Operation Schnitzel

The Great Escape

Fierabend is a German Hofbrau- Syle located at the street level of the shiny, new, ticky-tacky apartment complex on the other side of the alley from Apartment X. I used to go there once in a while until I had a less than optimal experience where the wait staff, with my help, had to eject a young professional Microsoft employee who was behaving like a 4 year old who’d been kicked in the shins. I found that the joint is usually overrun by tools, mostly the type of late twenties/ early thirties young-professional types in polo shirts. Fan as I was of the Haaker- Pschorr Dunkel, my loyalty waned after a few of these embarrassing scenarios. Unfortunately, the wafting scent of the schnitzel sandwich and memories of my frosty liter of Haaker- Pshorr made me miss the joint. Well, tell you the truth, it is not that I missed the joint, per se, I simply missed freedom. Sweet, sweet freedom.

An explanation is necessary here, I suppose. I get sick once a year without fail. Usually only once, but lemme tell you, it’s a bitch. I am out on my ass for four days every year when the season changes. Nothin’ I can do about it. I leave bed seldom, cough up a lung, quit smoking for a week or two and don’t go to work. I might be able to make it to the bar nex tdoor for a toddy and some food (even macaroni and cheese is a horse’s ass of a chore), but not always. It’s too cold and wet outside, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna step in a turd or used condom outside my door in this condition; I simply don’t have the sense of humor for that right now. How can I get a drink without leaving the apartment? This city isn’t quite civilized enough to have a liquor and cigarette delivery service and I’m fresh out of cloves for a toddy anyway. In the midst of my sickness and delirium the most capital idea arose; escape!

Here’s how it would be done: I would start digging three tunnels- Tom, Dick and Cornelius. Tom would exit from the wall behind the couch, drop down to the level of Yale Ave. and progress in a westerly direction. Dick would begin in the bathroom, it’s entrance hidden under our claw foot bathtub. Cornelius, my masterpiece, would begin in the random trash- filled locker in the basement common area. It likewise would burrow 25 or 30 feet, and continue west. Work on the tunnels began in earnest, my rig knife and marlinspike serving as picks, as I shoveled the broken concrete and dirt out with an old pot I found under the sink (Damned if we were gonna cook in that thing). I was clearing 10 feet a day, switching off from tunnel to tunnel so’s not to arouse undue attention, but there soon arose the question of where the devil I was going to store all the dirt. The single-shot, stove-top percolator was my first idea, as Juli had quit drinking coffee. Of course, since that only held about 1 metric cup of dirt, I soon began searching elsewhere. I had begun flushing it down the toilet, as well as the kitchen sink, but as the main drain clogged we had to call the plumber. In snaking the pipes, he discovered an undue amount of mud. Fortunately, it was blamed on the nature of the old plumbing- safe again! It was clear, however, that the pipes were no place for dirt. The Dumpster and the construction site next door were perfect, however. Problem solved.

Work once again resumed. As Tom and Dick clocked in at 30 and 28 feet, respectively, a new problem had reared it’s head: how could I provide fresh, breathable air in the tunnel? It was becoming difficult to breathe in the extremes of the tunnel, and I was only halfway there. Finally the answer came to me while washing off the dirt in the shower. The loud-ass fan in the bathroom! I could reverse the motor, and vent air into the tunnel! I ripped it from its wall mount, spliced two extension cords together, and it worked like gangbusters.

All was well until yesterday, that fateful day when Juli woke me to say that the plumber was coming again, and I had to move all my clothes I’d dumped on my closet floor (yet another cache of hidden dirt! Damnation!). I thought quickly and told her I’d fixed the drain, and to cancel the appointment. All seemed well, until we heard the deafening rumble of a heavy equipment truck. “What in God’s name is that?” I queried. She peeked out of the blinds of the window, “Concrete Sawing, Drilling and Breaking,” she replied, “guess we’re not sleeping in today.” “Oh, my God!” I thought frantically, “They’ll find Cornelius!” I sprang from bed like a coiled spring, and ran to the trash locker, Cornelius’ hidden entrance. I could hear the sawing, drilling and breaking going on above me as I descended into my masterpiece. Frantically, I tried to dig to Fierabend; I could smell the schnitzel! So close I could taste the curry ketchup and mustard. The sweet oblivion of the Haaker- Phsorr. Five more feet! For the love of God! I was using my bleeding fingers now and my sweatpants were stained by mud and fear. Just when I thought I could make it, just when sweet victory and freedom were within reach, the tunnel lurched, groaned and began to collapse. I had just enough time to back out, the deafeningly loud bathroom fan clutched in my bleeding hands. I reached the basement, weeping. Juli beheld me with a mix of curiosity, disgust and fear. “They found Cornelius…” I wept. “They found him and there was nothing I could do!” It was over. The tunnel was lost. I was doomed to wait out the duration of the winter, rationed and confined. But curiously enough, my hacking cough and runny nose was no more.

