My friend Benji recently mailed me a DVD for my birthday, Million Dollar Mystery, a “madcap” race-for-the-money flick in the vein of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I thought perhaps he had given it to me because the case referenced It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and I saw that movie when I was a kid and loved it. I saw it again last year and didn’t, eh, think it was so hot anymore, and similarly, Million Dollar Mystery pretty much sucked too. There were a few good lines, my favorite being when this family crashes their car into a toxic waste pond and, upon turning around to see the car melting, the dad puts his hands on top of his head and yells “My Volvo!”. I wrote to Benji thanking him for the gift and mentioned that there was a specific moment towards the end that made me realize I’d seen the movie, or at least the end, somewhere before. He informed me that we’d seen the movie together as kids more than once, and that I’d thought it was great. I found it unusual that I’d forgotten about the movie entirely, but wasn’t too surprised that I was really into the movie as a kid since I’ve been pretty obsessed with money as long as I can remember.

I remember that one of the most profound tragedies of my youth was when my Great Uncle Stanley, who had made a small fortune for himself in, I believe, vacuum cleaners, visited and gave me a hundred dollar bill, which my parents made me give back. I never had an allowance growing up in New Hampshire, and discretionary spending money was scarce. Nearly once a week I would ask my parents if there were any extra chores I could do for cash, and this practice continued well into my teens even though the scene generally ended with me being given additional chores with no corresponding financial benefit. While of course I wanted toys and candy just as much as any kid, my primary lust was for baseball cards, and I spent hours shuffling through my existing collection and dreaming of the cash that would expand it. A devastating blow was struck when the price of baseball cards at the local gas station went up a nickel to fifty-five cents, meaning that I could no longer get two packs for a dollar. In any case, an elemental tightness with money was instilled in me from early on.

Throughout my teenage years, after my baseball card obsession waned, I was incredibly reluctant to spend any of the money I earned. Within a year of getting my first job as a busboy, I was able to buy my first electric guitar and amp, and my first car, a ‘59 Studebaker Lark, and I saved pretty much everything else. This miserliness served me well after I was fired from that job shortly before my junior prom, as the savings I’d accumulated allowed me to explain to my parents that I had some money saved and wanted to enjoy the summer. I entered college with some money in the bank, and thanks to a soul-crushing sixty-hours-a-week job during the summer between my first and second years of college, I still had a couple grand in the bank when I graduated. One of the best instances of my obsession with thrift from the college era came when I blew up at my roommate because I felt I’d been unfairly burdened by paying for the stamps we used to pay our phone bill. I felt he owed me a dollar twenty-eight.

Everything changed the summer after I graduated, when I made it a point to blow all of my savings, a goal made all the easier by virtue of turning 21 a few months before. It felt great. For the first time, I’d consider going out to eat just for the hell of it, and when I got fast food, I’d spring for a soda. When I lost forty bucks in Vegas at the beginning of the summer, don’t get me wrong, it hurt, but it felt good finally spending the money that I’d earned instead of focusing on just having it for indistinct future purposes. Two grand of the last 2500 bucks I had in the bank went to a ‘93 Mercury Topaz that I drove home to start an internship with the City of Brentwood planning department, and living at home again, with all my old friends either in school or working full-time, saving was pretty easy once again. I had money in the bank again when I moved back to Arcata after the internship ended, but being back in Arcata with all the free time in the world, it was easy to run through that in a couple of months. May 2003 became the first month I didn’t pay off the entire balance of my credit card, and a few weeks after finally getting a job later that summer, I bought a new amp for six hundred and fifty bucks, establishing a new set of spending habits that has continued ever since.

Money has been more or less a worry ever since, and it fucking blows. During the year I was doing pizza delivery, I was constantly preoccupied with having a good variety of small bills in my wallet for change, and when I found that it was actually affecting how I spent my money, it really got under my skin. Last month I had a moment of clarity where I was smoking a cig in the shelter of the back alcove of my apartment while it was raining and I realized DAMN, I am fucking poor. I threw my hat down, and it was pretty funny at the time, but most of the time, it’s not so funny. I’m certainly well aware that my particular state of poor isn’t as grim as it is for a lot of people, but it still blows. I found fifty cents on the floor after my birthday party a few weeks ago, and that qualified as the highlight of the evening. Committing to some sort of “career” type job would certainly go a long way towards alleviating my money worries, but I’m entirely unwilling to do that, it just doesn’t suit me. For the meantime, I’ll just keep working fifteen hours a week, leaving me all the time in the world to worry about getting by and getting down on myself for not spending as much time writing as I do thinking about what I’d do if ten grand fell into my lap.

During a period at my old house in Oakland where I lived with nine roommates, some new blood, as new blood was wont to do, got fervent about cleaning up the backyard. Specifically, they wanted to move one or both of one of my roommates’ hulking dead vans out to somewhere more appropriate, such as a David Lynch movie. After trying the more direct and polite tactic of asking him nicely several times, they pulled the sneaky, backhanded move of calling the city property inspection division to come out and sticker them as “nuisances”. An unintended consequence of this was getting my car tagged as well, since my registration was expired. I’d been living at the house for about nine months at this point and working at the law office for a year, and was about to throw in the towel on both situations. A weekend out of town to clear my head was in order, and I decided to kill two birds by selecting the weekend that my dad’s girlfriend’s mother was visiting. I really had no interest in meeting an eighty year-old New Yorker who I was certain would ask me when I was going to start a real career and settle down with a nice Jewish girl.

Whitney and I left on a Saturday morning bound for Monterey, where her best friend Marie was living. We stopped at the DMV on the way out of town to take care of my registration problem and I smoked a celebratory bowl in the parking lot afterwards. It was late June, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the drive to Monterey took less time than I thought it would. We got to town around two and found Marie at the downtown coffee shop where she worked. She advised us to check out the “Blues” festival happening at the town plaza, so we secured a pint of whiskey and some soda and made our way over. The first band was a cover group that Marie had told us about, and I was surprised to find that she wasn’t exaggerating when she had told me they played an equal mix of classic rock, salsa, and Green Day. Also delightful was seeing that Marie’s impression of the keyboard player was spot-on; she was this petite woman in her fifties that stood as far back from the instrument as possible and extended her arms straight out while bobbing her head in a robotic and unceasing side-to-side pattern. Fucking bizarre.

