Fact or Friction*#!... 9/9/02

In Desperate Search of the Equalizer and the Sweet Second Chance of Extra Time

Well kids, I'm certain all of my friends are tired of hearing this, but I'm getting old. I can feel it in my bones, especially after running five miles or bicycling home from work. I can't just spring back from the hyper-physical exertion like I used to in my earlier, brighter days. I have to take a day or two off after each run. This is a mere five miles, mind you. Chicken feed. Chicken shit. And to think, a mere twelve years ago thirteen was a skip through the bloody country park. At the end of the work week, after a mere 50 miles of bicycling spread out over five days, I'm mush. My muscles go from fiesty gristle to rotting tomatoes. Is this the body's initial fits of yawns and creeks in the anticipation of the big sleep? If anyone in a black hooded robe carrying a harvest sicle comes around, I certainly won't play chess with him. I'm a terrible chess player.

The immediate pain after each run seems to be increasing. Ah, nothing a little yoga can't fix. Maybe. Well, of course, I'll need at least a day to recover from that. All the fibers in my body no longer scream in pain like the days when I was an energetic pup. They just sort of whimper, or just lie there and moan. "Goddamnit Basil Joe," they seem to be grousing, "why do you keep doing this to us?"

Well, that's easy, if I'm going to keep up with the twenty-year-olds of this world, well Sr. Viejo, we've got to keep in shape, no matter how much it hurts. Like everything else I do, well almost everything, the need, the burning desire to exercise is fueled by the quaint little need to get laid, or at the very least, not look like an entirely drooping sack of shit to the opposite sex. Yeah, I know, it goes deeper than that. Yes, I know the ladies reading this know better. This old man on the penumbra (my fave word of the last two months or so) of 40, wants to find his mate before everything just collapses and he's unable to get down to the Natch Foods Coop anymore for a quart of soy milk and a wink at the wiccan wannabes manning the cash registers and tofu aisles. Yes, your dearest hackmeister, yob-wannabe, cowboy messiah, class warrior, and all those countless other incarnations is in injury time. He's behind one-nil, a man down, and hasn't a clue of how to crack Love United's back line. Just when it looks like it's in, just when it looks like extra time (oh boy, do I need extra time) the goalie pushes it just over the crossbar. Heartache. Sweet heartache.

Ah, the near misses and the shots that just went wide, way wide, into the stands. Faith Hope was nothing but near miss. Sex only goes so far, especially when she never calls, only emailing me once saying, "sorry, not coming to Sacto this weekend. Staying in Chico. You're always welcomed here." Maybe something there. She's outrageously intelligent and fiesty, Cherokee Nation running hot in her veins, but she'll get her Bach at Chico State (where she has a 3.9 GPA by the way) and then head back east for grad school. Kid doesn't even have a major and she's already thinking grad school. Still teetering between Psych, Education, and History. I keep emailing her, telling her "psych! psych! psych!" and volunteering as her number one test subject. She can even be the first psych undergrad to admit to having sex with a patient. Could be grandly scandalous! Okay, off the upright. I like that kid. She has the highest self esteem of any trailerite I've ever met. From Vista Linda to Harvard. Okay, maybe BC or Tufts. UC-Merced anyone?

There was Sandra, a paralegal at a defense firm. I hung out with her for shits and giggles about 4 different times. Movie here, coffee there, dinner at Ernesto's. No big. Casual. Split the check. Then I really started to like her. I gave absolutely no indication of this, absolutely none, but one day, she just disappeared. She stood me up for coffee at Naked Lounge in Midtown. Didn't think much of it. However, got a bit worried when 6 days went by and no word. I called her at work just to make sure she wasn't sucked-up into a vortex or kidnapped by aliens on her way to Midtown 6 days prior, or just siezed by overwhelming boredom, a common dibilitating ailment in Sactown.

Ring Ring!

"Good Morning, Summers, Harris, and Rosenberg."

"Hi, is Sandra there?"

"Sure, one moment, who's calling. Tell her it's Joe, Basil Joe."

"Okay Basil Joe."

Long wait.. Maybe a minute, two minutes.

Woman returns.

"She can't talk right now." Click. Dialtone.

The ball deflates as it sails six feet over the cross bar and into the stands. An embarrassing shot. Jeers all around.

