Remember Meg’s doctoral dissertation, My Weekend in Omaha, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and
is commonly assigned in college literature classes? Well, here’s my term paper
in Freshman Composition, titled “I Went to Denver Recently to Visit My Friend
Bobo.” It was four hours late, in 13 point font, and with suspiciously wide
margins:
- Bobo lives near an Ethiopian restaurant that
sells food for $1.75 “per scoop.” Down the road, a Chinese restaurant has
adopted the same business plan. IT IS GENIUS. I didn’t try this but I hope you
can get food “to go” by just holding out your hand.
- Speaking of, apparently Denver is full of
Ethiopians, including the manager of the liquor store across the street from
Bobo’s apartment. He has a little trio of flags, USA/Ethiopia/Colorado, on top
of his TV, which is always playing spy movies. He sells Bobo exactly how much
liquor he thinks Bobo needs, occasionally putting a bottle back with a gentle
“No. You have enough already.”
- A friend of Bobo asked me if I wanted any
“edibles.” In my innocence I thought this meant snacks, and so I kept saying,
“Oh, you know, just something basic like taquitos or whatever.” Apparently
“edibles” actually means “food with pot in it which you can buy legally because
of Colorado’s amusingly lax medical marijuana laws.” It took two full days to
iron this confusion out, because Bobo’s friend was stoned and I am an idiot.
- Hypothetically, what do you think happens if you
give me some medical-grade marijuana? Hypothetically, what happens is that I
eat an enormous quesadilla, talk for half an hour about what Green Day songs
would be funny to commit suicide to, and then go to sleep for ten hours. (My
conclusion was “pretty much any track from Nimrod
depending on the circumstances.”)
- I know, I know, I’m a child, but I never get tired of seeing animals mate, ever. Denver’s
central park was absolutely full of Canada geese just going to town on one
another and I got a good giggle out of that.
- A drunk old Greek man who was bartending at the
PS Lounge on Colfax took fifteen minutes to decide that my (real) driver’s
license was fake:
DOGM: This doesn’t look like you.
Me: It was taken eight years and forty
pounds ago.
DOGM: ….
DOGM: ….
DOGM: …It doesn’t look like you.
Me: It’s an old picture. Look, here’s a
college ID and several debit cards.
DOGM: ….
DOGM: ….
DOGM: …. This picture has nothing to do
with you.
Me: IT’S MY DRIVER’S LICENSE PICTURE. IT HAS
EVERYTHING TO DO WITH ME. YOU ARE
DRUNK.
You can imagine where it went from there.
- I’m sorry I didn’t do a reader meetup while I
was there. I’ll be honest: I’d j-j-j-just finished school and hadn’t seen Bobo
in ForLikeEver, and I didn’t feel up to the delicate task of getting just drunk
enough that I wasn’t cripplingly shy but not
so drunk that I was intolerable. You deserve better. For example, I went
through a phase earlier this year where every time I got drunk, I started
telling the story of How Mayonnaise Got Invented. (See, during the Seven Years
War, the Marechal de Mahon was leading the French forces at the Battle of Belle
Isle, and his cook ran out of a lot of things so he had to make a sauce out of
only oil and eggs, and so Mahonnaise sauce, which over the years…) Everyone
talks about how graduate school opens doors; no one tells you it makes you
aggressively, intolerably boring.
- While in Denver, I met my
parents’ best friends from their youth, which was pleasant, but awkward:
“How are your parents?”
“Divorced.”
“Oh. Well, is your mother okay?”
“Well, she just had a heart attack, but it
was a little one.”
“Oh. Are you working?
“I just wrote a book making light of war crimes.”
“I just wrote a book making light of war crimes.”
“Oh.”
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