We soaked that all in for a little bit and then took a pleasant walk down a pier where Whitney shared some amusing tales of getting stoned in Danville and decided that sea otters were lazy jerks, possibly worse than the fucking sea cows that hand out near Pier 39. Stopping back by the Marie’s café, we encountered this really suave guy in his seventies who had always flirted with Whitney in the past and seemed decidedly unenthused by my presence. While killing more time walking around drinking a quart of Natural Ice and waiting for Marie to get off of work, I took a call from my Dad and admitted that I’d gone out of town. The call was brief but uncomfortable, and marks a very clear point in the day where the mood began to shift. This was also when I began to acknowledge that I was pretty drunk-coincidence?

Marie got off, and the three of us cruised back her apartment, drank some wine with her roommate, and then set out again to go to Marie’s favorite bar, the British Bulldog. Whitney said she was going to take a short nap in the back of the car, so it was just me that Marie introduced to her friend Roger when we got to the bar. Roger was a British guy in his fifties, and quite a character, he was fond of brushing his hand back across his hair to accentuate his big earring and proclaiming how handsome he was. He regaled me with tales of being beaten up in jail in his youth and his travels with the British army in the sixties, and was not shy about describing specific things he wished to do to Marie when she “realized she wasn’t into the lasses”.

After a few hours Whitney staggered in and said that getting something to eat was a strong priority, so I asked for my tab. I disagreed with it, explaining to the bartender that I’d paid cash for my first beer, and initially this was met with no qualms. However, after saying goodbye to the folks I’d talked to, the bartender reemerged and angrily demanded another five dollars. I insisted that I’d already paid it, and was met with the stolid rebuke “No, you didn’t”. Quickly I grew upset, realizing that this was an argument that couldn’t be won, but stayed my ground. After a tense minute, some random guy walked up and put five bucks on the bar, saying he didn’t want to see any violence, but I still left the bar steamed. I knocked over a potted tree on the sidewalk outside and displayed some drunken bravado by throwing five bucks on the ground when Whitney said You’re This Upset Over Five Bucks? Fuck Five Bucks was my retort, but when she picked it up and handed it back to me I took it.

The rest of the night was a mess. Marie was having going-away party at her place and a bunch of teenage friends she’d made from the coffee shop showed up and made me feel old. I left at point to take a walk and fell asleep underneath a huge pine tree for a while. When I got back to the party, people were looking for someone to go on a beer run and I volunteered because I didn’t want to be there. The fog had rolled in dramatically, and the girl who went with me stole a watermelon. This guy at the party told me some interesting stories about driving a cab, and the watermelon proved to be a genius acquisition. Whitney and I went to sleep still mad at each other.

Back in New York, my Dad’s girlfriend’s mother is dying, and I wish I had taken the opportunity to meet her.

I woke up feeling much as I had every morning for a while; worried about money. I made myself a cup of tea, ate a banana, and checked the balance of my finances online. I did the math and made a credit card payment on a card near its limit in anticipation of the check I’d be getting the next day, wondered about how I’d have train fare to get work the next week, showered, and walked to a hotel in Berkeley that was having a hiring fair.

I was delighted to see that AM/PM had a 20 ounce cup of coffee for 97 cents, and sent a text to my girlfriend reporting my delight. She replied that she’d found five quarters, and I spent the rest of the walk thinking about how good finding a dollar twenty-five would make me feel. The line for the hiring fair was ridiculous, it stretched out the front door of the vacant storefront, an old Ross that I’d stolen socks and pants from in headier times, around the corner and most of the way down the block. There must have been a hundred people inside, and hundred more in line. Construction workers were cutting up the sidewalk across the street, and my hour in line was marred by the hellish noise. By the time I reached the front door, I really had to piss.

A man in a suit standing in front of a “NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS” sign handed me an application, and I spent a frantic fifteen minutes filling it out, putting an asterisk at the bottom of the previous employment section to add the hotel experience I’d had five years ago. My completed application qualified me to stand in another line behind about sixty people for an on-the-spot interview. I thought about my chances of getting interviewed and still making it to the job I didn’t have enough hours at on time, and also weighed my intention of getting to the diner near my job before noon to drop off an application. After fifteen minutes, ten people had been interviewed and I had to get going. I left my application with a man wearing a red tie who shook my hand and thanked me for my time.

Waiting for my BART train to depart, I decided I didn’t want to apply at the diner anyways. The cost of taking the train across the bay into San Francisco was one of many things breaking my budget, and I tried to convince myself I was making a prudent move in limiting my search for a second job to the East Bay. A girl running to get on the train dropped her cell phone down onto the tracks and started freaking out, which made me realize I wasn’t having the worst day ever, I just really had to fucking piss. There was a Japanese guy on the sidewalk outside of BART in San Francisco wearing this amazing purple and white jacket that said something to the effect of “Mickey Mouse is the leader of the Disney gang”, and giving him directions brightened my mood a bit.

An interesting thing happened at work when a girl recognized me from my days as a cafeteria cashier in college, but walking to get a burrito at lunch my mood soured again. A woman asked to borrow my lighter, and after handing it over she said “Thank God! I’ve asked five people…people are too healthy these days. Not smoking anymore…” This led me to a debate I’d been having about quitting smoking to save money, and I thought about how backwards it was that I wasn’t thinking of my health at all. My feet hurt from all the walking I’d been doing lately, and, still thinking about that dollar twenty-five, I gazed longingly at the gum stains and broken glass on the sidewalk, imagining they were all coins, and how if they were, I could collect enough to buy myself a new life.

After work, I didn’t feel like going home, so I went to the library and sat started reading Night by Elie Wiesel. Holy fuck, if you ever want to feel worse about life, read about a holocaust memoir. It took me nearly an hour to get through the preface and the introduction alone, and as I sat crying and staring out the window at Civic Center, I thought about how to measure ten million people. The population of San Francisco is about a million, and so many people come into the city every day, tourists and workers, that I’ll estimate that around noon it’s safe to say there’s a million people there. Think about the entire city of San Francisco being killed at noon, then fully repopulated by nightfall with people shipped in like animals on railroad cars to die at noon the following day. Imagine that happening for ten days in a row, and then another million people showing up on the eleventh day, going to the bank and doing laundry and writing letters and walking down Larkin Street and whistling, do-dee-doot-doo-doo.

