Chris Issak's Nose

Chris Issak’s nose is slender with a bulbous tip, like mine. Maybe Chris Issak and I are the same breed of mutt because I am his nose doppelgänger. My bulb has not grown to his state of maturity yet. I hear the nose and ears grow throughout life, hopefully, growing to enormous caricature like sizes by the time death arrives, showing a long life.

My boss introduced me to Chris Issak’s music when I was working as a shop girl in a t-shirt and souvenir gift store in Tahoe. We would always listen to him, and I turned into one of those gushy googoo eyed Chris Issak loving romantics.

People who live in Tahoe are an outdoorsy sports type, pot smoking drinking outdoorsy sports type, or a pot smoking drinking type (see Venn Diagram below). It’s a tourist town where visitors come to ski in the winter and boat during the summer. The locals get to enjoy the tourist seasons and then spend a lot of time partying during the off-season. We took our townies duty fucking serious.

One night after a hard day of folding t-shirts and stacking shot glasses, my fellow coworkers and I went to a restaurant in a marina, where we started to drink rum runners. I recently got a credit card in the mail. The only reason I chose this card is because it was see through purple, so I had no idea what the interest rate was, or the limit. That night we had our drinks and danced, then had more drinks and did some more dancing. We talked about the Chris Issak concert happening the next night in Reno, and then the curtain went down.

The next day I went to work, same the day after, and the day after that. Fast forward three weeks, and I got my credit card bill in the mail where I opened it up and saw an enormous charge for 3 tickets to a Chris Issak concert, a concert that occurred two weeks and 6 days earlier. I bought 3 tickets to Chris Issak on my see through purple credit card, and never even knew about it, so I missed the show. 

Tonight the kids and I had a rocking dance session to Chris Issak on Spotify. Kiki was insistent on me playing Cheater’s Town every other song and I was insistent on play Somebody’s Crying every other song. So we alternated between the two for close to an hour. She made me lift her up, like Baby in Dirty Dancing, and then spin her around. George was in his diaper running in circles with a sippy cup. He took two poops so we rested during his diaper changes.

During our flailing-arms-hips-swaying-dance, I had a flashback of me sitting in a bar stool under a low hanging light, holding a phone with a coil connecting to a landline ordering the tickets. I was giving a thumbs up to my friends, doing upper body dancing while while leaning over to take a drink from the straw in my frosty red rum runner sitting on the bar. A truly Townie scene that would be completed with background music of G Love and The Special Sauce or maybe Sublime. 

I probably created the memory to fill in the blanks of a patchy history. If only it would have come back to me many years earlier, the morning after the actual event. I haven't seen Chris Issak yet, even though he plays around here often, Tahoe, the Sacramento Indian Casinos, and San Fran (Hello! San Francisco Days!) As I drive past his billboards on the highway advertising an upcoming show, I look at them and remember the time I could have gone to his show. Luckily, I don't get too down because I get distracted by his billboard nose, and I think, my God! It's like looking a freaking nose mirror.