Safe and Secure -or- The Remora: Part 2 (449 hits)
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Submitted by erosion_rules (View user info) at 2006-05-03 18:00:29 EDT
Part 1: http://www.ubersite.com/m/87398
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I stepped into the harsh sunlight outside the restaurant. Such a shitty job, I wondered why I had held onto it so long. For almost a year now, I had been a dishwasher. Now I was unemployed, and I had nothing ahead of me, and everything ahead of me.
The restaurant was in a small tourist hotel on the St. Lawrence River. We overlooked the Thousand Islands, with a view of Heart Island, home of Boldt Castle. I decided that was a good a place as any to start my journey.
I paid the seven dollars for the ferry trip to the island, and started touring the grounds. I had visited many times in my youth, but had never really noticed anything. The castle began construction in 1900, and was overseen by George Boldt. It was abrubtly stopped in 1907, when his wife died. Years later, construction was continued by independent investors, seeking to preserve history, or some shit like that. It's a wholly spooky place, a monolith of stone unfinished in the middle of an island. The room that stuck in my memory as creepiest, for some reason or another, was the swimming pool. It is ten feet deep all around, with a mosaic of tiles lining it throughout. There seemed to be no way in or out of this pool, with only about a foot of floor space by the door. The water was always kept at about three feet from the lip of the pool. Most saw this as a beautiful room, but the only thing I could think was that Boldt had built this room just after his wife died, as a means of drowning himself.
This may all seem irrelevant, but it was here that I met my first ticket out of Alexandria Bay, and my first opening to what lay ahead.
I was looking in on the pool from one of the "windows" situated around it, which were without glass. There was a glint of small change emanating from the bottom, years of people wishing in a man's intended watery grave.
"Pity no one ever got to swim in it." The sudden voice behind me startled me to an embarassing jump. If the windows had been bigger, I would have been treading water in this beautiful hydrated tomb.
"Jesus jumped up fiddling Christ, man, you scared the FUCK out of me."
I turned to be faced by Thane Chamberlain. No relation to the promiscuous athlete. He was about my age, a bit bigger than me, but by no means in shape. I myself am 6'1", 160 pounds. This guy was roughly 6'3", and closing in on 200. I'm surprised I didn't hear his approach.
"Come here often?" Oh no, he was a rump ranger, and I was his target.
"Uh...yeah. Like, every summer since I was four. Look, I'm flattered and everything, but I'm just not int--"
"What? Oh, shit, man, I'm not queer." Thane had almost no social skills. He was born locally, and he moved to Seattle when he was about two years old. His parents had gotten a divorce due to his father's...tastes. When they got to Seattle, he was raised by his father..and his new father. He never went to public school, so the only interaction he saw was that of too exceedingly effeminite men.
"Look, uh...wait, what's your name?"
"Connor." I was bracing myself for the last name question. Apparently Thane had no need for this information. "You're not going to ask my last name?"
"No, I figure you'll introduce yourself as what you want to be called. No sense lengthening introductions, eh?"
We left the island, and headed to Thane's car. For a social retard raised away from his peers by two pillow biters, he managed to do pretty well, and he had a dark blue Spyder, fully paid off. We went to Roman's, the local club, and got wasted. We each walked out of the club with a Canadian girl that spoke with a thick French accent. We followed it up with a ride out to the area known to locals simply as "The Fence."
The Fence was in a field next to the double feature drive in theatre. It was the single spot, privately owned, where you could catch two movies a night, free. One might think that it would be a visual event only, but most drive in theatres added AM and FM transmitting for their sound systems. No one wants a car filled with mosquitoes for the entire night. The transmitters are powerful enough to hear the movie from your radio, even miles away.
We caught the second movie of the feature, but we were too fucked up to even know what it was. It was just an ice breaker for the two Canuck chicks, anyway. I awoke in Thane's hotel room, a cheap single room two bed number, with the girls leaving, Thane's hookup looking down at him, clutching her head, and repeatedly muttering, "Merde."
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So ends part two. This installment is obviously mostly character development. I have a feeling this will end up being longer than Six Degrees.
User Reviews
Submitted by Beano312003 (user info) at 2006-05-15 08:18:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2006-05-11 02:48:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Better.
Submitted by MonkeyingAround (user info) at 2006-05-03 18:29:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I really enjoyed these segments... They are a light into the lives of my friends who go unnoticed.