…and thanks for all the (raw) fish.
After you’ve lived enough days and eaten three meals and lots of snacks in each of them, you eventually start to think you’ve finally tried everything. At that point, going out to eat means you aren’t in search of “new and different” so much as “good and enough.” Although I like lots of variety in other aspects of my life, I’ve never been the type to seek out exotic foods, so I probably wouldn’t have crossed over into “new and different” had my friends not dragged me out to have sushi.
That was definitely their thing. Both Zack and Andy were regulars at Sushi Yama. Andy just loved sushi and, being a casual vegetarian (i.e., not a Nazi about it) he enjoyed California rolls and the like. Zack wasn’t so nuts for the stuff, but his roommate Ken worked as the prep chef there.
I didn’t know anything about sushi: what it was, how it was different than sashimi, etc. Zack and Andy usually ordered a mix of things and we all shared. To my surprise, I found I loved the taste and texture of raw fish. I grew up in New Orleans, and I was sick of seafood. To be honest, I hated it. Having been fed the stuff all my life, I would have been happy to never have another bite for the rest of my days. Of course, that was fried fish. This was different.
I was amazed first of all that sushi didn’t taste anything like I expected. Specifically, it didn’t taste fishy at all. It didn’t smell that way either. Most of us have really bad association with a few chance encounters with bad-smelling fish, and that’s enough to instill a fear of the raw variety for a lifetime. Quality sushi can cure you of that aversion. This was completely the opposite of a bad experience. For example, tuna in particular was like an exceptional piece of rare steak without any trace of sinew… and it was essentially cholesterol-free. You couldn’t come up with a better equation for the perfect food for me.
“You like seafood now?” my mom asked when she heard I was going out for sushi (not really knowing what it was. If she had, I would have gotten an ill-informed lecture about parasites).
“Well, yes,” I said.
“But you hated fish growing up.”
“Yes,” I explained. “That’s because everyone in Louisiana ruins it.”
I couldn’t even tell you what all we ordered that first night. My friends just got me to try whatever they were ordering. It was a happy experience though not knowing what to expect and being pleasantly surprised in virtually every case.
The only near-miss was actually more like being grazed by a bullet. See, I noticed that the Japanese had an unexpected fondness for avocados. They seemed to put them in rolls for one thing, so when I saw the green blob sitting on the edge of one of the trays at our table, I thought “Oh, this must be the Japanese version of guacamole!”
As I reached for it with my chop sticks (which I was still using awkwardly at that point), Andy grabbed my wrist and said, “No!” He introduced me to wasabi. “Try a little bit on the end of the of the sticks,” he said. I broke off a piece. “No,” he corrected, “Less than that.” I scraped half of it away. “No. Even less than that.” I tried it.
Holy fuck, the stuff was strong! I was never a fan of spicy food when I lived in Louisiana, and I certainly didn’t move to Texas out of a love for Mexican cuisine. Wasabi was even stronger in a seemingly equivalent amount. Fortunately, it was also short-lasting. Whereas the capsaicin-based spicy most Americans (inexplicably) enjoy tends to stick around and burn the lips, tongue, and (for an unfortunate few who aren’t careful where they put their barbecue sauce-covered hands) the eyes, at least the white-hot burn of wasabi goes away almost as fast as its full intensity comes on.
It took less than a week before we got to be regulars at Sushi Yama and hit the place for the specials just like everyone else: Tuesday for the half-price a la carte nigiri or Wednesdays for the $10 bento boxes. Oh, and we’d do weekends too from time to time if Ken was working.
Everyone else came out for the specials most nights as well. We found ourselves waiting outside the place if we got there after maybe 7pm. The restaurant was situated in the elbow of a small shopping center in the middle of nowhere. Well, it was surrounded by loads of tech companies, but it was “nowhere” socially. Presumably all the Japanese clientele poured in from the businesses. They filled the place even though it held only fewer than a hundred patrons and were hardly staffed to handle even that many. There was usually just Ken and the owner working the sushi bar plus one or two waitresses (one of whom was the owner’s daughter).
The crowd didn’t die down until around 9pm. We managed to get a seat well before then, but we always stayed around talking for hours. Most of the time the place was empty by 10pm except for my friends and me. Sometimes there were a few other patrons, but not many, and usually they were Americans as well. That seemed to last until around midnight. At that point the place seemed to kick into high gear again for some reason. Whereas the crowd before was mixed, the next wave was almost entirely Japanese. Maybe they were jet-lagged and still living on Tokyo time? Although the posted hours said they closed at 2am, it wasn’t uncommon for people to be there until 4am, especially on weekends. Granted, I never stuck around that late, but Ken was forced to keep serving them until the tsunami was over.
