect, not because one dirt-poor Okie county paid more for their cement, but because they wanted to say “hey, you’re entering a place we call home, and this is where my home begins.” Just like there’s no reason why Mr. Mullen couldn’t have mowed the whole island of grass and traded off with us. Why did he have to cut his grass lower so that you could see the line? “this is where my home begins.”
I let the water run so that people would see where it was coming from, I wasn’t concerned about whose lawn was whose and whose county was whose. It was just that there were 80 different counties and 800 different lawns and each one being different that I always loved. I guess that’s why I talk to much -I love quantity. I love 8,000 wikipedia articles instead of 800. I love more Legos, more countries, more webpages, more countries visited, more music collected. I let the water run as a kid because I wanted someone to talk about Legos with. I was doing what I do today, and what I did at bars in Brooklyn and at parties with strangers - I stood there with a sad look on my face asking if someone would just play with me.
That was the dread that filled the return to Austin from the weekends in Oklahoma, but I usually hid the depression well. Because the last leg of the trip was always the most special.
During these Friday-through-Sunday grandfamily whirlwind visits, perfectly timed to allow for no vacation pay and no missed school work, the sun would usually be bright and hazy, and either cold or warm or about to thunderstorm and then wet the pavement. It was Texas, which meant nothing positive to me at the time, but it was my mother’s chosen “second home” and Texas is best enjoyed when seen from the dirty windshield of a car, even if it’s just a car with cheap hubcaps, manual windows and 4-cylinders. It had cold A/C, and it had my mother talking to me for 5 hours, where she couldn’t get drunk, she couldn’t watch a movie and fall asleep, she couldn’t go off to a concert and leave me with a babysitter. We had to bond, but didn’t have to call it that - it was just driving home.
My mom only once let me pick the awful air freshener at the car wash, but she always said yes when I wasked to take the long way home, down Highway 281, turning our 5-hour bonds on IH-35 into 6 hour bonds on pre-Eisenhower black-and-white-shielded B-roads. About a third of the way through or maybe half is Mineral Wells, full of abandoned art-deco real estate speculation, weeds, and an H-E-B.
Past IH-30, you drive through towns with oak trees and little plateaus hanging out like clouds for about 5-9 miles off in the distance. It’s all very Wim Wenders-esque, except this isn’t the desert, it’s honestly about the most conservative place in the country, but that’s not the oak tree’s fault. We usually stopped only for fast food and highway-side urinations in places like Itasca, Lorena and Hico, and we always stopped immediately if there was a Love’s travel stop or gas was under $1.25.
It was usually under $1.25 at a Love’s - a proprietary ‘brand’ of convenience stores with truck stop, cheap cassette kiosk, Subway, A&W, and more fountains to drink from than the largest doomsday suburban junior high cafetorium concep. My mother always thought it was a gal named Love who ran the place, “Hi, mah name’s Luvvvv”, she would joke. I thought it was a woman that is a common female archetype in Texas - the 2am gas-station clerk named Tammene or Pamelene or Suzy or Pam or Sandy. I could see her Love’s Travel Stop smock garnished with a plastic nametag that cheerlessly said LOVE in Helvetica. This Love-character never existed, but we always figured she was just “running thangs” from a portable building at the next exit.
Stopping to get gas in these small towns was really a matter of convenience and $1.25 or less gas, but it was also so that I could glance at the Rand McNally map that they always sell, and put one copy up with thumbtacks next to the stinky toilets. I always wondered why they didn’t just build a nice set of benches to eat and embed the map inside the table like they do the menus at Spaghetti Factory or Magic Time Machine! You can eat your sandwich and look at the great beyond. I guess those ideas are radical in small towns.
After the gas tank was full, it was again my mother and myself. I got what I wanted, the long way home, the peppermint ice cream, the Braum’s, the koozie, the Doritos, but my mother got to play her tapes.
Presets 1 through 6 had no meaning in the middle of Baptist bushland. It meant country or static or angry red-cheeked saviors gobbling up what is normally reserved for sports talk AM, so my mother during those trips would bring out her entire padded brown box of cassettes. They had some of my aunt’s left over from years ago, so it was an intriguing mix of heavy metal, 80’s synthpop, but it was also the stuff that my mother truly loved in a sentimental, lonely, alone with your thoughts kind of way.
I remember how excited my mother always felt when she talked about her favorite band, Rush, because she was never an intellectual sort and Rush was a thinking man’s (or woman’s) band. I think she was kind of pleased because Rush was about things like mythology, Ayn Rand, media pervasiveness, fascism, and echoes of the sounds of salesmen, but it was also crushing guitar solos, intricate, fey, cloying progressive rock segues. It was the same mixture of elements that have surfaced in my musical tastes as well, the raw talent to remind you of humanity’s urgency, the imperfections and the idiosyncratic flourishes to remind you that humans are not meant to be anything but blemished and utterly capable as well.
But there was one song that my mother loves out of all Rush songs, the entire canon from “Fly By Night” through “Roll the Bones” and it was one that was only played during a 5-hour road trip going 15 over the speed limit. As we always did, we left Oklahoma on Sundays by having breakfast at my uncle P.D.’s house, a big white farmhouse that screams Steinbeck. P.D. was a handsome blond 50-something playboy with a moustache and a younger wife who moved from Santa Barbara to Oklahoma to take care of Roonie as she started to become too infirm to take care of herself, P.D. being Roonie’s youngest son and the only one born after World War II. He sold his place in Santa Barbara, picked a big country house and bought it for pennies on the dollar. He kept another place in LA, and few people knew he even lived in Oklahoma, and even some of our cousins couldn’t tell you how to get there.
“My uncle has a country place that no one knows about…”
P.D. would make us food and talk about Mexico being his destiny. Jane would talk about how she is the only god damned Democrat in the county. P.D. would tell me I’m growing up too fast, and P.D. would say to my mother that his big sister Theresa, my deceased grandmother, would be so proud of Ann Marie and Matthew. He’d tell me how I’m going to make millions with uncle Tommy instead of be a beach bum like him. He’d choke my mother up before 10am, so we always had to leave.
And then my mom would play “Red Barchetta”, and I learned that there’s a reason for all of this and that it’s something that is a lot of trouble, but it’s just how our family operates. We do the stupid things to keep the structure of love in tact, knowing that rationality will just tear us apart. So I’ll happily wash the car if it means getting back to that place again.
And on Sundays I elude the Eyes,
And hop the Turbine Freight
To far outside the Wire,
Where my white-haired uncle waits.
I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car.
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better, vanished time.
