Atlanta Adventures

I arrive in Atlanta, home to Outkast, Ludacris, The Falcons and my good friend Randy Robbins. When booking my flight to Honduras I was first rather peeved at the thought of a 15 hour layover in ATL, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. One could even say that the experience of hanging out with Randy in ATL for a night should have actually cost me a little extra.

I get off the plane, grab my bags, made a phone call to Randy and went and waited on the curb. After about 5 minutes he rolls up in his crisp ’99 Cadillac with some of the wettest tires I’ve seen and a custom plaid sunroof shade that just screams originality. Seeing him pull up in his Cadillac is a good sight and reminds me that dreams do come true. I’ve heard Randy talk about a getting his own Cadillac ever since I’ve known him (about 4 years when we literally ‘ran into’ each other while working at Maggiano’s.)

After getting some initial greetings out of the way, we hop in the car and begin our mini-adventure. Randy explains to me how the 2 main highways in ATL run like the seams of a baseball and meet in the middle. Interesting I think, but where are we going to eat? Randy had 2 places mapped out for us, choice 1: a sushi joint, choice 2: a New Orleans style grill. I am not sure how to politely say that I am not about to eat any sushi that needs to get imported into ATL while I’ve got fresh Seattle Sound sushi at home, but I get my vote out there and we head toward Front Page News (supposedly a great NO grill.)

Randy takes this time to catch me up in his life. This guy is a really solid human being, really involved in his church, strong values, a great personality, and probably the best Colonel Sanders looking broom on his chin out of any of my other friends. Things are going well for him.

I catch him up on my life: travelling super hero, selfless devoter of time to my local orphanage, modeling contracts…. I also think this is a good opportunity to share some of my new knowledge that I had acquired from my new book (230 Things you Thought you Knew But Actually Didn’t.) Turns out Randy didn’t know who was America’s first president or who invented the telephone. You probably don’t either though so let me tell you: Peyton Randolph and Antonio Meucci respectively. Open a book.

We get close to where we are trying to get for dinner and start looking for parking. We see a sign for “complimentary valet” and pull in. Turns out though that the restaurant we wanted to go wasn’t park of the parking HMO and it was $15. After Randy talked with the attendant for a minute to get the scoop on some cheaper alternatives we ended up handing the keys over. I was just about to say something about his sign being false advertising, but then he said that Randy had really deep eyes and I technically could not call him out anymore.

On our way to the restaurant some promoters outside of a new Latin club told us about some drink specials they were running that night and when we asked them where the Front Page News was, the washed out boxer looking promoter pointed us up the street and said, “don’t eat the food.” Randy brought up a really good point that that is probably not the best way to make friends with your neighbors if you were a new club in the area. By the time we sit down it is about 10:10 PM and all they are serving is their Late Night Menu (chicken fingers, jalapeno poppers, etc.) We decide to bail and get a hot tip on a place called Vortex that serves late.

The food at Vortex turns out to be really good. I guess they have won a bunch of awards for their burgers and Randy and I try 2 of their finest. I get a Raging Cajun burger (pepper jack, spicy sauce) and Randy gets an Elvis Burger with a bison patty (peanut butter, bananas, bacon, tomato.) He jokes with the waitress that he thought bison were extinct, she lets out a laugh and says, “nah, they grow them just for us.” Our waitress was a definite character and there were definitely awkward moments in my mind when I wasn’t sure if she was enjoying talking to us or just waiting to jet. Randy broke out his best Michael Jackson food poisoning joke involving a five year old wiener and that seemed to help things. After she left the table I told him my new favorite pickup line, “Do you have any raisins? Then how about a date?”

On the way back to the car Randy ended up recognizing a local rapper and belted out some lyrics with him. When we got back to the car, a different valet came up to us and handed over the keys, Randy started talking with him and ended up going back and forth with some freestyle. Randy also was asked by 2 girls if his name was Scott Johnson, I told them that his name was Scott Tompson. I guess he looked like a guy named Scott that they worked with and they decided they had to have a picture of him.

Rolling down the street Randy brings up trying my pickup line on ATL girls. Randy was up first and he pulled up next to 2 girls walking down the street, “Hey do you have any raisins? Wanna date?” I think her reply was something like, “No, no raisins, but I do have a middle finger for you.”

The pair that he finds for me to talk to is much friendlier and with my perfect delivery, they quickly find themselves laughing. “How do you do it?” Randy asks.

On our way back to Randy’s we get a little lost in the seams of ATL highway system and find ourselves needing to take a toll. Randy decides to give the raisins one more try and belts the following out over 3 lanes of traffic, “You have any raisins? You trying to get a date?” Smile achieved!

It turns out that Randy had just moved into a new house with 2 new roommates. His room had a standard number of corners, 4, but he chose to make a floor-bed for me in the one that had previously been occupied by a ferret. I guess he was excited to test whether he had done a good job of masking all the rodent urine or not. After a good night’s sleep, Randy decides we have time for one last Southern experience before dropping me off at the airport. To the Waffle House!

We roll up to the Waffle House in the Cadillac, stroll into the building and are told to seat ourselves at the jam saturated booth of our choice. Our server comes to greet us and is very pleasant. Her name is Ashley and she is friendly enough to agree to answer some trivia questions. Ashley gets one point for guessing that George Washington was not America’s first president, but she immediately loses that point when her guess for most dangerous animal to man is dinosaur. Most dangerous animal to man.

A ride to the airport later and after a couple of chest bumps I was leaving Atlanta and on my way to Honduras. I know it’s hard to believe that we were able to find so many memories in a time span of less than 12 hours, but hey that’s what you’re going to get when you two playmakers together…. life experiences.

RRR 5/7

Sun, 28 Nov 2004

We made it to day five!!!

