Though I have been awake when the sun was rising more times than I care or am able to count, the only two times I've ever purposefully witnessed the event directly – actually set out specifically to watch the sun rise as opposed to, say, squinting out the driver's side window while speeding down the Parkway at 5:45AM and wondering why I can never seem to leave New York at a remotely reasonable hour – both took place, as it happens, on the Delaware Avenue end of the South Street walkway.
I started doing theatre in grade school (I just realized I've been doing shows for TWENTY YEARS, and god that's frightening), but I didn't get serious about it until I did Anything Goes in the fall of my senior year of high school.
(Interesting side note: no less than three other high schools around here were doing the same show at the same time, and when I got to the theatre at LaSalle there was this whole great big lot of us who had all been in separate productions of Anything Goes within like three weeks of each other.)
Even for those who at that age realize they're pretty good at this stuff and get vaguely serious about it and may want to keep on doing it, high school theatre is something of a fool's errand. It's a bit like that statistic you hear about athletes: only 2% of high school athletes will play college ball, and only 2% of those will turn pro. I'd wager the percentages for folks who do theatre in high school are roughly the same. Of the 50 or so people I worked with on that production of Anything Goes way back when – by far the largest show I ever did in high school – precisely two do professional theatre work, and I'm one of them. (Okay, 4%, fuck off.) People fall off the bandwagon, discover other interests, get sick of doing tons of hard work for nothing. I've heard "discover girls" mentioned in that list when talking to people about this phenomenon, but only someone who's never met the kind of girls who work in the theatre would say something like that.
After a high school show closes you have the "cast party" at someone's house, where their parents serve soda and chips and whatnot and your drama teachers are there and you talk about how great everyone was – everyone in a high school show is great, if the talk is to be believed – and you hang out for a little bit. After that ends you go to someone else's house who has more permissive parents for the REAL cast party where you give that person's mother your car keys and everyone sits around and gets blitzed. (Oddly enough I was NOT one of those people; I didn't start drinking until college.)
The real cast party for Anything Goes was at some guy's house in Society Hill – can't remember who it was – and there were about 30 of us spread out over the entire third floor of one of those gigantic townhouses that you see all around the pub. Most of the people there were heavily invested into getting drunk. I remember at one point that I got into a heated discussion – at the age of 16, before film school was even a fleeting thought in my head – about why The Empire Strikes Back was CLEARLY a far superior movie to Return of the Jedi and how anyone who thought otherwise was obviously retarded.
There was one other guy there who wasn't drinking – Christ, I can't remember his name either, but I do remember he was blind in one eye because he took a paintball to the cornea the year before – and at around 6:00AM, when most of the rest of the party was either drunk, passed out, or having sex in one of the 27 bedrooms, he suggested that since we were sober and wide awake, hey, you want to go watch the sunrise?
I thought, I've never done that. Why the fuck not?
We drove over to the parking lot in front of Downey's - I DO remember that was the second time in one night and, swear to God, second of only two times I ever violated my Cinderella licence – and ambled over the South Street walkway to watch the sun come up over Camden. This was before the USS New Jersey was there, so it was just pink skies and industrial wasteland on the other side of the river. It was early November and it was absolutely freezing, but we just stood there for a solid twenty minutes in silence watching the sun come up, and when it was finally finished he just turned to me and said, "pretty cool, huh?"
I had to admit that he was right.
The second time I watched the sun come up from the South Street walkway was this past Saturday morning after a very, very, very long night of celebrating my 30th birthday. I was by myself this time, largely because I hate the world and everything in it.
The party itself went smashingly well – I believe over the entire course of the evening we had about 60 people go through the Rigger Bar, including at one bizarre point a sizeable delegation from the Pennsylvania Ballet. I am not making this up. I went outside for a cigarette around 10:30 and when I came back in there was a very large bunch of very small women standing in a cluster in the middle of the room. Not knowing who these women were or how they got there, I shouted "who the fuck are they?" at no one in particular.
My friend Mike came over to me and said, "they're ballerinas."
I said, I thought not unreasonably, "who the fuck are they?" again.
"The Pennsylvania Ballet is having a party next door," Mike said. "I went in there and invited them over here."
"They look like they're 14," I said. I had never seen so many tiny little ostensibly-adults in one place before.
"I think the one might be," Mike said.
"I can't live in this world," I said.
People continued to come and go, mostly coming and not going, and the bar got filled pretty nicely. What was supposed to be the highlight of my evening happened around 11, when a large group of Chelsea friends of mine arrived from New York, including a young lady who I had hoped, at the very least, to get a word in edgewise with at some point over the course of the following 12 hours.
This did not happen, and thus begins my hatred of the world and all its contents.
This did not happen because amongst the group of folks who came down from New York was this douche nozzle who was cockblocking me like fucking Mike Munchak in a Nashville whorehouse. When I say I couldn't get a word in edgewise I mean this quite literally. This guy made any attempt at conversation impossible – and we're not talking conversation like, "so, your hotel room or mine once we're done here?" I mean "so, how was the train ride?" conversation. I couldn't get more than eight seconds of one-on-one with this woman without him showing up and – I am not making this up – positioning himself in such a way that no one – myself included, and I feel I'm the most important actor in this particular drama – could even LOOK at this woman without craning their head around this fuckwad. I couldn't make EYE CONTACT with her.
