Sept 21, 1998

On Friday evening, two girls from work, another girl from the City, Jack the Beagle, and I piled into my 1992 blue Honda Civic EX four-door sedan and drove four hours to Washington, D.C. It was the first leg of our journey to see The Dave Mathews Band in Roanoke, Virginia.

The car was pretty cramped, especially for little Jack who was confined to his tiny travel cage. Why I brought Jack, I don't know. It was an irrational act. I couldn't take him to the concert. When the girls and I got onto the party bus bound for Roanoke early Saturday morning, Jack stayed behind in the dark basement of an old friend's house, once again stuffed into his tiny, metal cage.

Now I'm no big fan of Dave Mathews. In fact, I hardly know anything about the band at all. Why would I drive four hours from New York to D.C. and then ride a bus for another four hours from D.C. to Roanoke to see a band I care nothing about? Well the answer to that question is in the first sentence of this story: I would be in the company of three girls the entire weekend!

I'd never been on a road trip with a bunch of girls before, so I was a bit anxious about what types of--if any--conversations we would have. What made me even more tense was the fact that one of the girls was one of Lindy's beautiful friends. (You may recall in my report Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, I talked about how I went dancing a few weekends back with my friend, Lindy, and five of her really hot friends. Kristi, the hottest of them all, was the one in the car with me this past weekend. Hey now! She's the one who told me a girl can always tell when a guy in a bar is coming on to her. How?, I asked. "When he comes up and starts talking to you", she replied with a smile.)

My apprehension evaporated quickly. Kristi and the two girls I work with proved to be outstanding conversationalists. I had a completely wonderful time. While Jack sulked in his cage on the way down, the girls and I told funny stories and laughed almost nonstop. It was just like being on a road trip with a bunch of guys; except it smelled nicer in the car.

Kristi made me laugh more than anyone else. A couple things surprised me about this. For one, most people don't make me laugh. Secondly, I'd never met a really pretty girl with my sense of humor. Kristi was the exception. Most of the time when I say I like a girl because she has a sense of humor, it really means I like her because she laughs at my jokes. In Kristi's case, I liked her because it was a challenge to keep up with her wit. (I especially enjoyed her story about her friend whose bowel movements were so massive that he had to break them up with toothpicks so that his monster log would go down the drain.)

Our Saturday morning bus ride through the Old Dominion was beautiful. The lush green valleys of central Virginia were an extreme contrast to the concrete jungle we'd driven down from the night before.

One of the girls I work with graduated last year from Catholic University in D.C. The thirty-odd people on the party bus were all friends and acquaintances of her's from college. At 26, I was one of the oldest on the bus. That was kind of weird.

Victory Stadium was the venue in Roanoke. Bruce Hornsby was the opening act. I cared even less about Bruce Hornsby than I did about Dave Mathews. Bruce was set to start playing at 2:00 p.m. At 2:30 p.m. we were still standing outside of the bus in a parking lot a couple of miles from the stadium. The kids in our group were more interested in drinking beer and smoking pot at that moment than listening to Bruce Hornsby sing songs none of us had ever heard of.

"You know we're missing Bruce Hornsby right now?" I asked Kristi.

"Yeah, I know," she replied with indifference.

"Well, I guess that's just the way it is."

That was a test.

Kristi immediately caught my joke and laughed. She passed. (Did you?)

A lot of other concert-goers showed the same lack of interest in Bruce Hornsby. When we got there at 3:00 p.m., there were still sizeable crowds filing through the gates of Victory Stadium. It was while we were waiting to get in that something very bizarre happened. Some drunk guy approached one of the girls in our group and made the strange request that this girl close her eyes, turn around, and put her hands behind her back. What was even more strange was that she complied. He then placed what felt to her like a warm kielbasa into her open palms. When she felt that the kielbasa had a pulse, she screamed. The guy bolted before any of us knew what was going on. I guess New York is not the only place where guys are fond of whipping it out in public.

Bruce was finishing up as Kristi and I and the rest of our group began pushing and squeezing and swimming through the dense mass of people on the infield. As we got closer to the stage, the crowd became thicker and more reluctant to let newcomers through. That was understandable. They'd fought to get as far up as they were; no one was going to yield any ground freely.

I felt like I was hacking my way through some thick jungle in the Amazon basin. I mean, there was no personal space at all in the crowd. Bodies were pressed more tightly together than in a porn film. Imagine if you had to cram 100 people into your bathroom at home. Okay, now shut the bathroom door. Now imagine 14 of those 100 people smoking pot. (You're not allowed to turn on the bathroom fan in this scenario.) Three of the people in your packed bathroom keep passing gas. (Don't touch that fan!) Everyone is sweating now due to the intense body heat in the room. (Students of physics will remember that an increase in temperature is directly proportional to an increase in pressure. There's a lot of pressure in your bathroom right now.) Let's see, what else? Oh yes, you've got two elbows in your left kidney. Three people are stepping on your feet. Your arms are raised above your head, crossed in front of your face, and pinned there in that position by the eight people around you who are pressing into every square inch of surface area on your body. Suddenly, some jackasses in the rear of your bathroom think it would be fun to watch everybody suffer even more and they start pushing the folks in front of them. This causes an immediate domino effect. Great swells travel through the crowd, knocking people off of their feet. These less fortunate souls are now submerged below the human sea, vulnerable to being trampled underfoot.

