Sunday, September 24, 2006

Blurry

Summer of 1995 I returned from several months in Mexico. Before returning home, I spent the remaining money in my checking account twice by putting a final trip to the Yucatan with a girl on my debit card and making a cash withdrawal at an ATM immediately upon leaving the travel agency. That trip is another story that isn't at all blurry -- its pleasures and pains remain blissfully vivid.
The blurry story is my return to Portland. Everything went away before and during the Mexico trip - my Portland girlfriend, my best friend, my place to live, my '73 Buick Riviera, my money as I mentioned and, most notoriously, a few years of sobriety.
I wanted to get everything back but the sobriety. I was staying at my mom's house in Dunthorpe, no place to be without a car. I had the idea that a job as a busser at one of the better restaurants in town would be easier to get and pay just as well as some starting shift as a waiter. I started work immediately. Black bow tie and starched white shirt hustling dirty dishes and setting tables. Drinking every night after work at the same couple of bars that boasted the latest last calls in town followed by boozy after-hours bullshit sessions at some waiter, cook or bartender's apartment. Some nights the whole gang was there. Other nights it was but a couple of us. I was very regular. There was a pretty cocktail waitress at the after work spot that eventually became a bartender and eventually said no to a date with me. There were flings with some of the waitresses at the restaurant where I worked. One of whom lived across the street from me in New York a few years later. And another whom turned up back east as a server at Grammercy Tavern where my wife and I went to celebrate our marriage.

I got incredibly tan while living in Mexico. So much so that two months after my return during which I was still awake on the wrong side of the sunrise more often than not, I still had a pretty deep tan. One night after work I was at the late last call joint with a co-worker - one of the cooks I think. After work I traded my no longer starched white shirt and bow tie for a tee shirt from a surf shop in Puerto Escondido. One minute I was telling lies to the cook and pining over the cocktail watiress cum bartender, the next some woman was all over me. I couldn't tell you if she was pretty or not. A lot thick, dark and curly hair. Tall - ish, I think. I had been waiting for this to happen at this bar all summer. Of course she was attractive; how could she be anything but hot? Two o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday, rubbing an underemployed dude's forearms. She was sure the big muscles in my forearms were from surfing. I didn't bother to tell her it was from hauling tubs of dirty china and buckets of ice all over a huge terraced restaurant. It was the day before my birthday. If she thought she was getting a surfer boy rather than a busboy, I wasn't going to let her down with the dreary truth.
The cook bailed and I ended up at breakfast with this woman and her friend. Breakfast was a pretext to extend the possibilities of hooking up. Somehow I guessed her last name and we ended up at my mom's real estate office by the river. I let her friend make long distance phone calls to her boyfriend. There was a lot of running around to the different offices. Even into the copy machine room. Finally to the break room where there was a fold out couch that I called home when I couldn't make it to Dunthorpe for the night. By this time it was dawn and my birthday.
A few months later I went out with this woman again. By this time things were getting more and more blurry. It was Fall - dark and rainy. All the Summer-time drinkers were getting back to their responsibilities. I was wandering the streets making poetry out of my lonely pain. I was calling women I didn't have but a fleeting attraction for in the middle of the night. I was crashing the '71 BMW a friend sold to me on a payment plan. The woman from my birthday was yet another on my desperate hit list. I remember a few things from our date. She was a flight attendant on international flights. We ate at some fancy restaurant. I had some sort of fish filet on a bed of lentils and a lot of wine. We crossed the street for drinks at a dive bar. We went back to her place in Goose Hollow for duty-free booze and a quallude. Despite our previous encounter and lots of drugs and booze there seemed to be some resistance on her part. Something happened between us - boozy arousal and clumsy attempts at satisfying it. Then I woke up and went to a Latin American history class. After that I wandered around campus in a pained, blurry haze. I saw her from a distance a few months later on Twenty-third. I didn't say hello.

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