Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Dreams Up In Smoke

Dan's dad is here. Which is strange because we talk about him all the time and he's become something of a mystical, fictional figure here. Dan's dad, who lives in a tiny house in Idaho that doesn't have a bathroom, just a hole he dug on the side of the hill. Dan's dad, who builds hovercrafts. Dan's dad, whom Dan visited in October and returned with a 3-foot tall, 20-sided isohedron, crafted from a raw aluminum sheet in the high desert.

And suddenly, here he is in the living room, drinking whiskey of course and debating who would win in a bar brawl: smokers or nonsmokers?


Dan's dad is named Charlie and he's more personable than the stories made him out to be. He may know the finer points of building a pipe bomb, but he's affable, too, and talks about wild things in a low voice. Attempting to explain how Dan has a "double cousin" ends, somehow, with, "My sister went fuckin' beserk! She yelled at him, 'We're gettin' married tomorrow and you've got the clap!'" Sometimes the entire premise behind a story doesn't make sense to my rigid, rational world. Like the time a moose ran him off his sapphire mine claim.

Sapphires come up later, too, after Charlie rolls a cigarette and they start debating whether it's better to mine for gold or crystals. Dan shakes his head and argues that either are preferable to sapphires.
"I have this bad association with sapphires and nose bleeds. I got a really bad nose bleed in this swamp one time looking for sapphires and I got covered in flies, flies up my nose, flies in my lungs. The first thing you said was, 'Don't get blood on the company truck!'"
Charlie laughs, this is true. Dan was 11 at the time. "And I was like, eat all this bacon and drink all this beer. He stopped thinking about all the blood, I can tell you that much," says Charlie.

I'll tell you one thing, we are all jealous of Charlie for our own personal reasons. Jill has always dreamed of riding a hovercraft. Nate admires his entire life ethic, his crystal mine, his insane skills. Me, I regret the time I've wasted listening to "No Scrubs" on repeat while eating soup at New Seasons rather than casting my own manta ray belt buckle out of brass.

"That is so hip," says Dan, when I gush about the ray, "You are wearing the zeitgeist." His dad invites him out to Idaho for Christmas, they could build a furnace in the shed out of a 55-gallon tank and some propane, they scheme, and cast all kinds of sea creatures. When he first got here, Dan's dad pulled a box of Jim Beam out of his bag and offered whiskey all around. Then he pulled out his knife and carved little apartment windows into the box and set it in the fireplace. Nate, Jill and I stared in horror as the building went up in flames. Not one month ago, Dan built his own little city of apartment complexes in the fireplace and watched it burn. We don't become our parents. We already are them. The horror, the horror.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Sarah,

Thank you for the wonderful review. You are all so gracious. a supreme pleasure to be around. as you stated that you wished there were more "visiting" blog additions, I'd like to add this discription of the Party evening, though realizing that i've left out pertiniate details, like that it was a suprize party. it may be too long for posting, so it's ok if you don't post it, or want to hack out pieces for some other posting. Anyway, love the hellout of all you gang, Charlie

PARTY
An ubiquitous NE Portland street, 35th, not 35th place which looks exactly the same. Modest strings of Christmas lights adorn each house, installed in accordance with seasonal conformity. A young couple grudgingly enters a house to their mid management boss’s boring slide show while looking wistfully at the Dude Ranch across the street. There, also with a miserable string of lights, but accompanied by the thumping of 20 decibel base, whirling light show effects, and the street penetrating laughter of the joyous inside. The cake walkers.

