# Old Stories - #36



## The Cack (Dec 25, 2011)

*Travelogue #4*

1) Poor Amy of Bellingham. The girl broke my heart when she invited me up for coffee to her third floor apartment at 9am. She could have been suffering from mental illness or, more temporarily, mental anguish. I side with the latter. 

Drink hot black coffee and sitting in her tiny studio room, she played guitar (Travis-picked, to boot). Her renditions were verging on heartbreaking--"Worried Man Blues" was a near-tearjerker. That very day, we made plans to busk in Fairhaven, neighboring 'burb of B-ham. Her jean-short hotpants, flannel fedora, and insomniac dark circles were intensely alluring. She was so attractive that the mix of coffee made me defecate excellent-ly. 

Busking at 6pm was an odd ordeal. Even in a more remote part of town, Amy kept running into people she knew. Hell, _I_ kept running into people I knew. Amy confided to me that for some reason she felt compelled to stay despite feeling blazé and complacent. Even at the spot where we would busk--it being her first time, so we chose Fairhaven for its distance from _tout le monde_--a guy named Dave was occupying the bench she had mentally planned on. After some awkward jovial conversation disguised as passive-aggression (and vice versa), Dave invited us to do a songwriters-in-the-round. 

Instead, we went to a pier to warm up. Amy misconstrued the warm-up as literally warming up, so I gave her my coat. We exchanged sad stories--frustrating stop-starts, her Christian awakening in North Carolina and subsequent falling-out with the church, my own derelict happenings, et cetera. She offered me an apple she had brought. There were crab apples that I tried to eat, offering one to her as a half-joke half-dare. "I can't eat it. Long story."

I pried, and she relented. Her bulimia had been such a problem that she was on a liquid-only diet. for THE NEXT SIX MONTHS. "Food to me is like being an alcoholic. If I eat anything solid, I could go back into..."

"Throwing up?"

When we were finally "warmed up"--I gave her my coat, we found Dave descending a hill. Dave, as I neglected to mention, was an older man, with long stringy gray hair concealing his vibrant tanned face. He had two dogs, some CD's recorded and for sale, and a book he had written. I thumbed through it, seeing alot of text that seemed pasted from journal entries about rambling existence. It cost $24.95 US, $29.95 Canadian. It was about Bellingham.

Finally, we busked. I went first, and then she went. Amy was timid at first, but by the third verse of "Worried Man Blues" (or was it "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"?), she came into her own. And after a half-hour, we made nothing. In fact, it was almost negative--Dave asked us for money to help him buy Two-buck Chuck (Charles Shaw wine), with an argument that it wasn't environmentally feasible to go the cheaper store because of all the gas wasted. The realization soon became apparent that this old guy, as benevolent as he was, would or had never left Bellingham. 

A bit of _The Lotus Eaters_, no?

So, we left when one of the old locals said we should smoke marijuana but didn't have any (Same Old Story). Boarding the bus to go "home" (we agreed to it as a Freudian Slip), Amy instantly hit it off with this girl from Canada about a dance program they both had participated in. A... um, coincidence. Again. 

Then, this fat girl got on the bus--I recognized her! AHHH, you could go nowhere in this town without being recognized! Worse for her, it was a girl who had yelled at me for using the phrase "the curtain matches the drapes" when describing a cow/dalmation-hat-wearing girl's eyebrows to her bleached roots. Her and her friend Megan railed into me, calling me sexist and "you just don't do that. YOU DON'T DO THAT!" I held my ground, backpedaling a bit to save some face, and within 5 minutes, Fat Girl's friend was pressing her breasts against my arm, pulling my face close to her inebriated googly-eyes and alco-breath. Fat Girl had disappeared from the scene...

...but now, SHE couldn't leave. 

"Hey, I know you! You're the girl who yelled at me."

FG looked embarassed. "Oh, yeah, you were... the.."

