Barry/Taxi

I wait for the cab with my things ready: my backpack, within which I keep this laptop (the one I’m writing on now), a little green camera, sweatshirt in case the plane is cold – and I developed a canker sore overnight, near the tip of my tongue. So I’m scraping that against whats left of my braces – the two wires that they had installed on me, behind my teeth that they want to be there forever. Water, my suspicions: incorrect, hurts my canker sore a lot. So I’m not drinking anything. I also will carry a piece of luggage that my dad forced on me in the target in san diego when I was there a for a week last week, visiting. Between aisles, he show cases the luggage, which to me are excess consumer crap! There are already about ten bags that I could choose from to take with me to Japan. This isn’t necessary. This is excess. This is the epidemic. But he doesn’t think so. And so he force it on me, another tags to have fluttering behind, or in front even, I don’t know how things work with – yes, it will spin 360 degrees like a small robot droid. (It turns out being useful). Anyway, my dad, who buys me this incredible, silvery, sunk-from-the-sky rolling luggage for me, for my trip, has such pain in his eyes. It could be pain or pride or something else. He buys it for me. I have it now, waiting for a cab in my Uncle Barry’s house in Portland. Last night I drank a beer with Barry after deciding against a coke, he was casually more excited to feed me this beer, which had a bad taste and, I believe, was the cause of this pain, inflamement of my tongue. Just two bloated tastebuds! You should see them. Like chubby gerbils close together, rubberbanded around, abdomen to abdomen. They skim over my metal wire again and hurt. The other thing I’ll bring is an acoustic guitar in a case. It is so new. It’s newer than the latest firefox installment or itunes update even. It sparkles. It is tucked inside the cases, cushioned by socks and a t-shirt and a yellow sweater. The guitar is beautiful. Everyone said, because I was looking on the internet for advice on guitar air transit, do not let them check our instrument! Also: loosen the strings. So I loosened the strings. It is in such pain, in there. I know it is. Something is going to get fucked up because of me and not because of them. It needs tension to keep shape! I tape and untape the latches to my poor guitar case again and again keeping watch over everything… it looks fine. But how do I know! The wood is probably splitting very small splits. Swallowing the path of microscopic bacteria from Barry’s bandaid thumb-wound when he took it out last night and played it and left a gooey black booger pulsing on its neck for me to whisk off with the edge of my thumb. They’ve probably moved all around the guitar, are probably being swallowed in tiny ravines of wood cracking apart. These thoughts are so unsettling. The taxi, outside. I wave through the blinds and open the door part ways to get my stuff in the way of it, it closes with a spring, I only struggle a little. She is on the phone. Barry and Anita have called her to pick me up and take me to the airport, saying that they have used them before, that they should call my cellphone, they don’t. But she is gorgeous. Her trunk is deep, my things are lavished by its capacity. I feel good sinking part into it to lower my bag, the guitar, my backpack. Then we’re in the cab. She touches the GPS that is saluting us both and asks me if it is right? I don’t know why she is asking. The airport is not far, 10 minutes away. She fumbles around for a minute, stopped car, and then decides and we start going. Her name is on the flap thing in the car, and so I ask, ‘You Russian?’ and she says, ‘Yes’ and I am right. She talks about my guitar and her guitar and her friend, the guitarist, who is also flying for PDX today with a guitar. ‘Do you like Russian music?’ she asks. ‘Yes!’ We listen to the Russian music and try to talk over it. She is so beautiful and with one mole. The mole is a cliché on her, you know, Russian women with moles, but she is so beautiful with blond hair and soft lips. She used to sing. She lost her voice 5 years ago. Her music is instrumental. She can sing all day. She sang this morning, but not loud. She loves to sing, but can’t loudly. She sang loudly yesterday. Our conversation is sometimes hard to understand. She talks on the phone then. Then she drops me off saying, ‘good luck,’ it was $20 that I am glad to pay, I am at the Portland airport, with my things, with a ticket to Tokyo that I will use in three hours.