Don't call it a comeback...

Words and Art: Manuel Martinez

Manuel and the Wine Magnate

Manuel and I met during the first couple months we were both working at a restaurant called Aziza. It was my first-ever bartending job and they only had a couple shifts per week for me behind the bar, so I ended up running food out of the kitchen sometimes to make extra money and Manuel was back there as an expo, calling the dishes as servers asked the prep line to fire them, and telling me where to run the food.

It was pretty braindead work for both of us, so mostly we stood around at the line joking around and telling each other stories. Add some good times after work doing shots and drinking beers at the Irish pub across the street, and boom, we were pals.

But I remember specifically a story he told me early on when I thought, “I’m gonna be friends with this guy for sure.” And here’s that story.

So, back in the day Manuel was dating a girl named Gina, whose grandfather was Old Man Maroncelli, the California wine magnate. Manuel and Gina had met working at another restaurant where Manuel was serving and Gina got hired on as the new host.

“We were like, ‘New host!’ Every time there was a new host, there was a finite amount of time before someone was gonna make a move, and then you had to back off and give him a fair shake,” Manuel told me. “So I jumped first.”

Manuel made it happen and they’d dated for two or three months when she invited him up to the vineyard in Napa for a big family barbecue. Old Man Maroncelli was hosting and when Manuel arrived, he wanted to be a gracious guest, so he walked right up and held out his hand and said, “Hello, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” and thanked him for the invitation.

The old man turned around. No eye contact, no handshake, nothing. Just a complete and brutal snub.

“And nobody noticed!” Manuel said. “Nobody noticed but me! Like because he’s the patriarch he gets to get away with being an asshole. And I figured, I’m the new guy, so I tried to make some excuse for the man, like maybe he didn’t see me. Whatever.”

So, Manuel’s still eating a nice meal and drinking good wine in a beautiful vineyard with this hot girl he’s dating, so what the hell. He can still have a good time. And he goes about the party enjoying himself and giving the old man some berth, because the dude obviously doesn’t want to talk to this strange Mexican his granddaughter dragged in.

But as the old man is walking around hosting and checking in on everybody, time after time the guy makes a point of talking through Manuel.

“It was like I was literally a ghost. I’d answer somebody’s question and the old guy would just talk right past me, to the guy who was behind me. I wanted to kick him in the balls.”

As the night wound down, everyone got ready to go, and just as Manuel was putting on his jacket and heading for the door the old man came rushing up and took Manuel aside.

The old man put a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye.

He said, “I want to know what your intentions are with my granddaughter.”

Manuel smiled, and looked the old man right back in the eye, and said:

“I’m gonna get her pregnant and steal ALL of your money.”

By the time the old man recovered from his near-heart attack and started looking around for a gun, Manuel and Gina had left. To go spend some Maroncelli money and screw in the car.

When Manuel told me the story, I laughed so hard the chef almost kicked me out of the kitchen. And that, as the fella said, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.


Post-Script: As Manuel was researching this story and looking for the old man on Google to find a photo reference, he made an interesting discovery. The guy died in 2008. So, in a weird sort of way, consider this a tribute. The guy might have been a dick, but at least he left us with a story to tell.


Words: Sean Murray
Art: Manuel Martinez

Delayed, or: The Russian Driver

So, we're behind on the blog this week. This is pretty much entirely my fault. We're going to be shifting to stories from Manuel's life for a bit, which I'm really excited about because the dude has some amazing stories. But I'm way behind on typing them up. I haven't even sent a draft Manuel's way yet for this week's story, so I suppose it's wise to just admit we're taking an off week.

However, I have a wee vignette to share. It's not really visual enough to have Manuel draw but it's one of those brief chance meetings that stuck out for me.

--------

My birthday is the day after Christmas. I turned 29 a few weeks ago, and I celebrated with a bunch of great friends at a couple bars in North Beach, across town from where I live, in the Excelsior. This is a cutty neighborhood, way out at the end of the city. If I mention to people I live there, six times out of ten they ask, "Where?" And that's people who also live in San Francisco.

Anyway, I called a cab to get me to the bar. I was by myself, meeting some people there, but the cab that showed up was one of those big van cabs.

Well, that was pretty cool. I smiled to myself that I got to stretch out in this nice big van the whole way across town and sidled on in.