The lull between these waves was the most interesting time for me. Ken was able to take a break or at least talk with us while he worked at the bar cutting things up for the next invasion of customers. Occasionally he’d ask if we’d ever tried something like, say, sea urchin. If we hadn’t, he’d fix us some on the house. It was the best way to be exposed to new things, and not just in terms of food.
In addition to authentic Japanese customers, everything else about the place was right from Japan as well. In the entryway were a couple of small bookshelves covered with all sorts of Japanese publications: newspapers, magazines, anime books, etc. And, naturally, the place had karaoke. Granted, it was rare that anyone actually went up and sang, but the player shuffled randomly through selections of backing videos on laserdiscs (this was 1998 after all). These were almost random in their pairings of images with the lyrics, typically montages of anything a videographer could capture around the city.
The only folks who actually did karaoke were occasional groups of the aforementioned Japanese businessmen, and only when they were completely drunk. It was unintentionally comical, something like you would expect to see on an Asian version of an amateur talent competition devoid of any real talent. And then factor in alcohol-clouded judgment of proper intonation, articulation, and timing, and you have a recipe the Iron Chef couldn’t compete with.
In spite of all this, aside from clips of similar happy insanity served up by YouTube or a few cartoons I grew up watching, my interest in much else Japanese never really took off. Except for sushi. Being bitten by the sushi bug left me constantly craving the stuff for the first few years, and while I’m not as rabidly intense about eating it to the point I got kidney stones (true story), it’s still my favorite food/experience.
The Junky Next Door
There was a copy of what was probably either Naked Lunch or Exterminator! sitting out in my room one day.
“Oh, that guy,” my dad said. “He used to live next door to your aunt.” That would be his sister. We’d been to her house several times in my childhood; she’d had the same place for most of her life.
“Really?” I asked. I was just getting into Burroughs at the time, so I didn’t know a lot of the specifics of his past, just that he’d done a lot of drugs. I didn’t know that so much from the “about the author” blurb as much as just reading almost anything he wrote. I mean, if he wasn’t high, there was something seriously wrong with the guy.
My dad told me he didn’t know a whole lot about William S. Burroughs, just that his sister said he was a weird guy who’d kept to himself most of the time. She remembered him because he turned out to be famous some years after the fact of his brief residence in New Orleans. At that point though he hadn’t even been published yet. Today there’s a plaque in front of the house indicating that he’d once lived there.
One night relatively late, Burroughs had gone over to his neighbor’s/my aunt’s house and said that he wanted to sell her the place. He offered her the house for what was a steal, although it was more money than anyone of modest means (i.e., anyone living in that neighborhood) would likely have on hand no matter how good the offer was.
She told him she would certainly love to buy the house at that price but that it would take her a few days to get that amount together for him. Burroughs looked disappointed and left. He basically rescinded the offer and said he was in a hurry.
I don’t know if he ever sold the house or just abandoned it, but he was gone very quickly after that. I’m surprised to hear that he owned it outright considering he was only there a short time. I don’t know the state of his finances at this point. However, he was likely independently wealthy, having been an heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune, his grandfather’s company.
I had always assumed his rush to get out of town was the consequence of the infamous incident involving him playing a drunk (or more likely stoned) version of William Tell that resulted in him putting a bullet through his wife’s brain. I wondered how this had escaped mention in the oral re-telling of my family’s encounters with him. Surely they must have heard a shot, discovered a body, something… hadn’t they?
It wasn’t until many years later that I got around to reading Burroughs’ first novel, Junky that the precise chronology of events was assembled. The book is an autobiographical tale of the author’s experiences with heroin (and a few other drugs), and mentions the time he and his wife Joan Vollmer spent in New Orleans.
I forget the exact circumstances recounted in that novel, but apparently there was something on the books along the lines of the “three strikes” law. Whether that was maybe something as simple as probation or some such, I can’t remember anymore. Burroughs hadn’t done serious jail time up to this point, but now he had been busted once again, and if he stuck around until this went to trial, he was likely to be sent up this time around.
Before the paperwork caught up with them, he and Joan split town in a hurry and headed down to Mexico. He stayed out of prison, but it didn’t turn out to be escape for Joan after all. The combination of easy access to boys and guns in a lawless land overflowing with tequila turned out to be lethal in her case. Burroughs shot her dead roughly three years after they fled New Orleans. He received a two year suspended sentence, but had already returned to the States by that point anyway.
