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rock and roll no show
Thursday, July 1 1999
I skipped out of work a little earlier than usual so I could be at Tio Leo's Lounge at 5:30 for the happy-hour pre-party in honour of Kim's birthday (which actually happened yesterday). I rode my bicycle and expected to be a little late, but for some reason I arrived before everyone else. So I killed a little time by exploring the business district just north of the mouth of Mission Valley. The place was even more low-rent than I'd originally thought. Not only did it have warehouses and large storage lots, but there was even a computer store. In a nearby electronics place I bought a couple cables and Y-connectors to facilitate routing some extra signals (particularly television cable) back into my computer room.
Tio Leo's was its usual clammy dark self. The Peggy look-alike bartender was all dressed up, but when I looked at her all I could think was "How unexpected; Peggy would never dress that way."
Kim arrived shortly after I did. Unhappily, she reported that Cyclefly's promotions chick had called her from Los Angeles with news that the show had been canceled. In somewhat typical rock and roll fashion, the drummer was suffering from a "bad back." Kim thought the band was probably exhausted and that their hotel room had seduced them. My theory was also about seduction, but it featured a gaggle of sexy boob-job equipped blond chicks descending, swooning over Cyclefly's European charisma and keeping them from leaving their beds. Adding insult to this injury was news of the replacement band that would be playing at Brick by Brick in place of Cyclefly. It was to be a Poison tribute band, believe it or night. Remember Poison? They were the then-fashionably effeminate guys who did "Every Rose has its Thorn" back in 1988.
We decided to make the best of the situation, ordering some top-shelf Margaritas and snacking on the slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature happy hour grub.
After Kim and me, the first person to show up was Lawrence, the underachieving janitor guy whom Kim first met as a massage client. Then came Scott, the erudite Harley-riding E-commerce dude from work. Sadly, since it was work night, and a busy Thursday to boot, we weren't going to be seeing many other people from my workplace.
But, unlike me, Kim has all the charisma of a rock star on Cape May Avenue in Ocean Beach, and four of our courtyard community neighbors turned up. They were soon followed by a fairly large fraction of her colleagues at the V!ctoria Rose, including the "President" herself.
I talked with Scott for some time about the things that are wrong with our company. He told me that his performance is at least twice as good as the next-best person in his resource, but still the company gives him even less respect than that accorded Rodney Dangerfield. So the other day Scott asked his boss why this was the case. Said his boss, "Look at you, Scott, you ride a Harley, show tattoos, and wear tee shirts and jeans. I could understand if you were an engineer, but you're a revenue-generating part of the company!" This despite the fact that all the work Scott does is over the phone. Yet again it's a stark demonstration of the vapid shallowness of the people in the company for which we work. Lip service is paid to a "casual" atmosphere, but really what the managers are doing is playing big corporation like little boys in a sandbox.
After a time I found myself alone in a booth with Lawrence. Even Scott, after my granting him permission, had gone off to flirt with my girlfriend at the big corner booth, which was crowded with Kim's friends and admirers. Lawrence is okay to a point, but he's kind of high-maintenance conversationally, and I was drunk and socially exhausted.
The liveliest element of the experience was Kim's two new Australian friends, a boy-girl couple. While she is a massage therapist at V!ctoria Rose, he is an ASP developer. Sound familiar? They both have delightful antipodal accents and are fully aware of the draconian new internet censorship law entering into the Australian penal code, dunderheadedly enough, on 01/01/00.
We decided not to check out the Poison tribute band playing at Brick by Brick. Instead, the party relocated back to our place. Thank God for cell phones; Kim had to make a bunch of frantic calls to keep various people from going to see Cyclefly. I also had to call my co-worker Kevin, who was tooling around Pacific Beach with one of the chicks I'd been flirting with the last time I'd been to Gordon Biersch. They were all pumped to see Cyclefly tonight, and I had to break the bad news that the whole thing was off, that Cyclefly was as flaky as a SQL 6.5 database server. By this point he'd been joined by his boss as well as my boss. Since, in Kevin's opinion, the nature of our celebrations would be the sort that probably shouldn't occur in front of anyone's boss, he eventually decided to go to Moon Doggy's instead of our place.
Since I'd last been home, Kim had replaced our couch with a white two-piece sectional, kicking down the old couch to our neighbors, Lisa and Andy, where it would once again sit where it did back when we lived in their one-bedroom pad.
In addition to many who'd been at Tio Leo's, my colleague Al showed up, which is always a good thing. We sat around smoking kind buds and drinking cheap Mexican beer. There were several lonely guys present and no unattached females, so it was sort of a sausage party. But it was still a good party, as evidenced by the fact that most of those present eventually had long conversations with at least two different people they had never known until tonight. For my part, I was having a great time. I was extremely drunk and high, but I was also energetic. Several times I told stories or even launched into song using my real singing voice. Best of all, I didn't go out of my way to flirt with any of the girls present. It was Kim's birthday party after all.
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