The cab driver was this blonde lady, with real short hair, maybe 45 or 50 years old. She seemed confused at first and had a hard time figuring out her way to the freeway.

After I talked her to the on ramp, I asked her, "How long have you been a cab driver?" I was curious if she was disoriented because she was new at driving around the city or because I lived in the boonies.

"About... a year and one half," she said. She had a striking Russian accent -- it was just a tiny bit husky, but still feminine and ornate. There was kind of a baroque trill to her sharp consonants and I realized I hadn't heard such a beautiful Russian accent in a long time. Usually the Russian accents I hear are shouted on the bus and sound like a German is throwing up while trying to remember song lyrics.

So, it turned out she was a bookkeeper who'd moved to San Francisco some ten years or so back to be with her family, "because it became very lonely for me in Moscow."

She'd done accounting for a jewelry dealer for many years, and when he moved his business up to Portland he offered her a job there, but she declined because she only lived in the States to get closer to her family.

They'd all emigrated here, I learned, but her. She had stayed in Moscow to be with her husband, who died.

She very much liked accounting and was good at it, but the economy made a new job in her field seem out of reach, so she took up the taxi to make ends meet.

"I like to drive," she said. "I am very good driver, but every day I thank God. I have no accidents and no crashes. Is amazing, if you drive so much, to have no accidents."

Later, in the midst of a shortcut she was excited to show me, we got stuck dead in traffic while the crowd from a ball game crossed the streets downtown. She apologized profusely.

"I am very fast," she said, "but there is nothing to do here."

Finally, having gotten to know her a bit, I complimented her accent. She held a hand to her mouth as if daintily blocking a little burp.

"I am embarrassed by it," she said. "I am here ten years and it doesn't go away. It sounds like pornography, like four-letter words."

Well, I liked it, I told her.

Nearing the bar, she got around to explaining why she was so afraid of accidents. Her husband had been driving in Moscow and was sideswiped by a car that left him completely paralyzed.

"I lived to care for him for three years and then he died," she said. "They said get a nurse or put him in a hospital, but no. I cared for him."

She must have really loved him, I said. We were at a stoplight. She put her arm over the shotgun seat and turned around to look at me, and she said:

"He was very nice man."

The whole ride was just great. Her name, I found out moments before leaving the cab, was Nina. I liked Nina. I liked how simple she felt the situations of her life had been, how in spite of being deeply difficult, their demands had at least been clear.

But maybe my favorite thing was something she said after I brought up her accent. She'd been here ten years, yes, and she spoke English now, but when she first arrived she didn't know a word of it. She stayed with her family and went to school.

In her first weeks in the city, she went for walks, she said, and one day she saw a man walking his dog. She saw the man order the dog to sit, and watched the dog sit. Stay, and the dog stayed. Heel, and the dog heeled.

"And I remember thinking I am jealous of that dog," she said, "for he understands English, and I have none."

Benjamin Franklin: The Homeless Stereo King

I met Benjamin Franklin as I was walking to Safeway ten years ago on a lunch break from my first real job. I was working for the San Francisco Design Center, a giant high-end interior design mall for rich people. One ironic thing about the place was that it was surrounded by some of the poorest streets in the city. The bus to work was full of homeless people and drug addicts and morbidly obese men and women in wheelchairs and dressed up blondes and gay guys on their way to work in the Design Center’s showrooms.

Me, I was learning how to do office work, planning events, getting screamed at by Louis, the psycho in accounting. I was also looking superfly in my black fur-felt fedora. I grew up stoked on old movies with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney going around acting like badasses in hats. I thought men looked awesome in hats ever since, so I bought one with my first paycheck at my first-ever job, clerking at a video store. As much of an affectation as it was, I didn’t give a shit: I loved that hat.

So one day for lunch I was walking up to Potrero Boulevard, one of the liveliest, poorest streets in that part of the city, and I saw the Homeless Stereo King.



He was a tall, gangly kind of guy, but permanently bent and bobbing along with the music. Up against the chain link fence behind him was a pyramid of stereo equipment four or five feet tall: boom boxes, Discmans, Walkmans, busted-up speakers, radios. On the side of that was a shopping cart ALSO full of boom boxes and radios, but also with cassette tapes and empty battery packages and cracked CD cases.

