AUGUST.

First of all, it's just a really stupid-sounding word, when you think about it. Yes? "August." Sounds like a big ball of wet toast or something.

Well, anyway, if you haven't guessed yet, August has been less than sterling around here. Much to talk about--so much, in fact, that I'll confine it to synopses:

Well, first there was Moby Grape, about which I've already spoken. That was great.

The following week we went to see The Monkees (without Nesmith)--and there was some weirdness. Do you know of this place called Manhattan Center, on 34th street between 9th and 10th? I vaguely remember it as being the site of what was going to be the Grateful Dead's first-ever New York show, which never happened because of some glitch with the promoter or something. I've never ever seen any concert, show, or other event advertised there in all the ensuing years, and I believe the place was actually shuttered for some time. Anyway, it's still called Manhattan Center, but apparently the theater inside is now called the Hammerstein Ballroom. We got these tickets the same night we got the Moby Grape tickets. Wayne saw John Fogerty there around that time and said it's a nice place. Reserved seating, too, and that's a rare commodity these days. We were in row P, which I fancy stands for "Peter is my favorite Monkee."

Anyway, Wayne was meeting us outside--he was already in NYC because some Polygram Fake-Jazz artiste was playing at J&R that afternoon--and as we trudged up the sidewalk, he was wearing a glum face. Not just the typical Swedish Glum Face, mind you, but a Really Glum Face. Now, the last time this happened was outside the Bottom Line when Arthur Lee had blown off his show--so the concept of Wayne Wearing A Glum Face, Not Just Your Typical Swedish Glum Face But A Really Glum Face, Outside A Theatre Where We're Supposed To Meet Him And Go Inside And Have A Good Time For A Change Instead Of Just Watching The Paint Peel Behind The Toaster Oven (and if I ever have to summon up that concept again, I'll acronymize it for you--so from now on, just watch out for the word WWGFNJYTSGFBRGFOTWWSTMHAGIAHGTFCIOJWPPBTO. Is that okay?) is a particularly chilling state of affairs.

Well, the show wasn't cancelled. But he informed us (glumly, in keeping) that we had better get inside quickly--the show had been moved from the Hammacher Schlemmer Ballroom, upstairs to some other space where the seating was to be general admission. WHAT?? First of all, what kind of place IS this building actually--not one abandoned theatre but an entire BRACE of abandoned theatres?? And secondly, Goddamnit, we had paid for reserved seats (at $50 each, by the way--it was a pediatric AIDS benefit or something) and now I was going to have to take what they gave me?? We were furious. No explanation was offered.

Now it gets weirder even--they take us, ten at a time, up to the SEVENTH floor in an elevator. A couple thousand of us. Ten at a time. We had, of course, taken our sweet time getting there, because we had "reserved seats." So there was quite a mob in there already. However, most people had apparently dawdled even longer than we, and as it turned out we ended up in better seats than we would have had. Folding chairs, though. Here's the weird part: the room we were in was a gorgeous theatre. Wraparound balcony, ornate decor, just beautiful. WHAT KIND OF PLACE IS THIS?? I felt like we had stepped through some lost portal to another dimension. How could this place be here so long and us not know about it?

The show was great. Their singing was better than ever, honestly. Micky in particular has not lost one scintilla of the lustre on those high notes. Although he is, to confess, starting to look a bit like Steven Seagal.

They didn't just play the Big Hits either--they tossed in several of my favorite obscure chestnuts, and Peter even did a cover of Jackie Wilson's Higher and Higher--on the BANJO.

On the way out, we (obviously) elected to take the stairs down. The stairs, also, were a big deal--not your typical zigzag fire stairs, but the real magilla, a la opera house; all marble, winding and spiraling from landing to landing. And on each landing, another cryptic sign indicating some sort of show-biz activity--"Studio H" or some such. At one point several adolescent girls with gymnast-looking bodies, dressed in Danskins, came hurtling past us on the stairs, going the other way. WHAT KIND OF PLACE IS THIS?? I fully expected that if we went down past the street level to the basement, we might in fact find a mummified Billy Rose or Cole Porter in a glass case. It was weird weird weird.