Untitled drunk story No. 1
The week before the semester starts, it’s not the nerds but the hardest partiers who have already moved into their dorm rooms. After all, when finals are over at the end of the semester, there’s just no time to do anything other than pack up and move out. But before classes begin? Well, that’s another story.
Granted, I was in a boring demographic between those two extremes, but I was there on campus with the wild bunch. I was a junior, but like the freshmen, I had to come up early for orientation. Having just transferred, I had to go through a similar program that admittedly I was skipping out of a lot of the time. I had no obligations by this point in the night, however. It was late, probably mid-way through orientation week, and I was hanging out in the lobby with some relative strangers. We were just B.S.ing about nothing in particular when four guys passed through, one considerably drunker than the other three. The stand-out of the group was louder than the rest and had pretty much lost any sense of decorum or, frankly, any sense of where he was in order to find the appropriate level of it.
I’m not sure where all they had been that night, but clearly there was much alcohol involved. They could have been coming from any of several bars on the edge of campus or maybe they had just been doing shots in someone’s room. Whatever the case, they were heading out the front of the dorm into the campus.
The drunkest one wasn’t the main point of interest though, just the most salient member (at least from a distance). When they got up close, it was immediately evident that one of the more sober guys was the leader here, and he had something specific in mind.
“We’re going camping,” he told the drunk guy.
“Camping!” the drunk guy agreed. It was like watching George subtly manipulate Lenny into the path of the bullet.
By this point there was a small crowd of us following them. We could all see there was a plan to this ostensible madness, and we wanted to be there when it unfurled to whatever end the ring leader had in mind.
The next set of dorms across the way from ours was arranged in a horseshoe at the end of a cul de sac. There was no thru-traffic normally, and virtually none at all tonight with so few folks on campus. The crowd of spectators (myself included) held back while the group led their mark up into a planter in front of one of the dorms. With us out of earshot (and the drunkest one too far down his tunnel vision to notice anyone or anything more than an arm’s reach from him), we were able to talk more freely. Someone in the crowd apparently knew a bit of the back story here. All four of the guys were from Alabama, but only the not-completely-plastered three knew one another previously. The drunk guy was someone they had “befriended” and gotten tanked up specifically to mess with. Now it was playing out in front of us.
By this point they’d talked the drunk guy into laying down in a bare patch of the planter.
“We’re camping out under the stars,” the leader said quietly.
“Camping under the stars,” the drunk guy repeated, his enthusiasm giving way to slumber.
“We’re going to sleep under the stars,” the leader said. It was a mantra.
“Yeah, sleep under the stars,” the drunk guy whispered. His lids were getting heavy. He was almost out… but then he wasn’t.
He jumped up and said something loud and too jumbled to make much sense. The other guys calmed him down. “We’re camping out under the stars,” the leader reminded him.
The cycle of slowly, deliberately hypnotizing the drunk guy began again. The leader of the group had clearly done this before with some success. The patience in his efforts testified to his confidence that he’d gotten it right on several occasions and would here again if he persisted long enough.
Over the course of calming him down, they managed to get the drunk guy to undress down to his boxers. They set the example doing the same themselves. They took off their shoes and placed them under their heads like pillows. With no volition left in him left to anything but whatever he could mimic, the drunk guy followed suit. If you’re drunk enough, reality is like silly putty, and as far as he was concerned, he was having the best camping trip with his buds.
After only a few minutes of lulling him into a calm, he was passed out for good. They could have carried him anywhere they wanted and he wouldn’t have noticed. But they didn’t. They quietly gathered up all his clothes except the boxers he was wearing and the shoes under his head. Then they just tip-toed away.
The crowd watching this were giggling before but were in total awe of what these guys had just pulled off now. We didn’t see this coming at all. Though they seemed drunk enough at first, it was clear now that it was pretty much an act on the parts of all but the one now left lying half-naked in the planter. We all took off back to our own dorm and left this party casualty to his mosquito bites and whatever else was in store for him.
I didn’t think anything more about this incident for many months afterward. In the meantime all of us who were there that week had started classes and had gotten settled into life on the campus. I had made some friends who lived in the dorms in the cul de sac. Some of us got to telling drunk stories one day about a year later, and before I could even bring this one up, my friend Maggie told us how the week before classes started when she was a freshman last year, she had woken up one morning, looked out her window, and there was a half-naked guy passed out in the planter in front of the dorm cattycorner to hers.
