Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

So there I was in the back of a deathmobile, and not the funny one from Animal House, speeding to Philadelphia with a family of bizarre cheapskates with broccoli in their pockets. Take that, man.

I spent the trip deeply engrossed in the static on my headphones. We were in some bizarre Bermuda Triangle of the radio, where the New York stations didn’t come in, the New Jersey stations didn’t quite come in, and the Philadelphia stations almost came in. But the sounds in my ears were better than the sounds coming from the Ming family, which consisted of Marvin yelling at his mom in Chinese, his mom getting all pissy in Chinese, and his dad getting lost and misreading all the highway signs, which were not in Chinese but may as well have been as every time I saw an exit sign I prayed that Marvin’s Dad would see it in time, which he did not when we arrived in AC and he almost flipped the car swerving through a lane of traffic to get off.

It was dark when we go to Philly. I didn’t see a single guy in a silly 1700s suit.. I did see at least 176 colleges but I wasn’t counting on this trip. That was twenty years in the future, and in Boston, and I had no way of knowing that at the time anyway.

The plan was to pick up Marv’s brother and go to dinner. There were only two things wrong with the plan. One- he wasn’t home. Two- he didn’t know we were coming.

Marv’s brother had no clue we were coming. We got to his apartment, parked the car right outside, and rang the bell to his building. We waited. We rang again. We waited. Marvin noticed that the lights in his windows (his brother’s windows, that is) were out and the whole apartment seemed dark.

An argument in Chinese ensued.

I stood back a bit and prayed that I was really back in Brooklyn and this was all a dream caused by some sort of overdose of cough medicine. Or a medically induced coma, or the last stages of oxygen deprivation causing me to hallucinate, anything that meant that I was not really there with a bunch of kooks.

But I was and I said, hopefully, “So I guess we should go home?”

That caused another argument. I already knew a bit about this one because Marvin and his brother weren’t getting along so well and Marvin would have been thrilled to go home. But not his mom who started crying. Marvin was scowling, mom was crying, dad was trying to make peace, and I was standing there out of place, very awkward and very Caucasian.

I was trying to stand about as far from then as I could so that no one walking by would see me and think I was a part of that noise. It was a quiet street and I expected the cops to show up at anytime and arrest them for disturbing the peace. In fact that was what I was desperately hoping would happen. I could always take the train back home. I backed away so far without looking that I bumped into a wall.

However, it wasn’t a wall. When I turned around and saw what it really was a burst of insight came upon me. I suddenly experienced a moment of perfect clarity. I knew what to do. I knew how to fix the situation. In that moment every synapse fired in perfect rhythm, every thought was focused, I could solve everything. It was genius. I cleared my throat and said “why don’t you call him?” I had bumped into a pay phone.

Call they did.

After calling the apartment which he was not in, they reached him at another number which I was not able to discover. Predictably, the brother had plans and wasn’t happy that he had to cancel them. In fact he refused to see them. Marvin, smugly, gave me a play by play of the call. He wanted to go home too. After all, he had a pants full of purloined chicken teriyaki. .

Mom cried, dad begged, and the brother agreed to meet them at a restaurant in Chinatown. Yes, Philly has a Chinatown too. Unlike the NYC version, this one is relatively straight and confined to one avenue, as opposed to the catacombs and warrens of Mott Street, Hester, Canal, et al. However, the restaurant we were going to eat in was, illogically (as was most everything that Marvin was involved with) located down a dark alley and in the basement of a store that sold, I think, crap. Though he never said it, I’m sure Marv Sr found the “cheapest Chinese restaurant in town.”

The basement was dark and furnished with a single long table at which we sat. Around the walls were coolers like you would take to the beach. I found out that they held cans of soda and finally got to drink some Pepsi, if only because I asked the waiter for it in a low voice and opened the can before Marv Sr could spot it and send it back.

Ever see “A Christmas Story,” where the family spends Christmas in a Chinese restaurant and they were served a duck with the head still attached? I had the same meal. But unlike the well-lit place they ate in, I was in a basement with cheap, peeling wood paneling, a waiter in a stained apron, and I was inspecting the chopsticks because I was sure they were left over from whomever ate there last.

To say that tensions were simmering at the table was an understatement. I could see the love glared from Marvin’s brother’s eyes and drilled into his mom’s head. I heard all the angry Chinese words but understood none of them, except “fuck,” which I understand is one of those words that means the same thing in Chinese and English, like “shit” and “Playboy magazine,” which really did come up in the angry conversation but I have never known for sure in what context. From what I know about Marvin, his lack of a bed, and his desire to “avoid temptation” I think he must have been mad that his brother brought it into the house and, I’m sure, forced Marvin to look at it, which in turn caused him to give in to temptation and, well, jerk off. (I have a basis for this theory and it involves pornographic stories hidden in a public library. You’ll have to wait for that story.)

I spent a good deal of time reading the fine print on my Pepsi can. It was strange. Back then, I wasn’t the seasoned traveler of the world I am now. I’ve been to London, Scotland, Paris, and Cleveland since then, but at that time a trip any farther than New Jersey was exotic. The soda can had an ad for a Philly radio station. It looked like any old NYC can but for the call letters. It all felt a bit like The Twilight Zone episode where a time traveler zaps back to the past and steps on a prehistoric flower and changes history, so that when he returns to his correct era all the Pepsi cans have strange ads on them. That episode was written by Art Lieberman, as was the Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder” on which it was based.

I ate very little at this meal because, in the dark, I wasn’t sure if the fowl was really a duck or, as I feared, a crow. Whatever the bird was, Marvin stuck some in his pockets and his mom got the bones (yes, bones) wrapped up to go.

The three Mings were all tense, having said very little (and even less to me) throughout the meal. I was just glad it was over, but the happiness was mixed with white-knuckle fear since I had to drive back with Marv’s dad behind the wheel.

Marv’s brother shook Marv’s hand, kissed his dad, said something terse to his mom and left. Marv Sr paid the bill and left no tip as far as I could see, and we got back in the car to go home.

I made it safely, though I was in a cold sweat because we spent twenty minutes heading towards AC again and I was afraid he’d make more wrong turns and I’d end up in Newark, or maybe Outer Mongolia.

I never got in that car again.