Frank (Slept Here)

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the kind of informal “writing group” that I had kind of cobbled together not long after I moved my blog from Myspace to Blogger. There was a pretty solid group of bloggers whom I read and who read my stuff pretty regularly. They lived all around the country (and in some cases, out of it), but I developed friendships with them, mostly through social media like Facebook and Twitter, and in very rare cases in real life. Ella and Scarlett are two of them, and this past weekend I added a third to the very exclusive club.

Ashley mentioned a while back that she was going to be in New York City for a couple of days, and seeing as how I only live a few hours away I couldn’t think of a better opportunity for us to meet. Ashley is perhaps my longest continuous reader, stumbling across my blog from her home in San Diego when my blog was essentially unknown to anyone else except my sister and college roommate. She is one of the few from that group in 2007 and 2008 that is still writing at the same web address, and through every joy and tragedy that I’ve been through in the last four plus years, she’s always been there with a kind word to offer when I’ve needed it. So when I heard she was going to be a short train ride from where I live, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to meet her in person.

Ella and I trekked down to New York for the day, arriving at Grand Central and walking through Times Square to a predetermined restaurant to meet Ashley and her roommate for lunch. Despite living in the same state as New York City for nearly a year now, I hadn’t been there since my Boy Scout troop took a spring break trip there in 2002, and most of my memory of the city revolved around seeing Ground Zero, the Statue of Liberty, etc. With the exception of Times Square, which is a whole other experience together, most of the city felt a lot like Chicago. There were the same grid blocks of buildings, same yellow cabs, same stores, same crowds of people on the sidewalk. It was a strange feeling to be in a city I hadn’t visited in ten years and feel oddly at home. Only when we waded through the crowds of tourists at Times Square did I feel that I was solidly not in a kind of bizzaro Chicago – it screamed New York too much for any similarities to creep through.

We met Ashley outside the restaurant and she was as nice as I had imagined. I’ve never been very good at meeting people – generally my omnipresent level of social awkwardness goes past that kind of nerdy charming stage and goes straight to, well, pure awkwardness. But I felt like we had known one another for years (we had, in a limited sense) and we enjoyed a lunch of cheeseburgers (with bacon) and milkshakes (with booze) before going our separate ways.

Any time I think about giving up this blog I remember all the people I’ve come to know through this page, most importantly the girl I will soon be marrying. This place has provided me with not only a way to express my thoughts, however insignificant, but also with a way to connect with people I would have otherwise never known about, in places I have never seen.

It’s been well over 15 years by now but we’re still pointing fingers at one another. Check your history books and you won’t find this scandal, yet between my brother Spenser, cousin Brian, and I there was no event more significant than this one.

It started with my grandfather interrogating Spenser and Brian, but not me. Someone had gone into grandpa’s den and and taken not one but two packs of his cigarettes and he was out for justice. Spenser and Brian were in his sights but the two of them sat there and denied it. Neither of them admitted a thing and they didn’t blame one another – for a seven  year-old and an eight year-old they were pros at the interrogation game. I listened from the kitchen because nobody was asking me a thing.

“You two are not leaving here until I find out who did this,” grandpa said sternly.

“What if we have to go pee?”

“You’ll have to just wait.”

“How come you’re only asking us?”

“Because Frank didn’t do it.”

From the kitchen: “I didn’t! You two probably did together. I hope you pee your pants.”

“See, now which one of you did it?”

The funny thing was that I hadn’t even been asked if I’d done something wrong. For some reason I was above suspicion. I was the smart and sensible kid who would never do stupid things.

Knowing full well my reputation I pretty much did as I pleased without penalty. First I just stayed up late or stayed out past curfew but soon I was sneaking booze with friends from school. Things started to go downhill from there but for a while I had immunity from blame. I should have kept that up longer.

Anyway, Spenser and Brian kept to their story and stayed there until grandpa fell asleep, but the funny thing is, for all I did do, I didn’t take grandpa’s cigarettes. One of those two was the thief but to this day they deny it.

By the summer of 2003 I was a teenage badass, in my own mind, at least. At sixteen I had gone full-time surly, taking up drinking…Bud Light, baby.

By all rights I should have been happier. Our family started running into money issues soon after I left elementary school, but around 2002 and 2003 our luck started to improve. I’m not sure what kind of scam my father was running but during that period we had lots of food in the house and our answering machine wasn’t full of calls from debt collectors. There were no broken-down cars in the driveway. Our neighborhood was mostly white and some kind of middle class, and the fact that we finally had a working lawnmower meant our house was no longer the absolute embarrassment of the block. In spite of this, sixteen is as good an age as any for a little teenage rebellion; my parents might have been trying to hoist some kind of middle class dream on me but I wasn’t going to take it lying down.

In protest I took up drinking, for no other reason than I knew it was bad. One of my friend’s dads was a pretty reliable supplier and let us buy 24-packs of Bud for about 80% of supermarket price, but that was just base cost. When you are sixteen and drinking you don’t just find a way to acquire beer, you need to get gum and mints, and frozen pizza too, because nothing goes better with terrible beer than equally terrible pizza. Drinking at sixteen can get expensive, especially if you don’t have a job, but you’ve got to rebel somehow and that’s what I did. Sticking a couple of cans into my backpack, I’d walk to the patch of forest near the middle school and hang out with some of the kids I knew. Out there amongst the trees we’d drink Bud Light and sometimes whiskey, and talk about girls at school who wouldn’t notice us no matter how much we drank.

