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Ojo Malo at Atomic Burrito
Friday, August 5 2005
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Today I set off on a week-long summer vacation in Virginia, leaving Gretchen and the critters behind in Hurley. I took the car, since its gas mileage is better than that of the truck.
In the course of such drives, the longest, most excruciating part always seems to fall in the vast blank spot on the map between Scranton and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. To help endure the agony, I stopped early in that blank spot to indulge one of my least noble addictions, Kentucky Fried Chicken. The KFC in Wilkes Barre experienced a serious computer crash as the guy in front of me (a Sikh absurdly wearing a distorted baseball cap over his turban) placed his order. From then on the monitors showed a protracted Windows 2000 Professional Edition boot screen while the staff were forced to calculate what to charge using a pencil and piece of paper. Evidently there were no calculators available. Situations like this give one the opportunity to see how truly sorry the state of education is in this country, at least for the sort of people who wind up manning a cash register at a Wilkes Barre KFC. After thirty or forty seconds the cashier calculated that what I'd ordered would cost me $11, which was more or less correct. But calculating tax was beyond her. If I wanted to get on down the road, I was going to have to perform this calculation myself. "Okay, so what's the tax rate in this state?" I asked. Nobody knew except the harried manager. "6%," he said, disappearing into the back. "Okay," I said, using the Socratic method to give me time to think, "So what's six percent of eleven dollars?" The assistant manager shrugged, as did the cashier. I could have said anything. "Well, 6% of ten is 60 cents. So let's say sixty five cents. Here's $11.65" Some miles down the interstate I wished I'd added, "This explains why you folks keep re-electing Rick Santorum." But it would have been lost on everyone except perhaps the Sikh, who'd been quietly chuckling at the incompetence.
The drive was uneventful until near Harrisburg, where construction, a fatal accident, and the persistent effects of rubbernecking conspired to bring gridlock to more than five miles of southbound traffic. I only know about the fatal accident because of the CB radio banter I overheard. Whenever the traffic became especially slow, some nasty old man would whisper "I'm not wearing any panties!" into his CB mic and everybody else would accuse him of being an obnoxious faggot.
I decided to drive all the way to Charlottesville, bypassing my parents' place for the time being. I called Jessika from near the Downtown Mall soon after arrived and she told me to come on over.
Jessika was actually at her next door neighbor's house, so that's where I went. The door was answered by the loud barking of the neighbor's two enormous dogs as well as the neighbor herself. The neighbor's name was Jessica, a tallish blond woman of about Jessika's age. The two Jessixas have been friends since Jessica moved into the neighborhood a year and a half ago. As for the dogs, I'd actually met them back in September when Jessica was away and Jessika was taking care of them. Since that time one of them has developed the unfortunate habit of peeing on the floor whenever new people visit. Sure enough, suddenly there was a fresh path of droplets across the floorboards.
Leaving the new Jessica and her enormous dogs for the time being, Jessika and I went to Jessika's house next door, where she's been living alone for the past week since her boyfriend Scotty the Hillbilly Werewolf moved out. Jessika's new favorite beverage is something called Sparks, an example of the wave of alcohol-containing energy drinks that is sweeping (has swept?) the nation. I've never seen them in New York so I'm guessing they're illegal there. We bought four cans of Sparks at the grubby mom and pop grocery at the nearby corner of Rives and Midland. They didn't have any Sparks in the refrigerator; for some reason these were being kept in the grocery freezer and had arrived at temperatures very close to the magic point where a beverage goes from maximally refreshing to undrinkably solid. This was perfect since, like all energy drinks, Sparks taste like some sort of space age hydraulic fluid. A sweet sourness is used to mask the throat-burning harshness of the Taurine. If you pour it out of the can into a glass you'll see it's a decidedly unnatural fluorescent orange in color. But it's the year 2005 and if we're not drinking glowing fluids by now, when are we ever going to start?
Back again at Jessika's house this new woman Catherine showed up. She's a coworker/friend of Jessika's from the Jefferson Theatre. Catherine was drinking one of those premixed clear concoctions since she dislikes (or is perhaps allergic to) beer. Conversation quickly turned to Jessika's recent breakup and I made a generalization about relationships that Catherine obviously thought was insensitive in the context of this particular conversation, though in the broader context of ten years of knowing someone like Jessika, it didn't matter to her.
Then we were joined by Jessica, who was now all dressed up in a summery black evening dress even though it seemed for all the world that all we'd be doing was hanging out at Jessika's listening to her collection of pre-oldies and haunted house compilations.
Somehow, though, we decided to actually go do something. So there we were, the four of us walking down the poorly lit streets of Charlottesville's seedy Hogwaller district into its rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood of Belmont. We were a pretty femme contingent, with two of us in dresses and all of us with gorgeous long hair. A couple cars cruised by slowly and hooted unintelligible comments, which is exactly what you'd expect to happen, but still Jessika expressed surprise, as if she'd been born yesterday. "What do you expect, with four hot chicks walking down the street?" I asked.
