Last night was my fantastic roommate Eliot’s birthday party, replete with a Tiramisu cake, LCD gifting, and 2 games of Scrabble. I ruined the whole thing, almost. A kind of weasly mania took over my body, sprung from my new weasly haircut. Late in the second game I skipped my turn because the letters of my tray spelled ART X ING which had me mesmorized like looking into baby eyes. For my next turn I insisted on double standard time because of skipping the last turn. Needed to clear my tray to win. After more than ten minutes I laid down “taxanrig”. The birthday boy was very angry and promptly removed my tiles.
The women in my house won both games last night as Eliot and I traded third and fourth places. Yikes, we got crummy chromosomes.
Two days earlier I finally journeyed to the new 7-11 in the neighborhood. It was after 2am and I was driving home after dropping a friend at his house in Allston. The parking lot was scrubbed but empty. The flourescent lights glowed in the extreme. When I got out of my car I looked across Hampshire street and saw the Hess Station attendant watching me from his plexiglass. I had promised the boys at Hess that I would continue shopping for my Pall Malls exclusively at the Hess Station, new 7-11 be damned. From 600 feet I could see the sadness in his eyes.
But I was curious damnit. What was going on in the new 7-11? As a street attorney and parttime detective I had to find out. So I went into the store. I had preplanned my exact in-store moves as to alleviate some of my paranoia. Down the candy aisle I went and scooped up some sour gummie somethings. Then to the counter. The only other person in the 7-11 was a fiftyish dark man with a long nose, short-legged, wandering the aisles seemingly at random. I did not want to presume him to be the 7-11 clerk just because of his Middle-eastern darkness. So I took the only politically correct course.
I stood at the counter and hollered, “Hello?! Hello?! Anyone working? Hello?!” The dark skin man with the long hooked nose crept to the door nervously. Skittish because of the yelling. We made eye contact. “Bathhroom?” he said rhetorically. Easily I returned his questioning bewildered gaze and shrugged. Sure enough, a few moments later the clerk appeared sluggishly from the hallway of the bathrooms. His eyes were blazing red and he appeared ackward. “Help you sir?” he said, addressing the dark man. The dark man made a gun with his fingers, hooking them a bit too much so that his finger-gun resembled a claw. He moved his index finger in a trigger motion. “A lighter?! Do you want a barbeque lighter?!” I guessed wildly, injecting myself into the middle of the exchange.
Before my words had really left my mouth the dark skinned man yelled, “No!” and ran out the door. Very strange I thought to myself. Did he just steal something? There was no way to know. I stuck to my assumption that he had wanted a barbeque lighter. At the cash register the clerk was glacially slow to understand that I wanted UNFILTERED REGULAR SOFT PACK THE RED-ONES-RIGHT-THERE Pall Malls. When he finally handed them to me his hands were shaking. “Hold up one minute,” I said. The clerks red eyes were wild.
“Just hold up one minute. Whats going on in here? Are you okay? I mean, you guys just opened five days ago. Is everything okay?”
The clerk meekly & reluctantly returned my concerned expression. “Good or bad I will see.” Then he softened up just a bit. “Live around here?” he asked me.
“Yeah, man. A couple blocks over.” He asked if this was a good neighborhood as a sports car with thumping bass pulled into the sanitzed well-lit parking lot. A big gangsta guy entered the 7-11 as I began explaining how the neighborhood was a combination of more than one elements because it was so east in cambridge that it butted up to somerville. The clerk had stopped listening, his eyes tracking the gangsta man, he dismissed me nodding saying, “I will see.” Dude was fearing for his life. He needs three inches of plexiglass like the Hess armored hut or at the very least a coworker at night on the graveyard shift. Yikes, new 7-11.
In Harvard Square I was approached by a Lyndon Larouche supporter flaunting a new pamphlet with the full text of a recent Larouche webcast. I was smoking outside the Co-op and tried to wave him away but he persisted with his pamphlet. So I made direct eye contact and motioned him to come right close by my face and I whispered, “The problem is, I am Dick Cheney…” Left him speechless, picked up some literature and headed back to the Nuclear Bunker.
On the way home I was savagely bitten on wrist by a wolfish fluffy white dog with baby eyes named Bear. Yikes, bear! His oldish effeminate owner told me not to worry about it because his soft old teeth hadn’t penetrated my fluffy gray sweatshirt or my wristband. Then when I responded to his query about my age with, “Almost 23,” he smiled and told me that at my age he was a boy-dancer in Amsterdam.
Ah Cambridge. Time to head back to my home in Connecticut for the holidays. I love places whose names start with the letter C.