Sexy In Seattle (I didn’t like Grandpa)

Illinois is really, really flat. I’ve recently come to understand just how boring my home-state is, topographically speaking. You can see for miles in any direction, and usually what you can see for miles in any direction is cornfields. It’s not like that everywhere, you know.

This past August, I spent a week in Seattle. You can barely see 9 feet in that town. Fog? Sometimes. But mostly it’s all about the hills. There is no level ground in Seattle. Every street is a hill. Every sidewalk is as slanted as the eyes of the Japs Jenni’s grandfather lectured to me about a few Christmases ago.

No, wait. It wasn’t Christmas. It was July. Yeah. But I was so scarred by grandpa’s rantings that I dreamt that he ruined Christmas. It was Christmas morning and I was at the McIntyre house, on account of that’s where I usually can be found on Christmas morning. It was Christmas morning and everybody was very excited but then Jenni’s grandpa ruined everything. He wouldn’t let anybody open their presents until after dinner. How messed up is that? I woke up very upset.

Jenni is the reason I spent a week in Seattle. Jenni has been one of my dearest and closest friends for nigh unto six years or something. This trip to Seattle was the first time I’ve just up and bought plane tickets and flown someplace. Jenni’s grandfather was not in attendance so it was a relaxing week and there was little talk of bigotry and hatred and the faltering US economy’s being taken over by the sneaky sonsabitches who invented gunpowder, religion and all that food I can’t eat.

No, it was a week of love and wrestling and the senseless spending of way too much money. $600+ I threw away that week. Half of that was airfare. The other half paid for my temporary vegetarian foodstuffs, various Robyn Hitchcock oriented compact discs and 8 novels by the late, great (and as it turns out, not so late after all) Robert Sheckley. (Yes, West Virginia, he’s still alive and yes, East Berlin, he’s still writing, Buddha bless his heart.)

Anyway, I spent a week with my Jenni wandering around the University District and marveling at the mountainous horizon and reading sci-fi novels. Also, as I briefly mentioned, I was an experimental vegetarian for the week. That was interesting and perhaps an experiment I’ll repeat later in life. Upon returning to Illinois, I weighed myself on the scale in Adam’s Chicagoland Apartment. I had also weighed myself the day before my flight for Seattle so I could compare myself before and after being a vegetarian for a week. According to the crimson digital readout of the scale, I lost 4 pounds. And that was after stepping off the plane and into the gay IHOP on Halsted at 11 PM to greedily devour a gigantic double cheese burgered item.

That was yummy. It was like when I was living in DeKalb and I would drink nothing but water for a week or two and then have a Dr Pepper at a restaurant. The Good Doctor would burn my mouth and throat. It was delicious! Then, my roommate, SEan suggested that I try it with Star Wars – seeing as how the Special Edition Trilogy was going to be released theatrically that year. It sounded like a good plan so I gave up my nearly weekly habit of watching one of the Holy Three (Usually Empire, obviously) and stayed away from Star Wars for about 8 months.

Or at least I tried to. They tricked me once. We went over to the Ronans’ apartment one night to watch movies. First we watched something that I can’t remember what it was. Then the bastards put in Empire. I was doomed. It was beautiful though. It was a widescreen laserdisc presentation on a gigantic TV. It had been a few months since I’d seen any Star Wars and my self-inflicted deprivation paid off. Seeing them in the theatre five months later was completely mind-blowing. It was all so fresh and yet so familiar, like really good bread.

Speaking of bread, there was something else yummy in Seattle. There’s this place called S.U.B.S. I don’t know what it stands for but they had this French wheat bread that must come straight outta God’s Oven so good it is. I et there twice, each time enjoying my one slip off the meat wagon – Tuna – my Achilles Heel if ever there was one. Not really, but it’s funny to say so. Adam said so once only he was talking of fried chicken. This S.U.B.S. joint also had bottled sody pop in a rainbow of flavours. I sampled their Crème Soda and also the Orange Soda. Both were yummy even thogh t’was Vanilla Crème and not the far superior Blue Crème which though previously available in select gas stations and bowling alleys is no longer available as the Nesbitts company wot manufactured the loverly beverage has gone belly up in a sea of broken glass and irate, thirsty bowlers.

