Clareified

Fisch won’t even let me see pictures of his siblings.
“What? Why,” I asked incredulously.
“Um…cause if you like how they look, you might start to take their side.”
Which, on the heels of my absconding with my second sibling in a week, suddenly doesn’t seem quite so crazy.
Although, unlike Karol, who continues to deny all my claims to Ron Lad, pearatty was much more pragmatic about my taking young Smokeyatty as my new sister.
“OK…we’ve gotten mom a digital camera for Mother’s Day and it’s going to be $50 for each of us atty siblings, Dawn.”
Wait…what…who…now? Dangnabit! It’s like starting to date right before Valentine’s Day…doh!
Anyhoo, Smokeyatty — so named because she is a hippie vegetarian farmer who now works for the Parks Department doing fire starting awareness — invited me out to Portland to spend the weekend with her and pearatty. And by “invited”…well…um…hush.
There were horrid thundershowers in NY on Friday, so my flight out there was delayed. I called pearatty to let her know, but when the information line in Portland told her the flight was landing on time, she ignored my information on the ground and they got to the airport something like two hours before I landed.
And if you’ve ever been to the Portland airport, you can imagine just how awesome that was.
My flight actually didn’t suck.
For some reason, I guess because of the delays, they just started showing a marathon of all the movies they had in stock. So I saw “Holiday,” (soo sweet) and Freedom Writers (soo formulaic) and fell asleep during Pursuit of Happyness (for the third time actually, since that’s the movie in my DVD player at home now and has been for the past week…I just can’t get past the bone scanner theft part…)
When I deplaned, I was tired and pretty much deaf.
“HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN WAITING HERE LONG?”
Pearatty lied.
“No.”
Smokey’s crinkled brow and shocked expression betrayed the truth.
“But I called! Information. From. The. Ground!”
I gave Smokey a hug and said that my goal was to become a hippie through her example.” By the time I leave here I will recycle, conserve and all in all give a crap.”
She laughed.
They always laugh.
Smokey lives in a huge basement in a faux cul de sac nearish to Downtown Portland. Her landlord upstairs has a huge dog. From the sound of it, something in the Saint Bernard family. As it runs along the floor, it sounds like barrels and barrels of rats scurrying across the ceiling in Pied Piperesque numbers. Or perhaps I think this because all through the night, pearatty would whisper “Rats!”
Just to hear me scream.
Bitch.
Proving that I cannot go 24 hours without playing games, we sat down to a game of Uno while I ate Smokey’s chili. (A day later I was told that said chili was made with tofu meat substitute. I glared. And then called poison control.)
Now, I don’t like to brag, but I was the Brooklyn Uno champion in 1983. Yes, I was a very advanced four-year-old.
So, it was little wonder that I dispatched with the atty sisters in like ten minutes during the first game. And while the second game took about an hour, I was again victorious. Despite pearatty cries of “you’re making up rules,” and her googling of “official Uno rules” every five minutes.
“Hey, so does Portland have a casino,” I asked innocently after dispatching with them for the second time in a row.
They both started laughing.
“Yeah, we had a bet about how long it would take before you asked that…or I figured you would have looked it up online before you came and we’d have to drop you off tomorrow.”
Feck! Why did I think of that???
“Sha…I don’t have to play cards every minute of every day…I can…um…play Scrabble.”
“Hey, my friends were saying we should have a Scrabble tournament at their place tomorrow!”
Grin.
They were in the beginning of a Firefly marathon, so I sat down on the bed to watch with them.
Of course, when I woke up eight hours later having no recollection of Serenity or Captain…I figure I must have fallen asleep.
I was starving to death the next morning, but when Smokey said she wanted to go to yoga class first, I didn’t complain. Nor did I whine for the next two hours about how hungry I was. Nor did I mention my intense suffering.
I was stoic.
Quietly stoic.
We headed out to a breakfast when Smokey got back — pearatty suggested we go to some French place for crepes, but when I stuck my finger down my throat and imitated gagging sounds, while rolling my eyes, she looked at me and said “you don’t like crepes?”
I said “Whatever would give you that idea?”
And then she called me retarded.
“And not in the good, nonjudgmental diagnostic way.”
I saw a couch on some dude’s lawn and became obsessed with taking pictures on it.
A couch! On a LAWN!

Portland was craaaaazy.
The brunch place looked good, but they seriously had the clumsiest waiters I’ve ever seen. In the hour that we were there, I saw one waitress bump into a waiter while he was pouring coffee, another chick dropped a few plates of food, and one guy walked into the counter.
The food was ok, but the beverages were terrible. They served chocolate syrup based hot chocolate IN A WATER glass.

Dude!
Get mugs!
(Oh, incidentally, as I was busy not complaining at the hot beverages in glasses, I saw a woman outside smoking a cigarette. I have never seen anyone look so awkward while smoking since Giovanni stole Mrs. Hall’s cigarettes when we were eight and tried to light it using the gas stove. This woman was holding it between her pinky and her ring finger, while taking like a series of mini puffs before exhaling…I thought people only smoked to look cool.)
Mr. pearatty came up from LA and joined us for the end of breakfast and the walk through Portland’s shopping district.
Hippies have the strangest stores.
There was one store called “The Monkey King,” which sold nothing but Buddhas and Chinese novelty items. Except monkeys.
Then there was this International Gift store, which sold obscure jewel encrusted instruments.
Easily bored, yet bearing it stoically and quietly, I decided to walk ahead — when I turned around to reconvene with the rest of my party there was a huge wolf blocking the store entrance!

