Brooklyn never sleeps. The bars close at 4am, sort of, and buses run through the night picking up wayward drunks who can't find the train. At the heart of Williamsburg, Bedford ave., sits a small opening with a patio able, maybe, to fit 7 underfed people. Inside you'll find the Lucky Dog, a misplaced wild west saloon, started possibly by accident, with a Brooklyn tint. The bartenders regularly pour free drinks, the owners bring breathalysers in to the bar on a somewhat regular basis (When they themselves are shit-faced) and scold the workers if they blow double 0's, the New York smoking ban seems to be optional - the owners strolled in with a pair of cigars hanging out of their lips - and the bartender will regulate the old jukebox, not the digital type, by typically throwing quarters at people and telling them to play anything from Weezer or AC/DC to White Snake. The bartender then proceeds to start singing and dancing to the song with theatrical flare.
This quarter flinging monster, half-viking, half-kitten, is Moonshine; Moonshine is never sober, never stops smiling, and if I were to stalk him home, I'm sure he probably doesn't sleep because he is too busy building magical sky-castles with rippling muscles while toting a long blond haired wig. The man is magical. It's obvious from the layman drinkers' perspective, but on a more professional level several awards from the city of New York hang above his head for "best bartender ever-ever" or something like that.
The Lucky Dog is called such because it accepts doggies. So imagine a drunken hole packed with an insane staff, regular shenanigan having regulars, quarters and other things floating blissfully through the air, all while a half dozen or so dogs crowd around your legs - Lucky Dog.
On a calmer day, I got a chance to meet some of the staff, Moonshine included. I sat with them outside on the patio during their smoke break and asked them what the owners were like, how they liked working there and living in Williamsburg. Moonshine was particularly chatty, and we soon discovered that we had both been present at Burning Man that year. If you were at Burning Man, you were sure to see the endless string of balloons floating through the air with no decided destination. At night they formed an eerie string of LED lights that seemed to mysteriously wave through the stars. No one knew where they came from, although it was obvious they were based somewhere, and they seemed to roam around the skies of the playa with no limitations. Either they were very fucking long, or their base was moving. Neither would have surprised anyone really.
Moonshine ended up being part of the responsible party for these balloons. Nothing really, for a man who forges flying castles with his bare hands, I thought.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Strategy: follow that girl on the bike, she's going somewhere we need to be.
There are quite a few effective methods you can use to find what you are looking for. You can use maps to find places, city zines to find events, you can ask people what's going on, or you can use the internet. Granted there are large piles of resources available to us to find what we need. My method is a bit bit different. There are only two steps: 1.) Find someone who looks interesting, or is doing something interesting. 2.) Follow them to wherever they are going.
This method is much more successful than you would think and ranks, in my book at least, higher than any stupid fucking Droid app you're going to find. This is the method I chose to use when we reentered Brooklyn the following morning. Aside from being forced into a weird zig zagging course through town because a parade decided to show up and follow us, I did manage to find a girl riding a bike that fit the description of step #1. That is to say, I like bikes. Step one, complete.
Step two was a little it trickier. We were still in the van, and the girl had an obviously superior vehicle which could navigate much quicker and smoother than we were able. So I told Jon to hold on.
"Whoa, you almost hit that bus?" Jon said, as I swung the van around a stopped city bus and made a right turn at the light.
"Did I? how close was it?" I asked.
"Pretty damn close."
"Oh, I should probably watch out for that eh?"
I was sure if we followed this girl on the bike long enough she would eventually lead us to the riches of the Brooklyn area. Damn the stopped buses, pedestrians, and parades, I was going to stay on this bogie.
The method paid off. It always seems to work, at least for me, but I'm unsure if it's because I'll just wind up finding something interesting anyway, or if it's actually an effective means to find stuff to do. I choose to believe the latter.
So this is how we ended up in Williamsburg. We found a parking spot after 10 minutes of driving around which was, I would find out later, a more than skilled feat. So we parked, I talked to some guy sitting on a bench for 5 minutes and then walked around the corner where I saw a girl with a back pack. Time to make friends. In my mind, backpack = traveling, and we were traveling - that's common ground, so the math added up to: I should go meet her. I walked across the street, tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she was traveling. Turns out she was just in from Dubai, and more originally from Canada. Neat.
Her name was Gina, and she was in New York chasing pipe dreams, and also, more presently, meeting up with her friend Jonathan whom she met in Columbia (I think, somewhere in northern South America). We sat and chatted it up for a few minutes until Jonathan arrived and joined our make-shift street posse. It was a quick chit-chat, and then Gina was eager to drop her backpack off and rest a minute, and we were itchin' to explore, so we parted ways.
We stepped through Williamsburg for about an hour and a half. I was personally making my mental map and learning the streets and how the city was set up: it's a square grid, bleh, easy enough though. We made our way back towards where the van was parked, just to make sure we weren't in a tow zone or something dumb. Living in Kalamazoo has me in a perpetual fear that my car will be towed no matter where it's parked, and so I have to check the van at least 3 times in a single spot before I feel safe leaving it there for any period of time.
The sun was on its way down when we hit a large intersection in the center of Williamsburg and took a break to look around and figure out where we wanted to go and collect ourselves at. But no luck for composing ourselves. I turned around and spotted Jonathan and Gina marching down the center of the street trying to hail a cab and I waved to them, just as the managed to flag one down. Jonathan asked me,
"Hey you wanna go to a boat party? It's 10$."
"Do I want to go on a boat...yes... Jon you want to go on a boat?"
"Okay," he replied. All four of us packed into the cab and we were off to the lower east side. While we were driving across the Williamsburg bridge, Jon decided to mention he had never been in a cab before and was a little scared about the way the cabbie was driving. I told him not to worry.
"They're pros. We'll be fine," I told him.
When we got to the boat, boarding went fine. Jon got frisked, but I was apparently too harmless looking to bother with, so I missed a free feel up by a 300 pound barbarian, shucks. The boat had a full bar, a small buffet, a lower sitting deck, an upper standing deck, a DJ, and of course a full dance floor on the top. We skipped around the harbor for about 3 hours with love music, it was bad ass, and I don't think we could have said "I'm on a boat!" anymore than we did. At the end of the day however it was a clean awesome, no drama, nothing crazy just good ol' boat party cruisin'.
Afterwards we took a cab and went back to Williamsburg where we parted ways with our new friends and chilled for the rest of the night at Lucky Dog with Moonshine...but Moonshine is another story...
This method is much more successful than you would think and ranks, in my book at least, higher than any stupid fucking Droid app you're going to find. This is the method I chose to use when we reentered Brooklyn the following morning. Aside from being forced into a weird zig zagging course through town because a parade decided to show up and follow us, I did manage to find a girl riding a bike that fit the description of step #1. That is to say, I like bikes. Step one, complete.
Step two was a little it trickier. We were still in the van, and the girl had an obviously superior vehicle which could navigate much quicker and smoother than we were able. So I told Jon to hold on.
"Whoa, you almost hit that bus?" Jon said, as I swung the van around a stopped city bus and made a right turn at the light.
"Did I? how close was it?" I asked.
"Pretty damn close."
"Oh, I should probably watch out for that eh?"
I was sure if we followed this girl on the bike long enough she would eventually lead us to the riches of the Brooklyn area. Damn the stopped buses, pedestrians, and parades, I was going to stay on this bogie.
The method paid off. It always seems to work, at least for me, but I'm unsure if it's because I'll just wind up finding something interesting anyway, or if it's actually an effective means to find stuff to do. I choose to believe the latter.
So this is how we ended up in Williamsburg. We found a parking spot after 10 minutes of driving around which was, I would find out later, a more than skilled feat. So we parked, I talked to some guy sitting on a bench for 5 minutes and then walked around the corner where I saw a girl with a back pack. Time to make friends. In my mind, backpack = traveling, and we were traveling - that's common ground, so the math added up to: I should go meet her. I walked across the street, tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she was traveling. Turns out she was just in from Dubai, and more originally from Canada. Neat.
Her name was Gina, and she was in New York chasing pipe dreams, and also, more presently, meeting up with her friend Jonathan whom she met in Columbia (I think, somewhere in northern South America). We sat and chatted it up for a few minutes until Jonathan arrived and joined our make-shift street posse. It was a quick chit-chat, and then Gina was eager to drop her backpack off and rest a minute, and we were itchin' to explore, so we parted ways.
We stepped through Williamsburg for about an hour and a half. I was personally making my mental map and learning the streets and how the city was set up: it's a square grid, bleh, easy enough though. We made our way back towards where the van was parked, just to make sure we weren't in a tow zone or something dumb. Living in Kalamazoo has me in a perpetual fear that my car will be towed no matter where it's parked, and so I have to check the van at least 3 times in a single spot before I feel safe leaving it there for any period of time.