The man in charge of this unbelievable cache of music machines had a tape running at top volume in one of the smaller boom boxes, playing some trumpety 70s funk as loud as its tiny tinny speakers could fuzz out. The man was swaying and laughing to himself, running his own personal, mellow dance party. He wasn’t flinging himself all over the place, just bumping side to side in a one-man, open-to-the-public groove.

I came walking up and, getting a fun vibe from the music and encouraged by a smile from this old guy, I bounced my shoulders and strutted a little.

“Well, look who’s here!” the guy said in a throaty, Creole accent. “It’s David Booway!”

I was so happy to be called David Bowie, and in an awesome accent, that I stopped and threw the guy a handshake. It completely made my day.

“What’s going on today, my man?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m just feeling love, brother, you know.”

“What’s your name, friend?”

“Ah, well y’see, MY name… is, ah… Benjamin Franklin,” he said, and he laughed this soft, wheezing laugh, as if he were getting away with something. I thought he was fucking with me.

“Did you just tell me your name is Benjamin Franklin?” I said.

“Yeah, baby, I AM Benjamin Franklin. Hoo, yah!”

Hell, if that’s what he wanted me to call him, that’s what I’d call him.

So we talked about music for a few minutes and then I headed off to buy some lunch. He didn’t ask me for any money, which was a relief. We’d had a fun conversation, and too often with San Francisco homeless people you find in the end it was basically an extended transaction. To have the conversation actually be just a conversation, just two people getting to know each other by talking, was really pretty cool to me.

I went back that way again a few days later and Benjamin Franklin was still there, this time with a different boom box playing, and we laughed and danced a little and I walked on to get my lunch. It ended up being something I did two or three times a week, just because the guy always made me smile. He was crazy, but something about it was okay: he didn’t seem lonely or sad, or even too upset about being so poor.

He never asked me for money, and he usually politely turned down any food I offered. The soup kitchen was right around the corner, after all. But once I came walking up and there was no music playing – he just leaned against the fence, not morose but clearly a little bummed.

“What’s going on, Benjamin Franklin?” I asked. He always called me by my full name (“Hey, look, it’s David Booway too-day! That’s a beautiful hat you got there, David Booway!”) so I always called him by his. And if he was conning me about the name, which seemed possible because every time I called him that he got that same mischievous, toothy grin on his face, I didn’t really care.

“Aw, baby, my batteries is all died,” he said. He turned to me with an almost conspiratorial, looking-over-his-shoulder posture, holding out a dirt-stained little tape player, and he said, “If it ain’t too much trouble, if you could bring me back some batteries from that Safeway, I could put ‘em in here and we rockin’ again.”

“Shit yeah, my man, I’ll get you some batteries.” He told me what kind he needed and I got a big pack of ‘em at the Safeway and gave him the handoff on my way back and when I walked by a few days later there he was, music back on, feeling good and dancing by himself.

Sometimes I’d see him with a little bit of money, and that was when I knew he actually was crazy. He’d walk out into the street, to a nearby manhole cover, and he’d jam dollar bills into the holes in the manhole cover. I saw him doing it once and I asked, “Uh, Benjamin Franklin? What the hell are you doing?”

“Aw, I’m planting that shit, baby.”

“Planting it?”

“Yeah, baby, planting that shit. Gone grow something.”

“…”

Well, it was harmless enough, I supposed. The guy was clearly able to eat and he seemed to have a place to go at night.

Well, one day in the winter, early in the year, I came walking up on my way to Safeway, and he was missing. The shopping cart and the mountain of stereos were still there, but all by themselves, weirdly still and silent. Something felt creepy about it. I figured he was getting lunch, though, because there was a line outside the soup kitchen, and I went and bought some fried chicken strips at Safeway.

As I walked back, somebody in line at the soup kitchen shouted, “Hey!”

I turned around and looked down the sidewalk.

“Hey! Yeah, you!”

Me?

“Yeah, come here! I gotta tell you something!”

I walked over. I’d never seen this guy in my life, but he seemed pretty clearly to recognize me. I walked up and I asked him what was going on, and he said a sentence to me I don’t think I’ll forget as long as I live:

“Something HORRIBLE happened.”

I actually had to pause a second because it was such a plain, simple, devastating thing to say I didn’t know how to react. But somehow I knew what was coming.

“What ?” I asked.

“That guy, the ol’ dude with the stereos?”

I nodded. And I knew where this was going.