“What happened to him,” I asked, giggling now even more than when we witnessed him being planted there.
“I called the cops, and they came and picked him up,” she said. “Why?”
I am not good at making friends…
…just at making people mad.
Here’s a brief conversation I had with “sandra” (would couldn’t be bothered to capitalize her own name).
—————– Original Message —————–
From: Alexplorer
Subject: RE: OMG!
Body:
You did NOT post a car as your main picture? Why, girl? Why?
-Alex.
p. s. You’re friends with Tom? Me TOO!!!
—————– Original Message —————–
From: sandra
Subject: RE: OMG!
Body:
because it is my dream car and I finally got it.
—————– Original Message —————–
From: Alexplorer
Subject: RE: OMG!
Body:
I have an emerging hypothesis that only people who post cars as their main picture lack the ability to receive sarcasm as such and return it in kind. Your thoughts on the matter before I pursue a pilot study on the subject?
-Alex.
Trilogy: What’s the opposite of a love triangle?
[All names have been changed to protect even the idiot characters depicted herein.]
My friend Shanna used to hang around with the strangest types when we were in college. Even though she was an honors student all her academic life, she still kept up with her friend Cammie long after the latter dropped out of high school and took a different course in life in every other way. I never liked that crowd of Shanna’s friends for several reasons, but I have to admit they were collectively a good source of stories.
Specifically, Cammie was a loser magnet. She used to date a guy named Trent. In case you can’t tell from the name I’m saddling him with, Trent was a dweeb. Cammie tried to break up with him, but he kept calling her and coming around and just being a huge pain in the ass for months after the fact. When Cammie’d finally had enough of trying to blow him off on her own, she resorted to gettting a bigger boyfriend named Ryan. This kept Trent at bay insofar as he quit showing up at her house, but that didn’t end the pestering. Trent didn’t have the good sense to leave well enough alone, so he kept calling Cammie.
One day Cammie put Ryan the phone when Trent called.
“You don’t quit calling her, I’m going to kick your ass,” Ryan told him.
“Oh, yeah?” said Trent. He was a scrawny guy, but his mouth seemed oblivious to that fact. “I’d like to see you try, you stupid fuck.”
“Well then, come on over.”
“Alright, I will! Me and my crew are coming over there right now.”
With this news, Shanna and Cammie’s plans to hang out at her apartment for a peaceful afternoon while Ryan ignored them and watched tv were shattered. Now Ryan’s on the phone calling up his friends, rounding them up for what is apparently going to be a huge gang war. Cammie’s freaking out, so she starts calling the cops because there’s no telling how far this is going to escallate. Within about fifteen minutes Ryan and at least a half dozen of his friends are outside the apartment along with several police cars and a group of neighbors worried about where this is heading… but there’s no sign of Trent or his supposed faction.
After waiting around for maybe half an hour, the phone rings. Cammie answers. It’s Trent.
“Where are you?” Cammie asks.
“Awwww, I’m not coming over,” he says. “Yeah, none of my friends felt like going over there and kicking Ryan’s ass.”
… … …
Every once in a while around this time, Shanna and I used to go out to this frat/sports bar not very far from campus. It wasn’t my scene at all, and it wasn’t really hers either, but she frequented it because Cammie and that crowd liked it. Again, this is really odd for the obvious reasons that there were plenty of other bars, but this was a college bar in a college town. Like I said, Cammie and her boyfriend(s) were high school drop-outs, but they went anyway. I didn’t realize it when we first got there, but it wasn’t so much that they liked the scene as that they liked making a scene.
If you’ve ever seen Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, you probably remember the segment where Robin Williams’ character is pursing the girl he’s in love with through a crowded train station. She doesn’t know he’s following, and he wanders through the crowd love-struck. Of course, much of the film takes place from the delusional perspective of his character. As a visual metaphor for the love he’s overwhelmed with in that moment, the throng of commuters spontaneously begins to pair up and waltz around the station floor. It’s a beautiful scene, but it paralleled a very different one from one night at the bar when Shanna’s, um, colorful friends were around.
Having little else to do there, I was at the edge of the room watching a guy setting up trick shots on the pool table. The dance floor opposite us is packed as the DJ pumps out the Spin Doctors or Soul Asylum or some other generic frat rock. All of a sudden in the middle of the crowd, two guys start spinning around together throwing punches and trying to knock the other down. Within half a second another couple of guys are doing the same, and so on until there are at least four or five couples wailing away at one another and just as many about to join in when the security starts pulling everyone apart and putting them in a headlock as they’re dragged out. It was over almost as soon as it started, but the speed of the chain reaction was faster than any montage of shots of this phenomenon you’ve probably only seen previously on The Dukes of Hazzard.
