{"id":54,"date":"2008-07-14T14:31:20","date_gmt":"2008-07-14T19:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blindwino.cyberphreak.com\/?page_id=54"},"modified":"2008-07-14T14:31:20","modified_gmt":"2008-07-14T19:31:20","slug":"where-ive-been","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/blindwino.cyberphreak.com\/?page_id=54","title":{"rendered":"Where I’ve Been"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where I’ve Been<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

by Mark Driver<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“Are you the guy who was talking to the blonde girl?”<\/span><\/p>\n

I don’t remember if I ignored him or if he just didn’t register on the considerably dim screen of the considerably narrow cone of my considerably impaired mental radar.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Hey,” he said more loudly, with a calculated increase in anger, a slight reddening in his face, a throbbing vein between his eyes that threatened gory eruption, “I’m talking to you!”<\/span><\/p>\n

He tried to grab my arm and I jerked it away with nonchalance, like I was used to it, like big oily goons grabbed me all the time. The truth was that I had been talking to the blonde girl earlier, flirting openly in fact, and before that I was talking to a stocky punker chick who couldn’t name any Crass or Discharge songs, before that I was sharing smokes and making eyes at a friend of a friend who seemed particularly stacked under the dim overhead lights, and now I was talking to another girl, a girl with long brown pigtails and a long black t-shirt. I was leaning into the girl, talking into her hair, breathing hot on her neck. The physical space between this lady and I had decreased considerably since my feeble pick-up line and her obligatory rebuff and things were going well, swimmingly in fact. I could feel that little rat body of hers pressed against mine, the knobs of her spine running under my fingertips and here comes this guy from two girls back, blowing my intimate moment and interrupting my Casanova flow. You can keep the blonde, I thought, I got this one now. There’s plenty of sweetie pies for everyone. Yet, even in my Pabst coma, it registered that playing Apology Boy to his Jealousy Man would not impress my new little friend, nor any of the commotion vampires vying for a view at what would undoubtedly become a very, very ugly show. <\/span><\/p>\n

This was a month ago and I was at a rock club. It could have been any generic rock club in any generic city with any generic gathering of generic losers with generic tattoos and generic jackets smoking generic cigarettes and holding generic conversations, generic wheeling and dealing of generic projects, generic motivations behind generic faces of generic glasses and generic hair. The rock was over and the band was downing bourbons in a filth cloud of butt-smooching music nerds, stoking long metal hair and playing their fifteen minutes well. The floor was a frozen ocean of crushed plastic cups, drink napkins and cigarette butts, the lightbulbs all had halos. My shirt was soaked through with spilled beer and sweat and I was sleepily hammered and holding that worst sense stomach ache, pathetically staving off serious depression by charming the multiple jean jackets off of questionably attractive hipster wenches, the sort of girls who stop all personal development after finding the perfect product to make their greasy hair redolent of rutting wolverine, girls with puddle depth, no surprises, no true anti-social tendencies, no violent streaks, no interesting opinions or hobbies or jobs or anything, just a different brand of the vanilla nothingness that occupies the barren shelves of my hollow headed country. Afghanistan of the mind, you might call it. Single girls suck. I might as well be talking to a barnful of Nebraska corn queens, sheltered dames scrubbing their dirty knees in a farmhouse sink to remove the stink before the big senior prom. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, one could politely inquire as to why, if I was so fucking superior, I was even bothering to engage them in my little courtful dances. <\/span><\/p>\n

A boy’s gotta screw something.<\/span><\/p>\n

But through all my risqu\u00e9 advances and cleverly constructed double ententes, there was, in the back of my mind, the squeezing talons of reality, the shadowy but inescapable image of all my earthly belongings, stacked in packed boxes three blocks away. My shit clogged all arterials in the apartment that me and The Girl had shared for the last three years. The inventory was ridiculous. Two tennis rackets, seventeen hundred books, a three foot tall ceramic cobra. Ten boxes of LP’s. Guitar amps. A Norelco foot massager. Two football helmets wired with walkie-talkies. A cracked snowboard. Dracula beer steins. A twice-used bread machine. A perfectly seasoned wok. One remaining pound of a ten pound bag of rice. A potato cannon. A seven foot tall classroom wall map of Alaska. All stacked and piled in radiating trash circles equidistant from the front door. It was all to be removed from the apartment, along with my carcass, and a call was out for a tractor trailer and forty thousand square feet of warehouse space. <\/span><\/p>\n