“He got hit by a car, man. He’s gone.”

Turns out Benjamin Franklin was out there at the manhole cover, planting his money, and someone had driven by, hit him and sailed on, leaving a crazy old homeless man battered and dying on the street. By the time an ambulance arrived it was way too late.

I walked back to work in kind of a daze. I stopped at his spot, which now felt more like a shrine. I knew other people would arrive soon like vultures to take whatever they could find to sell for a buck or two, and I didn’t really mind: my friend obviously didn’t need this stuff anymore, and it might as well be of some aid to somebody. But I wanted some kind of memento. I saw a single, recordable cassette tape lying in the kiddie-seat of the shopping cart, and I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

I wasn’t sure how to deal with Benjamin Franklin’s death. When somebody close to you dies, you can go ahead and make a big deal out of it. A family member, a friend from school or work, somebody you spend your downtime with dies? You feel powerfully sad, and you can cry and ask people for space or for support or whatever you want to do. But as much as I liked Benjamin Franklin, as much as I enjoyed him and liked getting him batteries when he was out, he wasn’t that kind of person in my life. I was mournful for him, but I didn’t feel grief, and I didn’t want to do anything disrespectful or phony with his death.

I talked about it with Molly and Darren, who was living in San Francisco then. I showed them the tape and I explained it was the guy who called me David Booway, and repeated what I’d been told happened. They both gave me condolences but I paused and told them I wasn’t looking for sympathy, and explained the weird feedback loop I had going on in my head.

Darren thought about it a moment and said:

“Well, I guess you should just keep the tape, and then every once in a while you can tell somebody about him. And that way people will know who he was, and maybe that’s the best thing you can do for him.”

It felt like one of the simplest, wisest pieces of advice I’d ever gotten. And I followed it. And I’m following it now.

Benjamin Franklin, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Manuel and myself, for whom the acts of storytelling and audience are so personal and so important, thank you for reading about him, and thinking of him.


Words: Sean Murray
Art: Manuel Martinez

The Time Sean Fought a Girl

Sometimes my whole Fight Club thing got out of hand.

We were living on campus in a trashy town at a dumpy school where High Times magazine interviewed my roommate (Doyal) for an article they were publishing about The Evergreen State College being the most pot-friendly campus in the country. Drugs were everywhere and everybody was a do-nothing know-it-all with something to prove. So there were a lot of crazy people to fight. And I was one of them.

For a guy who grew up as scrawny and nerdy as I did, I sure did my best to establish a reputation as a badass on campus. Usually, in my mind, I was starting fights in a friendly way, finding people who were game. I guess I got impatient. I eventually hit enough people in the face that I could get strangers to back down just by getting in their face a little.

In my fantasy, this was because I was some kind of terror, an intimidating motherfucker of the highest caliber, jackbooting my way across campus and leaving a trail of terror and punk rock destruction in my wake. It didn’t occur to me until quite a while later that maybe I was just a violent drunken asshole and most people would rather leave the party than get in a fight with a guy like that.

Also, the school was almost 100 percent white kids. I don’t know exactly how things would have changed with a different ethnic makeup but I doubt it would have gone down the same. Thank God for easily-frightened white kids.

In the meantime, I was stoked to be such a badass! Man, if I ever ran into the kids who picked on me in elementary school, I’d just show the shit out of them! They sure would be sorry! I took a cheap black jacket I found at the thrift store and sewed a Slayer patch on the left breast, and a tiny Black Sabbath patch on the back. The sew jobs were shitty and the patches began falling off. I was so excited and proud of myself.

Around this time, Tyler began regularly banging a girl named Lisa. Now, anyone (everyone) willing to bang Tyler was pretty messed up to begin with, but Lisa may have taken the cake. We didn’t know this right away, but she was completely nuts.

While everyone still thought she was relatively normal, she’d come by and sometimes she and I would hang out. We talked about all kinds of stupid college bullshit: photography, masculinity and femininity issues, anger at our families.

At some point, she decided she didn’t want people to call her Lisa anymore. Her German name, apparently, was Leila, and she wanted to be called that instead.

I believed I’d been pretty forgiving of some of her pretentious artsy crap, because I thought she was hot, but I decided to draw a line there. I kept calling her Lisa. I felt like it was bullshit to introduce yourself as one thing and then, for no reason, demand to be called something else. I just didn’t have the patience for it.

