Coconuts

I was out garage sale-ing (it sounds good as a verb but does not read well) with Pap and the Girlfriend in rural Pennsylvania. I found a nice camping kit with a small pan, mug and silverware in one compact package. An ideal addition to any expedition.

I go to pay the woman and she says, “Oh, I got that when I was Girl Scout.”

A woman browsing overheard and said, “I had one just like that from Girl Scouts.”

I said, “I had one like this too but I lost it.”

The woman selling didn’t even bat an eye but the woman next to me laughs and says, “Oh, you weren’t a Girl Scout.”

“I’d be there yet if I didn’t go out for the swim team.”

Thank you Groucho Marx, dispenser of all that is good.

Dance Monkey Dance

I’m sitting on the ground waiting for my shuttle to work, eating my PB&J and trying to ignore the cackling hens around me. When the shuttle arrives, I greet my favorite driver and take my seat. Before we even start moving, I start feeling a crawling sensation in a few places. I start sweeping at the spots only to realize that they are ants. And not just a few ants. They were all over me. I started slapping at them and yelled, “Son of a bitch, I’ve got ants” (an imitation of my father as he was getting mugged on the Moscow subway). The ladies laughed and laughed until they turned their attention to the next piece of sleaze in the Post. I was still finding ants on me at work. I classify this as reason #132 that I will never be a CEO.

The Bells of Matrimony have a Sweet Ring but A Sour Echo

I love free movies in New York. We watched two great films of Buster Keaton, “One Week” and “High Sign”, accompanied by a jazz band in Prospect Park. I laughed so much that I went out and bought an 11 movie collection of his from China for $2 + $25 S&H.

The next night, we watched “The Warriors” in Coney Island. It’s based on a story from Greek history when a mercenary army has to fight it way across the Greek peninsula to return to Hellas. In this movie, a gang from Coney Island goes to a all-city gang meeting in the Bronx and then gets framed for the murder of the leader that was to unite them all. They have to fight their way all the way home with every gang in the city looking out for them.

That day, teams dressed as gangs from the movie started in the Bronx and completed an all day scavenger hunt that ended here in Coney Island. Their final round of competition was a rap piece to be done in front of everybody right before the movie. There was only one team with decent rappers but the all girl gang, the Lizzies, made up for their lack of talent with gusto.

It was perfect watching this cult classic in the area these boys were fighting to return to.

Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world

I started off the night sitting in Bryant Park, drinking a Heine out of a paper bag and reading Eyeless in Gaza by Huxley. Unfortunately, I sat down next to a group of people learning about basic finances. I didn’t mind them talking but I think they minded that I kept laughing out loud when I got to into my book. This made me look around a little more and I noticed a women and her two daughters who looked to be from Spain. They had Goldfish (my favorite snack) which I stared at longingly until I caught the mother’s eyes.

“I wasn’t trying to be creepy. I was only staring at your goldfish,” I say sheepishly.

She gestures that she doesn’t understand English and gets her daughter to face my direction. In fact, now the whole family is sitting and staring at me. I freeze up and then mumble, “I just was saying that I really like goldfish a lot.”

She stares at me for a second and then says with an a pretty accent, “You can have some.” I walk over and she pours some into my hand. I offer to trade some of my Heineken for the goldfish but the mother just laughs and shakes her head.

I’m there to see A Shot in the Dark, a Pink Panther movie with the unequalled Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. The movie begins so I abandon my goldfish toting friends and move two chairs to where I can see the screen.

A man sitting a few feet in front of me turns around and says, “What are you doing?”

“Just getting ready to watch a great movie,” I say with a big grin.

“Why are you sitting so close to me,” he says with menace in his voice as he stands up.

“Because I want to see the movie,” I say in a calm voice.

“Why did you have to sit so close to me?”

“I’m not sitting close to you.”

“Why don’t you sit over there?”

“Because there’s a tree in the way.”

“You’re some kind of smartass aren’t you?” he says loudly, as he stands directly above me.

“No. I’m just trying to watch the movie.”

It goes on like this for a few minutes and I stay cool except for calling him an idiot once. He gets very heated and I flinched once when he made a sudden gesture because he was angry enough to start throwing punches. I felt pretty good about being able to sit there while he was in my face but I also don’t know why I felt a compunction to “win this battle”, as if it mattered if I won againt this angry, possibly crazy, man.

Eventually one guy goes and gets a cop. Once my weird antagonist realizes this, he starts yelling more but from farther away. He finally takes his seat when the cop approaches but he continues to glare at me for awhile until he settles down to just swinging his arms behind himself randomly to make sure I’m not there. He acted like a crazy homeless person but he had a brand new iBook on his table and dressed normally.

Ironically, once my brother got to the movie, we realized that his chair was behind a tree so we had to move to where the guy wanted me to sit in the first place. My brother wants some water to drink because he’s dehydrated after a long day of moving rich people’s junk. I tell him there’s a place down the street where I got my forty of Heineken. He decides he’ll get another one for each of us. As soon as he said that, I knew it would be an interesting night.