There's also the woman in another town. The woman I've told absolutely no one about. NO ONE!!! The secret girl. The one I met through an old girlfriend back in Tejas. The ex doesn't even know we were hanging, I think. This is the one I've flown to see twice in Vancouver, a fantastic town that you just don't want to leave. It's Kira. She's a goddess, and a fucking talented writer for the local weekly in Vancouver. Reading her shit just blows me away. She writes from a deep place, from the gut. It's beautiful, poetic stuff. I read it over and over again, and I'm like, "Wow, this woman actually let's me hang out with her, and actually lets me sit within a few feet of her. Wow."

So puke boy (that's me) naturally has to go get all googly for her, and fuck it up. So I did something a wee bit daring, and perhaps a wee bit uncool. Okay, really uncool. But I just had to do it. Something out of my control compelled me. Something deep and whacky, my inner Byron made me do it. Or perhaps it was just inner Godard or Trauffaut. Dunno. Does everyone have an inner Godard? Should we all run through the streets screaming about Marx and Coca Cola??? Je ne sais pas...I'll leave the judgment to you dear reader-> Well, about my perverse plot, anyway. I don't care what vous pensez de Godard. Please go easy on your crumbling hackmeister.

So the whole wild experiment went down like this..

Kira and I always talked openly about people we liked, our crushes, our dates, our disappointments, and we'd ask each other what the other thought we should do. Kira was one of only two people I told about The Great Sandra Debacle of 2002.

So, over the phone, I began planting the seeds of my insidious scheme. I started talking about this woman that I really really really liked and how I thought she was the goddess on earth, the dog's khakis and all that. The dilemma though, as I couldn't emphasize enough to dearest Kira, was that Ms. GOE lived in another city, and that any potenital relationship would be a terribly inconvenient, and possibly insane long distance relationship, and Kira's like totally, "Nah, Nah, follow your heart, follow it where it takes you." The message was basically, "PURSUE THIS WOMAN." Poor Kira, I'll bet she was certain that I'd fallen into the La Brea Tar Pits of Love with my Cinenerd bud in Hell A. I had her way off balance and she didn't even know it. I was really getting off on my perverse little trip into non-linear la vie comme cinema verite.

So I'm, like, cool. Good advice.

We talked about my incipient heart murmering for Ms. Out-of-Town at least four times over the phone.

So two weeks after the initial conversation on the subject of Ms. GOE, I show up in Vancouver, out of the blue, totally unannounced.

"Man, you are like Mr. Spontaneous," she says on the phone from the Weekly's office. "You are freakin' rampant."

I meet her at, appropriately, Caffe Bleu, which is this total dive on the fucking docks. The name is a total joke. It sounds like total yuppie world. I'd love the see yuppies in this place. It's mostly leather jacket art fags with blue mohawks and too much eyeliner who haven't bathed in weeks and heroin junkies who...uh...haven't bathed in weeks. So the place has, well, let's say, an interesting ambience, to say the least. Really romantic place. A place that can really stoke the soul's fires. But sarc aside, considering my twisted strategem, no place could be more appropriate.

Aside, Kira really dug the place. Made her little Miss Upper Middle Class Houston Memorial Heights Debutante ass feel like she was really getting down and dirty with the prolies. Yeah, Ms. Shikasura.. Did I mention that she was Japanese? Is that relevant? Is that un-pc.. this white trash dude try to make time with the asian girl. Am I a total Visagoth now?? Aspiring misegenator?? Slay me. Ms. Shikasura really dug "the people" as long as they were just sideshow freaks in the fantastic carnival of her life. Superior girl didn't befriend just anyone.

Kira is totally into the dirt. Furthermore, she loves Caffe Bleu because all of her friends refuse to go there, and she admitted to rendevouzing for some married dude trysts there-->> I think she told me that there were three of these guys. It was a place where she could go to lead a life separate from everything else she had. Plus, it was about two blocks from the paper's office. Short walk geographically, about a thousand miles psychologically.

So I segue the conversation about our respective jobs toward our crushes. I go on about my out of town crush, and try to get some specific advice from her.

"So, take her out, onto neutral turf, and spill your guts. Dozens of guys have done it to me."

"Did you reciprocate."

"To some, if I liked them."

"Should I kiss her?"

"You'll know if it's right."