I went for a walk to drink some malt liquor and try and reconcile the waves of emotion passing through me, and passed a crowd of people leaving a church with a smudge of ash on their forehead. The malt liquor was putting me in a more optimistic mood, but I still didn’t know what to make of it. Does Ash Wednesday mean anything to me? Should it? Should I find other people’s faith encouraging? On BART, there was a man who looked to be in his late thirties sitting with a teenager who kept making barking noises and unintelligible utterances. I moved over to them asked the older guy if the retarded kid was his son. No, He’s My Brother. Oh. Do You Take Care Of Him A Lot? He sighed. Yeah, My Folks Are Getting On In Years. Does That Barking Ever Get Annoying? He regarded me for a moment, let out a short laugh, and said Yeah, I Gotta Admit It Does, But What Are You Gonna Do?

I had been giving a lot of though lately to the sentience of people who I can’t communicate with, because some friends of mine had had a son a few weeks earlier. I found myself looking at their baby and being driven nuts wanting him to grow older so I could talk to him, find out what he liked. I asked the guy, Do You Ever Wonder What He’s Thinking? This he did not appreciate. I Know What He’s Thinking. He Can Communicate Feelings, And He Has Them, Feelings And Desires And Fears, Just Like The Rest Of Us. I felt like an idiot. I took a seat at the other end of the train. The night before, I’d been riding the train home from work with my friend Chris, who had told me his eighteen year-old cat was in declining health, and he was wrestling with the notion of putting her down. His opinion was that since he’d never had any damn clue what the cat was thinking, who was he to think she’d be happier dead than alive and in pain?

That night, I stood and looked at myself in the mirror, alive with my feelings and desires and fears, and thought again of the guy in the Mickey Mouse jacket, and Elie Wiesel and the ten million, and the Catholics, and the retarded kid and his brother, and of Nolan, my friends’ baby. No need to make sense of it. I slept on it all.

After leaving Arcata in December of 2004 and spending the better part of a month in Seattle, where my plans to start a new band and tour for a while fell apart, I wound up back at my Mom’s house in Brentwood and started sleeping the clock around. It was borne of a lack of anything to do and a growing numbness inside, and it didn’t hurt that by moving my waking hours to 7PM to 6AM, my Mom only had a three-hour window in the evening to berate me about doing something with myself. Such cycles of sloth are self-reinforcing, though the constant self-doubt I felt about when considering applying for jobs online at four in the morning was just a small part of the reason I didn’t apply for any. After a month of watching cable in the middle of the night and staring at the ceiling, I moved out to my Dad’s studio apartment in Alameda.

My Dad had essentially been living with his new girlfriend for half a year at that point, so it was no big deal to let me stay there. It was a definite improvement over my Mom’s house simply because it was in the Bay Area, instead of the far suburbs, though having to cook for myself was a drag and I soon started eating mostly pretzels and drinking lots of Steel Reserve. It remains the only time in my life I’ve lived alone, and while it was nice at first it didn’t do much good for my vocabulary, which started to noticeably diminish after a few months of the hermit life. I was miserable. I went days without showering, took long walks in the middle of the night when the island was as dead as I felt, and laid in bed thinking about all the mistakes I’d made in the last year of my life. One night I bought four tall cans of Steel Reserve and a big bag of Fritos and consumed all of it while driving from Alameda to San Jose and then back via the peninsula and San Francisco, crying. The next day my car wasn’t where I remembered leaving it, so I was ecstatic when the following day I canvassed the neighborhood a little more thoroughly and found it somewhere else with a parking ticket and a flat tire. This qualified as a good day.

I started living for Wednesdays, the day the new free weeklies came out, and I anguished over whether to do the new Bay Guardian crossword right then, or to save it for later to have something to look forward to. I’d get anxious when I knew I was going to hang out with friends, wracking my brain to come up with at least one interesting thing to say, and when I tried to say it, I tripped over my words and said ‘uh’ a lot more than I ever used to. One night I wandered through an abandoned grocery store that had been half torn down and disturbed a guy who was trying to sleep there, who appeared out of nowhere and seemed really jittery, asking me what I was doing there in broken and mumbled sentences. After reassuring him that I wasn’t a cop, he retreated to the dark corner he came from, and I found myself wishing he wanted to talk some more, he seemed to be on my level. I tried to read, but had trouble focusing. I slept about sixteen hours a day.

Against this backdrop, I was completely unenthused about taking a trip to Hawaii to see an old friend that I’d booked on New Year’s Day, when the world still seemed bright and appealing. My Dad was excited for me, I’m sure he hoped the trip would help snap me out of the doldrums I’d been in, but I almost broke down when he handed me a twenty on the way to the airport and said “Have a beer on the plane!” His tone just didn’t sync with the dread I was feeling. I had one suitcase with some clothes and toiletries, a book, two cases of Pabst and a Blue Raspberry Mad Dog. The PBR was because I had asked Benji if there was anything he couldn’t get in Hawaii that I could bring him, and the Mad Dog was because introducing the new flavor to him would be one of the few joys I’d had in the past four months. That eighty percent of the weight of my bag was alcohol was telling.

Benji met me at the airport, and things started out on a good note as we rode the bus back to the UH campus where he lived in a residence hall. He was duly impressed that I’d flown twelve bucks worth of cheap beer across the Pacific for us to enjoy, and initially there was a lot to talk about because I could reach back further than four months and tell him amusing stories from when I was still in the process of losing my mind, albeit with the slower pace and diminished flair that resulted from having lost it. The first night was jovial, we drank a few beers and he explained at length his studies in Polynesian anthropology, which really interested me, though a sinking feeling of doing nothing with myself started to cloud how well I was following him. I started having to ask him to repeat himself more and more frequently and got quieter and quieter as the evening progressed..