Do you know anything about this building?

Okay, so now two days later a couple of uniquely weird things happen to me at work. Right in a row. That's UNIQUELY weird. I guarantee that neither of these things has ever happened to any other retail store manager before, and they both happened to me right in a row:

First--I sell, to an old guy, a VHS to VHS-C adapter. (For you 8mm people, this is the cartridge shell that allows you to play a VHS-C camcorder tape in a regular VHS VCR.) He calls me later from home, says it doesn't work. I tell him, bring it on in and I'll either make it work or give you another one. Bring your tape with you.

He comes in, and of course he had the battery in backwards. I fix it, put in his tape, pop it into a VCR, and see on the screen--immediately, first thing--my ex-wife. Sitting at a dining-room table, giggling and saying, "Put that thing away." Not the first time I've heard her say that, you'll understand.

That was a real brain-toaster. It's kind of like walking down the street, rounding a corner, and bumping into D. B. Cooper carrying a battered briefcase with $20 bills hanging out of it.

THEN--I had five--count 'em, FIVE IN A ROW--old guys, with hearing aids IN THEIR EARS, but turned off. FIVE IN A ROW.

"That'll be $2.96."
"$2.96."
"$2.96."
"$2.96, SIR!"
"I SAID TWO NINETY-SIX, YOU DRIED-UP MOTH-EATEN DEMENTED AUDIOFASCIST BUCKET OF PUS! TURN YOUR GOD DAMNED HEARING AID ON!!! WHY DO YOU EVEN WEAR IT---TO KEEP THE MOTHS FROM FLYING OUT OF YOUR F***ING HEAD?????????"

Five times. I had completely lost my voice by the time I got to the fourth one--IN A ROW, remember--so I grabbed a piece of paper and scrawled, "Sir, please--I can't help you unless you turn your hearing aid on." He grumbles, "Aaaaah, I hate this t'ing. I hate ta use it." But he turns it on. I take care of him, he leaves. Next guy comes in, and I swear he is deaf as a stone, has a hearing aid, has it turned off. THE FIRST TIME he answers me with "Haah?" I just pick up the same sign off the counter and stick it in his face. If you could have seen the look I got.

I'm going to prepare some other signs, I think, to see if I can engineer a similar circumstance in future. Things like, "Lady, purple really isn't your color." "I told you last time, and the other nine times before that; what you need is an RF modulator." "Third aisle on your left." And of course, "What's that on your neck?"

So now we come to this past Sunday through Tuesday, 8/23-25. Against the usual insurmountable odds, we had scraped together a couple of days for a vacation of sorts. Wendy decided we should explore the Ocean Grove/Spring Lake area of the Jersey shore, which was the only part we really hadn't seen much of. We stayed at a place in Belmar, which is right between them.

The first day, Sunday, we went up to Asbury Park to see if it was as empty and scary in the daytime in the middle of the summer as it was at night, if you remember our experience from last year.

Well, the place is a ghost town. It's truly unbelievable. Literally everything (except of course the Stone Pony) is shuttered. Rats run freely along parts of the boardwalk. Casino Arena, at the South end, is boarded up. It looks
to have burned. There's grass growing IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET. A stray indigent or two can be found hunched over in the occasional doorway, looking at you like a hungry wolf. My brain was bending. I hollered, "WHERE ARE ALL THE HAPPY PEOPLE???" It was beyond my comprehension that such a prime piece of real estate could just VANISH. It really ruined my whole day--I remember when I was a kid we used to go there all the time. And when I was in college, that was just prior to the infamous Southside Johnny era--there were concerts at both Casino Arena and Convention Hall all the time. I saw all kinds of shows there--from Todd Rundgren (several times) to King Crimson. Here's more weirdness: apparently there's a move afoot to keep the corpse at least twitching--they're using Convention Hall for concerts again. In fact, a very popular post-grunge band called 311 was playing there Sunday afternoon, while we were there. So imagine this bizarre dichotomy if you can: there are several hundred kids lined up on the boardwalk waiting to go in, cars parked literally EVERYWHERE throghout the town, three sumptuous tour buses and six large Ryder trucks parked outside the hall, and another half-ton of kids sniffing around the tour busses, like they do--AND THE PLACE STILL LOOKS DESERTED. How do you figure such a phenomenon?