I still liked her fine, though, and sometimes when she came over we’d hang out. Eventually my whole fighting habit came up and she said she wanted in.

“Well, sure,” I said, “find a girl to fight and bring her over. We could make a night out of it.”

“No,” she said, “I mean I’ll fight you.”

We were in the kitchen. Doyal and Tyler and Molly and Darren and a good half-dozen other people were sitting around smoking weed and drinking whiskey and all of a sudden I felt very much on the spot.

“I’m not gonna fight you,” I said. To a sober man, this is the obvious answer. Any guy will tell you, it’s the worst possible situation for a fight. You either end up the asshole who beat up a woman or the biggest pussy of all time, a jackass who got his ass kicked by a girl.

I said, “That’s ridiculous.”

“Why?” she said. “If you think feminism is bullshit” – at the time, I was in such a foul mood about people that I felt pretty sure every opinion anyone had ever had was bullshit, including feminism – “and women shouldn’t get any special treatment, then why not?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I’m bigger than you.”

“What, so you only fight people your exact fucking size?”

I had a pretty comfortable, brain-killing drunk going on and I was running out of excuses not to fight her.

“Look, you’re gonna hate it. I’m gonna put a choke hold on you and it’ll piss you off and you’ll tap out and that’ll be it.”

Boy, did I love the choke hold. It was my go-to move and out of ten wins, I could thank the choke hold for seven or eight of them. About half the people I beat with it said it was a cheap move. I didn’t think that made any sense. This wasn’t Street Fighter II. This was two real life people in a fight. It wasn’t like I hit them in the nuts.

“What,” said Lisa, “you’re gonna use some pussy-ass choke hold? You’re gonna fight cheap against a girl?”

I couldn’t tell if she was flirting or just being a bitch. But either way the idea of fighting her began to sound really fun.

I looked over at Tyler. Surely he would talk me out of it, and since he was sort-of dating her, I’d have to respect his request.

Tyler was laughing his balls off. He was delighted by the idea.

I had nowhere to squirm and by now I didn’t really want to.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“Yeah?” she said. She was excited now. The sweaters started coming off. It was go time.

I made a plan in my head. I would back her off, let her get all her crazy out while I had her at a distance, then I’d grab her arms and hold her down until she admitted it was over.

That plan didn’t work for shit.

Lisa was out of her mind. She came at me like a complete savage. I kept cool for a second but almost immediately I was having the time of my life. We rolled all over the kitchen and living room floors and down the hall. People couldn’t get out of our way fast enough and we knocked a couple people down. I was holding back a little bit, still, but she started using her fingernails to scratch me and in my mind, she’d suddenly given up her frailty as a reason for me to fight respectfully. She was fighting like a badass and I couldn’t be happier.

Eventually we rolled into the bathroom, and then kicked our way into the little side room where the bathtub was kept separate and knocked the door shut. We were grunting and breathing heavily and Molly started knocking on the door, asking what was happening in there.

I knew what she had to be thinking, so I decided to do the respectful thing and make it clear this wasn’t a pre-fuck.

I had Lisa bent up over the rim of the bathtub, and I looked down and saw the tub drain. This was a house inhabited by six disgusting men in their early 20s. The drain was packed with hair and loogies and all of it had been peed on a hundred times.

I pushed Lisa’s face down into it.

Lisa lost her mind and screamed and flailed around until she finally agreed the fight was over. We both came out and drank as much whiskey as we could each handle, and that was that. Although Molly was pissed at me for weeks.

I felt like the whole thing had been pretty cool, and Lisa seemed all right with it too, once she’d been able to wash her face off. But later on she started dating a guy named TJ and got into punching fights with him in public all the time and they’d both walk around with black eyes they’d given each other. Somehow I knew where they were coming from but felt it crossed a line.

Plus, another time she and TJ were out walking on campus in the snow. They ended up playing and rolling around in the mud, which, again, I could understand, but then Lisa said, “Oh my God, TJ, I have the best idea. We should both pee our pants!”

Whereupon she actually did pee her pants. TJ told us the story later.

I can’t exactly claim to have been in my right mind during this whole period in my life. And Tyler brought home some pretty crazy women. But I always had love for Lisa for really taking the prize on crazy, Olympia-makes-me-nuts batshit behavior.

