GYPSIES

 I don’t know how to say this, these people were real deal Gypsies but I think the word gypsy has become pejorative. So, these people were the real deal. They were Romanian gypsies. They dressed like this woman and they sounded like her, too.  Insert you tube link  Dark skin and Slovik features. We’re talking knife fights and the uncle drunk in the front yard at noon. At 2pm ish he would call the fire department, they would come and there was no fire just this crazy drunk guy in the yard. They threatened to start charging $50 for each false alarm and he finally stopped calling them. 

At around sunset I would sit on the front stoop with two boys that were my age. This was 1998 or so. We’d sit there and have a beer. They were awesome dudes. I’m not kidding, when they introduced themselves I could not believe it. They were named Fonzie and Elvis. They had no idea that their names were insane. 

FIVE POUNDS OF MUSCLE

 My girlfriend dumped me in 2000. I didn't handle it well. The weekend I was supposed to move out I trashed the apartment. I wrote on every picture of her, like put an 'X' on her face with a ballpoint and put a bouquet of dead flowers on the kitchen table and left. I told you I didn't handle it well. I found a place to live and there was a 24 Hour Fitness right near by work. One night I decided to put on 5 pounds of muscle. I was pretty god damned skinny.

I went to the 24 Hour Fitness. They showed me around and as soon as they showed me the pool I decided I'd join. I told the guy I needed a personal trainer and signed up for a fucking year at the gym. The guy said, "Come back on Monday morning and write down what you ate all weekend and we will assign you a personal trainer."

On Monday I went there in the morning with my sheet showing my diet and saw that it only had Oreo cookies on it. I had only eaten Oreos allll weekend. Weird. When I got to the gym they introduced me to the personal trainer. I handed him the sheet, he took me into the gym which was not crowded but not empty. There were totally people around. All I had to wear were the fucking short shorts from high school. I was wearing fucking dolphin shorts and he made me do sit ups. I remember thinking, "Everyone is seeing this dude in dolphin shorts doing the most erratic sit ups ever," and I'm not kidding, I totally told the guy I had to leave and left. 

That Friday my phone rang. I didn't answer it and it went to my answering machine. He said, "Mike, this is Phil and I'm your personal trainer at the gym, just calling to see if you wanna come in." And then he hung up. I did not call him back.

The gym was near both my work and a Safeway. I used to go to the Safeway a lot to get lunch. I was in line with my lunch one day, like a year later. The fucking personal trainer was in line behind me. I could not believe this. He even remembered what I looked like. I had a bag of fried chicken wings, a stick of butter, a small bag of white rice and a giant bag of little white Hostess donuts. I remember thinking, "Holy shit it's that guy." He saw me and said, "If you ever wanna come in, come on down!" In my mind I said, "I'm never coming there again, you need to accept that, it's been a fucking year."

DAVE MATHEWS BAND (LITERAL) SHIT

 People have heard that Dave Mathews Band was driving around Chicago in their RV/tour bus. They were on a bridge to dump out the shit from the septic system. They did that but did not realize that they were dumping shit onto a yacht of people. 

People don't know this story: I had friends that took a taxi in SF. The cab driver said "Dave Mathews was just in here, he was my last customer." They were duly impressed. When they were sitting in back one of them came upon a giant bag of cocaine. It was a pound of coke and really good shit of course. They did it all night and one of them took it home.

This guy was named Don Steele like the airport author named Danielle Steele. Apparently he did the whole bag of coke his friends went to check on him he had lost weight. He had been doing it everyday and then he suddenly died. I saw them not long after this and they told me the whole story. As much as I loved him, that is a pretty great way to die. Dave Mathews Band had a bunch of live albums, at one point at work I had to cover them all. There were like 40, it was annoying. Most of them had been recorded in baseball parks, a big part of the reviews I wrote give a story of the ballpark they were recorded in. The first song was always "Rapunzel." 

3 FUCKING JOBS/NORMAN SHORETTE

 At one point in my 20s I had 3 jobs. There was one day a week when I worked 24 hours and I had Tuesdays entirely off. From 7am til the next day. I used to go to my job cooking at 3:30, at 10:30 I would RUN home and take a shower then I would run to the T to my job at 11pm. I did the night audit at a Best Western from 11-7am. Then I would go to another restaurant where I waited tables until 2pm and then I would go cook. I had fucking tons of money. I actually was able to sleep for 20 minutes here and there.

At the hotel job I got sick of the movies in their library. I read Moby Dick to kill time. All night long the night audit program kept running and literally stop running at like 6am. I had to set up wake up calls. It was a pretty easy job. I fucking read Moby Dick. Most of my job was giving prostitutes who called directions on how to get here. 

