PrettyFakes

Dear Gene,

It’s deep into Sunday, the day after Wes’ bachelor party. I just read in the newest Harper’s that Gabriel Garcia Marquz listened to A Hard Day’s Night the whole time he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. So what are you going to get when I’m writing you listening to that Missy Elliott/Joy Division mashup of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Get Ur Freak On”??

First things first: any love of football has been burned from me, so let us not speak of it. I even feel bad about Eli “Dancin’” Manning doing the last-second tumblefoot waltz.

So the bachelor party was more of a ladies’ club—I think Ron called it “our schoolgirl club.” Reasoning? Well, we didn’t go to a strip club, or watch porn: we tried watching a documentary about porn, but we didn’t want to miss our reservations at the sushi place.

So: schoolgirl’s club. Another problem is that the same crowd had just gone out the night before to see the Overnight Lows at Martin’s, and we’d all gotten pretty drunk: so doing it again the next night was kind of wearying. After Sally left to head back home Saturday, Wes and I went to this new thrift store/flea market kind of place named NUTS, an acronym for something I didn’t care enough about to memorize. It was a dollar-fifty to get in, but they were about to close so we only were charged fifty cents a piece, which Wes paid.

He got some pretty cool stuff—a large plastic statue of somebody from Planet of the Apes being best. I got an old hardcover book with a lot of statistical information on Mississippi in 1930, which was two-fifty, I think, and a cassingle of “In Your Room” by the Bangles for a quarter.

I thought I liked that song—it starts really great and fast, with the vocals kicking in right off the bat, which I like, it’s very immediate, but then descends into this baroque strings-and-oohing thing that’s just awful. What the hell were they thinking? “Okay, girls, I think we’ve got a real hit here. But I tell you what—kids are really into string-heavy descending chords. Let’s mix a bit of that in and wham! We’ll be bigger than the Go-Go’s.”

Then we headed over to the Little Big Store, listening to the good-sounding but awfully-art-directed Hardcore UFOs box set and I couldn’t really find anything there. Out of desperation, I bought a Ringo Starr cd for the song “Photograph,” which is really good and sad, and Wes got a Hawkwind LP and a Squirrel Bait ten-inch and a twelve-inch of “Jump Into the Fire” by Metallica, which I almost queered the deal on, because I didn’t know he was trying to buy it, and I told the crazy hippy lady that runs the place “ooh! That’s a total import. It’s not on Metal Blade—look, I think that’s French!” Yeah, great friend I am.

Schoolgirl dinner at Little Tokyo II was pretty good, although the mean waitress wouldn’t get me any fried rice. I could fucking see it getting made just a room over, in the steakhouse part, and I was mad that she told me, flatly, “no rice.” While I could see it. Between that and watching Bama throw a big lead in the second half to Auburn, I was kind of cranky. Cranky meaning hung-over and needing a nap.

The bartender brought Wes a mohito, which killed me. Very schoolgirl of him. Then Daphne showed up, because Marsh had her keys or something, and she covered her eyes the whole time, and wouldn’t look at us. “I know you have a ‘no-girls’ policy, so I’m obeying it!” It was wonderful to see a grown woman with her hand clasped over her eyes going along with our stupid rules. She was really into it.

We got to Martin’s way early after Wes vetoed Elixer, the new upscale drink joint. “No way am I drinking a jug of apple martinis,” he snapped, so to Martin’s we went. Todd fixed us up a batch of kamikazes (which I wanted to drink after reading Richard Selzer’s “The Spinsters of Eld,” in the new Harper’s again (I can digest a New Yorker in two days, or at least in the week they give you, but a Harper’s wears on me all month), where a ninety-year old Irish schoolteacher is sipping on one) and we listened to Enon, who just played there, and for whom Wes & I made fliers, and Kaito, who he likes, and I don’t; Jose asked for, yet did not receive, rocksteady (he’s a big Jamaican music guy) (by the by, did you get a subscription, or are you still cribbing your mom’s New Yorker?).

So we got drunk on sweet shots and union-made beer (when we headed to Seabold’s to meet up at the beginning of the night, he offered us Coors Lite, and Larry & Ron—both of St. Louis—yelled “scab beer!”) and dodged the awful Pearl Jam against the Machine band from New York—the Holy Ghosts, or something equally brainless. I was pretty drunk by then, and when an old punk guy who still comes to the bar asked me about them, I could only grit my teeth and say “the singer has long hair,” at which he grunted and frowned, and promptly wandered off.

We stumbled over to Hal & Mal’s to catch the end of the Vamps, who were actually playing “Free Bird,” for God’s sake, a jazz band with too many chops fucking with the inevitable jackass that requested it, and actually tearing it up, too. M & J are there, and so is N, who saves my white shirt sleeve from bad red wine she’s spilled all over the counter (which the famously lazy bartender has not yet cleaned up).

Drink drink, blur, blur blur drink. Wes & Jose and I shudder over to J’s, where we catch that Outkast video for “Hey Ya,” which is awesome, and the new Britney Spears and Madonna thing, “Me Against the Music,” which is not. Then I end up at home and can’t find my Lynyrd Skynyrd record to listen to “Free Bird” so I settle for poor second-rate, fourth-rate Ringo, and I fall asleep.

Anyway, it was a pretty good weekend. But don’t talk to me about football.

xo,

Gorjus

Playlist:
Missy Division (??) Love Will Get Ur Freak On
Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland 1945
new pornographers – Letter from an Occupant
pretty girls make graves – the get a way
thermals – no culture icons
Sheena Easton – My Baby Takes The Morning Train
Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
rufus wainwright – april fools
rhett miller – our love
death cab for cutie – The New Year
dntel – dream of evan and chan
mates of state – parachutes (funeral song)
rainier maria – the awful truth of loving
Stiv Bators – Make Up Your Mind
berlin – metro

P.S. From an e-mail my Labor Law professor wrote me in response to my comments about sympathy strikes in the workplace:

If workers don’t start uniting in some way, we will all be zombie prisoners of corporate America.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2003 at 9:02 am and is filed under Gorjus, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.