Words: Sean Murray
Art: Manuel Martinez

Bobby the Banker and My Daring 'Do

My best buddy working the bank was Bobby the banker. He was baby-faced and dorky but he was also about seven feet tall. It was amazing. I’m not a short man, but I had to do a lot of neck-craning when Bobby was around.

Bobby and I first bonded, I think, over comic books. We were both big geeks about ‘em and we’d try to take a lunch break together every week or two to walk down to the comics shop nearby and pick up our books. Bobby had some cool ideas for a superhero book he wanted to write and wild stories about living in a warehouse when he was young.

So, one day Bobby’s at the bank, and the line of customers is between his desk and the line of tellers. He glances up from his desk at the line and does a double take.

Bobby rubs his eyes with his hands.

Nope. It’s not his eyes.

That guy standing in line... is blurry. He’s standing still, holding his bank slip in front of him, just chilling out. But he looks like he’s in a blurry photo or something.

Bobby sits back in his chair looking at the guy, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. He looks at some other people in line to check, maybe it’s the lighting or something. But no. Everyone else looks normal. Bobby can’t figure it out. And he can’t exactly go ask the guy. So he sits there puzzled while the guy gets to the front of the line, does his business with a teller and walks out.

Bobby gets up and walks over to the teller.

“Hey, am I crazy, or was that guy, like, out of focus? Like fuzzy-looking?”

The teller, a young girl, looks at him with an ashen, wide-eyed look of grossed-out horror.

“He was CRAWLING,” she says, “with LICE.”

They had to shut down the branch for a week to fumigate.

Another day, some jumpy dude walked into the branch and asked Bobby if he could sit down. Bobby thought, “Awesome, nobody even had to work for this one,” and asked the guy what kind of account he needed help with. The dude mumbled something indirect in reply, and for a few minutes Bobby, disappointed this had turned instead into a waste of time, tried to figure out how to open an account for the guy, who was just sitting there fidgeting and half-shivering.

After a bit, the guy jumped up and walked right back out of the bank.

We were slow, so Bobby came over to the teller line to tell me about the weird guy. We laughed about him for a minute and then Bobby walked back… to find the guy had peed all over the chair.

Now, because I held this job during my Fight Clubbin’ days, I sometimes showed up to work with bruises and scabs all over me. Just like Edward Norton does in the movie, I took a sick kind of delight in having people walk up to make their deposits, make a quick second of eye contact with me and immediately turn their faces down to the counter and keep them there.

I didn’t want to scare anybody; I just thought it was funny how uncomfortable they were. Barbie thought it was funny. I got a really brutal black eye and face-scrape one night after racing down a sidewalk in Seattle with Tyler sitting on my shoulders, and when I showed up to work the next day she laughed.

“Did you get in a fight?” she said, the same way you might teasingly ask a soaked person if they forgot their umbrella on a stormy day.

“No, actually,” I said, half-surprised to be giving that answer.

“Did you get drunk and fall down?”

Good ol’ Barbie.

So eventually I decided to quit. My life SUCKED at this job! Olympia was slowly killing me and I was becoming an alcoholic and we were living in the only project housing in town and it was run by meth-heads, and my school was a limp jerk-off of an education and my job was boring and paid little and it was cold and wet all the time and Seattle was too long a drive to realistically visit very often and my girlfriend and I hadn’t had sex in forever and my parents were getting divorced with my brother dealing with it alone down in California, and some of my favorite people at work had been fired or quit to get better jobs and you couldn’t buy booze on Sundays.

All of which had been the case for quite a while, but then my boss said I couldn’t have time off to visit my family for Christmas.

That was when I realized something awesome. I didn’t have to do something just because my boss said I had to do it. I could quit the job. I didn’t have any abiding love for bank work. It would be easy! Holy shit, I couldn’t believe I thought of it!

Soon as I made the decision, life changed up a little. I called my mom and floated the idea of coming back home, and she was so cool about it I was stunned. My boss at the bank decided to quit, too. I went about making goodbyes and wrapping up what little needed wrapping up, and then I got a great idea.

My plan was to go to my last day of work, all normal-style, and then halfway through the shift – I would get a Mohawk.

It was genius. It would totally freak everybody out. It would be hella punk rock. I could tell people for years about how cool and anti-establishment I was, how I stuck it to the man by making them DEAL with a guy who had a fuckin’ MOHAWK, you guys. I was so stoked and full of self-satisfaction it’s a wonder I was able to put on my pants that day.

