Bored Rigid and Waiting to Get Famous
So anyway at least fifteen ideas of where to go came up and then none of them held anyone’s interest and we ended up sitting around on one of those lumpy, grubby couches smoking more cigarettes than we could afford and spilling beer on our pants legs.
Pete’s couches smell like grotty things have happened on them. It’s hard to describe the smell but it softly puffs up when you sit down and reminds you that this is no upstanding citizen you are dealing with.
Pete’s a cute enough guy, if a little on the portly side, but he’s got a cracked temper and flies into vengeful rages real fast. He particularly likes directing this frenzied wrath at me, I suppose because I am shocked each time as though it’s the first I have seen him like that. But it’s not and I’m not sure why, after all the times I’ve seen him do it, it still gives me that tight-heavy, immobile feeling in between my lungs and my stomach.
Tom always interferes with his thin-mumbled comments as I think Tom might love me although not as a wife or girlfriend or anything like that. But his interference only further enrages Pete who sometimes ends up breaking something. I think Pete actually hates my presence, but I’m not entirely certain.
Gina just rolls her eyes and says, “That’s Pete.”
Janie cooks pasta far too long and jar sauce not long enough and ends up serving it after everyone is too drunk to notice how awful it tastes or too hungry from smoking to care. The last time I suggested we add a little salt to the sauce and maybe some fresh oregano from the pot on the windowsill, she hit the roof and refused to cook for a while. Well, there weren’t too many complaints, just a few, which astonished me. Then we started meeting at Stella and Joe’s and Stella is an excellent cook.
Gabe is a little more Mod than the others and his band is pretty popular. He mostly only plays clubs now and kind of mainstream ones at that, not just Al’s Bar but also those slicker places with colored lighting and a big dance floor. He hasn’t done a wedding or a bar mitzvah in a year at least. He just got a short-on-the-sides-tall-on-top kind of haircut. It sort of waves around like feathers and looks very unusual.
At the barbeque we went to at his house, the new rental he has with the “older woman” roommate, he supplied more than enough Jager for everyone to get really stuck. We rested a while on the couches, which were half circles and yellow I think. Someone’s step-dad was telling us how to get used leather goods clean. I should have written it down because I don’t remember any of it. My skirt was a little short and I think Ronnie and Tom were looking at my underpants when I was lying down on the couch.
A couple weeks later, I went to a clam chowder cook off in Half Moon Bay with Ronnie. He stopped by when I was sunbathing in the front yard of the house with the lion statues, the one Karin and Janie and I rented together. He was looking for Karin, I’m sure as she is sweet and lovely and not as weird as the rest of us. But he was happy enough to take me along since I was the only one there. I got dressed really fast and we drove up there. I kind of gabbed a lot on the way, filling the inside of his truck cab with the same dumb stories told two or three times over because I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. I do that sometimes, and then I laugh in between.
Gina doesn’t talk as much as I do in the car when we are driving around. I figure she has some answers I don’t have because she is quiet and smiles mysteriously. She knows a lot about music and men. I don’t know much about either one. I know a little about clothes and books, classics and some new stuff but mostly classics like Dickens and Tolstoy. She doesn’t tell me too many of the secrets she knows but I figure if I keep asking questions, eventually she’ll spill.
Mo finished chef school in the City and then made us a really peculiar dinner in five courses of stuff we would never normally eat. Pete made a lot of jokes and ended up using the pâté like a Frisbee which I thought was really rude and embarrassing but I laughed anyway because he always makes me feel kind of on the edge. Mo just got drunk enough on the really good egg nog he made and didn’t pay any attention to the rudeness of his dinner guests.
Mike Romanof sang at the club under my new apartment (the one where I have no roommates) last night with his new girlfriend who looks like a mix between Natalie Merchant and Golda Maier. She’s kind of rough and seems like she could work loose from her hinges and go on a killing spree. A spicy type. I think their baby is due next month. But the singing was beautiful and me and Gina and Mike and the girl, shit I forget her name, were about the only ones there and that was ok with me even though Mike and the girl, oh Nancy that’s it, would have liked a bigger crowd. But what do you expect on Tuesday night? That bartender that I used to love is working at that club now. It makes me feel a little sick to see him because he teases me like I’m a joke lover or something. I just pretend like I get the joke and isn’t it so funny but I don’t really think so. His breath smells like corn chips.
Friday and Saturday nights Gina and I have decided to start our evenings at Mac’s on First Street. It’s down the block from Al’s Bar but more hidden and has fewer lights. Some of the men who go there would like to dress like we do in vintage and leather; so they enjoy it when we come in and are always glad to see us and analyze our outfits. They don’t like it if we bring straight guys and then it takes forever to get our drinks. So we just go on our own. Raphael is the bartender on Saturday nights and we prefer him over James, the Friday night bartender. James is very fat and very grouchy. He tells us if he doesn’t like the color of our nail polish, or in my case, how ugly my short fingernails look. But Raphael is charming and sexy and makes us feel like we’re the best girls in San Jose.
The drinks are cheap and strong at Mac’s but I don’t only care about that as I don’t really like to get drunk. Just going out and seeing what’s up, what might happen by midnight to set the tone for the rest of the night is really fun for me. Well, sometimes I’m incredibly bored standing around a club, holding a martini with two olives and smoking my menthols. But Gina seems to think we’re doing the right thing and I’m kind of following her cue.
Gina wears a lot of huge silver jewelry that she buys in head shops and at swap meets. She has beautiful mannish hands and when she has her long nails done thick and pearly white they look like the talons of a magnificent bird of prey. She moves like a cat with a long braid swinging and her big eyes outlined in black. She’s so gorgeous it makes the men spin and everyone’s heart is aching just to look at her.
There’s a vacuum cleaner in the center of the living room at this guy’s house, a guy Gina met at the club. Well, it’s not exactly in the center as that would block the console TV. It’s the kind that has a tray of water in the bottom to catch the dust and the water is thick with dirt and toenail parings and dog hair. I bet they’ve never changed the water, maybe they’ve never even used the vacuum. Maybe it’s art for them. But it’s not in the center of the living room. It’s sort of to the right of the TV between the brown plush couch and the glass coffee table. The glass coffee table has rings from cups of spilled beer or coke or a little of the hard. There are trails of brownish-green leaves dropped from the one time someone tried to fill a bong when he was too drunk.
