Here's another portion of a chapter from my book, Travels With Ritalin, that I'm pretty sure no one has seen. This first two posts describe what happened to me in Tucson. It's followed by the epilog chapter concerning what happened when I returned to Tallahassee. As you'll see, burlesque shows feature in both of the last two. Taken together, I think they're pretty amusing.
A Telling DecisionAfter my sudden financial shellacking in Santa Monica, I one-eightied and stayed with my dad in Tucson for two weeks, waiting for money to drop into my account. I wasn’t actually staying “with my dad,” since technically we were both staying at my aunt’s trailer, but she was out of town during my summer tenure, so dad had the run of the place and I was his guest. So it amounted to the same thing: this was the first time we’d lived as roommates since I’d moved out of the house at the age of 21. Fifteen years had passed, during which time I’d gotten engaged, broken the engagement, converted to Lutheranism, then Catholicism, then repudiated Christianity entirely, worked a real job writing greeting cards, quit to go back to college, and somewhere in there, despite all his attempts to train me not to, I’d managed to lose my virginity.
I’d also started discovering the startling ways in which I genetically take after my father. It started eleven years ago, when a dangerously fast car had passed me on the right, jerked in front of me, and nearly forced me off the road. I stomped the brakes, felt fury erupt within me, and, before I knew what was happening, I had clenched my right fist and heard myself yell out, “Hey there, fella!” Fortunately, the window was up, so the other driver didn’t laugh at me. But the comment was pure dad: you could imprison him, cut him open, and start winding his entrails around a windlass, and he’d look at you, sigh quietly and say, “I’m not mad at you, I’m just disappointed.”
That incident was merely the first leaf of autumn. Over the course of the next several years I discovered that I’d inherited my father’s early-onset crow’s feet, his sweet tooth, his laugh, his insomnia, his window-rattling snore, his inability to stay in one house for more than three years in a row, his overall fecklessness with money, and—most frighteningly —some sort of respiratory tic that leads me to clear my throat explosively whenever I’m in an opera house. (If you put us both in random seats in Radio City Music Hall, I’d recognize my dad clearing his throat no matter how far apart we were or how many other sounds intervened; it’s the same way that baby seals recognize their parents on the beach.)
Growing up in Tucson spoiled me. For one thing, precisely because the temperature’s only change year-round is to go from hot to hotter, I’ve never really gotten accustomed to the concept of seasons or even weather. What’s worse, there are huge mountains to the north, small ones east and west, and tiny hills to the south. So no matter where you are in Tucson, you can automatically orient yourself, and so I’ve never gotten used to using a compass, and I’ve never really been clear on where north is in any other town I’ve ever lived in.
But I left because, like most warm-weather college towns (Tallahassee included), it supports an economy where college students pay rent alongside retirees, and so there aren’t any really well-paying jobs. This keeps the cost of living low, but as my dad told me more than once, “You can live here for twenty years and never make enough money to move away.” When Hallmark called—and offered to pay for the move!—I left immediately.
Now I was back, and I was surprised to discover that while Tucson had definitely changed in the fifteen years since I’d lived there—it had practically doubled in size—the same stability still informed everything: the weather was hot, the skies were clear, and the businesses and restaurants were neither run down nor too high-end and tony. It was, in its way, as timeless as sun-drubbed adobe.
So on my first weekend in Tucson, I went immediately to the main cool area: Fourth Avenue, where the hippies and the scene kids hang out. In order to prepare for a venture out into the Fourth Avenue club district, I decided to go with my Vargas shirt—a sort of retro-kitschy bowling shirt with two columns of Vargas-y pinup girls down the front. I’d bought it at the Eye Scream Shop in Mobile, and I thought that it might have some kind of tattoo-parlor Suicide-Girl draw to it.
When I was growing up there, Fourth Avenue was scary precisely because that’s where the sinners went so smoke and drink beer and engage in occasional fornication. (Also, there were rumors of homosexuals and feminists!) I’d been back since then and had found the place much improved. So this night I walked up and down the strip and this time, in the context of my trip, I was surprised by a few new things. First, that the series of clubs along Fourth Avenue was actually cooler than anything I’d seen since New Orleans. (This has nothing to do with I-10, but I found another great bar scene later in Austin.) Which suggests that you can’t have a good bar scene unless you also have a city that’s committed to its music. This theory is confused a little by Kansas City, which has a terrific jazz and blues scene and yet in four years there I never went to a club worth the mention. So maybe you have to have a decent modern music scene. All I know is, it works for I-10, so just nod and go with me.
