slings and arrows

this post brings me back in to the real world for a little while. the last four posts have been chapters of a science fiction story about a dystopian, near future austin. the story deals with the nature of reality and perception. since i am also trying to have a little fun writing this, you can be guaranteed that future installments will touch on my favorite subjects : drugs, guns zombies, religion, firearms, extraterrestrials, conspiracy theories, and mental hygiene. 

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speaking of drugs...

saturday morning brunch was in full swing at the cafe i work at. people were waiting 30+ minutes for a table. cooks are yelling, waiters are running, etc.. a phone call comes in for the manager. 

as related to me:

"this the manager?"

"yeah"

"i thought you might want to know, the guy who cleans your carpets? he's a drug addict. he's all strung out on drugs."

manager: "and you want me to .... ?"

"i just thought you would want to know."

manager: "well, we're kind of busy here dude. later."

there's a couple of problems with this. first, he is a carpet cleaner, not a commercial airline pilot. who cares what he does as long as the carpets are clean? second, of all places, you call a 24 hour diner in austin, tx expecting people to be shocked by substance abuse? you must be high.

if the manager had not been so busy, he would probably have asked the anonymous caller if he thought the guy might be holding.

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one of the cooks i work with, lets call him jim, told me this story.

he had been off work and partying pretty hard for a couple of days. he was planning to spend a quiet friday night at home, trying not to be hungover and sick for the next mornings shift. suddenly, a large group of his friends showed up and insisted he get cleaned up and come with them. they had something fun planned.

he was a little shaky and kind of out of it, but he couldn't help but notice that his friends were dressed oddly. some of the guys were wearing cheap suits. one young lady was " decked out like that dole pineapple chick."

they drove to a racetrack a few miles outside of town, but it wasn't racing that was going on this friday night. it was lucha libre, masked mexican wrestling.

 evidently, a touring company of wrestlers had rented this old racetrack with it's decrepit wooden bleachers ( i saw Survival Research Laboratories there in '96 or '97) for a no holds barred extravaganza, masked heros and villains throwing each other from one end of the ring to the other in ritualized combat.

since lucha libre doesn't usually come to central texas, the event was packed. mexican families had travelled who knows how far to root for their favorites and hiss at the bad guys. "we were probably the only white people there."

they had arrived in two car loads. as jim stood in the gravel parking lot trying to get his bearings, two of his friends began pulling grocery sacks out of car trunks. everybody had to carry at least two bags. jim assumed that his friends had loaded up on beer and snacks.

when they finally found a spot large enough for all of them near the top of the bleachers, jim found out what the bags really contained: about a shelves worth of H.E.B. corn tortillas.

jim was told that it was lucha libre tradition to throw corn tortillas at villain wrestlers. to jim, this made as much sense as anything else. when the first match began, jim got in to the spirit of things and began tossing tortillas down the bleachers. it didn't occur to him until later that he and his friends seemed to be the only ones doing this.

at first people were laughing. then they were not laughing. then they were shouting.

things reached critical mass when jim decided to see how far he could hurl an entire package of corn tortillas. "i hit this old lady right in the face. she screamed, and everyone around her stood up."

before jim and his friends could get what they had coming to them, an armed security guard told them that they were about to start a riot and would now be leaving. now.

the only other thing jim really remembers from that night is hearing the words "pinche gringo" over and over.

jim is actually a very cool guy, but i fault him for accepting dubious instructions in a culturally unfamiliar environment. he may be proof that god does, indeed, watch out for fools and drunkards.

the story reminded me of a mentally unbalanced friend of mine from high school. his mother was a scientologist with a murky past as a "showgirl". she was also canadian. 

she liked me because her son was usually a complete jerk to her, whereas i had been raised to be respectful of my elders. she liked to tell me stories about her past because, unlike her son, i would listen politely.

to hear her tell it, her and her first husband had been some kind of hippy free spirits during the seventies. their favorite thing to do was to follow gordon lightfoot all over canada and the northeastern u.s., much like the deadheads that used to follow the grateful dead. they followed him on tour from town to town, seeing every show they possibly could.

to distinguish themselves from your everyday gordon lightfoot fans, they came up with a novel way of expressing their affection: they threw turquoise jewelry onstage. i asked, but she had no idea how they came up with this.

mr. lightfoot was the recipient of many airborne bracelets, rings, and necklaces, all with lovely polished blue stones until a fateful evening when a stage hand saw them in the act. during intermission, the manager of the club invited them backstage to meet the man himself.

this should have been the high point of their lives, instead an unsmiling gordon lightfoot asked them to please, please stop throwing things at him.

i can imagine canadas finest songsmith explaining patiently that it was hard enough to remember all the words to "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" without having to dodge stone jewelry, eh?

that's all for now. think twice before throwing things.