Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

stories

Shoot The Stars

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I am not a habitual taxi-taker. In fact, I’m the opposite – usually walking home with my guitar at 1 a.m. after playing at Lindsay’s bar of choice.

Every so often the need arises. Like a few weeks ago, heading home from work sick.

Months ago I meant to write about one driver in specific. He was the old, whiskey-soaked sort of driver you see in movies and not in actual taxis much anymore.

“I used to drive in Atlantic City,” he confided, “until one night I picked up this fare, and I knew something wasn’t right.

“Sure enough, at the first red light we hit he held a gun to the back of my head and told me to hand back all of my cash.

“I was sure he was going to kill me,” he said, as I stared at the back of his head, riveted. “But, he just waited until I had handed it all back to him, and then he just opened the door and got out.

“So I stopped driving in Atlantic City.”

As the numbers on Washington ave slid every-lower we talked about guns and people, and which is the real killer. We talked about how life is valuable.

When he left me on my step I half imagined that I would turn to find his cab nowhere in sight, as if he was some gossamer coachman emerged from the night just for that conversation.

This Thursday night on the way home from our band rehearsal my driver was Russian, and not sure how to get to my house from the Kimmel Center. Another recent transplant, perhaps?

After I pointed him in the right direction, he began to speak – unselfconsciously, not in a making conversation sort of way.

“My good friend from home played jee-tar,” he told me, turning onto Broad. “His mother, his father, both are deaf, and I think he not hear so well. But, he could play the jee-tar so well. His hands move so quick on… what do you say? The long part. For me it is [?].”

“The neck.”

“Yes, the neck. His hands move so quick on the neck. My friend’s jee-tar, made from before revolution.”

(I inwardly winced, remembering the t-shirt I had almost worn, but didn’t, knowing for certain that Gina would wear it instead (and she did).)

I found myself telling him how I like to play acoustic because I like to feel the music through my body, because you never need an amplifier that way.

“This week, the stars,” he said as we turned onto Washington. “How do you say? You have a saying.”

“Falling stars?”

“Yes, yes, but when they fall…”

“Shower?”

“Yes. A shower of stars this week.”

I told him about the time I laid in the middle of a football field in nowheresville, tucked into my sleeping bag, watching the stars fall. He corrected me, “not stars, Leonids.”

“You have to get out of the city,” I implored him. “They aren’t the same with the lights. You need to find somewhere where it’s really night.”

The ride seemed long for the conversation, but the fare was inexplicably cheap. Maybe he doesn’t know how to work the meter yet, i thought.

“Good luck with your show,” he said after i left him his tip.

“Good luck with your stars,” I told him.

This one I’m sure was real.

I so did not violate any confidentiality agreements by writing this post.

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How to write this post and not get fired? It’ll be tricky.

You all know by now I work in communications for a major Philadelphia company, and I love it. I get paid to do things I would probably be doing at home by myself anyway, as frightening as that concept is.

What you might not know (because I haven’t mentioned it in about seven years) is that I had a childhood obsession with the Price Is Right. I loved the One Bid, I loved the Showcase Showdown.

But, I loved nothing more than I loved Plinko.

I was obsessed with the way the penny slid into the board and plunked back and forth and to and fro down the pegs before it finally wound up in a prize slot.

You might not understand how those two facts are connected to each other. Here’s a hint:

Right now, somewhere in Philadelphia, there is a fully functional Plinko board.

I can’t tell you why there is a Plinko board, or where the Plinko board is, because it’s … well, it might be a trade secret? Like, if I were to reveal the purpose and location of the Plinko board, the reason behind my termination would be “dissemination of trade secrets on the internet.” I think.

What I can reveal is that within the last month my co-workers’ “duties as assigned” meant they had to acquire said Plinko board, and that when I walked one of said co-workers to the parking lot today I came within one hot second of climbing onto the roof of her mini-van like a fucking ninja and riding that sucker through rush hour to the location of the Plinko board.

