After I brushed off the feeling of shame and failure that accompanies not having an eagle tattooed across my shoulder blades, I walked down ghost alley. Ghost alley is an artistic haven for people who enjoy expressing themselves through the use of, well, used gum. I'm not sure who started the trend, but I'd say their work is on the order of what Michelangelo did with the Sistine Chapel. I take a few pictures of the gum because everyone is taking a few pictures of the gum. It's like that bit from White Noise by DeLillo where he talks about the most photographed barn in the state.
And as we all took photos together I was briefly missing the idea of alleys that I'd grown up with, people scared to go through them, the smell of fresh urine and old clothes. Seeing every tourist and their grandparent strolling through this alley as if it was a haven is enough to make me question the utility of alleys. Luckily the alley we stayed next to in Nashville a few years prior was far more respectable, with a couple of hanging plants and two nudey bars that appeared to be 24-7 type establishments, though why exactly you'd want to see someone naked at 4 AM is far beyond me. I don't want to see anything at 4 AM. If I'm awake at 4 AM I am deeply, deeply confused about the state of the world and also probably angry and hungry.
After taking in the splendor of the wall I program the directions into my iPad and begin walking towards the house. And yes, I do start out by walking in the wrong direction because that's the only way I know how to walk. The streets are sun splashed, the buildings cast shadows on my side of the street, many of them have the feeling of old bank vaults waiting to be unlocked. I've been warned by S that our funds are a bit tight and that these trips may become an every other year type of event, so I'm trying to scrimp and save where I can. I buy the fancy chocolate drink because she's not the Gestapo, but I do decide to walk the 1.8 miles to the place we're staying with my luggage in tow. It's the sort of decision that you can feel good about for about three blocks. After three blocks you start thinking about getting a second job grading essays for the SAT or something else that will allow you, on future visits God willing, to hail a cab and drive the 1.8 miles up to the house, which turns out to be on about a 90 percent grade with only a few attractions along the way lie a tent city and a park that a person tells us the following day is dubbed, "Crack park." Not presumably because of the fault lines.
The city is pretty and the air is brisk. Halfway up, when I'm pausing to see if I'm having a heart attack, I look back at the city, the stadiums, the piercing blue water and almost feel okay about my decision to walk. On the phone with Steph I let out an audible groan, and she temporarily panics and asks if I'm okay. I'm not, but I think I'll live, so I soldier on. This must have been what it felt like to travel the Seattle Trail, the lesser known Oregon Trail knock off.
Finally, after climbing Everest, if Everest were slightly higher, I get to our neighborhood and look for refuge in the house we've rented. As I'm standing on the doorstep, listening to people rustling around inside, imagining they're doing some last minute tidying up, rolling bath towels into swans and making sure we all have shampoo and conditioner, it occurs to me that I should probably check and see if I have the right house. I find a good place to sit, which means the sidewalk in front of the people's house and scroll through my e-mails. A woman walks out of the house and gets in her car and drives away.
My intuition turns out to be a good one as I learn from my e-mail that I was about to knock on a stranger's door and ask them when their house would be available for me to sleep in. I'm sure they'd have obliged as I'm a friendly enough person, but perhaps I'd have started to wear out my welcome when I asked if I could take a nap in one of their bedrooms. "Do you like spooning I just want to be warm?
Fortunately, I never got to find out whether this kind family of five would have taken me into their home, fed and clothed me for the weekend in Seattle. I hope you can tell that what I meant by fortunately was unfortunately. I walk a few blocks up past houses filled with trees as green as emeralds and mossy front porch steps until I reach something that looks like a condo that you might rent out on weekends to people who visit Seattle while day drinking. We've been provided no code to get in, so I just start trying random numbers. I quickly learn that the code is not 1, 2, 3, 4 or 4, 3, 2, 1. Clearly these people think harder than I do about codes. Suddenly, like a fairy in a Disney cartoon, a man appears next door, and I explain my plight to him. He seems unfazed and looks at me, appraising me like a fox looking at a hen.
I tell him that my friend Nate has rented the house, and he claims at first to not know anything, though after a few moments of watching me sit on the front porch he takes some pity and admits to being a part owner of the building. He still won't let me in. "I can't find any record of Nate in here," he says.
(I'm hoping this is right or I've just been bilked out of money by my friends, three of whom aren't coming and a fourth form whom I've just received an e-mail saying that he's come down with a cold and might be staying away as well).
Luckily, my two friends appear on the horizon. They are also carrying their bags, and he asks if we're all homeless people looking for a place to sleep. About the time that I find an e-mail with his name attached to it, he decides to let us in the house, though he warns us not to party too much, or smoke, or have fun.