The next day I walked into the middle of Honolulu and caught the bus that made a circuit of the entire island. It left the city heading northeast through a valley which became increasingly misty as the highway narrowed to two-lanes shortly after cresting the pass en route to Kailua. Enormous banyan trees were mere feet from the side of the highway, and I couldn’t believe that forty-five minutes earlier I’d been in big, dirty Honolulu as we passed small, modest houses with amazing flora all around them. After being on the bus an hour, I found a beach that seemed ideal to relax at for a while. That is, it was completely empty and had a 7-Eleven right across the street where I could get something to drink. Beer was tempting, but I opted for Gatorade and figured I’d try to clear my head and think my depression through.

The sky was a patchwork of clouds as I sat on the beach for a few hours and read Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil’s account of the early days of punk in Detroit and then New York. I’d look up every once in a while to take in the expanse of the ocean in front of me, and try to draw the contrast between it and the miserable lives I was reading about, and ask how I could feel so bad sitting on a beach in Hawaii. I waded out into the ocean about a hundred yards where the water was still only about halfway up my thighs and looked back at the beach, and it was very quiet and it didn’t make sense. I walked through the ocean down to the end of the beach where there were some houses. I stood looking at these houses and wondered if anyone was looking at me, wondered if I was anything at all. Back on the beach a short while later a light rain began to fall, so I got back on the bus. As the bus rounded the north shore and approached the miles of brilliant red soil at the Dole pineapple plantation, I tried to focus on the serenity of the beach and ignore its emptiness, but I couldn’t. I tried to feel an emptiness that focused on simplicity and contentment with the beauty of the world, but I couldn’t. The rest of the week, as Benji and I walked around Honolulu and climbed Diamond Head one day, I tried to be good company, but I just couldn’t.

A year later, I saw Benji at my friends Josh and Bethany’s wedding at Mad River Beach in Arcata. He gave me one of his band’s shirts and we caught up, and I was able to thank him for being so patient and kind with me that week in Hawaii. The following year I went to Benji’s wedding at his wife Kate’s grandmother’s house on Cape Cod and had the time of my life. At the reception, I got so caught up talking to people and dancing I forgot to eat a proper meal, and as the sun set, the imbalance between the food and drinks in me had to be addressed. As I lay puking on the lawn, Kate’s mother came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I adopted a lighthearted tone and yelled Get Off My Lawn!!, and she laughed. When the puking was done I looked at the sky and laughed until I cried, knowing it was the same sky over Hawaii, and Oakland, and Seattle, and the rest of the world, and that our entire lives take place under this sky. In New England, in the summer, the sky can change from blue to thunderstorm grey in as little as twenty minutes, and we can change as much and as often as we will ourselves to.

Towards the end of my junior year of high school, I was caught stealing a bottle of brandy from the restaurant I worked at and fired. The summer that followed was awesome, Ryan started playing drums and our band, The Amish Playboys, practiced every day at Garrett’s house. Writing songs has started getting a lot easier since I had started obsessing over the Mr. T Experience and their steady diet of power chords, and we were making up new songs weekly, many of which I still feel are pretty good. Other than play music, we mostly lazed around Garrett’s house harassing him about his burgeoning internet addiction and went on aimless drives around East CoCo County in my Studebaker. Shortly after the lazy times of summer ended, the money I had saved before being canned ran out, so in order to keep up with gas and insurance I got a job at a Papa Murphy’s take-and-bake pizza place.

Starting with the interview, I knew the job would be vastly different than my last. A highlight of my employment at the restaurant was one Christmas Eve when the owner swaggered up to me and palmed me forty bucks, saying “Merry Christmas. I’m sorry you have to work tonight, on Christmas, work is for the blacks.” My interview with Hank, the manager at Papa Murphy’s, was about five minutes long and mainly consisted of Hank telling me about his recent trip to Nashville for a country songwriting workshop. The assistant manager was his brother Rein, who quit three months after I started to take a much more lucrative gig as a bartender, but not before telling me about his half-decade long battle to get out of less than a thousand dollars of credit card debt. He’d come very close to paying it off earlier that year, but had failed to pass up a sale on VCRs at Sears and was back in the vortex again. Hank was not much more sophisticated.

Rein’s departure put him in a sour mood, and more than once he talked enviously about Rein, working at a TGI-Friday’s-type place somewhere in the Tracy Mall, was “making like thirty bucks a night, cash, and hanging out with hot chicks all the time.” By the end of January, Hank had broken up with his girlfriend of a few years and was making severely unwanted passes at one of my coworker after failing to get with a girl that worked at the Baskin Robbins next door. On Super Bowl Sunday, as I licked my wounds from having been broken up with by my girlfriend the previous evening, he said “Landon, I really want you to hear this,” and played me his two-song demo tape (awful), and his favorite Genesis song (slightly less awful, but mercifully at least not ‘In The Air Tonight’. I think I might have exploded if he played me that song.) The day after Valentine’s Day he told me he had gotten up the previous morning before dawn to watch the sunrise and realized how happy he was to be single, so I was not surprised when he was fired a few days later because the female coworker of mine he’d been terrorizing finally called the owner.

The owner made the specious move of hiring a new manager rather than promoting from within, his justification being that the assistant manager Dan was nineteen and not ready to run the store. Marlene was in her forties was a bit of a hard ass, and I quickly fell into the uncomfortable position of being made an example of in a positive way, i.e. Landon’s Working Pretty Hard, Maybe The Rest Of You Could Step It Up? After her first week there, Marlene hired her friend Patti, who was also in her forties, and you have to realize how weird this was because besides Dan, the rest of us were under eighteen. Patti was a fucking wreck, constantly late because “You don’t even wanna know how long it takes to walk here from my other job”, which was at a McDonalds about a mile away, and always complaining about her bad back and sore feet. One time she indignantly snapped “I know how to talk proper!” after Dan made fun of her horrible grammar, and her finest moment was one day when she showed up and told Dan that she couldn’t be asked to bend over at all that shift because he uterus had “fallen out.” By the grace of a God that may not even exist, Marlene went AWOL for four days less than a month after starting. Patti was canned alongside her, and the golden reign of Dan the Manager began.