The sun was on its way down when we hit a large intersection in the center of Williamsburg and took a break to look around and figure out where we wanted to go and collect ourselves at. But no luck for composing ourselves. I turned around and spotted Jonathan and Gina marching down the center of the street trying to hail a cab and I waved to them, just as the managed to flag one down. Jonathan asked me,
"Hey you wanna go to a boat party? It's 10$."
"Do I want to go on a boat...yes... Jon you want to go on a boat?"
"Okay," he replied. All four of us packed into the cab and we were off to the lower east side. While we were driving across the Williamsburg bridge, Jon decided to mention he had never been in a cab before and was a little scared about the way the cabbie was driving. I told him not to worry.
"They're pros. We'll be fine," I told him.
When we got to the boat, boarding went fine. Jon got frisked, but I was apparently too harmless looking to bother with, so I missed a free feel up by a 300 pound barbarian, shucks. The boat had a full bar, a small buffet, a lower sitting deck, an upper standing deck, a DJ, and of course a full dance floor on the top. We skipped around the harbor for about 3 hours with love music, it was bad ass, and I don't think we could have said "I'm on a boat!" anymore than we did. At the end of the day however it was a clean awesome, no drama, nothing crazy just good ol' boat party cruisin'.
Afterwards we took a cab and went back to Williamsburg where we parted ways with our new friends and chilled for the rest of the night at Lucky Dog with Moonshine...but Moonshine is another story...
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Click-Clack: We gonna ride Brook-Lyn.
We woke up, and I asked Jon if he wanted to stay in New Brunswick. I told him I most certainly did not. He agreed. And we were off, immediately and without looking back, away from the shitland that is New Jersey. On the way out I told him we should just dive bomb the van into Brooklyn and figure things out when we get there. The important point here, from my perspective, was to keep moving - particularly away from Jersey. Jon, being the compliant, shrugged his shoulders and said, "okay,"
An hour or so later we reached the Holland tunnel, an absolute master piece of civil engineering. The road and toll booths that led into the tunnel however, were not so intricately planned. Coming off the freeway, we haphazardly wandered onto a 10 lane street, that really was supposed to be a 6 lane street (I think), which was full of waving lines of cars that didn't seem to have any particular order or plan in mind. Moving at about 42 FPH (feet per hour), we crawled and powered our way through blocked intersections, swerving motorcycles, and creeping smart-cars which tried to wedge themselves into every ass-crack of a gap they could find.
We managed to squeeze ourselves about 6 cars back from the toll booth, which was relieving because we were low on gas and I didn't want to try and exit off the street to one of the Jersey gas stations that lined the entry to the tunnel, not to mention getting back into this nightmare. I was oddly glad I was driving the van. I thought beforehand that it was going to be a nightmare to drive it in New York, particularly in situations like this, but I found that I was mildly amused that I could shove cars aside using the "I'll fucking hit you," scare technique -
The "I'll fucking hit you," technique was primarily comprised of just driving at someone very very slowly until they realized they were in a tiny expensive car and were afraid to be run over/crushed. Of course, this feeling of dread could be amplified by squinting one of your eyes, pursing your lips, and scrunching your nose every so slightly to the side, achieving that determined, yet insane look. The crazy gaze, when paired with a huge van, terrifies people: when a driver looks up into the van's menacing grill bearing down upon them, and as they slowly edge their line of sight upward towards the gaze, they realize, startlingly, that it's being driven by a crazy person and their life might be about to end. They will get the fuck out of the way.
6 cars back from the booth, and with our spot secured, I was staring at the gas gauge wondering if it was going to hold out, or if we were going to have to run the gauntlet of drive-by fuck you's that would no doubt ensue if we stalled in the tunnel. A soft thud woke me from my mindless daydreaming in fuck-you land as the van rocked back and forth a few times.
"Oh, what was that?" I asked Jon. He stuck his head out the window and looked backwards.
He brought his head back into the van and replied, "Some guy just hit us."
"Really?" I said, laughing. He nodded. I shrugged, I didn't really care about the van's paint, and I couldn't muster up enough concern about a .25 mph crash. The point is, that fucker wasn't going to push me out of the spot, and I felt pretty confident that my 1982 G20 Chevy van could take a piss on his Lexus after kicking the nuts and bolts out of it's tail pipe.
He did, however, mind, that he had hit me and came up to our window to share his feelings with us through our window. His sharing included raised arms and a question, "why'd you hit me?" he asked.
"What are you talking about," I replied, "you fucking hit us."
"Well, you were trying to cut," he shot back.
"We're not moving, no ones moving, except you." I laughed and let him angrily stomp back to his car. Shortly thereafter he decided to just launch into the mess, and floored it ahead of us through some gap where he was quickly barricaded in and trapped in a swarm of cars.
We limped our way through the tunnel and emerged, unfortunately, on the lower west side of Manhattan on a Saturday night: I know, poor planning, or none really. Stuck in traffic, we started, somewhat desperately, searching with what means we had to find a gas station. We had a GPS, and the GPS had a "gas" button, and that was about the extent of our resources.
The first place it led us to was non-existent. Luckily, that spot was on a main corridor on the lower west side, so it only took us 15 minutes to explore it. The next spot the GPS told us to go was a little more complicated, about 5 blocks from Union Square which meant heavy traffic - not a good thing when your gas gauge dropped below the E an hour earlier. Without much of a choice we decided to give it a shot. Worst case: we could easily push the van faster than traffic, so it wouldn't be as bad as the van dying in the tunnel. Between staring at my gas gauge, and having a man walk up to the van and ask us if he could take our picture because we looked like Cheech and Chong, we made it.
We took a 30 minute break, enjoying our free parking on the lower east side. We got some fuel, next step: find the Brooklyn bridge. We decided to ask a cop the best way to get to the bridge, and he told us while giving us the your-a-fucking-idiot look after he realized we were driving. We got over the bridge without an incident, and began rolling around Brooklyn at about 11 or midnight.
To be honest, I wasn't really sure where to go, so I told Jon I was just going to drive around for a little bit until we found something promising. We stopped at a McDonald's for about 25 minutes to steal some of their internet, and without really much aid from that, we continued our wandering. After about 20 minutes later, after noticing 150 orthodox Jews marching around in full garb, I figured out that it was Yom Kippur. Considering the only two type of neighborhoods we were finding were Jewish and Ghetto-as-shit, I didn't think we were going to find much of anything to do at midnight, so we went to Queens...
It was already about 2am when we reached Queens and I was tired. I didn't feel like wandering around anymore and I didn't really know where the fuck we were anyway, so I told Jon I'm going to give it about 15 more minutes for something amazing to happen. Nothing did. And instead of staking out a spot in the city, I figured if we drove east on Long Island long enough we ought to hit some po-dunk hick town where we could crash in some parking lot. We found Hicksville, literally...and drove a bit south from there to some acceptable rednecky place where we parked next to a row of houses and called it a night so that we could have a decent amount of energy the next to tear apart Brooklyn.
An hour or so later we reached the Holland tunnel, an absolute master piece of civil engineering. The road and toll booths that led into the tunnel however, were not so intricately planned. Coming off the freeway, we haphazardly wandered onto a 10 lane street, that really was supposed to be a 6 lane street (I think), which was full of waving lines of cars that didn't seem to have any particular order or plan in mind. Moving at about 42 FPH (feet per hour), we crawled and powered our way through blocked intersections, swerving motorcycles, and creeping smart-cars which tried to wedge themselves into every ass-crack of a gap they could find.
We managed to squeeze ourselves about 6 cars back from the toll booth, which was relieving because we were low on gas and I didn't want to try and exit off the street to one of the Jersey gas stations that lined the entry to the tunnel, not to mention getting back into this nightmare. I was oddly glad I was driving the van. I thought beforehand that it was going to be a nightmare to drive it in New York, particularly in situations like this, but I found that I was mildly amused that I could shove cars aside using the "I'll fucking hit you," scare technique -
The "I'll fucking hit you," technique was primarily comprised of just driving at someone very very slowly until they realized they were in a tiny expensive car and were afraid to be run over/crushed. Of course, this feeling of dread could be amplified by squinting one of your eyes, pursing your lips, and scrunching your nose every so slightly to the side, achieving that determined, yet insane look. The crazy gaze, when paired with a huge van, terrifies people: when a driver looks up into the van's menacing grill bearing down upon them, and as they slowly edge their line of sight upward towards the gaze, they realize, startlingly, that it's being driven by a crazy person and their life might be about to end. They will get the fuck out of the way.
6 cars back from the booth, and with our spot secured, I was staring at the gas gauge wondering if it was going to hold out, or if we were going to have to run the gauntlet of drive-by fuck you's that would no doubt ensue if we stalled in the tunnel. A soft thud woke me from my mindless daydreaming in fuck-you land as the van rocked back and forth a few times.
