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Spartacus.
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Category: It Happened to Me
Categories
A Perfect Little Tuesday
Yesterday in Toronto, it was a sunny day with summer-like temperatures in the high 20’s (that’s low-to-mid 80’s for those of you who think in degrees Fahrenheit). People hit my neighbourhood — Queen Street West, the bar/boutique/broadcasting part of town — in droves, wearing short sleeves, shorts and tank tops. Every sidewalk cafe and bar patio was packed well into the evening, and any band who had a gig last night played to a full house.
That morning, I’d received an e-mail from an old supervisor of mine who needed a programmer to do some short-term but lucrative contract work. I had a great meeting with him that afternoon to discuss the project, and pending approval from his client, I could be starting in a couple of days. Apparently the pharmaceutical companies have just discovered computers and the Internet, and they have scads of cash to spend on software and Internet projects. I’m more than happy to help lighten the burden of having all that moolah.
After a quick “victory dinner”, I hit the streets with my accordion and got some busking in. With the throngs on Queen Street, I made that evening’s drinking money, handed out my phone number to various people who want me to show up at their parties, got a free pint of Guinness and worked on my rendition of the White Stripes’ Fell In Love with a Girl.
Then, a trip to the gym. I never thought I’d see the day when I was a regular in a weight room. I have to agree with Arnie: the best part is “the pohmp“.
While at the gym, Will and I were talking about making alcohol versions of bubble tea.
“The problem is that bubble tea takes so long to drink,” he said. “It’s too big a drink for there to be a practical way to sell an alcoholic version.”
“I’ve got it — how ’bout putting it in a martini glass and make bubbletinis? With the tapioca balls at the bottom, instead of olives or pearl onions?”
I think we’ve struck gold here, folks.
That was followed by a run home for a quick shower, followed by a little more busking outside the Horseshoe Tavern to join my friends Will and Tina, where someone invited me to make an appearance at her show, and then inside to see Tuuli, the all-girl power-punk-pop band who are oh-so-cute and have-oh-so-catchy tunes. They sounded put on a great show before a full house. I’m definitely buying their CD when it comes out next week. Now if I can only convince them to wrestle with me in a kiddie pool full of creamed corn, I can die a very happy and sticky man. How ’bout it, ladies?
After the Tuuli show, I collected the “sweaty hugs” that the band promised to the audience (and to offer my accordion backup services). Then we were off to the Bovine Sex Club to hang out and play pool (very poorly, I might add). Will had his usual — a glass of warm water. It takes balls to order that at a place that’s liberally decorated with empty Jagermeister bottles.
“I don’t drink,” he said, “and cold water is bad for you.”
Some guy saw the accordion on my back and invited me to do the between-set music at his stand-up comedy revue at the Poor Alex Theatre.
“I saw you and thought to myself ‘if he’s got an accordion at the Bovine, he must be into comedy,” he said.
After last call, we walked through the still-warm night to Happy Seven for some late-night Chinese food and conversation. We came up with a great name for Will’s band — Cockpunch — and Tina went on about how easily amused she was and shocking it was that she had hardly anything to drink that night.
“She’s off the booze and high on life,” I said, making hand motions suggesting the layout of a newspaper headline.
“Write that about me and you’re dead,” she retorted.
After that, I gave them a quick tour of Casa di AccordionGuy, after which they headed home.
I looked at the clock. 4:30 a.m. Considering I was up at 8:30 that morning, I figured it was a good time to turn in.
Categories
Quotes, Part 2
“What country is Laos in?”
Thursday, March 28th: Paul, Rob and I are at the Liquids Lounge on the trendy bar strip of College Street West. It’s a party for our friend Nasreen, who’s just successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis (mating behaviour in snapping shrimp). The bar is packed with at least three or four dozen well-wishers. Paul and I have been drinking weapons-grade cosmopolitans — only enough cranberry for colour — mixed by Sarah the bartender, who coincidentally happens to be in Paul’s tae-kwon-do class.
One of Nasreen’s friends was telling me what her plans were. “She’s taking a couple of months off — going to Vietnam and…what country is Laos in?”
“Laos is a country.” I replied, “It’s right beside Vietnam.”
