XO
Last Days
MONDAY, JANUARY 10 Last weekend I left my suit at the cleaners on Broadway, after the one on 15th said they couldn't have it ready by Monday, for City Councilwoman Judy Nicastro's swearing-in. I didn't know if the ceremony was at noon or 2:00, so to be safe I asked for the suit to be ready at 10:00. Turns out the ceremony is at 2:00, so at noon I'm still washing my underwear and wife-beaters. In the 45 minutes from 12:15 to 1:00, I transfer the wash to the dryer, then run down to Broadway to retrieve the suit, bring the wash up from the basement, then shower and put on the suit. Before the event, I have to run an errand for Jeff. The company Jeff works for has been making boat interiors for Tom Hasseler's company. Jeff is quitting because the place is being mismanaged into bankruptcy, and Jeff is proposing to fill Hasseler's orders for boat interiors on his own. If Hasseler accepts, Jeff walks with a new job and his own business. If Hasseler refuses and calls Jeff's boss, Jeff will be fired. Jeff has been my best friend since high school.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 11 Tonight Jeff and I drove in the snow (which is not sticking) to the sad, nowhere land of the Eastside, to clear Jeff's tools out of the shop in Redmond. No word yet from Hasseler; Jeff just decided not to mess around and get out immediately. Emptying the trash at the shop, we find a wrapped Christmas present and a pair of Jeff's fiancée's panties (left at his mom's place over the holidays and mailed from Vermont) that were accidentally thrown away. We listen to Tom Waits' Mule Variations in the truck coming home, and Jeff runs up the stairs to the room he shares with his fiancée, singing in his best Tom Waits voice, "I've got your panties; I've got your panties." Then Jeff sees she's on the phone. "Who're you talking to?" Carrie finishes the conversation and hangs up. "That was Bill." Bill is Carrie's ex, of a year ago.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12 Tonight it rained, and the streets glistened, holding the reflection of what colors flashed and shone over them. As I stopped my bike at the intersection of 14th and Pike, a woman in a 4x4 talking on a cell phone asked abruptly, "Where's Madison?"
"Right there," I said, pointing to the ground on Madison, adjacent to us.
"Right there?" she said, baffled, as if I'd been pointing through the earth to Egypt.
It was too close to give directions to. I had to describe its location as if she were blind. "It's running at an angle to us. If you continue straight for 60 feet, you'll be on it." There were no words for exactly what I wanted to say.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13 In what would turn out to be a two-novella day, today I woke at 4:00 a.m., unable to return to sleep after a deep Ethiopian food coma, and read A. S. Byatt's wonderful "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" in the winter 1994 Paris Review before rising at 9:30 a.m. Later, in the time it took to ride the #38 and #8 buses from Fremont to Capitol Hill in rush-hour traffic, I downed the entirety of Conrad's 60-page homoerotic love story The Secret Sharer like the first shotgunned beer of a frat-house Friday afternoon. Using the connective logic learned in my Women's Studies class at the University of Virginia, I concluded that car-loving, traffic-jam creating, initiative-writing white male asshole Tim Eyman is thus part of a conspiracy to indoctrinate commuters with the dead white male colonialist apologetics of the ass-kicking Joseph Conrad.
··Also today: The city's "straight" and "gay" "communities" found common ground, as I agreed with the regular author of this column that the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs is the best record of the year, and that Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry is sexy as hell.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 Tonight at Angel's Thai Cuisine on Broadway, I watched black bodies in Philadelphia or Houston or St. Louis contesting gracefully under lights on the corner TV, while a man waited, smoking and foodless, for his friends to arrive, and a group of young women were regaled at maximum volume by a man looking like a young, blond, and gay Tiny Tim (the musical archivist, not the Dickens character). I realized that I had the whole table in my cab a year ago, and they were just as loud then. Meanwhile, a century of empires, brocade, and ships cried up from the page of a poem before me, and the rows of bottles behind the bar were as various and sweet to this dry drunk as a crowd of young lovers. On the street, a college-type guy murmured "hello" and made heavy eye contact as I walked by. When I saw the back of his jacket ("Union Gospel Mission") an hour later, I realized that he and his similarly windbreakered companions were only cruising for Christ.
··Also today: On 15th Ave E at 11:15 p.m., I witnessed an out-of-breath man in his 40s attempting to engage an uncomprehending friend in a game of tag. He is the oldest person, by a factor of three, I have ever seen doing this.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 Just after sundown I headed over to the Breakroom for the early, all-ages Murder City Devils show, but had more fun watching openers the Blood Brothers, whose high-school-age dual vocalists, looking like the Columbine killers gone right, screamed and ran around like a pair of flamingos in a burning elevator, while their entirely unjaded bandmates whipped up a heavy squall descended in equal parts from the Germs and Truman's Water. Some of our kids (the ones who live where there is public space in which to develop their own culture and mores) are getting better. No attitudes, hardly anyone dumb enough to smoke, and the boys were so huggy with one another you'd have thought somebody died. Bless 'em.
··Also today: A cure was discovered for the common cold.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16 Today gargantuan winds blew the power out for several hours on the swanky crest of Capitol Hill. At the Little Theatre on 19th E., patrons waited by candlelight for the 5:30 showing of the Andy Kaufman wrestling/ performance-art documentary I'm from Hollywood. The show began on time after volunteers ran several extension cords to the next block (where the power was on) to run the projector.
Send your Hot Tips to lastdays@thestranger.com or phone the 24-Hour Hot Tips Hotline at 323-7101 ext 3113.