As in every house we stay in, we walk around and say that the place is really nice. My friends are pretty good-natured people, a fact that I'm appreciative of. Or maybe they just really appreciate nice decor. It could be both. We may have all missed our calling to be real estate agents or interior designers. To me, the place lacks a bit of character, but at least I get to sleep in a bed by myself for once. Granted it took a friend getting a tumor to make it happen, but I'm just saying I had a bit more room to splay out.
Upstairs, like any sane adult, I get out the Nintendo and put in Jackal. I've put in Jackal and brought a Nintendo because I'm sad that it's not 1988, and I think everyone else is as well, and it's all I can do, to assuage the sadness that it's not 1988. After a while, we go to get booze. This is also a standard operating procedure for these trips. When you only see people once a year, it can be awkward, so we usually attempt to diffuse that awkwardness through libations. And by libations I mean beer and Fireball.The local corner store only has beer and wine. I"m ready to call the trip off and just catch a flight home, but my friends convince me that it will still be okay. I suspect that they are wrong.
We drink and play video games. The best part about playing the video games is laughing at your friends when they eff up. "He just died against a little soldier, hah! That soldier can't even shoot." Really. Nothing is better. Every time I die I say something about how the emulator is making it hard to move, and my friends laugh at me for blaming the emulator for my poor performance because even though my friends are good-natured, they are also jerks who don't recognize a flaw in an emulator. And if you, like them don't know what an emulator is, just know that it's the sort of thing that can really put a dent in your video game playing skills by temporarily slowing the action down and not responding to your cat quick fingers when they evade a bullet on the control pad.
Eventually, the fourth friend arrives, hauling a back pack upstairs, a freshly minted ER doctor, who I am expecting to buy my plane tickets to these guy trips once he and his new wife get settled. I try to corner him as soon as possible to talk about the chronic bursitis in my knee because I can tell that he misses work. I do this to anyone I know who has some vague medical knowledge. I corner people for astrology readings to see if they can tell me what the future looks like for my right knee. "Will there be tendonitis?" People love it, and show their love by briefly engaging in conversation before asking where the alcohol is. As far as I can tell, he, like me, wishes he was still working. I can tell that he misses work because when we're playing video games right afterward he's on the phone, doing work and rolling his eyes and saying he wished that his phone would stop working.
From there we head down towards 12th street, past a few eateries that look too fancy. By too fancy I mean that they had candles or waiters were wearing white shirts tucked into black pants. As we've gotten older we've had more trouble mustering up the energy that it takes to do things like shave and not wear hooded sweatshirts. Thus, we wind up in a German brewery that looks like they won't kick us out for looking homeless. The restaurant is roughly the size of a football stadium. They have a full bocce ball court in the middle of the bar and roughly 70 televisions.
I'm sure the place is great, but I was exhausted from changing coasts and sleeping five or so hours, so I try and take a nap on the table while my friends order beers the length of my arms. We order a pizza with some fancy German toppings and a soup. Someone else orders something German. The food is uniformly good, and we share it around like we're on an intimate date with tapas. You have got to try this soup, we say and pass it around the table making appropriate noises of enjoyment and talking about how good the soup and the pizza and the pile of German meat and pasta really is.
I can't remember what we talked about, something about sports, or families, or weddings, or near death experiences. Mainly we talked about how damn good the food was. In the evening, we sat around the house and drank beers and wine. My friend's phone died, which meant he could temporarily stop trying to save people's lives or buy a house and focus on Mike Tyson's Punch Out. The thing that turns out to be funnier than watching your friend get shot by a little guy in Jackal is to watch them get knocked out because they don't know how to block the Tiger Punch. As soon as my doctor friends starts playing he mentions the poor emulation. He's a good guy.
Someone says they heard that there are good bars in the Capitol Hill neighborhood on 12th street, so we set off into the night. I suspect that they heard that mainly because it was close. Some other people have arrived upstairs, they're Canadian and loud, and much drunker than any of us, and they invite us out to a bar, and we say, "maybe we'll see you there," even though we'll never see them again in our lives. Canadians are friendly people.
The streets are packed and my friend, who eats roughly seven meals a day is eying a cupcake spot for the trip home. He eats at least three to four times on these nights that we stay out late. I suspect that he's going to die by the time he's fifty, but damn if he isn't going to enjoy some great ice cream and cuban sandwiches before he gets there.
We have a drink at a bar and then move on. We are engaged in what is called bar hopping, though it's less intentional than a reflection of something like boredom. We're on a never ending search for something better. Even when we find the right thing we move on fairly quickly. It's like a metaphor for life, or unhappiness, or grass always being greener, or bars always being only okay instead of the best bar in the history of the world, which exists somewhere, if you just keep searching you might find it.