I was suddenly reminded of a classic cartoon depicting a New Yorker’s view of the world: Broadway, 5th Avenue and the Hudson river rendered large with Chicago and L.A. rendered almost as dots and everything else on the horizon. To most non-Asians in North America, the map of Asia probably comprises of Japan (a good place to be if you have no marketable skills — they will pay you just to be a gaijin, Thailand (good backpacking, non-threatening food), China (too big to ignore, home of uber-hottie Zhang Ziyi), Afghanistan (a recent addition thanks to that cool war show on TV) and Everything Else.
“I think this monkey plays some other sport.”
Later that evening, I ended up chatting with my friend Liz — an old friend of mine from Queen’s University — and her boyfriend Keith.
“My Dad,” said Liz, “said that the younger me would’ve hated the present-day me.”
“Because you’re getting an M.B.A.?” I asked. “Back at Queen’s, I never would’ve guessed that you’d end up getting one, either. But still, isn’t your Dad a business prof?”
“Yeah. He just finds it surprising.”
“I don’t think the younger you would hate the present you as much as Elan’s younger self would hate his present, writer’s-credit-on-MVP2 self.”
Elan Mastai is a friend of ours and at Queen’s, he was the film student’s film student. He’d be the guy at the party telling you that the “Steps Scene” from The Untouchables — the one where Andy Garcia has to both plug the bad guy and save the baby carriage — was lifted straight from Sergei Eistenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. After The Phantom Menace, he let us in on George Lucas’ dirty little secret: that he’d liberally borrowed all kinds of plot elements from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and that Trade Federation bad guy Nute Gunray’s name is an amalgam of Republican names — Newt (Gingrich) and Reagan (with the syllables reversed). He and my ex-girlfriend Anne (also a film major) produced a film that won a small indie film award from TVO, the Ontario education channel, after which he graduated and entered the industry.
I’m not sure what kind of mental gymanastics he had to perform in order to justify it to himself, but his biggest writing credit to date is MVP2: Most Vertical Primate. Here’s the plot synopsis from the official website:
Jack, the most valuable primate, is back – and this time he’s taking skating in a whole new direction.
Everyone’s favorite hockey-playing chimpanzee from MVP: Most Valuable Primate returns to the ice after being drafted by the Seattle Simians into the ZHL hockey league. Jack amazes the Simians with his hockey skills and instantly proves himself to be an invaluable member of the team. But the Car Jackers, archrivals of the Simians, have plans of their own for Jack. Jealous of his success and popularity with the fans, the players plot to have him thrown out of the league. Confused, scared and with the authorities hot on his trail, Jack makes a run for it.
Alone in the big city, he meets Ben, a homeless boy who loves skateboarding. The two loners discover that they’re kindred spirits and form an instant friendship. Under Ben’s patient tutelage, Jack learns how to skateboard and is performing like a pro in no time. When Ben learns of an amateur skateboarding competition with a grand prize of a corporate sponsorship, he dreams of entering and putting an end to his life on the streets. But qualifying for the competition isn’t as easy as it seems.
Meanwhile, the Simians are struggling through the playoffs without Jack, their star player. With the last game of the series quickly approaching, the team is desperate to find him in time to have a shot at the ZHL Cup.
Can Jack help the team win the Cup and help Ben enter the skateboarding competition? The action – and the laughs – unfold as this big-hearted chimp gives it his all to come to the rescue of everyone who’s depending on him.
“He’s just paying his dues,” I said. “Mark McGee told me that Elan wrote some really clever stuff that ended up getting cut out of the script.”
Besides, bad animal-based comedy movie or no, he’s doing what he set out to do when he first came to school: make movies. Most of us ended up taking up whatever career path seemed easiest, and I’m sure there are some people in our graduating class who still don’t know what they want to do with their lives.
“The monkey-movie thing will be a little bit of colour in his resume, something for Premiere or Film Threat to have a little fun with when he’s big and famous.”
(It’s always good to keep things in perspective. There are many more embarrassing stories in the film-and-TV world, such as my actor friend Jeffrey, whose best-known scene to date is one where his head explodes on Earth: Final Conflict.)
“Of course,” Liz replied, “but…baseball playing monkeys and Joey Trebbiani?”
“No, you’re thinking of Ed. I think this monkey plays some other sport.”
