zoo party

This crazy old rich guy built a private zoo downtown just for whales and dragons. On cleaning day, he had a party. People would sit in the viewing galleries and watch as workers drained the whale pool and scrubbed down the walls of the dragon cages. Then there would be a parade through the city streets as the animals were carted back from their temporary holding facility. For this particular cleaning day party, the guest list included me and everyone I used to date. Everyone got pretty drunk in the viewing gallery, so I popped open one of the windows into the side of the empty whale pool and climbed down inside. It looked like an old city pool, just ten times deeper and so wide I could barely see the other side. The bottom and sides of the pool were lined with light brown tiles and skylights shot down beams of sunlight at random angles. I sat in one corner, breathing in the slightly fishy air, until alarms went off to signal they were going to fill the pool back up and dump the whales back in. I rejoined the party, which had moved up to the roof so everyone could lean over the edges for a glance of the purple and red dragons being carted down Broadway.

summer fun times

My mom was driving us to a picnic, going backwards down the highway. Through the front window, we could see the cars behind us with giant matching auras towering high above them. Apparently this was the result of refraction in the tires as the cars drove through puddles. It made the cars look tall and skinny. At some point, we convinced our mom to turn the car around and put the car in drive instead of reverse, and things went much more smoothly.

At the picnic, multiple concerts were going on all around us. Happy hipsters trotted from an outdoor bandshell to a musical parade to a giant rectangular pool that covered half of Queens. It was about two miles long and a mile wide, and we all jumped in and spent the rest of the afternoon breathing underwater, doing backflips.

Then John had to go check his parents into a retirement home and I realized we were 55 years old. The afternoon went downhill from there.

worst parents' weekend ever

My parents' were in town, and I wanted to show them a fun New York weekend. It didn't quite work out that way. I tried taking them to the pool party at McCarren Park, and we got there really early, right after my parents got out of church. But at 11 a.m., the line was already all the way around the pool, down the block, and across the Pulaski Bridge into Queens. We waited in line for a long time.

Eventually I gave up and took my mom out to breakfast with my friend Steve and his sister. My dad must have gone home, disgusted with all the queuing. I guess it was a fancy breakfast. I offered to pay for my mom and myself and ended up shelling out $100 for eggs and coffee.

Then my brother and I started breaking into people's apartments, just to check them out. We saw a cute attic room, and an apartment inside a large sailboat with a tendency to flip over even in the mildest weather. The sailboat apartment was full of clues. We discovered a tiny little wrench taped to the thigh of the guy who lived there (he was asleep). Then we found equally tiny little pieces of copper tubing under all the cushions in the room. The more clues we found, the bigger they got, until the entire floor was covered with nuts and bolts that we could barely scoop up into our arms without dropping them everywhere. At some point, we decided to let the clues be clues and leave the mystery for someone else to solve.

Now I was faced with the problem of finding a subway that would take me to work from Queens. The locals were full of useless advice. I took a B or a D further away from the city to catch an M, which seemed wrong, and someone told me it was running local on the weekend anyway. To transfer to the M, I had to climb down out of a parking structure, cut across a perfectly manicured lawn, walk through a very formal living room (which I think is more correctly called a salon), and hop a fence to cross more lawn. The whole time, I could see the train coming. In my hurry I kept tripping and getting stuck on fence posts and knocking over televisions. The various people I'd asked for directions crowded around and cheered me on.

The M station was very technologically advanced, with shuttle pods that would airlift senior citizens directly to Broadway shows. Still, I had to buy my ticket from an angry old woman at the bar, which took some more time. What I'm trying to say is, I totally missed that train, and I knew I would be stuck in Queens forever.