“Born into this”

The weekend was one I was looking forward to. Our arrival in New York had the same effect the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock must have had. We had made it to the new world and all our loved ones were booking tickets to come stay in the promised land with us. The last 6 of the 8 weeks we’d been in New York we’d had some combination of Steph’s sister, mother, my sister and her fiancee and boon companion Adam staying with us, with no breaks between and Steph being pregnant through all of it. Although broke, a respite was in order. Steph told me early in the week to get a rental car and that she was surprising me with a weekend away. We didn’t have any money to go out of town with so I was pretty sure she was going to kill me in the woods and dump my body in the Hudson. The day we left I went into work for a few hours and told them I had to leave early to rent a car. “Where are you going?” “I don’t know. My girlfriend has a weekend lined up but won’t tell me what we’re doing so if I’m not here on Monday, call the police. She may be taking me out to the woods to murder me.” I left around 1 and took the subway then a cab to LaGuardia to pick up the rental car. Some kind of new Dodge with a decent American engine in it. It felt strange and exhilarating to be driving a car with real power to it after not having a car for so long. I always feel slightly drunk when I get behind the wheel for the first time in a while. It’s like a dream where you’re undressing your grade school teacher in line at the grocery store. Exciting and awkward all at the same time. I picked up Steph and we headed North through my first real taste of New York City traffic and the thrill of driving a car lost a bit of it’s lustre. We crawl through Queens, then the Bronx, with that great area around Yankee Stadium where the bridges look like Roman aquaducts and up through Jersey. The wildlife outside New York City is beautiful and hits you like a wall as soon as you get one bridge outside the city.

We stop at a gas station to use the bathroom and I get some shitty gas station coffee but as I’m standing in there I’m suddenly hit with a warm wave of nostalgia for our time spent on the road; having not been in a gas station for months. Back on the road we’re alternating between AC/DC and Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young as we wind up through the Hudson river valley on our way to Saugertes. We get to the cabin she’s rented and it’s a great little loft style cabin on an acre of land complete with hammock and fireplace. She’s done well and I say “This place is perfect, the only thing it needs is wine.” “Look on the table.” There’s a bottle of red table wine sitting on it next to a corkscrew and two glasses. Life is good. I head back out to the car and drive up the road to a little market which is really just two racks of mac n cheese and pasta with a few bags of marshmallows and cookies next to a cooler full of beer and soda but all I came for was pasta and sauce so it’s a success. There’s a little deli counter and the friendly Asian lady ringing me up says “You want garlic bread tonight?” “Sure, sounds great” “I have some stale bread we just gonna make crumbs out of but you take for garlic bread” and I graciously accept. Damn, we’re definitely not in Brooklyn anymore. The next morning I wake up and sit outside with my coffee in the cool delicious mountain air. It’s really a treat to not smell trash and filth and smog and burned farts every time you breathe in. We play music and write a song, our first real practice in months and then head into town for lunch where we sit at the bar and eat some half-assed diner food and there’s one oafish looking cop walking the two main streets of town saying “Howdy” to all the people he passes and asking them how their son’s baseball game was and if their Uncle Ned’s tumor is still bothering him, while eyeing us with suspicion and contempt. I never feel easy around cops and hope I never do. We wander around the little town looking for cheap furniture but end up finding one of the greatest bookstores I’ve ever been in. Some guy’s house but it’s packed with great literature and all for $4 or less a copy. Even some 1st edition Henry Miller and Hunter Thompson stuff going for $10. We drop around $60 and the guy is looking at me like “Are you sure you want to buy all these books?” when I could have bought half the store and felt good about my purchase. The next day we head over to Woodstock, which I never thought of as anything more than a music festival or slang for acid. We got into the town and there’s a flea market going on with the usual trash and treasure and a hippie guy playing bad acoustic guitar and trying too hard to sound like some world-weary Bruce Springsteen. We passed some kind of psychedelic second-hand store and there’s two gray haired hippies in front playing guitar and talking very seriously about some guy who had sold some records earlier that day. They had a sign that said “Kariokee – Guitar Kariokee – $1 to make us stop playing!”  Naturally we went in and there were two parrots in a cage along with a whole clusterfuck of clothes, records, crystals, potions, dirty cds and posters. As we’re walking through the store we see a skeleton hanging in the corner with a rubber hand. Steph walked up to the lady who owned the store, a sunburned space cadet with pink hair of about 50 and asked if she’d sell the skeleton. “Oh, gee well he has been a good friend of ours and… you know, well I guess we could sell him, maybe for $40 we could sell him, we call him Doctor Bones although he’s missing a hand, just like my husband!” “Okay, great we’ll take him. Can we come back and pick him up on our way to the car so we don’t have to carry him around?” “Sure honey, sure.” As we walk out I notice a stack of business cards near the door with a homemade advertisement for her psychic services. “POPULAR IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES – ANIMAL PSYCHIC MEDIUM ANNA PETERSON – PSYCHIC READING / FORTUNE TELLING / SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE” and sure as shit there’s a photo of her with her two parrots. We walk around the town for a bit more and I like the place, and even though I’m not a fan of hippie culture I do love little mountain hippie towns like Arcata, CA and Woodstock. We find a store selling Catcher in the Rye shirts and Henry Miller shirts and Jack Kerouac tote bags and at first I’m thinking “Kudos” until we see the t-shirts are $30 each. What a strange culture we’re living in. We walk back to the animal psychic to pick up Dr. Bones but when we get in she’s flustered “Ooh yeah I talked to my husband and he doesn’t want to sell Doctor Bones, I’m so sorry you guys.” and so Steph wants to look around a little more and I dig through records. “If she’s psychic, wouldn’t she have known her husband would say no?” Steph says. But another hippie lady walks in and the two of them start talking loudly, the pink psychic saying “Yes, my husband lost all of his fingers and just got out of surgery two days ago. They attached his hand to his stomach until the skin grows back. He’ll grow new skin on his stomach and then they can detach it.” I guess giving up the one-handed skeleton would have left him without any company in his league and suddenly I didn’t feel so bad about the loss. We head back to the car and within 2 hours we’re descending back into the mouth of the beast and home.

