Wicked Pissah

June 9, 2010 05:48

I’m slow to rise today. The alarm on my phone vibrating on a plastic tote signaled the Sandman to stop the somnambulist gang rape of my subconscious. I was tired. I’m not sure how it happens, but it does.

Yesterday was a long day. Eighteen hours of Full China Mental Jacket will do that to a person. The students are burned out with only a few weeks in the term and there apathy is contagious. I struggled to get through the last class and the best comment I got from the passive learners was, “it’s over, it’s like torture” when the last bell rang.

A jumpy bumpy bus ride along traffic filled “Rice Runners” made for the usual quirky jerk commute home. I had the driver stop about a block from the last stop so we could join our crazy hairdresser for a “Chinese Baby Boy Party”. Another hour later found us stuck in traffic, again somewhere deep in the ceramic district of Foshan. There is just a point in a foreigner’s existence here that you just have to let go.  Seriously, there was no reason to get up tight. How could I. I had absolutely no control over the situation. We were cramped in a car with total strangers, listening to really bad cover music, going to an unknown destination, for vague reasons, at this point you have remind yourself, “This is China” and “who needs LSD?” The surreal effect of all the strange yet familiar situations can really make you laugh as opposed to getting extremely pissed off. It’s a balancing act over the high wire act of culture shock that affects your total being. While sitting on the bridge doing your best clown car impression for a micro eternity and Hong Kong film star Andy Lau warbling Roy Orbinson’s Pretty Woman with a series of mondagreens like, “Pretty woman won’t you stay a why” and “looka my why” at quadraphonic volumes, you know that Rod Serling is narrating the scene as Timothy Leary laughs. You just have to let go.

Take Me to Your Leader

In my case I bite my tongue as not to bust out chortling, as mind drifts to other wacky Chinese car adventures. After a few minutes of earthquake survivor contortions, I manage to fish my cell phone out from under me and my balls that I’m sitting on in the world’s smallest Buick. I needed to share the madness with my friend Danny Valenzuela, who was trapped in a similar situation with me in Beijing last summer. The only thing different was in that car there was also a drunken mad Canadian who had to piss so bad that he nearly jumped out of the moving vehicle in the middle of eight way traffic intersection.  His agitations lead to a string of obscenities that poor local driver could understand in any language. “Tell this fucker to stop the car! I’ve got to take a godamn leak! No seriously, make him stop, the shit head. I’ll piss his fucking seat, son of bitch!” This of course only made him drive faster and more reckless through the busy streets. Somewhere between being frustrated that Canadian Yosemite Sam was going to get us all killed and that we warned him not down a twelve pack of beer before the long ride, does the payoff come. His crescendo of cussing, cursing and pleading the driver to stop to let him piss ends instantly with a defeated, “there is goes…I pissed myself.” Danny and I are doubled up trying not to laugh aloud as it would be cruel. It was one of those stifling attempts of “don’t look at me” or bust out laughing. We were in agony, snorting and chortling like Bevis and Butthead. After a few minutes, I catch my breath and ask The Canadian “is it bad?” “Hell, I’m still going!” Which of course kills us all over again, as what has to be the longest piss ever taken by a human, but the fact that it’s happening in the front seat of a crazy Beijing taxi ride elevates the insanity to Cheech and Chong levels. It was the calm after the storm that left us in stitches. The quiet resolve of this mad man once he pissed himself left us scarred for life. Upon arriving at the hostel, Yosemite slowly gets out and throws some money at the driver. We amble out of the back with our luggage and watch the cabbie pull up the piss soaked passenger floor mat with a quizzical look as if he had witnessed a magic trick like, “where all this liquid come from.” We stumble our way up the Hutong to the reception desk, with The Canadian bluntly telling everyone and anyone repeatedly, “I pissed my pants”.  The fact they were also canary yellow with a pair of pink Crocs only added to the full of effect of what the fuck just happened. Like I said when you are functionally illiterate in Chinese, sometimes you just have to let go. Even if it’s in your pants, “Pretty woe mon, want jew stay aaah whyyyyyyyy!”