The crowd grows more dense. There are now 150 people in your bathroom. You feel the first rib crack. Then the second. A short, fat girl behind you starts to hyperventilate. She needs to get out of there. 'Pass me up! Pass me up!' she cries. The guys around her hoist her above their heads and convey her to the door. In the process, she accidentally kicks you in the jaw with her foot. 'She's a big'un,' one guy quips with completely audible insensitivity at she goes by. While you're rubbing your sore chin, a beach ball bounces off of your head. That amuses you a bit. When a beer bottle bounces off of your head, you become a bit distressed.

The sweatshirt you're wearing is not helping your perspiration problem. After five minutes of wriggling around, you manage to get it off. Five minutes later, you've successfully tied it around your waist. 'That's not your pecker, is it?' the angry guy in front of you asks. No, you reply, It's just the knot in my sweatshirt. But thank you for having that kind of confidence in me.

Now just add the music.

If you can imagine all of that, then you know what it was like to be front row center at the Dave Mathews Band concert at Victory Stadium in Roanoke, Virginia. We'd made it all the way to the front. Although I now had to contend with the full force of the crowd pushing me into the low, metal restraining wall, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment; like I'd reached the top of Everest.

Then I thought about poor little Jack back at my buddy's house, sitting alone in his metal tiny cage in a strange, dark basement. He was like a little doggie POW, suffering from sensory deprivation, hallucinating, starving for something--anything--to eat, even some cold rice and a little rat meat. What a lousy master I was. Bringing him on the trip was just stupid.

When we finally got back to my buddy's house at midnight, I went downstairs with much trepidation. To my surprise, Jack wasn't trembling in his cage. He was asleep. He even made it outside to pee. What a good boy! I guess he wasn't that mad at me.

Through circumstances too boring to explain, I found myself alone with Kristi for much of the next day. We strolled around historic Annapolis. (While Jack waited in his cage in the car.) Then we drove up to Baltimore. We toured the campus of Johns Hopkins University. (While Jack waited in his cage in the car.) We meandered about the Inner Harbor and watched the singing fudge makers in the Light Street Pavilion. (While Jack waited in his cage in the car.) Then we had a wonderful dinner of mussels, crabcakes, and beer at Bertha's in Fells Point. (Jack waited in his cage in the car then too.)

Kristi was just the greatest. (I'm not the only one who thinks that; she's got a boyfriend in Chicago.) She is very smart and refined (but playful) and very pretty. She's adventurous, self-confident, and well-traveled. But most importantly, she's got the spark or the sickness, as my friend Sean Simpson calls it. Her humor is full of asides, obscure references, dead-pan sarcasm, and occasional physical zaniness. We play off of each other very well. I was immediately comfortable around her.

Like I said she's got a boyfriend (albeit a long-distance one) and for that reason, I would never ask Kristi out on a date. That would be wrong for so many reasons, so it's just not going to happen. Like the thoroughly uninspiring Bruce Hornsby sang, 'That's just the way it is.'

But it was just very nice to hang out in Maryland with a girl that I felt completely at ease with. Annapolis, Hopkins, the Inner Harbor, and Fells Point were all old haunts for me and Andrea. (More about her in a later story.) When she dumped my sorry ass after a five-year relationship, these wonderful places became grim reminders of what once was. I just couldn't go on living in the Free State; everyday was like walking around my own personal Antietam Battlefield. The guns were silent, but it was now a very somber place.

So I moved north to the Big Apple for no bigger reason than I needed a change of scenery. Though I've tried to ignore it, my greatest fear since Andrea left me has been an inability to really connect with another girl. With Angel, I found the excitement that had been absent in my heart for such a long time. With Kristi, I found an immediate sense of companionship. (And by spending time in Maryland with Kristi, I created new, good memories in one of my favorite places.) Now I just need to find an exciting fellow-traveler who doesn't have a boyfriend. But that's really not that pressing. I'm in no hurry to be anyone's boyfriend. (I'd just like to hang out with an untethered fun girl who likes me primarily as a friend and occasionally more.) What's important is that I know now that there is life after Andrea. There truly are other fish in the sea. And that was why this weekend was so great.

As Kristi and the two girls from work slept in my car on the way back to New York, I thought about all of this and smiled.

Then I stopped smiling.

Something didn't smell right. In fact, something smelled all wrong. I looked over at the sleeping Kristi and wondered if this beautiful girl had just fouled my air. I hadn't heard any noise emitting from her nether region. Then I turned to look in the back seat. In the moonlight that shown through the sunroof, I saw what I swear looked like a smile on Jack's face. He was awake and staring straight at me. Then I saw that his penis was fully engorged; it looked like a tube of red lipstick turned all the way out.

Another wave of smell hit me. This one woke the three sleeping girls.

'Was that you?' Kristi asked with a pinch-nosed smile.

'No!', I protested immediately. It was him!

And for the rest of the ride home, Jack just sat quietly staring at me, farting and fully erect; exacting his silent revenge on his negligent master.

Broadway Jim Jenkins