The Transporter Couch

Don’t ask.  Don’t even ask where I’ve been for the past six months.  The shortest version involves the destruction of my laptop when the cats were playing and knocked a cup of coffee into its bowels.  Add to that how busy I was making and selling tortillas and growing a business and spending available down time swimming and sunning, then a long series of holiday events.  The end.

 This guy in the weather channel just said, “Texans can’t drive very well in the snow.  I’m from Indiana so I can drive all right but up here in Ft. Worth there are fender benders and major accidents galore.”  I take exception to this … er … observation.  I’m a Texan and I know perfectly well how to drive in the snow and ice.  I know how to ski in it, too.  Never got around to snowboarding though.

 So I don’t think any place in the continental US escaped this storm, which isn’t even over yet.  I like cold weather, and don’t mind a brisk walk on a chilly day.  But lots of people get in really bad moods when their feet are cold and their power and gas bills arrive and it’s twice what it usually is.  Whine whine whine.

I’m also frustrated because Saturday the front right tire on my car blew out at 11:55 AM.  I called Stroeher Tire and Auto, who sold me the tires and who manage the warranty, and was informed they close at noon on Saturdays.  The guy was pleasant but he wasn’t going to do me any favors.  So I locked the car and walked to my parents’ house about four blocks away, which is closer from that place than my own and it was already freezing cold (but no precipitation yet).  I got to the house and let myself in and announced my guandary.  They were sympathetic but could only shrug their shoulders. 

I called a variety of other places, including Wal Mart (which was open for business and said come on in, but the three other reputable places in this small town all close at noon on Saturday.  By this time, it was sleeting in earnest.  My car has alloy wheels and the spare is just one of those donuts and I didn’t want to go out into the sleet to change it.  And of course it couldn’t be driven with a blowout.  The towing companies on a Saturday afternoon would charge me $100 to pull the car anywhere in town, and I’m not cheap but I have better things to do with $100.  So I hunkered down and waited for the sleet to stop.

It didn’t stop.  After a while it snowed, and then it stopped (and that could have been my window of opportunity but I was doing something in the kitchen and by the time I had my time back to myself it was snowing again and then it was frozen rain and then it was nightfall.

Thus Saturday.  It’s now Wednesday morning and the precipitation has only just ceased but not for long.  The doomsayers allow that it will start back up any second now and if you don’t have to go anywhere, then don’t.  No one has left the house because the roads are treacherous.  I suppose if we HAD to go to the hospital or something we might venture out, but mom pretty much said, “uhh h…. no you may not use my car.”  She’s not mean, just nervous.  And I don’t have the best history with cars.  Plus they have a nice comfortable house and a pantry the size of my bedroom, three freezers full of all sorts of food, and I keep numerous items of clothing over here.  Dad keeps a roaring fire going in the living room.  And I don’t have any obligations, so I just sort of moved in.  My friend Gabe called me ysterday and asked if that was my car parked up on Main Street and I assured him it was.  He said, “Buddy, that sumbitch has at least two inches of ice covering it.”  Nice.  I’ve read three books and watched lots of TV and played with the cat a lot.  She doesn’t like cold weather and won’t go out unless you go out with her, and then she’ll play around.  Inside, where it’s wawrm, all she does is sleep.   Outside she gets frisky.

I’ve posted about this before and there’s no sense in belaboring the mechanics of working in a tortilla factory.  However, there is great, great sense in describing how good it has made me feel not just to go back to work but to work in that particular environment.

 First, I just think it’s good to work.  Even if you don’t have to, you must.  Or you get fat and lazy and watch All My Children.  One of the joys I have found in working at this tortilla factory is that the other people there are kind of *surprised* at how hard I work.  For the longest time, specifically times when I didn’t really work there, they just thought I was “the white guy who goes shopping with Hilda.”  Or, well, I suppose that’s what they thought.  But I was treated with a sort of polite deference that bordered on disdain.  Fair enough, for I was indeed the white guy who went shopping with Hilda.  But after working there, and working not tirelessly but always trying to be of assistance to anyone who needed assistance, I gained respect, and camaraderie ensued.  Hilda’s husband, Pedro, who for a long while was skeptical about my relationship to the business (and maybe to his wife), has embraced me as a friend.  Last night he and I and Hilda’s brother (one of serveral) actually had a lengthy philosophical question about religion and marriage. 