Assuming that they were already lost, I ran and saved myself. I’m sure it’s what they would have wanted.
I’ve got no segue for this, but what’s the deal with Hippies not having paper towels OR electric hand blowers in the bathroom. No. All they’ve got is like a towel hanging down. Do they honestly think that I intend to wipe my newly clean hands on some rag that has been hanging there for eighteen years collecting microbes from strange palms all day long? Cause if that is what they thought…they were wrong.

Mr. pearatty had given Smokey one of his old BMWs when she moved to Portland. The only problem with it is that sometimes it would stall. And sometimes when it stalled, the steering wheel would lock. And sometimes when it stalled and wheel would lock, we might have been in the middle of a U-turn and now the car is perpendicular to the street, blocking traffic from both directions and neighbors are coming out of their homes “to help.”
“Did that freak you out,” Smokey asked me later.
“Pshaa…no way…cool as a cucumber…I handle car trouble all the time. I am a seasoned, calm, professional.”
To Smokey’s credit, she and Mr. Pearatty pushed the car to the side of the road and which some elbow grease and WD-40 got the car moving again.
We went to Smokey’s apartment and I napped while she showed Mr. Pearatty around.
When I woke up, pearatty told me that I apparently insisted that we go see Black Snake Moan.
“Dude? That Samuel L. Jackson movie?? With like a naked Christina Ricci?”
“Yes. You said you wanted to go,” she said.
“Uhm…so…basically, while I was sleeping you said “hey Dawn, if you want to go see Black Snake Moan, say absolutely nothing…ok…we’ll go”
“Maybe.”
In the end, we ended going to see that Ryan Phillipe flick about the spy…”Breach.” We went with Smokey and one of her friends that pearatty described as “just like your friend Fisch.”
“How so?”
“He’s tall, thin, dark haired, Jewish and…um…quirky.”
And considering within minutes of meeting me, Fisch 2 was instructing to put my phone away and enjoy the scenery, gotta say the likeness was uncanny.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Breach or if you ever plan to so (SPOILER WATCH IN NEXT THREE LINES)…but the within the broader themes of patriotism and loyalty is a sub storyline about balancing home and work life and in the end the guy decides he can’t do that as an FBI agent, so he becomes…a lawyer. Pearatty and I both burst out laughing for a good five minutes at that twist.
BAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHAHAHAHA
We tried to convince Fisch 2 to come back and play Uno with us, but he was in a mood and decided to go back to his basement apartment instead…seriously, creepy. Somehow Scrabble fell through, as did bowling and we ended up at the Hippie McDonald’s getting Free Range veggie burgers with tofu fries, while Dawn cried.
To make up for my sorrow, smokey woke up early the next day and baked chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. I totally have the best younger siblings.

Pearatty and I decided to go to downtown Portland and sightsee. We went to the largest bookstore in the world — where we saw the funniest action figures. In addition to Jesus and Moses, they had OCD man and ProcrastinaTOR.
We tried to find the Buffy comics there, but they were out.
So, we had lunch in Chinatown and then drove out to the comic book store in Mississippi, Portland.
Pearatty loves the antique shops, so I was dragged from one “other people’s garbage” store to another before we headed back to Smokey’s place.
We met up with Smokey’s lesbian friends for dinner. (Would the hippie lifestyle be complete without lesbian friends? I. Think. Not.)
“Sorry, we didn’t meet up for Scrabble with you guys yesterday. There was an America’s Top Model marathon on.”
Oh, lesbians.
Our waiter at dinner was eight feel tall. Leading me to stare at him and call him TTG (The tall guy). I called him that because pearatty insisted that constantly going “whoa that guy is tall,” every time he came to our table, was rude. -
Speaking of rude, one of the lesbians, was also an only child, so the table made much sport of the fact that we were both slightly neurotic picky eaters. We didn’t much help our case when during the ordering portion of the meal she said:
“I’ll have the bacon cheeseburger with no special sauce, pickles, lettuce, onions, or tomatoes.”
And then I said “Oh, yeah. Me too. None of that. Except onions. Oh, and ketchup. Lots of ketchup.”
And then she was like “I don’t want anything, no onions or ketchup.”
And we both abandoned our first novelty beverages because they sucked, in favor of fountain soda.
Though it was determined that Misty drinks more juices.
My last day in Portland flew by. Before I knew it, Smokey and pearatty were driving me back to the airport as pearatty cursed out Chugarte and F-train, to my great amusement.
My flight was on time and as they were showing some crappy British flick with Rene Zwelleger, I drifted off to sleep pretty quickly.
That I woke up to the bacon cheeseburger with ketchup and onions escaping from my stomach to their freedom in the plane aisle, didn’t even really put all that much of a damper on the trip.
But I think I did lose all the hippieness that I picked up.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.