The other thing this S.U.B.S. joint had that was fun was a guy running off at the mouth about his budding careers in showbiz. He was just chatting with his fellow co-worker, making certain to talk loud enough for me and Jenni to hear. First of all he was talking about how he knows some guys in L.A. who do visual effects and CGI stuff for video games and that he’s written up this bold new concept for a video game. It all takes place in Earth’s future, see, and the ice caps have melted and the land is all under water so the people live in like giant bubble dome cities, see. And they drive from city to city in these little bubble pod sea vehicles. As he spoke, I envisioned Aunt Quinn and Brock driving the Calico’s little bubble explorer dealy around under the ocean while Godzooky gets in the way and endangers the mission.

But this guy wasn’t finished. Seeing that his co-worker wasn’t terribly interested, he changed gears. Evidently this genius was also working on a TV show. And not just like he’s writing a show or he’s got an idea for a show, because who doesn’t? No. This guy, whose job is to make a sandwich for me to eat, has written a pilot which is being considered by one of the networks for next year. He’s in, man! This dude is connected!

What follows is an approximation / condensation of this guy’s story about the TV show he wrote. I will surround the approximation / condensation with quotation marks for artistic purposes but it should be understood that I am paraphrasing / embellishing for historic / entertainment purposes / reasons.

“Yeah, so I’ve got a TV show that’s probably going to be picked up next year. Seriously. I know a guy at one of the studios and they’re considering my pilot. See, it’s about the crew of this spaceship and they fly around the galaxy and meet aliens and get into adventures and stuff. And the ship is called the USS Victory. Now, I called it the Victory because that way I figure the critics can say cool stuff about the show. You know, like ‘Fox scores another “Victory” with new show.’ or ‘Will “Victory” be victorious in the ratings?’ And I know you’re thinking that it’s a Trek ripoff but it isn’t. Apart from the fact that it’s about the crew of a spaceship flying around the galaxy and stuff the similarities to Star Trek end there. Oh! Also I’m going to make sure that each character has at least three different outfits. They’ll have the Officer Uniforms, Civilian Uniforms and their Dress Formal Uniforms. You know why? Because three oufits equals three action figures!”

He went on but I’m already bored with this so I imagine you are too. I just thought it was fun that he was specifically designing his show with marketing in mind. He didn’t have a cool premise or a story he wanted to tell. He wanted to create a franchise. He was more concerned with ratings and toy tie-ins than plot or character development. This guy was fuckin’ funny.

So, Seattle was fun and I took pictures until my camera died and I watched the sun go down behind the mountains while lying on a silver beach with Jenni in my arms and I wandered all around the city holding Jenni’s porcelain hand and I watched WWF Smackdown with her boyfriend Matt and I met her longtime pals Ken and Finbar and we drove up to Snoqualmie Falls which is really Twin Peaks and took pictures of the waterfall and the gazebo and the diner which has been burned up by somebody who evidently doesn’t “get” David Lynch. I, for one, rank Lost Highway in my Top Ten Films of All Time.

Talking of films, we saw The Cell and But I’m A Cheerleader. Both were worth the $5. The Cell was a piece of shit but it looked really groovy. But I’m A Cheerleader is fucking brilliant and is a DVD I will purchase. Before seeing that film, Jenni and I went to this mexican restaurant down the street from the theater. She had a veggie taco salad or something and I got a fabulous vegetarian burrito the size of someone’s head. It took them a bit to prepare my food though so I had to eat it while racing down the street, dodging punks and street musicians, and lesbians walking their german shepherds and yippies and yuppies and hippies and guppies, all the while keeping a passive eye out for Sara Stoltenberg whom I’ve not seen in eight years or so but whom has recently moved to Seattle from Chicago. I didn’t see her but I did finish my burrito just in time. It was delicious and filled with sour cream. By the time we got to the theater, so was I.

Also while in Seattle I drank two liters of Dr. Skipper and read sci-fi novels and I bought a rare Buzzcocks CD and ogled Jenni’s neighbor – Sexy Becky.