"Oh, what was that?" I asked Jon. He stuck his head out the window and looked backwards.
He brought his head back into the van and replied, "Some guy just hit us."
"Really?" I said, laughing. He nodded. I shrugged, I didn't really care about the van's paint, and I couldn't muster up enough concern about a .25 mph crash. The point is, that fucker wasn't going to push me out of the spot, and I felt pretty confident that my 1982 G20 Chevy van could take a piss on his Lexus after kicking the nuts and bolts out of it's tail pipe.
He did, however, mind, that he had hit me and came up to our window to share his feelings with us through our window. His sharing included raised arms and a question, "why'd you hit me?" he asked.
"What are you talking about," I replied, "you fucking hit us."
"Well, you were trying to cut," he shot back.
"We're not moving, no ones moving, except you." I laughed and let him angrily stomp back to his car. Shortly thereafter he decided to just launch into the mess, and floored it ahead of us through some gap where he was quickly barricaded in and trapped in a swarm of cars.
We limped our way through the tunnel and emerged, unfortunately, on the lower west side of Manhattan on a Saturday night: I know, poor planning, or none really. Stuck in traffic, we started, somewhat desperately, searching with what means we had to find a gas station. We had a GPS, and the GPS had a "gas" button, and that was about the extent of our resources.
The first place it led us to was non-existent. Luckily, that spot was on a main corridor on the lower west side, so it only took us 15 minutes to explore it. The next spot the GPS told us to go was a little more complicated, about 5 blocks from Union Square which meant heavy traffic - not a good thing when your gas gauge dropped below the E an hour earlier. Without much of a choice we decided to give it a shot. Worst case: we could easily push the van faster than traffic, so it wouldn't be as bad as the van dying in the tunnel. Between staring at my gas gauge, and having a man walk up to the van and ask us if he could take our picture because we looked like Cheech and Chong, we made it.
We took a 30 minute break, enjoying our free parking on the lower east side. We got some fuel, next step: find the Brooklyn bridge. We decided to ask a cop the best way to get to the bridge, and he told us while giving us the your-a-fucking-idiot look after he realized we were driving. We got over the bridge without an incident, and began rolling around Brooklyn at about 11 or midnight.
To be honest, I wasn't really sure where to go, so I told Jon I was just going to drive around for a little bit until we found something promising. We stopped at a McDonald's for about 25 minutes to steal some of their internet, and without really much aid from that, we continued our wandering. After about 20 minutes later, after noticing 150 orthodox Jews marching around in full garb, I figured out that it was Yom Kippur. Considering the only two type of neighborhoods we were finding were Jewish and Ghetto-as-shit, I didn't think we were going to find much of anything to do at midnight, so we went to Queens...
It was already about 2am when we reached Queens and I was tired. I didn't feel like wandering around anymore and I didn't really know where the fuck we were anyway, so I told Jon I'm going to give it about 15 more minutes for something amazing to happen. Nothing did. And instead of staking out a spot in the city, I figured if we drove east on Long Island long enough we ought to hit some po-dunk hick town where we could crash in some parking lot. We found Hicksville, literally...and drove a bit south from there to some acceptable rednecky place where we parked next to a row of houses and called it a night so that we could have a decent amount of energy the next to tear apart Brooklyn.
Friday, September 17, 2010
"New Jersey: We're more than just a turn-pike" But you're not Jersey. You're fucking not.
Monroe Township, New Jersey
Monroe Township was infested with old people, smelled like train, and anyone under the age of 40 had been enslaved to work in dry cleaning shops and gas stations - the two things old people never get tired of apparently.
Lotten had disappeared off to some shaman gathering in the woods in Pennsylvania early that morning, I'm still not entirely sure how she got there, I just know she was gone when I woke up. I also had to sit through a ridiculous breakfast with Howard and his mother where they argued about whether sugar or raisins were better in oatmeal: fantastic.
After Breakfast, Jon and I wandered around the nearby area eager to get as far away from the old people, and their fortress village, as we were able. We didn't find much. Among the highlights were a Baskin-Robbins which promised free WiFi but failed to deliver, a park next to a pond which no one was at, and a high school. We stopped at the library for an hour or and decided to get the hell out Dodge, before we got recruited into the elderly's secret internment camps.
Where to go? I didn't know much about the cities of New Jersey other than most of them are ugly, violent, boring and smell like car exhaust. We decided to go to Rutgers college in New Brunswick for lack of a better thing to do.
So we drove as best we could avoiding the turnpike, and avoiding the turnpike in Jersey is a pretty impressive task in itself, passing dozens of signs promoting New Jersey as "Not just a turnpike". Right. We managed to dodge it for most of the trip, only being forced onto to one or two times for a short length. About an hour later we arrived in New Brunswick. The first impression wasn't too bad, there was a neat looking church right in the center of downtown with a graveyard houses nearly 200 graves shoved into a corner of a city block. I wouldn't be surprised if they unearthed several of those graves when they built the street and buildings around the church. There was a decent sized train station that was slightly reminiscent of the EL stations in Chicago, and they had plenty going on outside of them.
We ambled up a hill and down what seemed to be the main drag through the downtown and university area. About a half mile outside of the busiest area, we found a parking spot on the side of the street, locked up, and packed out into the town to explore. What we found was so far less than impressive that I could only imagine playing with a cup and ball would have been more fun then roaming the streets around Rutgers university. At around 6, no one seemed to be outside. The few that were, if I were to guess, were completely preoccupied about getting shit-faced later in the night.
Everywhere we went there were deli-like shops toting their city's famous "Fat Darrell" sandwiches which all had cute names like "fat bitch" or "fat whore". Fat sandwiches, by the by, are monstrous creations that are able to turn a city's population into a large scale recreation of "Biggest Loser" overnight. They are sandwiches that are stuffed with, but not limited to, mozzarella sticks, French fries, an entire steak, ketchup, pork rolls, a pound or two of cheese, fried fat, chicken tenders, eggs, mayo, or an entire hamburger and pretty much anything else they can fry and shove into a sub bun together. For example, the "fat bitch" includes: a cheese steak, mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, French fries and ketchup. That's right, it's an entire steak with 4 mozzarella* sticks and chicken fingers smashed into it, sprinkled with a quarter pound of fucking French fries, and dunked in a vat of ketchup. For the vegetarian selection,(yes, vegetarian) simply take away the steak and add a splash of lettuce. That's Jersey's famous food, a big pile of fried shit. Fuck you Jersey.
We wandered for a bit more, and finally decided we should find a better spot for the van. Here's another shitty thing about Jersey: parking. You know the street signs in cities that say something like, "No parking 2:00am - 7:00am Mon-Fri" or something vaguely similar? Well let me give you an example of a Jersey sign: Take the "No parking 2:00am - 7:00am" and add an : "except for permit district 1 residence." Then, underneath that sign...make another sign, an addition if you will, that is square. This part of the sign will say something like "District 1 parking 3:00 pm - 9:00pm only, except holidays." Now we have two signs stacked on top of each other, so under those put another long rectangular sign like the one on top that says, "Bus route 7B, DO NOT BLOCK BUS," and below that something that says, "Handicapped parking on Sunday, unless park is closed." And finally, at the very end of it all: "City of New Jersey, Violators will be towed, except Tuesdays."
I don't even know if I could figure out if it was easier to violate the sign or just ignore it and hope no one else knows how to read it. I park next to one of these signs, not really sure what the fuck is going on, and decide to ask someone to translate this Jersey chicken-scratch for me. I flag down a kid walking into a nearby house and ask him how parking works. He replies, "Oh, it doesn't matter. They don't check. I just park in the handicap space everyday." Great work, good job.
Jon and I eventually stumble into an underground hip-hop / punk club which is actually pretty great. We stayed there for about 3 hours and listened and chit-chatted with some locals. One of these locals we found ended up being a real gem of a find. Standing about five foot ten and in the shape of a Twinkie, Ski-boy introduces himself to us (I'm not really sure what his name is).
I call him Ski-boy because in the natural course of speaking, he finds it necessary to tack a -ski onto about every third word or so.
"So you broski's wanna go over my friend Jeffski's place and chillski?" he asks us. We have nothing better to do, so we go. On the way there he asks us where we're from, and we tell him. He also adds, "You look like you belongski in Brooklyn broski." I wasn't sure if that was an insult or just an observation, and at this point I really didn't care.
When we get to Jeffski's house, no one is there. We begin to try to separate ourselves from this hodgepodge Jersey posse that has formed around us and go back to the van to sleep. We eventually get clearance to leave. Just Before we go Ski-boy asks me why I keep making fun of the way he talks. I tell him, "Because if you talked like that in Michigan you'd get punched in the face," and walk away.
*In Jersey, mozzarella is apparently spelled mozzerrela.
