And how was your weekend? My Friday to Saturday jaunt was most noteworthy, and like many good nights out was made all the more interesting with a simple lack of communication and a touch of misinterpretation. Step into the way back machine and let’s begin:

I had circled this night on my calendar weeks ago and was looking forward to a great night of live music. Joining me for the fun would be my cousin Erin, but she was running a tad bit late and since I had possesion of both tickets, I couldn’t very well meet her inside the venue. My solution was to go grab a cup of coffee at the nearest Starbucks, sit back, relax and read the NY Times to kill the hour lag time I was facing. One cup of black French Vanilla coffee and poundcake were $3.75. Fee to sit in one of their big comfy chairs was an additional 75¢. Quite the racket they have going there on those comfy chairs.

About an hour after the doors officially opened, I met Erin outside of Irving Plaza and we made our way inside with the first of the nights two acts yet to play. That gave us ample time to get some beers and one world’s worst mind eraser (all swished together in a shot glass-sized amount…maybe the bartender should have the recipe handy) along with banter about family, world events, and other such stuff. Nothing quite like trying to exercise your mind while slowly killing it with alcohol.

First to grace the stage on the night was Maktub, a very decent quintet that complimented the night’s main attraction quite well. The singers voice was as strong as his hair was massive, and his hair was MASSIVE! I’ll be keeping an eye out for them in the near future. ^_^

As good as Maktub was, they weren’t the reason I plunked down my hard earned cash this night. That honor went to Soulive, and they lived up to it and then some. They hit the stage and opened with “One In Seven”, the only song I absolutely wanted to hear them do live. How about that for setting the tone for a good time?

As they grooved along, I had to move along in time with the rhythms they were throwing down to the hungry masses. I even got a few compliments on my moves at point — a first time for everything, y’know. ^_^

About three quarters of the way through the set, Erin noticed what seems to be a young man taking advantage of an obviously drunk girl. Faster than you can say “what the fuck is going on here?” Erin had whisked the girl off through a side door to the merchandise room with myself and Mr. Man right on her heels. In all the hustle and the bustle, I ran over worst case scenarios in my head, hoping that fists and police officers wouldn’t need to get involved.

Of course, if there’s any lesson that’s to be taken from all of this it’s that appearances aren’t all they seem to be.

It turns out that the two of them, Lauren and Phil, did know each other and Phil was trying to corral Lauren out of the building so they could meet up with their friends who had been booted earlier in the show for smoking. So what started out as a rescue mission quickly turned into an escort mission, while Phil and I helped to guide, drag and carry Lauren out to the street and their friends.

As I loaded Lauren into her seat, she clung onto me and begged me to lay with her, hitting me with a very intense look from those big puppy-dog eyes. As wrong as it sounds, I took some of that will power to do the right thing and tell her that it wasn’t a good idea. Yeah, maybe it seems somewhat shady that I even considered the offer, but then again I am a single guy with enough testosterone flowing to power a 747, so what did you expect? In the end, everything worked out for the best, and I scored myself some bonus karma points. Go me!

Of course, that halo over my head also excluded me from re-entering the venue, or so I thought. My assumption in all the commotion was that Erin would be following right behind me, but one minute turned to five turned to ten and still no sight of her. I ask the bouncer if I could go into look for my cousin, but as soon as I tried climbing the stairs I got a lecture and the boot back to the entrance way, where I resigned myself to wait until the show was done and try to pick her out from the mass of humanity that was sure to be rushing out.

Well, it wasn’t all that bad. At least I could still hear them playing.

About ten minutes later, Erin wandered down to the front door to see what the hell was taking me so long to get back. She jumped into the mix, and with less than 20 seconds of clearly express explanation got me readmitted in time for the last few songs of the set. All of my excited babbling had done nothing more than get my ass booted to the door. Lesson learned: take a minute or so to compose yourself when trying to finagle your way back into a venue.

By the time all the fun and songs had ended, I had officially missed the last train back home. No worries though, just a short trip down to my office in SoHo to collect my things and then we’d be on our way to Weehawken and I would crash at Erin’s house. One small thing though: how to cross the almighty Hudson? Erin had come in under the assumption I had driven my car to work that day, when I had though the e-mail I sent earlier that morning had made it clear that was not the case. Lesson learned: Cute and witty remarks can be easily misunderstood. Sometimes plain english just works better.

Of course, Erin is a vet of late night city living, so having to pay $25 for a cab over to her place was not an option. Instead we would take one of the Sphinx busses that wait across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to cross the Hudson for the tidy sum of $1.50. All we had to do was get there and wait for one of them to fill to the brim with riders and we’d be on our merry way to Weehawken.

Of course, there was still a small matter of starvation that we had to tend to first. We had figured on grabbing a bite to eat before the show, but our scheduling didn’t allow us that pleasure, so instead we had to settle for a 24-hour pizza joint right outside our subway stop on the corner of 6th and 42nd. When starvation calls, you answer it any way you can.

And what would street pizza eaten in the dining room (for lack of a better term) of this fine New York establishment be without someone coming up out of the blue and asking me if I believe in Jesus? I toyed with the idea of screwing with his head a bit (Believe in him? Son, I AM Jesus!), but decided an afterlife spent in flames according to Christian dogma just wasn’t that appealing for two minutes of laughter. Instead we just wished him a good night and made our way to the bus, a long wait, and a cold walk to my cousin’s pad. By the time my head hit pillow, it was around 3:30 am. Sleep came quickly to me that night.

I awoke trying sometime around 10:30 to shake the tapestry of cobwebs Queen Mab had drawn through my head — some kind of strange fantasy where I was given lines 11-18 in Beat The Devil while carpooling with James Brown. The only thing I know for certain about this strange dream is that there wasn’t enough of anything in my system for me to blame its creation upon. This beauty was a total fabrication of my pure and unkept mind.

But I digress.

Felling a touch on the hungry side, Erin, her roommate Michele and I went for breakfast at a little Guatemallan resturant they knew of. There I feasted upon a dish of scrambled eggs with pepers, cheese, refried beans, fried banannas, sour cream and salsa you placed into a tortilla, all to be washed down with some freshly juiced OJ. Considering the fact that eggs and I had been on non-speaking terms as a primary breakfast staple since I was in kindergarten, this was a pretty big deal. The verdict? Mmmm, good! And filing too.

Time came for me to say my goodbyes, grab a Sphinx bus back across the Hudson and hike down to Penn Station to grab a train back to New Jersey (not as fucked up as it sounds when you consider New York is 3 miles from Weehawken and trains to the North Jersey Coast don’t run out of Hoboken on the weekend). Just another in a long line of weekends that can be looked upon rather fondly once I start to lose my mind. Oh wait, that’s already starting to happen.

I’d better go back to the top and start reading again, I guess. ^_^

Tags: Personal

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 26th, 2002 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.