Categories
Quotes, Part 1
Here are some of the more interesting quotes I’ve heard in the past fortnight, and the stories behind them.
“You’re the happiest unemployed person I know”
Friday, March 22nd: Walking into salsa night at the Courthouse is like walking into a movie.
The Courthouse — so named because it actually was a courthouse built in the 1800’s — has a gorgeous 19th-century ballroom with high ceilings and a balcony, lit only by chandeliers, a couple of fireplaces and dozens of candles. The floor is packed with well-dressed dancing couples and spectators lounge in large and comfy couches by the fireplaces at either side of the room. The musical selection is mostly salsa, with a little cha-cha and merengue thrown in now and again. Unlike most dance clubs, this is one place where strangers walk up to you and ask you to dance.
We were invited there by our friend Sue, whom we’d met at one of the “Singleton” parties organized by our friend Marichka. (The Singleton gatherings are rather yuppified affairs held at a chi-chi resto-bar called Fat Cat, where twenty-, thirty- and forty-something professionals — mostly journos, from the look of it — gather to meet others of their ilk.) It was a little send-off for Sue; she was due to move to San Diego to start a new job in a week.
Paul and I have been to a couple of salsa nights. Paul has ballroom danced for years; he’s even been in competitions and won. He tends to seek out the women who know how to salsa, take them to the floor and then transform himself from dairy country rube to dancing machine. Paul takes dancing seriously and complains that he keeps forgetting all his steps, but as far as my uneducated eyes can tell, he does just fine.
I, on the other hand, can barely waltz. I tend to ask the wallflowers staring longinly at the dancefloor:
“Would you like to dance?”
“I’d like to, but I really don’t know how.”
“Neither do I,” I’d say and then dancing — or a cartoonish approximation thereof — would ensue. There’s a lot of “so what do we do next?” throughout the dance, I tend to turn my partner more times than the legal limit and I’m sure Arthur Murray spins in his grave every time I take to the floor. The “I don’t know what I’m doing but I don’t care” approach to ballroom dancing is cheesy John Hughes movie behaviour, but so is carrying an accordion everywhere, and that’s done me nothing but good.
After watching me, our friend Valerie told me as we watched Paul the Midwestern Mambo Machine, “You’re the happiest unemployed person I know.”
“My brothers would kick your ass”
Saturday, March 23rd: It was like Coyote Ugly, except with better dialogue and an accordion player.
I thought I was going to have a relatively quiet Saturday night — a little coding work until midnight, and then down to Velvet Underground, the alt-rock dance place down the street. Instead, I got a phone call from my friend Anne, who invited me to join her and her cute friends from her PR class at a resto-bar called Seven Numbers. She also mentioned that there was someone she wanted to introduce me to.
(Having your ex try to set you up with someone is similar to getting a letter of recommendation from an employer who fired you. Both will recommend you to others, the fact that you were let go makes the recommendations seem a little odd, you think that your being let go was a colossally gross error in judgement, the severance pay/nookie is never enough and you gracefully accept the recommendation anyway because it’s the polite thing to do and hey, you never know where it’ll lead.)
I arrived at Seven Numbers and met a table of several women and one guy. I’d met Anne’s equally hyperkinetic friend Tanya before, but the rest of them were new to me. She introduced me to her friends as “the infamous Accordion Guy”. I’ve been getting introduced to people that way, complete with “the infamous” or “the notorious”. Most people would probably be embarrassed, but I feed off that kind of thing. It’s called rock and roll, kids.
The restaurant was more like a movie restaurant than a real-world one: the waiters constantly flirted with the girls (when the girls first entered the restaurant, one of them carried Anne to the table); people were doing body shots — drinking sambuca out of each other’s navels — on the bar, and when the music came on, I played along on the accordion and we all climbed up on the bar to dance.
I phoned Paul, who’d stayed home that night. “It’s like Coyote Ugly here,” I told him, “and you’d never forgive me if I didn’t call you.” He arrived about a half-hour later.
A couple of pretty women bought me a drink and asked all kinds of questions about me and my accordion. Have I mentioned how much I love this instrument? (It was a good thing that one of them mentioned that they’d put their kids and husbands to bed before going out. I really need to remember to check for wedding rings.) An older Italian woman walked up to me and pinched my cheeks, saying “It’s-a so nice that a young guy like-a you still plays the accordion.” Grazie, ma’am.
