Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
(Also w/r/t my sleeplessness, I experienced a highly unexpected psychotic break into hysterical tears at of the intersection of Broad and South while singing along to “Morse Code Love.”
At least, I think it had to do with sleeplessness. That’s not one of my typical welling up into tears in the middle of the street tunes.)
Like most tragedies in life, today’s caught me completely unaware and unprepared.
For many years I have eschewed a heavy winter coat in favor of a layered winter ensemble consisting of perhaps a suit jacket, then a light warm-up jacket, then my trusty mod-squad brown leather jacket, topped with a scarf. It’s enough layers to keep me feeling insulated without the claustrophobic implications of a dowdy jacket.
This morning was cold enough to warrant the full layered ensemble, which I carefully arranged even as the clock crept towards making me late for work. The layers kept me from overheating as I nearly jogged from my house to the Orange Line, haplessly flinginging myself onto the second car as my lateness extended from seconds to minutes.
Fast forward past my triumphant entry to work sans five inches of curly hair and a highly efficient morning meeting. I sit down at my desk with a sigh and notice a smear of something on my right pant leg.
How in the world did I get this reddish paste – it looked like orange marmalade – on my dress pants? I carefully sloughed it away with a napkin, using a damp edge to pick up the remaining crumbs.
Must’ve bumped into someone’s bagel on the elevator, I thought.
I continued thinking that until I noticed more of the strange orange substance on the tail of my suit jacket, and all over the seat of my pants, and also strewn across the lower back panel of my treasured mod-squad jacket.
I wasn’t so worried about the jacket, which has suffered many indignities over the years, so much as I was concerned about the suit – my favorite one. Luckily, I had another suit waiting for me at the cleaners. I could walk to the cleaners, turn over my suit and leather jacket for cleaning, and come back wearing a clean suit.
Down the elevator I went, and across the street to the cleaners. When I arrived I helplessly flung my leather jacket onto the counter and breathlessly explained the problem.
“… and I know this jacket is a little beat up, but it’s my favorite, and I just want you to get this stuff off without it leaving a stain, and the same for my suit.”
The man behind the counter tilted his head and spoke to me in a slow, patronizing tone.
“Sir, I really can’t do anything for the coat now that you’ve let it wear through to the lining.”
Now, many of you have seen me digitally or physically wearing the mod-squad jacket, and though I might have let bits of it get slightly tatty, I’ve never literally worn it through. So, imagine my surprise when I looked down past his patronizing gesturing hand to discover that the strange orange marmalade was now encrusted around a quarter-sized hole in my jacket that – yes – showed through to the lining.
After a moment of consideration I decided that said hole definitely was not present when I examined my jacket in the office. The orange marmalade had eaten through my jacket.
How had my life gone from a typically busy morning of corporate communications to some oddball Jack Bauer subplot? What could I have possibly rubbed up against between my front door and my desk that would eat a hole through otherwise impervious 30-year-old leather?
Why was I still wearing a suit covered in the stuff?
I swiftly stripped down behind the cleaner’s changing curtain as they retrieved my on-hold suit, passing it into the booth in exchange for my soiled clothes. I came out of the store sans-coat, clutching my suit jacket closed with one arm and holding my mod-squad jacket (rejected by the cleaners) far away from my body with the other.
And that was all before lunch.
To the best that anyone has conjectured, at some point I leaned against some element of Septa that had recently been liberated-from or treated-for rust, and the mixture of the solvent involved and the leftover grit wound up pasted across my backside. Curiously, it didn’t seem to be harming my suit (nor my briefcase, which I noticed was slathered in the stuff hours later).
The upshot is that my beloved mod-squad jacket is now wrapped in airtight dry-cleaner’s plastic, probably on the way to an ignoble end in an industrial strength trash bag, and my best-fitting suit is at the cleaners being de-marmaladed (if such a thing is even possible) and I won’t know the outcome until the morning.
Frazzled, distraught, and facing a walk home in the cold without a jacket, at 5pm I decided that I could not let Septa’s passive act of terrorism against my fashionable layering cow me into inaction and dowdiness. I would fight back the only way I know how – with an ample credit limit and a trip to Kenneth Cole.
