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Monday 30th June to Saturday July 5th The fourth of July is a big day for Americans, in fact it's by far and away the biggest day of the social calendar. A day more than any other when they celebrate their overbearing sense of national pride combined with their Independence from us Brits by essentially doing two things; i) bedecking anything and everything in stars and stripes and ii) getting pissed out of their tiny little minds. Anything goes and if it wasn’t for the boys in blue no doubt a lot more would too, the only irony of it all being that the main identitifying source of pride of any nation, it’s mother tongue, isn’t even their own. They stole it from us.
To mark the occasion in tandem with warming my new home and rejoicing a days public holiday Phil and I had arranged a small get together but before the celebrations could begin there was the little matter of getting through my re-scheduled Refinery Safety Training which had been harshly curtailed the previous week due to nothing more than a couple of miserly minutes.
On Tuesday morning, anxious not to repeat the nightmare scenario
Boyz n the Hood
Party in the Park.of the previous week I arrived at the Long Beach Medical Centre with time to spare and with the necessary documents to hand, queued and enrolled with as much polite co-operation as humanly possible answering questions clearly and precisely and made my way up to the second floor classroom as instructed. It was two minutes to eight as I entered and the room was already packed, so much so that it was all I could do to squeeze in and close the door behind me as I took the only available seat at the end of the narrow benched desk that lined the wall. Forty or so other students were crammed onto five other benches facing the front and each and every one barring the mustachioed Richard Dreyfuss lookalike instructor, two white guy’s huddled nervously together on the front row, a couple of Hispanics and myself possessed one thing in common, they were all soul brothers, blacker than the Ace of Spades. Unsure whether I’d found the right room or accidentally stumbled across an audition for the next Spike Lee production I sat quietly motionless until I was absolutely sure I was in the right place. I’m certainly not racist
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July 4th. Beer and ice. but still made doubly sure that eye contact with any of my class mates was avoided for anything longer than a nano second and silently thanked my lucky stars that the only seat available when I entered, the one I was now sat in, was at the very back of the class and facing the side wall.
As befits a day free from the office environment I’d chosen to wear my shorts co-ordinated neatly with pop socks and trainers but as I looked around quickly realized my combats weren’t exactly the in vogue attire. It wasn’t just the colour of my skin that made me stand out like a sore thumb. A lack of neck tattoo’s, oversized tee shirt and two foot wide denim three quarter shorts clinging loosely to the waist six inches below the top of the bum crack and revealing undies that didn’t appear to have seen water or soap this side of Easter didn’t help either, nor for that matter the lack of industrial shipyard sized gold chains and medallions hanging around my neck. Rainer had warned me that the course content was pretty intense but perhaps not wanting to worry me had neglected to
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Party in the Park mention that it would take place under constant threat of a drive by shooting.
A heck of a lot of things can go wrong for a heck of a lot of reasons on a working oil refinery that can endanger human safety and we had to gloss through them all; toxicology, fire, exposures, chemicals, they were all covered and a lot more. I started by taking notes as Dreyfuss progressed through the slideshow at a comfortable rate sporadically trying, without much luck I hasten to add, to entice some form of audience participation out of the boys from the ‘hood but as time progressed unfortunately so did he and as the end of the course approached he was sounding more like an Irish racing commentator as the horses neared the finish line than a health and safety expert. To keep pace with his speed of light ramblings the slideshow resembled the reels of a one armed bandit. He seemed so intent on finishing, handing over to the quizmasters and going for lunch that the next slide was flashed up before you’d had time to even focus on the previous one and for the last fifteen minutes I downed my
pen and sat back as the realisation came over me that attempting to write anything was going to be an exercise in total futility.
Fortunately for us all the test was, much like the driving test the week before presented in a multiple choice format which assisted greatly in my achieving a score that enabled me to walk out into the hot afternoon sun with an accreditation card nestling snugly in my wallet. It was only two thirty, hardly worth returning to the office so instead I headed to Carson City for another visit to Ikea.