Monroe Township was infested with old people, smelled like train, and anyone under the age of 40 had been enslaved to work in dry cleaning shops and gas stations - the two things old people never get tired of apparently.
Lotten had disappeared off to some shaman gathering in the woods in Pennsylvania early that morning, I'm still not entirely sure how she got there, I just know she was gone when I woke up. I also had to sit through a ridiculous breakfast with Howard and his mother where they argued about whether sugar or raisins were better in oatmeal: fantastic.
After Breakfast, Jon and I wandered around the nearby area eager to get as far away from the old people, and their fortress village, as we were able. We didn't find much. Among the highlights were a Baskin-Robbins which promised free WiFi but failed to deliver, a park next to a pond which no one was at, and a high school. We stopped at the library for an hour or and decided to get the hell out Dodge, before we got recruited into the elderly's secret internment camps.
Where to go? I didn't know much about the cities of New Jersey other than most of them are ugly, violent, boring and smell like car exhaust. We decided to go to Rutgers college in New Brunswick for lack of a better thing to do.
So we drove as best we could avoiding the turnpike, and avoiding the turnpike in Jersey is a pretty impressive task in itself, passing dozens of signs promoting New Jersey as "Not just a turnpike". Right. We managed to dodge it for most of the trip, only being forced onto to one or two times for a short length. About an hour later we arrived in New Brunswick. The first impression wasn't too bad, there was a neat looking church right in the center of downtown with a graveyard houses nearly 200 graves shoved into a corner of a city block. I wouldn't be surprised if they unearthed several of those graves when they built the street and buildings around the church. There was a decent sized train station that was slightly reminiscent of the EL stations in Chicago, and they had plenty going on outside of them.
We ambled up a hill and down what seemed to be the main drag through the downtown and university area. About a half mile outside of the busiest area, we found a parking spot on the side of the street, locked up, and packed out into the town to explore. What we found was so far less than impressive that I could only imagine playing with a cup and ball would have been more fun then roaming the streets around Rutgers university. At around 6, no one seemed to be outside. The few that were, if I were to guess, were completely preoccupied about getting shit-faced later in the night.
Everywhere we went there were deli-like shops toting their city's famous "Fat Darrell" sandwiches which all had cute names like "fat bitch" or "fat whore". Fat sandwiches, by the by, are monstrous creations that are able to turn a city's population into a large scale recreation of "Biggest Loser" overnight. They are sandwiches that are stuffed with, but not limited to, mozzarella sticks, French fries, an entire steak, ketchup, pork rolls, a pound or two of cheese, fried fat, chicken tenders, eggs, mayo, or an entire hamburger and pretty much anything else they can fry and shove into a sub bun together. For example, the "fat bitch" includes: a cheese steak, mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, French fries and ketchup. That's right, it's an entire steak with 4 mozzarella* sticks and chicken fingers smashed into it, sprinkled with a quarter pound of fucking French fries, and dunked in a vat of ketchup. For the vegetarian selection,(yes, vegetarian) simply take away the steak and add a splash of lettuce. That's Jersey's famous food, a big pile of fried shit. Fuck you Jersey.
We wandered for a bit more, and finally decided we should find a better spot for the van. Here's another shitty thing about Jersey: parking. You know the street signs in cities that say something like, "No parking 2:00am - 7:00am Mon-Fri" or something vaguely similar? Well let me give you an example of a Jersey sign: Take the "No parking 2:00am - 7:00am" and add an : "except for permit district 1 residence." Then, underneath that sign...make another sign, an addition if you will, that is square. This part of the sign will say something like "District 1 parking 3:00 pm - 9:00pm only, except holidays." Now we have two signs stacked on top of each other, so under those put another long rectangular sign like the one on top that says, "Bus route 7B, DO NOT BLOCK BUS," and below that something that says, "Handicapped parking on Sunday, unless park is closed." And finally, at the very end of it all: "City of New Jersey, Violators will be towed, except Tuesdays."
I don't even know if I could figure out if it was easier to violate the sign or just ignore it and hope no one else knows how to read it. I park next to one of these signs, not really sure what the fuck is going on, and decide to ask someone to translate this Jersey chicken-scratch for me. I flag down a kid walking into a nearby house and ask him how parking works. He replies, "Oh, it doesn't matter. They don't check. I just park in the handicap space everyday." Great work, good job.
Jon and I eventually stumble into an underground hip-hop / punk club which is actually pretty great. We stayed there for about 3 hours and listened and chit-chatted with some locals. One of these locals we found ended up being a real gem of a find. Standing about five foot ten and in the shape of a Twinkie, Ski-boy introduces himself to us (I'm not really sure what his name is).
I call him Ski-boy because in the natural course of speaking, he finds it necessary to tack a -ski onto about every third word or so.
"So you broski's wanna go over my friend Jeffski's place and chillski?" he asks us. We have nothing better to do, so we go. On the way there he asks us where we're from, and we tell him. He also adds, "You look like you belongski in Brooklyn broski." I wasn't sure if that was an insult or just an observation, and at this point I really didn't care.
When we get to Jeffski's house, no one is there. We begin to try to separate ourselves from this hodgepodge Jersey posse that has formed around us and go back to the van to sleep. We eventually get clearance to leave. Just Before we go Ski-boy asks me why I keep making fun of the way he talks. I tell him, "Because if you talked like that in Michigan you'd get punched in the face," and walk away.
*In Jersey, mozzarella is apparently spelled mozzerrela.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Detroit part 2: Howard.
Detroit, MI
With the van properly restocked, re-licensed, and repaired, we went to meet Howard. On the way there we discussed what Howard might be like, at this point all three of us had at one point or another talked to him over the phone, or e-mail.
A brief history: Lotten found Howard on Craig's List. His main concerns were about how old we were, and if we were "normal". I thought we might be in trouble when Lotten first showed me the E-mail (on account of the normal comment), but I decided we should just go for it anyway and figure it out later. Worst case, he bails, and we're out 30$. The day after we received the E-mail I talked with Howard over the phone and he seemed very concerned about getting character references from us, I told him he could talk to my mom, but she'd probably just say I was great because I'm her son. I asked him what other reference he might want, and he wasn't sure. So jokingly, but he took it rather literally, I suggested I give him the E-mails of some of my former professors and bosses, all of whom I knew were far too air headed to ever respond in time, not that it mattered. Again, I told him these people are all on my side, they aren't going to say anything bad, and I don't really don't have any objective references. he told me it would be fine, and I gave him my mom's e-mail and number. I don't think he ever called. He also gave me his mom's phone number, who was nearing 90 - just in case I wanted it. I didn't.
So this is Howard, a person who wants character references for a ride-share, works in a Detroit suburb, and generally seems worried about everything. I began compiling what I thought he was going to be like in my head: short, dress button up, glasses, a mustache, and 50ish. Everyone was in general agreement to this as we were approaching the address of Howard's friend's house, where we were supposed to meet him.
As we pulled into the driveway a rather stout polish man greeted us from in front of the garage. Howard hadn't arrived yet, so we killed some time talking to him about car mechanics, or something like that. I'm somewhat confident I was thinking about either spaceships, or David Bowie, or both.
Howard pulls up in some janky sedan, and he fits my description almost pin
on - sans mustache. We talk for minute, pack up his bag in the back of the van, and right before we take off Howard's friend looks at a stick on the back of my van that says DK and says, "Denmark! I lived there for a while." I didn't have the heart to tell him that I feel it's more likely to mean Donkey Kong. Although, no one really knows what it means, so I just let him have his Denmark experience.
By this time it's about 3:30, and I knew we were looking at a fucking late arrival in Jersey.
Fuck it. We rolled out anyway.
Howard ended up being a decent conversation, nothing too exciting, but he did at least know how to keep awkward silences at bay. We talked about running, health super foods, and some other mildly entertaining things, again nothing spectacular.
The whether decided to give us hell once we got into the Cleveland area. I felt a couple ways about this: Annoyed that it was going to take us even longer to drive through a raging storm, but at the same time it meant that at least there would something to look at while we drove through east Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and by that I mean Rain and Lightening which are far more interesting than anything you'll find in western Pennsylvania.
Then something odd happened. There are something you don't expect to come out of the mouth of a 50 year old Jewish man. But there we sat, driving down some podunk road in Pennsylvania when he brings up New York, and he says to me, "yeah, I used to go out on the pier and watch The Clash all the time."
"Excuse me?" I said back. "You used to go watch The Clash?"
"Yeah, we'd pull on our leather jackets and take a train up to the city and watch them play on the pier."
I was having trouble imagining Howard punked out in leather at a Clash concert, but the man isn't lying. He just sits there, content as can be, peering out the window through his glasses adjusting his collared shirt. I take a few more quick glances at him and get a picture of him in the early 80s in a ripped leather jacket, sitting on a pier, and singing along to London's Calling...and it's just not clicking. I just gave up after a while trying to figure out how he ended up where he, and just accepted the world was weird. 50 year old Jewish man used to be a punk rocker...whatever, add it to the list next to the California fruit detective.
