on holiday with the law.

For Thanksgiving break I carpooled with Eric's girlfriend Heather up to the Bay Area for a visit, my fifth time there in four years. More and more friends of mine keep winding up up there. But I stayed with Robert. I met him through the internet. He's a cop. He looked up all my information, and I was in the clear. He told me my license isn't actually suspended in California; I've just been banned from getting a license here. On Tuesday, when I arrived at his condo, he wasn't back from work yet, and we had not yet met in person. He knew I like orange concentrate and had a bunch for me waiting in his refrigerator. I lounged on his couch finishing a thick pulpy glass of it and awaited a rapping at the door.

Wednesday, Robert let me ride along in the cop car for a few hours. He brought us to Newark's always troublesome motel where a woman named Rosie who was banned from staying the night refused to leave the grounds until she got a room. The other cop on site gave her a choice between scheduling a court date and then leaving the premises *or* going to jail for Thanksgiving and seeing a judge the week after. She would say, "I want to see the judge." The cop finally just pretended she said the first choice. She was slow to walk away, and every now and again would stop and peek behind. "Goodnight, Rosie!" the cops would yell back each time. I started to feel a bit enamored with "the law" by the end of the ride-along. And a bit jealous when I would see Robert handcuff or restrain any other felon.

He gave me bullets. He gave me a tour of the police station, including the control room, the locker room, the lounge rooms, the microwaves. He gave me official police department stickers, evidence tape although reluctantly, biohazard tape, a psychiatric evaluation form, a county coroner reportable death form, field sobriety and chemical tests, an official key ring, I put the key to his apartment on it, which I still have. He stamped my hand with something official. He showed me the city council room, which is in the same building, since the city of Newark, California, is so small. I found a gavel, but it turned out to be a croquet mallet. I tried to use it as both. I pretended to be councilwoman Marla L. Blowers. He gave me an official Newark Police Department box of crayons. He gave me his trading card: Officer Robert says, "Choose your friends carefully."

We got home and watched "A Shot at Love", an MTV reality show where sixteen men and sixteen women are living in a house, competing to fall in love with some annoying older Asian woman named Tila Tequila. I found it deeply bothersome and yet really amazing how all of the contestants would say they were in love with her. In one episode, after they all go swimming—there were only maybe ten left at this point—Tila's make up is washed off, her hair looked scraggly—she looked so hideous. It's hard enough to believe a diverse cast of barbie girls, manly lesbians, army guys, effeminate imported Italian boys and cholla hoop-earring girls could all be in love with the same person. But that ugly mess Tequila? And why didn't any of them fall for each other? It's kinda amazing how the show kicks up a notch the obvious fakeness and makes no apologies. They really seem like they're in love, I almost believe it. It's like social surrealism, if there was ever such a thing. I wanted the really tall Courtney Love-looking girl to end up with one of the cute guys.

Thursday, my friend David picked me up (one of my best friends in the era between my mother's death and my move to Los Angeles, employee at Google and a huge fan of Xena Warrior Princess). We drove to Petaluma to have dinner at his father's girlfriend's daughter's house. David's father's girlfriend's daughter's husband used to live in LA, and asked if I knew the hospital he was born in. That's the hospital where a friend of mine went to when he overdosed on heroin, I said. I also told them about the S&M dinner I went to (see February 15, 2007 entry). Canned cranberry sauce always seems better every year; did they always have whole cranberries buried in the can-shaped gel? David's father's girlfriend must have been fairly drunk, or else she's a pretty cool lady for age sixty-four. She put a whoopee cushion on her belly and farted it into her boobs. Before I left, she gave me a list of Chicano artists, and we made a deal to all hang out in Albuquerque around Christmas and to bring my father along. I think he needs friends like them. Right now it's 9 AM at the McDonald's on Juan Tabo Blvd every day with a bunch of Mexican Republicans.

Friday, Robert and I went to the Bone Room in Albany. I was slightly disappointed, because I heard there was an actual room full of beetles eating meat off bones. But I was too tired from our late-night bonding time to be concerned. We ate Nepalese, after that. In San Francisco, we took three taxis, and I talked to all three drivers. The first was from Brasilia and knew about the Mennonite communes in and around Paraguay. The second was Persian, and Robert's police instincts were sure the fellow was on heroin. He may have also been lying about being from Iran, since all his answers to my questions were decidedly vague. "I'm from the east." The third was Russian. He was driving around 50 MPH when he purposely came within a foot of hitting a woman on the crosswalk.

Drove up to Sutro Bath Ruins on Saturday. Sutro Baths was the world's largest indoor swimming pool complex, built in the late 19th-Century. It got burnt in the 1960s, just like everyone else in San Francisco. It was beautiful walking on walls of nothing at the beach. Anything can be considered ruins these days; why not use government money to preserve or give tours of that abandoned warehouse in Glendale? Or maybe I'm adapted to LA's unofficial "get rid of everything old" slogan, and can't fathom the valuing of one thing over another. It's terrible how they tore down the beautiful Ambassador Hotel where Bobbie Kennedy was shot, just to put in a high school for the retarded. Or is it? I wish I could have been to Sutro before the fire to swim in one of seven swimming pools with differing degrees of salinity. I spotted a Sikh and immediately took his photo (below). (My roommate Huan gave me a bracelet three weeks ago and told me it was from India, and last week at an art event some half-offended girl told me it was a Sikh bracelet.) "Hey! I'm a Sikh, too!" I said to the Sikh. And he nodded in a heh-heh-yes-I-can-see-that sort of way. But we both knew I was missing the other four Sikh items of faith, the comb, long hair, underwear and sword. After all, I'm no Xena. Speaking of which, David and his father met up with us at the ruins. When we all first spotted each other, they were walking down the hill, and for comic effect, David's father acted as though he was slipping and about to fall over the edge.

In the evening, we met David-minus-dad at a bar in the Castro. He took Ambien and got so drunk that he spent a good while hugging a fat Asian man from behind, and after that I didn't see him again. We were outside when a friendly homeless woman came up to one of David's friends and asked if he was from around here. He said he wasn't. She asked where. He said, "not here." I saw all this and thought she seemed sweet, so I butted in. "Where are you from?" and buzzedly pointed at her. She walked up to me and said "you're cute" and we held hands and swung our arms back and forth like we were ten. Robert was right next to me, and I had my shoulder against his chest. She told him I was cute, and asked Robert if I was his boyfriend. He said, "yes." She was very cute, and she tried selling us an old sandwich. Then, David's friend said he'd give her money for her silence. She was paid, and she walked away like we'd never spoken.