2005-03-21 || 5:34 p.m.

|| brut cologne forever ||

aside from my father, rick harris was the first man i really got to know and draw conclusions from re: men. he looked exactly like the man on the tapatio bottle. he wore brut cologne. he had hairy arms and a tattoo on his forearm from a drunken night when he was young. he was my best friend's dad, and spending nights at their house on and off for fifteen years, i got to study him. a man. men. he was an electrician and came home for lunch every day, expecting a sandwich and glass of milk on the table. he took julie's george michael cassette away when we were 10 because it featured the salacious hit 'i want your sex,' but we found it in a drawer in the garage and would sneak it late at night to mouth the words emphatically in her closed bedroom. he started calling me olga the maid when i was thirteen and spending weeks at a time at his house in the summers when i had moved too far away to ride my bike over. he called his wife kate when everyone else in the world called her kathy. he sang karaoke like you wouldn't believe and always rented tricked-out jukeboxes for every major harris-family function, turning it on hours before the party to blare elvis while arranging rented folding chairs in the garage. he came home for lunch while i was dying my hair for the first time at age 16, and julie made me wear a towel over a plastic bag over my wet hair in the event he would get angry i was undergoing such a life-altering change in his spare bathroom.

the year julie went away to college i drove with him to visit her. we spent two and a half hours driving up the 101 in the harris buick stationwagon and he told me about his first car with the lights on the dashboard that would change with the music, how he stole julie's mother away from another boy while in junior college and fell in love with her, and how odd it was getting old enough to be driving to visit his daughter at college. i had never heard anything like that from a man, not even my own father at the time, and i felt almost embarrassed that i had witnessed his life playing out before him while sitting in traffic in los angeles.

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