I have been promised photos, and possibly even a video demo, of the Plinko board in action. Yet, pester, plead, and outright beg as I might I could not obtain permission to play, touch, or even view the Plinko board at its secret location. And, after tomorrow, it will be gone, whisked away by the cruel whims of fate (and/or the decrepit liver-spotted claws of nigh unknown game show dieties).

However, though I may be barred from visiting the Plinko mecca, or enlisting you to help me gain entry to it by some nefarious means, I have taken away one important thing from this experience:

I now know that there is a life-sized, fully-functional Plinko board that can be delivered to the Philadelphia metro area.

And, I’m pretty sure I have a high enough credit limit to rent it for the weekend…

An Itch That I Could Only Scratch

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I can say with some amount of certainty based on years of life experience that I am a sound sleeper. When I’m ready for sleep, I sleep well, with the exception of ticking watches, rogue hamsters, and urban roosters.

So, when I tell you that last Sunday I awoke from a dead sleep at 2:41 a.m. because my hands were itching, you have to understand that they were really itching.

To put it in perspective, last summer a dozen of our friends attended a wedding just outside St. Louis, and we spent the night in revelry on the banks of the Mississippi, and when we returned to Philadelphia we discovered that our feet were covered with angry red bits, up to the ankle.

We never discovered what the source of the bites was, but I had 103 of them, and the heat from the itching was bad enough that I took my shoes off while riding the Broad Street Subway.

Contemplate that for a minute. And then understand when I tell you that the itching that awoke me was worse. Much, much worse.

Actually, strike my last, it wasn’t even the itching that awoke me. It was the scratching. I was scratching my hands in my sleep. That’s how bad the itching was.

The worst part about it was that there was no discernible source – not bumps, scratches, or rashes to hint at my malady. I tried a dab of aloe on one hand and an Afterbite stick on the other, to no avail.

I tried to be rational and methodical. I made a list of foods I had eaten that day. I walked downstairs to check that we were using our normal laundry detergent. I pulled the pillows off of the bed and examined them closely. I checked my head for lice.

Nothing.

I visited Web M.D., but after extensively listing my symptoms the best it could suggest was an allergic reaction (or a drug addiction).

The day before Gina and I had wandered through the city for our first photo shoot as a band, taking pictures in front of abandoned shop fronts and dessicated alleyways. Had I got a splinter from one of the boarded up windows? Had I brushed against an urban sprout of poison oak?

The itching hadn’t resolved an hour later, at which point I was soaking my hands in ice water to take the edge off. At this point I sent an urgent email to Gina and Lindsay to see if they were experiencing the same symptoms, as well a very curious email to my boss which concluded:

This is much later than I’ve ever taken Benadryl on a work night, so there is a distinct chance I will be late in the morning due to my resulting stupor.

Gilt & Hail

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While out in the world I am constantly seeking out details to ferry back to this little white box.

Some days are just as plain as the box itself, monochromatic and empty, and so the smallest sensation of actual life sticks out. Last Friday, a fever, riding home in a cab from work. He had attached a small plastic hose to the passenger a/c vent, and it pumped air under the divider, directly onto my naked ankle. In my hyper-sensitive state the sustained blast of air was alternatingly soothing and intensely painful.

I sank into a kind of paralyzed trance, in rhythm with the throbbing veins beneath my skin.

Other days the world is so vibrant with narrative color that I can hardly take it all in. Not if I had a tape recorder for my thoughts, or a camera for the view. And so I marvel at the human mind, and how in a life full of gadgets it is still the best recording device I’ve got so long as I make sure each aspect of the world is remarkable in its own way.

I prise away at every little detail.

A beautiful voice is emerging from the post office boxes. At first I think it might be the radio, but it slips remarkably from disco to R&B to lullaby without changing key. I don’t think digital satellite can do that.

I peer through the keyholes and tiny windows in the doors of each box to try to catch a glimpse of her. Gilt, but fading, each door is set with a key hole surrounded by a multi-pointed star, each of ten successive letters marking its points.