We get to Jersey at 5:30 a.m. at a city called Monroe Township. Howard's mother lives in a more or less planned community with a guard at the gate. We get in, and drop Howard off and then passed out.
With the van properly restocked, re-licensed, and repaired, we went to meet Howard. On the way there we discussed what Howard might be like, at this point all three of us had at one point or another talked to him over the phone, or e-mail.
A brief history: Lotten found Howard on Craig's List. His main concerns were about how old we were, and if we were "normal". I thought we might be in trouble when Lotten first showed me the E-mail (on account of the normal comment), but I decided we should just go for it anyway and figure it out later. Worst case, he bails, and we're out 30$. The day after we received the E-mail I talked with Howard over the phone and he seemed very concerned about getting character references from us, I told him he could talk to my mom, but she'd probably just say I was great because I'm her son. I asked him what other reference he might want, and he wasn't sure. So jokingly, but he took it rather literally, I suggested I give him the E-mails of some of my former professors and bosses, all of whom I knew were far too air headed to ever respond in time, not that it mattered. Again, I told him these people are all on my side, they aren't going to say anything bad, and I don't really don't have any objective references. he told me it would be fine, and I gave him my mom's e-mail and number. I don't think he ever called. He also gave me his mom's phone number, who was nearing 90 - just in case I wanted it. I didn't.
So this is Howard, a person who wants character references for a ride-share, works in a Detroit suburb, and generally seems worried about everything. I began compiling what I thought he was going to be like in my head: short, dress button up, glasses, a mustache, and 50ish. Everyone was in general agreement to this as we were approaching the address of Howard's friend's house, where we were supposed to meet him.
As we pulled into the driveway a rather stout polish man greeted us from in front of the garage. Howard hadn't arrived yet, so we killed some time talking to him about car mechanics, or something like that. I'm somewhat confident I was thinking about either spaceships, or David Bowie, or both.
Howard pulls up in some janky sedan, and he fits my description almost pin
on - sans mustache. We talk for minute, pack up his bag in the back of the van, and right before we take off Howard's friend looks at a stick on the back of my van that says DK and says, "Denmark! I lived there for a while." I didn't have the heart to tell him that I feel it's more likely to mean Donkey Kong. Although, no one really knows what it means, so I just let him have his Denmark experience.
By this time it's about 3:30, and I knew we were looking at a fucking late arrival in Jersey.
Fuck it. We rolled out anyway.
Howard ended up being a decent conversation, nothing too exciting, but he did at least know how to keep awkward silences at bay. We talked about running, health super foods, and some other mildly entertaining things, again nothing spectacular.
The whether decided to give us hell once we got into the Cleveland area. I felt a couple ways about this: Annoyed that it was going to take us even longer to drive through a raging storm, but at the same time it meant that at least there would something to look at while we drove through east Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and by that I mean Rain and Lightening which are far more interesting than anything you'll find in western Pennsylvania.
Then something odd happened. There are something you don't expect to come out of the mouth of a 50 year old Jewish man. But there we sat, driving down some podunk road in Pennsylvania when he brings up New York, and he says to me, "yeah, I used to go out on the pier and watch The Clash all the time."
"Excuse me?" I said back. "You used to go watch The Clash?"
"Yeah, we'd pull on our leather jackets and take a train up to the city and watch them play on the pier."
I was having trouble imagining Howard punked out in leather at a Clash concert, but the man isn't lying. He just sits there, content as can be, peering out the window through his glasses adjusting his collared shirt. I take a few more quick glances at him and get a picture of him in the early 80s in a ripped leather jacket, sitting on a pier, and singing along to London's Calling...and it's just not clicking. I just gave up after a while trying to figure out how he ended up where he, and just accepted the world was weird. 50 year old Jewish man used to be a punk rocker...whatever, add it to the list next to the California fruit detective.
We get to Jersey at 5:30 a.m. at a city called Monroe Township. Howard's mother lives in a more or less planned community with a guard at the gate. We get in, and drop Howard off and then passed out.
Detroit part 1: I just want a fucking used tire.
Detroit, MI
Waking up in Warren, Detroit is about as exciting as waking up in a bank lobby on Christmas Morning when you're 9. Across the street from us stood an enormous complex that stretched, what would have been, five city blocks or so, but the complex had fenced off, barb-wired, and blocked any kind of through-ways that would have let the city keep any of it's cityness. Instead, it looked like a commercial prison where inmates were kept, but at the same time business men could meander around the hospital-style interior begging for coffee and vending machine snacks. They had a Starbucks in there somewhere, or their corporate equivalent.
I'm sure this worked out well for the company, having a completely self sustained business environment from which your workers had no need to ever leave, or couldn't. I felt a little depressed, and it reminded me of grown men wandering down hallways on their way past pasty cream colored offices, identically lit, on a closed campus. I was curious how long it took a new employee to memorize the lay out. I wondered how often people got lost. From the outside, for me, they were trapped in a sickening re-happening of high school, only this time they supposedly wanted to be there: this was their life goal, and they had achieved it far beyond anything they could have imagined when they were younger. This is where material and characters for office scenes in movies comes from, right here. A Hawaiian shirt day is happening in one of these buildings, a group is violently debating whether to go to Chili's or TGIF for lunch, and the IT guy is belittling someone next to their computer because they pulled him away from his computer cave. Right here, now.
I sat, still mildly depressed, staring at this worker-school-prison, and I remembered I could move; I could leave. I wasn't stuck here with them. I was just passing through on the way to anything I wanted. More important things were at hand, we needed a new tire, we needed our wheels to keep rolling, and I felt, after my zombie-gazing across the street, that needing a new tire was a problem I was only too happy to deal with. Detroit should be teaming with them.
You see, much like tumble weeds skitter lazily across the desert in Nevada, car parts and tires happily float and frolic through the abandoned parking lots and homes of Detroit. Well, not really, but really. If you were to go a mile or so south to 8 mile, you'd see more abandoned buildings than actual homes or businesses, and it has the same vibe as Gotham City: with gangs loitering in the alleys and, you know, tires bouncing down the street.
So we went a mile south and started roaming around. Unfortunately my theory that tires were uncaged and roaming was a little off. I decided to take Lotten and Jon on a scenic tour through the sad, and still saddening, neighborhoods of Detroit which are the real combined results of the car industry collapse and the mortgage crisis. After bouncing down broken roads pointing at dilapidated, leaning, houses with unowned meadow-lawns, women pushing groceries in baby-strollers, and men sitting in doorways where the boards had been ripped off, put back on, and back off again, we ended up at a Discount Tire back up around 10 mile.
I parked the van, dropped the shredded tire onto the parking lot with a clang, and dragged it over to the garage. A Russian man walked up to me, far too well dressed to be working in a tire garage, and asked what he could do for me.
I asked, "think you can fix this?" pointing at the long strips of rubber on the ground with metal wire, frayed, poking out and scheming to cut your fucking finger off.
"No," he replied. There was nothing humored in his voice. You could tell people came in and, legitimately, asked for this often enough that it actually annoyed him.
"Okay, seriously though, I need a used tire to replace my spare." And this is why I love seedy parts of towns: his eyes lit up, his face brightened and he spun around motioning for me to follow. He led me into a back room that was little more than a huge pile of tires that looked liked they had been chopped off parked cars and hidden back here. Then, he began digging through the pile - tossing the undesirable...wherever. It only took him 5 minutes to find the right one, and considering how many different tires there are, and how many were in this pile, I was actually quite impressed he navigated through a stack of tires this size so quickly, especially being so well dressed - in that Russian-Guido way.
"40$," he tells me.
"Deal."
He rolled the tire back into the garage and dropped it on the floor. Then, onward, to the salesroom to do get down to business time. While waiting for a register to open up, a BMW pulled into the front parking lot and a super-Guido steps out. This guy is night club material, he's on the list, silk shirt clad, and probably knows the owner. Only, it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon, at a tire garage, and we're in inner Detroit. The guy is obviously, in my mind, part of the Detroit mob. No one gets to cruise around inner Detroit in a BMW dressed like that unless they have some firepower to back their shit up, and in a foreign car no less. In general, from a city-wide sense, he's just pissing everyone off. And here, anyone within viewing distance already wants to slap a baton across his face and break his sunglasses/face; he hasn't even started talking yet.
He peels his glasses off as he enters the door, and already everyone is poised and ready to hear what egotistical bullshit escapes from his mouth first.
"I need 4 of the best tires you have, and I need them put on immediately," he tells the clerk who, surprisingly enough, stares back at him with a contemptuous face and says,
"It'll be an hour. We're busy."