Dan lived in the first neighborhood my family had lived in after moving to Brentwood, so I had known him since I was eleven, and used to cover his paper route sometimes. I am to this day impressed by his skill at shitting on demand when material is needed to Shitbag someone. We did all the usual stupid stuff that bored teenagers do at food jobs; shaking up 2-liters of soda in the parking lot and throwing them up in the air to watch them explode on the pavement, taking the phone off of the hook when we didn’t feel like taking orders, seeing who could fit in the dryer in the back, putting “experiments” on top of the walk-in to see what weird colors they would turn, you get the idea. Our only outside supervision under Dan’s steed was the owner’s son Todd, who had failed to graduate from Chico State after nine years and been given the bullshit job of regional manager by his Dad to check up on the whopping three Papa Murphy’s he owned. Todd was easy to ignore.

There was a great parade of memorable co-workers; Stinky Crotch Girl, the girl with huge boobs who LOVED horses, Doug who would always let the floor drain overflow when he was high, the dude who got fired after he gave another guy methadone when that guy asked if anyone had something for a headache, and Tre, who stabbed himself in the leg while trying to slice a tomato he’d thrown in the air, drove himself to the hospital, and then came back to finish his shift. Customer service highlights included an incident when a guy who was pissed off said “Come on, buddy, the first thing they teach you in business school is that the customer is always right,” to which I replied “Eh, sir, if I’d gone to business school I don’t think I’d be working here.” Another one I’ll never forget was a guy who called after getting home and complaining that we’d forgotten to give him his breadsticks side order. I apologized and said he was welcome to come back and pick them up, and he got irate and demanded that we give him something else for free to make it worth his while. After I said no, he blurted out Look, I Just Got Back From Mexico And I’m Really Sunburned. After a lengthy “Uhhhh…” on my part, he hung up.

I was planning to quit at the end of July because I was moving away in August to start college, but the store was abruptly sold at the beginning of the month to new owners who owned the two other Papa Murphy’s nearest to us and were looking to consolidate their empire. Their first order of business was to call a meeting and introduce a corporate type they’d brought into re-train us, and after that meeting ended I told them I’d just as soon quit. Their ludicrous plea to get me to stay, since I was by then one of two people over eighteen working there and thus “legally” qualified to touch the dough mixer, was that if I stayed home and went to community college, they’d pay for my books. I laughed, took my shirt off, and left, and he only time in my eighteenth year of life I felt more superior than then was when I told an army recruiter that his plan for me to drop out of college and then return with the GI Bill was fucking retarded, click.

Having nothing to do with the fact that I had turned eighteen and graduated from high school during my employment at the Papa Murphy’s, I felt that it was one of those experiences where I went in a boy and emerged a man. A man who was only learning the delights of ten-dollar jug vodka.

A partial list of the people still living I want to get drunk and/or high with:

Dustin Hoffman
Bill Murray
Danny DeVito
Sean Connery
Michael Irvin
Dr. J
Sean Astin, but if he starts talking about Rudy, I might have to bail out.
Eddie the Eagle, that crazy British ski jumper from the ‘88 Olympics
The dude who invented the Snuggie
The dude who invented the Pet Rock
NOT the guy who invented the Segway
Joe Millionaire
Alex Trebek
The RonCo guy
Anthony Bourdain. This guy ought to have to come to mind sooner.
Jeff Bennett, as soon as I have money to visit Oz.
The guy who owns the Time Traveler in Arcata
Thomas Kincaid, so I can beat him up
Matthew Lesko, but I suspect he gets high solely on life
McCoy Tyner
David Lee Roth
T. Great Razooly
Steven Seagal
Matt Sharp, the original bass player for Weezer and founder of the Rentals
Shane MacGowan
The chick bass player from White Zombie
Barbara Walters
The guy who does the voice of Homer Simpson
Leonard Nimoy
William Shatner
George Takei
Robin Williams, he’s bound to fall off the wagon again soon.
Mr. Blasi, my wacky high-school Chemistry teacher
Mrs. Phillips (no relation), my awesome high school history teacher
Mr. Dodson, my awesome high school health teacher and cross-country coach.
Mr. Vargen, my high-school video production teacher, in 1982. (There’s this fucking awesome picture of him from 1982 wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat and looking really tough)
The cop who, while releasing my recovered car to me last September, recommended the new Metallica album to me.
Conan O’Brien
Dennis Richmond, the recently retired channel 2 news anchor, whom a friend told me they had heard he was a total asshole
Joe Biden, that’s gotta be interesting
Meaty, Rob and Big’s dog
Miss Manners

The two dead people who I most strongly would want to get as fucked up as possible and hang out with:
Rodney Dangerfield
Sammy Davis, Junior

Famous person I most strongly want to take mushrooms with and have sex with for hours:
Winona Ryder

On Casey’s twenty-first birthday, our friend Jeremy met him at his house around seven in the morning with two large bottles of a concoction he used to be very fond of; a mixture of fruit juice and some sort of flavored vodka. Roughly six hours later, Casey was told he could leave the car show in Pleasanton they had gone to in one of two fashions: in a police car or an ambulance. It seems he’d be spotted by security wandering around semi-coherently asking people where a bathroom was. Being a rational fellow, Casey opted to leave in the ambulance, and after unsuccessfully trying to bribe the ambulance men with In n’ Out to just drop him off somewhere, he found working through the titanic drunkenness he’d gotten himself into with a saline drip at the same hospital where twenty-one years earlier he had been born. Four days later, it was time to go to a rockabilly weekender in Vegas.

Casey, Jeremy, Shawn, Joe, Vic and I left Byron around midnight in Casey and Joe’s old Bronco, which we called the OJ in honor of our favorite Heisman Trophy winner. On a side note, in case anyone is unaware, the Brentwood I hail from is in eastern Contra Costa County, about fifty miles east of Oakland. Around the time knife catalogs started showing up at our post office in 1994 addressed to OJ, since his Brentwood doesn’t have it’s own zip code for idiot hicks to look up, I highly doubt there were any millionaires in my Brentwood, and there certainly weren’t any mansions. ANYWAY, we drove all night and stopped only once so that Vic could get food poisoning from a Tina Turner Tuna Sandwich at some fifties-themed diner in the desert. Casey ate the Richie Valens fries, but avoided a similar fate. We rotated through the back storage area of the Bronco for short attempts at sleep, and mine cam up just as our driver Joe started listening to the Howard Stern show really fucking loud to keep himself awake. Thus I entered Vegas for the first time around ten in the morning having already been awake for nearly twenty-four hours.