Now, if only I could figure out a way for this story to end with Septa picking up my K.C. credit card bill I could say I lived happily ever after with my new perfectly-fitted not-too-warm winter jacket (and accompanying splurge-shoes).
The closest I had ever been to a casino prior to Saturday was my twice-yearly reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so when we stepped onto the floor of the Tropicana I half expected a neon carousel full of lizard-people to greet me.
It would have been better than the real thing; shabby carpets whose patterns snaked from side to side as they stretched across a hazy room filled with a fleet of leggy middle-aged waitresses in weird black corsets and hundreds of chain-smoking, hollow-looking gamblers, with a few cigar-smoking rotund gamblers thrown in for good measure.
I suppose I could have inferred the haze and the zombie-like patrons from Hunter, but i had been hoping for something more psychedelic.
In Vegas, maybe, but the nine of us were in Atlantic City. Wes and Karen sat down for winning streaks at black jack while I milled back and forth, nearly having my legs broken when i mistakenly wandered into the service-space between two active craps tables.
It occurred to me that there was really no instruction for the beginning gambler; I couldn’t have even sat down at a black jack table, let alone craps or some poker variant. While the hollow-cheeked undead of Atlantic City elbowed their way past me to get a closer look at the craps game I wondered if they all just expected me to buy some chips and lose until I understood … until I realized that anyone who spent any amount of time wondering about that wasn’t fit for gambling in the first place.
Eventually the more serious boys headed to poker while the rest of us made a pass at the slot machines, where I spent my first (and perhaps only) $3.25 on gambling before declaring that the fleet of corseted grandmothers were not going to keep me inebriated enough to make my gambling cost-effective.
We retreated towards the sports bar and, as the whir and hum of the shabby casino room faded behind us and as the ceiling gave way to rows of wicker fans and then impossibly-bright false-clouds, I thought that perhaps I liked casinos very much so long as I didn’t have to go into the casino part.
Either that, or calculate just how much I had to gamble in total to have my drinks and roomage completely comped and spend exactly that hour-by-hour over the slow course of a day. Because I’d rather spend my money on a steady and sure flow of Southern Comfort than whip it away on the whims of an eight-deck shuffler.
Eight hours later and we were all thoroughly drunk (some of us already hung-over) and mourning our poor Eagles while singing karaoke, me and Gina and our entire table screaming back the pitches of Bohemian Rhapsody at the pitch-deaf lump who had the (intentional) misfortune of selecting the song, and then carrying our scream-singing into the cool night air and back to Philadelphia as i sang the pitches i still could with my husk of a voice.
It took me the better part of Sunday to recover from the experience – just sleep and water, no speech or food, until finally this morning I felt as though the rest of me had returned from AC, where it had somehow become entangled in the hazy air on the casino floor.
Capital One not only boasts commercials with various vikings and other barbarians, but also a strong claim of fraud protection. It was with that in mind that i rang them up last night, as i was about to drop some major expense onto my Capital One card, including a purchase from a new website that would be shipping to an alternate address. AKA, recipe for a declined charge.
Calmly and with the air of one resigned to the large amount of money he was about to spend i explained my predicament to the phone rep. She told me never-to-fear, that we would add the alternate address as a note on my file so that any questions about the validity of my purchase from vendors or the fraud department would be headed off at the pass.
Having found a rare phone rep who sounded as if she knew what she was talking about, i let her do her thing. I think i almost offered to send her flowers, but settled for passing my complements along to her supervisor.
Fast forward to today, twelve-hours post buying binge, when i check my email to discover that one of my transactions had declined. Not the special, weird transaction, but a normal one with Amazon.
And, a few minutes later, so did another. And a third. And a fourth.
None of the transactions to the new address declined. Neither did those paid in Pounds or Euros. Just the standard American purchases that probably comprise half of my credit card statements from 2006 – sheet music.
