Story of Kim 1: Summer of 93

While we're on the subject of girls I should have stayed the hell away from, I figured I might as well dig another one out of the more distant past. It's a torrid tale of whiskey and loneliness and a small bottle of E&J I kept by my bed for no good reason at all.

It's also a tale involving someone who reads this blog at least semi-regularly, so I will change that person's name, and he'd better have enough sense to keep his trap shut. Ready? OK then.

Back in the summer of 93 I had a pretty solid crew of friends that actually LIVED IN THE SAME CITY as me, in some cases as close as next door. We did a lot of crazy things, of course, because a) none of us really had jobs and b) I had access to a lot of really, really good LSD. I'm trying to work those things into a coherent tale, but for now you'll have to be content with the Story of Kim.

I had a friend named Edward, who I'd met while I was in school at UCO, but who was planning to transfer to another school that fall, out of state, but close by.

On a weekend in late...May, I think it was, Edward and I had spent the night drinking whiskey and arguing about the definition of art (I'm not kidding--these were the days) out on the front porch, with the ultimate result of Edward falling asleep in my bathtub. [Let's face it, the man couldn't drink brown liquor, and we both knew it, but he was always game for trying and by the time he'd start running his bath I was too drunk to care anyway.]

Sunday morning I staggered out of bed after being awakened by the grumbling and muttering of a wet, half naked Edward, surveyed the wreckage of my refrigerator, and proposed that we visit New Orleans Cafe for breakfast.

As I've mentioned in the Meghan story, New Orleans Cafe was the locus of nearly all hipster activity at the time, because it had the two things young hipsters require: cheap coffee and bad art. Well, maybe the art wasn't ALL bad, but it was mostly artists who didn't mind letting their paintings get covered in grease and soot from the kitchen, which meant a lot of dilettante hippy friends of the owner, who's a whole fucking story by himself.

Upon arriving at the place, I was comforted to see the large round table by the door was nearly full of good people, almost all of whom I knew.

[as an aside, that table held about fifteen people, if you sqeezed them in, and most days and nights you could always find someone you knew sitting at it--it was a sort of proto-friendster, facilitating introductions and contributing to (dare I say it?) a sense of community in a city that doesn't otherwise have a lot to offer for people like me. I loved that table, as greasy and fucked up as it was.]

So, we took the remaining two seats at the table, ordered breakfast, and settled in to talk. The people, as I said, were cool, and some of them close friends, but Edward and I both noticed a girl I hadn't seen before. She was attractive, with reddish hair and green eyes, and before long I was wondering how I'd managed to miss meeting her during all my other visits. She knew all the people at the table, it seemed like, and I knew everyone at the table...and she was apparently single. Hmmm...

I looked at Edward, and I could see in his beady little eyes that he was thinking the same thing.