We checked into our room at the Orleans on Tropicana and Joe immediately bought the twenty-four hours of continuous porn on our TV package for twenty bucks. I complained that we didn’t vote on it, to which Joe responded It Had To Be Done. This became the first component in my Unified Theory of Vegas, which would later be expanded to include Why The Fuck Not? and finally Because We Can. After an hour-long wild goose chase trying to track down some beer, drinking commenced shortly before noon. We surveyed the Orleans and discovered to our delight that it had a bowling alley and an auditorium where they would having a boxing match that night, so we bought tickets to the match and walked outside with our beers held proudly in hands to catch a shuttle over to the Gold Coast and see what was going on with the car show.

Delirious from being up all night and now the booze, I got frustrated as the shuttle took us through a row of warehouses on a street parallel to the strip, which I hadn’t actually set foot on yet and was keen to explore. I would soon learn that with the congestion on the strip, taking the less-scenic back way on Industrial Road was the prudent course of action, and furthermore there was really no quick way to get anywhere in Vegas. Except when in the company of one man…

We dicked around at the Gold Coast for a while, then walked back to the Orleans, where I almost passed out face-down in a plate of nachos but was held back by Joe. The time that elapsed between the nachos and the boxing match are a blur, and I finally caught an hour of sleep during the main event of the match, two tired-looking heavyweights who didn’t throw many punches, then awakening to hear Casey screaming “Break his mind!”
 
After the fight, we went out to walk up the strip and discovered a two-floor porn emporium just a few lots down from the Orleans. After an hour of browsing, we made it to the strip, and eventually to the Barbary Coast, the third hotel affiliated with the rockabilly weekender. I sat down to play roulette for the first time and had my first taste of the highs and lows gambling had to offer when a hot girl won two hundred bucks on double zero and then got surly in a hurry as it evaporated away in ten minutes. I politely lost ten bucks and walked away nursing my free Heineken. We soon discovered that one of the greatest things about not having a ban on public consumption of alcohol makes it a lot easier to walk out of a place you aren’t digging. There’s no leash on your drink, nor on your sense of human decency…

We staggered into a small place called the Wild Wild West around two in the morning to inquire about a 99-cent breakfast that was advertised on a huge billboard that loomed over the building like a UFO. Indeed, breakfast was 99 cents, and our waiter Bru informed us that for only a dollar more you have either a burger or the spaghetti dinner. Vic made his second questionable meal decision of the day by opting for the spaghetti, while the Jew got the breakfast and everyone got burgers. When I started complaining about the bill, saying we needed to split it six ways instead of the five Joe seemed to be insisting on, Vic reminded me that Jeremy had turned in after the boxing match and hadn’t been with us for more than four hours. “Oh.” We went back to the Orleans and bowled for a while, then I stayed up gambling for another hour after everyone else went back and turned in and finally got to bed around five.

I was awoken around eight because Shawn, Vic, and Casey were adamant about getting over to the car show and seeing some bands play. We caught the shuttle to the Gold Coast again, and Joe suggested that we get the lunch buffet at the nearby Rio, which highly appealed to me because I had heard many tales of extravagant Vegas buffets whose prices hovered around the gallon-of-milk level. Thus I was flabbergasted when, after waiting in line for almost an hour and nearly losing my mind from hunger and anticipation, I was fleeced for twenty bucks. I became psychotically determined to eat my money’s worth, and was able to do so only by staying for an hour, taking a massive crap to get a second wind, and putting ten cheeseburgers in a backpack for later. This was the genesis of an in-joke that’s still around with our gang, that of having a locked briefcase handcuffed to your wrist that’s full of cheeseburgers. “Cheeseburger, Shawn.”

We bought a bunch of beer and wandered around the car show for a while, then went to the ballroom at the Gold Coast to see a band play. They were all right, and ended with a song about how you can’t be rockabilly if you drive a Honda, a moment that I would reflect on a few months later in Wendover when a guy referred to the Vegas event as “a fuckin’ fashion show.” We went back to the Orleans for some rest and showers before the main concert of the evening, then caught what remains the coolest cab of my life. The driver was Russian, and when we told him we wanted to go to the Gold Coast, he said You Know There Is Free Shuttle. We said Yeah But We Don’t Feel Like Waiting. He said You Can Walk You Know. We said We Don’t Feel Like Walking. He made an angry noise and said Then Get In.

The ride was incredible, he blew stoplights, honked incessantly, and when caught behind a driver at the red light on Flamingo who was exercising too much caution in turning right, he augmented his horn by muttering Must Be Asian. Or Old. Or Woman. He pronounced the word woman with an amount of disgust not often heard outside of racial slurs, and as he blew one final light to turn left into the parking lot of the Gold Coast, the meter read a little less than seven dollars. The mile and a half journey had taken about five minutes. This man was constant source of inspiration when I was doing pizza delivery.

The rest of the night was more drinking, the breaking of bottles, another visit with Bru at the Wild Wild West which saw Victor falling in line with the group and getting a hamburger, and me and Casey staying up hours later than everyone else so I could play more two-dollar blackjack and he could smoke more Swisher Sweets indoors. After my eyes started to cross, we walked outside and were shocked to discover it was broad daylight. We reflected on the surreality of it all, and went straight back to the room, announcing ourselves by throwing on the light and screaming PANTY RAID!

I was again awoken after three hours sleep because we had to be out by eleven. I struggled to stay awake and upright during my shower, and as I packed my bag, I found four cherry-flavored Swisher Sweets I had brought along for novelty smoking. We went to a bar on the first floor to redeem our boxing match tickets for a complimentary drink, and in a request that has never otherwise been granted when getting a drink on the house, the bartender served up five Long Islands and one screwdriver, for me, who was trying to take it easy. My goose was re-cooked when everyone gave up on their Iced Tea Death Bombs about halfway through and I finished them and started chain smoking my Swishers.
 