Sexy Becky lives beneath Jenni. That is to say she lives in the semi-finished basement of Jenni’s rented house. Soon, Sexy Becky will be moving upstairs into the very room I slept in whilst I was in Seattle which is the very room the Mouse lived in whilst she was in Seattle. Sexy Becky will move upstairs for about a month. Then, she will travel the nation and “get into adventures” leaving the room vacant and ready for occupant #4 whose name is Jen.

I met Jen ever so briefly during my stay but I didn’t really spend any time with her or get to know her at all so this will be the last of her sentences and, in fact, the last of this paragraph.

Sexy Becky was the first Seattleite I met. I don’t know if she’s originally from Seattle and I don’t care. She’s sexy and her name is Becky and she can kick my ass and that’s all I need to know. I sat on her papazan chair and read a sci-fi novel. I sat on her loveseat item and watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I walked next to her down University Drive and she handed me a fuzzy leaf Jenni had plucked from a flowering plant and as she did so, she noticed my fingernails. Those who know me know that I have fabulous hands and that my nails are the envy of girls and drag queens the world over. Or at least they should be.

In Seattle, my nails were unpainted. Today, however, I type this with painted ringfingers and thumbs. Left hand blue, right hand gold. The nails were painted by Jenni and by the Mouse’s sister whose name is Karen. I have a picture in my scrapbook of them painting my nails. This happened in Chicago a week after the things that happen in this essay happened.

Sexy Becky came downtown with us to go comic book shopping. She ate with us at S.U.B.S. the first time. The guy wasn’t there. She bought a Wonder Woman action figure. She’s really into Wonder Woman. In her living room, which is beneath Jenni’s bedroom, she has a large Wonder Woman painting hung up. It depicts Wonder Woman punching a bad guy and saying, “Girls kick ass!”

I adored it. I wanted to have Jenni take a photograph of Sexy Becky punching me in the face just under the painting, creating a dual image of the triumph of estrogen over testosterone but I was far too shy and intimidated by Sexy Becky to ask her to pose with me. Yes, dear friends, she was that sexy.

I hold out hope, not much, but some, that one day Sexy Becky will wander in my direction. I hold out hope that one of her upcoming adventures will bring her back into my life. It’s possible, I suppose, but probably I’ll never see her again. Probably, like Bambi before her, she will fade into the literary universe I’ve created and become just another part of this fiction I surround myself with. My fiction bleeds truth but time forgets and the heart wanders and wallows.

But that’s neither here nor there. The point of all this is that Illinois is really, really flat. I mean there are hills, sure, but Seattle was as ragged and crooked as Jenni’s grandfather’s logic with more dangerous slopes than the Korean War.

(There’s probably a word for this: the deliberate use of offensive language and viewpoints not to shock the reader but to show how not in agreement with such language I am. I use them like a grandma in wolf’s clothing, or perhaps a grandma in grandpa’s clothing as it were.)

Twice Told Tales is the coolest bookstore I’ve ever been in. They had at least, no hyperbole here, twenty cats roaming the joint. There were cat bridges spanning the spaces between the bookshelves so the cats could get from perch to perch without disturbing the multitude of readers. They’re open 24 hours on the weekends. We went there after seeing But I’m A Cheerleader. I bought some sci-fi novels. Sheckley.

I was wearing a Boba Fett t-shirt because, well, that’s half my wardrobe. The lady behind the counter saw this and flipped. The excitedly pointed to this giant hand written list of random things behind her. This list was like ceiling to floor long in overlapping reels of paper. She found what she wanted me to acknowledge and pointed.

“Who would win in a fight: Boba Fett or Iron Man?”

I supposed that Boba Fett would win but I admitted that I don’t really know much about Iron Man or the potential of his armour. I know that his name is Tony Stark and he’s an alcoholic. “Hi, Tony.” That’s about it. I’m pretty sure he can fly and he’s most likely got rocket launchers or a flamethrower or some such in his suit but I think Boba Fett could take him. I mean, Boba Fett was smart enough to hide in the garbage.

The lady behind the counter then told me about how much she loves Star Wars and how she’s seen it 15 times or something. I wasn’t that impressed, really. I mean I’ve watched my Widescreen Special Edition Trilogy 12 times I think plus I know I’ve seen the Original Star Wars movie at least 30 times. Seeing that I was unimpressed, the lady behind the counter changed subjects.