Next we went to Ocean Grove, or "Ocean Grave" as I will refer to it henceforth. If you're not familiar with it: it's the next town South of Asbury Park, and North of Bradley Beach, Avon, and Belmar. This is the only part of the Jersey shore that's actually on the mainland, and each town is separated from the next by a little river. There are bridges over the little rivers, duh. EXCEPT at the borders of Ocean Grave. There is only one way in and out of this place by car--from way in on the mainland. A bunch of Church Pigs--oh, sorry--"Methodists"--decided, in the 1800s, to found a lifeless, humorless, colorless, bloodless little colony of CHURCH PIGS. By the ocean. Only in the last couple of decades did the state of NJ force them to function as an actual tax-base and stop burning witches and Jews and such. All true, except for the witches and Jews, which is probably also true except I have no PROOF, you see.

Anyway, the town is still all Church Pigs and old people--I mean REALLY old people--just sitting in wheelchairs staring our into the surf with their mouths hanging slack, waiting to die--no joke. You can literally smell mothballs in the MIDDLE OF THE STREET.

This was my VACATION.

I am, of course, supposed to get three weeks. So far I got two days. And I spent a good chunk of it looking at rats and old people. I could do that HERE.

Well, anyway, why we were there--there are actually some interesting things to see there. In the center of the town is the "Great Hall"--a rather impressive auditorium/Sunday-Go-To-Meetin'-Hall/Witch Abbatoir or whatever, surrounded by a town square ringed by an actual Tent City, which still stands. Apparently there is a six-to-ten year waiting list for these tents, in which you can suffocate and read your bible or your Danielle Steele or whatever. We went back to see them a second time, Monday night--we figured they might look interesting lit up from the inside (no)--and as we walked through the square, there was a Church Pig Service going on in the Great Witch Abbatoir. All the doors and windows were wide open and there was some woman caterwauling some Pig Hymn or other (perhaps, "Nearer My Hog To Thee"??)--and I couldn't stand it anymore. As we wandered past, safely ot of eye-shot, I felt compelled to roar "HAIL SATAN." This tested the limits of the wife's sense of humor. Well, what does she know--she didn't endure fifteen years of Catholicism shoved down her throat and up her ass, like somebody else I know. Anyway, Hail Satan. Or at minimum, Christopher Lee.

Protestants bug me maximally--they have neither the twisted sense of dogma to be Catholics not the Dogged Sense of Twistma, I guess, to be Jews. They're the Miracle Whip of organized religion. Can I copyright any of that?

Well, anyway. Sunday night at dinner, in Belmar, we had the rare treat of witnessing, in the booth next to ours, two guys who had just picked up two little Surf Bunnies--and doubtless thought to impress the s**t out of them by taking them to Pat's Diner. ("Pat's--Where The Omelettes Are On Tap 24 Hours A Day", it says in the AAA book, and who ELSE are you gonna believe?) BUT, one of the guys--("Ed", apparently), had misjudged what George Carlin refers to as "his ability to metabolize ethanol." Ed went into a replica coma, right in the booth. His companion brought him outside, removed his T-shirt and laid him out on the lawn, right by our car. The waitresses kept going over to the window and giggling. When we left, half an hour later, "Ed" was still lying in what was now multicolored grass.

I'm quite sure I remember going to college but I appear to have circumnavigated that entire particular stage of existence. Then again, if I had ever gotten as swocko as "Ed" I probably wouldn't remember it anyway. So who knows.

We spent the rest of our time wandering around Spring Lake, which is where all the rich people live. Pretty impressive. Also, Monday night we had two lovely things happen: first of all we ate at a place on Route 35 called the "Ragin' Cajun"--I know that doesn't sound encouraging but the Chicken New Orleans was transcendent. It's a very funky little place carved out of an old house, and they have some extremely deep blues music playing while you suck down your food. Also: with your rolls they bring you an entire roasted head of garlic. I MAY have eaten the whole thing--I'm not sure, I blacked out and had to be carried away from the table. Like Ed.