This led to me falling out of the Bronco as we parked outside of Fatburger about an hour later to get breakfast, a gaff that Casey gracefully covered up by picking my drunk ass up and saying Right This Way, Mr. President. I ordered chili at Fatburger because a)it was cheap and I was almost out of funds, and b)it seemed like a good idea to pave the way to some awful gas for the nine-hour drive home. We ditched the idea of visiting Hoover Dam, bought a shitload of bottled water, and headed south on I-15.

There are many awful sights and smells to be encountered in Vegas, but perhaps none so miserable as six men emptying out of a 1988 Ford Bronco at a gas station in Mojave, CA, desperately fleeing the scent of a near-death young Jew’s Vegas cocktail of flatulence.

Stephanie visited me in Oakland at the end of September, 2005, just as I was finally climbing out of the shell I’d put myself in over the past nine months. I was still living in the basement room I was subletting, but I had been working for a few months and my vocabulary, which had noticeably shrunken from months of disuse, was returning. Steph and I went to The Alley and listened to people sing old songs around the piano, and she bought a round of drinks with seven bucks in half-dollars her mom’s boyfriend had given her. The bartender seemed strangely indifferent, but maybe it pissed her off because I remember that particular greyhound was pretty weak. We stumbled back to my place, split a bottle of champagne, and had a two-person dance party in the basement at three in the morning. When she suggested I visit Seattle soon, I took her advice. It was good to be able to have fun with friends again, it had been a while.

I flew up for Columbus Day weekend, cashing in a flight voucher that took me to Seattle via Phoenix, which unfortunately gave me seven hours to drink from the handle of vodka I’d brought. I always used to bring liquor with me when visiting Oregon or Washington in protest of their arcane laws, and also because it’s always fun to violate interstate commerce laws. Anyhow, my arrival was good excuse for all of my old friends who lived in Seattle to get together for a party, and it was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had showing up to a party that was more or less in my honor. Sadly, though, within twenty minutes I was projectile vomiting off of the front porch of Kaydee and Cesar’s house, and that segued ungracefully into an hour-long nap on the porch couch. I awoke briefly to puke some more and call Garrett an asshole for reasons I can’t remember. Sixty to zero in the span of an evening.

The next day I roamed around town with various assemblages of friends having the time of my life. It was a glorious Indian summer day, I was back in a city that I had blamed for a disproportionate amount of the unraveling of my mind less than a year earlier, and I was using the first paid vacation time I’d ever earned. I was on top of the world, and also well on my way to puking for the second night in a row. That particular vomit would come in the alley behind the Blue Moon in the U-District, and did I let it stop me from drinking more? The careful reader knows the answer to that.

I continued my streak on Monday when I put a punctuation mark on the end of a great evening out at Stephanie and Phil’s place in Ballard by puking into a strategically (i.e. hurriedly) placed metal pot while rolling around on the kitchen floor and singing It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). My suspicion is that the people who witnessed this spectacle were unnerved, because without the context, lying on the ground with your eyes closed and mumbling “It’s alright, Ma, I’m only dying” could be seen as a cry for help. Far from it, though, and I wish I’d been able to bounce back and explain myself that night- I was just excited about heading down to the Experience Music Project the following morning to check their Dylan exhibit. As it was, I awoke in the morning well rested and caught a bus towards Seattle Center.

The exhibit went so far beyond my expectations I found myself crying several times. There were listening stations dedicated to each of the first seven albums, and each had alternate takes of album tracks and unreleased songs to get lost in. I had heard Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues once before, but standing alone in a booth with headphones on, looking at a huge photo of a clear-eyed, twenty-two year-old Dylan made it something much more. The most unique thing in the exhibit was an absurd three-page letter he’d written to Joan Baez’s mother which he’d asked Joan Baez to say was from her. She did in fact send the letter, but with a cover of her own explaining the circumstance. She mentions in her letter that she wants her mother to meet Dylan, she says “you’d love him.” It was a funny thing to make me recall my friend Joe’s comment “The only thing Joan Baez was good at was sucking Bob Dylan’s dick.”

A comment as prescient as that could have been the most quotable thing to come out of the day, but later that day I was walking across Teletubby park in Capitol Hill with my friend Kaydee and her asking “What’s that Journey song that goes like ‘Don’t stop believing’?”

I didn’t puke that night, and flew home the following day just in time to get out to Antioch for Yom Kippur services with my mother. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the culmination of the High Holy Days, the first ten days of the Jewish year. It’s a day you’re supposed to reflect on transgressions you’ve committed against others and yourself and the Lord in the past year, apologize and ask forgiveness for them, and think about how you’ll prevent yourself from letting similar mistakes come to pass in the year ahead. I’m glad I saw that day, considering all the nights I’d spent in February, and March, and April, and May, drinking malt liquor and trying to work up the courage to walk into the bay off of the south edge of Alameda. I realized the greatest transgression I’d made that year was getting fixated on the past instead of looking forward. I had great friends, my mother loved me, I was alive and I was young, and there was a lot of life left to live.

I’ve talked about my on-again/off-again relationship with the sport of baseball already, but special consideration is due to the three times I went to Arizona with my father to watch Spring Training games. The first time we went was when I was eleven, and the San Diego Padres still help camp in Yuma, Arizona. We flew into San Diego and rented a car to drive I-8 across the desert to Yuma, stopping along the way to visit a small park populated by numerous intriguing rock outcroppings that I found only modestly amusing until I was told years later that it was a place that my mother and father had spent a transcendent few hours shortly after meeting.

Yuma was hotter than I had any idea any place could be in the beginning of March, and I clearly remember going for breakfast in the motel restaurant the first morning; the heat that the legion of rotary ceiling fans were powerless against, the predominantly white-haired crowd, the lukewarm pancakes that still seemed too hot to consider eating. On either the first or second day, the drive train in our rented Ford Tempo completely disengaged from the transmission, leading to an alternately tense and mind-numbingly boring few hours in a parking lot while we waited for a new car to be brought out. I remember doing my algebra homework laying on my bed at the motel and skimming over how to divide fractions, a deficiency in my arithmetic education that would remain uncorrected for years. We went to the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historical Park, and I was unimpressed by both how escapable the crumbling structures seemed and the inches-deep Colorado River that flowed past the decaying not-even-hulks of a supposedly worth-remembering past.