My first stop was a bar called Plush, which does its kitsch nicely: no Elvis paintings or tiki masks. It’s just loud red shiny satin everywhere, with lots of gold trim. It’s gaudy as hell, you can’t escape it, and if you hate it that much, just go into the back room where the bands play. Me, I’ve always stayed in the front.
The bartender’s name was Misty, and she was definitely a Suicide Girl type: just shy of thirty, black hair, black shirt, nose piercing, tattoos on her arms (nothing wild, though; they were the names of her two kids). So I asked her, “Are you by any chance a Suicide Girl?”
“What’s that?” she said.
I explained, and she said, “Oh, no. I had my goth moments, but I would never do anything like that.” She paused and then said, “You want to hear about the gothiest thing I’ve ever done? A couple years ago I went to a secret underground vampire club in New Orleans.”
“A vampire club? Like the kind where they all dress up and roleplay different characters, or a real vampire thing where they drink blood?”
She nodded. “Blood. At least, that’s what they said. There was supposed to be blood back in the refrigerator, but all we ever saw was absinthe.” (Absinthe, for those not au courant with goth culture, is a kind of alcoholic beverage spiked with just a little bit of poison, allegedly to inspire hallucinations. It’s illegal in the U.S., but I imagine the Libertarians are working on that.)
With a writer's instinct, I pulled out my notebook and prepared to record the interview when---my hand to God---a guy suddenly rushed back to where we were, and announced to everybody, "Guys, check it! There's a guy with a mohawk getting his ass kicked by a midget across the street at the Dairy Queen!"
I immediately realized I had a choice to make: continue my interview with the vampire, or find out what was going on with the midget? (Correction: dwarf. Little person is a terribly imprecise term.) I had to choose quickly, and no sooner was this choice presented to me than I realized that nothing in my life up to now had prepared me to make this snap decision. Thank god there weren’t lives depending on this. The choice you make in a time like this says a lot about who you define yourself to be. In that second, I had to look into my soul and ask, “Okay, Dave, who are you? A vampire guy or a dwarf guy?”
“Oh!” yelled the guy, looking out the window. “They’re going at it right now! She just punched him in the nuts!”
“Excuse me for a second,” I told Misty, and I wnet to the window. And sure enough, some lanky young man with a large blue spiked mohawk was weakly fending off the attacks of a female dwarf. She was dressed casually, with long curly brown harir, and was clearly not associated with the mohawk guy’s punk ass. She kicked him and hit him and he collapsed over a bench and started crawling away, although it looked like he was half wincing, half laughing. She, apparently satisfied (though obviously very angry), let him go and started walking with a friend in the opposite direction. She was getting away! They both were! Should I run across the street and go interview her? What the hell was that fight all about? I burned to know.
Then I saw the dwarf’s friend pull out an umbrella. It had started to rain.
Am I a vampire guy or a dwarf guy? It turns out the answer is, I’m a rather lazy guy who doesn’t like to get wet. Such a shame, too! The whole dwarf-at-the-Dairy-Queen story faded away like a fascinating subplot in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel. I sighed for the road not taken. But at least I had my vampire.
“So,” I said, returning to my seat in front of Misty. “This was a vampire club where they served blood?”
Misty nodded. “At least, that’s what they said. There was supposed to be blood in the back room in the refrigerator, but all we ever saw was absinthe. (Absinthe, for those not au courant with goth culture, is a kind of alcoholic beverage fermented from wormwood that’s very sweet and apparently somewhat poisonous. It’s illegal in the U.S., although I imagine the Libertarians are working on that.) [Sidenote: in researching facts about absinthe, I met a nice young goth man at a bar back in Tallahassee and he explained the wormwood connection and he told me, “I actually had some absinthe. I was at a science fiction convention and a guy said, “You want to try some absinthe?” so I said, “Okay, why not?” And there was a party at his room where they were serving absinthe, and I had it in this little Dixie cup and I walked up to the guy and I showed him that I was trying it, and he shook his head and said, ‘You can’t drink absinthe out of a paper cup. You have to drink it out of half of a human skull.’ It turns out he worked in the anthropology department of a university and he had this skullcap lined with copper that he offered me a drink out of. It tasted like licorice. It’s very sweet.”]