The other event was that great thing you always get at the shore--six big f***ing elephants. Well, maybe I might be wrong about that--but we DID in fact have six big f***ing elephants, right across from the motel. It seems that the Clyde Beatty Circus was just setting up for a week in the marina across the street. So we got to go across and say hi to the friendly pachys. That was fun and unexpected.

So Wednesday I have an all-day meeting, which brings us to Thursday. I have a twelve-hours-by-myself day scheduled. Wendy has the day off. A whole bunch of annoying stuff happens to me by mid-afternoon, but never mind that. Here's what happens at around 2:00.

An 80-year-old guy, with Florida license plates (that's Strike Two) named Joseph Tomczyk (of 2506 Shady Branch Drive, Orlando--in case you should ever run into him "on the links") comes whipping into the parking lot, somewhere in his own little universe. He glances off the bumper of a woman driving across in front of my store. Then he moves diagonally away and glances off the bumper of a guy coming the other way. That guy drives away in a hurry. Got it so far?

Both those cars now have crumpled hoods and shaken drivers. Not as shaken, though, as the 80-year-old COOT, who now STEPS ON THE GAS INSTEAD OF THE BRAKE, and is hurtling towards my car, in a T-formation, at about 35 miles an hour. What's that you say, reader? It needs to be WORSE than that? Okay, how about this: somewhere in the twelve feet between his car and mine, there's a GUY WALKING WITH HIS SEVEN-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER.

I don't know how in the world he did it, but the guy ("Adam Keith", it says here) hears the other two crashes and turns around, sees the car--and with no more than half a second to spare, he picks up the girl ("Megan", it says here--normally there'd be points deducted for such an obvious yuppie name but I'm sliding on it vis-a-vis the circumstances) and set-shoots her LIKE A BASKETBALL into the bushes. Then he tries to dive out of the way but doesn't quite make it--the car catches him mid-air in the ass. Here's the amazing part--he gets away with a skinned elbow and the girl has two skinned knees. That's it.

My car, as you may have guessed, is completely destroyed. He turned it totally around.

By this time I've run outside with the phone in my hand, and locked the door. One of my customers, (who's 75 years old, but still younger than the driver) is chasing the driver, on foot, through the parking lot. Almost had a heart attack. It looked, at the time, like the driver was trying to get away--but I surmise now that he was just in some alternate dimension and driving aimlessly in semicircles. Anyway, I run over to the pedestrian Mr. Keith and his daughter, and am amazed to find them okay. I'm about to dial 911, but suddenly an amazing little piece of non-verbal communication took place between me and the pedestrian--I looked at him, he looked at me, we both looked over at the Cootmobile, back at each other, and he broke into a run. The tacit agreement was, obviously, that 911 would not be dialed till he reached the car and found out if the f***er was drunk or not. Somehow each of us plainly understood the concept that, if he was drunk, we were going to pull him out of the car without opening the window first. THEN we'd call 911 and the cops could have what was LEFT.

Of course, he wasn't drunk. We run back to the little girl, as the crowd gathers, and I rush the two pedestrians into the store and lock the door again. I insist that the two of them get their wounds cleaned up, and I let my other customer guard Mr. Golf-Pants until the cops get there.

So then, of course, I have to spend most of the rest of the afternoon out in the parking lot, with the cops, with the door locked--as a whole herd of a**holes ignore the vast carnage and ask why I'm not open just now. Pointing somberly and saying "That's my car" does not affect them in the least. F***ing jerks.

I had it towed, and I have my doubts that it can be put back in drivable shape for what insurance is gonna give me for it.

Well, I wrote that last night--just got back from Mr. Mechanic and the car is, in fact, over with. Which really pisses me off because it drives just fine. But it'll never pass inspection with no bumper and Jimmy says there isn't enough solid car left to attach one to.