Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

family

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It is eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning, which is a solid hour and a half earlier than i’ve gotten up on this day of the week so far this term. People were already up, about, and trickling out of Rabi‘s house as their day begins, and we’re just sitting here — her because her day hasn’t got any sort of structure or schedule other than making it onto a plane and me because i’ve totally subverted the ebb and flow of my entire week. I woke up long before nine in the morning yesterday and the day before; starting at 6:45 and waking up roughly every three quarters of an hour from there until nine, because that’s the way my alarm at the apartment works. Today i only got one chance at sliding back under the cover of sleep, and then i braced myself for the bright light of the kitchen and popped out of my room into the Whitaker’s morning routine.

You have to understand that i’ve only ever lived in a house with myself and my mother as a kid, and that back when she oversaw my mornings at all she was usually involved her own daily rush to work at the hospital. Somewhere in there i’m sure there was a “make sure you have your homework” and “did you get your shoes on,” but most of what i remember about mornings is from other people’s houses — my grandmother’s, and Eddy’s, and George’s — all of whom were layovers on my daily commute to CTCA or Masterman. Eventually i was old enough to take public transportation and much more reliable about waking up than my mother or her alarm clock and my routine became totally divorced from her own, barely even intersecting at the shower or the kitchen table. But, anyway, that’s not the point.

I suppose the point is that i was right, and this was really exactly the vacation that i needed. Boston isn’t anywhere exotic, and my time here was even more scheduled and routine in a lot of ways than my daily classroom engagements. However, inserting myself into this alien routine in this different place has somehow recentered me back to the things i should be really caring about instead of whatever i had on my head last week, and that’s more invaluable than anything some tropical location could possibly provide.

Well, plus there was vegan chocolate couscous pie waiting for us when we got back from the concert. That would never happen at home.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6376932/

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Out of my entire family my grandmother was really the only person who read the Sunday paper with any kind of regularity. Whenever i would stay in her house i was absolutely guaranteed to wake up to find her at her thick kitchen table with the comics section all splayed out in front of her working on cryptics and things with the teevee blithely chirping weekend nonsense in the background.

I wasn’t one for waking up early and so i would always miss the sound of crawling through the paper… front page stories, local interest, past the ads neatly tucked in front of the funnies for just that reason. I only ever saw the aftermath.


Today i awoke to a quiet sort of rustling seeping through the sturdy door and it took me a moment to orient to just where i was before i realized someone was reading the paper in the kitchen. I didn’t want to bother them, so i just rolled over and took a nap.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6328055/

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Last night’s start stop rain versus humidity gave way to gray an drizzle today, much to my delight. So much heat all week was just piling more wear and grief onto me and onto the city with every day, and today wiped everything back down to the simple scent of cement and a breeze. With the city so cool and forgiving Hillary entertained my ambitions to get out and wander. We were on second street looking for a restaurant to preface seeing Ghost World, and somehow we wound up in Pagoda.

Pagoda occupies a place in so many simultaneous sentences in my head that i can hardly discern what order i’m supposed to write them in, so please excuse the tangle.

Pagoda is nestled in a restaurant-and-Ritz-theatre district that is Old City, so there are a lot of cobbly streets and things with “independence” in their name. In front of it there is some kind of tiny square about Ben Franklin (though it is not the Ben Franklin House, which is nearby), and in it is a tiny metal model of a historic house on a tiny podium. I saw the house all of the time, because Pagoda has just recently become Pagoda… it’s claustrophic bamboo-strewn space has experienced several incarnations in my lifetime. The restaurant to occupy the building for the longest time was Waldo’s… the same upstairs balcony with a low-flying view out the two-story front face of the building but with a marbly bar extending the entire length of the restaurant from front to back with the swingy doors to the kitchen at the end and a pinball machine tucked into the back corner.

I would sit tiny in those high chairs at the bar with a can of pineapple juice over ice and a bowl of chunky round bar pretzels watching football, because i was nearly always there on a Sunday. The surroundings and everything have melted away now so much that i believe that i really didn’t know anything about the place other than the doors and the balcony and the chair and the top of the bar and the teevee. And my father behind the bar; but, he’s not something i know all that well.