“How did you find out about this club?”
“My husband is in a band. Soon to be ex-husband, by the way. We’ve been together since we were fifteen, and he’s crazy.”
“What was the club like?”
“It wasn’t even a club, really. It was just some couple’s house, and we sat at their table
and listened to spooky music. They were a pretty rich couple, so it was a nice house. There were candles everywhere. And tapestries. What’s sad is there were only five people there, including the husband and wife who owned the place. Not even my husband came. I just sat around for about an hour, waiting for the scene to pick up, but it never did. So I just went home.”
“How was the absinthe?”
She shrugged. “It burned a little, but it didn’t do anything to me that I could tell. It tasted like shit, though, so I didn’t drink a lot. I thougth about asking for some blood, just because it would be great to tell people about later, but you know, you don’t know whose blood that is, where they got it, or what’s in it. I just didn’t want to be that unsafe. I mean, I’ve got kids.”
“So you never actually saw any vampirism at this vampire club.”
She shook her head. “No. The people didn’t even look all that weird. Just regular club rats.”
I can picture myself in the same position. I’d be a little curious about drinking blood, too, but I imagine I’d ask, “Could you put this through a water filter for me? Brita will do; anything with charcoal; thanks.”
I nodded and put away my pen, but inside I felt deeply betrayed. I felt like asking her, “For this nothing story? For this I missed a violent midget?” But of course, it’s entirely possible that the dwarf interview would have been ust as dull. Everything is better in my head before the workaday facts show up and ruin everything.
How I Became Trite By this time my ancillary goal of meeting kickass alternative women was pretty firmly established, so imagine my emotions when I left Plush, walked farther down Fourth Avenue and discovered a new bar that hadn’t been there two years ago. The sign outside read “The Surly Wench Pub.” How could I resist?
I was not disappointed. As if it were the establishing shot of a movie, I walked in and heard Wanda Jackson singing “Riot in Cell Block #9" while the bartender—a pierced-and-tattooed vixen with astounding cleavage—served me whiskey that was stored under a pair of vintage Dolly Parton LPs. As I took my drink, I noticed that over the door there was a flat screen TV that was currently showing the scene from Kill Bill where Uma Thurman single-handedly beats up about a hundred angry ninjas. Then, as I looked around, I noticed that the women here not only seemed artsy and alternative, but an awful lot of them were wearing athletic jerseys and Spandex shorts.
“Is there something going on tonight?” I asked the bartender.
“It’s the Roller Derby After Party. We just had the last game of the season.”
“Back up. Tucson has roller derby?”
“Oh, it’s all over. It started in Austin, but we have four leagues right here. And it’s real this time. Because you know, back in the seventies, it was fake, like pro wrestling.”
I nodded sagely. I hadn’t known this at all, but I wanted everyone in this bar to think I was cool.
I spent most of what was left of the evening talking to a roller derbyist pseudonymed Polly Graf—they all have nicknames—and her friend, Carrie Guns. I’d missed a really great game. Apparently, Vice defeated The Iron Curtain. Which, if you think about it, is what happened in real life too. I asked Polly if she was a Suicide Girl and she said, “I’m not a Suicide Girl, but I’m on another site like it called burningangel.com. My name there is Kitten.” We talked a little about Bust magazine, about Tucson’s music scene, and of course about roller derby. (Interesting fact: “Our league has more lesbians than any other city in the U.S.,” she said. “We’re like fifty percent. Phoenix is only around fifteen.”)
Soon it was closing time, and I walked out with Polly and two of her friends, and at the sidewalk we had to part ways. (“What are you guys going to do?” I asked, hoping for an after-afterparty, and she said, “We’re going to go home, smoke weed and hopefully fuck. A boy’s supposed to call me.”) As I hugged her party goodbye, I told one of her friends–a very short flirty woman with a deadly wicked smile and a nearby boyfriend—“This is turning into a theme in my travels. I just love kickass women.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” she said. “Just look at you.”
