last five entries

host - email - older- newest - profile - notes

Grucci

2006-04-04 - pm

My father called me the other day from home and said that he was at Starbucks and bumped into Tina Grucci, a girl I used to know from High School. They started talking, and she realized he was related to me. I haven�t seen this girl in years. He kept telling me to call her, which is something I�d usually put off. What�s another decade? I mean she�s nice, but it�s been a while. The last time I saw her was in a bar, and we just drank and I talked a lot and she laughed the whole time. I remember wondering if my stories were really funny, or she was just wasted. My Dad texts me with her number and said she really wants you to call her. She was out to L.A. a few weeks ago, and took the bar exam, so she�s waiting back home in NY until she gets her results in May.

In fifth grade, the Grucci family was the only other family I recognized at the church masturbation film our parents took us to � which at the time was a word I had never heard. I thought it meant working with heavy machinery. I only knew that this film managed to be the most uncomfortable viewing experience of my oppressed Catholic life, next to the camp I went to in the woods where the farmer snapped the chicken�s neck in front of 30 shell shocked eight year olds. I didn�t think that it was any appropriate to subject us to that, when we were barely learning how to eat the guy once he was dead, much less watch him transition. So this film was really something. I may have mentioned once before but it bears repeating, that in tenth grade, Tina�s little brother T.J. Grucci, who was in my class, took one too many drops of liquid acid at a Grateful Dead show and was arrested in front of 6 of his friends for public machinery handling, which may have had less to do with the fact that the acid made him crazy, and more to do with the idea that that film said it was okay to. He eventually got over it, but we never did.

I called Tina today. Three minutes into the conversation, she had an argument with her mother.

� I can�t believe I fucking came home to stay with these people. Big mistake! Hold on, Ohell. Ma, will you please stop talking�hold on. Ma. Will you please � go into another room if you�re going to yell? Not good! Sorry Ohell. Ma. No, because he�s not home yet! He�s not��

�Hey, Tina listen. Did I call at a bad time? Should I try back in another ten years?�

We ended up having a really good talk. She�s still religious, but in an Italian fuck you kind of way. She asked me what I currently do, and I told her I�d find her a Legal job when she finally moves out here. She said she�d call me later tonight.

An hour later, I was trying to find a folder of a walk-in interview I had last week in the file folder room. I couldn�t find work for her and realized I it was because she was essentially unemployable. That happens a lot, but sometimes the walk-ins will surprise you and become the head team leader or something when you merely gave them a job doing something they couldn�t possibly screw up, like taffy pulling. I looked through all of the Gs and couldn�t find this girl�s file. But Tina Grucci�s was in there, glowing. I yanked it, though that�s probably not the phraseology I should use here.

She was in a week ago, but she didn�t meet with me. She met with our Type A recruiter! I think I actually waved to her that day too. Sometimes I do that. Of course I had to call her again. She wasn�t surprised, she just said a bunch of stuff about how God always does that to her, and that it was meant to happen, so I should hang around her more often! I thought fuck, if I don�t find this girl a job, God might put another tricky surprise in the file folders! Spooky! What are the odds? The Ripley�s Believe it Or Not show would know. In the 70�s they used to calculate for example what the odds were that Beth Barker could receive the same five dollar bill at some random grocery store in her 40�s that she got at her 5th birthday party from her uncle. He wrote Happy Birthday to Beth from Uncle Tippy or something all over it. The host said the odds of that that were something like one in 50 million. My Tina folder could qualify.

�Do you mean to tell us your father randomly met Tina at some Starbucks in New York, then figured out you knew her, then you called her, and an hour later saw her folder in your files at work in California? What are the odds Ohell?�

�It�s not so much the odds, Sally � it�s that I was probably chosen. God doesn�t pick just anyone to play spooky name games with. I�d say the odds have to be at least one in 80 million, to be sure, but then who can put a measure on spirituality?�

To be honest, this kind of stuff happens to me sometimes, but it never makes any sense. It�s like winning an apple orchard, which is nice, but it kind of makes you wonder what you should do with it. I like apples, but I usually only eat like three a week. I certainly wasn�t thinking of raising any.

previous - next