I read in my protesting book that if you make it through day five of a protest, then that means you've made it over the hump and everything is downhill from there.... whew!

So today, Sunday November 28, I arrived at my corner at around 5:14 PM after picking up my friend Dan AKA Massachussets Fats. He had offered to go out and support me the previous day and actually called me up and got me motivated to go out to the streets tonight (before he called I had wasted most of my Sunday watching old O.C. episodes and eating Cookies and Cream frozen yogurt.) So I was excited to be mildly productive with my Sunday.

We got to the corner in high spirits and I had given Dan one of my old Red Robin polos so that we could both be in full uniform. The honks were few and far between tonight (I think we only got three) and one ass clown had his girlfriend lean on her horn while he tried to get me to admit that I was fired for smoking too much weed. Despite the low crowd participation Dan and I still managed to have fun by making small talk and deciding that it would be a bad idea to get my hair cut and that I should sport the longness for awhile.

Well about half way through my shift on the street my friend Paige showed up for her shift at work, but she made sure to stop by and say hi before she went in. Immediately after Paige came up to a, some crazy guy with open lacerations covering his face walked by and said something about "argh You got fired from red robin for the truth argh huh?" And I kind of just nodded and went back to talking to Paige because it was obvious this guy was not big fan of showers or being sober. But while he was waiting at the corner for the light to change to cross the street he started talking to Dan. Now I can hear Dan talking to this guy and I can tell that he is uncomfortable and the noble thing for me to do would have been to turn around and help Dan get out of this unwanted conversation, but instead I tell Paige not to move so that I can fake that we're are in a deep discussion so that I won't be bothered. Well this guy "Cuts McGee" starts asking Dan why he's protesting and I hear Dan say, "Well, I'm not the one that you should talk to, my friend here has more of the facts." And this is followed by a not so gentle poking to get my attention, well I knew what Dan was up to and I was not about to get sucked into a conversation with Cuts so I held my ground and continued talking to Paige.

Sometime around then Paige tells me that if I'm nice to the guy maybe he'll give me "Bush." And I was kind of confused, I didn't know what she was talking about. Was "Bush" the new street slang for oral pleasure or did she mean that the smelly ole Cuts might try to offer me a marijuana cigarette if I was nice enough? Well turns out she was referring to neither of these scenarios and actually was suggesting that if I was nice to Cuts, then maybe he'd give me one of his Busch beers that he was carrying around......Well the guy caught his light eventually and ended up leaving but I guess he was trying to get the inside scoop about working at Red Robin from Dan (a person who has never worked at a Red Robin) because he, Cuts, was seriously considering thinking about maybe going in to see if they might be hiring at Red Robin to which Dan's internal reply was "Dude maybe you should think about sealing up some of these gaping flesh wounds on your face first."

Shortly after that and Paige had gone to work and told people that we were protesting, people started gathering at the window to sneak a peek. At one point I turned around at thought I saw a model of the moon rotating around the earth, but it was just our diminutive kitchen manager, Francisco, being dwarfed by our not so diminutive assistant manager, Lori.

The music started acting up after that and the CD wouldn't play any songs after #12 so after I tinkered around with that and Dan let me know he was cold, we called it a night.

Possible slogans:"Sabrina the burger witch" and "King: A Royal Pain" (those being appropriate because our general manager's name is Sabrina King) Any suggestions?

Thanks to Dan!!

Joe

RRR 4/7

Tue, 23 Nov 2004

Today was a very good day. I arrived at my corner at about 6:33 PM on Monday and stayed till 7:54 PM. I got four honks from people driving south, four from people going north, 8 from people going east and 1 from someone going west. I also got three thumbs up (2 from cars and one from a pedestrian.)

Shortly after setting up shop Clint, an employee of Red Robin, came out in his street clothes to shoot the breeze with me for awhile and ask me if I wanted to go to a Health Card class with him the following day.

Then after that I got many more visitors. Becky, the manager for the night, came out to see me, Marissa, the creepy girl down the street, brought her equally creepy roommate to meet me and try and convince to come home with them, and then the highlight fortnight happened.... My friends Nate, Elias, and Andrew stopped by. They (Elias and Nate) came out and did cartwheels and held signs and yelled at cars passing by while Andrew stood in the back with his arms tucked into his T-shirt (I guess he was cold or something and didn't really want to be seen with us since he still works for the Red Robin we were protesting in front of.) Anyway it was great to have a big crowd and that's when the people from the restaurant (employees) came out to kick it, we even had a cameo by freaking MARIETTE GUIDRY!!! It was great, I wish all my days could be that fun. So after Nate, Elias, and Andrew left Clint came back out to stand with me until my CD ran out and we were harmonizing to Oasis' "Wonderwall."

So after I left my corner, I went to work out, and when I got out of the gym I saw that I had a new voice mail. When I listened to it I was elated to hear that it was some guy from Red Robin Inc. telling me that he was calling in response to some complaints he had heard and to give him a call at some 1-800 number. At the time I didn't really think it was weird that he was calling me at 10 at night or that his message was somewhat mumbled, I was just excited that I had got a reaction out of the company. It wasn't until later that evening at our poker game that I realized/found out that it was actually Nate who had called and left a bogus message on my phone. I was slightly crestfallen at the time, but hopefully with a little time I'll be able to get a genuine angry message of my very own.

Shout outs:

I just want to say "what up" to melissa. It was really cool of you to come and make amends after you made a huge Samoan ass out of yourself.

To Carhart and KEXP for sponsoring me in my time of need. For today's best mix of oldies and newbies make sure to tune to KEXP!!

And to Ms. Guidry: Good luck with that new phone, make sure you store me under ASIAN DREAMBOAT.

Joe