Bay Area: Slept in and took long
showers and went looking for the car. We
found it after about ten minutes of searching and re-parked it closer to
Miranda’s. Had to empty out the cooler because
the chicken and eggs had rotted (we hadn’t replaced the ice since before
Yellowstone) and stunk to high heaven.
We drove to Muir Woods without getting breakfast or coffee (poor
choices) and arrived around noon. Beautiful,
beautiful, beautiful. Big Redwoods and
Giant Sequoias, which it turned out were different things. A plaque commemorating FDR, that “apostle of
everlasting peace.” Dubious. We passed an Australian guy and heard him say
to his friends “fern gully” (“Now that I’ve taken you through fern gully…”) and
agreed that this was one of the defining moments of the trip. In Cathedral Grove, which was supposed to be
peaceful and even spiritual (there were SIGNS POSTED exhorting people to be
reverent) there were people everywhere talking noisily and taking pictures in
excess and generally being obnoxious and terrible. Started hiking the Ben Johnson trail and then
tried to get onto the Dipsea moving towards Stinson Beach (the Pacific Ocean),
a distance of 5.7 miles. Unfortunately we misread a very ambiguous sign and
ended up going the wrong way on Dipsea for about an extra mile. We turned back and met up with an equally
confused woman named Tricia who was from Birmingham, Alabama and pronounced her own name “Treesha.” She
also had that charming shibboleth of pronouncing her “wh’s” as “hw’s,” so that
“white” was “hhhhwhite,” etc. Treesha
looked about 38 but was by her own admission 50, though she could have been
even older for all we knew. Treesha had
been flown out to SF by a cousin who worked as a crime reporter for Fox News
and was variously described as “a runway model,” “cute as a button,” and “a
younger, taller version” of Treesha herself.
Don’t worry, Treesha; you’ll always have our hearts. Treesha’s children were all away at college
and she missed cooking big meals for them and their friends. Treesha now flipped beachside condos but had
been a nurse for many years prior.
Apparently flipping condos was lucrative and Treesha was happy to tell
us all about her new money. Directly
before coming to SF she’d spent a week with her husband in the Cayman Islands
celebrating their 25th anniversary. They
had stayed at the Ritz. Treesha
described it as being “very clean.”
We finally made it to
Stinson Beach after about four and a half hours of hiking and kind of emerged onto
the sand bedraggled and ill-dressed. We
walked past girls in bikinis and big bloated tan dudes and took off our boots
and long socks and waded into the ocean.
It was very cold and refreshing.
We then walked to a recommended parkside snack bar called “Parkside
Snack Bar” and ordered lunch. It was
pretty damn good and we were pretty damn hungry. Asked two girls from SF and LA how we might get back to the Muir Woods
entrance. I’d say that we’d DECIDED not
to hike it but that would imply our having a choice in the matter. Truthfully neither time nor, more
importantly, our bodies would have allowed another five-plus mile hike. (Tim Note: 5.7 miles of hiking, it turns out, is a
lot harder than say 5.7 miles of walking around a residential neighborhood
because of the elevation changes. We hadn’t really been aware of this to start: “It’s only 5.7 miles!” we’d
said. “We’ll be there and back in four
hours tops!” we’d said.) The girls
suggested we hitchhike back and we nodded as if this were a revelation and they
left and we called a cab. Here is where
everything changed forever.
I called a company
called “A Marin Taxi” whose one Google review started, “This isn’t so much a
taxi service as a local guy who owns a taxi.”
Perfect. A woman answered the
phone cheerily enough, however when I asked to go to Muir Woods she
deflated. “He’ll do it, but he charges
45.” She said it as if it were a great
warning but Tim and I were undeterred.
The woman put me on hold, which is to say that she put the phone down
for a few minutes, and I heard her talking in the background and then
screaming, “HELLO? HELLO?” but not into the receiver. I heard some garbled conversation and then a
man’s voice screaming, “A PALM TREE! A
PALM TREE!” and hysterical laughter. The man came to the phone: “Where are
you going?” “Muir Woods. Will you drive
there?” “Yeah where are you now.” “Parkside Snack Bar. You know where that is?” “Yeah I’ll see you in a second.” Click.
No phone number given. No
information exchanged. Simply this.
In a few minutes a black
town car pulled up to Parkside Snack Bar.
It was covered in laminated signs marking it as a cab and behind the
wheel was an older (not “elderly” per se) Hispanic man wearing thick black
sunglasses and a navy blue cap. His
voice was kind of high and hoarse as if he’d been yelling and when we hopped in
the backseat he said, “Is it just you?”
“Just us.” Without another word he
pulled towards the highway and, steering and shifting gears with his left hand,
grabbed with his right a compact trumpet from the passenger’s seat and began
blasting “Fly Me to the Moon.” When he’d
finished the tune we kind of meekly complimented him. He didn’t explain the trumpet-playing at all,
as if being picked up by a trumpeter-cum-taxi driver were the most common
thing in the world. “I was just about to
hit the bed when you guys called me.” It
was 5:15pm. “I was in my pajamas and
everything.” We were driving over US-1,
which on our left wound sharply along a mountain and on our right dropped off to the Pacific Ocean.
Treacherous driving made all the more nerve-wracking by our friend's pedal-brake-pedal-brake pacing. We sat
in the backseat fearing for our lives and hanging on this guy’s every word as
he told us the following stories. (We
never learned the guy’s name [huge mistake] so I’m just going to refer to him
as “AMT” for “A Marin Taxi.” Also the following has been heavily edited in consideration of our many readers and their delicate sensibilities.)
