Joe

My son just turned eighteen, and in honor of this auspicious occasion, I washed all my fake outside flowers.  They get dusty and cobwebby and need a good rinsing every so often.

Nothing is too good for my baby.

I had my usual twenty-first-century family dinner in celebration- my ex-husband, his wife, my boyfriend, my ex-husband's parents and sister, a couple of my son's friends.  It was really fun.  And some of us watched baseball playoffs.  The only thing that would have made it better was if the teams I was rooting for actually won.  But, you can't have everything.  Party animals that we were, we were done by about 9:00 p.m.  Whatever happened to the days where you would stay up all night, drinking, etc.?  Not, as my son and his friend planned to do, stay up all night at separate houses playing some game online, which seems to be the twenty-first-century equivalent of a teen-aged playdate. 

I started thinking about a dinner I had with a friend recently.  Talk about a real party animal.
"I lived with a chimp for three months.  His name was Joe."  With that startling pronouncement, my friend took a sip of her overpriced chardonnay and smiled at me.   I wasn't sure if Joe really was a chimp, or just a badly behaved man.  I asked for clarification.  "Oh," she said, "he was a chimp.  Better behaved than most men, as a matter of fact.  Unless he got stoned."

This conversation was getting stranger by the second.

This was a newer friend, and I was enjoying getting to know her.  She was educated, well-traveled, and fun.  And, apparently, she had a wilder side. 

In the '70's she was living in El Paso, Texas.  She met a Mexican man in a bar in Ciudad Juarez.  He was light skinned, had sparkling brown eyes, dimples, and was really sexy.  And they hit it off, and soon, she was spending most of her free time at his place in Juarez.  Juarez is a bridge away from El Paso, and back in the late '70s-early 80's, it was not a particularly dangerous place.  It was prosperous with the rise of the maquiladoras.  Jobs were to be had for the asking.  Money, liquor, drugs and sex flowed, and the bars were hopping.  Her  new boyfriend owned one of these bars, and lived above it.  With Joe, his pet chimp.

"Joe was a trip," she said.  "He loved to dance- any music at all, he was shakin' his money maker.  He'd get right up on top of the bar and boogie down.  Got great tips from all the drunks, too.  He was scary smart- he could practically answer you when you talked to him.  And he rolled a mean joint with his feet.  It was the craziest thing I've ever seen."

My Golden Retriever could flip peanuts into her mouth from the top of her nose.  Guess that's not quite in Joe's league.  My friend kind of rolled her eyes at me when I interjected this.

Joe was pretty much the big hit in the place.  Especially the rolling with the feet.  "It was crazy to watch him," she said.  "My boyfriend did warn me, never ever let him smoke a joint.  I couldn't figure out why not."

My friend took a bite of her ravioli.   "I actually developed a relationship with Joe- we became quite close.  One night my boyfriend was off doing something, and Joe and I were manning the bar.  It was a quiet night- just us two in the place.  I wanted a joint, and as soon as I pulled the stuff out, Joe went to work.  He rolled a beaut, a real fatty, and as I lit it, I swear his eyes were pleading with me.  He smiled at me, and being, a little drunk anyway, I decided what the hell.  What would one little toke hurt him?"

Well, apparently, it caused him to pretty much go psycho.  "He went crazy.  He started screeching, and throwing everything in sight.  The violence in his eyes!  I got so scared that I locked myself in the bathroom.  I could hear Joe screaming, and I heard things crashing and bumping and so much noise, and then suddenly, silence.  And then, Joe started hurling himself at the door of the head.  It was bending under his weight.  I had myself braced against the sink and the door, to keep him from breaking in and killing me, I swear."  She took a sip of her wine and wiped her mouth daintily.  I think my mouth was hanging open, because she started laughing at me.  I can't help it, I don't get out much. 

"When my boyfriend got back, he let me out of the bathroom.  He was so pissed he would barely talk to me.  That bar was completely trashed.  All the bottles of booze behind the bar, smashed to bits.  Glassware, crushed.  All the tables overturned.  Light fixtures torn out of the ceiling.  And Joe was gone."