As we walk along 12th, getting further downhill without really noticing, because: downhill, we notice a corner bar with a dilapidated wooden fence around the outside and a neon green pony perched on the top. "Let's go there," my friend says, which makes me think he may be blind as it looks about as divey as divey can get. One of my friends opens the door, which has an ADA compliant walk, and I see the neon signs for various beers on a dimly lit hallway, and I decide to stay outside because I have visions of wandering into a biker bar and getting beaten to death with a tire iron for not being in the right gear. We turn around and walk back to the street corner. Someone checks the yelp review to see if it was the most dangerous bar in Seattle. "The Pony is a gay bar." Well, we would have done fine there.
We wander down the street farther just like stupid water, until we find a place called Sam's. The bar is lined with windows, and a single television set plays a game, some game. At some point one of my friends points out that we're four of about seven guys in the bar. And I start looking around the room at all these people having a wonderful evening, who all happen to be women, which is probably not an accident. As I'm gazing around the room doing a gender identification game one of the women
catches me looking around the bar and walks up to introduce herself. "I saw you looking," she says, "so I figured you might as well get to know my name." She extends her hand, and I want to tell her all about heteronormativity and the obnoxiousness of the male gaze. I shake her hand instead and mumble my name. At that point I'm ready to leave. In my rush, I slide an empty glass across the table and it catches on some moisture and slides clean across the table and onto the floor. Someone from another table shouts, "It didn't break," and I feel like I've finally found a friend.
Whenever we're all out together we're operating on different schemas. On the one hand, I enjoy music and dancing. On the other hand, other people don't. As such, we wander around until we find a bar where we can play games. The place has big pool tables, ski ball, and a miniature shuffle board table, which has always struck me as a perfect kind of belligerently drunk but flirtatious thing to do at a bar. I've never played, and it shows as my partner and I lose three consecutive games, though it was mostly his fault. There is no emulator to blame, except alcohol, which is not an emulator, but a beverage.
From there we hit the cold Seattle streets in search of street food. There is a giant polish hot dog eaten. There is a large cuban sandwich with french fries and two pork tacos. I'm sure we ate somewhere else as well and maybe even chased the night at another bar or two, but sometimes you need to know when you're beat. We walk uphill past the cupcake shop and see them putting the chairs on top of the tables. Maybe tomorrow night will be better.
And as we all took photos together I was briefly missing the idea of alleys that I'd grown up with, people scared to go through them, the smell of fresh urine and old clothes. Seeing every tourist and their grandparent strolling through this alley as if it was a haven is enough to make me question the utility of alleys. Luckily the alley we stayed next to in Nashville a few years prior was far more respectable, with a couple of hanging plants and two nudey bars that appeared to be 24-7 type establishments, though why exactly you'd want to see someone naked at 4 AM is far beyond me. I don't want to see anything at 4 AM. If I'm awake at 4 AM I am deeply, deeply confused about the state of the world and also probably angry and hungry.
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After taking in the splendor of the wall I program the directions into my iPad and begin walking towards the house. And yes, I do start out by walking in the wrong direction because that's the only way I know how to walk. The streets are sun splashed, the buildings cast shadows on my side of the street, many of them have the feeling of old bank vaults waiting to be unlocked. I've been warned by S that our funds are a bit tight and that these trips may become an every other year type of event, so I'm trying to scrimp and save where I can. I buy the fancy chocolate drink because she's not the Gestapo, but I do decide to walk the 1.8 miles to the place we're staying with my luggage in tow. It's the sort of decision that you can feel good about for about three blocks. After three blocks you start thinking about getting a second job grading essays for the SAT or something else that will allow you, on future visits God willing, to hail a cab and drive the 1.8 miles up to the house, which turns out to be on about a 90 percent grade with only a few attractions along the way lie a tent city and a park that a person tells us the following day is dubbed, "Crack park." Not presumably because of the fault lines.
The city is pretty and the air is brisk. Halfway up, when I'm pausing to see if I'm having a heart attack, I look back at the city, the stadiums, the piercing blue water and almost feel okay about my decision to walk. On the phone with Steph I let out an audible groan, and she temporarily panics and asks if I'm okay. I'm not, but I think I'll live, so I soldier on. This must have been what it felt like to travel the Seattle Trail, the lesser known Oregon Trail knock off.