That stopped me. “What do you mean?”
“You look the type,” she said.
“Well, I wore this shirt deliberately,” I said.
“Oh, it’s not just the shirt. It’s like—well, you’re bald, you’ve got a goatee, you’re wearing boots, and . . . all that. It’s perfect.”
I don’t know what she could have meant by “all that”, unless it was code for, “and you could stand to lose fifteen pounds.” I suppose she meant this as a compliment, but when she said “it’s perfect,” what I heard was, “You’re a textbook art school geek. You’ve hit the cliche smack in the sweet spot.”
I had a long drive back to my father’s trailer, and since my stereo no longer worked, I had lots of time to think. Without meaning to, I had become a cliche. Normally, I suppose I wouldn’t find this so alarming, but it had recently occurred to me that I had been on sort of cliche or another all my life. Example: when I went back to my father’s house, I chanced to look in an old high school yearbook and I was appalled at my picture. “Jesus Christ,” I thought. “You can tell just from the photo that I’m an uptight, Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing virgin.” The out-of-date hairstyle, the painfully cheap clothes, the smirk that suggests that I think I’m smarter than the cameraman. Why didn’t anyone tell me? Oh, right—because I thought I was so damn smart.
I’ve actually gotten a relatively late start at purging myself of nerdiness, and one of the things about nerdiness that I noticed a few years ago is that there’s a weird uniformity to geekdom that transcends genre of all types. If you meet someone who mentions being a big fan of
The Lord of the Rings, you can usually ask them, “So what’s your favorite Star Trek episode?” or “Can I borrow your Monty Python tapes?” and if they’re male, they’ve almost certainly played role-playing games. They probably following some cult show even as we speak (whether they’re taping Alias or catching up on old Buffy the Vampire Slayers). And they all own at least one album by They Might Be Giants.
Now, there’s no logical connection between TMBG’s song “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and an interest in the new Battlestar Galactica. But it’s there. It transcends logic. In fact, speaking of the word “transcend,” that’s the only thing they all have in common: they’re all vaguely religious, transcending pastimes that reward you for being smart and obsessive and inclined to daydream of some place where smart obsessive kids are the heroes. Like the Harry Potter series, which every geek has also read at least one of. Like a religion, geek-friendly cult shows tend to establish systems, or entire worlds, full of rules that are fun to speculate with. Smart TV shows of this type know that they’re better off not explaining everything, to that the computer geeks among the fans have stuff to natter about on their personal websites. And so on.
What’s horrifying is that even when you know this, it can be practically impossible to escape. For example, maybe eight years ago, when the first Japanese anime films started appearing in art theaters in the US, I was thrilled at the first review I saw. “How interesting!” I thought. “A form of animation that is completely unlike Disney, for once! And with adult themes and storylines! This really expands the possibilities of the genre!” And so, when I saw there was an anime club forming in Kansas City, I went to my first meeting . . . and saw a room full of the same role-playing geeks I’d been trying to avoid since college. Here I was, choosing on my own to be interested in anime, and damned if the geeks hadn’t gotten there ahead of me and formed ranks. They keep pulling me back in. But not that night; I ran away, and I’ve never joined any anime clubs at all.
But this problem surfaced again when I came back to college. I decided after a year that it was about time I made some friends outside the English Department. So I went to the Student Resource Center and looked up all the clubs on campus. Each club took up one page in campus records, and all the pages together filled a very thick binder. There were a hundred clubs, easy. But as I flipped through them, I felt myold prejudices kicking in. With a million sports on offer, I said, “No!” to them all—and then I stopped at fencing. “Huh!” I said. “Fencing! That might be fun . . .” And as soon as I thought it, I realized that the fencing team was going to be filled with the same role-playing losers with no social skills I’d been avoiding ever since I started buying decent clothes. Like an ex-smoker, I have very low geek tolerance. There’s a reason I don’t go to Renaissance Fairs, and it’s this: I viewed this return to college as a chance to do it right this time, with “doing it right” defined as “actually getting laid.” For that, I was willing to burn a thousand Harry Potters.
