I have like 20 minutes of dead time between one project and another, so rather than lying down — I’ll never get up — I thought I’d write a post on this stupid fucking blog. I love writing on this stupid fucking blog.
I’m a little bit superstitious. On Saturday morning, I got one disappointing piece of news — a print piece I had written had been pushed online, a fact that the editor assured me was actually good news because it would “get more readers.” For me, bad news comes in threes. So I searched for the other two disappointing events for the rest of the weekend, and found them, willfully.
The best thing about bad events is that good events usually follow them. (Have I mentioned I’m bananas?) So when Caleb started literally getting anally raped by a bunch of traffic cops and other unsavory types this week — note, I love using the word literally incorrectly — I knew it meant good things for his success at BKLYN Designs, which opens tomorrow morning.
First, he opened the door to the delivery men who brought his table back from the place where it was photographed for New York Magazine, only to see that the guy who was holding the box was smoking a cigarette, and the guy who was driving the truck was standing, full frontal, in full daylight, pissing in the middle of the road.
“I’m not accepting this,” Caleb said, looking down at the box, which was dented in many places.
“If you don’t accept it, we gotta take it back,” the delivery man said.
“Caleb, you’ll never get it back if you don’t accept it,” I hissed.
So he signed for it. When he brought it inside, he opened the box, and one of the front panels had been dented off. The gold leaf was smeared.
“Thanks for telling me to accept this, Brie,” he said, and then washed his hands for a full five minutes. Neither one of us wanted to catch hepatitis from the pair we had just encountered on the street.
Fortunately, Caleb has skills to kill, so he fixed the table no problem.
But every other fucking day this week, he’s gotten a ticket either on the Jeep or on the truck he rented to move shit around. The first was for an expired inspection. The inspection expired the day before the ticket, and the traffic cock probably rubbed his belly and was like, “I’m a fucking dick,” when he wrote it out for us. The second was for the TRUCK’s expired inspection, which wasn’t even his problem because it was a rental. The third was for parking in a no standing zone. The fourth we received at 3am in the morning last night, as we were driving home from the studio.
Caleb has been at the studio for almost 22 hours a day for the past week. He basically returned home from Asia, slept for four hours, and then started working. Any of you motherfuckers who have experienced Asian jetlag know that this is like a Superman level feat.
I’ve been working a lot too, but it’s been mostly in front of my computer, screaming things like, “I will fucking kill who ever invented Apple computers” — Caleb: “He’s already dead” — and “I am going to throw this piece of shit out a window.” I wanted to clear my week this week to help out Caleb as much as possible, but didn’t really get any free time until yesterday evening, when I went over with Marilu to help Caleb and Mr. R put the finishing touches on the furniture he’ll show.
Rikard, Marilu and Mr. R all went to SCAD together, so technically, they’re trained artisans. I went to Brown where I learned how to smoke pot and minimize my workload to maximize the amount of hours I could sleep, so I don’t know how to do much with my hands besides eat sunflower seeds and knit — which, coincidentally, I used to do to keep myself from falling asleep during undergraduate art history lectures.
When we got to the studio, Mr. R was already sweating from all of the physical labor he’d been doing. Marilu is not only a writer, designer and artist, she’s also a virtuoso with her hands — she was co-opted by Occupy Wall Street to screenprint all of their shirts last year. She has her own jewelry line. All day long, all she does is figure out how to make shit.
Needless to say, she took over the screenprinting station, where she began making boards of Caleb’s logo in varying shades of red. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked Caleb.
He patted me on the head like I was a retard, and led me over to a chunk of wood. “You can sand this,” he said.
“It’s already sanded,” I observed.
“You can sand it BETTER,” he told me.
Then he proceeded to stand over me, and go “EH EH EH” whenever I would start pressing too hard with my fingertips.
Let’s just say that it quickly became apparent that my role was pointless.
So I turned on some Kendrick Lamar, literally smoked a marijuana cigarette — I’ll let you read whatever you want grammatically into that — and began taking pictures. “Mr. R!” I screamed. “Go over there and pretend like your hand got sawed off!”
At the time, it seemed pretty brilliant to do a photo montage of my friends looking as if they had been seriously injured in Caleb’s studio.
Long story short, and the night turned late, and then early. We drove both Mr. R and Marilu back to their humble abodes, and turned in the direction of ours.
Underneath the BQE there were cops everywhere, their lights already on, waiting. We drove past one right near the Battery Tunnel. He lackadasically swung out behind us, and signaled for us to pull over.
When we rolled down the windows, you could tell that they were surprised by what was inside. I say that because our windows are tinted so black that you can give like full on road head in the Jeep, and no one would even get a picture show.
We didn’t tint the windows so black — the Burmese weed dealer we had brought it from had “purchased” it that way.
“Sir, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your windows are tinted way beyond the legal limit,” one cop said. The other, who was standing on my side of the car, looked at me, and I tried as best as I could not to make it seem like I had literally smoked a marijuana cigarette.
“Actually we already got a ticket for that,” Caleb said. And then proceeded to launch into a long story about the previous ticket, obtained after a wedding one night a few months ago. I had to physically restrain myself from putting my hand over his mouth.
“Well, sir, it was pretty bad that your windows were so tinted, but after you told us that story, it got even worse,” the cop said.
He went back to his car, and returned like 20 fucking minutes later with a $350 ticket. It took so long because in between typing in a simple code of registration numbers into his computer, our cops visited with a number of others who were just lollygaggling around the hood in their own patrol cars.
It must be that time of the year when cops are looking to make quotas, or some shit — either that, or we had a target over our heads because God wants as many bad things to happen to us before this weekend. Then, our fortunes will reverse.
We’ll make back at that ticket money in furniture sales. Caleb will become the face of the new Brooklyn. They’ll make an SNL skit about him, and people will get his hair cut. I’ll be praised for being such a supportive girlfriend who did NOT — I repeat did NOT — make him come pick her up this week because she was having a panic attack over making a revision on an essay. We’ll live happily ever after in our matching skinny black jeans, and Caleb will have everything he’s ever dreamed of wanting. He’s worked for it. He deserves it. Keep your fingers crossed for him this weekend.