"How much?" He responds back shrugging off the wait time. The salesman clickty-clacks on his computer for a moment and comes back with,
"890$, installed." Silky mutters something in Russian and waves his hand dismissively.
"Too much, let me talk to him." He points to a skinny kid who looks about 24 leaning against the wall behind the counter. They spit some Russian back and forth for a few minutes before he finally pulls a macho-man stunt and simply decides to swear at everyone, storm out the door, and squeal out of his parking space only to be forced to stop 50 feet away trying to merge back on the street. At this point everyone on the sales floor is giggling and pointing at the BMW which is trying to angrily edge it's way onto the freeway, unsuccessfully.
Amongst the giggle fest, a mechanic came into the salesroom and informed us that the tire wasn't the right size after all. Shit. I asked them if they had anything else, and they both shook their heads. They tried to sell me a new tire for about 100$, but I eventually left, determined to find a used tire somewhere.
By this point, communication with Howard, our Detroit ride-share, had begun. He was still at work and would be getting off around 2 or so. It was about 11am; we still had plenty of time to get a tire. We tried a Goodyear shop, a Michelin place, and even went back down to 8 Mile and roamed around for a bit without luck. In fact, none of them even carried used tires. Around 1, I called Howard and told him our dilemma and said it'd probably be a little bit later than 2. He didn't seem worried about it. From what I could tell, he hadn't exactly prepared before hand, and still needed time to ready himself for our mighty presence. Howard did however recommend Wal-Mart for a tire. I hate Wal-Mart, but I had to cede to him that he was probably right.
We parked at a coffee joint, and Jon and I grabbed a bagel while Lotten slept in the car.
"So do you think we should go to Wal-Mart?" Jon asked. I shrugged. I really didn't want to go, but I did really want a fucking tire, and Wal-Mart usually has some cheap Chinese stuff.
"I don't know...I hate Wal-mart. I just want a fucking used tire, we used to have piles of them at my grandpa's shop in Algonac. They used to be popular. Guess it's just all new shit now."
"If we were in Raleigh...they have used tire shops everywhere," Jon said.
The mention of Raleigh reminded me that my registration on my car was due to expire on the 25th, and that I should probably get that taken care of before we leave Michigan. The closest Secretary of State's office was on the border between Warren and Sterling Heights. Oddly enough, so was Wal-Mart. Knowing that it would take a couple of hours to get the registration done, and that we still needed a tire, for time's sake - I conceded. We got back in the van and drove up to Sterling Heights.
Waking up in Warren, Detroit is about as exciting as waking up in a bank lobby on Christmas Morning when you're 9. Across the street from us stood an enormous complex that stretched, what would have been, five city blocks or so, but the complex had fenced off, barb-wired, and blocked any kind of through-ways that would have let the city keep any of it's cityness. Instead, it looked like a commercial prison where inmates were kept, but at the same time business men could meander around the hospital-style interior begging for coffee and vending machine snacks. They had a Starbucks in there somewhere, or their corporate equivalent.
I'm sure this worked out well for the company, having a completely self sustained business environment from which your workers had no need to ever leave, or couldn't. I felt a little depressed, and it reminded me of grown men wandering down hallways on their way past pasty cream colored offices, identically lit, on a closed campus. I was curious how long it took a new employee to memorize the lay out. I wondered how often people got lost. From the outside, for me, they were trapped in a sickening re-happening of high school, only this time they supposedly wanted to be there: this was their life goal, and they had achieved it far beyond anything they could have imagined when they were younger. This is where material and characters for office scenes in movies comes from, right here. A Hawaiian shirt day is happening in one of these buildings, a group is violently debating whether to go to Chili's or TGIF for lunch, and the IT guy is belittling someone next to their computer because they pulled him away from his computer cave. Right here, now.
I sat, still mildly depressed, staring at this worker-school-prison, and I remembered I could move; I could leave. I wasn't stuck here with them. I was just passing through on the way to anything I wanted. More important things were at hand, we needed a new tire, we needed our wheels to keep rolling, and I felt, after my zombie-gazing across the street, that needing a new tire was a problem I was only too happy to deal with. Detroit should be teaming with them.
You see, much like tumble weeds skitter lazily across the desert in Nevada, car parts and tires happily float and frolic through the abandoned parking lots and homes of Detroit. Well, not really, but really. If you were to go a mile or so south to 8 mile, you'd see more abandoned buildings than actual homes or businesses, and it has the same vibe as Gotham City: with gangs loitering in the alleys and, you know, tires bouncing down the street.
So we went a mile south and started roaming around. Unfortunately my theory that tires were uncaged and roaming was a little off. I decided to take Lotten and Jon on a scenic tour through the sad, and still saddening, neighborhoods of Detroit which are the real combined results of the car industry collapse and the mortgage crisis. After bouncing down broken roads pointing at dilapidated, leaning, houses with unowned meadow-lawns, women pushing groceries in baby-strollers, and men sitting in doorways where the boards had been ripped off, put back on, and back off again, we ended up at a Discount Tire back up around 10 mile.
I parked the van, dropped the shredded tire onto the parking lot with a clang, and dragged it over to the garage. A Russian man walked up to me, far too well dressed to be working in a tire garage, and asked what he could do for me.
I asked, "think you can fix this?" pointing at the long strips of rubber on the ground with metal wire, frayed, poking out and scheming to cut your fucking finger off.
"No," he replied. There was nothing humored in his voice. You could tell people came in and, legitimately, asked for this often enough that it actually annoyed him.
"Okay, seriously though, I need a used tire to replace my spare." And this is why I love seedy parts of towns: his eyes lit up, his face brightened and he spun around motioning for me to follow. He led me into a back room that was little more than a huge pile of tires that looked liked they had been chopped off parked cars and hidden back here. Then, he began digging through the pile - tossing the undesirable...wherever. It only took him 5 minutes to find the right one, and considering how many different tires there are, and how many were in this pile, I was actually quite impressed he navigated through a stack of tires this size so quickly, especially being so well dressed - in that Russian-Guido way.
"40$," he tells me.
"Deal."
He rolled the tire back into the garage and dropped it on the floor. Then, onward, to the salesroom to do get down to business time. While waiting for a register to open up, a BMW pulled into the front parking lot and a super-Guido steps out. This guy is night club material, he's on the list, silk shirt clad, and probably knows the owner. Only, it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon, at a tire garage, and we're in inner Detroit. The guy is obviously, in my mind, part of the Detroit mob. No one gets to cruise around inner Detroit in a BMW dressed like that unless they have some firepower to back their shit up, and in a foreign car no less. In general, from a city-wide sense, he's just pissing everyone off. And here, anyone within viewing distance already wants to slap a baton across his face and break his sunglasses/face; he hasn't even started talking yet.
He peels his glasses off as he enters the door, and already everyone is poised and ready to hear what egotistical bullshit escapes from his mouth first.
"I need 4 of the best tires you have, and I need them put on immediately," he tells the clerk who, surprisingly enough, stares back at him with a contemptuous face and says,
"It'll be an hour. We're busy."
"How much?" He responds back shrugging off the wait time. The salesman clickty-clacks on his computer for a moment and comes back with,
"890$, installed." Silky mutters something in Russian and waves his hand dismissively.
"Too much, let me talk to him." He points to a skinny kid who looks about 24 leaning against the wall behind the counter. They spit some Russian back and forth for a few minutes before he finally pulls a macho-man stunt and simply decides to swear at everyone, storm out the door, and squeal out of his parking space only to be forced to stop 50 feet away trying to merge back on the street. At this point everyone on the sales floor is giggling and pointing at the BMW which is trying to angrily edge it's way onto the freeway, unsuccessfully.
Amongst the giggle fest, a mechanic came into the salesroom and informed us that the tire wasn't the right size after all. Shit. I asked them if they had anything else, and they both shook their heads. They tried to sell me a new tire for about 100$, but I eventually left, determined to find a used tire somewhere.
By this point, communication with Howard, our Detroit ride-share, had begun. He was still at work and would be getting off around 2 or so. It was about 11am; we still had plenty of time to get a tire. We tried a Goodyear shop, a Michelin place, and even went back down to 8 Mile and roamed around for a bit without luck. In fact, none of them even carried used tires. Around 1, I called Howard and told him our dilemma and said it'd probably be a little bit later than 2. He didn't seem worried about it. From what I could tell, he hadn't exactly prepared before hand, and still needed time to ready himself for our mighty presence. Howard did however recommend Wal-Mart for a tire. I hate Wal-Mart, but I had to cede to him that he was probably right.
We parked at a coffee joint, and Jon and I grabbed a bagel while Lotten slept in the car.
"So do you think we should go to Wal-Mart?" Jon asked. I shrugged. I really didn't want to go, but I did really want a fucking tire, and Wal-Mart usually has some cheap Chinese stuff.
