2005-05-24
So...... hot.
I've taken to spending an hour in my car everyday, since it is the ONLY place where little Miss Goldilocks with the black hair over here can regulate the temperature to her own, selective satisfaction.
It's so HOT out there.
And it's not monsoon season, so it is hot - like no similie hot.
There is nothing scarier than when someone in Southern Arizona says quietly and simply, when asked the question "How is it outside?", replies calmly and without inflection "Hot."
It's like we give up on trying to describe the hot. We surrender to the heat and all of the rashy, tummy-bubbling, sniffling, headache that goes with it.
It's hot and it's not funny. In fact it's so not funny that it's serious and we are not allowed to attempt metaphor in the name of comedy because the hot must be taken with the utmost of seriousness.
While in my car, I listen to the Back in the Day Buffet on the local rap music station and every single day, I party on with Tigre and Bunny, who like the Boom; with Ghetto Boyz while they are trick-or-treating; and with the Daddy Mack, who's, you know, the Mack.
You can totally tell how old people are by the way they dance. Anyone who does that elbows-out, bounce-from-side-to-side and then bust out once in awhile with an Ally Sheedy-from-the-Breakfast-Club-Sideways-Shuffle is pushing forty.
!
People in their early thirties do the Tootsie Roll and we wave our hands in the air like we just don't care, raising the roof with impunity.
The kids?
Who cares - they're losers who don't understand the importance of getting down low. All they want is to take X and do this circle thing with their arms that makes me think of Cirque du Soleil only with cigarettes and bad teeth.
So while I was in Chicago, I had quite a series of adventures. One story found me on the El, at 5:30 on Saturday morning, wearing my dress and gigantic high heels from the night before. Classy, right?
Shockingly, someone followed me off of the train.
Since I got mugged, I kind of have a sense about these things so I was paying attention to the footsteps behind me.
Unfortunately, I was also probably still legally drunk and this is almost exactly what was going through my head.
"Okay. Shit. This isn't good. I'm not really in the mood for harrassment. Can't he see that I am a freaky eye-makeup mess? Oh. Yeah. Hence the following. Maybe he's not following me and I'm just being paranoid."
I went down the wrong street to throw him off and he followed.
"Great. Nice move, Sarah. Now you are going to get lost and have some rapist following you."
I climbed the steps of a townhouse, and pretended to make a phone call, like I was calling someone upstairs to let me in. I was thinking that I'm all brilliant with my building decoy tactics.
Not so much.
He stopped and started in with me.
"Wha'ss up baby. You pretty. You wanna su'un su'un?"
Hangover + blistered feet + bar-smelling dress + old school badass made me tell him off. I started spewing profanity and doing the neck twisting thing and generally freaking out because as I've learned from experience, would-be criminals don't seem to expect me to attack first.
He went OFF on me and I'm glad I didn't get hurt but seriously? At this point, I have figured out that I could fuck someone up if he tried to hurt me and I would have no problem with the possible resulting legal consequences.
At one point, he saw my cell phone and taunted me, about calling the law. Little did he know that I had to get permission from the state of Arizona to even BE in Chicago. Call the law? Honey, the law is not my friend and I know that.
I was all, "Bitch, I'm not calling the law, I was calling my BOYFRIEND to let me in the house and you are in my way and now you need to walk ON."
I was kind of impressed with my slang and with the fact that the only shakiness I felt was totally attributable to the alcohol leaving my system. Part of the reason the exchange went on for as long as it did was that in those shoes, I wasn't sure how strongly I could walk. My feet were turning into this pulpy, bloody festival and the idea of stomping off just seemed... painful.
I finally did stomp off, back to the big street but that wasn't cool, either.
He followed me.
Okay, so now I'm being followed and I'm still drunk from the night before and I am pretty sure that the skin blistered so badly by those heels was never, ever going to grow back...
... and I realized that, no surprise here, I was LOST. Can a party girl get a break here? Hello? No? Okay, fine.
The good thing is that this security guard from the parking lot at DSW walked out onto the street for a smoke break and I ducked into the garage and hid right around the corner of the entrance until the creep walked by, yelling "White whore" into the mouth of the garage.
Perhaps, my enemy.
Perhaps.
But this 'white whore', just told you off and escaped your pyscho intentions.
I resumed my search for Chelsea's place.
I think I called her 7 or 8 times trying to find the place but given that neither of us had really slept and that she had company and that I couldn't feel my feet anymore, I walked by her building like 5 times and in the second-to-last phone call, she told me to quit calling her. See You Next Tuesday, thanks for the hospitality...
If it wasn't 5:45 am and I hadn't already been sexually harrassed, almost lost a foot, and was still intoxicated from a debaucherous evening in cute shoes, I might have taken her request personally and found the effort to tell her off, too. Fortunately, I was out of gas.
When I finally found her place and crawled up the stairs, I made some announcement about puppies and the mini-bar, crawled into her bed with my dress on, peeled the shoes off (and I think there are still bits of my skin stuck to the leather) let my bloody feet pass out with the rest of me.
I still can't wear regular shoes yet, so I suppose in a way, I am thankful for this insane heat situation because I can wear flip flops to work and not get funny looks.
Thanks super-long-night and guy-who-might-have-raped-me!
arizonasarah at 12:24 p.m.