Because, clearly, someone had stolen my card and was using it to buy obscure Madonna sheet music to send to my house. Oh my god, please save me from the fraudulent horror of rare, out-of-print Madonna sheet music. In two of the declined cases we’re talking about a single copy of a piece of sheet music out of the entire internet, verified via approximately six hours of hunting.
On this phone call i was much less calm, and i spoke to a much less confident phone rep. His name had a ‘v’ in the middle of it. He, uh, thought that, um, maybe my card had been flagged for fraud? Possibly. Because, ahhh, because of the amount of online transactions I made on the card over the past week.
“Levine,” i said, “I think every purchase on the card in 2006 was made online. From the same stores that are being declined.”
Devon “ahhed” in agreement.
“So, why is it declining now that I’m relying on it to pay for twenty-year-old, nearly one-of-a-kind sheet music?”
Irvin “ummed” in confusion.
“Howabout we just put a note on my file that says, ‘Book purchases will never be fraudulent?'” I resisted the urge to add, “or any itemized charge including the word Madonna.”
Slevin “uhhed” for a moment before agreeing that this was doable.
The upshot of that story is that fourteen days from now I will have in my possession sheet music for all but a dozen of Madonna songs (not counting Evita tunes), and of the ones I’ll be missing most people have only heard three.
At that time my office will be officially dubbed the International Madonna Sheet Music Library.
(In case you’re interested, the three common tunes are “Burning Up,” which inexplicably doesn’t exist as sheet music, “Beautiful Stranger,” and “American Pie.” Though, if you’re a connoisseur you will probably also know the trio of “Physical Attraction,” “I Know It,” and “Think of Me” from her first LP. However, I’d be surprised if anyone would really miss my ability to play “Gambler,” “Spotlight,” or “Time Stood Still,” and would be outright shocked if many people have heard b-sides “Cyberraga,” “Your Honesty,” or the crazy-obscure “Supernatural.”)
After a week of her absence, every aspect of life involving Elise seems like an adventure. Let’s cook rice! Let’s light candles! Let’s go for a walk!
Okay!
The dizzying newness of every trip up the stairs to see the light on in her office only serves to emphasize the advice I received from my-former / Elise’s-new co-worker Dan: a couple needs to vacation together and apart.
Since I had Bonnaroo in June and we had St. Louis together in July, Elise was suffering from a one-vacation handicap. She needed time away from me to have an adventure, and I needed time to shuffle around the house and pretend to be a bachelor. With her returned from San Francisco it feels as though our balance has been reset.
Our walk this afternoon took us through the Italian Market*, and afterwards past Pat’s and Geno’s** to wander down Passyunk to find a fabled Mexican restaurant with excellent margaritas.
It had been fabled by an old professor of mine who, apparently, has only a relative sense of location. We didn’t have directions, or the name of the restaurant, but he told us that we would have arrived when we were able to see a mural, a parking lot, and the Mexican restaurant all at the same time.
We came to such a point, and were faced with a drab Mexican restaurant with multi-colored blankets in the windows. It did not look like the home of excellent margaritas.
“Do you think that’s the place he was raving about?”
“Well, consider the source.”
The source being my motorcycle-riding, monochromatic- dressing, ponytailed senior project advisor.***
“Well, i suppose…”
Elise tapped on my shoulder. I turned to regard her and noticed that we were standing in front of a giant orange slab of a building with no sign and a huge wooden door.**** It looked like it needed a moat.
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
Indeed, it was. And, not only were the margaritas excellent, so were the mojitos. Several drinks later I learned how to use Elise’s new camera, and bit my poor drunken tongue so badly that we thought I would need stitches.
It’s nice to be having adventures together, again.
* Note to self: The Italian Market is a ghost town by two on a Sunday. Start getting out of bed before one.
** Note to the internet: No Philadelphian who enjoys cheesestakes would ever eat at Pat’s or Geno’s. They are for tourists and people in South Philly who don’t know any better. If you want a good cheesesteak go to Jim’s or Tony Luke’s. Trust me.
***Yes, essentially my father as a communications professor (except i don’t think prof owns several dozen rifles).
**** Name, undetermined. It’s just above Morris on Passyunk, and both we and Prof. Steggy highly recommend it.