It turned out this wasn’t anymore spontaneous than the tv version. Shanna knew the crowd and filled me in. Most of these guys arrived planning to get in a fight with whatever frat boys they could take a swing at. Often they were in and (thrown) out of the place in a total of fifteen minutes which hardly sounds like a bargain for a group that wasn’t averaging much above minimum wage. If you do the math figuring the cover charge they were paying for a thirty second scrap, their wallets were hit at least as hard as anyone they sucker punched that night.
… … …
Fights like this being a regular occurance here, you could reasonably expect to find trouble in the place pretty much any time without even looking for it. Trent went one night and, being a scrawny guy, some of the jackasses there kept messing with him as an easy target.
Although Trent wasn’t especially bright, he had enough street smarts to make quick alliances. In this case, he found the first big guy there who’d listen and offered to buy him drinks for the duration of the night if he took out any of the other guys who were messing with him. The big guy was just the type who came there for fights anyway, so an offer of free drinks from a guy who also served as bait was a doubly ideal situtation.
As it turned out, nothing much happened that night. The presence of big guy was enough of a deterrant that the punks left Trent alone, and in fact he and his one-time body guard for the evening hit it off. They hung around together until last call, then both went home without incident.
When he got home, Cammie asked Ryan what he’d been up to.
“Nothing much,” he said. “I mostly hung around with this little dude all night. He bought me drinks to beat up these guys he said were fuckin’ with him, but they never did.”
Cammie wasn’t so swift herself, but it started clicking almost immediately. “Wait. Was his name Trent?”
“Yeah…”
“Did he have blonde hair, kinda scrawny?”
“Yeah…”
“You dumb fuck! That was my exboyfriend Trent that said he was going to come over here and kick your ass!”
Ryan was flooded with a mix of emotions. “That fucker! I’m going to… actually, um, he… he was kind of cool.”
Surprise, Surprise!
Personally, I don’t like surprises, but Dani doesn’t like planning things. By default of both those corollaries, she’s the one of us who’s going to get surprised and it will be by something I’ve planned. Usually she’s surprised that her ADD partner can plan anything. Odds are you’ve already heard several stories about the wedding surprises I pulled on her (starting with the proposal right on through the reception), but now everything was coming together all at once again.
See, I always have to work pretty hard around this time of year. Dani’s birthday is 12/1, then there was our old (i.e., before the wedding) anniversary on 12/22, and then Santa needs to show up on 12/25. That’s a lot of gifts to gather together in a short period of time. I never ask Dani what she wants either. It’s a game I play with myself that presents are always a surprise. Of course, it means I have to listen for ideas all year long, but that’s part of what makes this fun for both of us.
One thing I knew was this: Dani loves horses, and a horseback trail ride has been among the things I’ve wanted to surprise her with for the last couple of years; it’s just always been so cold (and rainy sometimes) that outdoor activities are not an option by the time her birthday arrives. I thought that was a great opportunity for a birthday party, just one that would happen a couple weeks early this year… precisely when she wouldn’t be expecting it.
I emailed a group of friends and asked if anyone was interested in going on a trail ride. I got Mark and Brindle and Kristen to meet us out there. I didn’t tell Dani; I just told her to put tennis shoes on.
“But I’m on call for work,” she said.
“No you aren’t,” I replied.
By now she knows not to argue because I’m going to make her happy. The proposal, the wedding surprises, Halloween after Halloween, I’m all about making memories. That’s my job, and it’s the one thing I’m good at. She didn’t know it, but I had one of her co-workers cover for her for a few hours. I just steered her to the car and pointed the way from there.
The ranch is only about five miles from our place on the southern edge of FW. I had scouted it earlier to see exactly where it was, how long it would take to get there, etc. We scheduled the trail ride for 1pm and got there about 15 minutes early with the liability forms filled out and everything; they were under the seat.
As we got right up close to the place, it finally dawned on Dani where we were heading. I told her where to park and she was like, “You’ve been here before?!” As we got out of the car and walked up to the place, Mark and Brindle were standing in front of the main office waiting for us. Dani was still reeling from the fact we were going riding, and then a couple friends were there as well. A few minutes later Kristen showed up. Not long after that, we were riding on the trail. It was a group of about ten or so of us counting a couple of the guides. I’m not into horses, but I’m always up for new things.
