Tales of a Librarian [part i]

We started drinking too early last Friday night, which was part of the problem, I later realized, though it was only one factor contributing to the prodigious pounding in my head the next day. The other culprit was the sugary drinks at the tiki bar with Kapp and Sparky.

"What's the biggest, fruitiest, girliest drink you have?" Sparky asked the waitress, Tanya, after we'd settled into a thatched roof booth at the sunny end of the patio.

In response, Tanya described a frou-frou beverage called a Blue Mama, which Sparky deemed perfect for his needs. Kapp chose something banana-y while I scanned the cocktail menu for the least sweet concoction, and settled for a Mojito.

The drinks arrived a few minutes later: Sparky's, tall and blue and topped with a pink umbrella; Kapp's tall and pink and topped with a blue umbrella. A Mojito is made with clear rum and lime juice, and is topped with a mint leaf.

We raised our three glasses and I offered the toast: "Cheers, girls."

I love hanging out in bars with the boys.

It was my first Mojito, and it was excellent. Both Kapp and Sparky explained to me that it was a Cuban drink that had been popular years ago and was now trendy again, the way Cosmopolitans had been during Sex And The City. I was amused to learn that Americans would adopt the drink of a country they purport to hate.

"Have you been to Cuba?" I asked Sparky.

"No. Have you?"

"Yes, but only once, about three years ago when I needed a veg-out vacation and didn't have much money."

"You've been to Cuba?" Kapp exclaimed.

"Sure. Everyone in Canada has. Well, everyone in the eastern parts of the country, that is. Kinda like how everyone here in California goes to Hawaii. But it's way cheaper. You can get a week all-inclusive for about $600. We can buy Cuban cigars, too, and no one throws us in jail. Speaking of which, have I mentioned HOW BADLY I WANT A CIGARETTE RIGHT NOW?"

"How's the quitting smoking going?" asked Sparky.

"Better than I expected, actually. Except for RIGHT NOW!" The patio at the tiki bar was smoke friendly. I fervently hoped that someone would light up in the booth next to ours, and that I'd be downwind.

The sun went down, a duo of guitarists started playing lethargic Hawaiian music, Sparky announced he was going home after the next round, and Kapp suggested we head back to Gordon Biersch and meet up with his librarian buddies.

So that's where we went drinking next.

To be continued in part ii.

Bad America

Kapp was still recovering from his trip to the City over the weekend, where he saw Iggy Pop and had a run-in with the stairs at a MUNI station, so it was just me and Sparky at Trials for pub quiz night.

When all three of us are there we make a killer team. Kapp is an expert on music and pop culture, plus, being a librarian his head is full of all kinds of trivia; Sparky is an expert on musical theatre, movies, and "down east" (he's from Halifax); and I know a little about hockey, 80s new wave, Shakespeare, and postmodernism. One week épanouie joined us and aced all the science questions. But last night it was just me and Sparky.

We ordered a beer, waited for quiz time, and discussed our favourite topic, Americans. Sparky just moved here. He's been working for a Silicon Valley company for two years, flying back and forth and racking up the frequent flyer points while waiting for his visa. It finally came through, and now he's living in San Jose with me.

Er, not with me. You know what I mean.

I told him that, in the days after the Virginia Tech shootings I had some new visitors to an old story of mine called "My United States of Whatever," and a couple of new hate comments that had to be moderated. (If you're a first time reader and you feel the need to leave a comment telling me I have no right to my opinions about Americans and that I should go back to Canada, be forewarned: This is my blog. If you don't care for my writing, just go away. We'll both be much happier that way.)

"You know what kills me?" Sparky asked. "The headlines that screamed, Why did this have to happen, and How could this happen. Are they really that stupid?"

"Every time," I replied.

"They really don't get it? That people can buy guns? Why are they always so surprised when someone starts shooting?"

"Beats me. That, and NASCAR are only two of the many things that boggle me about this country."

I have nothing to say about what happened in Virginia last week. I have nothing to add to the whining and crying and renting of clothing and poseuring of the masses who had no connection to anyone at that school. The victims of this latest shooting are not heroes, they are victims, and out of respect for them, I will not watch the sensational entertainment magazine programs that turn America's murderer's into America's celebrities.

You want to keep fighting for the rights of your citizens to own guns? Fine, it's your country. Just stop acting shocked every time someone uses one. I can't abide the disingenuity.

Take On Me

It's Day 9!

PrincessAhAh asked whether I have a cassette deck. She wants to send me a hypnotherapy cassette to aid with the no-smoking.


Next, Postmodern Sass takes on Americans.

