[Note: the following is a letter that I sent to a dear friend back in April. I decided it was amusing enough to share, and so is presented below with only mild editing.]
Last Wednesday I got off work, went home, and just had about enough time to wolf down a peanut-butter sandwich (one of my principal food sources as a bachelor who isn’t very picky) and clean myself up a bit before I had to head outdoors to wait for my buddy Niels to swing by and pick me up. We were on our way to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play at the Roseland, just a few blocks down from the Burnside Bridge. My last check at Ticketswest revealed that there still tickets available for will-call pickup. Sweet.
Neither of us had really eaten dinner, so we grabbed a parking spot a few blocks away and walked up the street to the Baja Fresh next to Powell’s Books, and talked our nerd talk about world affairs and technology. Around 8 o’clock, when the door were scheduled to open, we headed back out the door to go watch the show. “They’re fuckin’ rad live,” Niels assured me. He’d seen them before, opening for the White Stripes a few years ago. He also related to me the story about how he met Suge Knight, but that’s one I’ll let him tell you sometime.
We get to the front door of the Roseland and get in line. I sneer contemptuously at the scalpers outside, before noticing the sign on the door proclaiming in bold all-caps that TONIGHT’S SHOW HAS SOLD OUT. “Fuck!” I proclaim in response. I look at Niels; he looks at me; we look at the scalpers. We hate scalpers. “Fuck, man,” he says.
“Well,” I start. I don’t want to go home yet. I’ve earned a night out, dammit, and I’m sure he has to. “Want to start drinking?”
“That works for me,” he grins. And so we wander off, trying to remember which bars in Chinatown won’t get us shot, or expose us to hepatitis, and yet won’t totally suck ass. We both mourn the loss of the old Hung Far Low and its treacherous set of stairs and stiff drinks.
“How about Berbati’s Pan?” I toss out. “We can shoot some pool, too.”
“Sweet!” It’s decided then, and we loop back around and across Burnside towards Berbati’s. On the way, I catch a glimpse of who’s playing at Dante’s. “Hey dude, you want to see Storm and the Balls play at 10?” This is also greeted with enthusiasm. Niels has been to a couple of her shows, but I’ve yet to see her.
So we arrive at Berbati’s and Niels buys us a couple pints of a micro-brewed Porter. I feed some quarters into the pool table, which miraculously aren’t accepted when the table disgorges its billiard balls. We play through our free game and nurse our beers, talking about old times, and our pal J. from the CS trenches gives us a call mid-game. He tells us that his interview with the [agency] went well, and that through a contact he has, his resumé has been reviewed by the [other agency]. J., incidentally, is the guy that first introduced me to concepts like public key cryptography and secure channels. But you’ve already heard that lecture from me.
It’s a little after nine when we wrap up our second game of pool (this time the table took my quarters, but we still came out ahead with a free game). We decide that now is a good time to bail out and walk over to Ground Control, since it’s past the time when they start serving beer. Ground Control is an arcade in Old Town that evokes all sorts of teenage memories when you enter it: it’s dark, and a little seedy, and is packed with video games. There’s about three or four games there that are from the last few years. Nearly everything else is of an early 80s to mid-90s marque, and most are rigged to play for only 25 cents. Upstairs are pinball machines that span about three decades. Also, they serve beer. Fucking awesome. I buy us a pair of Full Sail Sessions, and get some quarters; we discover that most of the pinball machines upstairs have bottle holders mounted on the sides, which are sturdy enough to hold onto a beer even when an alcohol-addled individual like myself slams his pelvis into the game in an attempt to jerk the ball towards one of the paddles. I play Star Wars and Black Knight 2000 pinball; unfortunately, the Star Trek: the Next Generation game is down for repairs.
We get our game on, playing Tempest and Missile Command and Pole Position and Star Wars and Tank Assault. We race against each other in Hard Driving or whatever the hell it’s called; I can recall racing against [one of my high school friends] in this same game at an arcade in Palm Springs. I feed two quarters into the Virtua Cop game so that I can enter two player mode and use both plastic handguns. This ends up being rather tiring after a while, but Niels shows up just as one of my players dies and picks up the slack. We both gun it through a car chase and a hostage situation before getting our shit ruined. Which worked out well: we were out of quarters, and it was after ten.
From here we made our way back to Dante’s to watch Storm Large and the Balls play. I sip at an Iron City beer while we wait for her to come on stage. I strongly encourage you to check out her site and see some pictures of Storm: a Portland icon, she’s a ravishing Nordic beauty, tall and strong with “Love” tatooed across her upper back in Gothic letters and a voice to die for. She starts out singing a lounge-style cover of “Enter Sandman.” I am in love with Storm. I am torn: on the one hand I wonder what her inner thighs must taste like, but on the other I hand I can’t help but notice what great muscle definition she has and wonder what it would be like to fight her. Maybe we can duke it out, punching and wrestling, and once we’re all sweaty we can 69 it for a while. In the meantime, she’s an incredible performer, saucily working her way through her set list. I am hoping she’ll do her number that Ash told me about, the one about Rumsfeld and Cheney being secret lovers and washing each other down in the shower.
We stay through about a half-dozen of Storm’s songs. It’s 11:30 on a weekday, and although Storm is rockin’, both Niels and I are worn out. So we bail out, and luckily Dante’s is only a block away from where we parked. Almost as if we planned it that way.
It would have been nice to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I’m kinda bummed we didn’t get a chance to see them play. But all in all it turned out okay. Sometimes the best evenings out are the ones you didn’t plan at all.
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