Bahstan

Tam and Dionna

Boston seemed alright.  The city was rainy but seemed small and comfortable.  Came across a woman with no teeth who asked us where we were from, told us a quick story about how she was jilted by a man from Pittsburgh ("You oughta be glad i don't kick you in your ass for that!") and how a deacon at the Catholic church had tricked her into thinking he wasn't married, or something, to jilt her.  I didn't understand what she was saying, but it sounded like a pretty ludicrous conspiracy.  Running to her bus, i asked her for her name, "my name is April but you can call me Irene," she smiled the glorious pink and black smile.  She was crazy, but she was lovely.  

We met up in Jamaica Plain with the girls we were staying with, who Mark didn't know but knew secondhand from some people in Pittsburgh.  They were moving out a friend, so they were a little preoccupied.  We wandered around town, stumbled on an Obama fundraiser where we ate a bunch of gourmet pizza and bowled candlepin bowling for a while.  It was sweet.  Yee-ha!  I got my picture taken with a giant cardboard cut-out of the president-elect.  I gave him bunny ears!  It was delightful.

We helped the girls move some, handling a dresser and bookcase they claimed was too heavy, but we found easy as hell to move.  It was an awkward spot for me, because the girls were gay and i did not want it to seem like i was showing off because I'm male.  Lesbians give that macho feel, and i didn't want to undermine them--as a guest--so i worry when these girls can't move a dresser that i can move with little trouble.  To avoid any potential problems, i made it seem like i was extremely winded and from that point on needed help with many other things being moved: boxes with books and a bunch of coats from a closet.  For all my cautious sensitivity, i think they were probably more annoyed that the guy who carried a dresser couldn't carry a duffel bag full of clothes.  Ah well, you win some, you akwardly lose some.  

I caught on t.v. some discovery channel thing about a guy who free-climbed up cliff faces.  No harness, no gloves, no rope.  "If there's no risk of falling, it's not real climbing," he said.  I was floored.  Later on when me and Mark were talking about it at the bar, he mentioned that the guy only had one arm, a detail i failed to see.  Somehow i was less impressed.  He became to me more of a mythic creature then, something that exists but is impossible.  I stopped thinking about him as an impressive man and he just became one of those half-men, half-gods, like Hercules.  And Hercules' shit is sooooo passe.  

Anyway, we went to an expensive bar which in the gentrifying space of Jamaica Plain had been converted from a queer-friendly, karaoke specials biker bar to a yuppie, dungeon-themed sports bar called the Alchemist.  It's a plot line straight out of a Tom Robbins book, yes folks.  Drinks were too expensive and apparently the servers were dumb as mutton (one of the girls told this story: when the food came out wrong and the server asked, "well, what do you want instead?" And she answered, "I'll have what she's having."  Thirty minutes pass then, "Hey, where's my food?"  "I thought you were going to eat off her plate!")  We got semi-drunk and started talking about this show on Spike TV called Manswers, which combined sports, chicks and explosions into a menagerie for the Id by answering "sent-in" questions like "Which tits float better?  Natural or silicone?"  I thought their interest was strange because they were gay and the show was obviously tuned towards a hedonism that would probably qualify as slightly antifeminist.  But then, they may have liked it with surreal irony, like that "Springtime for Hitler" song from the Producers.  A situation becomes so exaggerated there is no alternative but to laugh. Anyway, they put me on the spot again, when they asked: what question would you ask?  Man, there's a thousand deviant perverse questions i could ask, flying through my mind like a dismantled helicopter propeller made from the mobile above the Marquis de Sade's bed; but i came up with "How fast can racecars go in reverse?"  Damn.  I was really proud of that one.  Especially because that is a really good question for Manswers.  it's a palindrome, right?  It should be able to go just as fast backward as forward!  They could go ask Danica Patrick, in a bikini or something.  it would be a hit!  

The girls we were staying with were named Dionna and Tam.  Tam had been a skateboarder and had traveled the continent in the search for the perfect skate park.  She found that empty pools were her slice of pie.  Her father, brother, uncle and grandfather all worked for Amtrak so she took trains for free.  She would go to a place, find a park then ask to crash at anyone's house.  One time, she said, she asked a guy and he said you can stay my place "but if you touch anything i'll fucking kill you."  Alright, she said--blowing it off as weirdness.  Only later, she was confronted by someone else who said to her, "don't stay with that guy.  He's psychotic and a murderer.  You can stay with me."  Off in the distance the other guy was twitching and punching an invisible bag near the wall.  Phew, close call.  But then the second guy turned out to be a shady drug dealer with issues of his own.  I won't tell you what city it was in order to protect it's reputation.  oh alright, it was Baltimore.  

We left the bar around 1am and Tam asked if any of us wanted to go get "a fucked pile of fried."  She meant the chinese food down the street.  I thought that description was delightful.  We left early in the morning and grabbed a loaf of sourdough bread at a neighborhood market then arrived at the train station to Portland, ME with 30 minutes to kill.