Our Morning So Far

It’s 11:30 am; Otis and I have only been up for one hour. With our combined hangovers and devotion to sleeping in, the two of us managed to snooze through the shattering barrage of noise made by the garbage truck emptying what sounded to be Dumpsters full of glass bottles and screaming children not less than two feet from our window. A few hours later, this early commotion was followed by a strange procession of horns on I-5 (conveniently located just one block behind the apartment) that whined in such perfect harmony I thought our upstairs neighbor was enthusiastically blasting Sigur Ros at quick, short intervals. Despite these disturbances, I was not to be truly roused until 10:30 when our apartment manager called to announce that the plumber would be arriving in thirty minutes, wanting to be sure that our closet had been cleaned out so they could get to the proper pipes.

Rolling out of bed, dressed head to toe in wool and wrapped in an acrylic sleeping bag, I sauntered into the cold, dark grey of the kitchen where Otis lay sleeping on his mattress in the corner, and told him to clean out the closet. Lifting his head from his blankety cave, he told me to call Frank back, tell him “no”, and go to bed. “It looks to be draining fine now, so I don’t see any real need for preventative plumbing,” I told Frank.

Now awake, I moved towards the freezing leather couch. Carefully laying down a blanket so as to not make contact of warm skin to cold leather, I smirked to think of how clever I was, duping the first law of thermodynamics so early in the morning. As I made myself comfortable, Otis pulled the most recent issue of the Stranger out from some hidden fold in his sheets, where he’d been cuddling it through the night. He was incensed by the issue’s poor writing, he told me, enumerating his grievances  article by article, and finally producing a small moleskin notebook in which he had drunkenly written a letter to the editor addressing his manifold concerns the night before. As we bemoaned the unworthy exultation of shitty music and terrible art for the sake of odious ass-kissery, I puttered around the kitchen making peanut butter and honey sandwiches until what sounded like a plumbing truck pulled up outside our window. “Is that a plumbing truck? That sounds like a plumbing truck. Didn’t you talk to Frank?” Otis questioned at rapid pace, still swathed to his head in twisted sheets and old quilts. I peaked through the blinds at the truck immediately outside our window, so close in fact it blocked all natural light- “’Concrete sawing, drilling, and breaking,” I read, anticipating the intimate urban symphony in store for us as a city worker pulled a variety of massive machines out of his truck into the cavernous alley.

Ryan fearfully suggested they may find his tunnel*, which they very well may have had they sawed, drilled, and broke much longer. Luckily they were satisfied with drilling shallow entrenchments at various intervals- our tax dollars (were we not chiefly employed under the table) hard at work…

*details on this later

Cafe Solicitation

Cascades, the neighborhood surrounding our home sweet home, is a recovering industrial area on the edge of downtown, populated by an equal mix of junkies, scum bags and yuppies. My roommate and I live in the unnumbered basement unit of a 100 year old building across the street from an abandoned brick complex with a large white smoke stack, and even here there are more than four coffee shops within a quarter-mile radius. Welcome to Seattle.

In my ample free time I have perused a number of coffee shops in the area, judging each on a complex scale of varying criteria such as quality of music playing (and its subsequent volume), variety of seating options, décor/ ambiance, and of course, the care with which they present me with a double Americano.

Meeting these criteria are a few choice cafes in the area, each one of which I’ve carefully staked out in order to be on a first-name basis with a roving staff of baristas and receive free coffee from each. The process of this endearment is simple: you show up at the same time three days in a row to order the same drink. You make small talk as necessary, but on the third day will invariably introduce yourself to the now-familiar looking employee behind the counter. By day four, your coffee is on the house. While this may appear to be a scam for self-indulgent ends, baristas do invariably make great acquaintances. They typically interact on a highly-caffeinated level, and emit a positive attitude in regards to their easily-relatable hobbies (which they’ve picked up in order to relate to a wide discrepancy of clientele). They are usually well versed in pop culture and music, being as “ipod operator” is their secondary responsibility to food-delivery system, “the regrettable, necessary step between chow and chow-hole”* which means they can likely recommend a good show for you to see any night of the week. In the case that such a recommendation is provided, you now have an opportunity to invite them out as your platonic date in order to buy them a drink, thus recouping them for all the free java they’ve passed your way. This also legitimates your relationship beyond that of mooch and provider (unless you’re tipping them for each free coffee, in which case you’re already a good person and the provision of beer is unnecessary unless you’re actually trying to get in their pants).

