Sketches IV
Despite my seemingly constant dental work (in addition to the root canal and the broken crown I had 9 cavities that needed filling – smokers, beware) I had been trying diligently to keep up my comic production. I was still riding the inspiration from Kieth Knight’s class, so if I wasn’t slanging fish or sitting in a dentist’s chair I was at the drawing board.
The drawing board, specifically, because the day before I even went to Keith’s class I dropped my shiny new iMac off at the Apple store for repairs. Seems there was a malfunction in the power supply which was causing the capacitors on my motherboard to burst. But the good news is Apple covered the whole repair under an extended warranty, and I just had to wait 7-10 days.
Fine, I thought. Inconvenient, but I’d manage. I took most of the time for inking and sketching out storylines. It was difficult at times to keep up with the story I’d written, as a lot of it was already on my new (broken) computer.
About a week later a tech from the Apple store called me. He told me my computer was still broken, and I did not have a warranty for these repairs.
A good deal of arguing with the techs in the Apple store followed. Eventually I took the computer home and tried to fix it myself. This took weeks.
It turned out the problem wasn’t what they told me at the store. So I kept digging. Two weeks later I found out the real problem was the same part they had just replaced.
The weeks that I spent working on the computer were agonizing. I had geared myself wholly into making a comic strip, and suddenly that project screeched to a halt and I was hacking away at command lines, diagnostic software and reinstalled operating systems.
And outside it rained and rained. Day after day. The weather report said it was a record-breaking month for rainfall in California.
One day in the middle of the whole mess I was at home working on a third reinstall of the Mac operating system. The phone rang and I answered it.
“Three rings. Yo you know whenever you see that 413 you know you better pick up.” It was my downstairs neighbor. For some reason he always thought I was avoiding him when he called up to my house. “House could be burning down. You gotta pick up.”
“Alright… I did pick up. What’s up?”
“You gotta move your car.”
“I just got home, why?”
“Cuz Theresa just got home. She’s blockin you in.”
“Well why didn’t she park on the street?”
“Man there’s two spots down here. Y’all got one, and we got the other. I’ve been here! I paid my rent for twenty-five years!” He hadn’t paid rent for twenty-five years, his mother did for most of it. He was twenty-seven.
I got off the phone furious. My roommate had come home after me, but rather than bicker about who was going to move their car, most of our anger was directed at our downstairs neighbor. His girlfriend had recently decided that she didn’t like parking on the street, so he had decided that it was disrespectful when we both parked in the driveway. We were outraged because he constantly had visitors coming in and out of the house whom had no regard for where or when they parked, and would frequently block us in. I didn’t like the lectures about respect, either. He was a rap producer, and frequently our floor would shake with beats under construction from 9AM to 2AM. But we never complained.
When my roommate finally did go down to move his car, his girlfriend refused to come out. So a couple hours later she had to move her car in a downpour, when I had to go to work.
“I thought you parked on the street,” she snapped when I showed up at the door dressed for work.
“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.”
“Well just park on the street and we ain’t gonna have no more problems.”
“Whatever.”
I drove to work as buckets rained down on my car. When I got there the parking lot was flooded, so I skipped over them as best I could, pointing my toes like a ballerina, as raindrops bounced off the top of my head.
I was surly and solemn with my coworkers that night. But I still put on a smile and a show for the customers. I’m not sure if its a virtue or a vice if you can be way too nice to people that don’t deserve it on demand.
I was still grumbling when I finished my shift and headed to the back for cash out.
A couple of my older coworkers were sitting back there chatting over their finished lunches when I sat down at the calculator. They mostly ignored me except for a slight smile and a nod of the head when I entered the room.
There were two of them, a man and a woman. The woman’s name was Mary, I talked to her sometimes. She seemed lonely when I spoke to her. She worked on Thanksgiving because her children had all moved away. She often lamented being on her feet for so long, and seemed tired. More than once she mentioned feeling depressed to me. In a business where people are constantly bounding around as fast as they can, Mary always moved very slowly.
The man I had never seen before. From the looks of his uniform he worked somewhere in the kitchen. He was telling a story about a relative of his that was very ill: “…so they did a blood transplant on him. I guess that means that every day they flush out his blood stream. And I went to see him last week and he showed me his hands. ‘Look Dad! No gloves!’ he said. He usually had to wear gloves since his hands were so sensitive…”
“That’s wonderful. I wish we had a cure like that with mother and all – I’m going down to the hospital all the time for the radiation treatments.
“And medicine is so expensive. I was thinking of signing up for this experimental treatment at Stanford. I figure once they’re willing to test them on people they must be OK. And they’ll pay you a thousand dollars…”
Mary stood up, slowly and clutching her back, “…oh but I don’t have any time. I don’t want to wait on these people anymore…” she headed back towards the madness of the serving floor.
The man stood, shaking his head. He picked up his plate and walked out.
In the silent break room I could hear the rain pounding the roof. It echoed throughout, thousands of tiny drops forming a sustained yet chaotic rhythm. And on and on it went…