A Bittersweet Haze

A different sort of gray than the previous post…

I was in St. Louis for the weekend. A high school buddy of mine is getting married in September, so the bachelor party was this weekend. My brother, who lives in St. Charles, was in Springfield visiting my sister, so I didn’t visit until my way back Sunday evening.

Oh, where to begin. If I give a complete synopsis of what I did, it sounds like yet another “Internet Noise” blog of which the author is completely self-obsessed yet oblivious to just how inane his writings are. It would come off as the product of another Twitter Twit but without the conciseness.

We can’t have that.

So I must attempt to impart some sense of meaning to the experience, some introspection worth mentioning. There was plenty of that this weekend, but it’s so abstract that I doubt I would be able to explain it.

I want to stress that the weekend wasn’t all fun and games, and it most certainly wasn’t a campaign of reckless debauchery.

But since all of it is certainly worth mentioning, I might as well give that synopsis I am so loathe to tell. I hate how pompous it is to detail one’s exploits. I imagine most of you are skimming anyway (or even scrolling straight past the whole thing).

Friday I headed out right after lunch, intending to spend the afternoon reading at Barnes & Noble and milling around the Mid Rivers Mall before continuing to David and Lindsay’s place. I noticed that I had run over a very large nail, so I abandoned my plan of hanging out and limped my way to Wal-Mart in St. Charles, taking the side roads.

Wal-Mart, after finally getting to my car, told me I’d have to replace the tire completely. Then, after trying to do that, in all their expertise, they told me that they couldn’t get the last lug nut off (wtf?!), so I’d have to “take it to a regular mechanic.” You mean… a real mechanic.

So I hobbled over to Auto Tire, losing air with every passing moment. They were pretty busy, but I had excellent service from them in the past. And since I didn’t have the air to go to a third place, I told them I was pretty much there whether I liked it or not. So I left them my car and proceeded on foot to the Fantasy Shop, the nerd store down the street, where I would wait for my tire whilst perusing Eberron sourcebooks.

I finally got my wheels back, and by this point I had already spent more than the budget for the hotel room. And I hadn’t even technically gotten into town yet. Morale was low, so I headed to Picasso’s, my old sanctuary coffee shop, to reflect and to watch part of Kingdom of Heaven: The Director’s Cut on DVD, which I had packed in my laptop case. It’s pretty much my favorite film (and film score). And somehow, during the course of the weekend of epic posse action, I managed enough time alone to watch it. Twice.

By this point, my brother’s family had already departed. I was at Schnuck’s, trying to decide on a type of beer for the evening before arriving at Dave’s house, when the groom-to-be called me and reminded me to bring an air mattress. I had forgotten one. Naturally, after what had already transpired, I was beginning to curse the entire day for its bad fortune. But then I recalled that I still had the keys to my brother’s house. My luck, it would seem, had turned around.

I told you this was inane.

By the way, Friday night was a coed hangout, and we stayed at their house. Saturday was the downtown hotel stay.

Finally getting to David and Lindsay’s house to pop open that first Killian’s after a bad day was quite a relief. I had forgotten that David and Lindsay have two cats. For me, that sucked a little bit. We went to a smoky bar, which didn’t help. And I was up until after 4:00, talking to one of the groomsmen, who I’d never met before that night. Other than that, Friday night was not particularly noteworthy, just a nice time with old friends.

Saturday afternoon, we went to the hotel to check into our two rooms before dinner. As we took our bags past the front desk, the group of us spanning almost the entire spectrum of styles of facial hair and fashion, the guy at the front desk said we looked like rock stars. I said we’d be trashing the hotel room like it, too.

It was a culture shock to have a top floor hotel view where as soon as you open the curtains the St. Louis Arch punches you in the face. As the other guys took forever getting ready, I just sat next to the window, feeling like the laid-back rock star I was described to be.

And so began the night at the Landing, the entertainment district on the riverfront, book-ended by the Arch and several casinos.

Though I felt bad about sinking money into my car, I tried to enjoy the weekend as much as I could. The weather was Idyllic (we sat outside to eat), and the food and fellowship was good. Most of the night I would have rewritten. Would it were that easy.

The piano bar was a meat market. Somebody should do a study, because every time I go to a piano bar I run into eight bachelorette parties and no bachelor parties. Anyway, it was just packed to the gills with people wanting to get laid. I had to reign in my inner Rorschach, because it was too loud for me to even hear myself be cynical.