So, it’s a joyful thing to know that people like me.   And to know that I work to the satisfaction of others.  And if possible, that my work is, if not an inspiration, at least an example.  I mean, I worked at the counter, took out trash, poured salsas, cooked (sometimes), cleaned, took phone calls, MADE phone calls, added up deposits.  Short of roasting the peppers for the chiles rellenos, I did a little bit of everything.  But most of all, and best of all, I worked the counter and with my honest, engaging smile and my incomprehensibly pretty eyes, I could sell sand to an Arab. 

 Also, I brought fresh fruit every day.  Grapes for sure.  Two or three bags of them, sometimes a mixture.  And pineapple, and strawberries.  And whatever else looked good.  Melons.  Watermelon.  Cantaloupe, honeydew…  At first this was regarded with its own brand of …. again, skepticism.  What?  We nosh on chips and salsa all day long.  We have burritos at will.  Tortillas abound!  OK, I said, but look…. next time you want to snag a chip, have a handful of grapes.  The grapes are a HUGE attraction now.  The melons, well someone has to cut all that up.  But once it’s cut up, people EAT it.  I’ve initiated a trend!  All the fat people at Hilda’s are about a month away from serious good health.  And I came in yesterday and they had taken the watermelon and not cut it up to eat but rather had made this sort of punch out of it!  Yum!  Strawberries are a huge attraction, too, but they go fast, so the grapes are the mainstay.  One day we ate a ton of pineapple and there again, no one wanted to cut it up but once it was done it just disappeared.  Maybe they think it’s a luxury to eat fruit.  I couldn’t say.  I don’t think so.  I think it’s the best thing you can do.

 Not that I don’t eat real food, but having lost a lot of weight, I intend to keep it at bay.  I just hope that Hilda will continue my tradition.  Or maybe I’ll get lonely and start coming to prepare fruit salads for the employees every day!

B

A thousand apologies for my absence over the past three weeks.  Several things happened to interrupt my … flow.  As it were.

For starters, and I made reference to this, I was being of assistance at the tortilla factory.  Then we quite assuredly LOST the counter girl because she got drunk and beat up her husband and had to go to jail.  So suddenly I was the new counter girl.  Or … well … boy.  But anyway, from 6 AM ’til 2 PM I would sell tortillas and Mexican food.  I have a vested interest in this business so I had to do it.  And on some level I enjoyed it.  But I was delighted when I learned last Friday that I was being replaced.  Yay!!!

Second, Hilda took the cover off her pool and after long days of working in a tortilla factory I just loved to dive into it and then take a nap in the sun.  I have the most beautiful tan on the planet, ladies and gentlemen.  And I highly recommend a product called Banana Boat Aftersun (or something like that).  It comes in a cream or a gel.  I prefer the gel.  But as much sun as I have gotten lately, not once have I felt the heat of burn.  It’s basically Aloe Vera and Lanolin but I’m sure there’s some mysterious chemical in there, too.  Ancient Chinese Secret!

After sunning and napping, I would find myself languid and it was past the time when I would likely make a post, so I kept saying to myself, “tomorrow.”  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.  Tomorrow always came but the posts didn’t.

Moving right along, I have one cat of my own but my sister’s two cats were “visiting” and one of them was horsing around (not catting around) with my own, and they were chasing each other and knocked a glass of diet coke into the keyboard of my laptop, which is to say, into the hard drive.  It sparked and smelled funny and quit working, kinda like gramma in her golden years.  I’d been pondering buying a new computer anyway but I didn’t really relish having the decision tossed onto my plate, especially not when I was so busy and tired.  So THEN, me being prone to inertia, I just got all pissy and said, “Fuck it.”  And for three weeks I didn’t post, didn’t check email, etc.

The cats are gone.  I have a new computer, and new help at the counter.  I can resume my life.  Except I’m about to depart on a ten day trip to West Virginia so there will be another dry spell.   However, I have absolutely nothing to do today and I have a lot of things on my mind and I will begin to share them, albeit piecemeal.

I take it back. In a previous post I said today wasn’t a good day but it’s turned out to be an important and frankly a good day. I “came out.” I was busy being pissed off with it all but I got past it. I’d say that was a milestone. As I look back, I’ve been rather masterful at avoiding it but eventually, I just HAD to do it. I know this will create obstacles but I hope it will eliminate others. I started this day angry and now I’m at peace.