I was not, as they say, holding my breath.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, much to my credit, I hadn’t been dumped for 24 hours and I was already back on the horse, resharpening my once razory pick-up skills, skills rusted shut from nearly a decade of non-use. That’s smart, right? Back in the saddle, hair of the dog, only the good die young, one day at a time. The platitudes were coming in droves. Nothing pathetic about me. Nope. The dating population of Seattle had been deprived access to my genitals for far too long, and now, my loss was their gain. Top quality at low prices! Everything must go! Liquidation sale on my soul! <\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, you should have seen me! Despite my sitch, I stank not of creepiness nor of desperation. The initial approach was directly sly. Every compliment was followed by an insult. I couldn’t care less about them, yet I kept asking them questions. In the course of thirty seconds I made them laugh and pissed them off and wandered away and came back with another beer. Just one. For myself. I was selfish, I was rude, I took cigarettes without asking, I was so into them, I was completely indifferent. I was on fire!<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, had I actually brought my banterious bicep-flexing to the level where the possibility of fluid transfer with a stranger would fall within my realm of reality, I would have monkey shrieked and, after confirming that there were no leftover pizzas in the stained refrigerators of their laundry clogged studio apartments, I would have run away from these strange women, sprinting into the safety of the night like a crazed baby gazelle. I was not after physicality, I was after shadows. Out for the illusion of something that once made sense. I was operating the heavy machinery drowsy and without purpose. The act of intercourse, clumsy groping on a burlap couch under musty blankets that never stretched down to my feet would’ve taken more constitution than I could’ve mustered. I would’ve shattered on contact. Broken in half. I did not want unfamiliar mouths. I just wanted to keep my mind occupied. Give my hands something to do. Forget forget forget everything that ever happened before and start over new.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuck. Here I was. Bummed. Unemployed again. Dumped and kicked out of my house for lack of smiling. Chasing girls I didn’t want. I had stopped writing, stopped listening to music, stopped nearly everything but sleeping and drinking. <\/span><\/p>\n

It had been the previous months that did me in, working a seemingly endless shift pouring poison in a dirty bar. The dirtiest. It had scraped away my sense of decency, drained me of all sympathy, made me into a hate machine. That fucking place ate me alive, like drain cleaner in the guts, it burned me from the inside out. <\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve always liked to hang out in dive bars. The yuckier the booths, the saltier the drunks, the more bacteria-laden the taps, the better. But I will tell you right now, it’s one thing to hang out in dives, to get hammered with the suffering, to make facial expressions that approximate sympathy, to humor rambling stories, to absorb the absolute pathos of the room and thank Vishnu that you were not born one of these sorry sacks. You feel tough and you feel like salt of the earth and you feel like you can hang with any mean bunch of crusty cunts and hold your own and then you get back in your shiny Honda Civic, crank the new Khanate record, and, holding hands with the cutie pie beside you, steer home towards the spacious one bedroom with hardwood floors and the cleansing sterility of digital cable. <\/span><\/p>\n

But working in a dive, servicing those drunks, mopping up their puke and wiping up their abuse, looking at their sagging cracked faces ten hours a day six days a week as they drown themselves in self-created nightmares, this is not easy. Or pleasurable. Or healthy. Maybe someone’s built to withstand this and emerge unscathed, but it sure wasn’t me. I’m not tougher than leather; I’m more absorbent than Bounty, the quicker-picker-upper. <\/span><\/p>\n

At first it wasn’t that bad. I mean it was bad (my first official duty bleaching fresh vomit off the front door) but in the sort of ‘this is tough but it will probably be good for me’ badness that I also attribute to broccoli and Thomas Pynchon and unprotected anal sex with strangers in Volunteer Park. Working under conditions like these would toughen me up. I was due for some serious discomfort. I had been camped in front of my laptop for a year, writing and living entirely in my own head and ignoring everything else, sleeping late and typing like an idiotic machine until 5pm or so, then meeting the lads and the ladies out and about for pints o’ plenty. Yes I was poor, but nobody was telling me what to do. One meal a day and someone else buying the pitchers. What life! What bliss! <\/span><\/p>\n