Action is his reward

It's Day 7 without a cigarette, and I don't want to hear about the junk food, OK?

Sure, I consumed three small bags of chips today, Miss Vickie's Black Pepper and Lime, if you must know (I just love that they have those here; seems Miss V sold out to some American company, but right now I'm glad she did!), and I know it's just substituting one oral fixation for another one, and I'm fine with that, so just SHUT UP!

That box of peanut buttered Ritz crackers? Ate the whole thing last night, while watching three episodes of 24. Season 4 is seriously lame, by the way.

X and I quit together, years ago. He used to say to people, I can never think of a reason why I smoke, until I quit, and then I know all the reasons. Maybe that's why I had a nightmare about him last night.

Just let me make it through this weekend, that's all I ask, and if I do, I'll tell you the story about how I took a drunk librarian home.

Super Freak

It's Day 6 of Postmodern Sass quits smoking, and this sign outside the local chiropractor's office pretty much sums up how I'm feeling.


I appreciate your support, Gentle Reader.

Some of you have suggested laser therapy, acupuncture, the patch, nicotine gum, even drugs, but I don't need any of that because I have the best weapon of all: this blog.

You see, though I do enjoy writing stories that entertain and amuse you, the reason I started writing this blog was for me to write out my fears and frustrations, and deal with them by publishing them. Metaphorically speaking, I like to put the thing that's bothering me up on the wall and slap it around a bit.

I've quit smoking twice before, and both times I did it cold turkey, so I know I can do it so long as I am motivated to do it. It is that motivation I lacked until my Dean died. And it's not that I want to quit now because she died of cancer and that scared me, though it did, some. It's because I didn't get a chance to make her proud of me, and I know that if she'd known I smoked she'd have been so disappointed in me... and I can't bear that thought, not after I failed to attend that reception to say goodbye.


I am not going to have a cigarette today. And I'm telling you, Gentle Reader, so that you'll hold me accountable.

Tomorrow: Day 7

If I Didn't Care

Lauren Bacall is still alive and kicking in New York, and I've heard she still smokes and I know her voice is still gravelly, and she's such a dame. She's my girl-hero.

It's Day 5, and I'm doing fine, just fine, really. Well, I'm doing OK, I guess, except for the difficulty I'm having quelling the urge to stomp on small furry animals and grind them to death under my heels.

Why am I quitting again?

Out of respect for the Dean, that's why.

Tomorrow: Day 6

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

And in your clothes and your curtains and your upholstery, but that's not why I've decided to quit smoking again.

Smoking turns your walls and your teeth yellow, and it's an expense that nothing justifies. It's harmful to your health, advanced science now tells us, not like in the 1920s when doctors used to recommend cigarettes to pregnant women as a way of controlling their weight. Yes they did. I'm serious. Go look it up.

Smoking is messy and unpleasant, potentially harmful to cats, and makes people look down on you unless they're doing it too, which fewer and fewer are. You don't need to tell me any of this, Gentle Reader. I may be clueless sometimes, but I'm not a moron.

Goddamit, though, smoking sure looked sexy when Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did it in To Have And Have Not. There must be something good about it.

Let me think on that and I'll get back to you tomorrow.

But there were times, Dear...

Continued from this story.

I took it very hard, the death of my Dean, not only because she was an incredible woman who did not deserve to die so early — though she was, and she didn't — but because her death came as a complete surprise to me. You see, I learned too late that everyone knew she was dying, everyone except me, that is.

It was almost exactly one year ago, a warm day in early May, a week after I'd flown to San Jose for my interview at USJ, when the phone rang in my condo in Toronto and it was her, the Dean, calling to say that she would like to offer me a tenure-track position, and that a letter was being drawn up, and then she elaborated on the terms and asked, was I inclined to accept. I can still hear her voice, her Norwegian accent.

I replied: Probably.

You know the rest, Gentle Reader. I decided to accept, and then I moved to California.

The day after classes began in January, an email came from the Dean's office, from the Dean herself. She had cancer, she said, and she would be taking a leave, effective immediately. She would be back as soon as she could, she said, and I never doubted it, not for one moment. People get cancer every day. They have surgery, chemo, radiation; they get better, they come back to work, and the people who love them get to love them a while longer.

Especially the tough ones; the tough ones always come back, and she was tougher than most, my Dean. She was tough with me, and I respected her for it. I'd been throwing myself into academia, serving on committees and writing grant proposals and conference papers, and I was going to show her she'd made the right decision, hiring me, that I was worth what I'd asked for, the terms we'd negotiated, you bet I was.

