Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Great Road Trip (Nights 1 & 2)

Night 1:

Did you ever see “Synechdoche, NY,” that truly mind-bending movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman? I'm here to tell you that Schenectady, NY, the real town, and its surrounding villages, are just as weird.

Tonight I pulled into the motel near the Albany Airport, ready to have a lovely night in a quaint little hamlet. After a nap and an attempt to make me NOT look like I had been driving for the last four hours, I took a long ride down a two-lane road. I passed a lot of people on porches, setting off illegal fireworks, beating their kids, and fighting over the last cold beer. I passed a biker bar named Humpy's boasting karaoke every single night. Humpy's. I pulled through a depressed sort of ghetto and came upon 2 blocks where the roads narrowed and there were fake facades on the old buildings. Brand new trees, plopped in plastic planters painted to look like actual terra cotta. Brand new parking meters that don't actually function. Two restaurants (both closed), a CVS, and a movie theater. Not a soul in sight. Wait, sorry. At the next intersection, up where the manufactured town turned back into a concrete, tired hood, there was a woman in an oversized pink t-shirt and no bra on, fighting with her significant other, a man who was seventy years old if he was a day, smoking a blunt and cursing. Shirtless.

I knew at this moment that I would not be spending a darling evening in Schenectady, NY. I knew what I was going to do: hop in the car and drive like hell until I got back to the mini-mall which featured a P.F. Chang's and a Regal Cinemas, right where Albany turns into Colonie. The rest of the night was nothing to speak of – satisfying dumplings from a Chinese fusion chain, and a late viewing of “Magic Mike,” which was about ten times less magic than I was hoping it would be. Frankly, I feel a little dirty and disoriented. I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep, a questionable breakfast at Denny's, and three-and-a-half easy hours north to my true destination, the place I belong – Montreal. 


Night 2:
 
Today was my first almost full day in Montreal. I wonder if it will ever not be disorienting to hear French spoken everywhere with little English curses and proper names sprinkled in. it's like having amnesia with 2-second spurts where you remember absolutely everything. Fleeting, distracting, but you're always looking forward to the next one.

After a two hour nap (otherwise known as me trying to figure out which channels work on the TV), I headed out for dinner to a recommended restaurant by my hosts, Sushi Mikado. After a lovely walk down Rue Sherbrooke, then Rue St-Denis, I looked, but did not find. Three sushi restaurants, but none called Mikado. I walked into one, seeing as it was the busiest, and hoped I took the right chance.

I didn't.

It was an all you can eat sushi house where nobody pays attention to you and the rice is overcooked. My food was fine, until I got a piece of something un-chewable in my eel roll, and decided it was time to bounce. My standoffish waiter informed me that all you can eat sushi palace would cost me $22, but I gave him a look. A look that clearly meant, “I had no idea this place was all you can eat because my French is awful. I barely ate any food and I want to leave. Don't do this to me.” he made my check a-la carte and if I understood French, I know he would have said to his waiter friends, “This poor fool from the States. Learn to read!” the same way we make fun of people from New Jersey when they can't drive or park or walk down the sidewalk. I was the silly American saying, “merci, desolee, merci, desolee” when all they could think was, “give it up, sister. Just say thanks and go back to your hotel.” I seriously should have consulted my guidebook closer. I had seventeen restaurants highlighted in that neighborhood alone.

After that I did what I do best in strange cities – I took in a movie. Tonight it was “Take This Waltz,” another movie where Michelle Williams walks around being simultaneously adorable and depressing. Seth Rogan also tried his hand at a semi-dramatic role, but I realized that his earnest puppy dog face and serious under bite make it impossible to take him seriously. Ever. It looks like he's about to launch into baby-talk all the time, and in this movie, it sure didn't help that he actually did. I did enjoy the Michelle Williams part of it, but I'm going to say this – I'm not sure if this movie made me believe in love more or less. I know it wasn't supposed to be sad, but when it ended, I cried like someone had just smacked me really, really hard. The premise was simple and not unexplored – Michelle and Seth are married, and they have happy moments and stupid moments and moments when everything the other person says is awful and wrong. Michelle meets Mystery Guy and he's amazing, either because he's actually amazing, or because she knows nothing about him. It almost doesn't matter. Almost. Because she's married, she does nothing, but this doesn't stop her from meeting him illicitly, and it doesn't stop him from graphically describing a sex act to her for twenty minutes in broad daylight in an empty bar. After endless minutes of her staring into space because she loves two people at once for different reasons, they finally admit they're in love, Seth suffers the consequences, and then Michelle and Mystery Guy legit get together, which we know thanks to a montage of some seriously graphic fuck scenes. 

The movie goes on for twenty mostly pointless minutes after that, showing the clumsy clean up of a failed five-year marriage and the inevitable decline of a hot fling into another mediocre relationship. What I'm not sure of here is what I was supposed to take away from this. There are a few possible lessons. Everything new becomes old, so stop chasing shiny stuff and leaving the dull because it will all be dull one day? Love is amazing and rare, so it's OK to leave the person you've been semi-happily married to for five years if you find something better and more intense? Go with your gut? Don't go chasing waterfalls? I seriously have no idea. 

What I do know is this – at the end, when Michelle goes back to the tilt-a-whirl ride where they play The Buggles and spin you around too fast, the site of quite possibly her most intense, pressurized, feverish moment of desire with Mystery Guy, and she spins around alone, trying to recapture that sense of dizzying wanting and insane, dopey happiness, I just wanted to die. I felt like someone punched me in the gut. There's so much glitter and music and noise in that scene but it's so desperate, so empty, so unbelievably familiar, like when you go back to an amazing restaurant for the second time and nothing's quite as good. You order the same thing, you sit in the same booth, but the little ball of fire that made you want to jump out the window is gone, and you feel like you might need to go to a million more restaurants before you find it again. That's how I'm feeling right now, as I sit on the terrace of my little apartment and watch happy couples amble down the street, giggling and drunk after dinner. Like there a million restaurants ahead of me, but only one amazing meal, and I don't know if I have the energy to go find it.

1 comment:

  1. So I saw the preview for that movie while waiting for Moonrise Kingdom to begin and I thought I was going to vomit...it looked so heart-wrenchingly painful that it made me grab onto Aaron in fear. I seriously thought I was going to vomit.
    I guess that could happen...that you could be happily married and someone could sweep you off your feet/knock you on your ass when you're not expecting it...but then you would have to choose to pursue it.
    What I know about marriage (mine anyway) is that it is a choice you (I) make every day. Of course it's easier to make that choice when you feel lovey and romantic, I think that's the way it's designed. But on dark days, sometimes the only light comes, not from love or like or lust or something else that comes and goes, but from the choice you made for many days before that one and the choice you'll keep making for countless days to come.

    ReplyDelete