AMT told many stories about
people falling off the cliffs we were currently driving. One guy named “the Butler” who used to live
with AMT fell off the cliffs one night and wasn’t found for four months. “Nobody missed him enough to go looking for
him!” (Everything AMT said was
punctuated by hysterical laughter.) The
Butler also went by “the Italian,” although he spoke no Italian. He was called “the Butler” because he would
show up at your house and without your asking him to start folding your laundry
and doing your dishes. He wouldn’t cook
you a meal but he’d do everything else and so you’d just let him crash on a
couch. This is apparently how the Butler
ended up living with AMT for some time.
On the night of his death the Butler had as far as anyone could tell
been drinking heavily and came upon an abandoned couch on the side of the
highway. The couch had been balanced on
the edge of the cliff, but the Butler had been too drunk to notice and at some
point tipped over into the rocks below.
(Though there’s obviously no evidence of this and AMT may not have been implying
it, I got the impression that the Butler might have spent a few minutes or
hours on the couch just relaxing before falling to his death and I found that
image appealing.)
Another Butler story: at
some point before his death the Butler was living with AMT’s son. Sometimes the Butler would go on
“cyclones.” “You know, cyclones. Benders.
Cyclone benders.” On one occasion
the Butler was on such a cyclone but still trying to clean AMT’s son’s
house. Somehow he moved the oven too
close to the refrigerator which as it happens was worth $3000 and made of
chrome. (We never learned what AMT’s son
did for a living.) Every time the Butler
opened the oven door it would scrape the chrome of the refrigerator but he was
too...uh...focused to notice (due to the cyclone).
When AMT eventually got there he saw the Butler scraping up the chrome
refrigerator and freaked out.
AMT then told us the
story of four drunks flying off the side of the mountain going 60mph in a
truck. Apparently they were not only
drunk but new to the region and so at some point missed the signs for a hairpin turn. Fatal results, obviously. They also had a hitchhiker in the bed of the
truck. When they went off the road they
were “perpendicular” to the sea. They
were so high up that when the truck flipped they still had a quarter mile to
fall before hitting the rocky shore. As
for the hitchhiker in the bed: “He probably thought, ‘Oh I’m gonna jump out of here like James Bond or Schwarzenegger!
The Governator!’” (Hysterical laughter.)
“But he got pinned down by the centri…centrifugal forces? So he just got smashed with the rest of
them!” Soon volunteer firefighters
showed up at the scene. “When they found
‘em they were this big!” AMT gestured
with both hands so that the car was for a moment driving itself. The men had apparently been compressed such
that they would have been about three feet tall if they’d had the ability to
stand. “They were pinned down in the car
bleeding from every orifice.” AMT
proceeded to list every orifice.
“They were doing the death rattle.
You know what the death rattle is?”
“It’s like the rattle of your breath before you die, right?” Matter-of-factly: “No, it’s the sound of your energy – or as we call it, the ‘soul’ – leaving the body. It makes you shake and your bones rattle
around and make a rattling sound. Like a
rattle!” AMT said the firefighters had
been so traumatized by this experience that they’d needed counseling
(hysterical laughter). But the
hitchhiker had been a local and a UCLA student, a kid who’d done good, and AMT
seemed saddened by this fact.
Then he grabbed his
trumpet and played “Hello Dolly.”
AMT starting telling us
about Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants in San Francisco. “When I was in high school we’d go to this
Chinese place down on Jackson. A real
hole. We’d go there and watch the
mongrels and the gangsters hang out ‘cause that’s just what we did. But the place was called...‘Huey Louie Chewie
Gooey’!” (HYSTERICAL laughter.) “HUEY LOUIE CHEWIE GOOEY!"
AMT started talking
about the French word for “otter,” which is apparently hilarious, but trailed off when we passed an “otter crossing” sign in the road. “This place is trippy.” Told us that every morning there passed here a veritable parade of animals: otters, turkeys, coyotes,
raccoons, etc. All marching together peacefully. Trippy indeed.
As we approached Muir
Woods AMT asked us where we were from.
Upon learning Tim’s place of residence he screamed, “THE CONFEDERACY!”
and grabbed his trumpet and played “Dixie” with lots of trills and elaborate
improvisations. When he found out I was
from “close to Canada” he called me a Canuck and then parked and yelled,
“The Confederacy and the Union!” He
tried to get us to go to his bed and breakfast (he owned and operated a bed and
breakfast) and gave us his card which did not have his name on it but which was
in German for some reason. We paid him
$49.
Drove back to Miranda’s
trying to remember every detail of our ride. I felt imbued with some of AMT's incredible vitality. Eventually we met up with Miranda and the three of us took the BART
(public transit) to gentrified Oakland and ate dinner at a sausage restaurant and proceeded to hit many bars. I felt
elated, kept thinking of and obnoxiously insisting upon the truth of Kanye
West’s song “I Am A God.”
Tchotchke-filled bar where we saw a jazz/funk band rocking out.
Clearly a dream come true for these erstwhile band nerds. Went to a bocce bar (there was a bocce station
inside the bar) and at some point I looked across the room and saw Dom Rodriguez (Williams '12).
It was really good to catch up with her and meet her teaching friends, whom she was there with. Later Miranda and Tim and I went to another bar where they
blasted hip hop music (very good DJing) and this was around the time Tim
started drowsing off.
Miranda and I talked about hip hop for a while. We went home.
No comments:
Post a Comment