NEEDLING

It’s Monday. It’s morning. The weekend has rolled over and petered out and a new week has started. A rat has once again died somewhere underneath my kitchen. As I walked into my house early this morning, the smell hit me with its nauseating stench, and I nearly vomited right there and then. Not to mention my head pounding away from non-stoppable good fun since closing the store Saturday evening. It’s all a bit of a blur right this moment.

It started at my neighbors’ belated Halloween bash Saturday night. Lots of fun. It’s not quite clear to me around what time I stumbled back to my humble abode, but Kari said they’d left around three and I was still dancing away...dancing away like fools. My outfit was that of a French Cowboy. Basically my usual attire with Glenn’s cowboy looking straw hat he uses at work. It’s a very smelly dirty thing which looked perfect on my head. I could have tried a little harder, but I don’t particularly care for dressing up, though I enjoy dress-up parties. Glenn and Kari went as a priest and nun couple.

At some point Sunday night I was in a hot-tub somewhere in South East Austin, frolicking with three other people. That is, until the guardian of the apartment complex came by and nicely asked us to please step out of the whirlpool as it is not to be used past 10pm. We kept going from the hot-tub to the much colder water of the swimming pool. I’m not sure what time it was, but it was certainly much later than ten in the evening. He was very nice about it. I’d even lost my glasses during one of my dives into the swimming pool going after one or both of the two ladies in our little group. The guardian found them. They were at the bottom of the swimming pool. It took us a good twenty minutes of searching before he finally found them. He took out his flashlight and was very patient with us. All four of us very drunk, all in our mid-thirties, groping around in the dark in our swimming apparels, looking for my glasses. There’s something to be said about hot-tubs and semi naked people drunk out of their heads very late into the evening. It’s kind of fun.

Saturday still at the store, I sold a bottle of scotch from my personal stash. I keep a stash of bottles I want to buy for myself in the back room. The customer is a young fellow in his mid twenties. He first started coming to the store a few months ago, and said he wanted to learn about Scottish whisky, that he knew absolutely nothing. He couldn’t buy anything that first evening he talked to me, but said he would be back. I’d told him to come over whenever he wanted, and that I’d try my best to walk him through the various regions and styles Scotland has to offer. He’s bought more that half a dozen since, and Saturday he wanted something special, something he’d never had. After a little perusing of our Scotch section, I decided on the bottle. I took him to the back room and showed him the bottle. A 22 year old whisky distilled in 1978 by the Macallan – Glenlivet distillery. Raised in sherry oak, and bottled by Cadenhead at cask strength in 2000. Pure nectar!

“You’re killing me, man,” he said to me. I was showing him the bottle, giving him the low-down on what I was showing him.
“That’s the stuff here, my friend,” I said. “Look at it!” I was holding the bottle in question next to another bottle, also from the Cadenhead bottling company, so that he could see the difference. The 22 year old whisky was much darker than the other one. “Look at this stuff, man. Look how thick it is, this is the kind of whisky you have to chew, it’s so thick. This ain’t for you and your buddies to pour down your gullets without thinking, this is the stuff that you respect, that you pour in the glass and you take it in with your eyes, with your nose, you take it all in, man, before taking the glass to your lips...”
“That’s not going anywhere near my buddies. Nobody’s touching this except me, and you, since you were keeping it for yourself, I’ll invite you over and we can have a drink.” He held the bottle in his hands, then set it down, and placed his head inside his hands. “Dude! you’re killing me, here.”
“I’m not forcing you. I’m not twisting your arm.”
“Yes you are,” he said as we were walking back to the front of the store. “You’re the whisky expert putting a bottle in my hands telling me this is the shit, what am I suppose to do?”
“I don’t have a gun to your head.”
“You just about do.”

We made it back to the counter, and my colleague was looking at the bottle as we took our respective positions. Me behind the counter, entering the skew code of the bottle into the computer, and him in front of the counter awaiting his new purchase.

“Dude, that’s the shit! That’s some incredible stuff!” My colleague said, “how much more of this stuff we got?”
“That’s it, man, there’s no more around here, probably not another bottle anywhere in Texas.”
After the customer left, he said “What are you doing? You should have kept that for yourself.”
“Yeah, I know, but I like the guy. I had it stashed away to buy later.”
“Why’d you sale it to him?”
“He’s bought so many bottles of scotch in the last couple of months. He’s been trying every region, every style, and he wanted something different. Anyway, it’s fun to sale a great bottle to somebody who appreciates the fact that you’re selling him something special. That’s part of the fun.”

And so I started my weekend on a good note. All the evil shadows and demons were closed out. Good karma. I was sitting on top of the world, going home with two six packs, getting ready for a festive weekend completely unplanned for, other than my neighbor’s party.

At the party, there was a young woman visiting from Bombay. Her brother lives in Phoenix, and they were in town visiting my neighbors. I was absolutely entranced by her beauty. We were about five of us sitting around in a circle of chairs talking about this and that. This young woman’s dream is to become a star in Bollywood. She’s certainly beautiful enough. She’s in dancing school, acting school, taking singing classes and all the other stuff, and she’s planning on finishing her university studies in the States. So there we were in a circle, discussing such things as you do. One of the fellows, who was dressed as Zorro, is a stand-up comedian, and is currently writing a screenplay about being an Indian living in Austin trying to make a living as a stand-up comedian. He wants to direct it himself. I told him: good luck.