…There’s no moral to this, it’s just something I remember. As much as I liked being a rebel I started to get the feeling that these weren’t kids I should really be hanging out with so much, especially when marijuana started making regular appearances at our gatherings (I’d have my own experiences with that, but not until a few years later). Mostly I just stayed home after that and stayed moody. By 2005 our run had ended and we were once again taking trash bags of cans to Kroger to get money to buy food. We were hungry and I drank a lot.

The bar has been lowered, substantially. I got excited when I woke up this morning because I realized it was Friday and I could wear jeans to work. Then, at work, the broken mouse on my computer was replaced with a NEW mouse, a wireless one with the fancy scroll thing on top. I got so excited that I nearly cried. Then I felt shame, deep shame. When did I lower my asking price to little more than permission to wear old pants and a new piece of PC hardware? I don’t feel any different, but I seem to have lost something while my back was turned. I’m going to try and get it back, whatever it is. For the rest of the day I’ll be blasting Talking Heads until my ears bleed.

I was warned this morning not to step under a ladder as it was bad luck. I stepped aside to be safer, I guess. The guy on the ladder was pretty beefy and had he fallen as I passed beneath I’d be hurt badly – no, wait, that’s wrong. If someone were to fall or drop something off a ladder the safest place to be is under it since the falling object will land on either side. Some days my genius astounds me and this is one of those days.

Normally I don’t think of myself as superstitious but there is one thing that I will never do, for fear of certain doom, and I know I’m not alone in this. You will never catch me or any member of my family opening an umbrella inside a house. Don’t confuse this with shaking off a wet umbrella inside a  house, which is rude but not fate-tempting. What I am referring to is actually opening an umbrella all the way until it clicks and stays open. I grew up believing that this was the worst thing you could do. As a group my family doesn’t believe in much but we believe that an open umbrella inside the house can kill you. We’re game for anything else – drug use, violence, larceny, etc., but open umbrellas indoors is simply beyond the pale. We have standards, you know.

Another superstition of mine comes courtesy of one of my college roommates. According to him, if you drop a kitchen utensil you should immediately step on it, or you’ll get unwanted guests. I always liked this one, but keep in mind that it only counts at home; you can do what you want in restaurants, except maybe the umbrella thing.

I get up to the customer service desk at heaven’s Albany branch office, located behind a dollar store in a non-descript strip mall, between a Payless Shoe store and a Super Cuts salon. Yeah, I know it’s not what you’d expect a branch office of a better world to be like, but they don’t want to tie up a lot in administrative costs – this building gets the job done and it helps make the headquarters look new and shiny in comparison. So like everyone else I overlook the frayed carpets and long lines because the muzak is good and it’s got the best tasting water fountain in the Northeast AND if you have to use the bathroom they hold your place in line…after all, it’s heaven. Anyway, most of the people in line are there to check their balances to make sure they are still eligible to get in. They’re all much older than me. I spoke to the bathroom attendant who told me that after a certain point everyone starts coming in to check, even if they think this is a front.

“Some people get sick and come early but most have lived long lives and are making sure the ledger is in the black before they close up shop.”

He hands me a towel.

“Well, not me,” I say. “I’m healthy and I’m pretty sure I’m in good standing with the home office. I’m here because I have a complaint to make.”

So I get back to the line and grab the box I came in with just in time to hear my name called to the front desk.

“I’d like to return these prayers, nobody answered them,” I say.

“Sir, we don’t do that.”

“Well hear me out, I’ve got a whole box here,” I flip through some pages. “I’ll start at the beginning: 1992 – ice cream man wouldn’t accept IOU, 1994 – couldn’t hold it in until I got home, 1995 – Lions blow it in Philly, 2007 – the Colts in the Superbowl…wait, you answered that one. Some of these are out of order but just listen, because they’re not all about sports…people died before they should have, pets ran away, jobs got lost, and girls left me. I asked you guys to do something and I got nothing. Now I’d like to give you the whole box back if you will just give me your word that the next one will happen for me. I’m getting married in a few months and I just want to make sure that everything goes okay. Come on, it’s like 100 for 1…please…I just need this one wish…”

“I’m sorry Frank, we don’t do business that way. Is there something else I can do for you?”

“No thanks. Wait…can you throw this box out? I should probably stop driving around with it in my trunk.”

“Sure, I can also give you your account balance if you’d like.”

“No thanks, I’ll take my chances.”

I spent the day feeling blue about the amount of work I have but it’s getting done, albeit not as fast as it’s piling up. A client of ours misplaced a flash drive which contained several drafts I’d been working on – some fifty pages of work. Most of the morning was spent recreating those documents (with some added expletives), and then a co-worker was taken to task for being insanely unproductive and she responded by going home; this resulted in yet more work for me. Everything seems to mean more work for me lately. All I’d like now is a clear inbox and a clear head. Maybe that’ll come tomorrow but for now I’m curling up on the couch, eating macaroni and cheese and watching Top Gear. Everything else can wait.