Tuesday was my day off. I know this because whenever there are chances of rain outside, the chances of that falling on my days off are pretty high. The clouds look menacingly on schedule.

I planned the day to be an art related day. You know, visiting Newbury St. galleries to get inspired and then going to the coffee shops and letting everyone know I’m an artist by intensely drawing on my sketchbook. Rain or not, this was going to happen and I went ahead and  involved a fellow artist named Casey with me.

Besides the rain, the day already started off at a shit start. I woke up late to my 11AM scheduled meeting with Casey at the Trident cafe. I checked my e-mail and found out that it wasn’t really going to be a day off after all since I’ve forgotten about a little Mandatory meeting at 6PM over my job at  Improv Asylum. Then I fell asleep on the train and completely missed my stop by 3 train stations away. At this point I said to myself, “Ah…I get it….it’s going to be one of THOSE days.”

But by the time I made it to Newbury Street things started to look up. The rain postponed itself and Casey didn’t mind my lateness. We walked to the Other Side Cafe, which was looking a little bit more hipster than usual, and ordered some lunch and began to sketch.

I wasn’t feeling it. The creative juices weren’t flowing and the best I could come up with was a sketch of Casey sketching.

"Look, I'm not trying to be creepy here...I'm just out of ideas."

I think it’s important to note that the sketchbook I was using was made of duct tape and computer paper. I forgot to bring my sketchbook at work one time and decided that the reasonable thing to do was make my own sketchbook out of office materials.

"I'm poor."

Turned out copy paper sucks at handling ink from a pen and all my drawings ended up having smudges and  ink diarrhea. So it just made me less motivated to sketch. I needed inspiration so I convinced Casey to leave the self-conscious cafe and head towards the International Poster Gallery. About a month ago, I took my girlfriend Sarah to this gallery and remembered being inspired by the many awesome art ( I also saw an 1899 Tosca poster made by Adolfo Hohenstein that put my LHO poster to shame) and this visit was no exception.

But before we can get back to sketching, we decided to do a little wish-list-shopping at various clothing stores. We went to ZARA’s where  50% sale means you still can’t afford it. Around this time I noticed myself in their mirrors. My cell phone was bulging in my pants looking like I’ve got a rectangular hard on. So I took it out and placed it on my backpack’s cell phone holder. That’s what  they’re for right? Holding your cell phones.

We visited a few more stores and realized we didn’t have enough time to draw anymore so she offered to drive me to my 6PM meeting. After a little adventure getting lost on the way to the North End I finally told her to drop me off near the Hard Rock Cafe near government center. We hugged and she drove off. That’s when I realized that my cell phone holder failed at doing the one thing it’s supposed to do. My cell phone was gone. Immediately I thought, “It should be in her car!” I saw Casey stopping at a red light and I ran as fast as I could to catch up. When she made a turn I intercepted her so that she could pull over. I searched her car and didn’t find the phone anywhere. We both had appointments to attend to so she left and I went to my meeting shaking my head in disbelief. It WAS “one of THOSE days.”

I was obnoxiously anxious during the meeting. A co-worker offered to punch me in the face if I don’t stop it. I must have called my phone from the office line about 20 times hoping someone would pick up and say, “yeah I found your phone. I’ll mail it to you. What’s your mailing address?” and not “Yeah I found your phone, you want it back? What’s it to me? 50 bucks. cash.” But the thing just kept ringing and going to voice mail…which makes me think that  a) it’s on a floor where someone can’t notice it ringing , b) it’s smashed into a million pieces, or c) the person who found it turned it off because the ringing annoyed the shit out of them.

I had a plan! I was going to re-trace my steps and see where I could have left it. I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve conditioned my mind to feel naked if I hadn’t got a phone on my person and now I was running around town figuratively in the nude. I was such in a rush that I heard someone call me an “asshole” when I cut them getting off the train. No time to insultingly stick my tongue out at her. I had to look for my phone.

I was in Newbury comics asking the cashier if anyone had found a phone. They didn’t. They’d call “Mom” or “Dad” if they did find a phone. I retraced my steps all the way to where Casey had parked her car and Lo’ and Behold! There it was! I was all anxious for no reason at all. My phone was nice and secured right under the tire of a volvo.

It was sticking out of the car enough for me to see it but not out enough for me to pry it off. It was quite a sight really, this big black piece of  Swedish automotive engineering and this tiny little orange phone glimmering underneath it. The irony here is that I wished I could have taken a picture of it with my camera phone. So while waiting for the owner of the car to come back and move, I took out my sketchbook and drew a portrait of my cellphone’s plight.

"Car phone! Get it? It's a car with a phone.....you get it."

I was standing around like a hooker in the cold waiting and feeling hopeful every time a person walked towards the car. I knew the phone wouldn’t work anymore but I’m hoping I could still save the sim card at the very least.  While waiting, I heard a voice cry out “Vic!” and saw that it was an old friend  and fellow artist named Lino Ribeiro. He took pictures of my phone with his  camera and kept me company as I waited for this person to move his car. He told me to call the cops borrow their jack and push the car up, but we slowly realized yet another irony since he himself didn’t have his phone on him. So we waited…and waited…and waited….after a while I felt really bad for keeping him there. At the same time he felt really bad to leave me but he had to, Lino had other businesses to attend to. So we said our goodbyes. Around this time, it started to rain.

It’s been four hours and who ever owned this car had no indication of showing up any time soon. So I put my fingers underneath the car, positioned my feet securely on the asphalt, and with all my might, I picked up the car and got my phone out. Then I set my jet pack to “Home” and I flew back into Quincy just before the rain began to pour hard.

Ok. Not exactly. I did position my self right next to the tire and pushed. To my surprise the car nudged a bit. I then tried my hardest to pry the phone out. I pulled and pulled and then I felt something in my forearms that would sound like a pop had it not been muted by the covering flesh. That’s when my left hand started to feel broken. Making a fist became damn near impossible without me screaming out in profanities and crying a little bit. I pulled so hard that I pulled a tendon or a muscle or something. But the rain wasn’t going to stop and my busted hand wasn’t going to be busted without any accomplishing results. “FUCK THIS CAR!” I pushed and pryed the cell phone with my sore fingers as hard as I could. Damn the consequences! And finally, after all that effort, my phone was out!

Now here’s the weird part, besides some scratches on the back of the phone where it was pinned on the pavement, the screen, which was under the tire, was not in the slightest broken at all! I wasn’t hoping much, but when I pressed the “On” button, the light on the screen glowed. I pressed all the features on the phone: the camera, the mp3 player, the keyboard…holy shit they all still work! My phone still works perfectly! I’ve had phones where the screen cracks for having been in my pocket and this one didn’t even bend after having been ran over by a car!

Moral of this story….Samsung Gravity 2 T469 Berry Mauve is a badass.

"badass"

Oh another moral, don’t trust phone holders on backpacks.