Three weeks passed, or maybe it was five, and another email came, this time from the associate dean, inviting all to attend a reception — that was the term they used, a reception, fucking euphemisms — that was to be held a week hence in the Dean's honour. A reception, what a silly idea, I thought, what was the point of that, when she'd be back in her office, maybe not as good as new, but good, and soon, and I would see her then, and so because the time and date of the reception were not convenient for me to attend, I did not attend, and only when she died two weeks after that did I realize that the reception had been held so that we might say goodbye.

I did not say goodbye, it's my stupid fault that I did not say goodbye, and I did not thank her, or tell her that I wouldn't let her down and that I'd never, never forget her, so I cancelled my classes Monday, because I was going to that funeral, you better fucking believe I was. I didn't know how I was going to get there, or how I was going to get home, but if I had to walk the 20 miles to Palo Alto that's what I'd do, and that's when he called: Jack. He called exactly when I needed him to, like he'd been hearing my thoughts with some sort of emotional radar. He asked what time I needed him to pick me up, not whether I needed him or what I needed, because he knew, he only asked when and where and said he'd be there. He'd cancelled his business trip, and he'd be there, because I needed him to be there.

He and Beauty arrived right on time, both of them dressed in black, and we drove to the church, and I was quiet because I was thinking about her, the Dean, for real this time, and Jack knew that, of course he did, and when I was a little too quiet he would ask me about her, so that I could tell him about her, even though they'd never met, and would never meet.

He sat at my side through the service, and he listened to her loved ones tell stories about her, and he laughed when they laughed, and he looked sad when they were sad, and he said, she was quite a woman, wasn't she, and I agreed that she was. There were five hundred people in that room. Five hundred people who cared about the Dean, and one who cared about me. One who I'd thought had let me down, but I was wrong, he hasn't let me down for a long, long time, and I wouldn't be here, I mean in California, if it weren't for him, not because I came here for him, but because I wouldn't have been able to come here without his help. He's the best man I know. I need to stop doubting that.

The Dean's son talked about his mother, and maybe because it made me think of my mother, and about how she died of cancer, too, but not suddenly; no, not at all, that I started to cry then, just a little, and I reached into my purse and rummaged to find the tissues that I knew were there, but I couldn't find them, and then, like he was Cary Grant in an old black and white movie, with one graceful swoop of his arm, Jack pulled his white linen handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to me.

The final speaker was the Dean's husband, who told the story of how they'd met, more than three decades ago. How they'd been dating for a few months when she said to him, you talk about marriage, but you haven't actually asked me to marry you, so he proposed right then and there, will you marry me, he asked, and she replied: probably.

Jack laughed heartily at that. I laughed, too, but not quite as hard, because I could hear her speaking the words even though her husband had been the one telling the story. I could hear her saying it.

He'll never ask, I know that, no one every will again, it's too late for that, but if, just if the moons line up just right one day, and Jack asks me the question that I'd always thought I'd answer immediately with yes, well, I think now what I'll say is this:

Probably.

I Fall to Pieces

Continued from this story.

Every so often, about once a year, the boy would break the girl's heart, and each time it would happen, she'd be surprised. Sometimes, he knew he was doing it, and he did it anyway, did it deliberately, even, and months would pass and then, on the day that she'd decide to give up on him, he would slay a dragon for her, and the pieces would stitch themselves back together, like a crazy patchwork quilt.

Forget about him, others would say every time it happened, he's no good for you. But they didn't know how good he was to her, how he could be exciting and unpredictable, how charming he was; how entertaining, and how generous, if not magnanimous.

She loved to listen to him talk. She loved his voice, just the sound of it, no matter what he was saying. He would tell her stories about his travels, and he would mimic voices, perform sound effects, even sing, and sometimes, in an unguarded moment, or emboldened by alcohol, he would say something that he had meant, but hadn't meant to say, and the loosely stitched pieces would fuse together again. She had learned, though, to pretend she hadn't heard; to make no reference to the things he had said, because he'd forget that he'd said them. He'd deny that he'd said them.

Am I a good man? he would ask her, and she would reply, you are good to me, and most of the time, it was true. She understood how very desperately he wanted to be loved, but only by strangers in bars, and dogs, and little children, because that was safe; because they could never betray him.