Finally, after climbing Everest, if Everest were slightly higher, I get to our neighborhood and look for refuge in the house we've rented. As I'm standing on the doorstep, listening to people rustling around inside, imagining they're doing some last minute tidying up, rolling bath towels into swans and making sure we all have shampoo and conditioner, it occurs to me that I should probably check and see if I have the right house. I find a good place to sit, which means the sidewalk in front of the people's house and scroll through my e-mails. A woman walks out of the house and gets in her car and drives away.
My intuition turns out to be a good one as I learn from my e-mail that I was about to knock on a stranger's door and ask them when their house would be available for me to sleep in. I'm sure they'd have obliged as I'm a friendly enough person, but perhaps I'd have started to wear out my welcome when I asked if I could take a nap in one of their bedrooms. "Do you like spooning I just want to be warm?
Fortunately, I never got to find out whether this kind family of five would have taken me into their home, fed and clothed me for the weekend in Seattle. I hope you can tell that what I meant by fortunately was unfortunately. I walk a few blocks up past houses filled with trees as green as emeralds and mossy front porch steps until I reach something that looks like a condo that you might rent out on weekends to people who visit Seattle while day drinking. We've been provided no code to get in, so I just start trying random numbers. I quickly learn that the code is not 1, 2, 3, 4 or 4, 3, 2, 1. Clearly these people think harder than I do about codes. Suddenly, like a fairy in a Disney cartoon, a man appears next door, and I explain my plight to him. He seems unfazed and looks at me, appraising me like a fox looking at a hen.
I tell him that my friend Nate has rented the house, and he claims at first to not know anything, though after a few moments of watching me sit on the front porch he takes some pity and admits to being a part owner of the building. He still won't let me in. "I can't find any record of Nate in here," he says.
(I'm hoping this is right or I've just been bilked out of money by my friends, three of whom aren't coming and a fourth form whom I've just received an e-mail saying that he's come down with a cold and might be staying away as well).
Luckily, my two friends appear on the horizon. They are also carrying their bags, and he asks if we're all homeless people looking for a place to sleep. About the time that I find an e-mail with his name attached to it, he decides to let us in the house, though he warns us not to party too much, or smoke, or have fun.
As in every house we stay in, we walk around and say that the place is really nice. My friends are pretty good-natured people, a fact that I'm appreciative of. Or maybe they just really appreciate nice decor. It could be both. We may have all missed our calling to be real estate agents or interior designers. To me, the place lacks a bit of character, but at least I get to sleep in a bed by myself for once. Granted it took a friend getting a tumor to make it happen, but I'm just saying I had a bit more room to splay out.
Upstairs, like any sane adult, I get out the Nintendo and put in Jackal. I've put in Jackal and brought a Nintendo because I'm sad that it's not 1988, and I think everyone else is as well, and it's all I can do, to assuage the sadness that it's not 1988. After a while, we go to get booze. This is also a standard operating procedure for these trips. When you only see people once a year, it can be awkward, so we usually attempt to diffuse that awkwardness through libations. And by libations I mean beer and Fireball.The local corner store only has beer and wine. I"m ready to call the trip off and just catch a flight home, but my friends convince me that it will still be okay. I suspect that they are wrong.
We drink and play video games. The best part about playing the video games is laughing at your friends when they eff up. "He just died against a little soldier, hah! That soldier can't even shoot." Really. Nothing is better. Every time I die I say something about how the emulator is making it hard to move, and my friends laugh at me for blaming the emulator for my poor performance because even though my friends are good-natured, they are also jerks who don't recognize a flaw in an emulator. And if you, like them don't know what an emulator is, just know that it's the sort of thing that can really put a dent in your video game playing skills by temporarily slowing the action down and not responding to your cat quick fingers when they evade a bullet on the control pad.
Eventually, the fourth friend arrives, hauling a back pack upstairs, a freshly minted ER doctor, who I am expecting to buy my plane tickets to these guy trips once he and his new wife get settled. I try to corner him as soon as possible to talk about the chronic bursitis in my knee because I can tell that he misses work. I do this to anyone I know who has some vague medical knowledge. I corner people for astrology readings to see if they can tell me what the future looks like for my right knee. "Will there be tendonitis?" People love it, and show their love by briefly engaging in conversation before asking where the alcohol is. As far as I can tell, he, like me, wishes he was still working. I can tell that he misses work because when we're playing video games right afterward he's on the phone, doing work and rolling his eyes and saying he wished that his phone would stop working.
From there we head down towards 12th street, past a few eateries that look too fancy. By too fancy I mean that they had candles or waiters were wearing white shirts tucked into black pants. As we've gotten older we've had more trouble mustering up the energy that it takes to do things like shave and not wear hooded sweatshirts. Thus, we wind up in a German brewery that looks like they won't kick us out for looking homeless. The restaurant is roughly the size of a football stadium. They have a full bocce ball court in the middle of the bar and roughly 70 televisions.