So was her relationship, after that.  A couple of years ago she traveled down to Juarez just to see what had happened to her boyfriend.  Apparently he had been shot dead in the street a couple of months earlier, a victim of the violence that currently wracks Juarez.  The bar was shuttered, actually. most of the old neighborhood was shuttered and abandoned.  The silence was eerie;  she didn't stay long.

"Nothing stays the same," she said.  "Enjoy it while you've got it."

Maybe for my next dinner party, I'll wash the inside plants.

Secret Agent Man (Or Woman)

My boyfriend has a friend that is a real Private Investigator, one that goes on stakeouts and trails people and files reports and does all the cool stuff I've only read about.  My boyfriend, before he got his real job, used to help him out, serving people.  He became a licensed process server.  I was a little unclear on why you needed a license for serving.  "You get ten," he explained.  "Ten?" I said.  "Ten serves for free," he said.  "Then with the eleventh, you need to have a license."  "Why?"  I asked.  "How would they know?"  He had no answer for me.  Aside from getting a license, you don't really need anything else to be a process server.  One of the downsides is that people who get served sometimes live in sketchy places. 

The other morning, driving to work, I got a call from my boyfriend.  His PI friend had a job for him- not exactly a serve, but delivering a message to a women who lived in my county.  My boyfriend, now that he's a working stiff like the rest of us, couldn't do it;  maybe I could do it on my lunch break?  Since I'd get paid for it, I agreed.  He e-mailed me the name and address.

On my precious lunch hour, I set off.  Since I work in an office I was dressed in boring work clothes- and motorcycle boots.  After all, a girl needs to keep her edge.  I was heading for a neighborhood that I didn't know anything about, had never been to in spite of living in my county for twenty years.

I got off the freeway, and turned into the neighborhood.  Two turns later I was deep in the projects.  Rap music was blaring from a boom box in the middle of a group of young men hanging out across the street from where I was parking my car.  They all stopped talking and watched me park, and watched me get out of the car.  The only sound was the music and and the footsteps of my boots.  The sound of my car beeping as I locked it was a punctuation mark to everything.  I just wrapped my attitude around me and walked determinedly to the apartment.

Once upon a time I lived in the Lower Haight.  I used to walk to work in the financial district every morning with a good friend of mine who lived up the block from me.  We found walking to work got us a bit of exercise, and provided relief from the erratic schedule and insanity of the 7-Haight Muni line that serviced our area.  To save time, we would walk past the projects on Haight Street.  After all, no one seemed to be around at 7:30 in the morning.  Then, one morning, as we walked past the projects, we heard running footsteps behind us. A young man suddenly reached out and shoved my friend, grabbed her purse, and ran back into the projects.  His companion was coming for my purse.  A bit of background, here:  I am a purse slut.  That bag was a new Coach one, and irreplaceable on my meager salary.  It also contained my lunch and my work shoes.  Okay, I am also a food and shoe slut.  This punk wasn't going to get any of those things if I could help it.  I whirled around and stared at him, and opened my mouth and started screaming every expletive I knew, at the top of my lungs.  I have a prodigious vocabulary, and I can project.  He stopped dead and stared at me.  I remember his face like it was yesterday- black Jheri curls, green eyes, skin the color of black coffee with a touch of cream.  He suddenly turned around and ran back into the projects.  Later, it occurred to me- maybe he had a gun.  He could have shot me.  Fortunately, he didn't.  I still have that purse- it's older than my children.

Delivering the message was actually anticlimactic.  The tv was on in the apartment I went to, but no one answered my knock.  I left the message in a pile of mail stuck in the screen door.  I walked back to my car, watched silently by the youths.  I actually waved good-bye to them as I drove off.  No one waved back.  I treated myself to a Pumpkin Spice Latte before returning to work.

I went back to a busy, bad afternoon at the job from hell.  "Why can't I just quit my job?"  I asked my boyfriend.  "Because," he said reasonably.  "You don't want to be a process server." 

Good point.