the dragon and the undead
Music: Underworld: Oblivion with Bells (2007)
It's day six of my "research" travels, and I'm sitting in James' charming living room with E! checking up on our emails (oh, and blogging). We've just finished eating the delicious Eggs Benedict platters that I prepared (I do cook on the road, you see, 'cause I'm talented like that). E! departs in a few minutes for the airport; James and I are going to head to the Laundromat to, you know, get jiggy with some things dirty.
We've been having an absolute blast, with a touch of somber. I arrived Sunday afternoon and we had a quiet but laugh-inducing evening in. On Monday we went into school with James and watched her metamorphose from our smiling and gracious host to a teaching machine. We had lunch with her colleague Steve and his wife Kelly, when we learned about "yiffing" (plushy sex where I'm from), and then we hopped a train to Manhattan.
We got off the E train at the World Trade Center and toured "Ground Zero." I have a lot to say about this visit, but I'm not in the mood for pensive so I'll just say it was sad, strange, and oddly proprietary. The ownership of trauma and the critique of trauma-envy was everywhere (one guy's t-shirt said, "Go find your own damn city to love"). Visitors are both barred from looking at "the hole" and from purchasing anything commemorative from renegade vendors (signs telling us not to do damage to the "9/11 community"---whatever that means---were everywhere). A sanctioned homeless man played amazing grace on a flute as visitors silently looked at and read the signs about what is being built there. Some people were tearing-up. Others, like this couple, took snap-shots of each other in front of a gate to the site, festooned with warning signs and hard-hat-wearing imperatives. I asked a cop why visitors were prevented from seeing the site with the green blinders: "There's nothin' ta see, just a hole," he said. I wanted to say, "um, yeah, that's precisely what visitors are there to see---this no-thing." But I didn't. He continued it was probably to protect visitors from debris from the construction.
We walked around the WTC block and took notice of signs and so forth. We ended up at an Irish pub, wherein we peed and had a drink (these two activities were not related, thanks . . . but stay tuned). We caught the sub, then a train home to Bayside/Queens from Penn Station. There was a K-Mart in Penn Station. I shopped in it and bought some antacid.
Once home, we changed, relaxed our feet, and then headed out to meet up with James' friend Tara for a drink at a New Orleans themed bar on Bell Street dubbed "Bourbon Street." It seems no city is free of Fat Tuesday cheer (the place serves food on plates previously occupied by Mardi Gras beads). Tara was great fun and gave us the skinny on shady shenanigans at her former employer. As we were finishing up our first martinis a handsome firefighter hit on Tara, whom she deftly redirected with an artfully placed "my boyfriend and I" phrase. It was the second "hit" that constituted the evening's strange turn of events.
We were standing near the bar sipping our second martinis when we met "The Dragon." Shortly after a nice lady took our photograph, The Dragon approached. His appearance was so astonishing, I was too busy trying not to drop my jaw that I forgot to take a photo. He was about 5'3" and had very long---like, down to his knees---hair, but it was a mullet! He had these strange wrestling-style poofy-at-the-top and skinny-at-the-bottom black pants on, with red Superman logos repeating all over them. He had a Hulk Hogan style moustache and sunglasses on and sauntered over to us and looked exclusively at James, although all of us were standing there.
"Hellllooooooooooo Sparkarella," he said in a squeaky voice, as if he knew James.
"Hello Dragon," James responded. Both of them looked like they were about to lose it in laughter, but they didn't crack. They commenced some sort of handshake routine that ended in rock-paper-scissors.
"Ok then," said the Dragon (he lost).
"Steve, a round of Butt-tree Neeeples" he demanded of the bartender in this thick, New York accent.
Needless to say, E! and I were astonished and probably looked like complete dolts at this routine. Tara acted like the guy wasn't even there. It was bizarre. I kept thinking James was going to introduce us to The Dragon, but she didn't. She just handed us our shots and we all downed them after "One, Two, Three!" The Dragon just looked straight at James the whole time. The Dragon then saluted James, did a military style turn-around, and abruptly left the bar.
"What the fuck?" I said to James. She laughed and laughed. Once she caught her breath like, oh, ten minutes later she explained The Dragon as "local color," sort of like Lindsay in Austin, only that his claim to fame was his ability to move through various social circles and find acceptance (even with those goofy pants). James met him through Kelly, who knew him from a Yiffing convention in Manhattan six months ago (Yiffing and "pot pies from my pants" were the two idioms of the day).
At this point we were pretty tipsy and largely because we hadn't ate dinner, so we left Tara and retired to Erawan, a fancy Thai place. More bizarritiy ensued: because we were running on tired and booze, we elected for "crazy" food, you know, out of our comfort zones. (We were focused more on ordering more drinks, me another gin martini, them, some sort of green tea martini that tasted like Rosie's Lime Juice and turpentine). I had some sort of sea urchin thing, E! had some kind of noodle thing, and James . . . Lobster Pad Thai. I shit you not. So they bring out this food, we're all two sheets to the wind, and James' dish has us stunned: we were expecting lobster bits in the Pad Thai, but no, it was precisely the opposite. The Pad Thai was served in the lobster, and it was huge, seriously, like a small Volkswagen, with legs and claws coming out every which a way. James was not amused. "I don't want to work to eat," she says, just as our waitress plunks down a tin bucket of surgical tools. It looked like a scene from a Marilyn Manson video. We were all laughing hysterically at James and her menu special.
E! reaches over with this clamp and rips off a claw, cracks it with a claw cracker, and lobs out a huge, intact piece of lobster toe. "See, it's easy" (Swedes grow up eatin' crustaceans like candy, apparently. And listening to Abba. Lobsters and Abba, that's Sweden). Not to be outdone, James grasps this bigger clamp and rips off the other claw. It was like a prehistoric sacrifice, complete with Quest for Fire style grunting.
This is when the Pad Thai Crustacean decided to let us know it was not dead yet. "Balls!" says James, "the fucking thing is moving." No way, I said, or something like that laughing. "I'm fucking serious. Look!" So we all put down our utensils/weapons and stare at this damn thing. It's dead as a lobster, just lying there. The noodles look like intestines coming out if its belly. Then I thought I started seeing something wriggling, every so slightly. Then I thought, "nah, your mind's playing tricks, and you are drunk." Pad Thai Crustacean then wriggled its fucking remaining arms! Total creep-out! Then it stopped. Just wriggled and then stopped.
The waitress was suddenly there like magic---probably because E! screamed bloody murder. In broken English she said, "don't worry, it's dead, it's dead. They sometimes do that. Let it cool off or stab with fork." Needless to say James didn't finish her dinner, nor did E! I did.
Never trust a crustacean. Never.
We went back to James's, perused the Twenty-Five Most Disturbing Sex Toys website, were particularly alarmed by the anime sex doll, a "horrifying, dead-eyed abomination with three useable holes." We laughed ourselves to sleep.