The ride itself was fun, and easy enough for a first-timer (like most of us were) to handle. It was just an hour heading out into a well-trodden path through the woods that the horses have done about a thousand times. These guys are more or less retired from anything but this monotonous job, so they were pretty easy-going. Dani loved it just the same. She’s never been into anything more adventurous than that.
After the trail ride, Kristen took off to go visit her mom, but the rest of us headed over to a park down the street. Once we got there, I popped the trunk and pulled out a carrot cake and drinks for everyone. (Actually I had a separate vegan cake for Mark and Brindle, no eggs or something; I don’t know what was special about it.) Dani was shocked that so much planning went on without her knowing about it. Superheroes are good at things like this. For example, how many of you know my real name? See. There you go.
Part(y) II
What Dani didn’t realize was that the trail ride was smokescreen. Every time she would bring up something about her birthday coming up (which was surprisingly often for her), I would say, “Hey, you already had your birthday. Don’t be greedy!” This was especially funny in light of the fact she forgot my birthday when it came around a few months earlier. The whole morning of mine I kept saying things like “Could you make me breakfast in bed like it was my birthday?” and “Could you give me a massage like it was my birthday.” Her response was to tell me to go fuck myself; I didn’t deserve anything special. The guilt set in around 2pm when it finally dawned on her what the date was.
Like I said, the ostensible reason why I did the trail ride two weeks before her birthday was because I didn’t know what the weather would be like on the actual date. In fact, within a couple days of the trail ride, winter had arrived and it just as cold and rainy as I expected it to be. I got the timing exactly right this year and finally crossed something off my “to do” list.
Of course, if you’re one of Dani’s friends, you know that the next Monday I started sending out Evites to the surprise party I was planning. This involved a lot of digging around and calling because Dani does the worst job of almost anyone when it comes to keeping her address book up to date. The evite itself linked to this page which prospective guests were alternately frightened by or found absolutely hilarious, but yes, I would have ruined the lives of anyone who spoiled the surprise.
Once I had a decent enough idea how many people were coming, I had to sneak around shopping. A few days before the night of the party I was able to buy anything that didn’t need to be refrigerated (e.g., chips, party plates, etc.) and just leave that all hidden in my trunk. However, I couldn’t sneak anything into the fridge like, say, a veggie tray without Dani knowing something was up. I talked to my neighbor Linda and asked if I could use some space in her fridge. She was cool with that (no pun intended). Since she was going out the day of the party, so she let me borrow her keys.
I spent the morning finishing straightening up the place. For the three days or so leading up to this point, I had Dani helping me clean around the house on account of the supposed fact that my OCD was flaring up and only she could help keep me out of the ICU. We decorated for xmas, got piles of junk that needed putting away finally put away, and washed all the accumulated laundry and dishes. While she was out, I gave the place a clean sweep both literally and figuratively and cleared lots of space to put out food, etc. for later that night.
Dani loves carrot cake, so I knew she would welcome a second helping in as many weeks, but of course that was the one thing Target didn’t have when I went out that afternoon for everything else I still needed. I’m driving around with a trunk full of groceries looking for this one last thing. I end up at the grocery store down the street from us, but no luck there either. I’m on my way to the third store hoping to end this scavenger hunt when the cell phone rings… from my house. Worst possible news: Dani is home. She tells me there isn’t much going on at work so she decided to take the rest of the afternoon off. I’m like, “Oh, shit.”
I lie and say I’m out hitting pawn shops in search of still more guitars, that I’ll be back in a little while. It turns into the French Connection as I give Linda a call and we end up doing a hand-off of the groceries in a shopping center between where the two of us happened to be at the time. She loads it all in her fridge when she gets home. In the meantime, I go home and hang out with Dani for a bit, but around 5:30, as planned, her friend Jessica swings by and picks her up to go out to eat and to do some early xmas shopping.
From the time Dani leaves, I’m in a mad dash to get all the crap out the car, out of Linda’s fridge, and all set up. Fortunately and at my request, Tracy came over ahead of the rest of the guests and handled the cooking (okay, microwaving) and we put up most of the decorations before people started showing up (plus lots of folks blew up balloons once they got there).
When Dani finally arrived, she was just about floored when we all yelled “Surprise!” as she came through the front door. She stood there for several minutes speechless trying to get her head around what was happening. Honestly, I was a bit worried until just then because I really didn’t know if she had found out and was just playing along, but it worked. The secret was safe until the proper moment. Moral: When in doubt, Dani won’t notice most things hidden in plain sight, but it’s best to play it safe anyway.
