Car crisis.

The day started with me waking up after a good night's sleep and going out to start my car.

Or rather -- try to start my car. It wouldn't start. The battery was dead, I assume from the interlock warming up six days a week when I don't need it to, followed by the battery not recharging because I'm not going anywhere at 9 am.

I panicked and called my mother, of all people. She said I should get a taxi. Made sense, and so I did. I also called Hartman and told 'em I'm gonna be late. Then I realised why the hell am I calling my mother, this is exactly the sort of panic-inducing crisis I should call my sponsor for. Speaking with him last night he said if I stick to being sober there are gonna be some everyday, petty crisis situations that'll crop up and drive me nuts and that's specifically what he's sponsoring me for, to help me get through those. As usual the idea I'd had in my mind -- about it being more like me calling him up from the bar saying I've just ordered a perfect martini and here it sits, now see if you can keep me from taking the first sip before it gets warm -- *isn't* in fact how it works at all, but just some fantasy I'd had since I've never actually done this sort of thing before. Another flying leap into the great unknown.

Laugh if you will but so far my experience with AA has been nothing but pleasant surprises.

I call him and expect to leave a message but he picks up. Oh boy. Yikes. Now I have to talk to him, and I probably just woke him up. He doesn't chew me out. He's not just calm, in fact, but very helpful. He gets me to thinking about getting the car fixed (of course, that hadn't yet occurred to me) and right then the taxi arrives earlier than they said it would because they had a cancellation. Great. I get to Hartman two minutes early, after all. It costs me thirty bucks to ride across town in a taxi but damned if I'm gonna show up late for the job. Before I hang up and dash out on him, my sponsor asks if I'm going to the meeting tonight and I say I want to but don't know how and will probably wind up taking the bus down to Foxes and hanging around there for four hours before starting my shift. That's ridiculous, he says. Well, yes, it is; but what else can I do? He says take the bus home and he'll pick me up and we'll go to the meetiing and then take it from there. OK.

Hartman had a ton of little tiny orders going out today, which is mildly annoying because it's a lot more work for less money coming in to the company. Big orders are actually much easier to pack -- you might have to label, tape, and stack twenty boxes but with little orders you're running around for one of this and two of that and putting together boxes and filling them with crumpled paper while checking everything three times. Erin had to help me near the end because it was getting down to the wire and I still had a ton of little samples going here and there and everywhere before the Gary, our UPS driver, shows up at 3h45 sharp and we can't make him wait because every now and then we need a favour from him. I got the remaining postal orders and letters done by myself and got out 30 minutes early, which I apologised for, but didn't feel *too* bad about since I did get there on time and used the hour I had before they processed orders and printed labels to move two pallettes each of SNAC TBs and WBs over and put two pallettes of NAHK TBs and WBs in their place, where they'd be more convenient to reach, vacuuming underneath where all the pallettes had been previously. Finally, we're well stocked in the mailroom again. I also found and threw away a dead cat.

I go home and stop by the Firestone between the bus stop and my house to ask can they fix the electrical system. Yes they can and work with Knittles towing but have a jump box I can borrow if I leave a credit card with 'em until I bring it back with the car so I can save sixty bucks by not towing my car eight short blocks. But -- whoops! -- the jump box isn't charged, so can I come back at 9h30 am tomorrow? Shit, I need to be at screening tomorrow at ten clear across town, I don't think so.

So tomorrow I wake up before eight to ride the bus out to screening and then ride the bus some more to get somewhat closer to Hartman in a general way and if I have time to spare will eat at Cafe Istanboul and maybe go online there and then work at Hartman and come home on the bus and hopefully pick up the jump box and get my car started and taken to Firestone late in the day and probably leave it there and ride the bus out to Foxes and either take a taxi home from there or hitch a ride from Alex or Albert, both of whom I've given rides to when they needed it and who have offered to help me out now. Hopefully Firestone'll have my car ready by Wednesday morning and I can drive to screening and Hartman under my own motive power, but if not I may have to do the bus/taxi/hitchhiking thing another day.

So anyway I go home and my sponsor (for whom I've got to make up a name, since it's all anonymous and stuff) comes by to pick me up and we go to the meeting. It's really good. Then he takes me out to eat and he pays for my dinner. Good god, that was completely unnecessary, but a kindness I won't easily forget, especially since I'm spending all my money on rides in taxis and repairs to the car. Meanwhile he sits patiently and listens to me spew all the madness in my life at the moment. He then takes me to work and drops me off with a good ten minutes to spare before my shift starts. Unbelievable. I only hope I stick with this long enough to pass these favours on someday to someone else who needs them as desperately as I do now.

Ferdinand. That's what I'll call him. He could easily pass for a Ferdinand in the cathedral at Toledo.

I go in and Chip and Alex are painting like mad. The mural is gone, covered over by a deep hunter green they both insist is "dark gray" and a maroon they just call "red" (making me wonder just how queer they really are, although the colours do look really good). I take over painting the green, which is generally the wall up to wainscoting, and paint the area around the doorman's station and the literature shelf in front of the DJ's booth. Then I help cover the back wall on the Central side, doing the green as Alex does light gray and Chip does red. The place looks a hundred times better, at least, just from this painting, already.

Then Albert asks me to call a taxi for Alfredo who's been drinking all night from before I came in.