"We met when you and your friend Megan yelled at me for saying 'the curtains match the drapes'. Now, what I really meant was that curtains and drapes are almost on the save level, whereas 'carpet'--especially with an alliteration that makes the phrase sound better--"curtains match the carpet'--would be construed as an allusion to your friends pubic hair color, not her roots to which I was referring."

"Sorry. I was drunk. I'm sorry."

Amy and I arrived in Bellingham, played a few songs with a guy named Travis who played Cake's version of "I Will Survive" as his party piece. Midway between my song, a squinty-eyed blonde girl came up to Amy and asked, curtly, if she was "going to {her} show". Amy said no, that she would rather busk for a while, and her friend trotted off, squintier. Angry. Grumpy.

And, when Amy decided to leave before making any legitimate money, collapsing to her squinty roommate's pressure, she gave me my dollar back. "No, you keep it." We feigned an argument, but I really wanted to have her gain something from the night. I gave her the dollar and made sure to lightly graze her hand. Did she feel it? 

The rest of the night I was depressed about Amy, waiting around for her after her casual suggestion that she might meet me in front of The Horseshoe Cafe. I was there until 3am. She never showed.

In the morning, I printed out some Charles Bukowski poems("Roll the Dice", "The Shower", "A Smile to Remember") with my email written with a "get up and do it"-style note, sliding them near her door. The next day, hoping that she would answer my prayers, that she'd invite me up to her apartment to "talk", that I'd shower in her apartment, that we would lay and tear up about our lives, make love, and most of all, keep in touch when I left. Maybe she would travel with me. 

Doubtful. Isolation is the gift. I saw her one more time before I left. No email.


2) Talked to a drunk off-duty cop at this diner called The Horseshoe Cafe and actually enjoyed his company (or drunk company--_drunk-any_?). He was hesitant to show too much kindness, a cold distance between him and me, which I broke down when I offered unorthodox opinions to his casual mentions of "biological parents", "8-year old caught drinking and smoking", an uneducated man making more money doing easy work than his job (I assured him of the fringe benefits of being an officer) and anecdotes about drug addicts on the reservations. He left feeling slightly relieved, his blue eyes still bewildered by the cruelty of the world. 

"Did you catch any of that?" I asked of the waitress Dana, a tall goose-like female. "It was pretty intense."

"Pieces," she replied. The she filled up plastic to-go jars of gravy.

3) So much for seduction. I tried to seduce this woman--she was 38 years old--and failed. She even had rotten teeth, a jaw that looked more attached than part of her body--_how could she NOT want to have sex with me???_ She excused herself, saying that she wanted to meet up with her friends. Which came as relief--I didn't have the heart to leave the conversation, and would have copulated with this lackluster female as a matter-of-course. 

4) I woke up to children congregating in this park near the Bellingham Library, baking in the sun. Music came from two musicians playing children's music, which struck me--dehydrated and tired--as disguised pedophilia. The woman musician, dressed in an orange dress, acted out the song's action to the bewildered and enthusiastic children. She even looked kind of hot acting out their rendition of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider", spreading her arms and miming the actions of a thwarted arachnoid. To their credit, they played some Woody Guthrie songs. But to their discredit, can you imagine playing the Library circuit? 

"This one goes out to Bobby. Its his birthday! Yayyyyy! Happy Birthday, Bobby! Okay, everyone sing! Ah-one, at-two, ah-one two three four!"

5) When a shirtless black kid asks you to go to his birthday party, don't. This "party" consisted of setting up an illogical bonfire along the springwater river in the middle of the night behind a supermarket. I had even tried to leave, but shirtless black--holding a hatchet--stood in my way and cooed "please? its my birthday." 

Of course, we got busted by a nervous, young, merciful cop. Luckily, that occurred right before I was going to skinny-dip, then dry off by the fire--what a tragedy that would have been, to be dripping wet, speckled with dried leaves, and to shiver for most of the night! The cop asked Shirtless Black about when he ran away from Blaine, then ran his information on the radio. As it turns out, of course it wasn't his birthday. The sage we smoked hit my cheeks and I hit the town, looking for Amy Amy Amy Amy Amy...


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