“Do you watch the scene in Jurassic Park where the T-Rex is chasing the jeep down the hill in slow motion? I cue that up and watch it over and over in frame advance.”

“Uh… I don’t think I’ve seen Jurassic Park since it was in the theaters.” This is true mostly. I saw part of it once in DeKalb when somebody rented it. I probably watched part of it on cable at some point too. The lady behind the counter was dumbfounded. She leaned forward, clearly to impart some big, important secret to me.

“It’s very relaxing.”

Seattle. The week went by at a normal rate. That is to say it felt like a week. It felt great. It didn’t rain but one can’t have everything. At least I got to see mountains again. At least I got to see Mount Rainier. I especially saw it when my week was up and I had to fly home. As the 727 broke the cloud ceiling like a less than majestic whale I saw it. Standing firm against the abstraction of sky and sun and condensed water was enough for an entire mountain. Rainier is that big, folks. Enough was showing above the goddamn clouds for me to gasp and say “Holy Shit” out loud. Seattle.

Coming into Chicago at 10:30 at night was something I shall not soon forget. The Captain switched on the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light for at least the tenth time and the ground climbed into view. It had been a crazy flight with swoops and curves and dives as if the pilot had caught whatever disease Seattle suffers from that makes it so bumpy and steep and oddly calm all at once. It seemed that every twenty minutes the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light would go on and we’d dive wildly beneath the clouds or veer hard to starboard for no apparent reason.

The flight from Chicago to Seattle was very straightforward and smooth. Orderly, like Chicago itself. Chicago is a grid. The streets are straight and even (apart from Sheridan which is shaped like your intestines) and easier to conquer than a horny japanese schoolgirl.

I was reading a novel by the late, great (and as we discussed earlier, not so late after all) Robert Sheckley called The Game of X in which an ordinary man flies an aeroplane. I paused in my novel to look out my window at the approaching suburbian constellations.

I could identify most of them: Schaumburg – the Hunter, Palatine – the Emperor, Aurora – the Monkey Princess, Park Ridge – the Naughty She-Mouse and that great creeping Arachnid – Arlington Heights. Gleaming orange and twinkling with traffic and crime they welcomed me home. Then, their stars faded as Chicago – Centre of the Galaxy – arrived on the scene. Bloated with the Blues, its azure lights overpowered those of my greeters. Urgency wafted up through the air from the curiously grounded night sky. As it drew closer I could see its denizens creeping about in its veins – the City Virus at work.

Seattle is Chicago on Valium with half the Drag Queens exchanged for German Shepherds. Seig Heil, darling. Except that Chicago is flat. Seattle is a zaftig lesbian with unshaven legs and a big mug of coffee taking a bubble bath next to a mountain. Chicago isn’t a lesbian, though it’s definitely gay. It’s the butch kind of gay though – The leather kind of gay. Chicago wears boots and a cock ring. Seattle wears flannel and has its lips pierced… if you know what I mean.

Chicago and Seattle are the only two large cities I’m familiar with, really. I mean, I know St. Louis pretty well too but St. Louis is like an annoying grandfather with dreadful advice and a poor grasp of Holiday Cheer. Let us not speak of it.

Yes, dear friends, Seattle is a sexy place. There, I was reborn through the vaginal sculpture outside the Asian Art Museum in front of some goth kids and also a wedding. There, I held hands with my beautiful Jenni and watched her smell every flower we came upon in our lengthy strolls up and down the curves of Seattle’s body. There, I met Sexy Becky and she filled my head with Wonder Woman fantasies.

There, I did not visit the WOTC building or climb the Space Needle or go to a grunge concert. No, dear friends. I did not see the wharf where they filmed season 23 of The Real World. No, I did not visit Curt Kobain’s grave or pretend I was in a Shadowrun adventure. I was far too busy for all of that. I was relaxing, reclining against the constant kinetic slope of potential that is Seattle.

I had found the Tao. So much was happening but it was all so relaxed and when I think back, I didn’t really do anything. Mostly, I flew across the country to spend a week sitting on a couch with my dear and sexy Jenni whose legs are newly unshaven. It seems she’s caught it too. Seattle fever.