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inside Fellinis
Thursday, August 11 2005
setting: setting: Martha Jefferson Neighborhood, Charlottesville, Virginia
Nathan and Janine went off to work bright and early this morning and would be heading to a cabin in the Blue Ridge later this afternoon, so my plan was to spend another day with Jessika and friends. I arrived at Jessika's house this morning with a bottle of Drano because Nathan and Janine's slow shower drain had reminded me of Jessika's, which is even slower.
I came along with Jessika when she went downtown to ship some international packages (as part of her online clothing boutique), and the very next stop had to be the gas station. We went into Fuel, the high-end gas franchise prototype, because it was the nearest station available. I'd only known Fuel from the crazy raver neon illumination it gets at night. In the day it's a series of upscale stores, starting with a convenience store on one end, moving on to a espresso bar in the middle, and ending with a white tableclothed restaurant on the other end. From what I could see there were many more employees standing around than customers. Still, I'd never seen a gas station anything like it and a little voice inside me said "In this crazy keeping-up-with-the-Jones country this is gonna be the next big thing!" So you're cruising the streets of whereverville with your hot date in a Taurus because you can't afford a Hummer or even a hybrid. No problem, just make sure you bust a right into your friendly neighborhood Fuel. But wait a minute, what's this? The gas was $2.39/gallon, a full fifteen cents more than this other station Jessika knows in Belmont. True, that other station doesn't have wine tastings, or even a cash register. Supposedly they have to make change mentally using money that's just loose in a drawer. Awld skool! Just don't try that in Wilkes Barre.
We went down to the park on the Rivanna River so Jessika could walk her dog, a tiny Boston Terrier named Ramona.
There was a guy in a parked car at the trailhead parking lot who was sitting by himself listening to country music on a local Clear Channel affiliate. He looked vaguely deformed, and since I wasn't hungover, this means that he probably was vaguely deformed.
Jessika strapped on her roller skates and she and Ramona proceeded to whip about at high speeds, constantly having to double back because my strolling was so relatively slow. Jessika is so thin these days and her skates jacked her up so high that she looked like a Scandanavian goddess.
The trail took us into a patch of forest and to sandy beach on the river where we all got in the water. I went completely under, though Jessika just waded out a little ways and Ramona did some swimming back and forth between us and the shore. Her wading options were limited because the water was well over her head only two feet from the shoreline.
On the way back to Jessika's house, we drove up from the Rivanna through the part of the Hogwaller neighborhood that lies down near the river, a place I refer to here as "Lower Hogwaller." The other side of Hogwaller, the part near Belmont, is your typical old-Charlottesville mix of early 20th Century houses on smallish lots, but the further southward (and downhill) you go, the larger the lots become while the houses themselves shrink in size or are replaced by occasional boxy multi-family units. Less than a block from Jessika's house the trailer parks begin and extend down the hill to the Rivanna floodplain. At that point there are no more houses, just a debris-strewn farm yard surrounding a large rotting cattle barn that looks abandoned but is actually a functioning part of America's beef infrastructure. There are so many leaks in whatever economic motive drives this establishment that it seems more like the third world than the United States, let alone its supposedly best place to live. Wild chickens scurry and forage among the debris and sometimes there are wild goats too. Locals come here to play horseshoes or, I imagine, test fire newly-purchased firearms. On this particular day it was being used as a staging area for the sections of a modular home that was being assembled a block or two away.
Back at Jessika's house I continued something I'd begun earlier, the eradication of spyware and viruses on a computer belonging to Scotty the Hillbilly Werewolf. He'd told Jessika she could have his computer, but now that she'd bought her own laptop he'd probably come back and get it. In the meantime, it was so junked up with crapware that it felt like a thorn in my sense of justice. I can't stand idly by in such situations, even if I'm on vacation. I mean, for Christ's sake, its desktop background had been replaced with a seemingly unremovable advertisement for a supposed spyware fighting product. That shit had to go.
Meanwhile, Jessica from next door had come over and we'd begun drinking beers out on the front porch. Then a plan gradually hatched to visit some long lost friends, namely Theresa Venesian, Matthew Hart, and Matthew's wife Angela Venesian (who is Theresa's younger sister). All of them live in Charlottesville, but Jessika had dropped out of touch, pointedly failing to return numerous phone calls made by Theresa. We were all such good friends back in the day. Our web of relationships was contentious and often sexually charged (mostly in some unrequited manner), but damn we had fun together! While I was in town it made sense for us all to get together. So Jessika called Theresa and said I was in town, something Theresa didn't believe at first. Actually, initially Theresa didn't even believe it was Jessika who had called her. An arrangement was made for us to visit, and off we went. To see what this was all about, Jessica came along too. There we were in a crappy ghetto convenience store, a Grand Air Trine trying to figure out what beverage to bring on such an auspicious occasion. We considered getting a bottle of wine, but it was all strangely expensive. I don't know what fool buys a $20 bottle of wine at a ghetto convenience store; evidently it doesn't happen too often because the bottles were blanketed in dust.