I know, I know. “It’s a bachelor party, it’s supposed to be raunchy and wild.” I just prefer a little dignity and the ability to hear what people are saying. I prefer to accompany my friends with grace. To each his own, I guess. But I wish the powers that be had actually gone to the very minimum amount of professional effort to do a sound test before the night began. Seriously. Not impressed, piano bar.

As for the second bar we went to, I’ll just skip that whole chapter.

After that is where our paths diverged. The groom and I went on a two-hour divertissement that I’m not allowed to talk about but was by far the most Larry David-esque misadventure of my entire life. Anyone else in my shoes would have been pissed off, but I found it hilarious.

The way I see it, it’s not really a bachelor party unless things go horribly awry.

Finally, the very angry other groomsmen found us. They were mad because we were holding them up. The plan was to go to the strip bar, but the groom was more or less asleep on the bathroom floor (in his defense, he did have to work earlier that day). Eventually, they said that if we really wanted to meet them, we’d know where to find them, and they hailed a cab while I was busy covering my tracks with something unrelated.

So basically, here’s my question: how can you have a bachelor party without the bachelor?! That’s just a party, isn’t it? The groom-to-be had finally crashed, apologizing to me for preventing me from going to the strip bar. I didn’t mind; had I gone to a strip bar, it could only have resulted in bloodshed.

But the groom-to-be still had some spunk in him. We went back to the Landing, then to Lumiere’s Place, the closest casino. Eventually, we stopped at the Irish pub in the hotel for a nightcap, heavy on the atmosphere (set design is how I roll). I then forgot the hard lesson I learned years ago in downtown Chicago: hotel bars charge twice as much, because hotel bars are for rich out-of-towners with no desire to actually explore. $8.25 for a Bailey’s on the rocks. That was the final mistake I made that night. The ultimate “fuck you” to the warrior bard.

Unfortunately for me, less than two hours later the others returned from their expedition for breasts, and the dude sharing my bed snored so much that I literally couldn’t sleep a wink. I showered and left the hotel, walking to the park to watch the sunrise beneath the Arch.

Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, ever since Thursday I had been seriously pondering the music I had been working on, some projects necessitating that I brush up on my Renaissance counterpoint hardcore. So the whole weekend, to me, had an unseen air of professionalism. That’s about the best way I can describe it. Watching Kingdom of Heaven twice in a weekend contributed to messing with my head, to be sure.

So when Sunday afternoon came around, and I was left to my devices for several hours before my brother got back into town, I had a lot to think about. The whole weekend I felt good and bad at the same time.

Sunday, it was actually chilly. And cloudy. Wandering around the olde-style shops, looking at Halloween decorations, I couldn’t shake the pervasive sense of wrongness of it all: October of last year was perhaps the most miserable of my life, riddled with stress and dread and fear of my social and professional future. And I hated the entire St. Louis area for all the terrible memories it gave me… last fall. And now, autumn was upon me again. And I was wandering around St. Charles, killing time.

All weekend I had been unable to shake the crystal-clear feeling of being dejected in St. Charles this past Christmas, alone at one of my sanctuary coffee shops, avoiding family and customers, listening to iTunes in the early evenings of winter, drinking coffee with a shot of holiday blues. But this weekend was August. It wasn’t October, November, or December. And I wasn’t living there—I was only visiting. And I wasn’t working as a cashier anymore. And I had worked on music every day for the past two weeks. And I had just finished a bachelor party that lasted most of a weekend. Big difference. It’s been almost a year since the Worst of the Worst, which is not long enough to forget. You can’t possibly know. But you don’t have to.

Sunday afternoon, in the Mirror of Erised, I saw a restaurant patio table full of my friends getting drunk, and I was wearing a nice new sweater, for it was autumn, and all was well.

And the Cardinals won. When you’re in downtown St. Louis, that’s kind of a big deal.

Overall, the weekend was a mixture of great fun, social interaction, cavalier spirit and regret, sleep deprivation, raucousness and quiet dignity, lightheartedness and melancholy, relief, victory, and defeat. Somehow.

Once again, I’ve put everyone off by writing too long and still failing to hit the nail on the head.

I hate blogging.