Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Mon, 11 Feb 2008

Personal history deja vu

When I was but a wee sprout, I made a mistake, and caused a humongous white van to crash into my little Mazda. Oops. As a result of that accident and the monumental $125 ticket which resulted, I found myself in the position of needing a job.

I interviewed around the local culinary establishments, and shortly found myself working as a dishwasher at Godfather's Pizza. This is a now-deceased brand of pizzerria whose ads featured a big-lipped old guy in a fedora exhorting customers to "Do it!" in re the eating of their pizza.

The particular Godfather's I worked at was in thriving downtown Woodinville. It featured as normal a cast of misfits as I believe you'll find working in any restaurant of similar prestige.

My memories of all this are somewhat vague, so I hope I am not fabricating too much.

First, there was the manager, good ol' Bob. (I can't remember any of their names except one, so I'm just going to make them up.) Bob, at the time, reminded me of a somewhat incompetent Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis (current at the time). He had that same balding, smirking look about him, except that he was nowhere near as clever as Bruce. He was also a bit on the bossy side, except that he wasn't very good about following up on his orders, so they tended not to be paid much heed.

One of the most memorable of my fellow pizza-slingers was Colette. She actually lived down the street from me, which was remarkable because there were very few people my age who lived anywhere nearby. One reason she was so memorable to me is that she dressed exactly like Boy George (complete with lack of chin and everything), a look which was guaranteed to freak out my sheltered, 16 year old self.

It was a look that I now identify as pre-goth, and is one I've even tried for myself, later in my misspent youth. I didn't find her even slightly attractive, which is notable, as at the time, I seemed to find at least half the female population of Woodinville highly desireable, as I've mentioned in the past.

There was a moment, one day, when Colette and I were on break at the same time. Break consisted of 30 minutes during which we were allowed to consume one (1) Personal Pizza with as many as two toppings, and a soda, as part of our compensation. Anything else we had to pay for at full rate. In any case, Colette and I were sitting at a table in the nearly-empty restaurant. We may have been having a discussion, but I don't really recall.

Suddenly, she spoke up on a complete tangent. "You know," she said, "I'm not addicted to crystal." I looked over at her, goggle-eyed, unsure what she might be talking about. How could a person be addicted to a class of minerals? "People say I am, but I'm not," she continued inscrutably. Moments later, she gathered her miniature pizza plate and glass, and walked back down to the counter to go back to work. I was completely mystified by this non-sequitur. It was only years later, in college, that I had any clue what she was talking about. I'd only ever interacted with her at the Godfather's, and had seen no indications of drug use.

There was another girl who left a vague memory, who we'll call Kimmy. Kimmy had huge frizzy curly hair, which was apparently all the rage at the time. She wore a black leather jacket, which frequently hung on the coat rack in the hallway back to the walk-in refrigerator.

Kimmy also smoked, which bothered me. I didn't feel any particular connection to her, but I had this stirring deep in my soul that I didn't want her to kill herself with cigarettes. This manifested one day when I walked across the parking lot to the Albertsons, and purchased a pack of gum. We'd had a discussion about smoking some days earlier, and she'd mentioned that when she was chewing gum, she smoked less. It was 25 cents, but my finances were up to the challenge.

I furtively slipped the gum into her jacket pocket, in a short-sighted attempt to be helpful. For days, I didn't see any evidence that this had been noticed, and she seemed to smoke as much as ever. Finally, I asked her about it, and she said, "Oh, no, I didn't find any gum in my pocket." At this moment, Bryce spoke up: "Huh, I was wondering where the hell that came from!"

Bryce was another character from our little ensemble. I had actually blocked him out until I started thinking along Kimmy's story line. Bryce was a young man with a cruel, bullying streak a mile wide. His face was fixed in a permament, superior sneer. The only problem was that he was built like a hatchet, with a frail, thin body topped by an enormous, distorted face. His chin was promiment enough to prompt us to compare him unfavorably to the "Mac Tonight" McDonalds ads which were running at the time. "Mac" was a sort of life-size mannequin with a quarter moon for a head. The shape of his head was actually a crescent, as if someone had cut a 1/10th wedge of the moon and scraped out the seeds as from a cantalope.