Recently a friend asked me, “Do you shave or wax?” And the force of the question wasn’t “Do you shave? Do you wax?” It was more like, “shave or wax, which do you do?”

I said, “I do neither. Sometimes I trim.” And she looked at me like I was from Mars but that was the extent of the conversation.

This morning I was lying in bed, my body resting but my mind wide awake, and I remembered this scene from the Jenny McCarthy movie, “Dirty Love,” in which Carmen Elektra is behaving like a soulful black woman, consoling her friend who got dumped. With her left hand she holds a phone and says things like “Oh HELLLLLL NO!” and with her right, out of the scope of the camera, she’s doing something. She could be fingerpainting. She could be kneading dough. Then all of a sudden she YANKS her hand up and is holding this rectangle of fabric, or paper. At the instant she does that, these feet sort of pop up behind her and this disembodied voice yells, “OW!” And you see the pubic hair on the fabric. And you realize OMG, she’s been having this conversation while she’s waxing some chick’s pookie!

Well, this got me giggling, and I thought, had I had my wits about me when my friend asked if I shave or wax, I should have said, “I shave my crotch but I wax my balls.”

This got me giggling even more and then outright laughing, lying in bed
Alone.
Laughing.
Well, I wasn’t alone. The cat was on the corner of the bed looking at me like Marlin Perkins standing back at a safe distance. I observed her presence and said, “ARETHA! Do you wanna get shaved or waxed?” And as if she actually understands English, she fuckin vanished.

Now she’s lying on a speaker absorbing the sounds. All is forgotten. Or is it?

This post has been brewing for a little while.

Sometimes I don’t know who I am. I know what my assets and liabilities are and what the cash flow looks like and what the daily activities are, but I don’t know who I am.

I know what I like and what I don’t like, and whom I like and whom I don’t like, and I can usually put my finger on why I do or don’t like someone or something.

Sometimes the challenges in my life help me define myself, but sometimes they’re just …. obstacles as I head recklessly toward equanimity.

I can have anything I want. I have the resources to have anything I want.

So…… I want very little.

I want people to be happy in my presence, and I seem to be good at making that happen.

Lately I’ve been feeling really beautiful, physically, emotionally, socially. I have lost a considerable amount of weight, my pants are falling off (which isn’t necessarily bad), and while I don’t gaze at myself in the mirror I never pass one without thinking “wow, that was a good looking guy.” I guess I’m just in awe at what engendered this…. because dammit I want to cultivate it! I love loving myself! I love charming people into submission! I love being liked! I love …. I don’t know. It’s some sort of power and maybe I like the power.

About a month ago I found, in a box (I didn’t save it on purpose or maybe I did) my driver’s license from when I was 20 years old and had just moved to Santa Fe. Ladies and Gentlemen, you NEVER saw a cuter boy than I was back then. Maybe finding that has jumpstarted me out of my midlife crisis. In fact, maybe it just alerted me that was in fact having one.

So I started off saying I didn’t know who I am, but perhaps, as I think about it, I am just learning who I am… at least, who I am today.

Been a long, hard week…  I won’t bore with details but my great thanks to Art for his invitation to join this project and for his patience with me.  What follows was my original post, which I didn’t ever successfully post.

Greetings, prophets. The great work begins. We went to the San Antonio Food and Wine Fest yesterday to ply our trade and present our wares. It was fun. It was fine. It was fur. San Antonio is, in Texas at least, the last bastion of the fur-friendly. Plus it was cold, so at least pretentiousness wasn’t a dynamic. Then I stop and think ……. While genuine, I’m about as pretentious as a man can be, when pressed to be so, and I don’t own any furs. Perhaps I should invest in one. I used to have a fox stole ….. My friend found it at a peculiar venue and since we were both at peculiar places in our lives I suppose it just seemed like the right thing to buy that day, and the right gift to give. Ultimately it landed in the arms of the most unanticipated and unanticipating recipient, my father, who himself has presented actual dearer furs to my mother, and he embraced it as a gift and used it to adorn his organ. Electric, not pipe. But to him, this was a dear fur and there lies the joy of it all. Joy, you will find, is a common theme for me. Fur, less common except when I get raggy about fashion, and I guarantee it will happen. Best regards to all and sundry.