Drew, a friend of the girls, arrived around last call and invited us back to his apartment for more drinks. Drew lived in Yorkville, a boutique-y part of town filled with pricey restaurants, small art galleries and overpriced designer clothing stores. He had an apartment above Gabbana and beside a dance club that had a gaggle of Mexican guys outside, staring each other down with what Laura, one of the girls, called “the look of death.” (Later that night, a fight would break out, there would be lots of screaming in Spanish, an old man would get knocked onto his ass, followed by screams of “El Viejo!“. We’d watch the conflagration from the balcony above.)
I had a feeling of deja vu as I walked into the apartment. Paul Oakenfold playing on the stereo — the same track that the fratboys in San Francisco played at their apartment, where just like now, we’d left a bar and gone back to some guy’s place for more drinks. To my relief, the guys weren’t obnoxious at all, and I didn’t hear the word “dude” all night.
Tanya told us how she’d been kicked out of a bar the week before. Apparently she’d been talking to some guy who called her a “whore from Halifax”. Tanya decked him and was promptly ejected from the bar.
Drew told us about his trip to Mexico and showed us some badly-painted Mexican wrestler dolls he’d bought at the airport. I’ve seen shoddy Third World workmanship before, but who ever painted these wasn’t even trying. They wouldn’t even pass muster in the Land of Misfit Toys.
Somehow the topic drifted to Judy Blume books, and being the pop culture aficionado I am, I mentioned how her books used to be more relevant to school kids and how she went down the slippery slope and ended up writing incredibly cheesy soft-core porn. Stephanie was quite appalled that a guy would know shit from shinola about Judy Blume.
“My brothers would kick your ass,” she said.
“They’re welcome to try,” I replied, “but I’d make sure they limped back to their trailer.”
She either didn’t get my quip or took it extremely well.
(Nice title, eh?)
It was a springlike day in Toronto: bright and sunny with temperatures around 14 degrees (that’s almost 60 degrees in that antiquated scale for my American friends). I decided to take a break from work at around 4 p.m. to finally do what I’d been meaning to do since getting fired: join a gym.
I was going to join the Premier Fitness Club down at Skydome. My friends Anne and Adina work out there, it’s nice and big, and it’s pretty good for peopel watching. My friend Rob once asked me: “Why would you want to work out there? It’s just full of models!”
Duh. (Nice kid, but sometimes he’s as sharp as a sack of wet kittens.)
Rob suggested that I get a membership at the Jewish Community Centre. I said it was too far away, and besides, being Filipino, they’d think I was the houseboy.
The real problem with Premier is the price. The best deal they could offer me was a $90/month membership, with some fairly hefty start-up fee. It would be cheaper if I were working for “The Corpse” — Frank Magazine’s nickname for the CBC — or any other firm with whom Premier had cut some kind of employee rate deal. I couldn’t afford Premier’s on my current salary, which in financier’s term is referred to as bubkus, so no models for the Accordion Guy.
Luckily, I had a backup plan: GoodLife Fitness on McCaul. It’s smaller and definitely less glamourous than the SkyDome club, but it’s also closer to home, being only a few blocks away (more incentive to go).
I walked into GoodLife and was immediately greeted with “Accordion Guy!” It was Will, a guy I know from Kick Ass Karaoke. It turns out that he did membership sales there. He gave me the grand tour — a little cramped, but the equipment was nice, and all the classes were free — and then we got down to talking money. I told him that I was currently unemployed and working on Peekabooty for the learning experience and the exposure. It turns out that he runs a couple of Web services on the side, and in an act of solidarity with a fellow geek and karaoke performer, he cut me some very nice deals that blew Premier’s best offers right out of the water. Another lucky break, thanks to the accordion.
While going over the contract, he called over a woman who turned out to be the bassist for the local band The Rockertits. “Look! It’s the Accordion Guy!” Shortly after, my friend Danielle walked over.
“Hey, Joey! Are you signing up here?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know this was your gym.”
“Not only that, but this is where we had that shower conversation about you,” she said, walking into an aerobics-with-weights class.
“Shower…conversation…?” Will asked.