Bryce was convinced he was superior to everyone. One of the ways he liked to prove this (and, which wasn't based upon sneering) was in his driving. He'd shift his automatic-transmissioned car into 1st, for instance in a parking lot, and gun the motor. The car would scream forward, howling in pain, until he smugly bumped the shifter into the second gear position. The motor would gasp in relief, and accelerate into the stratosphere again before Bryce would cruelly jam the shifter forward to the next position.

I was fortunate in that I never witnessed one of these travesties against machinery. No, I discovered this because Bryce proudly described his driving style to me in loving, sneering detail.

In another class entirely from the in-store workers were the delivery drivers. You had to be 18 to be a delivery driver, so they were like some kind of unattainable demi-god to me, at 16. From this side of 18, it's a ridiculously small difference, but at the time, it was incomprehensible -- they were out of highschool, and could drive for a living. And they got tips.

One of the delivery drivers, Jason, was sneeringly superior, but unlike Bryce was actually superior in some important ways. He had, for instance, a girlfriend. He smoked (this was something that made him seem even further from me, even though I viewed it negatively even then). When I later saw Top Gun, I would recognize Val Kilmer's character as a higher order of Jason: smug, superior and confident, but with some reasonable justification.

The other delivery driver I remember is J. We'll avoid full names here for reasons which will become clear in a moment. She was 18, smoked, and filled with all the self-confidence which clearly accompanied these facts. She was also possibly the most stunningly beautiful woman I'd ever met in person, with clear, alabaster skin, fine features, and straight, light brown hair that was either pulled back into a pony tail, or on rare occasions, hung down to her shoulders, framing her angular face beautifully. When I later saw pictures of Jodie Foster, it put me in mind of J.

On top of being 18 and a delivery driver, she was a fan of a wide variety of music I'd never heard before. In particular, she had a tape of The Cure's album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me that she loaned to me one day after expressing shock that I'd never heard of the band before. She was, now that I think about it, one of the earliest non-classical musical influences I had.

I loved to go on break with her. She always had great, irreverent stories to tell, and would tell them with this confident laugh. I was, needless to say, completely smitten with her. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend. He referred to her as his "china doll," which was a good description of the quality of her skin. She described doing things with him which are best not retold in a family-friendly environment such as this, but were extremely tittilating to me at the time, and did not make it easy for me to "be cool" around her. She demonstrated her "thunder god" impression by taking a deep drag off her cigarette, and then blowing it out through her nose and the corners of her mouth so that it streamed out in four diagonal jets.

I have one distinct memory, of the aforementioned tape, which I must have listened to for weeks before returning it. I recall preparing to return it, and carefully cueing the tape so that "The Perfect Girl" would play the next time she listened to it. It was a half-hearted attempt by any outward measure, but to me at the time, it was a bold, heart-thumping declaration of love, which was also carefully subtle enough to cause absolutely no embarrassment if nothing came of it.

Nothing, suffice to say, came of it.

We probably worked together for a period of a month or two before one or the other of us stopped working at that Godfather's Pizza. It's in the nature of crappy fastfood jobs that there is a high turnover rate, as Bob loved to carp about. She moved on or I moved on, however it worked, and that was that. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Oregon (where I was told while applying at a Portland area Godfather's that my previous experience at the Woodinville store was worthless, because apparently all the Washington stores were run by undisciplined babboons instead of managers; since I would have had to start over at the lowest form of grunt, I passed and got a job at Burgerville. So much better, clearly).

As the years passed, I would occasionally remember J, and wonder what had happened to her. I had a pessimistic feeling that everyone I'd known in Woodinville wouldn't amount to much, which in some cases such as J.'s, caused me real regret. Fortunately, I've been proven wrong in this pessimism in recent years, which is nice.