I was blown away by the level of gentrification in "downtown" Belmont. I don't know what of it has popped up since I was here last in September, but suddenly where there used to be grimy muffler shops and faded convenience stores there's now an upscale Tapas bar and a fancy coffee shop called La Taza. Tonight both places were crowded with a volume of upscale young adults that I didn't know existed in Charlottesville. They were all anonymous new people, "brought here" in several senses of the word by the Bush economy of targeted tax cuts for the wealthy and the protracted housing bubble. That same housing bubble (and the inflationary effects it has had on Belmont real estate) also had brought a whirlwind of new porches, paint, fences, stonework, granite, rooves, and repointing to the formerly-sagging houses on the neighborhood.
The gentrification continued on into downtown, where the Fridays After Five performance space looks like it was hit with a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy stick. Nearby is a brand new upscale gas station franchise prototype called Fuel, which at night is illuminated by an unearthly pattern of raver colors. Happily, though, across High Street is the Lucky Seven, which hasn't changed the slightest in at least ten years. It's probably the most ghetto one can get that close to Charlottesville mile zero.
We stocked up on more alcohol in the Lucky Seven beer section. Something about the demonic packaging for a Mexican malt liquor named Evil Eye (Ojo Malo) convinced Jessika and me to each get a can. We later regretted the decison because of its poor drinkability, but buying it was half the fun, particulary given the rude way the cashier interrogated us about our ages. As I pointed out Jessica and Catherine outside, such rudeness would have been a lot more appropriate had we actually been teenagers. "We're teenagers, we've just had a hard life," one of them said. "Yeah, we're crack whores!" said the other.
For lack of other options, we clambered over the chain of the outside patio area of a closed Downtown Mall restaurant and drank our various drinks there, having a candid and somewhat girlie conversation about body image issues. Jessica talked about an unusual extra bone in one of her knees and I had to demonstrate the supernumerary nipples that dangle from my armpits.
It had been left to me to make the obvious astrological observation about Jessika's new clique of girlfriends. Jessica is a Gemini and Catherine is a Capricorn, astrological analogues for the members of the legendary Big Fun clique that included Jessika (Libra), Sara Poiron (Gemini), and Peggy (Capricorn). Astrology is more of a language than a useful framework for understanding psychology, but this relationship was nevertheless a delight to discover and seemed to infer some sort of important underlying meaning just by virtue of its being suddenly brought to light. I'm a fair weather astrologer and it's fun to in some way believe when I'm hanging out with the likes of Jessika.
Having absorbed a certain critical volume of alcohol, we were motivated to relocate to Atomic Burrito, a new hot spot off one of the Mall's southward sidestreets. The place was jammed with sweaty young people, many of them dancing to the music and all of them drinking like it was the eve of another round of Prohibition. Not a single actual burrito was in sight. I spent most of my time out in front talking with either Phil Ginini or Andy, one of the later transplants from Malvern, Pennsylvania. I always get to feel like a rock star when I'm hanging out with a bunch of Charlottesville old timers, even those whose names and faces I've forgotten.
After Atomic Burrito closed and kicked everyone out, we lingered in the street. I was still nursing my Ojo Malo, though it tasted like jock strap. A bicycle cop showed up and gently admonished me and made me put in the trash, though I rescued it and continued my drinking the moment he was gone. Later an enterprising young man came around selling cold beers for a dollar out of his backpack. He was making money hand over fist, but I would have paid twice as much. It was capitalism at its most useful.
Catherine headed off on her own and that left me with the Jessixas for the walk back to Hogwaller. We were an astrological Grand Air Trine, though Jessika was in a different place socially and practically. While we wanted to crash this random party we passed in Belmont, Jessika was intent on heading home and avoiding "the crackheads."
On the porch at the random Belmont party, this guy Christian Breeden thought it essential that Jessika not go home but instead join the party. So he ran off after her while Jessica and I waded in. Various cheery, hospitable people offered us icecream and pie as well as a variety of beverages, though all we cared about was booze. The only person I knew there was Joanna, another Malvern transplant. She was wearing a kerchief on her head, which reminded me of a fetish I'd admitted to earlier: bonnets on the heads of Amish women. I don't remember much of what was happening at this point, except that Christian Breeden's slender girlfriend was pacing back and forth with a cellphone pressed hard against her head. Evidently she was in a quandry about where her boyfriend had gone.
Jessica and I ran across them later as we left the party. There was some sort of strange conversation full of veiled insults with a chaser of drunken pleasantries. By the time we got back to Hogwaller, we found Jessika had bolted her door to hold back the crackhead horde. So Jessica and I went next door to her place. For some reason she was talking about Pantera as she put on a Rod Stewart album. By this point Monk the enormous dog had again peed on the floor. Though it was late, for some reason the night was not yet over, so I had to go out to my car and retrieve a warm bottle of Hurricane Kitty, one of many Keegan Ales I'd brought with me from the Hudson Valley. I ended up sleeping on a couch belonging to a Jessica, not a Jessika.
[REDACTED]
A flyer promoting one of Charlottesville's bands, the Elderly.
Various guys with Jessica in Atomic Burrito.
Jessika on the Downtown Mall with her prepared "drink."
Me with the Evil Eye (Ojo Malo), Jessica with her polaroid camera, and Catherine with her eyes closed in front of Atomic Burrito. Malvern Andy, who looks the same as he did eight years ago, is in the right background.
This is the only picture I have where Catherine has her eyes open. She's talking to Phil Ginini in Atomic Burrito. Phil is outspoken about being in love with her.
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