I brought a pair of clippers in a bag and stashed them in the break room. Then when lunch time was coming up, I walked over to Bobby’s desk and broke him the news.

“Dude, you have to come help me cut my hair.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I brought clippers. You gotta give me a Mohawk.”

“I don’t know how to give you a Mohawk, man!”

“Dude, it’s easy. You clip off one side and then you clip off the other. Come on, don’t be a pussy!”

“Okay, but we gotta be quick.”

I’d made Bobby all kinds of nervous by springing it on him at the last second. We went into the employee bathroom and I took my shirt off and knelt down over a wastebasket and Bobby – still wearing a full business suit – stood over me with the clippers. I wanted a REAL Mohawk so we took the guards off and he was shaving my head bald.

He was seriously freaking out, though, and he kept saying, “I gotta get back, man, they’re gonna notice I’m gone,” and he ended up cutting the shit out of my scalp with the clipper blades by jamming them into my head too fast. He managed a straight line down one side of the ‘hawk but the right side of my scalp had hair coming out farther around the middle of my head, forming a sort of long triangle instead of a long, thin bar of hair. I was bleeding all over the place. I had loose hair all over my shoulders and neck. I put my shirt back on and it was the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever worn.

I went back to the teller line, all set to rock everybody’s world… and nobody gave a shit. A couple people laughed but nobody was freaked out. I was stunned. I came in with a black eye and everyone got shy and quiet, but a freakin’ badass Mohawk and blood all over? No one really batted an eye. Every time someone walked up, I gave this expectant, excited look, ready for them to flip out, and people would just nod and look at my hair and say, “Well, how ‘bout that?”

I went home and showered and looked at it again and I couldn’t believe how stupid I looked. I tried to fix the damn thing and got Molly and Darren both on the job with the clippers but it was never the glory I expected. And Molly made me agree to shave it off before driving the moving van back home, arguing that without any black people to screw with in either Washington or Oregon, the police would likely instead fuck with people who had stupid punk rock haircuts.

I was so glad to finally have someone give me validation that the ‘hawk was, indeed, a very punk rock gesture on my part, that I shaved it clean off and drove through three states looking like Uncle Fester.


Words: Sean Murray
Art: Manuel Martinez

Banking: Not the Glamorous Life I Imagined

When I was about 16, an older kid I was sorta buddies with got a job as a bank teller and I thought it sounded like the fanciest job ever. Boy, did I have it wrong.

For a year in Olympia, I worked as a teller. I was desperate for the work. Less than a year before I got to town I’d bought an ’86 Ford F-150 that immediately shit its guts out and sucked up every last dollar I’d ever earned.

The problem was, I moved to Olympia just after 9/11 – about six months after the Nisqually earthquake beat the shit out of Seattle and everything in some ridiculous thousand-mile radius. Olympia was split into two sides – the west side was full of homes and had the college campus, and the east side had the capital building and all the local business. The two sides of town were connected by a thin, short bridge that got busted up in the quake, and the already-screwed up economy just completely went to hell. Everywhere you looked there were “Going Out of Business Sale” signs posted in windows.

Somehow, I was able to land the job anyway and, despite being arrested on my way to the first day of training, managed to keep the job.

I got there and my God, the bank was depressing.

For one, we had the Labor Ready payroll account. Labor Ready is based in Tacoma and sells itself as the country’s biggest provider of temporary manual labor to construction sites. What that means in real world terms is basically this: if you’re an alcoholic or a convicted felon, you show up at the work line at 4 or 5 a.m. and hope they give you a job for the day, digging ditches or hammering roof tiles or whatever the hell. You bust your ass all day in the sun or the rain and at the end of each day you get a check.

So these guys would come slumping in, stinking like a homeless guy and tired and hungry and greasy, and they’d wait in line and then try to cash their checks with us. About a quarter of these guys had expired IDs, or the card was so beat-up and weather damaged that you couldn’t read the information and we had to send them away. None of them had bank accounts, obviously, so we’d have to get their thumb prints stamped onto the checks. Some guys would have their thumbs all fucked up from work, scabbed up or covered in paint or glue or tar, and they’d leave these thumbprints that looked like a raccoon’s paw or something.



