Sleepless in Austin

“The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together —
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.”
-Wendell Berry

Over the weekend, a dear friend of mine got married in Austin, Texas.  Some stories require much more telling of things than what actually took place in the time span in whence they occurred.  And being that this particular group of friends is one I go back with a good 22 years, it is safe to say there is far more context than would be fair to squeeze into a meager little post such as this.  All in all, the weekend was another addition to the many wonderful stories and lessons from my childhood-into-adulthootd that I may one day be desperate enough for fame to pen a book pseudonymically over. (Sorry everyone!  I won’t use your real names, either!).

Anyway, Austin always makes me a little sentimental.  Even before a considerable contingent of my friends from high school moved there en masse, the city held a certain lure that felt like independence promised.  That’s where people went when they graduated.  They lived in apartmentsand stuff, with their own dishes.  But since so many of my friends have taken root there, I have occasion to visit on the regular.  I wanted to write about Austin this week, but I needed a story that could be told in isolation.  And one that had enough distance on this side of it that wouldn’t ruffle too many Mom feathers.  See?  Everything turned out fine!

When I was a freshman in college, one of my dorm-suitemates was named Ashley.  We had a number of things in common but the two important ones to know for this story is that we were both from Texas and were passionate about the same bands (and Matthew Broderick.)  Here’s the setup:  it was Christmas break, we were both going to Texas to see our families, and Alanis Morissette was playing a concert in Austin.  That’s right, I said it!  Alanis Morissette!  Judge not lest ye be judged!  Neither of our families lived in Austin, but Ashley drove in from Houston and picked me up at the airport for a night of ROCK.  Things were great during the show (obviously!) but afterwards, we started running into trouble.

The venue was outdoors and parking was about a million miles away, on the way back to the Jeep, Ashley’s flipflop broke.  It sounds like a small thing, but it was dark, the terrain filled with rocks, broken glass, and maybe the odd cacti.  Preeeety much the circumstances for which shoes were invented.  She gave me her keys that I may go and bring the Jeep to her.  When I got to the Jeep however, I could not get it to start up.  What she failed to tell me was that, for whatever ungodly reason, the windshield wipers had to be on for the engine to fire up.  Mind you, I was not a mechanic at the time…but even if I had been…this… this is not really the sort of thing you think to try.  My solution was to yell and scurry around the Jeep repeatedly, throwing my hands up, and collapsing into the driver’s seat to bang my head against the steering wheel until a group of concerned citizens came to help me.  I don’t remember if it was by accident or someone’s similar experience, but we got it running.  By this time Ashley, fretful and shoeless, had decided to strike out on her own to see what had become of me—she was not where I left her.  I had to wait for most of the cars to leave the field before I was able to spot her stumbling and cursing in the darkness.

Ashley had to be at work at Blockbuster—in Houston—the following afternoon, but we’d planned to stay the night in Austin, so she could sleep before driving back.  Even though neither of us had family living in Austin, it should not have been a problem because I know so many people around…but I had not at this point bothered to ask any of them for a place to crash because my parents were actually in town for a conference and they had a hotel room with an extra bed.  But, as you know, we got kind of a late start in getting to them.  Once we were on the road, I called to let them know we were on our way.  They were going to bed.  Mom artfully framed the following demand as an option:

“Well, your Dad has to be up early in the morning for meetings tomorrow, and you know he has a hard time falling back to sleep once he wakes up…Could you stay somewhere else?

Again, this would not usually have been a difficult thing to do, but the timing was bad.  Being on the cusp of winter break (and rather late in the night by now), my friends were either holed up studying for their last finals, or they’d left town to spend the holidays in Commerce.  These were the two responses we collected again and again, sorry but…no room at the inn.  I finally got a hold of one friend who was still around and not trying to sleep.  Bear.  Bear was in fact so opposed to sleep that he was throwing a party at his house that very evening.  At the time, he lived in a place with 8 other folks in a quaint establishment that came to be known locally and historically as the Hardcore House.  When we showed up there were about 40 people (still early), kegs, a DJ, a well-laid lighting design, a lot of public urination and, if memory serves, a goat in the backyard.  Sleeping there was not going to be an option for a number of reasons, not least of which was that each bed already had multiple inhabitants.  We excused ourselves.

The Jeep, as you might imagine, was kind of wonky.  It was the kind of Jeep with zip up plastic doors, but in that moment, it was the closest thing to a Hyatt we were going to be able to procure, and we were very very tired.  We drove around for a while trying to find a less sketchy place to park, but ultimately decided on the most sketchy place- literally, behind a dumpster.  I do not recall our rationale, but I’m sure it was classic.

We may have slept an hour. It is tremendously difficult to get a good night’s sleep in a vulnerable plastic enclosure behind a dumpster in East Austin.  Imagine.  My parents would not be awake for several more hours.  We finally gave up sleeping and drove to the Denny’s across from the hotel where they were staying, waiting for the sun to rise.  There was a lot of coffee and a lot of Moons over My Hammy that night.  As there should be.