While I have met a number of fine coffee-industry employees and spent a great deal of time at both Café Vivace on Yale Ave. as well as Uptown Espresso on Republican (a shout out to their respective baristas, Mike and Bryan), the one spot I long, but have yet, to infiltrate is that of Moka’s Café and Coffee Bar, home of the most dangerously delectable mocha in this entire city. In fact, I’m going to go get one right now in order to better describe it to you: holy shit it’s delicious.

The perfect Moka’s Mocha is a delectably suffused amalgam of espresso and chocolate mixed in harmonious proportions so that neither overwhelms the other. It is like a sugary yin yang, just enough coffee to chocolate so that the two combine to taste like a tall cup of steamed cream. This being Seattle, said coffees are always topped with impeccable latte art, which has unfortunately become more requisite than impressive. Ryan says that he recently witnessed a barista creating a latte-art skull in preparation for the Barista Olympics, which is impressive. That’s what I want to see more of. If not a skull, then possibly a badger- to ask me how my day is going. Practice, practice, practice.

*The Stranger- How To Be A Person Who Isn’t A Failure; Jobs- How To Be A Barista, Sep. 2009

Birth of a Nation

There is a word to describe the entry to our little cement hole in the ground: quisquilious- of the nature of garbage or trash. Though the kind of things “quisquilious” describes typically rank upsetting at best, I think it’s a rather pretty word for an otherwise unattractive entrance. The innumerable negatives (such as the wafting smell of stale beer mixed with urine and rain-water [there's got to be a word for that]) of our proximity to the Dumpsters aside, the things people throw away do occasionally emerge as an interesting glimpse into what the seven-or-so floors of tenants rising high above us are up to.

One such example was the recent discovery of the obliterated shards of a VHS copy of Birth of a Nation amidst the usual smear of glistening green and white glass shards strewn about the concrete alley. If you know the story of this film, you may enjoy puzzling over how it came to be a crushed mess on the pavement, as if it had been torn apart in the critical rage it rightly deserves. If not, a brief adumbration: Birth of a Nation was a silent film put out in 1915 by D.W. Griffith and is considered by some to be one of the first Hollywood “blockbusters.” That said, it originally premiered with the title “The Clansmen” and follows the victorious rise of the KKK, as they promote white supremacy as a solution to a lawless, post civil-war south. At a tribulating three hours long, the film was protested by the NAACP and incited riots in several states. Sensing trouble, many cities refused to let the film open, and thank god for that, but the damage had been done.

If I had a VHS copy myself, I would probably smash it too.

To The Poor Bastard Shitter

It’s funny sometimes what it takes to constitute an insult to me. I have weathered innumerous taunts, hazings and abandonments in my life. All of these, with few exceptions, have been taken in stride and are quickly forgotten. On the other hand I have been known to carry a few with me. Be sure that that heroin-shooting, hepatitis-B contaminated, homeless motherfucker that left that rancid, Hormel Chili looking  turd  on my door step will taste my steel before this month is out.

Now granted, we picked this joint out for the low cost and surrounding neighborhood. I’m no elitist, I know what it is to be broke. But this was too much. There it sat, as large as life, staring at me with its brown, deformed, corn-kernel eye. Next to it of course was the obvious means of clean- up: a shit stained napkin of the McDonald’s table-dispenser variety. When I finally began to come to terms with this clear personal reproach, I could see the fellow’s thought process. I could walk in his shoes, as Atticus Finch taught me. I imagine it went something like “I’m high, it’s late, no one will let me shit in their toilet because I smell terrible and have dementia. Wait a minute… here’s a convenient, seldom-used, dark doorway to an apartment not even I would live in. Ah, and a tall dumpster to shield the view of a casual late night passer- by. Capital!” and with that he dropped his stained, cargo-pocketed trousers, and squatted quick as lightning like a bearded neanderthal, defecating on my front stoop.

I would have pitied him, but then, inevitably, the smell of that unspeakable brown pile met my nostrils. As tears welled in my eyes and bile began to coat the back of my throat, I knew, by God, that this was the manner of affront that I would not soon forget. May the Lord God guide me to his cardboard box dwelling so that following an asparagus dinner, I might urinate on his drunken, passed-out carcass. I will follow him to the shelter, where I will volunteer to ladle soup, patiently biding my time until revenge is ripe. When his glistening, grateful eyes meet mine as I pour the soup, little will he know that the chowder is a delicate mix of cigarette butts, crushed glass shards and the little kitten he used to carry around. Then I will sleep like the innocent and victorious. Or maybe I’ll just let Russ sweep it up with the rest of all that bullshit that doesn’t make it in the dumpster. See? It’s losing it’s smell already.

In the beginning

So here we are, testing things out. Does this feel a little sparse? We can tweak things here and there if necessary.