One guy that came in a lot owed a ton of child support and alimony. He’d been ducking it so long that the courts had gotten involved and forced any employer that paid him to garnish the holy shit out of his pay. You know the walk people get when they’ve just been in a fight? Like a slow stagger, half-deliberate and half-drunk? I never saw this guy walk any other way.

He walked in and stood in line with his stained orange baseball cap and his red plaid jacket, picking at his trucker moustache. He came to me once with his check, signed the back of it and gave me his thumb, and I cashed it out. As I counted out the money, he said, “Do you know how many hours I worked today?”

I looked down; the check was tiny.

“Yeah, rough getting hours these days, huh? I feel for ya, man,” I said.

“I worked for ELEVEN HOURS TODAY."

I looked down at the check again. I pursed my lips.

I took out the cash and counted it out to him.

Nineteen dollars and seventy-four cents. Neither enough for a full twenty-dollar bill, nor a full three quarters in change.

I laid the money on the counter between us.

He looked down at it. Then he looked up at me.

“I can’t even get drunk on that,” he said.

I had nothing to say. What the hell CAN a 20-year-old kid say to a dude in his 40s in that situation? Here I had thousands of dollars sitting in a drawer in front of me. I was making nine bucks an hour – I’d topped this poor sonofabitch’s income for the whole day in a little more than two hours. And I felt poor!

We stood there for about five or six seconds. He looked at me with this confused, demanding disappointment. He wanted me to do something, but he didn’t know what. Or he knew what he wanted someone to do, but he was wrestling to remember that it couldn’t be me that would do it. I just tried to keep as much eye contact as I could – I was completely unable to help, but I didn’t want to leaving him hanging, so I figured the best I could do was look him in the eye.

He took a deep sigh, slowly slapped his hand on the counter over the money and slid it back, jammed it in his pocket and walked out.

Another account we had where people would come to cash their checks was the crazy people. Sometimes a court will declare somebody incompetent to handle their own affairs, right? Well, when that happens, that person’s money (apparently) gets sent to some corporate handler that squirrels the cash all away and portions it out in controlled, specifically-designated doses to the poor old sap.

This stuff was hyper-specific. I’d get guys walking in with checks for five dollars, and in the memo line it would read, “For cigarettes.”

One of my favorites, though, was an old dude named Harvey. He was practically the only black guy in town – Washington State is, in my experience, almost totally white. He was maybe 55 or 60 and the kind of guy you might guess at a distance is homeless, because his coat was ratty and cheap and he wore a knit-wool cap, but when you got up close to him you could see he was wearing clean, modestly-framed glasses and he was perfectly clean-shaven.

The way I got to know Harvey was one day he got in line to cash a money order and the teller who helped him was Barbie.

Barbie was super-hot in kind of a “white trash town in the middle of nowhere” sort of way. I don’t mean she had four kids and an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt so much as I mean that every white trash dude who came in the place would get to the front of the line and then let people go ahead of him until Barbie freed up for the next customer. Every once in a while, when she wanted a new person to treat her seriously, she would introduce herself as Barbara. I would hear it from my little station a few doors down the teller line and it always made me smile.

So one day Harvey comes in, and as Barbie starts cashing this little money order he brought in, he belts out at the top of his lungs: “Yooouuuuu are so beautiful… to me! Yoooouuuu are so beautiful, to me, can’t you see?”



He did the whole song. Barbie had no idea what to do. The entire bank stopped. Everyone was completely absorbed in this guy and the girl he was singing to. He was good, too! He threw his arms up at the emotional notes, held his hands to his chest for the heartfelt, quieter parts, like a whole professional performance.

Barbie had no idea what to do. She giggled. She covered her face, which was red as a drunken Irishman’s. She tried to compose herself and crossed one hand over the other on the counter in front of her. Then she busted up again.

When Harvey was done, the whole bank exploded into applause. It was the greatest thing ever.

I got the guy’s phone number, and that year for Christmas I bought Molly a steak dinner and had Harvey come into the restaurant to sing to her. Cleared it with the management and everything. To my amazement, Harvey came in wearing a tuxedo! He gave her a rose and sang three or four songs, two that I had chosen and then some improv of his own choosing. If you’ve never tried this with a guy who breaks into song in public for (almost) no reason, I highly recommend it.

The week after I met Harvey, though, somebody else came into the bank and caused a really amazing problem. We’ll tell y’all about that next week.