In the end it was all about Ice House (a beer I only see in Virginia) and some species of non-beer bottled girlie booze. It was kind of funny when Jessica attempted to pay for it all and her card was rejected. Even if you're living paycheck to paycheck, the 11th is awfully early in the month to have nothing left in a check card account. But still, there's something exciting about a girl who routinely lives way beyond her means.
Theresa lives in a planned community kind of place northeast of Charlottesville's Fratville. She lives alone with her baby daughter, having retreated from New York City after her husband was thrown into prison for a very long time on an alcohol-related vehicular homicide charge. Theresa's house is strewn with the primary colors of children's toys, a surprising thing considering how goth she was when I last saw her. Kids, it seems, are the strongest drugs you can possibly take. Theresa has also developed a pathological fear of microbes and contamination.
Theresa got on the horn and invited Angela and Matthew Hart (who live in her same development) to come over and visit. At first they were going to beg off but then when they heard I was in town they were excited to come over.
Matthew and Angela have a kid of their own named Jacob who is something like two or three. Jacob was all about Harry Potter and magic, and this inspired me to have him cast a spell in which an eye developed like a stigmata in the palm of my left hand, a magic trick that required a small amount of artistic ability on my part and the suspension of disbelief among all who saw my art. That's something which comes easy to a kid of Jacob's age.
Theresa wouldn't stop talking about how good Jessika looks. She was particularly amazed at how thin Jessika has become. "You look like a supermodel!" she'd say. And then Jessika would say something about how she guessed her metabolism was to blame. This sounded like a lie1, particularly to those who know that neither of Jessika's parents are especially thin. But Theresa's surprise was understandable given the context. Everyone around her, including most of the other people from the Big Fun days, have grown paunches, puffed up, or otherwise packed on surplus human biomass. As for me, the only reason I'm as ripped as I am is all the stone work I did early in the season. Of course, since I'm 37, I'd have a good excuse no matter what I looked like.
These days Matthew Hart supports his family by playing online poker. I shit you not. He's been playing poker for years, but in the last two years poker has suddenly become trendy and lots of "suckers" are pouring into poker venues, where they serve as low-hanging fruit for those, like Matthew, who know the ropes.
Eventually the mother of Theresa and Angela (who still looks fairly young) came over to babysit the kids, leaving us all free to go out somewhere. Our party ended up at Fellini's, a recently-reopened restaurant on the west end of the Downtown Mall. Throughout my Charlottesville years, Fellini's was just a placeholder, seemingly full of ghosts. Old timers would share their fond memories of the place and you'd stand there looking at its blank white facade and wonder what was ever going to come of it. But now real estate in Charlottesville is just too valuable to sit idle. And here we were inside Fellini's, taking in its supposedly million dollar renovation, but the results had been nothing special.
Our waiter recognized me, but I couldn't quite place who he was. We all ordered drinks and talked (not just about the old days) just like the good old days. The great thing about old friends is how easy it is to be comfortable with them again, no matter how many years have passed. I asked Theresa why she'd taken her imprisoned husband's last name, didn't she know that doing so was so 1953? She was shocked - shocked! - to learn that my wife had not done me the honor of taking my name. "Gretchen Mueller - spreken ze English?" is a sufficient, if succinct, response to that sentiment.
On the drive back to Theresa's place, Theresa was driving and I was delighted when she fired up a joint and popped some industrial music into the CD player. It was still the same old Theresa, even after having a kid and being thrown into a serious prolonged family crisis.
After we'd said goodnight to our old friends, Jessika had to drive us back to her house, which was a bit of a challenge considering how drunk we all now were (and given Virginia's new draconian drunk driving laws). But she did a good job, even taking us to various convenience stores so Jessica could perhaps buy more beer. (All such places were closed.) For some reason Jessica was a lot drunker than the other angles of our Grand Air Trine, and Jessika and I had to keep urging her to behave herself and maybe not, say, beat on the glass of an obviously closed convenience store in hopes of getting them to reopen so a drunk girl could buy more beer. We assured her that she should trust our judgment and that she'd regret her behavior in the morning. "You're ganging up on me!" she protested.
I spent the night on Jessika's couch for the first time on this particular vacation. At some point in the middle of the night Ramona came down and curled up beside me. She smelled like Jessika.
Jessika on the Rivanna River trail. She is actually wearing her dress inside-out because she likes the way it looks that way. The white line is recent and no one seems to know why it is there.
Ramona makes friends with a big Canadian dog.
Lower Hogwaller.
Vaguely-deformed country music fan. A Hogwaller chicken.
Jessika and Ramona look inside/under a piece of a prefab house at a staging area in lower Hogwaller, while wild chickens forage in the distance.
Click to enlarge.
A complete staircase in a prefab part of a house at the Hogwaller staging area.
1In all fairness to Jessika, the whole time I was with her she subsisted on a diet consisting of quarts of non-lite beer, cold leftover Wilkes Barre KFC, BLTs, corn chips with salsa, and frying pans full of dumpster-dived potatoes. It's possible she has a tapeworm, a topic we discussed at some length (wordplay intended!) after we got back from Fellini's tonight. Jessika's crazy Malvern friend Katia had a tapeworm and from the way Jessika described it their relationship was more symbiotic than host-parasite.
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