It actually got a point where my FRIENDS were getting angry at this guy. I had to turn down repeated offers of, alternatively, throwing him into the Delaware River, beating him up under the stairs out the back of the pub, and things that began with, "I have this knife in my car, and…" I made a for-me rare determination that violence was not the answer and I would solve this problem in a civilized way.
Later in the evening when we learn that – and this is the best part - he is GOING OUT WITH SOMEONE ELSE, I started to feel my sense of Zen calmness slipping away and began to get seriously pissed off.
As Kyra was kicking us out of the bar around 2:20 a group consisting of Chelsea fans from Philly and New York who had all gotten rooms at the Society Hill Sheraton – we had a game on at 7AM, so it was determined we'd just crash for a few hours two blocks from the pub – headed back to the hotel, and on the way back and in the rooms I again had to deal with this fucking muppet making any attempt at even casual conversation with the woman I invited to the party specifically so I could HAVE a conversation or two, or three, or perhaps slightly more than a conversation with completely impossible.
It is also important to note at this point that at this time I am, as per usual, the only sober person in the group.
When the small party in the New York people's hotel room turned into, quite literally, a beer-throwing fight, and I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't so much as going to say hello to this woman until the entropic heat death of the universe thanks to this cockblocking kumquat, I decided to head up to the room we of the Philly persuasion had gotten and try to get a whopping three hours of sleep before the match.
About ten minutes after I got down there my friend Tim rolls in and all I can say is that he is fucking DRUNK. I mean, wow. I learned later that he had polished off most of a mini-keg of Heineken in the New York room, and after screwing around for maybe 90 seconds he flops down on the floor and promptly passes out. I was lying awake in the bed, thinking that interfering jackasses aside, and making a note to thank my "friends" for bringing the jackass in the first place, I came to the conclusion that all things considered it was still a pretty damn good birthday. Maybe turning 30 isn't so bad after all.
About two minutes after coming to said conclusion, at almost exactly 4AM, Tim begins to snore.
Well, "snore" isn't exactly the right word for it. The proper description would be something more along the lines of, "at 4AM Tim began to emit noises of roughly the decibel level and vibrational magnitude of a 400-horsepower Evinrude outboard yacht engine."
Let me tell you something, folks – when I was a bouncer at a city pool, way back in my youth, I used to sleep in the pump house of a 40,000 gallon pool, which at the time I roughly equated to sleeping inside a jet engine. I used to sleep like a fucking ROCK in there.
Friday night, I was lying awake listening to these frightening noises coming from my friend, and I couldn't sleep to save my life. I actually – and yet again I am not making this up – attempted to hypnotize myself so as to be able to enter a state in which I would be able to get at least a modicum of restful sleep. (Yes, I actually know how to hypnotize myself.) I could not. The noise was unbearable.
At 5:30AM I said, out loud – since I knew my other friend Ron, who was also bunking in the room, was as wide awake as I was – "oh, fuck all THIS," and took my pillow and blanket into the bathroom, closed the door, and sacked out in the bathtub. I have done this before on road trips when a bed was not an option. It's actually not that uncomfortable, almost womb-like.
On my 30th birthday, lying in a bathtub, in the dark, with a blanket over my head, with the bathroom door closed, I can still hear Tim snoring.
It is loud enough to keep me awake.
Oh, God.
At one point I decided to try the age-old method of counting sheep – in my case, just counting up very slowly in my head – in a last ditch attempt to get maybe an hour of sleep before I had to get up for the match. When I reached NINE HUNDRED, I pulled my cell phone out of the soap dish, saw that it was 6:15 and said, "fuck it, SSD opens soon, might as well get some breakfast."
I showered, changed into my Chelsea kit, and walked down to South Street. I picked up an Inquirer at the WaWa and walked over to the South Street Diner at about 6:35 to see that it didn't open until 7. Hmph.
I looked out towards Front Street and saw the sky starting to turn pink and said out loud to no one in particular,
"we're sober and wide awake, hey, you want to go watch the sunrise?"
So there I am, standing on the river end of the South Street walkway, about a month past 13 years to the day from the last time, watching the sun rise over the USS New Jersey.
When 7AM came I went back to SSD, availed myself of the best French Toast in Philadelphia, and headed to the pub to watch Chelsea beat West Ham 1-0 and stare at the back of that guy's head (conveniently placed directly between me and the woman in question, who I have now completely given up on ever saying another word to ever again).
As the day wore on I went home, got some sleep, watched my DVR of Navy destroying a hapless Army, made plans to watch the Ricky Hatton fight next week, and got some more sleep. Things returned to normal, at least as normal as they get around here.
Looking back at the whole experience of turning 30 I have come to the following conclusion:
I have faced, stared down, grappled with and survived thirty years of the weirdest, most ridiculous, most bizarre, most nerve-rattling insanity the universe can throw at anyone. And I won every time.
Thirty years down, a hundred to go. A hundred if those sons of bitches are LUCKY. I don't know about you, but I plan to live forever.
The last thirty years is the best you got?
Bring it on, motherfuckers.
JLK
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