You’d think after four or five previous visits I’d be totally familiar with the store layout on all three floors but I suppose rather inevitably for me I wasn’t. The previously documented stresses and full speed ahead strains of my earlier visits had seen to that. Each previous trip at some point or other I’d lost my bearings and had to ask a member of staff for directions to this or that despite the arrows placed on the floor to guide shoppers which I had by now become convinced some joker kept unpeeling and placing back pointing in a totally different direction
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Party in the Park with Stephen and the girls altogether. I’d considered discreetly dropping small pieces of bread in the manner of Hansel and Gretel to ensure I never again had to ask an employee where the stairs or elevators were but forgot to stop off for a loaf en route and somewhat unsurprisingly, after parking my trolley to help speed up my search around the market place found myself struggling to find it again. I re-traced my route not once, not twice but three times from the house plants, through the lighting, bedding and the artwork and picture frames to the elevator yet still there was no sign. It was as though the thing had evaporated into thin air. Where the hell was it ?
I was seriously beginning to doubt my sanity, questioning again and again if I was actually in the midst of some bizarre nightmare or worse still if I’d ever had a trolley in the first place when I noticed four glasses and a picture frame stacked clumsily on a display of vases, the very same glasses and frame I’d carefully set down in my trolley twenty minutes earlier. Like a bloodhound discovering a scent for the first time my eyes widened and
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LB Municipal Band do Lil Brown Jug. my ears pricked and I quickly noticed a couple more frames identical to ones I’d earlier selected. I was sane after all. By now sensing I was close I was pacing through the market place almost at a jog when I suddenly came across something that struck me as very, very strange. The market place was the last part of the store before you entered the self service area, the checkouts and then the exits and yet here was a man of Chinese extraction accompanied only by a young boy of maybe six or seven years old and a baby sleeping in a carry cot which had been untidily and no doubt somewhat hurriedly strapped to a shopping trolley. Apart from the cot the trolley was empty. I have been to Ikea’s many, many times in my lifetime and still defy anybody to browse the full length and depth of a store without putting anything, at least a free catalogue or a cheap and nasty hot dog into their trolley. It’s nigh on an impossibility to totally resist the cheap household bric a brac that populates the store and I consequently knew I had my man.
I recalled two
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Party in the Park. You don't lose it ! weeks earlier when, with pressure at a peak and the sweat beginning to flow I’d removed the Mexican’s things from his trolley, replaced them with mine and then denied all knowledge when he’d politely confronted me on the matter but I was overcome with a combination of relief at knowing I wasn’t half way to the nut house after all and anger at the man’s audacity that before I’d had a chance to formulate a plan or smile at the total irony of the whole situation I’d totally uncharacteristically stormed up to him, probably traumatizing his young son in the process.
“Did you just take that stuff out of that trolley ?” I demanded pointing across the floor to the frame and glasses that was making a nonsense of the carefully choreographed vase display and ignoring all the other shoppers heads that were by now turning my way.
He shrugged his shoulders in a way that suggested 100% guilt but didn’t say a word. I repeated myself louder and an octave higher but quickly realized I was going to get nowhere as he shrugged again, muttered something oriental and proceeded to slowly and sheepishly move away. As I
Boyz 'n the Hood
Party in the Park. Phil took his Harem along again. turned a smile came across my face. What’s good for the goose I thought as I headed to replace my goods. Lesson well and truly learned.
I’d thankfully completely calmed down when I left the store to head for the Jeep. As I stopped to cross a car courteously slowed to a halt to let me proceed driven by an Asian women in her mid thirties. Along side her was the very same man sheepishly shielding his face in an attempt to avoid my glare in much the same way a movie star avoids the intrusive lens of the prying Paparazzi and it was all I could do to resist running up and putting my foot through each of the car headlights. Instead I smiled and nodded, waved a wave of appreciation, crossed and drove home.