So I say, “tell you what, we’ll write a screenplay together, I’ll call up my buddy in Bombay who’s a cinematographer working on some big stuff, and we’ll let this young lady star in our movie. We write, I direct, she stars! My buddy shoots the movie, and you, the Grime Reaper over there, you can be the producer.”
“But I don’t know anything about being a producer!”
“That’s all right, you’ll learn as we go. We can’t make a movie here in the US, because it would be an independent, we’d never get the financing necessary to make a proper feature, and it would be too ‘quote unquote’ ethnic for American audiences, and we’d never in our wildest dreams get a distribution deal because distribution companies are bastards that way. No, we need to shoot an Indian movie in India with a ‘quote unquote’ international appeal. It’s cheap as hell to make a movie over there. I know the guy who can get us anything we want, the best crews, the best studios. We’ll make a beautiful picture, we’ll make millions, we’ll make her a star, and we’ll have a blast doing it. We could go to Cannes, the French will love it, and that always looks good on your resume, when the French love you in the film business. I can see the headlines all ready: French-American man directs his first picture in India. They love that kind of shit in France. They’d have some patronizing bull shit about French Indian relations going through the centuries, what the two countries have in common, what they’ve shared and so on. They love that kind of shit over there, as long as the movie critic slash journalist feels superior to it all. All we need is a story. It has to be very simple, yet be some crazy love story with lots of dancing and the whole village going off into choreographed dancing and singing at the most inappropriate times.”

I was off on a wet dream, talking, thinking, not sure whether I was thinking out loud, or talking to myself, dreaming, or actually communicating. The alcohol, the dancing, the loud music, were all starting to take effect on my brains and my ability to make any sense whatsoever. The young woman had me completely mesmerized. She was appropriately dressed as Cleopatra. She had the most perfect set of teeth I’ve ever seen. I’m a tooth fetishist, have I ever mentioned that? Her lips were about as sensual as any I’ve ever seen on or off the screen. This young woman is a star in the making, all she needs is to meet her Fellini. And she needs to find him quickly. That’s what this girl needs. A guy who worships beauty. There’s not even any need for a story in the Hollywood sense of storytelling. What we need here is some Italian post-modernism, some Freudian fantasy with a twist. A man living a mid-life crisis falls in love with a girl he cannot ever have. Her destiny has all ready been completely planned out by her family, and he’s not any part of it, but he must have her at any cost, even at the cost of both their lives. That’s the whole story. Lots of tracking shots, endless discussions that go nowhere, flashbacks, flash-forwards, coming in and out of fantasies, nightmares, and various levels of realities. The guy is in his late thirties, early forties, an Indian who has lived most of his life in the States. He’s a wall street type, or an engineer, or a professor, and he’s very successful at what he does, except he’s not happy. He’s a highly educated man, very Americanized, and is traveling to India for the first time in years for family business. His father, who also lived in America, has asked in his will to be buried back in India, and that’s what he’s doing. He can barely talk Hindi or Tamil, and he really doesn’t want anything to do with the whole situation. Then, he meets this girl half his age, who blows him away, and he can’t do a single thing about it. He can’t have her, he’s got a wife and family back in the States waiting for him to get back home to, and he’s crazy in love with a girl his daughter’s age in a country which might as well be a foreign country to him. That’s a movie. That’s a damn good movie. Anybody out there want to write it? Somebody who knows and understands both Indian and American cultures, who can write a good story without the stereotypes? I’ve got both the girl and the cinematographer. All I need is the male star and a good screenplay. I can direct.

There was also the Romanian Mathematician with whom I danced for a while. She had this accent as if she would chew you up like a banana at any time. Rough, yet soft. She was wearing a bright red hair piece, and wasn’t really dressed as anything in particular, she said, just last minute grabs here and there. Algebraic geometry is her field of studies. Great escapism, is how she described her work. She couldn’t be bothered with reality. Everyday reality bored her. She kind of looked like a crazy artist type, except she’s a scientist. We danced, then at one point, I was off to get another drink, and she had disappeared. I’m not sure what happened to her.

And then there was my neighbor’s lab techs. Two more beautiful girls. One was quiet, didn’t drink a thing, was dressed with a sheet wrapped around her, and hung out talking with Cleopatra most of the night. The other, a crazy girl dancing and drinking, was dressed as a post-modern Cinderella. By the end of the evening, she took her costume off, and changed into a cut-off t-shirt and some blue jeans. I’m not sure how I stumbled home, but what I do remember is staring at this girl’s navel. She had the most incredible navel in the world, and there was no reason to look at anything else. I was plastered drunk sitting in a folding chair, staring at her navel. She was dancing, and her navel stretched, tightened, moved about her stomach like a contortionist. It was amazing. Needless to say, there were way too many beautiful young women at this party, and my overall senses were overwhelmed by all these beautiful female forms moving about in my surrealistic universe. This was a Fellini movie, all these people dressed up in all kinds of crazy costumes. All these beautiful women dancing and being crazy. My imagination taking the better hold of my person, and me incapable of concentrating.

And now it’s Monday, and a new week is upon us. Tomorrow, I must go back to work. Tonight, I must go to school, though I’m currently thinking about skipping. I’ve spent way too much money this weekend. Somehow I went through forty bucks...oh yeah, it was the door fee to get into the Celtic festival Sunday afternoon where we got drunk on dark beer and various bottles of liquor we snuck in. That’s me and my friends who called me out of the blues, and forced me into their car Sunday midday to go to god knows where and drink yet way too much. I’m not sure what I’m going to do as far as food is concerned till my next pay check, which is still a long ten days away. There’s always the credit card.