“It took place last year,” I explained. “Danielle told me that she was in the shower after one gym session, and she asked her friend if she knew me. She was in the middle of describing me — Filipino, plays the accordion, takes it everywhere — when another girl pipes in and goes ‘I know that guy! I see him all the time on Queen Street!’ So the three of them, in the shower get into this conversation about me. Danielle e-mailed me because she wanted me to know that three naked women, all lathered up in the shower, were enthusiastically talking about me. She thought it might brighten my day.”
Will just arched an eyebrow in response.
“Accordion, Will. It’s the future.”
North Beach
Photo by Weegee010, and under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license.
Click to see the source.
Friday, February 15th: North Beach is one of San Franscisco’s most lively neighbourhoods. It’s a strange mix of date-worthy Italian resto-bars and strip clubs, as if New York’s pre-Disneyfied Times Square and Little Italy had merged. The sidewalks are crowded with people eating tiramisu at cafe tables and passers-by taking in the sights. The road is packed with cars looking for places to park and limousines and buses full of partygoers toasting each other and people on the sidewalk with cans of beer.
Paul, Scott Hardy and I were being led to The Lusty Lady by Annalee Newitz, sex-and-tech writer extraordinaire, whom we’d met at CodeCon earlier that day. We were joined by her friend Charles Anders, who wore a smart little skirt uniform (Meter maid? Police? I don’t recall.) and sensible red flats.
A little aside: I have a theory that the “Gay Disneyland” part of San Francisco’s Castro neighbourhood stops where Castro Street turns into a steep hill because it’s impossible to climb it in a pair of pumps.
It was the kind of group you might only see in an ensemble cast movie: cross-dressing Charles, Annalee in indie-rock olive drab, Scott (who looks as though he could’ve been a member of Steppenwolf), Paul the tall guy from the Midwest, and the mop-topped Asian guy with the accordion on his back (“…and together, they fight crime!”).
The Lusty Lady
Photo by “Noodle”, and under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Click to see the source.
The Lusty Lady is no ordinary peepshow theatre. It was the setting of a documentary film called Live Nude Girls Unite!, a story about the struggle to form first exotic dancer’s union. In order to supplement her income, comedian Julia Query started dancing at the Lusty Lady and found the work arrangements appallingly bad. Dancers had to pay stage fees — the exotic dancer’s equivalent of the musician’s onerous “pay-to-play” contract, were being asked to “date” the owners’ friends and were being videotaped for porn without their knowledge or being paid. The end result: the Exotic Dancers Union was formed. The Lusty Lady is, as I understand it, the only unionized strip club in North America.
“Do they have a good dental plan?” I asked Annalee. “I’m unemployed, you know. And is it, you know, empowering? I don’t want to be exploitive. I mean, I’m like that guy from the Chris Isaak Show, the guy who had the line ‘You give me a boner…with respect.'”
When we arrived at the Lusty Lady, we were met by more of Annalee’s and Charles’ friends, making our combined group an almost even mix of men and women. How different this scene was from what it was like ten years ago, when many of my women friends shared Catherine MacKinnon’s and Andrea Dworkin’s views: “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice”.
The Lusty Lady’s front desk is in a room painted a very lurid red with cheesy furniture; it would look right at home in a Russ Meyer film. A little weasel of a man sat at the front desk.
“Are the art films still in the video booths?” asked Annalee.
“Art films”, I thought. Yeah, right.
“Yesmam!” he said in an cartoonish Spanish accent with an even more cartoonish sing-song cadence. He sounded like a less gravelly-voiced version of “Cheech” Marin’s character, Chet Pussy, in From Dusk Till Dawn. “De regular pooooorno feelms are on channels hwone t’ru twenny-seven, wit’ the art feelm on channel twenny-h’eight.” He said pooooorno feelms and art feelm with particular gusto, and cupped hands pantomiming the squeezing of breasts. “An’ don’ forget ’bout de nekkid ladies!”
The back area was painted the same lurid red. It was a hallway with closely spaced doors, each with a number and a light overhead that was lit up if the room was occupied.
“Let’s get the corner booth,” said Annalee. “There’ll be more room there.”
The five of us piled into a triangular shaped room with a bench built into the wall. On one wall was a machine that accepted bills. The wall that the bench faced had a plexiglass window that was covered by a shade on the other side. The booth was stuffy and had a vague, mushroom-like odor.
