I was deep in my very early career as a San Francisco resident when I found it. Or rather, it found me. It must have been about late 1995, a good chill swept through the savvy city by the bay, and my good friends and I were pillaging an abandoned basement apartment under an Edwardian flat a sort of friend was renting. Apparently the landlord, who lived in the neither reaches of China, kept the basement settlement as a storage unit for all of her crap. Boxes of financial files, old clothes and documents in both Mandarin and English were everywhere. After consuming much cheap beer and fine herbal weed just delivered from Humboldt, we decided it was a good idea to break in and take a peek.
The area felt haunted, deserted and even a bit sad. Somewhere in the center of all the mess piles and debris, a band had set up camp with a makeshift practice space. Good use of the living room I thought. We left the instruments and worn amplifiers alone and continued our flashlight illuminated search for absolutely nothing in particular.
Scaling through mountains of bankers boxes, heaps of moldy outdated clothes that even the cheekiest of thrift store adviser would turn away due to the reek of 1970's gloom held its pace; I found something that would somehow change my life.
No, let's say, make my life a bit more complete.
It was a cooler. A mid-sized red one, with a white top and an emblazoned Arrowhead Water sticker proudly regaling on the front. It looked new but felt, like much of the other scattered remains of the place, old. Quickly seizing the moment, I snatched the thing up and took it home with me.
Once it made its presence known and accepted, the cooler would be much more than just a container for ice and beer. In my room, in several rented rooms across San Francisco, it would be a chair, a table, a shelf and even a balance beam for a strange act of whoopee I engaged in one night. The cooler now had a memory, one that I could not erase, even if it did have an actual brain.
This cooler, which I gave the nickname “The Red Rider”, not only for its obvious color, would soon be my companion on many trips and excursions. It has seen horrors I dare not mention in Las Vegas, it nearly saved my life one night in Reno, it helped solve mysteries in Tahoe and every time I went to Austin, TX for the big SXSW festival, it would become a therapist, a close friend when I needed one and was a good desk as I typed away my daily adventures on my old Underwood writer.
My cooler survived a house fire. In mid-1999 I was invited to participate in an internet showcase for this new webcam hosting company called Spotlife. Myself and six others lived online, 24 hours a day, surrounded by orbital cameras and streamed whatever we did, even the unthinkable, on the rapidly growing world wide web. It was fun while it lasted, but later that year the house caught fire and nearly everything inside it was destroyed. Except, now here’s the funny part, most of the stuff in my room. I was away the night the place went up, sleeping at my then girlfriend’s apartment. When I got the frantic call early that morning I went over to the house to see that it was gutted and charred. I climbed the smoldered staircase up to my room only to find it was the one space in the house that still had white walls. Apparently with the door and windows closed the fire did not have a chance with such little oxygen, so I packed up my things and moved out.
There, under my fireman soaked poster of the Spice Girls next to my thankfully spared Castle Grayskull, was the cooler. The Red Rider now had magical properties.
That same year I would embark on a journey to some big event I was sent out to cover for a magazine called Burning Man. My cooler, of course, was my brave and earnest companion. That first trip to the playa, that week in 1999 would change me forever. It was really hard to go back to a desk job after having that kind of experience be thrust upon you. I did Burning Man for five years in a row and when I decided that I was finished with it and it was done with me, I sat on the esplanade, drinking ice cold beer, listening to Black Sabbath, on my old lawn chair with my feet resting on the cooler. It was a mighty tribute to a good run and I don’t regret a thing.
The cooler would see several girlfriends come and go, old and close friends get married and move away, and various apartments and roommates across the city. It was with me when I made a valiant attempt to move to Los Angeles and start a new life and would be next to me on that long ride home when my efforts failed. It saw me in the best of times and the worse. My cooler was always by my side. And I couldn’t that it any more than I am now.
In late 2005 my cooler was back at the apartment when three girls from Arizona bellied up to the bar where I worked. One in particular caught my eye. She was cute, chain smoking, heckling the guy playing guitar on the little stage, drinking massive amounts of beer and I knew I was smitten. I confided in my cooler that true love had finally caught up with me and I knew something drastic was about to happen.
In early February of 2006, I pared down my belongings to the bare essentials, throwing the rest of the crap out on Columbus Avenue with a sign that said “Take!” and selling the rest, rented a midsized car, stuffed it with the aforementioned essentials, and drove fourteen hours to get to Tucson, AZ, to get to the one lady I knew I would be with for the rest of my life.
My cooler, obviously, was one of those essentials, along with Castle Grayskull and my fog machine. I’ve been living in Arizona, with my lady She-Ra, for seven years now and the Red Rider continues to amaze me. Sure, it’s a bit worn down and, yes, it’s getting a little older, but my cooler is staying with me to the end. Heck, it’ll probably be the vessel that I keep my ashes in when the day Metal Mark has to split and go onto the next adventure. It’ll keep me safe from being blown around in the winds. Just as much as I saved it, my cooler saved me.
Thank you Red Rider. You my bestest friend…
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