I'm sure the place is great, but I was exhausted from changing coasts and sleeping five or so hours, so I try and take a nap on the table while my friends order beers the length of my arms. We order a pizza with some fancy German toppings and a soup. Someone else orders something German. The food is uniformly good, and we share it around like we're on an intimate date with tapas. You have got to try this soup, we say and pass it around the table making appropriate noises of enjoyment and talking about how good the soup and the pizza and the pile of German meat and pasta really is.
I can't remember what we talked about, something about sports, or families, or weddings, or near death experiences. Mainly we talked about how damn good the food was. In the evening, we sat around the house and drank beers and wine. My friend's phone died, which meant he could temporarily stop trying to save people's lives or buy a house and focus on Mike Tyson's Punch Out. The thing that turns out to be funnier than watching your friend get shot by a little guy in Jackal is to watch them get knocked out because they don't know how to block the Tiger Punch. As soon as my doctor friends starts playing he mentions the poor emulation. He's a good guy.
Someone says they heard that there are good bars in the Capitol Hill neighborhood on 12th street, so we set off into the night. I suspect that they heard that mainly because it was close. Some other people have arrived upstairs, they're Canadian and loud, and much drunker than any of us, and they invite us out to a bar, and we say, "maybe we'll see you there," even though we'll never see them again in our lives. Canadians are friendly people.
The streets are packed and my friend, who eats roughly seven meals a day is eying a cupcake spot for the trip home. He eats at least three to four times on these nights that we stay out late. I suspect that he's going to die by the time he's fifty, but damn if he isn't going to enjoy some great ice cream and cuban sandwiches before he gets there.
We have a drink at a bar and then move on. We are engaged in what is called bar hopping, though it's less intentional than a reflection of something like boredom. We're on a never ending search for something better. Even when we find the right thing we move on fairly quickly. It's like a metaphor for life, or unhappiness, or grass always being greener, or bars always being only okay instead of the best bar in the history of the world, which exists somewhere, if you just keep searching you might find it.
As we walk along 12th, getting further downhill without really noticing, because: downhill, we notice a corner bar with a dilapidated wooden fence around the outside and a neon green pony perched on the top. "Let's go there," my friend says, which makes me think he may be blind as it looks about as divey as divey can get. One of my friends opens the door, which has an ADA compliant walk, and I see the neon signs for various beers on a dimly lit hallway, and I decide to stay outside because I have visions of wandering into a biker bar and getting beaten to death with a tire iron for not being in the right gear. We turn around and walk back to the street corner. Someone checks the yelp review to see if it was the most dangerous bar in Seattle. "The Pony is a gay bar." Well, we would have done fine there.
We wander down the street farther just like stupid water, until we find a place called Sam's. The bar is lined with windows, and a single television set plays a game, some game. At some point one of my friends points out that we're four of about seven guys in the bar. And I start looking around the room at all these people having a wonderful evening, who all happen to be women, which is probably not an accident. As I'm gazing around the room doing a gender identification game one of the women
catches me looking around the bar and walks up to introduce herself. "I saw you looking," she says, "so I figured you might as well get to know my name." She extends her hand, and I want to tell her all about heteronormativity and the obnoxiousness of the male gaze. I shake her hand instead and mumble my name. At that point I'm ready to leave. In my rush, I slide an empty glass across the table and it catches on some moisture and slides clean across the table and onto the floor. Someone from another table shouts, "It didn't break," and I feel like I've finally found a friend.
Whenever we're all out together we're operating on different schemas. On the one hand, I enjoy music and dancing. On the other hand, other people don't. As such, we wander around until we find a bar where we can play games. The place has big pool tables, ski ball, and a miniature shuffle board table, which has always struck me as a perfect kind of belligerently drunk but flirtatious thing to do at a bar. I've never played, and it shows as my partner and I lose three consecutive games, though it was mostly his fault. There is no emulator to blame, except alcohol, which is not an emulator, but a beverage.
From there we hit the cold Seattle streets in search of street food. There is a giant polish hot dog eaten. There is a large cuban sandwich with french fries and two pork tacos. I'm sure we ate somewhere else as well and maybe even chased the night at another bar or two, but sometimes you need to know when you're beat. We walk uphill past the cupcake shop and see them putting the chairs on top of the tables. Maybe tomorrow night will be better.
I believe the movie was called "worlds end" or whatever ..where the 5 brits drink their way across the city filled with zombies..now that is a challenge!
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