2002-04-18 - 8:19 p.m.
Sunday, 04.07.02
It�s the day after that Scottish parade and the bagpipes still won�t leave my head. If you think that�s bad, as earworms go, it gets much worse this evening.
How so? Two words:
Cheap Trick.
More on that later.
***
I don�t have an awful lot planned for today. My energy usually starts to ebb toward the end of a trip, and three days of wheeling around Midtown Manhattan and shoveling food into my piehole like a famine victim at Billy-Joe-Bob�s All-U-Can-Eat Pigateria has left my metabolism crying for mommy, so I figure that mellow is the word for the day. A friend of mine in New York recommended the Circle Line tour, as a way to chill out while staying active and touristy, but said friend has just had her domain name stolen and is too busy trying to get it back to hang out with me today. Besides, the temperature is still hovering around 40 degrees, so the prospect of spending three hours out on the water does not entice. Yeah, I�m a weather-pussy. So sue me. I�m from California.
Around 11:00 I have brunch with my old college friend B at a cafe near Rockefeller Center. B was part of my harem back in college. I mean that only in a nonchauvinistic way, however; I had an above-average number of female friends back then, and whenever we went out as a group to clubs and parties and whatnot someone would invariably yell, "Hey, here comes Mig and his harem!" In reality, I was too much of an insecure, socially inept goob to actually ask out any of these women, but it sure made for a studly entrance to a room. Either that, or it convinced everyone that I was gay. Take your pick.
B and I spend a couple of hours catching up and then window-shop up and down Fifth Avenue--which has got to be the greatest shrine to the Gods of Wretched Excess since the days of Tiberius, but I digress. Last time I saw B she had just moved back in with her folks to sift through the debris field left by her most recent relationship catastrophe--whereas I, meanwhile, had not yet moved out of my parents� house and was still waiting to know the touch of a woman (or at least the touch of a woman who wasn�t dressed in scrubs and holding a needle or a bedpan, anyway).
A lot has changed since then, and a lot hasn�t too. We�ve both gone a long way toward getting lives--B�s crossed major oceans several times in the course of her career and now has a high-power job in Midtown which allows her to own a huge four-bedroom house just across the river, while I�ve moved out on my own and am using my talents to enslave humanity. And yet neither of us can afford any of the insanely expensive merchandise on display at Bergdorf�s. (Fine with me--who in their right mind would pay $500 for a handbag, anyway?)
***
And now we come to the Cheap Trick part of the story.
After leaving B I go back to the hotel and crash. By the time I get up again, it�s past 6:00 and I�m touristed out, so I decide just to hang out in the Overpriced Yuppie Martini Bar downstairs for a little while and then get packed up for tomorrow. I�m not really in a martini kind of mood, but I�m told the bar makes a killer cosmopolitan too, and I can�t possibly leave New York City without having a cosmopolitan.
So there I am, sipping my drink, picking at my $10 plate of shrimp (insert Repo Man reference HERE), when a whole damn entourage walks in and commandeers one end of the bar. The group positively screams Music Industry--I can pick up the vibe a mile away. Most of them are shabbily dressed aging hippie types--lots of ponytails and receding hairlines on the men and unshaven gray body hair on the women--with a handful of ultrasophisticated New York hipsters in their 20s. And then--
I can�t place the guy at first. I know I�ve seen him before, but my brain doesn�t want to remember it. Whoever he is, he�s woven into this terrible, sticky web of overarching trauma draped all over my junior-high-school years. If I remember who he is, I�ll suddenly find myself re-experiencing that shit all over again, from that one time someone wedged a stick into my spokes and parked me in a stall in the girls� bathroom, to--
It�s Robin Zander of Cheap Trick.
Holy fuck.
Inside my head, an army of about a million 13-year-old girls with feathered hair start squealing all at once.
I�ll say this much, he hasn�t aged very well--though he looks better than most of his contingent at the bar. I just sit there, swirling my drink around in the glass and not saying anything. One of the 20something hipsters in the group keeps shooting eye daggers at me, though, for some reason--maybe my gimpy presence is upsetting his carefully arranged music-biz tableau, or something. Yeah, well, fuck you too--and by the way, those black-rimmed emo glasses make you look like a male Lisa Loeb and all your friends are laughing at you behind your back. Just so you know.
I keep waiting for Robin to start a fistfight, or grope a waitress, or go all paranoid psychotic like Adam Ant did a few months ago--something, anything, so long as it�s Behind-the-Music-worthy. But nothing, nada, zip. Robin, you disappoint me.
Eventually, I go back up to my room and try to go to sleep--and that�s when the nightmare begins.
Now, not only do I have bagpipes stuck in my head--I have Cheap Trick songs stuck there as well. And before long, they start to blur into each other, and now I�m hearing Cheap Trick songs as rendered on the bagpipes. Ever tried falling asleep with 10,000 bagpipers skirling "The Dream Police" inside your skull? Well, have you?
So around 11:00 I give up, throw my clothes back on and go.
To CBGB.
Must ... have ... punk ... rock.
I�ve always wanted to go there, anyway, just so I can say I did--the earworms are just a convenient excuse. The club�s obviously not the in-place it once was, the band is forgettable,the bathroom is down a flight of stairs I wouldn�t dare use even if I could walk, and I have trouble imagining the Ramones or the Talking Heads on that tiny stage, but who cares? It�s cramped, packed, sweaty, squalid, and perfect. And by the time I leave an hour and a half later, my earworms are quite dead--dead, and mashed into the floor along with about 25 years� worth of beer, vomit and cigarette butts. What a way to cap off my visit.
***
Monday, 04.08.02
Nothing much to report today. Except that a limo to the airport is only $25 more than a taxi and more than worth it in convenience and fabulousness. And that the security checkpoint at Newark is a case study in Chaos Theory.
If the climate and wheelchair accessibility weren't so much better in San Diego, I'd move my Double-Secret Evil Headquarters to New York in a second.
Anyway, vacation over. We return you now to your regularly scheduled diary.
***
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