The Doppelganger on the 91

It was July, boiling and no relief came from the cool breeze of the Pacific. Half awake sprawled on the double sideways seat near the rear doors of the number 91. My fedora mostly covering my eyes, my back pack as a pillow and a Hawaiian shirt toping off the outfit in a kind of mocking cool, I didn’t believe I looked good just different. After all that’s what mattered more. Not being some cookie cutter clone of a carbon image but trying for something individual.
In other words I had the look and feel of a classic dweed trying to be cool but nonchalant about it.
Didn’t really matter because at summer school. We couldn’t really be cool because there was no one to impress, just a handful of facts to be memorized and part of our freedom taken away.

That ride was my meditation. Through the kids going to the beach, or the adults going to and from work and all the rejects of other schools riding home I’d lay there listening to the road. Putting the few facts I stumbled on that day into order. Forgetting the host of people having a better time than me. The others that weren’t shackled to the bus but rather librated to go or come as they please.
In whatever form that came I’d wait out the ride and eventually get home. Disappear or hang out. It didn’t matter this was my last summer before adulthood and I tried to take some kind of advantage of it. If nothing else there was that MUD I had just found.

Then I came in.
I stopped and looked down at myself.
Electricity was in the air as I looked into my own eyes thick glasses in front of the same black brown eyes, mouths agape each of us looking for the words.

Here I way laying there I, or he, was staring down at me. We were the same but different. A different set of choices put him in a t-shirt and jeans and me in my poser cool garb. Both uncaring but for different reasons neither really confident or I don’t think he was as confident as I tried to be. I wanted to know what made him him and me me. What was the major difference but I got scared and couldn’t ask.
The bus jerked forward and he walked the couple steps to sit in the back.
I felt his eyes for the next few stops until I couldn’t take it and had to get off. I knew I fucked up but I couldn’t phrase the words right.
Couldn’t think the right way to say I knew it was me but also no me. Knew we were alike but different and that’s what haunted me. Was it just superficial or was there something more there?

Wandering over to Clark I tried to figure how the conversation would have gone. Did he have any better idea what was going on than I did or was he too trying to find that balance that I hoped existed. Did he have high hopes for the future or was it just me.
Did he have a girlfriend?
A part of me figured he must have known the answer because I didn’t.

Today over a decade after that event I still feel his wake. Coming from people who swear they know me but I figure they know him. Claiming I worked on shows that I wasn’t around for or couldn’t have done in places I’ve never heard of. Maybe if I try hard enough and go enough places I will run into him again. This time I’d like to be the cool one and him the dweeb.

Dreams of Midget Town

Most kids that grew up in Long Beach, Lakewood, and other outlaying cities have heard wild tales of a town with houses meant for tiny people. Some even went looking for this place only to come back with wild tales and a night gone. My story isn’t too much different.

It began at Bolsa Chica, like a lot of summer nights, with a bonfire burning and the boredom of a night spent hanging out in a parking lot doing the usual shit that teens get up to on summer nights or perhaps back to someone’s house for a few movies and then home by the time the sun rises. When the beach patrol rolled by saying the beach was closed and to get the hell out we piled into the whale that one guy drove, chucked our cups of coke and whiskey and he started driving. Leaving the beach and turning onto PCH, we end up at a parking lot sitting on car hoods listening to Rodney on the Roq, bumming cigarettes and being bored. We get to telling ghost stories and legends and someone brings up Midget Town and says they know the way. So we follow.

Fueled by youth, excitement and black velvet we head into a wealthier part of Long Beach. With the promise of glory and midget sized town stop at the Ferris Bueller house, ring the bell and run away screaming ‘Save Ferris’. Dashing through the dark streets and back alleys, we follow our guide and his strange directions. Stopping in places to double back and finally coming to a hedge ‘On the other side’s Midget Town’ he swears and we climb the thing. On the other side is the manicured grass of a golf course. He shrugs saying him and his cousins came through and there was Midget Town.

We start to argue.
The sound of a car pulling up stops us and we take off across the grass. All swearing it’s the cops come to get us. Through another set of bushes and doubling back through the streets we pile into the whale and take off.

A bit later at Denny’s we talk about the night. Like adventurers come back from fights with head hunters and pygmies, the weird and exotic inside the boundaries of the south land. Our waitress isn’t impressed with our round of cokes and sampler, our tales of near arrest and saving Ferris. Putting down the bill she tells us in her day Midget Town was up in Hollywood.

----------------
Now playing: Don't Let's Start - They Might Be Giants
via FoxyTunes