Any story i could tell you about Waldo’s would just be an iteration of “and then the Eagles scored” or “and then we played pinball,” but looking back i think it was the only place i’ve ever been where i have been unequivocally happy; time has wiped away all of the pouty bored pieces of it so they are just smudged pictures around me at the bar trying to teach my dad how to play football on gameboy (“What do you mean there’s not penalties?”) or making my typical assertions (“If the Eagles lose the the Cowboys on my birthday i’m never watching a game here again, okay dad?”) or something. My last memory was from down at the end of the bar at one of those Superbowls that Denver lost, but by then we were me and my dad and his wife and i only remember it was strange being there at night on a Sunday because visitation always was over by 7pm on a Sunday so my life could get orderly again for school the next day.

Splitting time between parents was a funny thing, because weekends with my father never got very much accomplished except for stealing me away from what i was used to, and we never went anywhere because i always was back at home by sundown on a Sunday with a kiss goodbye from his rough stubble. But, i did it nonetheless, from when he lived in a tiny apartment with fish and one of the other bartenders to the wife’s adorable splitlevel house in Andora to their home in BlueBell that is anything but that to me. And, now i don’t even really call him for father’s day, because i don’t have a strong enough association with the world, but i think of him whenever i hear doo-wop on the radio because of his silly high voice that i cannot really match, or when i am distractedly ignoring the Eagles lose. Or when i see where Waldo’s used to be.

So, Hillary entertained my buried sense-associations and we ate at Pagoda and i choked back some tears. It was raining, anyhow.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5038252/

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I was walking down my street and it was lit up all shades of sun… twinkling past trees and bare on the cement and reflected off of polished old cars. Out on the porch next to my building someone was eating something with bay seasoning, and the sense-memory association snapped me back to once when i was crabbing with those funny little cages off the side of a pier after fifth grade and the click of their metal against the wooden dock as we set them down and watched the crabs toddle out sideways from within. I associate the smell more with live crabs than with eating them because i’ve never really eaten crabs. Plucking meat out of anything’s shell is a bit too carnivorously aggressive for me… even sliding a tail off of a shrimp is a bit distasteful. The summer after fifth grade i went on “the cruise” with the boat-club that my mother’s boyfriend belonged to… really just a whole slew of tiny personal boats chugging their way down to Maryland and then back up again over the course of a week. At the time it didn’t really occur to me what an odd little vacation it was. My mother had left me alone at my Aunt Susan’s the year before to go out on the cruise with our just found cat Googie, but i wound up (accidentally) kicking out a window in her den door and it was all quite a debacle. The first time i was ever on a boat was a few years before, and it was a house-boat with a living room and oreo cookies and a resident fluffy cat.

I fell for a girl on the cruise and every fictional character i created for an entire year afterwards was named ‘Barbara,” and i’ve never met anyone my age with that name again. When i would chase her in the water she’s just swim out until the deep end and wait until i grew tired of bobbing up and down just by bouncing off of my toes and floating a little. Other than that, all i really remember from the cruise was that it was the first time i danced in front of people and not just with my mother in my own living room. And, i quite liked it. But, somehow i contrived to be sick for the last night’s dance and missed it, i think because i knew she’d be there. The whole trip had this very fraternal atmosphere between all of the boaters and their counterparts at various marinas down the coast. I don’t think i’ll ever do anything quite like it again. Except for those silly butterflies and staying home from the dance to play with my gameboy and watch the stars… i suppose i might contrive that a time or two more in one way or another..

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/4877285/

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#3 is true. In my life i have consumed under 1 gallon combined of beer and/or cola. I can tell you nearly exactly how much beer i’ve ever had… 20oz. of Old English, 16oz of Corona, 8oz at the PNE convention, and various other tiny amounts of beer that total well under an additional 20oz. That’s half a gallon. As for cola, i’m only referring to Pepsi/Coke, and not gingerale, seltzer, ect. I had a glass of coca cola once on a very hot day when it was the only thing available, and otherwise i’ve never had more than a mistaken sip through a straw once or twice a year. I’ve always hated soda, because it tastes horrible, it’s carbonated, and it has absolutely zero redeeming healthy qualities. In my mind, it should be restricted to consenting adults as much as cigarettes and beer, because as long as the government sees fit to tell people what they can and cannot do we really ought to try to make our nation’s children a little healther in the process.

When i was seven years old my grandmother offered me $20 to drink a shot glass of Pepsi and i declined. She was always doing funny things like that… in retrospect i suppose she was attempted to get me to broaden my tastes since i was a very picky eater, but everything she tried to broaden me with was unhealthy and unsavory (one halloween she somehow convinced me to have a hotdog and i think my mother stopped talking to her for a month). Except, she always tried to get me to drink apple juice with milk icecubes in it, and earlier this year i sortof unintentionally had that and it wasn’t so bad.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3899453/