By the time I fell asleep in Jenny's passenger seat at 11:30pm, not long after leaving The City, I knew that the next day was going to be difficult. I would be sore, under-slept, exhausted, and otherwise completely hungover after spending the past 34 hours on a concert road-trip with Jenny in the Bay Area. I expected this, yet I also knew it was worth it. The little headache, the eight used-up AA batteries, the sore back, the hole ripping in the toes of my Toms... Who knew I'd ever eat so much Asian food in one day? I fell asleep curled awkwardly toward the door, ensnared in the seatbelt, tired muscles trembling, and when I woke up in Sacramento, Jenny dropped me off at my house and I stumbled up to bed to sneak in a couple Z's before work.
I feel better, now. I've taken a nap and rested.
My Toms still show their new sign of wear-and-tear. My body is still a little sore. Part of me still wants to be asleep. I'm realizing that the healing process is getting harder. Sure I didn't get a whole lot of sleep, and part of it took place in a car, but I'm pretty sure I've been able to handle worse in the past. I worry sometimes that despite being excited about the process of growing old, I might be slow to recognize that it's actually happening, that I'll wake up one day with this unfortunate pain that never goes away. I'm generally oblivious to the signals of my own body. My knee, thankfully, has ceased to ache so I'm still capable of recovering from minor ailments, which means I'm not quite "old" enough to worry.
Jenny meets me Thursday at Old Soul in the early afternoon in a black-and-white striped dress, a white blouse, leg-warmers and big pair of summer sunglasses. I'm in blue flannel with a gray undershirt (Colorado University's logo hidden behind the button-up) and jeans with the bottoms rolled up once to not get caught beneath the ripped heels of my worn burlap shoes. I'm reading a little more of "Whatever It Takes," getting inspired, getting curious about charter schools, and we head out immediately for lunch at Buckhorn and a dessert from Trey B Cakes.
Then we're on the road, Jenny at the wheel, a tri-tip sandwich in my hands. In Davis, Jenny pulls off the freeway and we switch positions so she can eat her tri-tip salad. Gates open for the Railroad Revival Tour at 5:00pm and it's pushing 4:00. We make it to Oakland and then the Google maps app goes mentally insane and my phone battery dies and our blue dot is slow to refresh, so we get temporarily lost in this urban decay near the docks and make a few u-turns until finding our way toward the shuttle pick-up parking zone. By the way, we're at the dock, so we're surrounded by huge trucks and towers of shipping crates and chain-linked fences and train-tracks crossing the flat four-lane numbered roads. It's a quick ride on a bus to the venue and Jenny says, "I thought this concert sold out. Where are all the people?" But once we're moved like cattle into the line, it's a little more obvious how big this crowd is going to get. Big variety of characters. Young and old. Hip and formal. We slowly make the penguin shuffle into the gates and here Middle Harbor Shoreline Park opens up before us to reveal a tent-city food court, a large metal fire-sneezing snail, a steam-engine replica with appropriate whistle sound-effects, an army of porta-toilets and the all-important Beer Garden. We meander. We people watch. We wish we had our cameras. We drink beer. We wonder who's got weed. We eat: her a burger, me chili fries. We use the bathrooms and go find space on the lawn. Old Crow Medicine Show opens. Good energy. Great folk music. Girl in front of us loves them, dancing between sips from a flask she smuggled in her boot. Easy to get your feet stepped on. The only song I know is "Wagon Wheel." When they finish, Jenny and I look about the venue again. Sun begins to set. Decent weather, a tad cold, but bearable. The crowd is still growing, people still coming in through the front gates, getting ID's checked, flooding the Beer Garden. Maybe this is when we ate that food. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are playing. The sound is bad, almost sounds like a recording. Lead singer sounds drunks. Still good to hear, though we only see the set from a distance. They won the crowd over at the end with their staple, "Home," and cleared the stage for Mumford and Sons. Jenny and I squeezed and pushed our way back into the thick, stubborn crowd of everyone else who only really bought tickets because Mumford and Sons was headlining. It's dark. The lighting is better. The sound is better. We're thirty feet from stage-left and there are lots of tall people, but we can see alright. Mumford and Sons come out and they steal the show. They make worth it the drive, the cold weather, getting lost, eating cheap over-priced food and finding space to breathe surrounded by four thousand screaming fans. Everyone sings along. Every knows all the words, or thinks they do, and at least everyone knows all the choruses. They finish with "The Cave," but each song was played with equal fuck-yes enthusiasm, as though they were playing each track for the last time. Afterward, all three bands came on stage for an encore rendition of "This Train is Bound for Glory," and that was pretty epic. Jenny and I made our way back to the porta-toilets before heading out with the others to wait for our shuttle to take us back to the car. I got back behind the wheel and, unsurprisingly, the iPhone got us lost again on the way to the freeway. It's not a road-trip if you don't get turned around, however, so we didn't panic. A detour later, we're heading toward The City with Mumford and Sons songs stuck in our heads, aching muscles, smiles and excitement for our oncoming adventure.