So she would come to his beautiful city by the bay, and he would show her things: the bar where a famous writer used to drink; the best pizza by the slice; the world-famous art and jewelry store on Post Street whence had come her extravagant and absolutely perfect Christmas present; a quirky café in his neighbourhood with a canoe and a sled on the wall; an old Jewish man named Phil, who cleaned his shirts and gave her a lint brush. She's a handful, he would tell others, and they would laugh, and then he would spoil it by saying, but she's not my girlfriend, not so that they would know, but so that she would be reminded, and then later he would hold her so tightly that the breath was pushed out of her but she didn't mind not breathing, not one little bit, if he would hold her like that forever and never let her go. But he always let her go.

She knew that he knew that she loved him, and he knew that she loved him, but it was never enough; it could never be enough, because the other thing he knew, just as surely as he believed that the sun would rise tomorrow, was that one day she would betray him. It did not matter to him that years worth of days had passed and that she had not done so, because tomorrow could easily be the day, and he was convinced that the day that he stopped believing that, would be the day it would happen.

She, for her part, could not allow herself to believe that he would not one day abandon her, even though he had said (though not promised) that he would not, even though he was almost always there for her when she needed him (though she tried not to need him), because as soon as she'd let herself begin to believe, something would happen, something like what happened yesterday, when she saw the pictures in his apartment, the pictures she tried first to ignore, then to forget, and she'd thought she was managing, because she had managed not to cry (she hated to cry, and she hated even more to have him see her cry), not then, at least; not until much later; so when he'd asked, have you got it?, meaning the enormous television set that he was giving her, meaning had she got her end of it, and could she lift it, and she said yes, got it, and she thought she had, but she hadn't, and she dropped it, and she told herself it was because her hands were sweaty, not because they were standing right in front of the pictures, because surely he hadn't done that intentionally; hadn't placed the television on the floor right in front of the pictures so that she couldn't possibly miss them.

So she let him believe that the reason she hardly spoke on the long drive to her place was that the woman who had hired her had died suddenly of cancer, and that this had affected her greatly (which it had, it's just that that wasn't what she was thinking about in the car; what she was thinking about was that face in the picture, and how to erase it from her memory), and when she told him that the funeral was on Monday, he had offered to escort her, but then when she told him what time it was he realized that he wouldn't be able to make it, and that was fine, really, because she knew that he had meant the offer sincerely and that if he could have arranged his schedule he would have, and that his work comes first, of course it does, and that none of this means that he is abandoning her, she tells herself; there's nothing for her to fear.

But you see, Gentle Reader, the thing we fear the most is the thing that has already happened to us.

The girl found out later that the pictures were not what she had thought they were, but they are what they are, and they still are, but none of that matters anymore because of this.

Everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school

Have I told you about the time I spent in Detention, in Portland?

No? Well.

Tequilacon, that ultra-serious blogger (ahem) conference (cough) organized by Jenny and the blogger formerly known as Brandon (What? Come on, people, we had lanyards!), was held in Portland, Oregon, a few weeks ago. You may remember. You may have been there. I may even have met you, but then again, there was a lot of drinking going on, and don't even get me started on the Tequila. Seriously, don't.

Where was I?

Oh yes, so, Tequilacon was held at this marvelous establishment called McMenamin's Kennedy School. I was told this was a bar that was in an actual school building. I was directed to the website. None of this prepared me for what the place actually looked like, though. I mean, there was a dance in the gym (we weren't invited).


But in this school, you could hang out in the halls and drink, and not get sent to the Principal's office.


I, however, was sent to Detention. It's the smokey cigar bar, and I would have had the party in there, had I been the one organizing it, rather than Brandon and Jenny, but it's just as well since it would only hold about six people at a time.


They had a fine single malt collection.


And retro ashtrays.


I was allowed out for recess with Dave and Jenny.


But not for long, because my new friend Sizzle kept getting me into trouble.


At the end of the school day, Dave led us in a seance.


Then we all lay down on the floor and oogled the cool lamps.


OK, so I'm fibbing about that part. Only the bit about lying on the floor, though, not about the lamps. I was totally in love with the lamps.


And with Portland.



This is probably the last Tequilacon story, but no promises. I already told you the story about the Jehovah's Witnesses, and how I no longer feel the need to be polite to them. And I told you about meeting Sophia (oh, and Neil, too), and all the other awesome bloggers.

Can't wait to get back to San Jose

"Do You Know The Way to San Jose" was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1968. The lyrics tell the story of a woman who moved to Los Angeles to pursue fame and fortune, but plans to move back to San Jose, where she was born and raised. —Wikipedia

Because, after all, there's nothing more homey and welcoming than A CITY WITHOUT ONE SINGLE TREE.






Pictures of downtown San Jose in 1975 stolen from the website of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency (and thank GOD for them). To view the entire slideshow, click here. Thanks, Joann, for the link.