But I went through the list, wrote down the ones that appealed to me on my first pass, and was disheartened to see that, despite the vast array of clubs offered, how few of them came even close to my demographic. Future Engineers? Sorry. Phi Beta Kappa? I don’t have the grades. Progressive Black Men. Not so much. Skydiving Club? No thanks! I spend good money on my pants; I’d like to keep them unsoiled. When I made it to the end and looked back, I discovered that my list looked like this:
The College Democrats
The Women’s Center
The FSU Film Society
Ballroom Dance Club
That’s it. Of course, that’s not counting the ones that I instinctively went for and then flinched from on the theory of “I’d rather get laid this time”: not just fencing, but The Role-Playing Games Club, the Society For Creative Anachronism, and Ultimate Frisbee. So I had this very small list left. And once you realize that all the clubs are peopled by undergraduate college students, most of whom can’t even legally drink, the social aspects of the clubs seema lot less appealing. Why go to a College Democrats meeting if you wind up overhearing six conversations about how smelly the dorms are, or how mom is supposed to send you more money so soon you can afford to get a tattoo in Cancun?
So then I started thinking, “What a shame they don’t have more clubs that meet my own interests! Like, why not a Crossword Puzzle club? Or a Scrabble club? Or a club for people who are picky about drinking single malt scotches?” But I didn’t bother dignifying this with an actual list. There’s an excellent reason those clubs don’t exist. No one with social skills would be interested, and no one fuckable would show up. Put those “clubs” on your resume and you could literally frighten women away.
And now this: I had been labeled a stereotypical Suicide Girl lover. As I watched Polly Graf and her friends walk away, “hopefully to fuck,” I felt like one of those sad cartoonists who draws huge-breasted women in spike heels. Thank god I’m a lousy artist. That could have been me.
When I got back to my dad’s trailer, I realized I had to see if what Polly had said was true. Was there maybe a way to find out what Suicide Girls fans looked like—a page for the members? To find out, of course, I had to wait until Dad was gone the next morning, and I crossed my fingers and hoped he didn’t have some kind of naughtiness-blocking software.
In a way, he did. I was only a few keystrokes in before I realized that my Dad, who has a degree in Medieval Spanish Literature and had just returned from a missionary trip in Spain, was using a Spanish-language keyboard. Nothing was where it should be. It had upside-down punctuation! Quotation marks were—get this—above the 2, the apostrophe was under the question mark, and when I typed on automatic, relying on muscle memory of a regular keyboard, all of my words acquired umlauts of mysterious provenance.
At one point, when I went on a side-trip and was trying to look at a few trailers for upcoming movies, I clicked on a link and a screen popped up:
Safari no encuentra el modulo de Internet. La pagina incluye contenido MIME tip “audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin.” No tiene instalado ningun modulo para este tipo de contenido MIME asi que no puede mostrarse. . . . and below it a button said
OK. Silly dad! He was using Spanish settings all around, the little dickens! I panicked for a second, and then I realized that there was no choice anyway, and it was just the computer making conversation, like, “Hey, I just wanted you to know that I had a dream last night and you were in it. It was really weird, though.” Fine. Whatever. I clicked OK.
But then I did something else—I wish to god I knew what—and another balloon popped up:
[upside-down question mark] Seguro que desea enviar de nuevo un formulario? And this time I had two buttons to choose from:
Cancelar and
Enviar. I scanned the room for a Spanish-English dictionary, but couldn't see one. So. The obvious choice would seem to be “Cancelar”, but what if the question was a good thing? What if it was asking me something like “Do you want a future of happiness and professional contentment? Should I get my electric flunkies to work on that?” I took a few slow breaths, and hit “Cancelar,” hoping it wasn’t Spanish for “self-destruct.” Nothing happened, and I backed away slowly and took a few calming breaths before my next venture.
Eventually, however, I navigated the Spanish keyboard and found my way to the Suicide Girls website and discovered that there was indeed a place for members to post their own pictures, and damn if Polly’s friend wasn’t right! It was appalling: row after row of pictures of bald men with goatees, all in their thirties, and seemingly all of them sitting in chairs. And you know what? They could have all stood to lose a little weight. I felt a shiver go through me and I stood up from my chair. “No!” I said. “Not again! NOOOOOO!” If there had been birds nearby, they would have flapped away in alarm.