“I just stepped in something slimy,” Paul said.
That’s when I noticed the paper towel dispenser on the wall.
Someone fished out a five-dollar bill and fed it into the machine. The shade on the other side of the plexiglass rose, giving us a view into a small room lined with animal print faux fur and lit by several chaser bulbs. Five women, some completely nude, others wearing tiny pieces of gauzy lingerie looked inside our booth and seemed a little annoyed that we were “cheaping out” and cramming inside.
I raised the accordion so that they could see it.
“What’s in the box?” one of them asked. Oops. I was showing them the back. I turned it around and put it on.
“Let me play you a little song,” I said, and started into Wild Thing.
One by one, they gathered around our window. Three of them lay down on their stomachs, their heads propped up in their hands, as if they were kids watching Saturday morning cartoons. The other two did a sexy dance along to the music.
When the number ended, they appluaded and asked for more. I could not possibly turn down five naked women asking for more. All the women, save the cute blonde one with glasses, took turns dancing; she stayed by the window, watching the show. I smiled at her, she smiled back.
“Take your clothes off!” she yelled.
“I will, but first you have to put money in the machine on your side!” I answered.
We kept feeding the machine for another five songs and left the booth afterwards.
“I tell you, that blonde was checking me out!” I told Paul.
“Yeah, right.”
Paul and I tried one of the video booths next. We opened the door and Paul checked the seat for gooey substances before we sat down. I gave Paul a couple of dollar bills to put into the machine. We cycled through the first twenty-seven channels, which were standard run-of-the-mill porno: anal, vaginal, fellatio, threesome and posing.
“Not much variety,” Paul noted.
The twenty-eighth was quite different. It was a reel of student- and “artist”-produced short films. The first was a close-up of a woman’s mouth licking a one hundred dollar bill, which we found hilarious. The next segment showed a naked woman standing in the woods, with two men in soldier’s uniforms running at her from her left and her right. As they approached her, she raised her arms to face each of them, revealing that she was carrying two handguns. She shot them dead before they could reach her. This repeated in a loop for about a minute.
“Pavlov Video Chicken One,” I said. (You’ll have to ask a fan of the old Saturday Night Live about that one, it doesn’t appear in Google.)
Someone knocked at the door. “Joey,” said Jesse on the other side. “Your presence is requested.”
One of Annalee’s friends, a rubenesque woman with a low-cut black shirt was going to strip for the strippers and wanted some accompanying music. She, Annalee and I piled into the corner booth. I played a blues progression in C minor while she pulled up her top, presenting her breasts for the dancers’ viewing pleasure. Such reciprocity!
I could feel the love in the booth. I just hoped I wasn’t standing in any of it.
After the call-and-response peep show in the booth, we returned to the hallway, where we gathered to talk about what we’d just seen or done. We were interrupted by the guy from the front desk, who spoke over the public address system.
“E’scuuuuse me! I just haf an announcement for all the people jus’ standin’ in de hallway. Eef chu wan’ to talk, please do it outside an’ don’ block de way for de people who are tryin’ to spend their money on de poooooooorno feeelms!” He said poooooooorno with particular gusto and spoke so comically we couldn’t help but laugh. We walked outside.
Hotel Metropolis
We went to a cafe on Columbus street and occupied the sidewalk tables. Jillzilla arrived and joined us.
She and I looked through Charles’ book, The Lazy Crossdresser, a copy of which he’d just received from the printer. It starts with a chapter titled Matter and Panty-matter and continues to be hilarious to the very end. I’m definitely going to purchase a copy and have it on my coffee table to put The Fear into some of my more timid guests.
After some cake and coffee, we all parted ways. Jill and I were still in a partying mood, so we gave Brandon a call and headed towards his hotel. We caught a cablecar, where Jill noticed that someone had altered one of the signs within.
The sign had four of those red circles with the red diagonal bar cutting across an image within the circle.
Three of them were what’s you’d expect: no smoking, no food or drink, no leaning out of the cablecar. Someone had altered the fourth one so that the pictogram and text said “No IGOR”. Apparently lab assistants aren’t allowed on board.