I don’t understand why. I still can’t see her.

A pleasant-looking woman in a Ft. Lauderdale shirt strolls in with her toddling son, adorable with untied shoes. In line behind me he too is drawn to the singing, or maybe just the gilt, and strays beneath the nylon divider to investigate.

“Get yourself back in here,” she croaks. She speaks like a bull frog, lower and more destroyed than a woman who had smoked for twice her age. She yanks him under the rope and lays a firm smack across his midsection. It reverberates across the tiled floor as he looks up at her. No tears, still quizzical.

She catches me staring, and I hold her gaze for long seconds.

The posters, I notice, are coded. A star means to leave them up indefinitely. A plus means they will expire; their shelf-life is printed below, white on black. And it isn’t just the posters – laminated mats and signs as well.

The tiny woman in front of me is trying to pick up mail in her maiden name; she drops pennies into her purse and they make a peculiar clinking sound, like the inside is made of tin. At the next window the clerk informs a man that he was lucky to receive his package, as it had no address on it.

I can’t figure it out, either.

I am at my bullet-proofed window. I think I could slip a pvc tube around the edge and spray aerosol poison into the face of my clerk. But that wouldn’t be an effective way to pick up my package. She is fussing with her watch, which is clearly two or three links too small for her wrist. Had it swollen suddenly?

There are scratches everyone on the inside of the bullet-proofed window; who is trying to escape?

The woman behind me bobs, up and down, back and forth. The stamp machine does not take dollars. There is a mural on the wall of some Midwestern settlement, and I can’t understand what it has to do with post offices or Philadelphia.

I fiddle with each tiny ball bearing that chains the pen to the bullet proof window as if they are rosary beads.

I pray: remember each detail.

Of Undergarments

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For a significant portion of my adult-shoe-sized life I consented to own only a single sort of sock. Gray Hanes socks.

My time, I reasoned at the tender age of fifteen, was too precious to be spent sorting and matching socks.

(Of course, at the time my mother was sorting and washing socks; I only did laundry when I wanted to work out something on guitar without anyone being able to hear me.)

And, socks were a utilitarian piece of clothing – their selection hardly factored into my fashion sense. Between boot legged jeans and tight vinyl pants no one would ever know or care what color socks I wore

(Around the same time I had deemed that all of my underwear be black, which seems contrary to the whole “utilitarian piece of clothing” argument. Except, nothing spoiled a good semi-goth outfit than a tiny peek of the angelic elastic of a pair of tighty-whities. Trust me.)

My single-sock philosophy developed a chink at Drexel, where our job-interview coaches put our impending job interviews in a plain and dire light: if your interviewer caught you wearing gym socks under your dress pants they would turn you out on your ear, having already seen for themselves your greatest on-the-job weakness and deemed you unworthy. And, if Drexel caught wind of it you could be expelled.

Or something like that.

I carefully shopped around for a black sock I could stick with, eventually settling on Dockers. Generic, easily bought in packs of three or nine. The perfect complement to the gray Hanes. With only two colors, sorting was still not an issue, which I appreciated much more now that doing my laundry involved sitting in molded plastic chairs and sorting on card tables.

I’ll spare you a sock-tinged journey through the remainder of my collegiate and professional career and just cut to the chase.

Friday morning I spent ten minutes rustling through my laundry basket seeking black socks. In the literal sense my quest was fulfilled – I came away from my hunt with eight socks. Yet, practically it was unfulfilled – none of them matched. I have designer black socks, gold-toed black socks, black socks with subtle patterns, and two subtly-different sorts of black Dockers socks.

What’s the moral of this tale? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps that all of those fussy teenaged whims usually have some sort of obstinately sound reasoning behind them, and if you don’t wind up as an entirely different person as an adult you might find yourself wishing you had never let down your guard.

Although, for the record, I still do not own any white underwear.