"So, I should meet her in some divey coffee joint, and look into her eyes and say," at this point I get up from my seat and sit right next to Kira on the vinyl booth seat against the wall, below a black white and gray painting of a skeleton with wings flying over downtown Vancouver and look into her eyes,"'I think you're the most brilliant person I've ever met in my life and everytime I go back to Sacramento it pains me that I can't stay here and be with you.'"

"Sounds good," Kira says.

"'I think about you nonstop and not a moment passes without me thinking about what you're doing, what you're thinking, what brilliant thoughts are going through your head and being committed to a piece of paper or tapped onto a computer screen.'"

"You didn't say this chick was a writer."

"'And how all these miles that separate us are nothing. When I'm here with you the world is right," I look right into her eyes and take her hand, "When I know you're out there, even if you're 800 miles away, the world is right."

"Kira Shikasuru," I say, "I have the biggest crush in the world on you."

I kiss her and pull back.

She spends a few seconds looking from the table, then back at me.

A drag queen at the bar lifts his glass to me. I smile in return and lift my double espresso a few inches from the table.

There is a tense heavy silence for at least two minutes. All I hear is my heart pounding and the overwrought laughter of the drag queen and his "date."

Finally, she says, "I have this sudden urge to start smoking."

"Gosh, me too," I reply.

I bum two cigs and a light from the drag queen. "Here ya go, honey" he says. "Let me know if you and your sweety need more. Is she real?"

"I think so," I reply.

Kira and I light up. I drag and look at the floor, only glancing occasionally at Kira who is puffing away and studying me like a principal studying an unruly pupil. You could tell she was disappointed, only she just couldn't figure out how to tell me without totally going bonkers.

"You're pissed, aren't you," I said.

She took a long serious drag and a sharp piercing glare at me.

"No. Pissed isn't the word."

"Disappointed," I quipped.

"Maybe. It's around there, somewhere."

The long tokes from the cig were really pleasant. The only thing keeping me from running out of the place and jumping off a pier at this point. I examined the shimmies of smoke rising from the brown paper.

"Holy shit," I just realized in my head. "These are Shermans. Nat Shermans. The fucking drag queen gave us Nat fucking Shermans. What a mensch."

"You hardly know me," Kira says, "All I know about you is that you went to UT, like me and lived in Texas most of your life. Like me. That's hardly a basis for a relationship, and you live 800 miles away."

"Besides," I smirk. "What's a relationship."

"Yeah," Kira says, leaning toward me,"What is a relationship but a bourgeois right of possession dominated by the male hegemony."

Holy Shit. I withheld the urge to puke at this point. The thin line between love and hate couldn't be more obvious as my heart swelling admission of undying eternal affection was turning instantly into rage. Gosh, Kira had gone all Gloria Steinham on me.

I took the longest drag in tobacco history, burning the cig from midway to almost the end. All in the name of world peace, and whatever semblance of amicability with her Kira-ness that could be salvaged from my self-imposed debacle.

I sucked it dead and bummed another two off the drag queen. I placed one on the brown wooden table in front of Kira. She picked it up and started nervously pecking it against the table, one end after the other, twirling and twirling, as she finished Nat one.

"You're the one who said relationship. I just confessed my heart. This has nothing to do with relationship. This is a yearning heart's desire."

"So you're saying that you want to sleep with me."

"No. I just want to know how you feel. This is how I feel. How do you feel? Does everything have to be about calculation and advantage and fear and distance and all this crap you're giving me right now."

Kira Smirks. "Oh, and that little song and dance about 'this woman in another city' wasn't calculating."

"That's the only way I knew how to express it. It wasn't meant to trick you. It was meant to protect my tiny little bit of remaining self esteem."

"I can't believe that you, of all people, would travel 800 miles to pull this bullshit on me."

"It's not bullshit. It's how I feel. Do you remember feelings and emotions or did they suck that out of you in the suburbs."

"Don't go getting superior on me country boy."

I just smile and look around. I snort a little.

"Follow your heart huh," I say, looking straight at her, a fuck you expression leaping off my face and onto hers.

She threw a Canadian Five on the table and left.

I used it to buy the drag queen at the bar another glass of wine.

So much for clever daliances in other cities, other countries.

The referee looks at his watch.

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Today sucked. All of the crazy clients crawled out of the woodwork and oozed all over paralegaldom. I'll spare you the details. Crazies all. I was tense. Not enough exercise. Tonight's run really hurt, but man my head is straighter.

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BJR