We have a great time drinking and watching Peter Sellers working his magic. I vowed to my brother that I will surprise attack around his house someday soon just like Kato attacks Inspector Clouseau. Quotes:

Clouseau: And I submit, Inspector Ballon, that you arrived home, found Miguel with Maria Gambrelli, and killed him in a rit of fealous jage!

Clouseau: Well... that just goes to prove what I have said all along.
Dreyfus: What you've said, Clouseau, qualifies you as the greatest prophet since Custer said he was going to surround all those Indians!

Afterwards, as we biked over the Williamsburg Bridge, we switched bikes to see what it felt like to ride a different fixed gear. He had a lower gear ratio so I could get more speed on the downhill of the bridge but I had a hard time skid-stopping. I was ready to switch back to my bike and Colin’s only remark was, “It felt like I just fucked your girlfriend.”

We made it to the hipster mecca of the Union Pool bar. I knew that Williamsburg packed in the hipsters but this place was crawling with them. It felt like a roach motel that gathered them in with cheap PBR instead of pheromones. We got our drinks and sat down at an outside fountain across from two girls. Soon we’re talking to them. Actually, my brother is talking to the exotic beauty from South America while I’m playing wingman with the one with a facial blemish from Jersey. He got her number and a promised date so I consider it a job well done. I met a girl who is the bike mechanic for a peditaxi company and she says they can make up to $200 bucks on a good day.

After a few more trips to the bar, I get a free round from the bartender because she says we have been good customers. I figure that’s a good indication that we’ve been there too long. We get on our bikes and Colin leaves for a girl’s apartment and I unknowingly go the wrong way under the BQE. I eventually get to some docks and I have no idea what body of water I would be running into but I hike back up the BQE and cross the water on the highway bridge, weaving around the late night construction. I get off the exit at 57^th street and 57^th avenue.

I have no idea where I am. I know there’s nothing like these streets in Brooklyn and I’m pretty sure, judging by my surroundings, that I’m not in Manhattan. Somehow, I completely forget about the borough of Queens. I ride despondently for a few blocks and then I just give up. I find thick bushes around an apartment building and crawl under them to sleep the sleep of the damned.

I wake up at seven with a little hangover and start biking to Grand Central. I stop at a restaurant for some a wash in the bathroom and a bacon, egg and cheese. I make Metro-North but I fall asleep five minutes before my stop and snooze for three stops. I wake up with that “Oh shit” feeling. I jump off the train at Mount Kisco and find out that the next train back is an hour later.

It’s a miserably hot day, I’m hungover and so I decide to hitchhike back to Valhalla because the highway goes right next to my work. After a hot and sweaty 45 minutes of wandering around trying to find the highway entrance, I give up and take the train to White Plains. Somehow, this whole sad, crazy adventure puts me at work only about 45 minutes after my boss, albeit stinking and miserable.

The curtain rises on a vast primitive wasteland, not unlike certain parts of New Jersey – Woody Allen

I went to the end of Houston Street to go rowing with Floating the Apple. It's an organization that builds 19th century white hulled rowing gigs with inner city kids. The guy I am house-sitting for builds the boats and he introduced me to the adult rows on Tuesday and Thursday night.

Last night, I had a perfect row. We had no girls and a coxswain from New Zealand on his first solo coxing (he only told us afterwards that we took his solo cox cherry) . I was stroke meaning that the other three rowers followed my rhythm. We rowed strong down the island and were doing so well that New Zealand decided to strike out for New Jersey. In spite of a lot of boat traffic, we made it safely to a park on the other side to be greeted by a gaggle of toddlers waving and yelling. After about two hours on the water, we get back to the dock and pull out the boat.

Afterwards, I hang out and talk to the guys from the boat. The cox lives in Chinatown and makes a living writing screenplays. The grizzled old guy I took for a dock worker is actually an actor and played the villain in a Kevin Smith movie I’ve never heard of. The last guy, who I convinced to row when I met him at the Clearwater festival, walked with me for a few blocks. He’s had a number of jobs over the year: taxi driver, construction worker, bike messenger and my personal favorite: porn star. Now he’s “dating” a dancer that he met at a strip club but it seems like all he does is buy her food and trips together without ever seeing the fruits of his labor. Lesson to Lex: Never trust dancers, or women in general.

At home, I jump in the shower and I starting howling out curses because it feels like a red hot coal is pressing against the top of my butt crack. The infamous rowers butt! A blister formed from all the friction with the seat and the water painfully washed over it. But my tale gets worse from here. The next morning I wake up and am poking around down there only to find another blister right on the taint by the testicles. This one is even worse because I can’t stop playing with it and it gets aggravated during my bike ride. It’s time to bring in the big guns: Gold Bond

A Brethren Wedding or Shooting the Moon

I went home to Lancaster, PA, a place many people have been to on field trips or vacations for reasons befuddling to the locals. However, I went home for a wedding. And not just any wedding, but a conservative Brethren wedding.

One of my good friends, Andrew Hess, actually held out until marriage at age 23. An impressive feat. He comes from strong stock. His dad is a hog farmer and a minister. He grew up working with the death machines. When we were young, we would crawl up above their steers so we could piss on them to make them run around their pen. We stirred up trouble at youth group and our families had acorn wars in the woods (we did not fare well, the Hess men are all pitchers).