But the games, the games made it the best trip in the world. In spring training, the established players start the game but only play a few innings to allow management the opportunity to try out the new guys. Thus, the results of any individual game and indeed even any given player’s statistics over the whole spring season must be taken with a grain of salt, but to an eleven year-old madly in love with baseball and on a special trip with his father, it meant more than wars. I would try to keep score longhand, on cheap sheets where the printed ink smeared at the slightest press of sweat from my small hands, in pencil, to allow for changes in the official scoring, but my efforts were confounded by the simple facts that the pre-printed scorecards didn’t allow for twenty-five players to cycle through a single nine innings.

Then there was the flavor of the crowd, a certain flavor that rarely interacts with pro sports for perhaps the simple fact that as of 1992, rare was the professional sporting contest that could be a)walked to, and b)admitted to for less than five bucks, with c)really cheap food and beer. We went to a couple of games while we were there, and one of them fell on my birthday. My Dad went up to the announcer’s booth before the game and asked him to wish me a happy birthday between innings, which he did. I felt like a prince, and in retrospect, perhaps even cooler was how mature I felt when my Dad scratched the surface of the scope of adult misbehavior when he explained how strongly he’d had to plead with the announcer for my recognition, based on pranks the announcer had been on the receiving end of in springs past.

OH MAN, and then there was the fucking greatest salesman on the face of the earth, a fat red-headed kid whose line was HOT DOGS, Get Your HOT DOGS, GONNA DIE ANYWAY So Might As Well Get Your HOT DOGS! People treated him like he was the mayor, and holy shit did that kid sell a LOT of HOT DOGS. (He was also there the second year we went back, and I might be making this up, but I remember him walking around barefoot. The third year the Padres moved their camp to Peoria, AZ, God knows what that kid’s doing now…)

I remember playing blackjack over the center console on the long straight drive back to San Diego, my Dad steering with his knees and the occasional hand to correct, and watching an old movie called Kill The Umpire at his old friend Bob’s house where we stayed a night before flying home. I remember waking up that night in Bob’s guest room and for the first time feeling the worry of not having any idea where you are. There was a large mirror directly opposite the head of the bed, and a fair amount of moonlight, and I sat straight up in bed looking at my own reflection and feeling absolutely disconnected from space and time. I remember quickly coming to, and falling back asleep recounting the grand and wholly unprecedented events of the preceding days…

There was a series of notable killings that occurred in Oakland in 2002 and 2003 that were attributed to a small gang that called themselves the Nut Cases. The killings were noteworthy primarily for the fact that they were committed upon victims who were complete strangers to the killers with no motive of robbery. Essentially, as testimony unfolded in court, it seemed to be the deeds of a group of angry young men who killing people just to cause mayhem, and, in my armchair psychologist’s opinion, draw attention to and respond to the brutal and seemingly meaningless lives they had led up until that point. The testimony of one of the killers, who was seventeen at the time he pulled the trigger, included the biographical information that he had always been mercilessly teased at school for not knowing who his father was.

I have felt and may some to degree always a certain amount of pain about certain things that have passed between my father and I, but I know his name and I know who he is. I know that he loves me, because he acts that way most of the time, and he’s told me so thousands of time. Most importantly, when I tell him that I love him, and I mean it, he tells me I Know, Son, I Know.

Things in Humboldt County can be maddeningly more difficult to accomplish than they would be in the real world, but in general, they’re easier. When I was looking for my first off-campus apartment in the spring of 2001, I consulted the list that the housing department compiled and found a place that fit all of my criteria; close to campus, on-site laundry, cheap. I got the landlord Tiffany’s home answering machine when I called the number listed, and she returned my call later that day to set up a visit.

Tom and I thought the place was great and filled out an incredibly simple one-page application on the spot. A week later, when I hadn’t heard back from Tiffany, I called to ask what the status of the place was. She said, “Well, I gave the place to somebody else. I was concerned about your income, four hundred bucks a month doesn’t seem like enough to cover the rent.” When I explained that my parents would be paying my rent for the coming year, she said “Oh, you should have said so. I’ve got another apartment if you want that one.” The following day when Tom and I gave the new, larger (and same price) apartment a cursory inspection and immediately agreed to take it, I asked Tiffany if she had any other apartments, as my girlfriend was looking for a place as well. She said Yeah, That One Over There’s Available Next Month. Have Her Give Me A Call. And so the galvanization of the Carriage House crew began.

I lived at that apartment for three and a half years. On the eighteenth (!!??) of one month, after we’d been there for more than year, Tiffany came to the door asking where my rent was. I said I’d dropped in the slot on the fourth, and she said Oh, Okay, Sometimes Checks Fall Behind Things In There. (In a charmingly insecure system, rent was put through a mail slot in the door of the maintenance shed) I wrote her a new check for rent minus the cost of canceling the first check, and I thought the matter was concluded. However, I found the first check torn neatly in half sticking out of my mailbox the following afternoon, and when I asked Tiffany about it later, she just said Yeah, I Found It. Sorry About That.

One day we crossed paths in the parking lot and she said Hey, I Heard That The Cops Have Been Called A Few Times For Loud Parties. I said Oh Yeah, But It Shouldn’t Happen Again, and that answer was enough for her. Towards the end of my residency Tiffany asked if I wanted to do the gardening for a discount on the rent. I gave her some stuttering excuse about having no attention to detail, and she just shrugged and said all right, whatever. When I moved out, my friend Jenny moved in with her cat. Tiffany was very anti-pet, but gave Jenny a pass since by that point Tom and I had been at the apartment far longer than the standard one year that pervades the college rental scene.

Perhaps the oddest moment in my relationship with Tiffany was when we ran into each other at the San Diego Zoo in February of 2007. I asked what brought her down to southern California and she said she was on her way to Baja to do some sort of extreme kayaking. This did not raise my eyebrows. We talked for twenty minutes or so and wished each other well. That was the last time I talked to her, but I may have called and left her a Happy Thanksgiving message this past year. I was pretty drunk, and if I didn’t, well, I was thinking about it.

You can see why I find property management agencies that want credit checks and co-signers criminally unnecessary.