Pea Soup

Today I need to turn in my pages for real. I’ve written actual comments and corrections and clarifications in pen and pencil on pieces of paper for my book/memoir The Royal We, that I will send back to Akashic. The book comes out in November and we seem to be functioning in a timely way. There’s a passage that I’ve written and want to include and I’m going to share it here. My old friend, Sugarpie, is visiting here from LA. He came out to NYC for a family wedding. We are connected and have been since we met. We ate takeout Thai in my apartment and I remembered the story I’m sharing below, the one I want to include in the book. I’m not sure whether it’s a stay or a go yet. Such remarkable lives we lead, right? Thanks for reading.

We’d got on the Five as it loped out of Hollywood winding past the Bowl, looking for its direction past the last palm trees, past Cahuenga, past the John Anson Ford, there on the right, the north bearing mundanity doesn’t kick in til after the valley and past Magic Mountain. And then, even then, there’s a promise of a road that could be someone. The grapevine appears, sudden and brazen, the Tehachapi’s shoving their shoulder on the flatness of the stolen land like a spent volcano in the span of the desert, series of soft peaks so unmovable we were forced to climb. The Christos umbrellas had been there not that season but the one before, and a man had been killed installing the artwork, not only on this mountain but on the one in Japan. They had been blue, the umbrellas on the grapevine, but the ones north of Tokyo had been yellow. ‘Well worth it,’ we had cheered about the installers who’d been killed. Not cruel, not insensitive, we’d have given our lives for the art and we understood.

There were too many of us in a van, no seats in the back, just the awkward and cold metal of the car that we spread some too small serape on and leaned and propped on the bags and sacks full of things we’d brought. An acoustic guitar out of its case and a paper sack of carrots, a liter of Mountain Dew. Gary sang David Bowie songs, ones from Hunky Dory and he sang remarkably like him. Gary was crooked and dressed like a witch, his shoes were pointed and buckled and his cape was purple and black. The van was his but he wouldn’t drive it, it was on loan and would be taken back before long so we’d made the most of the loan and were driving it to San Francisco on a Friday. There was a party at the apartment that Courtney would eventually burn down and we were aiming to get there before midnight.

Gary was the singer in a band that Chuck and I loved called Celebrity Skin. Their craft was odd and twisted and so far wrong and mischievous and genius that it scared most people off. I’d seen a Christmas show in which they ensembled a collection of reindeer on cables that were pulling a Santa Claus in a sleigh in front off the stage but the reindeer were carcasses somehow of old meat and goat heads. Another time after they’d finished making early demos of their songs, they played the recorded songs over the speakers and lip sync’d the entire set to an audience unaware. Another time they’d befriended my sister when my parents were out of town and I was in San Francisco and they convened at our family house and went through the closets and wore my sisters high school uniforms for the show. On and on they were genius, unparalleled and undeniable. Tim Ferris changed his name to Sugarpie much later, he wore tights under rips and buckled boots that were pointed as well. We were thrown together because we were alike and both watered wild spirits.

In the second half of the 5, past the stinky cows that were herded together in spaces too small that stretched forever and smelled so bad before they were milked or killed or used in the way that animals are, there was Andersen’s Pea Soup, a restaurant that somehow attracted travelers at the midway point with their audacious and ridiculous pitch of ‘all the pea soup you can eat,’ as if that was an attraction. We were drawn to it of course and filed into the restaurant like a sidewshow, colors and rips and loud and practically cartwheeling to a table amongst the fellow travelers, so drab in their journey.

Our waitress was a teenager, Carol, who loved us as much as we loved her and we asked her, ‘what is the most amount of bowls that have been eaten under this deal?’ And she told us nine. Nine bowls was the amount we were competing with. We ate our bowls vigilantly and aggressively and the pea soup kept coming. It delighted Carol and she was rooting for us. We had all had more than five bowls and Gary went up to seven but that was it. We were bloated with the green soup and left the restaurant in a sort of sheepish defeat, leaving all they money we had, over a hundred and twenty dollars, on the table for a tip for Carol.

The smell of the pea, still crusted on our lips, and sloshing in our stomachs was disgusting and wrong and immediately Gary threw up in the parking lot as we walked to the van. Vomit is contagious and the rest of us, one by one, joined him. We were laughing and screaming and vomiting and made a dance, a choreography of the act, spinning, caterwauling, leaping in the air, actually, and sticking the point of the dance with a vomiting expulsion of the soup. I’ve never laughed so hard, we were all tickled with ourselves and wiped ourselves clean and got back in the van and drove to the party in San Francisco, arriving after midnight and finding a parking spot right in front.

Thanks again for reading. If you’re in NYC, I’m doing a reading at Parkside on Houston on Sunday, the 16th at 4pm. I’ll be reading from the book and discussing with my friend Ann. Ann hosts a wonderful series at Parkside. I’ve been a couple times and it’s inspiring and wonderful. I love the sound of my voice, come be with us. My sister is coming and my niece is coming and Joey will be there. All family and friends. Love you all, let’s be together.

x

RB