"I don't know...I hate Wal-mart. I just want a fucking used tire, we used to have piles of them at my grandpa's shop in Algonac. They used to be popular. Guess it's just all new shit now."
"If we were in Raleigh...they have used tire shops everywhere," Jon said.
The mention of Raleigh reminded me that my registration on my car was due to expire on the 25th, and that I should probably get that taken care of before we leave Michigan. The closest Secretary of State's office was on the border between Warren and Sterling Heights. Oddly enough, so was Wal-Mart. Knowing that it would take a couple of hours to get the registration done, and that we still needed a tire, for time's sake - I conceded. We got back in the van and drove up to Sterling Heights.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Exit Strategy: Hello, I'm leaving. Bye.
Kalamazoo, MI
To be fair, everyone knew it was coming. And with a six foot tall Swedish shaman woman expecting me to run her away to New York, I wasn't about to renege. Lotten held up her end well enough, finding us a guy in Detroit to ride with us until Jersey. With a little under 5 hours before leaving, I thought up the now famous Peace-Out doctrine and drew up my exit strategy: Go find everyone, say hello, say goodbye, give hug/kiss/handshake/bomb, leave forever(maybe). The specifics of this plan...did not exist. The results were however, mildly successful, at least as successful as they can be with a quick-drawn strategy like this. I do not exaggerate its effectiveness when I say I dropped good-byes, like they were hot, to about 100 people in less than a day.
So with most of that out of the way, I had to finish up my computer transfers before everything was lost forever. I got a hold of Laura and she let me shanghai her computer for a few hours while I transferred the files back onto mine. About 5 minutes into the process with 3 flash drives blinking their little mechanized hearts out, I realized that this was not going to happen fast enough. It was already 8 p.m., and Jon and Lotten were, for the most part, set to go. I told them to run back to Avi's place, where Jon had his car stashed, to figure out their final details and I would meet them there a little bit after 10.
I decided to dump my beloved collection of videos and music. Replaceable as they are, it's still hard to push delete on the master piece theater of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding that is The Mighty Boosh. So cutting most of the replaceable crap out, I was left more or less with my writing doodles and pictures. Sounds simple right? Well it would be, if you didn't have a stack pictures that could bury several pregnant mothers and a dog. Estimated, the time was going to be about midnight before I had them all secured safely back onto my computer.
I called Jon and Lotten and told them we weren't going to be able to leave until midnight. I don't think they minded too much, and they didn't have much of a choice to be honest. As long as we got to Detroit, or somewhere close, so we could pick up our guy the next morning after he was done with work, everyone was happy. Lotten had also talked to our mutual friend Lando in Detroit, (other Nevada BM* folk), and he had a place for us to stay - if we didn't get there too late.
"What's too late?" I asked her.
"I dunno, 1? He has to work tomorrow morning."
"We aren't going to get there at 1, maybe 2."
"Well I guess we'll just be too late."
I figured it'd be nice to have a place to stay in Detroit so I went back inside Fourth Coast, where the computers sat chitchatting it up, and asked them if they could drop a HEMI in their pants and speed things up. They were too busy making out through USB cords and swapping flash drives to listen much, so I let them do their thing. Figured it was worth a shot.
When The files were wrapped up around 11:30, I remembered I still had to ditch the refrigerator-sized bench seat I pulled out of Matt's garage. First things first though, I had to get the computer back to miss Laura Hillen. Texting up a storm, (I've come to realize this is the only communication Laura Hillen will accept most of the time), I figured out she was at Derek and Nikki's house down the street, so I packed up shop and shipped out.
On the way in the door I noticed there was a lonely couch sitting on the curb. I figured it could use some company, like a bench seat. My beat seat was exactly what I had in mind, so I asked Derek if it was okay to drop it off. He said it was, and I kind of wondered why I asked since there was already trashed piled on the curb. Syd, the one the bike was for, helped me unload it out of the van and drop it next to the couch so they could talk before they met their death, being crushed and compacted into the size of a sugar cube, the following morning.
So long story short: I gave a few hugs out and said bye-byes there, picked up Lotten and Jon, and fired the Van up and took of for Detroit, city of industrial abandonment.
30 miles down the road everything was going fine, music was playing, Lotten was in the back doing whatever Swedish girls do in the back of vans by themselves, and I was happily gulping an energy drink hoping it would help get me through all the way to Detroit without stopping. There are only a few sounds that really irk me, the sound of Ex-girlfriend's voices, dogs barking, and, of course, the sound of a wheel grinding against the frame of a car going 70 m.p.h. Well, I thought, it didn't take long for God to swoop down with his glistening talons, scoop us up, and drop our marauding band in to a nice steaming pot of fuck-you soup. I've had wheels falling off my cars for most of my life, and I was pretty sure that this was the case here. A bad case, a wheel falling off usually means replacing 4-5 parts that attach it to the car...and keep it from...falling off and...stuff.
"Oh fuck, what was that?" Jon asked in response to the lovely metallic thudding followed by what I can only describe as a teenage girl's scream paired with the thuds of someone rhythmically hitting her in the face with a hollow pipe.
"Eh, I think our wheel fell off, or something. It's definitely something," I replied as we crossed over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder. After getting the van stopped, and to the side of the road, I popped the door and hopped out. Lotten, distracted by something obviously, was just now noticing what happened.
"Did we hit something? I felt a bump."
"I think we hit a kid," I told her.
"Oh no! really?" she yelled, more panicked, as she popped her head between the curtains separating the back of the van from the cab.
"No, I'm kidding. Hold on, I think something fell off the van." I skipped over to the other side of the van and took a look. By the great unicorn, it was just a flat. "Oh, shit it's just a flat," I said, scoffing. Moving, as Jon would later put it, at the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, I rounded up my gear and had us back on the road within a few minutes. "Well," I started as we all jumped back into the van, "we got the bad luck out of the way." And this was true, we made it the rest of the way to Detroit without incident.
We did however, arrive far too late to meet up with Lando (Awesome name right?). Instead of our expected ETA of about 1:30, we got there in record-smashing slowness: 3:15a.m. And for those of you who haven't experienced the beauty of inner city Detroit at three o'clock in the morning, I highly recommend it. With no Lando, we had to come up with new arrangements for sleeping. First, we heading to the north suburbs, so we didn't have to worry about being shot, then crawled around town for a bit looking for a place open to get coffee. We gave up quickly; hypothesis: there isn't anything open after 10 in the suburbs. Instead, we slid, sneakily, into a hotel parking lot and crashed in the van.
*references to BM, Nevada, or The Desert, are referring to Burning Man.
To be fair, everyone knew it was coming. And with a six foot tall Swedish shaman woman expecting me to run her away to New York, I wasn't about to renege. Lotten held up her end well enough, finding us a guy in Detroit to ride with us until Jersey. With a little under 5 hours before leaving, I thought up the now famous Peace-Out doctrine and drew up my exit strategy: Go find everyone, say hello, say goodbye, give hug/kiss/handshake/bomb, leave forever(maybe). The specifics of this plan...did not exist. The results were however, mildly successful, at least as successful as they can be with a quick-drawn strategy like this. I do not exaggerate its effectiveness when I say I dropped good-byes, like they were hot, to about 100 people in less than a day.
So with most of that out of the way, I had to finish up my computer transfers before everything was lost forever. I got a hold of Laura and she let me shanghai her computer for a few hours while I transferred the files back onto mine. About 5 minutes into the process with 3 flash drives blinking their little mechanized hearts out, I realized that this was not going to happen fast enough. It was already 8 p.m., and Jon and Lotten were, for the most part, set to go. I told them to run back to Avi's place, where Jon had his car stashed, to figure out their final details and I would meet them there a little bit after 10.
I decided to dump my beloved collection of videos and music. Replaceable as they are, it's still hard to push delete on the master piece theater of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding that is The Mighty Boosh. So cutting most of the replaceable crap out, I was left more or less with my writing doodles and pictures. Sounds simple right? Well it would be, if you didn't have a stack pictures that could bury several pregnant mothers and a dog. Estimated, the time was going to be about midnight before I had them all secured safely back onto my computer.
I called Jon and Lotten and told them we weren't going to be able to leave until midnight. I don't think they minded too much, and they didn't have much of a choice to be honest. As long as we got to Detroit, or somewhere close, so we could pick up our guy the next morning after he was done with work, everyone was happy. Lotten had also talked to our mutual friend Lando in Detroit, (other Nevada BM* folk), and he had a place for us to stay - if we didn't get there too late.
"What's too late?" I asked her.
"I dunno, 1? He has to work tomorrow morning."
"We aren't going to get there at 1, maybe 2."
"Well I guess we'll just be too late."
I figured it'd be nice to have a place to stay in Detroit so I went back inside Fourth Coast, where the computers sat chitchatting it up, and asked them if they could drop a HEMI in their pants and speed things up. They were too busy making out through USB cords and swapping flash drives to listen much, so I let them do their thing. Figured it was worth a shot.