The Hotel Metropolis is on the edge of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district. I was expecting it to be a complete fleabag, but it turned out to be the one of the nicest hotels I’d ever seen. It looked as if it had been decorated by Asian readers of wallpaper* magazine, complete with a glass wall waterfall behind the concierge’s desk and Delirium being played instead of standard Muzak. We went to Brandon’s room, where he, Bram, Jane, Steve and Liza were relaxing. I told them about our evening at the Lusty Lady.
“I refuse to believe it happened!” said Brandon with a smile. “It’s all lies, Joey! Lies!”
“I want to believe,” said Steve.
“I want to sleep,” said Jane.
Somehow Jill and I managed to convince them to go out for a bite to eat at a nearby restaurant, which made for a lovely end to a fun and unusual evening.
Recommended Reading
The Lazy Crossdresser by Charles Anders. Be sure to check out Chris ‘site.
A little cross-dressing humour: Transvestites are cross-dressers who hang from the top of the cave, while transvestmites stand on the cave floor. Ha! I slay me!
Annalee’s card says TECHNOLOGY * POP CULTURE * SEX on the front and Must…East…Brains… on the back. How can you not visit her site now? Be sure to check out some of her articles:
I get mentioned in the latest Techsploitation column, which appears in today’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. This column covers blogs and CodeCon.
Thanks, Annalee! You don’t know how much this means to a skanky accordion ho like me!
A Bone to Pick
I had a bone to pick with San Francisco. The entire damned seven-by-seven miles of the city from the yuppie ghetto of the Marina to the no-man’s land known as South San Francisco. (Don’t get me started on the Valley — especially San Jose.)
It’s not any one thing that brought about the rift between me and what I like to call “The Richest city in the Third World”, but a combination of its many annoyances:
And let me tell you, even the lowest of the low in the shantytowns surrounding Manila do not take a dump in the middle of the sidewalk the way San Francisco homeless do.
It’s all that, along with what happened to me during my abruptly terminated stay in the city.
Westward ho!
Like most of my stories, it starts with an accordion. One of its many powers is to attract job offers, and in 2000, it got me promoted from programmer to programmer-and-developer-relations-guy. In a fit of needing to be where the action is, the company decided to open a San Francisco office and send its best or loudest spokespeople — namely Cory, me and our white-guy-who-drops-a-lot-of-black-urban-lingo-for-street-cred Chief Strategist — down there to shill our not-yet-existent and often-changing product. There was a short period, maybe a day or two, where I was leaning towards turning down the transfer when my then-girlfriend sagely pointed out this important fact: if I didn’t at least give it a try, I would regret it later.
I moved to San Francisco on December 28th, 2000. I was put in charge of taking care of the corporate apartment, a two-bedroom townhouse in a complex right by Alamo Square Park, whose Victorian houses you’ve probably seen in San Francisco pictures and postcards, as well as the opening shot for the intro to the TV series Full House (brr). The company was constantly sending people from Toronto to San Francisco, and the bean-counters figured that it would be cheaper to maintain a corporate apartment than to book them into hotels. My caretaker role meant that I lived rent-free in a new place equidistant from Soma, the Haight, the Marina and downtown. It was an arrangement not unlike the way Higgins looked after Robin Masters’ estate in Magnum, P.I., the differences being that I was not a stuffy Englishman and my Hawaiian shirt collection puts me in the Magnum fashion camp. (I suppose that Cory was my Robin Masters.)
By February, we had moved to the best damned office I’d ever worked in, made a big splash at a major conference and were being courted by the Beast of Redmond. It was all going accordion to plan.
The E! True Hollywood Story Turning Point, or: It All Goes Wrong
My girlfriend at the time and I were maintaining a long-distance relationship and had decided to shorten that distance considerably. She moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in early March. About a week and a half later, horrified at everything about the city that makes Cory refer to it as “San Fran-scarcity”, she told me how much she hated the place and that she suddenly had some very serious doubts about the relationship. I asked her to think it over. After all, she hadn’t been there two weeks and it may just be a case of homesickness. I tried to tell her that although it’s not New York — no city is — it wasn’t as if she were suddenly moving to a cardboard box in downtown Calcutta. However, after a couple of hours of talking it over with her, it seemed that she was determined to flake out and I was resigned to the fact that she was going to move back. She booked a flight home for the following Monday.