But when you get to choose every single person you come into contact with, your view of the world shrinks. Without horrible challenges, you start to lose your imagination. You start relying on entertainment instead of being the entertainment. There is little that can be learned in comfort. Comfort is the warm bed at the end of a long journey. It was never meant to be slept in forever. <\/span><\/p>\n

But, as much as I played the above paragraph up to those around me, this was not a case of ‘sensitive artist type takes spiritual vacation in the misery of others to find basic human truths’. I was, as they say, broke. Dead broke. Real broke.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not the sort of broke I was used to where I had to choose between seeing the band on Monday or seeing the one on Tuesday, I was the sort of broke where I stopped leaving the house because I was sick of talking walks and kicking the soccer ball against the Opera House and EVERYTHING else cost more than I could muster. I was living on rice and drinking on record reviews and t-shirt sales (thank you thank you), being bombarded daily by collection skunks, getting a new credit cards to get the phone turned on, borrowing money from people I met at parties, shoplifting bananas, etc. etc. etc. It had been a fun free-fall, but the cliff floor was fast approaching, and, as timing is everything, economic recession in Seattle was in full force. Second only to Portland in the National Unemployment Rate. It was not good times.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, it was four months of hard looking for work. First in the dotcom graveyard. Even with my considerable ability to smile in the face of terrible ideas I found no love there. Yes, I had written an article for the Seattle Weekly called ‘I’d Rather Shovel Dog Food Into Bags Than Ever Work at a Dotcom Again’, but seeing how I couldn’t even get a job shoveling dog food into bags, the Dotcom world was once again fair game – and totally not hiring. Nor could I find work doing any sort of writing, at bars or restaurants, at moving companies, grocery stores, minimum wage manual labor, asbestos removal, cable hookup, fish processing, old person bedpan clean-up, mopping up jerk-off booths at the Lusty Lady, or rubbing the corns off of lumberjack feet. I do believe the FBI was hiring snitches, but a boy’s gotta draw the line somewhere. <\/span><\/p>\n

Despite my wranglings to keep the phone turned on, it did not ring. Not once. Desperation was there in that silly little dress it always wears but finally, on a hot tip from a hiring center employee who I threatened with physical violence, I got hired on the spot at the only place that would even talk to me, a shit bar gangster nightclub in South Seattle with a DJ that played the same mix of J-Lo, DMX, Mystikal, and Shaggy every single night in the exact same order, the only relief coming when the Mexicans brought their own salsa CDs from home and threatened the DJ with knives to play their funky Latin beats. It was a shack the size of an airport hanger with considerably less aesthetic appeal. The daytime manager hired me because I was over six feet tall. She appraised me as one would a horse. “Broad shoulders. Biggest guy to apply here in a while,” she said. “You’ll do fine.” Gulp. She was on days. I would be on nights. Everyone at the bar laughed when I took my first order. The average employment of a night bartender in this place was a week and a half. These were demanding drunks, and I had lied about previous bartending experience. And being fluent in Spanish. Gulp.<\/span><\/p>\n

Within three weeks, I had seniority. Within five weeks I was managing the place. Not because I worked hard to get ahead: I was last man standing. The only person who lasted. Who would stay there? Pay was below minimum wage, abuse was currency, and the tips were nearly nonexistent. Run, I would tell new hires. Run before they stab you! But for me, quitting was not an option. I was a permanent member of the insanity ward. Me and the drunks. We were all trapped there together.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a scary place for sure. It stank of violence, of conflict, of awfulness. Various attempts by the owners at making it more festive via disco balls and blacklights only increased the creepiness factor. Plastic lawn chairs sat at all the knife carved tables because, as the day manager explained, “they weren’t worth much if stolen and did less damage when thrown.” Gulp.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once I got over the initial shorts-soilings and stopped showing obvious fear, things mellowed a bit for me. I began to learn little lessons like:<\/span><\/p>\n