Vic Socotra

26 June 2009

One Hand Clapping

(A sequined Glove)

The news spread through Twitter and all the broadcast media late yesterday, and it reverberated in the halls of Big Pink with the speed of electrons. The nerve center is the concierge desk, and the Queen of all information is the Day Lady, Rhonda.

She has been down there since the building went Condo in the early 1980s. I think it was the year Thriller was released, in 1981.

She was getting ready to go off shift at the desk in the lobby, and I had just walked was holding an orange notice that told me I had to get the Hubrismobille, the Police Car and the Harley out of the garage not later than 0800 on Monday.

“Re-striping and concrete repair,” the notice read, but I suspected some darker plot, maybe in conjunction with the Arlington County Tax Assessor. They are always poking around down there, trying to smoke out the cars with Maryland tags. They suspect that people are not happy to pay the extra taxes on their personal property every year.

We are a transient lot at Big Pink, and times being what they are, it is worth it to check up on personal property and actual site where vehicles might happen to be garaged, despite what the official records in Richmond or Annapolis might indicate.

I’m in the process of moving everything out of the County myself, you know. I mean that seriously and have reported it to Richmond.

I asked Rhonda what she thought, since she is very much the conscience of the building. When she is on duty she is plugged into everything that is happening here, analogue and digital.

She pursed her lips, and pulled off her glasses, letting them fall down at the end of the chain on her ample bosom. She rolled her eyes in that way that reminds me she must have been really hot in her younger days.

“I don’t know about his personal life,” she said thoughtfully. “That seemed a little messy for my taste. But he sure could dance, couldn’t he?”

“You have got a point there. That Moonwalk thing. I could have saved a lot of money on movie tickets over the years if I could have done that. The ushers would think I was walking out while I was sneaking in.”

“You are dating yourself, Vic,” she said. “They don’t have ushers any more.”

I shrugged. “You know he wound up owning McCartney and Lennon’s music catalog, and married Elvis Presely’s daughter for a while. That tells you something about the magnitude of what he was able to pull off.”

Rhonda nodded and put her glasses back on. “Would someone explain the glove thing to me? I never did get why he had just one glove. Circulation problems? Or wardrobe malfunction like his sister?”

“It’s in the Goddamn Smithsonian, Rhonda. And I think he actually wanted to be his sister,” I said. “At the end of it all I can’t even make fun of him. I just feel sorry. Sorry they took your childhood away, and sorry that you could never get it back, no matter how much money you spent.”

Rhonda is a practical woman. “Give me a hundredth of what he had and I would be willing to give it a try,” she said, and got ready to walk out to the bus stop in front of the big pink building.

When the Intern got home from work, she hadn’t heard the news. But it surprised me that she had “A-B-C” on her iPod Nano, and we listened to it in tribute, sharing the ear-buds.

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