Two or three hours later, I'm in the hallway bathroom puking in the toilet, shirtless, just wearing my pajama pants, with a glass of water on the tile beside me. This is awkward. I'm trying to be discreet about it, but puke does what puke does, so I just get it over with and drink some water. For about five minutes, I rest on the tiles and have a dialogue with my body. Are you done yet? I think so. Are you sure? Ask again later. With Jenny waiting in our room across the hall, I get up and deal with it. Thankfully I'm actually feeling totally better, so I get back into bed with Jenny and we sleep much more comfortably tonight than we did in that hotel in Santa Cruz two months ago. I think it was the chili cheese fries that did it. And the beer. And the jumping around and hollering. By the way, the hotel is awesome. The Mosser. It's designed a little like a hostel with the shared hallway bathroom and shower. In our room: a sink, mirror, closet, bed and television, with a window that overlooks a sub-level garage entrance, the windowed wall of a neighboring building full of office-chairs and boardroom tables, and a sliver of 4th street eight stories below.
We wake up early and gather ourselves together before heading out to start our adventure. First stop, the lamest place in the whole city, as Jenny put it: Walgreens. I buy a new pair of sunglasses because I left mine in Jenny's valet-parked car, and she picks up a thing of chapstick. During a stroke of genius, I took a sampling of hair-gel to fix up my hair. We venture further into the maze and start to soak it all in. The people, the smells, the characters, the stores, the cultures, the languages, the skyscrapers and the slums. There's so much more around us than we ever experience in a singular Sacramento moment. When Jenny says, "Look at that thing over there," and I turn to look, there are a million things she might be pointing at. Finding one non-interesting thing to look at is like trying to find Waldo in the candy-cane factory.
Every time I've been to San Francisco, I've wanted to wrap my hands around a lamp-post, lock my fingers together, and shout, "You can't make me leave!" But tomorrow I have to open at Old Soul. Tonight we have to leave for our normal day-to-day, so that means we have to make the most out of today. Sure it involves a lot of stop-and-shop, but hardly any moment feels wasted. We hear good music everywhere. We meet rude people, polite people, old people and young. We bump shoulders with strangers in souvenir shops. We step around strangers taking photographs of posing couples, posing families. We visit a church and see where the higher-powers sit. Drink coffee. Eat Chinese food in China-Town in a restaurant filled with Chinese people celebrating a wedding or something. We'll get noodles later in a dim hole-in-the-wall joint with sexy red lighting and hip-hop on the radio. I buy suspenders. Jenny almost buys very expensive boots. We climb hills, many hills, some with staircases, some surrounded by buildings and some surrounded by trees. We visit a park and appreciate this oasis amid the concrete, get high at the peak where I look up in the sky and see the hole in the ozone while Jenny paints her nails. There's a one-man-band street performer who puts on a good show and later gets told to leave by a bunch of cops. The metro. A mall. We take a stoned wander toward Haight and Ashbury and find a French textbook being given away by a French woman helping her daughter move to New York. Tres bien. There are giant hearts, graffiti, book stores, homeless people selling newspapers, cable cars and pigeons everywhere. We end up at Amoeba, where Jenny buys the Bon Iver album and we meet her friend, Jason, who makes enough at his software job to afford 1700 a month for a hardwood floor apartment near a perfect little stretch of city life. I liked the guy. Sort of reminds me of my old roommate, Bryce. He introduces us to the view from Twin Peaks, which is a great way to watch the sunset after spending all the daylight hours wandering that sprawling concrete field. Afterward we meet up with Jason's friend and coworker, AJ, in a red sweater outside of Jason's apartment. Upstairs we absently watch TV and get stoned and AJ's never used a bong and Jenny finds some magnet toy to play with and Jason talks about the nearly indiscernible flaws he's found in his television, which lets me know we'd totally get along. At this point, however, I'm glad to take back-seat to other characters because that headache is starting to form and I'm completely exhausted, so I don't say a whole lot and don't make a big effort to be social, but I think it works out alright, and I think from the blank stare on my face it's pretty obvious that I'm already half-asleep. A few minutes later, Jason's other friend, Ryan, who is up visiting for the weekend from San Diego, one of Jason's oldest friends, arrives at the apartment and now that we've got a posse, we head out to play pool at an Ethiopian bar. After some douchebags with drunk girlfriends finish taking too many turns, Jason and Ryan win the table and then the five of us share a game before Jenny and I decide to leave. It's been a fun outing and everyone's nice and friendly, but we really should've left like four hours ago. Maybe thirty minutes later, after a series of poor iPhone directions, we're crossing the Golden Gate and heading home.
I wake up once when Jenny stops to get gas and chugs a Rockstar.
Then it's Saturday and the vacation is over. Life in Sacramento had gone on normally. Nick did a really lazy close the night before, so that was annoying to start the day with. Shaun had to work his first barista opening-shift yesterday because Meredith was apparently sick and it was really busy. Hank is back working as the Old Soul driver, and happy to have a job again. Weatherstone was closed down by the health inspector, for now. Drew seems down about his relationship, again. I was fairly fed-up with customer service today, mostly on account of being tired, but San Francisco always wakes up this restlessness in me that reminds me that there are so many places in this world left for me to experience, and standing behind a coffee-shop counter for eight hours is hardly helping me get to them. Grr. But I finish my shift. I tell Nick my complaints about his close and my "Do Unto Others" approach doesn't work, but at least I said something, and he apologizes later by promising to smoke me out. Then it's a nap to regain my sanity and a text to Jenny and a review of all the photos (there were a lot). This leads to a visit from Jenny and her posse, dinner at Hot Italian and an earlier bedtime because now I've got a cough to take care of and tomorrow it's Easter dinner with Jenny's parents.
And the story continues...
- Left to Fry
