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FAREWELL CREWEL WORLD
She's maybe fifteen and and almost too pregnant to walk. Not that it's much fun hiking around the old shot-out Western Addition bungalow where she's crashing with her speed-cook boyfriend. But she's got her needlework--slamming maybe a quarter a day of such dubious quality that it lays these big red rails on her lard-white skin. But meth-monsters will get bored, so she's sitting there by the smut-crusted window with a cruved needle, carefully stitching multi-colored threads into the skin of her thigh. The design (if that's the word) is bright, but a tad ambiguous. She looks up incuriously and says, "I hate just sitting around tweaking. I'd rather do something constructive."
A muscular shave-head, just down for the buy, says, "Decorating for the child within?" But she doesn't respond.
XGQ
He's lounging in the corner booth of the Orange Julius in Factoria Mall and he's pissed. "They said my appearance wasn't right for retail," he bitches, "It's selling records, for shit sake, not Tupperware."
He tries to make it all clear, point by point. "This Revolting Cocks shirt cost me $15 in L.A. Black leather pants run, what, $75 a copy? See all these steel studs on my jacket? A buck and a half EACH to put them on. So, what, $180? Combat "Docs", another bill. The piercing must total $150, these doberman cuffs were $40 apiece. So get this....I'm sitting there with my resume up my butt wearing like $500 worth of clothes and this suit is telling me I'm not well dressed.
MIAMI VOICE
He's squatting in his booth at the summer weekend street fair up by Moe's, reading Tarot cards for some guy in a full-length skirt, when the red BMW and silver Toyota chase each other through the barriers and into the tangle of tents and stalls. Obviously a drug spat; both cars look seriously homocidal. The BMW bashes into a booth full of pottery and tangles in the weighted guywires, the Toyota slams into a tent full of clothes. He's really mellowed since he turned gay and quit the police force, but some reflexes die hard. He jumps up and yells, "Freeze, asshole!" in a voice that paralyses half the street, then slams both hands down on the rear deck of the Toyota. The driver leans out the window, gun in hand and checks out this guy with a bleached Andy Warhol hairdo and pink triangle tattoo wearing nothing but a black leather breach cloth and a silver chain between his nipple rings--says, "Man you better get REAL!" and spins out onto Newport in reverse, the BMW in pursuit. He stands there staring for a minute and says, "Sorry, this is as real as I get."
MELANIN JONES
Two Greek-geek yuppie puppies, handsome and bare-cherted, don't much care for the sight of the weathered homeless. Especially the raggedy-assed troll who's scurrying around the steps at Gaswork Park, diving the trashcans and trying for the last few drops out of discarded beer bottles. They throw their own bottles into Lake Union just to cheat him of the satisfaction. He gives them the finger and they give him mass shit. Like, "Have some pride." And, "Get a life." The vagrant splits, but they're still miffed.
"Doesn't it piss you off," the hunky one with the Gargoyles says, "These scumbags have better tans than we do?"
THE PEPSIN CHALLENGE
She's pretty young, but it probably isn't her first trip--just maybe her first big bummer. Maybe it was cutting her foot on the broken glass in Mission Bay, maybe throwing up right after she came on. Fortunately her friends, who look like lost and found at a Dead concert, are experienced. They've given her something to help her maintain and are keeping tabs. A dreadlocked white boy kneels down to ask how's her head. It's hard to tell--all she says is, "The only thing bringing me back to reality is the nasty taste in my mouth."
CONSERVATION OF VACUUM
It might have been a set piece. She's a lesbian of the lipstick variety (" I stick my lips where I think best," she explains,) chatting up a highly mixed bag of chums in the Comet. When did decide she was queer? "When I realized that men SUCK!" One of her companions, a very pretty guy not quite campy enough to be a stereotype (however much he might desire it), is delighted, "You know what? Me too."
MA BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE
Moms who listen on their teenaged daughter's calls don't usually care for the results. But she's so concerned that she ends up hearing the soon-to-be-ex boyfriend (a dim-witted wastoid from Renton) getting jumped out by her retro-punk Georgetown daughter. He just can't understand why she's dumping him off. It couldn't be the drugs or the body odor or his death-metal band. Unless, just maybe... "It's because I talk to Satan, isn't it?"
RISING GORGE CONCERT SERIES
They aren't the most obnoxious yuppies at the Rod Stewart/Santana concert at the Gorge, but they're the ones right in front of us. He's trying so hard to be hip about people whose prime was before he was born, and she's pretending to buy it. And nobody even laughs at them out loud. Until he says (with a world-weary aplomb) "What could be better than this, Clapton?" And she, of course, answered, "With or without Teneille."