Cake walkers must dance and leap between squares on the floor, anticipating the halt of music that will determine their culinary destiny. Suddenly, the pulsating rhythm stops, the condensed masses freeze in contorted mid dance, blinking myopically at the descriptive sticker at their feet. Zardot’s Bride; lier; Bush’s bathroom; Derrato; and other unintelligible phrases greet their eye. The illuminated Liz barks to loudly in the microphone… “Who is standing on “The meaning of dialectic materialism is the re-distribution of wealth to the proletariat” ?? . “Hey .. That’s me” Happily rings out Nate. “A winner” she cries “ You are the choosing recipient of the one ton spice cake, the SeeSee Man Mistake cake, or the pedestrian candy bar. Yea!!”
Nate.. scratching as always when in thought, magnanimously chooses the candy bar, allowing the packed assembled the opportunity win the greater masterpieces. With a yell heard across the street in yawning sandstone arch slides, the thump, thump, thump resumes in a frenzied electron cloud of flailing arms legs and leaping torsos. The twisting turning lights mingle in the masses as though all are trapped in a kaleidoscope. Now some wags begin hopping from square to square, the rest joining the vertical dimension, a booming bounce that turns the whole house into a drum. I think, as the resident structural engineer, that the trampoline resonance will soon exceed the breaking strength of the floor and we will all soon be in a pile of 9-11 rubble in Dan’s basement room. I leap my highest to assist this eventuality. The music stops. Falling from the sky, I am on two squares. Does this mean I have two cake chances?
“Who is on “Red and black bullshit”? “It is I. It is I!” cries a gentle voice in the assembled. She chooses the 25 seed all organic zucchini dough-gob Baggett. Enough with the lard-sugar layout. Many are secretly jealous of this choice and sneak off to the kitchen to beg her for a corner of leathery crust. The pummeling music resumes, now to geographically auction off the miscellaneous baking’s, the rutabaga rolls and dropped cupcakes.

The ritual “cake walk” eventually concludes with frosting fingers. Now it’s on to karaoke’. Books of 10 thousand songs has been circulating beneath concentrating brows seeking their tune. A dude all in red, professionally belts out a kick ass hip hop song and the dance floor fills without the carrot of carrot cake. Dan becomes a Bing Crosby. It’s “White Christmas” due to a mix up of disks, but being a sport he says “Fuck it, fuckit, just play it, I’ll sing it”. A noble croon it was, melting our hearts in Christmas commercialism. Kori sings a love song, embarrassing everyone’s mirror neurons. The lovelies Sarah, Jill and Liz, trio twenty chick-songs with two microphones, pulling the unsuspecting into mid-floor dance.

A gust of cold air washes across the floor and a dozen unknown dark people slip along the walls. Like lost shadows they work themselves into the kitchen corners and eddies of activity. Knee length black jackets, hoods and watch caps, Rasputin beards, I fear uninvited bangers have invaded. I steel myself to confrontation intervention. But wrong I am. These are wandering Karaoke junkies, alerted by some iphone pheromone, congeal conspiratorially at this address of the Dude Ranch. Without warning, the microphones are scooped up and the howling of country rock songs are belted into the air, Black jack boots thromping the floor. Long after the cake table has disintegrated into a mass of crumbs and cupcake wrappers, there is a dueling dynamic between the bombastic black robe blasters and the twirling trio of multicolored women. “Like a Virgin” sung in the key of angels, followed by the “Wabash Cannonball” in clod hopper baroque.

Out the back door is a congregation of smokers. The icy winter winds tear at the puffs of smoke and the collars of the trench coats. Cigarette butts pile up in a stair corner, a change from the flicking days of past. Smokers are squeezed into a mere third of the area, the rest an orgy of bicycles all mashed together in a mating melee. I think to see little unicycles and tricycles, the progeny of this proliferation, careening about under the refined Shimano gears, misbehaving as children do.

As the alcohol diminishes, more masses are pressed into the walls in their torpor, bludgeoned by the blasting kamikaze karaoke machine. The young couple emerges from the bosses house across the street, sober, still employed by their obsequiousness’, still wistfully longing to be part of the looser crowd in the whirling lights. They climb into their politically correct Subaru station wagon, heading for another ubiquitous string of lights on a matching street across town. Inside the dude ranch, the trio triumphant, Howling “Girls just Wanna Have Fun” to the collapsed masses.

I sure as hell had fun. Thanks Dude Ranch.