When The files were wrapped up around 11:30, I remembered I still had to ditch the refrigerator-sized bench seat I pulled out of Matt's garage. First things first though, I had to get the computer back to miss Laura Hillen. Texting up a storm, (I've come to realize this is the only communication Laura Hillen will accept most of the time), I figured out she was at Derek and Nikki's house down the street, so I packed up shop and shipped out.
On the way in the door I noticed there was a lonely couch sitting on the curb. I figured it could use some company, like a bench seat. My beat seat was exactly what I had in mind, so I asked Derek if it was okay to drop it off. He said it was, and I kind of wondered why I asked since there was already trashed piled on the curb. Syd, the one the bike was for, helped me unload it out of the van and drop it next to the couch so they could talk before they met their death, being crushed and compacted into the size of a sugar cube, the following morning.
So long story short: I gave a few hugs out and said bye-byes there, picked up Lotten and Jon, and fired the Van up and took of for Detroit, city of industrial abandonment.
30 miles down the road everything was going fine, music was playing, Lotten was in the back doing whatever Swedish girls do in the back of vans by themselves, and I was happily gulping an energy drink hoping it would help get me through all the way to Detroit without stopping. There are only a few sounds that really irk me, the sound of Ex-girlfriend's voices, dogs barking, and, of course, the sound of a wheel grinding against the frame of a car going 70 m.p.h. Well, I thought, it didn't take long for God to swoop down with his glistening talons, scoop us up, and drop our marauding band in to a nice steaming pot of fuck-you soup. I've had wheels falling off my cars for most of my life, and I was pretty sure that this was the case here. A bad case, a wheel falling off usually means replacing 4-5 parts that attach it to the car...and keep it from...falling off and...stuff.
"Oh fuck, what was that?" Jon asked in response to the lovely metallic thudding followed by what I can only describe as a teenage girl's scream paired with the thuds of someone rhythmically hitting her in the face with a hollow pipe.
"Eh, I think our wheel fell off, or something. It's definitely something," I replied as we crossed over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder. After getting the van stopped, and to the side of the road, I popped the door and hopped out. Lotten, distracted by something obviously, was just now noticing what happened.
"Did we hit something? I felt a bump."
"I think we hit a kid," I told her.
"Oh no! really?" she yelled, more panicked, as she popped her head between the curtains separating the back of the van from the cab.
"No, I'm kidding. Hold on, I think something fell off the van." I skipped over to the other side of the van and took a look. By the great unicorn, it was just a flat. "Oh, shit it's just a flat," I said, scoffing. Moving, as Jon would later put it, at the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, I rounded up my gear and had us back on the road within a few minutes. "Well," I started as we all jumped back into the van, "we got the bad luck out of the way." And this was true, we made it the rest of the way to Detroit without incident.
We did however, arrive far too late to meet up with Lando (Awesome name right?). Instead of our expected ETA of about 1:30, we got there in record-smashing slowness: 3:15a.m. And for those of you who haven't experienced the beauty of inner city Detroit at three o'clock in the morning, I highly recommend it. With no Lando, we had to come up with new arrangements for sleeping. First, we heading to the north suburbs, so we didn't have to worry about being shot, then crawled around town for a bit looking for a place open to get coffee. We gave up quickly; hypothesis: there isn't anything open after 10 in the suburbs. Instead, we slid, sneakily, into a hotel parking lot and crashed in the van.
*references to BM, Nevada, or The Desert, are referring to Burning Man.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Fuck it, let's go.
Kalamazoo, MI
I was standing outside 4th coast café in Kalamazoo, Michigan around midnight doing the usual can-kicking that the rift raft around there does. Mostly, we just bullshitted, chased off panhandling bums, and stared threateningly at people who drove into the parking lot the wrong direction. We drank coffee too, but that was more or less an excuse to be there. Welcome.
Anyway, I was leaning up against the grill of my van when my friend Lotten, from the Nevada adventure (also from Sweden), bullied* her way into our circle and said hello. Quickly, she took over and decided the subject. The subject is: let's go to New York; time - now. A bit taken aback, not that I mind spontaneous adventure, I stopped a second to chug my coffee and replied, "Okay, when?" She goes on to say she wants to leave as soon as possible. Normally, I'd pick up and go, but I was in the process of transferring all my photos from a copy of windows, that was performing at about the same performance you'd expect out of a person having a seizure, onto my friend Laura's computer and then back onto mine after a new install of windows, so I told her it'd be a minute before we could leave.
Lotten, not one to let her optimism about things get dragged down by a setback, asked, "okay, when?" We decided on Friday at 10 p.m., and left it at that.
I had a lot of shit to do in Kalamazoo. So my mad rush to do everything began right then and there. I quickly turned to my side and recruited my friend Jon for the trip. The conversation went a bit (or exactly) like this:
Me: Wanna go to New York?
Jon: I don't know...
Me: Fuck it, let's go.
Jon: Oh, alright then.
Other recruiting attempts died about as quick as an ant under a shoe, so I returned my attention to Lotten and put her to work finding a ride share. Then I was off, I ran up to my friend Matt's house, where I had been living in my van/his couch for the past couple of months, and began ripping two bikes, a bench seat, and bits of carpet that were left over from the Van Renovation Project 2010tm, out of his garage. One bike I decided to leave for my friend Anya, and the other was about 50% put back together, but it was eventually for my friend Syd so I took that one down Grant Hill** to her house. Then it was off to Laura's shack to watch random T.V. shows while I entertained myself with a screen full of loading screens as I transferred all my files. I didn't get to finish this entirely because she had to work. I decided I should probably make a list of shit I had to do. I did that, and went to bed early so I didn't wake up at 4 in the afternoon pinch-eyed and pissed off about wasting most of the day when I had bags to tie up.
*Lotten doesn't take a lot of crap, and never let's things get in her way. By bullied, I mean elbows drawn and ready to take over the conversation. She also stands over six feet high which helps.
** Grant Hill is a nightmarish creation that sits in between Stadium Drive and Grant street in Kalamazoo. Its only benefit is that it will build your leg muscles in such a way that they'll resemble a brick. I am unaware of anyone who enjoys it.
I was standing outside 4th coast café in Kalamazoo, Michigan around midnight doing the usual can-kicking that the rift raft around there does. Mostly, we just bullshitted, chased off panhandling bums, and stared threateningly at people who drove into the parking lot the wrong direction. We drank coffee too, but that was more or less an excuse to be there. Welcome.
Anyway, I was leaning up against the grill of my van when my friend Lotten, from the Nevada adventure (also from Sweden), bullied* her way into our circle and said hello. Quickly, she took over and decided the subject. The subject is: let's go to New York; time - now. A bit taken aback, not that I mind spontaneous adventure, I stopped a second to chug my coffee and replied, "Okay, when?" She goes on to say she wants to leave as soon as possible. Normally, I'd pick up and go, but I was in the process of transferring all my photos from a copy of windows, that was performing at about the same performance you'd expect out of a person having a seizure, onto my friend Laura's computer and then back onto mine after a new install of windows, so I told her it'd be a minute before we could leave.
Lotten, not one to let her optimism about things get dragged down by a setback, asked, "okay, when?" We decided on Friday at 10 p.m., and left it at that.
I had a lot of shit to do in Kalamazoo. So my mad rush to do everything began right then and there. I quickly turned to my side and recruited my friend Jon for the trip. The conversation went a bit (or exactly) like this:
Me: Wanna go to New York?
Jon: I don't know...
Me: Fuck it, let's go.
Jon: Oh, alright then.
Other recruiting attempts died about as quick as an ant under a shoe, so I returned my attention to Lotten and put her to work finding a ride share. Then I was off, I ran up to my friend Matt's house, where I had been living in my van/his couch for the past couple of months, and began ripping two bikes, a bench seat, and bits of carpet that were left over from the Van Renovation Project 2010tm, out of his garage. One bike I decided to leave for my friend Anya, and the other was about 50% put back together, but it was eventually for my friend Syd so I took that one down Grant Hill** to her house. Then it was off to Laura's shack to watch random T.V. shows while I entertained myself with a screen full of loading screens as I transferred all my files. I didn't get to finish this entirely because she had to work. I decided I should probably make a list of shit I had to do. I did that, and went to bed early so I didn't wake up at 4 in the afternoon pinch-eyed and pissed off about wasting most of the day when I had bags to tie up.
*Lotten doesn't take a lot of crap, and never let's things get in her way. By bullied, I mean elbows drawn and ready to take over the conversation. She also stands over six feet high which helps.
** Grant Hill is a nightmarish creation that sits in between Stadium Drive and Grant street in Kalamazoo. Its only benefit is that it will build your leg muscles in such a way that they'll resemble a brick. I am unaware of anyone who enjoys it.
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