In 6th, 7th, and 8th grades I went to this Catholic elementary school called St Bridget's. I walked home with this guy who was so short he looked like a dwarf. No lie. He also had the most incredible foul mouth. I'm not kidding, literally every other word was the F word. At one point he said, "That guy's ass sucks canal water." This makes no sense but he said it. He also said, "Fuck face." The first time I ever heard it I was like, "What the hell? This guy is making swears up." 

TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA

 When I was 18 I was gonna open my own donut shop. I had worked in one from when I was 15 and now I was gonna open a new one of my own in this awful Massachusettes town called Marlboro. Before we were gonna open it I had a dream. In the dream I was an old man serving the same DPW workers who I hated. I got out of bed at like 5am, put the keys to the donut shop on the kitchen table and drove to L.A. I remember driving around until the bank opened at 9am. The whole time I was paranoid that my boss was looking for me. I took out all of the money in the bank and dove to LA. 

I was somewhere in New Jersey at night and I saw a sign for Route 66. I figured this was the same Route 66 that they sang about so I took it. It was not the same at all. I drove around a couple hours in midnight New Jersey. I got back on the highway. Three days into the trip I stopped in Indiana and called my mother. I hadn't told anyone anything, I just had just dissapeared. My father put out a fucking APB on me. This is how you end up in jail. Anyway I told my mother I was driving to LA and I would be back. She hung up the phone and told everyone I had moved to California and that I would get residency and go to college there. This was not the plan at all but my mother told everyone that. 

It took me four days total, I basically never stopped driving. I totally got road fever. This is a real thing. I drove around Chicago and St Louis but I didn't stop anywhere. I remember approaching Las Vegas, the plan was to check it out.

 I was in the desert. It was fucking pitch dark but I knew Las Vegas was nearish. At one point I crested a hill.  I got to the top, and a sea of lights opened up before me. This was fucking cool. It had been total black and then an endless sea of lights. These were just the barrios leading up to the strip. This took an an hour at least. When I got to the strip finally it was literally everything I had seen on TV. It lived up to that. I parked and went into a casino. I will never forget that sound. I slept in my car. 

The next day I got to LA. I remember being on the highway going into LA. Everyone was going 85 or so. Suddenly all traffic stopped. The people behind me hit the car directly behind me. Fucking scary. I drove around until I found an adult book store. I went into it, they had a fucking new Traci Lords movie legal and everything. I couldn't believe my luck and bought it. So basically I drove to LA for porn.

I got a hotel room in a chain called Travel Lodge. There was a Guitar Center back on Sunset Blvd, I went to it. The salesman acted like a hungry wolf going for its prey when I walked in. He convinced me to buy a gold top Les Paul. I went back to my hotel room to get the money for it, I realized this would be all my money left so I would be homeless with a sweet guitar. I did not go back to Guitar Center because I felt guilty about lying to the salesman. I left LA and drove to the fucking Grand Canyon. 

I was at the Grand Canyon for about a minute before I got bored and drove out from there. I was headed to Memphis, Tennessee. I wanted to go to Sun Studios and Graceland. For some reason they were both closed even though it was daytime. I did drive by them and looked in. From there I went to Washington, DC and saw the Smithsonian, Lincoln Memorial, the giant monolith, the White House, everything. Then I drove home. 

My mother had told everyone I had moved to California and all my shit was in storage and there were people living in my room. 3 weeks later, I was in the driveway shooting baskets and my boss showed up. He said if you didn't want to open a store you could have just said so.

ROADIE-ING FOR AIRPLANE MAN

In 2004, these two girls I had heard music from in Boston visited. While they were here they asked me to roadie for them on a tour of the west coast. They were playing in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and LA and they needed a driver so I gladly said yes. This was a 2 piece band, a drummer and a guitar player. Both girls. When we had jammed we played Mona by Bo Diddley. Me and the drummer were laughing because it was so fun. I laughed until I cried. She didn't miss a beat. They played some garage rock but also a lot of Howlin' Wolf covers. They had fucking just seen Junior Kimbrough .

I drove them from here to Vancouver, Canada and then down to LA. They played shows the whole time. Roadie-ing is fucking fun. You become part of the band. I had two days with the van after they flew home. I spent it at these two bars in Echo Park. One was called the Short Stop and the other had no name. These bars were awesome and I love LA. 

One of the things I forgot to mention is that before one of the shows in LA we went to a diner and met fucking Billy West who was a friend of the drummer Tara. The internet was still new so I didn't know what had happened with Ren & Stimpy. He had taken over and he told me the story of how John Kay got eff'd. He just said he had been fired, he didn't say why. He said they needed someone to do Ren. Later I heard Billy West on Howard Stern but before then he had just been a guy from Boston. Now he's my hero.