That weekend could’ve been a miserable one, but it wasn’t. I “officially” broke up with her on Thursday, thereby demoting my status back to “um friend“, a role that made her considerably more comfortable. We spent a very debauched St. Patrick’s Day weekend weekend painting the town red. The bars were serving Irish whiskey, Guinness and green beer, the street parties were great raucous affairs, and playing The Wild Rover on the accordion got us a lot of free drinks. It was one of my better turn-lemons-into-lemonade moments.
Monday was difficult, to say the least. I took her to the airport, said goodbye to her and watched her plane disappear, A few hours shy of two weeks after she’d arrived in San Francisco, she was gone. It was the lowest I’d felt in a very long time.
I didn’t even get the chance to take a couple of days off to cry in my beer; the company had scheduled a series of very important meetings with to-die-for clients: an on-line auction company of some repute and a portal whose name is an expression of glee. I’d written some user interface prototypes that I would be demonstrating at these meetings, as well as talking tech with their developers. I spent the rest of the week putting on my happy face and burying my woes with demos and work.
At the end of that week, it was decided that I should fly back to Toronto for a couple of weeks to meet with the rest of the team that would be developing the 1.0 version of our software. About a week into my visit to Toronto, the company laid off a dozen people in Toronto, cancelled the lease on our San Francisco office, and downsized the San Francsico team to just me and Cory, who would work out of an office at our VC’s headquarters in Palo Alto.
I saw which way the wind was blowing and decided it would be better for me (and even earn me some points with management) if I volunteered to move back to Toronto. They thought it was a good idea, but said that they couldn’t spare me for enough time for me to fly back and pack my stuff. They dispatched our office manager Amy to pack up the office and my apartment and ship it back. About five weeks after I had come to Toronto for a visit, an moving truck packed with all the evidence that I’d ever lived in San Francisco brought my stuff to Toronto. Within the span of four months, I had moved from Toronto to San Francisco and back again.
I spent a week in an “I’m not supposed to be here!” daze. Having lost a girlfriend and then being involuntarily displaced, I felt as if I’d been harshly dumped by San Francisco too. The bitch!
From that point on, I associated San Francisco with unpleasant memories and heartbreak, as if I’d been through some kind of neo-Pavlovian negative reinforcement experiment in which the city was the gerbil cage (whose liner needs changing very badly).
The Return
Just over a week ago, I made my first trip to San Francisco since my abrupt move back to Toronto. I was there to present Peekabooty at CodeCon, do some developer relations with the various hackers who would be attending, and maybe even make my peace with the city.
(Yes, I realize I’m anthropomorphizing a seven-by-seven mile clump of hilly land, its people and its human urine- and feces-stained sidewalks. Don’t tell me you haven’t done something similar.)
Cory gave me the keys to his apartment, where I dropped off all my stuff save the accordion. I had plenty of time to kill before meeting Jillzilla for dinner, so I decided to spent the afternoon walking about the city that was supposed to be my home.
I stopped by Brain Wash, and old hangout of mine located across the street from the old office. Its back half is a laundromat and its front half is a cafe. I’ve eaten just about everything on their menu, spent many afternoons writing prototype software at their tables and even did a couple of accordion-assisted stand-up routines at their regular amateur comedy nights. (For the brave or the shameless, performing in front of an audience is a great way to meet people if you’re new in town.)
The place was silent. Normally, the sounds of the kitchen, stereo and washing machines fill the place. Something wrong happened with the power grid, leaving the entire block without electricity.
Amy, one of the cute punkish staff, was talking to a co-worker. I used to fantasize about her, wearing nothing but Doc Martens, softly kicking me in the head. But I digress.
“It’s too quiet here. If I don’t hear some music soon, I’m going to go crazy,” she complained as I walked in the door.
That was my cue. I switched the accordion from backpack mode to ready-to-rock mode, unstrapped the bellows and said “Did someone say music?”
“You! Free cookies and drinks if you play!”
That’s when I knew that San Francisco was about to make it up to me in many weird and wonderful ways.
San Francisco, you are forgiven. (Now, if you can do something about your personal hygiene…)
Next: The bustling metropolis known as downtown Mountain View, CodeCon, children trust me, matter and panty-matter and entertaining a room full of naked women.