Let me just say in my defense that I’m bald because I actually look better that way. When I had hair—and I had long hair, dammit!—I would comb it straight back, and eventually I discovered from photos that my hair had a tendency to curl, which meant two things: 1.) When I wasn’t looking, the hair would swing to one side and look like a terribly lame combover, and 2.) When you looked at it from the side, there was so little hair on my head that you could actually see light through it. My combed-back hair was just a bridge over nothing. I decided to spare everyone the pain of seeing that, and I’ve never looked back.
As for the goatee, I’ve got my reasons for that too. First, I have no chin to speak of (thanks, parents!), and a very wide neck, so when I don’t have a goatee, when you look at me straight on I unappetizingly resemble a turtle. I used to have a mustache, but I discovered, upon looking at my driver’s license, that the mustache actually didn’t attach on one side. It looked like I was wearing a furry schwa. So I cut that off too. The only hair that’s left on my skull is the only hair that’s actually doing its job properly. I have literally no other choice in how I look. So if I join the Suicide Girls fanclub and happen to look like everyone else in the room, I can swear upon a stack of affidavits that it’s everyone else’s fault. I am blameless.
But just as I was getting my dander up, I noticed that the member profiles all listed occupation, and while several of them were something like me (thirtysomething college students), there were a couple of other intriguing recurrent themes: Roadie. Deejay. Guitarist. At least five of them worked in music stores. I read deeper, and almost none of them mentioned role-playing games. And I suddenly realized that after years of trying, my attempts have paid off. I’m not a gamer geek. I’m a music geek! I’m the record store clerk; the kind of guy who tracks down the single of the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” in order to get their ironic B-side cover of “Stand By Your Man”; the person who actually has an opinion about bands like Yo La Tengo and The Mountain Goats, and who sneers at anyone who can listen to Elvis Presley sing “Hound Dog” without thinking of Big Mama Thornton. If I was still 18 and had a weblog or did internet messaging, I’d have a special tab constantly informing people of what music I was listening to at every moment. With a little nudge in this direction, you might see me standing outside a nightclub, smoking clove cigarettes between sets, and saying bitterly, “These guys are better live, but don’t get their latest album. Their early stuff is good, but lately they’re starting to sell out.”
And the thing is, I’ve been like this for years. My music collection includes blues, soul, swing, rockabilly, alternative pop, alternative country, underground hip-hop, experimental electronica—if no one actually listens to it, I own it. I should have figured this out the third time a friend of mine agreed to drive with me only if I didn’t play my music. The evidence has been with me for years, and yet it had never occurred to me to embrace it.
A further irony struck me then. Barely an hour earlier I had been horrified at being a cliche, and yet, what had I been doing for the past two months but hunting down cliches? Looking for women with a certain Suicide-Girl look, a certain retro-punk style, and assuming, based on mere appearances, that we’d be kindred spirits. And what’s more, these assumptions had been right! So sometimes cliches are helpful. You just have to choose the one that fits you.
So now I have a new theory. Yes, I’m a cliche. But there are worse cliches to be. Hang out at any sports bar during a major sporting event and look at the guys: all wearing the same t-shirts, the same ball caps, all having the same predictable reactions to every call (yay for the good ones, groans for the bad), the same more or less obvious opinions about everything. (E.g., “they should fire that coach.”) Minds beaten into cretinism by one gallingly insulting beer commercial after another. . . it makes my skin crawl. Or go to any high-class nightclub on a weekend, and you can see any number of blond, fake-titted current and ex- sorority girls whose mission in life seems to be to look perfect and never have a surprising opinion. I love women dearly, but such people aren’t women; they’re fembots. My people—by which I mean, we music geeks—live a slightly better life. We drink liquor thoughtfully. We hand out with interesting unconventional women who are bold and opinionated and unpredictable. It’s true we’re a little obsessive, a little messy, and god knows none of us will ever be rich. But I can’t think of a happier kind of geek to be. So I hope you’ll excuse me, but I have to go. I have this sudden powerful urge to move an amplifier.