The City of Long Beach entertains it’s residents, or at least those up for a bit of entertaining each July with a series of ‘Parties in the Parks’ whereby the Long Beach Municipal Brass Band performs a series of themed concerts at various patches of greenery across the city. Thursday was the turn of my local park, situated alongside the Marine Stadium,
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Brian, Monica and Phil. a stretch of man made waterway reserved solely for water sports and after a trip to the gym Phil and I headed off on the bikes to see what it was all about. It was clear as we approached that a lot of the local residents are indeed up for a spot of entertaining as the familiar sounds of Glenn Miller (the evenings theme was World War Two), which somehow always seem to raise the mood filtered out over a huge audience of picnicking, wine drinking, deck chaired locals. The formula here was plain to see, kids let loose to play in total safety whilst the parents get nicely pissed on a bottle or two of last years Merlot, an easy paced relaxing preparation for the following days binge and all to the instantly recognizable strains of the Chatanooga Choo Choo. It reminded me so much of the fete’s you sometimes see in the movies, the only in America types where kids carry miniature stars and stripes to a background of carousels and big wheels. I tried to picture the scene being replicated in Whitby Park but couldn’t so poured another glass and sat back to enjoy.
Throughout the
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Party in the Park with Jo Jo Summer months Bayshore, the street outside my apartment is closed to traffic by an over zealous police force effectively transforming it into a promenade between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Not only is this a slight inconvenience at weekends but also meant that I was up earlier than I’d have preferred on a day off the following morning to find an alternative parking spot before the barriers went up and I found myself trapped in a tow-away situation. July 4th is of course a national holiday and due to this fact the nearest spot I could find was about seven blocks away. When I returned the beach had been transformed into a building site as awnings were in the process of being erected everywhere as revellers attempted to stake out their very own piece of sandy ground and by 9am Phil and I had erected ours right smack bang across the road from the flat.
I’d heard tales of the previous year when fights had broken out between drunken partyers and by eleven o’clock as the beach crowd started to swell a large police presence had already started to gather. Everything that moved, bikes, cars, people, dogs were
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Phil and Lisa at Party in the Park all bedecked in the colours of Uncle Sam and a neighbour was even colouring Bayshore's tarmac to match. The local fuzz surprisingly didn't seem to object to this but remained put for the day which fortunately put paid to any repeat occurrences of the previous year but that’s not to say the day was without security scares. About one o’clock, after the first of our guests had started to congregate under the beach awnings I noticed out of the corner of my eye four girls climbing the stairwell to our apartment across the street. These particular stairs only service two flats, Phil’s on the first floor which was housing the party grub and mine on the second which held the booze and I knew there was no reason for anybody I didn’t recognize to be going up there.
I was aware Phil was in one of the flats but not which one but also knew that both front doors had been left open so quickly crossed, strode up the steps three at a time and came across four girls in their early twenties, two of whom were completely wasted to the point of being almost rag dollish lounging around
and rolling a joint on Phil’s balcony. I didn’t say anything, just took a seat and waited for them to notice a gate crasher had just entered their party. Suddenly, one of the more coherent ones rose and started scaling the next flight.
“Oi, were the f*** d’you think you’re going?” I called and she turned seemingly almost offended that I’d had the audacity to question her motive’s. For the remainder of the day both flats were kept firmly locked unless occupied and the rest of a super day was spent lounging on the beach until the sun went down, taking a break from the festivities by taking a short bike ride down the beach, hiring a Kayak for a swift paddle around Naples Island evading the many water gun ambushes that emanated from the gardens of the rich and wealthy and then by watching the spectacular Queen Mary firework display from Dan and Lisa’s roof top terrace. Some time after midnight I staggered the short journey home alone, Phil sticking very true to form by crashing out on Dan’s couch.
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waymo
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You seriously are turning into victor meldrew !