Trying to chill after an all-too-typically bizarre Sunday evening. Canceled my standing Monday night dinner appointment. Ripped a bunch of Miles Davis CDs to the iPod – 50s and 60s now well covered, but do I want the live stuff, the angry 70s electric stuff, the poppy 80s sweet stuff? Stretched out on the bed, put on the newly remastered DVD of Rio Bravo and got ready to spend my night with the Duke, Dino and Ricky, and 20 minutes in, the phone started getting busy.
I then remembered it was wake-up time in NYC, my mother’s birthday, and while I’d already sent a gift I needed to send an ecard and make the call. She’s 86 years old today. And that led to thoughts of how, in some ways, we are so alike, as much I’d prefer to deny it. First, with just one major exception (she was one of the first, possibly the first, successful cornea transplant recipients), she has been mostly healthy and managed to stay out of hospitals for most of her life. Second, until recently, most of her friends tended to be half her age, because she always possessed that sort of energy and spirit. And third, while she has never been officially diagnosed as such, for most of my life I have been convinced that she is clinically insane. I will offer no examples of that other than the fact that I am her son and look how I turned out.
Anyway, midway through the call, the phone got busy again and I received an invitation to go for a drink from someone I can rarely say no to. (Oh, that’s an awkwardly constructed sentence, innit?) And so, off to a Wyndham Street bar, where just one drink turned into four, but accompanied by good conversation and a nice view of some stunning women passing along the street. A very loud group sat at the next table, hip enough to hang in a Wyndham Street lounge bar, local enough to pass their time there playing the 5-10-15-20 hand game.
That phase of the evening came to an end all too soon and I was again on my own. I decided to resist the call of Wanchai and instead descended, literally and figuratively, into Lan Kwai Fong. Monday and after midnight, so not much going on in any way, shape or form.
There were far more taxis along the street than people. I latched onto a glass of whiskey and soda, plonked my tired body onto a stool at a front table at Bar George and resolutely ignored the few remaining hookers ready to try almost anything at that late hour to avoid going back to their ten-in-a-room yet $500 per night impromptu dormitory.
As I sat there, a song came on, a cover of the old Stones song, “I’m free to do what I want any old time.” And I thought, yes, it’s true, I am. For all of the baggage that I have picked up or that has been forced upon me, my life is entirely of my own making.
And secure in that whiskey-enforced lesson, I walked up the hill, got into a taxi, as always gave my address in Cantonese and received a polite reply in English, returned home and settled into a dream-free sleep.
