I have an appointment at noon on Monday to drop my car off where I bought it so it can have a LoJack system installed. I realized on the way home from buying my car last week that LoJack is a play on the word hijack. Realizing this felt like an epiphany, it was that sudden and joyous. The way is clear, the world makes sense.
I wake up late for my appointment and call the place and apologize and the lady on the phone says “No problem, come down anyway.” I follow Dominic to the car dealership, he is going to drive me back after we drop off the car. We pass the place where I saw a man sitting cross-legged painting a very rough, jagged wall last week with a paint roller. It’s finished now, and it has lots of stripes of colors. I am proud of him, though I still think he’s got to find a less depressing way of working. We also see a car with the license plate reading “BNL.” I wonder in earnest if it’s driven by a member of the Barenaked Ladies.
When I get out of the car in the service bay, an employee comes up and asks my name. I tell her. She says “come with me” very gravely. Once we’re inside and she’s behind her computer, she tells me that the LoJack guys have left for the day. She tried to call me, she says, but it was the wrong phone number. I tell her I called and they told me to come down anyway. She says she can call the LoJack guys and see if they can come back. It is pretty clear at this point that the LoJack guys are a band of misfits and outlaws who blow in and out, like the wind but twice as ornery. She calls their dispatcher. It’s a no-go. Telling the LoJack guys to come back after they’ve left for the day is like telling the coyote not to howl. I leave my car there so they can take care of it when they come back in the morning, installing the anti-theft system through a punishing fog of rye hangover, working their tongues in and out of the spaces where teeth used to be before they lost ‘em in last night’s juke-joint brawl. As we are leaving the dealership, I remember I did a dumb thing and left the core of the apple I was eating in one of my cupholders. Then I content myself in the knowledge that one of the LoJack guys will ferment it into jug-wine.
Later, Dominic and I go to see The Smokes at UCB LA, a team featuring lots of our New York friends. On the way, we hear a McDonald’s radio commercial where a guy brags to his friend about the time he “beat Marcelle at that video guitar game.” This radio commercial appeals to Dom and I because we are young people and that is how young people talk. I see an ad on the back of a city bus reading “FIREWORKS: Play it safe. Go to a public show.” I think of how if you make your living doing big public fireworks displays, Black Cats and things you buy on the side of the road are kind of like your BitTorrent or your Chinatown DVD bootleggers. Except they aren’t, because the mayor is never going to say “We’re not gonna do the big show down at the river this year, everybody’s fine with shooting off bottle rockets in the alley behind their house.”
There are neat old-fashioned music shops on Vine with painted signs and instruments in the window. There’s a sun-bleached, negativized Rat Pack mural outside the Capitol Records building. We find parking very easily outside of UCB, a small win.
After the show (which is funny except for the two minutes when we are distracted by an enormous spider lowing itself from the ceiling by a single web-strand, teetering precariously over the head of an audience member in the front row who has no idea this is happening, and then climbing back up to the ceiling as quick as it came) we hang out at Bird’s, a restaurant and bar next to the theater where everybody pretty much hangs out. It is cool to catch up with everybody. We get a thousand restaurant recommendations, and a thousand opinions on good places to live. The first is helpful because we like food. The second is helpful because everyone in our building hates us because we work at night, in our apartment, and that work often devolves into us shouting bits to make ourselves laugh.
While we’re eating a table outside, I watch an older black lady smoking at a table outside the coffee shop next to the restaurant, staring off into the distance, her head cocked at an angle that makes it look like she’s always about to sing. A hipster guy walks by with his girlfriend, and he has a cane around his neck like he is pulling himself off of a vaudeville stage. It is pretty clear he does not need the cane to walk, it’s just a fashion choice. This is kind of a culture shock, because where I’m from, you do not carry a cane as a fashion choice unless you are a count or an ultra-flamboyant urban comedian.
I am very grateful for my UCB friends. It is so cool to see everybody, hear their collective CA wisdom, and to meet new people. It feels a lot like the first week of school, where you don’t know who will be who to you, so you had pretty much better leave your door open like the too-friendly RA recommends.
It’s pleasant outside walking to Dom’s car after dinner. A woman in a white SUV shouts at us: are you guys leaving? We shout back that we are. She follows us but someone else pulls out of their spot before we can get to our car, so she takes that spot. I am weirdly bummed out by this. It seemed like an opportunity to participate in the social fabric. Also I guess I thought maybe she would reward us for our thoughtful departure by shouting her phone number after us or something.
BNL could also be the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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