the world has turned and left me here

crutch-stealing bmx kid

A hipster house party turns ugly when this 19-year-old drunken bmx kid tries to steal a girl's crutch. It's unclear why he did this. She had a broken foot & had gone to sleep hours ago, so there was no imaginable motive. Her hipster guy friends, though, were good enough to chase bmx kid down for her. A lame fistfight ensues in the middle of the street, and bmx kid eventually gets chased off.

Then in a save-face move he undoes his wallet chain--a big heavy wallet chain--and comes running back. Justin & I watch him go inside. There are shouts and glass-smashing sounds, and one of his friends gets on the phone with the cops. I turn to Justin & suggest we split.

Halfway home he realizes he left something back at the party & we turn back. I'm very apprehensive about going back, in cop avoidance mode you know, but Justin refuses to be talked out of it. So I park on a dark sidestreet and wait for him. He comes out a few minutes later though & says all is well again, bmx kid has been arrested, so we end up hanging out with the hipsters until dawn.

Everyone is remarkably cool & I just spectate. It takes me a while to realize these two guys who showed up together are a gay couple...not because one of them is indistiguishable from straight, but because no one makes a deal out of it. When dawn comes they leave with a girl from the house to go sleep in the back of camper-top truck down by the shore.

Occasionally friend-of-bmx-kid receives calls from bmx kid in which he threatens to break into a neighbor's house, steal his guns, and blast us all to bits. No one seems too concerned with these threats.

I must have passed out on the couch for a half hour or so. I'm still groggy when we leave so I let Justin drive. Mistake. White knuckles all the way home...I've underestimated the extent of his altered state. He is moving slow, like a stiff desert lizard coming out of his rock shadows in the morning, but the car is moving incredibly fast down these waterfall hills & around hairpin corners. He's drawling on about this & that & driving with his knees half the time. Seemingly, he's paying attention to everything but the road. It's all miraculous to me...each successive moment that I survive. The car might as well have been driving itself.

I wake up on a crappy couch about the size of my torso. It is almost 2 pm & I am in the University district somewhere. As usual, it's drizzling outside. I stumble out into the rain & find a place to eat a few blocks away. Then try out some basses in the music shop around the corner from Justin's before catching a bus downtown, where I walk into a Steinway dealership & try out grand pianos for a few hours more.