To be honest he was always my hero. When I was a kid, he had characters on the radio that were hilarious. Fucking WBCN. Every day at 5 minutes past 5 they would play 5 minutes of stand up comedy. "Thanks to morons, psychopaths, and mental defectives." It was funny. And then Billy West would do his developmentally disabled character Duane Glasscock. Later when he was on the Howard Stern show he came out and did fucking Larry Fine. It was incredible. This was back when Howard had homeless Jeopardy and it was on Fox, back when Fox TV was a cool TV station.

I also need to mention that when I spent two days at the bars in Echo Park I wrote my name on the board for pool. By the time I finally came up I was playing a beautiful Latina girl. The Gypsy Kings version of "Hotel California" came on the jukebox. Talk about perfect timing.

THE GRITTY MISSION DISTRICT

I lived in the Mission kind of a lot. For awhile I was at 21st and Harrison and there was a taco wagon within walking distance and a taco window on the corner from my apartment. It was awesome. Eventually I went inside and ate at the restaurant that had the window. I had never been there and ordered enchiladas. They came with fucking cactus. The cactus was succulent and in a pile between the rice and the enchiladas. Fucking good. 

It was just me and a family in the restaurant. The family was totally real deal Mexican people. There was a big screen tv at the counter, you couldn't not watch it. It was back when big screens had those 3 lights at the bottom of the screen. This was some early big screen shitiness. Whatever, I watched anyway. It was a bullfight and I was watching the tv. I noticed that all the matadors were dying and I figured out that it was some Faces Of Death on tv. I hated that stuff. I saw that it was called Toro Del Muerte. It was thankfully silent.

At one point the family called the waiter over and gestured to the tv. I remember thinking, "Thank Christ they're turning off people dying." The waiter went over and turned up the volume, they were totally watching it. 

THE LONG WALK

I moved in with my father in Florida in 2008 or 9. I had just left Thailand so it was the definitely '08. When I got picked up by my father at the airport, we went to Osco Drug so I could buy something. I fucking shit my pants in there somehow. Then I had my father drop me off at Starbucks so I could use the wifi. It was like 9am. The idea was to work all day and make some money. 

When my father left Starbucks I went over to my table and there was no wifi. They had wifi at Starbucks in fucking Bangkok so I assumed they would have it here too. They didn't because Florida sucks. The girl behind the counter said, "We don't have wifi but they have it at Wendy's if you wanna walk to it." So I was like, "Yeah, I have to," so I left Starbucks and started walking to Wendy's.

It was fucking easily 100 degrees. I was in direct sunlight on the highway. Wendy's was fucking miles away. This was Florida, I assumed shit was all a mile apart but it was fucking 10 miles easy. I remember at one point I was thinking, "Wendy's has to be nearby.." I was pouring sweat. I finally got to Wendy's and they had wifi. I ordered food and started working. Eventually I couldn't write anymore and had to go home. 

I didn't see phone booths or phones anywhere. I realized Wendy's doesn't have a phone. Literally no one did. At this point I had to keep walking, I walked another 10 miles to the next Osco Drug. Hopefully they would have some phones. Thank Christ they did and I was able to call my father and have him come get me. This was my first day after moving in with my father. It totally got worse. 

MORE BANGKOK SHIT

 When I first got to Bangkok I realized people there could not say words that ended in a 'K' or 'L' sound. So when I signed up for pool in a bar I started writing 'Mikey.' The word for shit is 'Kee' and that word 'Mai' is a negative, like 'No.' I was in a taxi and the driver asked my name. I said, "Mikey, Mai-kee', and he said, 'You're name is 'no shit'? Do you have constipation or something?" I love pool. I shot it every where. There was a bar I went to called Morning, Night. The idea was to get there in the morning and stay til night. I totally did this. I used to have a rule in Bangkok, any time I walked by a bar and they were playing 'The End' by The Doors, I had to go in. That's how I ended up at Morning, Night. They were playing 'The End' and you could hear it on the sidewalk. Cool. 

There were like 20 tables in this place, it was a pool hall that sold beer and the girls were available if you wanted to leave with one. I would hang out with this girl basically every time I went there. She was fucking good at playing pool. Her name was Tai which in that language means 'rabbit'. So her name was 'Rabbit.' I used to say her name by rolling the 'R' the way people would say hello to Bugs Bunny, "R-r-r-rabbit" She never got this joke but I made it pretty much every night for awhile. I never took a girl from this bar but I did notice that this bar like almost all of them had a shrine to Buddha in the doorway, above the door. When girls left with a customer they would pray to the shrine on their way out. I'm not talking about them kneeling, they would nod or Wai. I loved this. 

I had a girl over to my apartment so I cleaned it up. I was paranoid about it smelling like cigarettes so I bought incense. I got some that smelled good and lit it before she got there. The girl I brought smelled the incense and said, "It smells like a funeral in here."