Having said, “He’s here!” and having greeted me warmly, Mark disappeared like the pantsless Internet wraith that he was. I collected my meager belongings and climbed the stairs to the second level.
Mark’s room was directly at the top of the stairway. The door was slightly ajar, and I could see the dim motel room light reflecting off the bedspread. Feeling a bit like Philip Marlowe, I tapped at the door. A shadow moved about on the other side. Before apprehension could replace exhaustion, the door swung open, and I was confronted with Bernie, the other Internet wraith.
He was about my height, trim, curly-haired, and wearing pants. He smiled warmly and offered his hand, greeted me and invited me in. Mark emerged from an alcove-cum-dressing area, properly dressed. “Sorry about that, but I wasn’t wearing any pants,” he said. He was approximately 11 feet tall.
We exchanged pleasantries, and Bernie offered me a plastic cup of wine. I demurred because I was still on East Coast time and was afraid of falling asleep during the show or of being removed from the audience when the combination of alcohol and jet lag led me to shout out, “We love you, Phil!” during an inconvenient moment of the performance.
After a quick confab, we determined our plan. I would go and call my wife and shower (this last, curiously, Mark’s suggestion), then we would reconvene and do something—maybe get dinner or overlook the bridge. Bernie took refuge in his room, and I dragged myself down to mine.
As I unpacked my show shirt and my deodorant, I discovered that my cell phone wasn’t in my bag. I checked my pockets and rummaged through the pile of debris I had accumulated on my trip. I went down to the car and searched it. Nothing. Fortunately, the airline had recompensed me with a five-minute phone card for the inconvenience of being shuttled around the country willy-nilly, and my wife and I were able to communicate long enough to determine that the cell phone hadn’t been used and wasn’t being answered. We were out one phone, but still hoped that it would turn up at the car rental agency or the airport. (It didn’t. My wife made the sacrifice and got a camera-cell phone, and I got hers. Perhaps the old phone grew despondent and threw its troubles off the Golden Gate Bridge. Nobody knows.—ed.)
I showered and put on my going-to-see-a-show shirt, and the three of us reconvened in Mark’s room, which was quickly becoming our nerve center. Within minutes, we were able to determine that Mark wasn’t hungry, Bernie would eat if I did, and that my stomach thought it was after 9:00 p.m. and was expecting to be parked in front of the TV at home. We compromised by deciding to go straight to the venue.
Mark volunteered to drive, Bernie volunteered to navigate, and I volunteered to criticize from the back. We piled into Mark’s car and inserted ourselves into the bustle of San Rafael’s social whirl.
Despite having at least two sets of directions and three nominally intelligent people to decipher them, we managed to get lost not once, but twice. This was on a trip that covered all of about a mile-and-a-quarter. We were working together as a team; unfortunately, it was a really crummy team, one that always finished last. Despite our collective incompetence, we arrived at the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium with something over an hour to spare.
Tomorrow, Part VII: In the Presence
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