Albert wasn't there the night Alfredo hit his head twice on the doorpost and then fell down twice in the parking lot so he doesn't know what a pathetic piece of shit this sorry excuse for a human being is. I ask Alfredo his name. He won't tell me. I say you're Alfredo, right? I'm gonna call you a taxi. What's your address? I ask at least a dozen times. He finally starts mumbling "901 motherfuckin' Jaffa" over and over and finally I ask him how to spell it. He spells out J-A-F-F-A. Fine. I don't think it is a street but I call the taxi anyway. (I wouldn't *ever* want to be a taxi driver.) He's staring daggers at me the whole damn time. Then he starts going off about how I "assaulted" him and "cracked" his head the other night. Oh really. Well, I have it documented, and Verge and Alex and the security guy saw everything that happened between 'em and will back me up. He says I'm goin' to jail and he's gonna call the cops and yada yada yada. Then he says he's gonna kill me.

OK. That's it. I take his beer. I look him straight in the eye and tell him "you're pathetic". I pour what remains of his beer in the floor drain in front of him and throw away the empty bottle. Sometimes when you do this in front of people it's as if you'd ripped their babies away from them and hacked them into little pieces with a machete before their very eyes, making them beg, plead, and demand for more. Alfredo's too far gone for it even to register what I've done. He's literally foaming at the mouth but isn't *doing* anything worse than talking shit, since he can do that without moving his thoroughly pickled corpse.

I tell Chip very discretely the gentleman at that end of the bar is giving me a hard time saying I cracked his head open the other night but neither my documentation of what actually happened nor the testimony of three other people backs his version of the story. Chip goes over to him and says it's time to leave. Alfredo tells Chip I assaulted him. Chips quietly says oh no, my people don't do that. You need to get out before I throw you out because I'm really mean and it won't be pretty. Then he goes back to hanging pictures. His taxi's not here but he insists he's waiting for it. No. You're not. We're closing. Now. He eventually gets up and I move him without touching him towards the door as he tries to stumble to the bathroom.

Once in the foyer, Alex comes over and reiterates everything I've said, only waving his handcuffs around, which once again, this guy is too far gone to even make sense of. He didn't attack you, he says, you fell down because you were drunk, I saw you. The taxi arrives right as Alfredo's leaning against the front door and the driver opens it. Alfredo stumbles out. See? Exactly like that. That's how you fell. I probably overstep a bit but go ahead and tell him you don't need to come back. Ever. He's gone.

One minute later Alex has spoken with Chip and tells me he's not to come back, ever. Great. We're all on the same page. I write it in the log and will tell Ben so everyone will know. One more pathetic pain-in-the-ass, nothing-but-trouble drunk that we won't have to deal with ever again, except probably to tell him don't you dare step through that door.

Alex drives me home. This after all night of slightly insulting "humour" from him which I no longer find particularly amusing since I'm not drinking, and am more inclined to ask "precisely what is clever about that statement?" than to reply in kind. Funny how that works. I guess it still falls into the category of "he doesn't mean anything by it". Still, it bugs me in a way it didn't used to. But of course, once again, when I need a favour (though actually, I'm ready to take a cab home), who gives me a ride clear across town to where he absolutely doesn't need to be but Alex. Go figure. It's like the world of the bars got word somehow that I'd gotten to work that night in the car of my AA sponsor and had to return the favour lest I give myself over completely to sobriety, robbing that world more-or-less forever of a pretty darn good doorman and a damn good customer. They're also starting to offer me more hours.

I'm being pulled in two diametrically opposed directions at this point. I am aware of it. I don't know how exactly I am gonna respond in the end but honestly I doubt I'll work at Foxes that much longer. The simple fact is that the other side seems to attract me more. I can indeed do acupuncture school if I go that way, but can likely not if I keep working in the bars, and frankly that is more important than anything else I've got in the works for long-term.

I love the place. I always will. I love the people there. I always will. But once again it's ingroup/outgroup and by my own free will I'm standing just one step apart from this particular ingroup. Deliberately keeping myself on their periphery while remaining in their presence. I'm one of you, but only to a point. I'll keep you safe to the best of my ability but likely never can really be one of you like some of you guys are.

I've had a grand old time and wouldn't trade a minute of it for the world. But it is getting close to time for me to move on to far, far better things. What those might be or how I'll get there, I don't really know, at this point. But once again, I have to disappear. I will have spent some remarkable months between your crumbling walls, basking in the warm glow of your lights and the incessant attention of your customers, and have helped in my small way not just to keep the place going but make it better than when I first got hired because (as I joked then) Sid was desperate for a doorman. I have already seen things happen in that bar which happen once per generation in any bar that lasts a third or half as long as Foxes has already lasted. I understand how the bars work in a way that no one does who doesn't actually work in them, and stood close to the center of a major transformation still in progress.

But it's a closed-off world. Like jail. You can't spend very much time in a closed-off world without having it change you. I think that overall my time at Foxes has changed me for the better; but I know I need to leave before it changes me decidedly for the worse. Same as working graveyard at Frontier last Spring. When I see how cynical I have become just in order to survive it frightens me. I needed a good dose of cynicism, needed to be toughened up, and tempered in the forge. But even pathetic loser pricks like Alfredo are suffering human beings, and I don't like to be in the position of having to say "it's either you or me".

Now is a good time to just stay awake. I've seen so much, and will see so much more before I go; but once the opening presents itself, and once I go, I absolutely can't turn back. I'll probably avoid the place pretty completely until someday, like Pat Bailee, I can go to certain shows because they're still the heart and soul of gay community, with all its fractious crosscurrents and eddies.

I don't know when the time to go with come. It won't be for some minor inconvenience or petty slight. As with all jobs I've ever had, I have to leave on my terms, and those terms have to be good.