Don't Mess With Unicorn Power!

How I got Delip's Digits

Last Night after working at the, a, unnamed theater company, hanging, operating and un-hanging lights, I went out to a club. If you know anything about me you know that:
a. I DJ at said club once or twice a month.
b. I work over 50 hours a week most weeks, also DJ, and never sleep.
c. I am slightly neurotic and tend to overanalyze every social interaction as if I were a character in a Woody Allen film.

As I said, I made my way to the club where I sometimes DJ and engaged in a heated discussion with my Co-DJ about the state of our nation, the fascist aesthetic, and 50 cent indie rock bootlegs available in Vietnam. All the while my housemate and his new boyfriend hovered in the corner, drinking one dollar beers. Our livid discussion was propagated by the emergence into office of the world's worst presidential incumbent, the passing of 11 discriminatory anti-gay laws, and one of the most demoralizing defeats liberal America has ever faced. At the darkest hour all I could sing was "Thank Jehovah for Kung Fu Bicicles and Pricilla Priesley."

Soon after this much needed vent session on the saddest Wednesday I have ever encountered, I headed over to the Red Room, a Santa Cruz institution. It is a red bar with pictures of debutants and beauty queens lining the walls, as well as attractive bar tenders and less attractive, primarily male clientele. Upon entering this fine establishment, I ran into G, my friend and past romantic involvement. Unfortunately, my feelings for G, often cloud my ability to communicate with him in a normal fashion, causing my to appear frantic and sometimes rather awkward in social settings. However, I was playing it smooth last night.

And so appears the star of the story, DB. This gentleman is an eccentric professor of indian film studies at a certain Sea Side University. I had only heard of him from G, his loyal employee and protoge. However my first meeting with DB exceeded all my expectations. This short, rather round, middle age, Indian fellow greeted me warmly as he struggled to remember if he knew me. Like most introductions, there are always some small silver strings attached to memories and connections to other people and life situations, and this was no exception. Within the first five minutes of our acquaintance, I told DB that G was in fact my x-boyfriend, and that My department on campus, had in fact destroyed his one of a kind archival film, earlier that year. He assured me that it was no problem, and I said, "Well, I blame those crappie 35 mm film projectors after all!" DB replied "Ah! You mean the ones that I had donated to the school?" "Yes" I replied, "those, um projectors" (Notice how I coyly omitted the adjective "crappy" from my response, smart Eh? Eh?) DB replied, " SInce you work for media, we need new 35-mm projectors!" I informed him that I had in fact arranged for the installation of said dual projectors this friday. He must have asked 4 more times, if I was joking, but eventually he believed me and declaired that he was "eternally grateful to me." Our conversation ended with DB inviting me to India and promising to publish an essay of mine on an Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a 1968 Satyajit Ray film about the adventures of untalented musicians who charm ghosts of the forest and go on to prevent a war in India. Thanks to G's access to these archival and little known indian films, I have been viewing what very few Americans have seen and maybe writing about them. So thats how I got the digits scrawled on a red napkin from a red bar.