The wedding was dry which is understandable even though the temperance movement has no basis in the bible. It was a ploy by the church to increase membership during the Third Great Awakening, a strategy that ruined out to be very effective at filling the pews and emptying the bars. However, this wedding took it further. There was not allowed to be any songs about alcohol or relationships outside the bounds of matrimony. These are tough requirements to put on a DJ when he doesn’t even have a drunk audience to work with.

In any case, we still had quite a good time because the wedding was in a beautiful park . I learned the game of Frisbee Cup where you put bottles on sticks in the in the ground. If the other teams knocks your bottle to the ground, they get a point. If you catch you the bottle before it touches the ground, you get a point. My fake brother-in-law and I lost by two points. I fared better in fencing where I gave my Dad a bruise on his side. This prompted him to challenge me in his speciality: wrestling. We went to the back corner, took off our shirts and started grappling. It took him about 90 seconds to throw me directly to my back into a puddle for a perfect show stopper. On our way home, the fake brother-in-law passes us on the PA Turnpike. Dad barks, “Moon ‘em.” I rush into action while the girlfriend does something devious with a french fry.

Given Up: Safe Conduct - Pasternak's autobiography
Taken Up: Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza

Rain Rain, Come My Way

Friday’s downpour caused it to become the best day I‘ve had biking in the city. I took off my shirt, rolled up my pants and took off into the torrent, singing short snatches of songs repeatedly, loudly and off key such as “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortening Bread”. Because of my recent reading of The Rum Diary, I used the phrase “vicious rat bastard” often, although always in good humor. I was so happy. I was flying through the streets of Manhattan with little traffic. I skid stopped at every opportunity because it is always most fun in the rain. You can skid for twenty feet, the back end starts fishtailing, you stop skidding for a second to straighten out and then lock them up again. It’s a glorious feeling. I’ll take a rain like that any day. It’s the damn sun that’s killing me.

Currently reading: Safe Conduct: Pasternak’s autobiography

Free Room Service or Theater for the Asses

The girlfriend got free tickets to a play called Room Service at the Bank Street Theater. I was excited because this play was turned into a movie by the Marx Brothers and I am a big fan. It became their greatest flop because “the Marx Brothers were constrained by having to play characters with a passing resemblance to human beings.”

I had some time when I got off the train so I went to one of my favorite spots in the city: the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. I plan to start busking there as soon as I spend a weekend in the city. In preparation, I rememorized all the plaques of his poems around the statue.

Twinkle twinkle little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.

They told me you had been to her
And mentioned me to him;
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.

Beautiful soup so rich and green!
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle!
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

Then I finish up with the Jabberwocky poem. I practiced yesterday on three little kids. I don’t think they spoke English and they regarded me with much more fear than admiration.

I headed down to the theater on 8^th Ave at a good clip when my chain fell off. On a fixed gear bike, this is the worst thing that can go wrong because the chain is used for braking. Luckily, I am not hardcore fixie because those guy ride without a backup brake which would have left me brakeless at high speed in the middle of Manhattan at rush hour. I still barely avoided an accident because I had to be grabbing for the brake which is not aligned well and does not slow me down very quickly.

This is why I like fixed gear for commuting through the city. I had a dangerous situation and I had to be grabbing for the brakes which left me very little control over my handlebars. Usually, when I have a problem and need to stop quickly and swerve, I have complete control of where I am going because my legs are taking care of the braking. I also can stop much quicker because I can skid to a stop instead of allowing the friction of the hand brakes to slow me down. But enough preaching,

I actually just put the chain back on the side of the street and kept going carefully. It means my chain must have been too loose and I’ll need to tighten it up when I get home. I continued down to the theater and met the girlfriend. The show was in a small theater with about 50 seats, cheap beer and only one bathroom.

The show was a “door slamming farce from 1937” and the director did a great job selecting the cast. Everyone fit their role, especially the lovable scheming producer who, of course, managed to pull it out in the end in spite of the odds. It was full of fast dialogue, one-liners and faked deaths. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Faith in Humanity: Restored

I was in a rush to lock up my bike at Grand Central yesterday because I was going to miss my train. I locked the front wheel to the frame but didn’t notice that I hadn’t gotten it around the projection on the side of a lamppost. This means that my bike was unlocked and sitting in front of one of the city’s busiest daytime spots for 11 hours and was not stolen. This either means that New Yorkers are much more honest than their reputation or my bike really looks like a piece of shit.

Reading: The Rum Diary by HST

Take My Ex-Wife, Please

At work in my lab, a professor I didn’t know was demonstrating a technique where you insert 10 mL of air into a mouse’s back to simulate a certain type of injury. As the air was inserted, the mouse began to bulge and stretch ending with a grotesque bulge in the middle of its back. I looked at it and said , “Looks like my ex-wife.” He gives me a look for a second and then turns to my professor and says, “This boy should be put in shackles and in prison. He’s sick.” I thought that was a strong response to a bad joke until I realized he thought I said “Looks like my next wife.”