Some people are like homing pidgeons and can always find the way home. Bob Dylan is not one of them, going solo off the title of his latest bio-pic, No Way Home. But I am. Even at a young age (16) I was nicknamed Mapquest by my friends in high school. Okay, so I called myself Mapquest and they just eventually made fun of me for it. Whatever, same result. Its not that I knew all of the roads, though working at the time as a prescription deliverist for the town pharmacy I knew a few (company car & gas included)… by the way, driving around my hometown in that beat up Dodge Shadow is where I officially began smoking cigarettes. I digress, rather, that my talent was to somehow always maintain the ability to deliver myself home, in a timely fashion.
Timely fashions were out of fashion earlier this evening. A friend from my hotel job came over to the Grill to have a bite to eat and say hello. Evidently crossing the bridge from Boston over to Cambridge can be traumatizing for a certain set of people, this I did not know. I was cut early from shucking last night and my friend arrived at the Grill after I’d left and gone home. I had taken a shower and was in my pajamas when I got the phone call that he was over there. I walked over to say hello, we hung out for a while, and then I was caught up in a surprise episode of the hit series Lost.
Not only are some people not born with the knack for finding their way home, some people also don’t know how to give directions. I was snaking through street after grimy street of Jamaica Plain, Newton, Chestnut Hill, not to mention past numerous hospitals and Dunken Donuts… and my navigator was silent, occasionally telling me to “Follow that car.”… hours passed… cigarettes were smoked and anxiety rose. Would we ever find the place where he lived? Rt. 9 was traversed in both the Eastern and Western directions: fruitless meanderings. “We’re adjacent to it now,” he said, hundreds of times. Whenever we passed dark forest area he insisted it was the Arnold Arboreum. “The Arnold Arboreum is adjacent to it.”
“We’re on Arbor Way,” I said. “Arboreum Way, perfect,” he replied. Circling and circling like sea gulls adjacent to a Mcdonald’s french fry orgy. Thank god he bought me a blueberry donut when he finally got out to ask the Russian immigrant woman working at Dunken Donuts for directions to Forest Hills, because my nerves were fried. It was becoming a quagmire. Finally we followed the train tracks in past Forest Hills and he located a safe corner to be dropped at. “Don’t complain about this on your website,” he told me. No. This website’s purpose is for me to complain. And complain I will.
By the way, Stalker A didn’t show Monday night. But he called and left a pissy message, which is nice.