American Outlaw - Jesse James [46]
With bright bursts of electricity, I jointed aluminum and steel. Soon, a vague realization came over me that I might actually be good enough at this to do it as a career. Maybe it wasn’t curing cancer, but I was contributing to the world. One way of life, football, had disappeared for me. But just as quickly, another had arisen to take its place. I felt grateful for the turn my life had taken.
The jury was still out on Seattle as a city, though: it was absolutely freezing there. After years of the mildest Southern California winters, I’d been dropped face-first into a never-ending drizzle that went from cold to gray, and back to cold. My Chevy bombed its way through flooded highways at seventy miles per hour, its shoddy tires spraying up huge arcs of water. I remember the windshield wipers of that car vividly, because I never actually turned them off. They batted back and forth so continually that I’d wear them out by the month, and had to fork over eight bucks for new ones.
“You want the regular model, or the double-arm blade?” the lady behind the counter asked me.
“Give me the doubles,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
The people mystified me, too. Seattle was in the dawn of its Plaid Shirt Era. This wasn’t the preppy California plaid I had grown up with, either. Dudes wore goatees, sideburns, and beanie caps pulled down over their eyebrows. Meanwhile, chicks went for chokers, ripped jeans, laced-up Docs, and pale makeup. Apparently, a mutant gang of ex-hippies with seasonal affective disorder had taken control of the city’s fashion scene. No matter where you went, you could never really get away from the plaid.
It wasn’t that I hated grunge; in fact, quite the contrary. I just liked to laugh at the people who thought it was so hard-core. These folks had never been to a Circle Jerks show, I can tell you that. When it came down to the music, I actually liked a bunch of the bands and their sound. In Pike Place Market, there was a Sub Pop record store, where they sold singles and EPs and limited edition stuff by cool new bands like Tad, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden. I happily threw my money down for those records.
The welding money came through as promised. For the first time in my life, I had cash to burn. The dumb part of me wanted to blow it all on toys, of course, but something inside me told me not to be such an asshole. Getting a better place to live would be way smarter.
“Your week’s up,” the night manager at the Red Lion Inn coughed, irritably. “Whatcha gonna do?”
I decided to stay put. It was the easiest thing to do, and broken mattress springs be damned. The shipyard had me working fourteen-hour days, so I wasn’t inside that motel room very often. Also, this was the first time I’d ever had a pad of my very own, and hence, I had nothing to compare it to. The lukewarm shower, broken mirror, and trashy courtyard view were just so much gravy to me.
Each month I sent off some cash to my mom to help her with her rent, but beyond that, I didn’t have that many expenses. On weekends, I’d make myself a bag lunch and drive to downtown Seattle, where I’d end up at the Aquarium or at the Ballard Docks, watching the sea lions play. I’d park myself with my bag of sandwiches and laugh as I watched the sea lions swim around and poach the world-class salmon. They’d take one huge bite, and then just toss the rest of the fish away. Kings of all they surveyed. I dug them a lot.
There was a secondhand bookstore downtown that I grew fond of, and I took to wandering around in there and exploring their shelves. No one had ever told me I was smart when I was in school, but I had always liked reading, even if I’d spent more time on the football field trying to shake the life out of people. Now