The kick-off the shoes rest of being home didn’t last long though. About 10pm Steph starts feeling bad and is having stomach pains, which have been more or less common for the past few weeks and I start to doze off as we lay there only to wake up at 11:30 to her saying “This is really bad. This is bad. I think I need to go to the hospital.” I fly out of bed, call a car service to send a gypsy cab and start gathering our jackets and books. She’s on the ground shaking with pain and something is clearly not right. The gypsy cab finally shows up out front and rushes us up to Queens then over the Queensboro bridge to the hospital in Manhattan. I had been expecting an emergency room packed with gunshot victims and people vomiting blood; immigrants moaning and schizophrenics yelling about the government, maybe a few Jehovah’s Witnesses handing out copies of the Watchtower on those about to die in a sterile plastic chair under flourescent lights. But thankfully we get in and there’s only one person ahead of us and all is relatively quiet. An old man comes in on a stretcher with what appears to be his strange Indian lawyer. The strange Indian lawyer with bad comb-over, protruding front teeth, coke bottle glasses and strage hunch is talking to all of the paramedics, trying to get each ones badge number and name and scribbling it all down on a pad of paper. He shuffles back and forth in his sloppy polo shirt and baggy khaki pants. He looks like he should be sitting in a filthy apartment that smells of cat feces and old Chinese food, watching a small black and white TV with rabbit ear antennae. The paramedics eventually have had an ass full of him and walk back to the ambulance. They finally wheel the old guy out and let us in. Steph explains her symptoms and that she’s pregnant (which is a great card to be able to play in an ER) and we soon get our own room. Midnight becomes 1 AM becomes 5:30 AM and finally we’re released and in the freezing early morning Hudson River wind we stand on the corner or 10th Ave. and wait for a cab. I’ve got that thing where I start shivering and can’t stop again and I’m trying to pretend I’m back in San Diego with my hands on the hood of a car on a blistering hot day, a trick my mom told me to use when I was cold when I was young and which I still use. It kind of helped and finally a cab pulled up and we got in. I send an email to my boss explaining that after being in the hospital all night there’s a snowballs chance in Hell that I’m making it in to work. We get home and sleep for about three hours when I wake up for no good reason and can’t get back to bed. I get up, make coffee, usual stuff and as I’m crawling back into bed Stephanie screams “Oh shit!” I figure I’ve got some giant spider on my forehead or she’s going into labor or something but my nerves are so shattered I don’t even panic. “Today was my court date! I was supposed to be at the courthouse at 8:30 today! There’s going to be a bench warrant out for me!” So I throw on pants shirt shoes hat and walk to the subway thinking about how 4 hours earlier I was sleepless in an ER and now here I am on my way to court. She may not need expensive jewelry or a closet full of shoes, but that doesn’t mean every girl isn’t high maintenance. The courthouse goes smoothly since I’m a tall white guy that doesn’t have a shaved head or goatee, and I go into the courtroom with her documents and explain to the officer that she’s pregnant and we spent the night in the ER, and he says “OK, this case is dismissed and no further action is necessary, have a good day.” Say what you will about the facade of equality in this country but at the end of the day the System is a lot easier for a white guy. I’m pretty sure the Jesus look doesn’t hurt either and gets me a lot of unconscious associations with goodness and salvation. Since I haven’t heard back from my work I call my boss Alison. “Oh my God Joel, when you sent me that email it went to my junk mail folder, so we didn’t think we’d heard from you all morning! We all remembered you saying if you weren’t here Monday to call the police and we’ve actually been wondering if we shouldn’t call them and tell them to start looking for you!” and she broke out laughing. I assured them there was no need for any more law enforcement this morning, hung up and walked out of the courthouse. Pleased that I was spared a bunch of bullshit by the man I walk back through downtown Brooklyn and see girls practicing ballet in the bottom floor of a building and two old guys playing guitar next to the subway entrance and I’m thinking about how much I love being who I am where I am. Sitting on the subway back home there’s an old Hispanic guy reading a Spanish newspaper with the headline “PINATA HUMANA” and I have to laugh because sometimes things work out even when they don’t seem to be on paper. I’m about to get off the subway on a beautiful Monday and crawl in bed with my girl, and for now I’m not a human pinata, my hand isn’t attached to my stomach and I don’t have the cops looking for me. For now.

-Joel