Before too long, I forgot her last name, and by the time I got to college, I figured she would have gotten married anyway, so there was no real way to track her down. It was always idle curiosity anyway, so I never pursued the thought beyond idle fancy.

Today (fast forwarding just a few years), I walked in to eat lunch at Blue C Sushi as I do essentially every day. I'm well enough known there that the manager and servers and I regularly joke about pretty much anything that comes to mind. I sat down (not having a customary spot) with my well-battered copy of Moby Dick, and waited for something good to come down the belt.

I looked at the other patrons around me, and thought I saw a familiar face. It looked like it might be a friend of Jesse's, but I couldn't be sure. I kept my face in my book, and waited for my sushi to come around. When the belt had completely cycled past me, I asked a chef for a salmon maki.

By this time, Peter (Jesse's friend) had recognized me, and we'd greeted each other. Peter was talking with someone next to him, so I let him get back to it. As I accepted the plate from the sushi chef, Peter's companion looked at me, and said, "That's the way to do it." "Indeed," I replied (or something equally innocuous). In a few moments, I got sucked into their conversation, and put the book down.

I mentioned my adventures in welding from last night, and Peter's companion said, "No way!" turning fully towards me. She explained that she has a 1976 Honda CB360 that she's having restored right now, using one of the shops in town, and we traded memory and "ums" back and forth until we'd filled all the details in. I told her about this vintage racing thing I'll be doing, and she seemed really interested. I told her to come down and see a race, how to find the schedule on the WMRRA page, and so on. Our conversation quickly dominated, as this woman and I chatted vintage bikes and racing. Peter followed along, amused, but uninvolved. The sushi plates slowly ground past.

At some point in this conversation, I was looking at her profile, and thought to myself, "She has a really nice profile. It kind of reminds me of J, from Godfather's." I didn't actually go so far as to fully form her name or the restaurant or anything, but I had the impression in my head. I started searching her face a bit more closely, and realized with an increasing sense of disbelief that she shared a lot of facial features with J.

Eventually, she hailed a server, and got her check. She pulled out her wallet to get her card, and I found my eye drawn to her driver's license, which was facing up at me from the table. I was suddenly intensely curious, and read the last name. It wasn't exactly familiar, but seemed to ring a bell from long ago.

Before she could get up, I said, "I have a weird question for you. Did you grow up in Woodinville?"

She looked up at me and said, "Yeah," with an unreadable look on her face.

"Uh-huh," I said, pretty sure my theory was right. "And did you work at Godfather's Pizza when you were maybe 16?"

"Yeah," she said, "that's freaky, how do you know this?"

"I worked with you," I said. "I worked there at the same time. You don't remember me?"

"No."

Not too surprising, overall. At the time, I was the most unassuming nobody anyone could strive to be. I actually would have been surprised if she'd remembered me. I described myself a little bit more, but it didn't ring any bells.

She handed me a business card with an email address scrawled on the back. "Send me an email with the race schedules," she said, as she got up. In a moment, she was out the door and gone.

"So, you didn't know her?" asked Peter. "Like, you haven't talked to her recently, you really just met her for the first time in a couple decades?"

"Yeah," I replied. "That was really weird. I thought she was your coworker or something."

"No, we just got seated next to each other, and started talking. Huh!"

Huh! indeed. When I got back to work, I put on the MP3 of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, and didn't stop grinning for the rest of the day.

Posted at 20:07 permanent link category: /misc

Productive night

I don't have time for a full update right now, but I wanted to get these pictures posted:

That's a brake pedal for the CL that Jesse and I made last night. He made an identical one for himself. I think they came out pretty well. We spent about 6 hours in his garage. Cutting, filing, welding, grinding, shaping, etc. It was great fun, and makes me really want a gas welding rig.

We also put swingarm spools on my swingarm, but I don't have a picture of that yet.

Posted at 15:15 permanent link category: /motorcycle

Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.