Neil texts me last week saying we should hit up a Wolves game and see Al Jefferson in person. Great idea, I'm immediately in. Plus, it's against the Knicks' traveling circus. Sweet! His bass player Mike's in as well, and I also rounded up Knapper and Justin from Kwang.
We agree to meet at the Target Center and started looking for choice scalps. Finding 5 tickets was hard for obvious reasons, but we did manage to find 5 for $40 apiece, 3rd row, center court, upper level. Nah. So we kept looking but didn't find anything, and then decided to just hit up the box office. Cool, they had a sign up - 50% off the $70 tix. Yeah, sure, $35 ain't bad, let's check it out.
As we're waiting in line and making veiled and coded jokes about sexual subjects with a family of children behind us (like when Harry - aka Rost as he's known on Musicscene - got felt up by a gay dude at Club Underground), this lady comes up to us and says she's got suite tickets for $20 a pop. We all gave each other that "no friggin way!" look, and after almost 10 seconds of a shocked collective pause, we all fire $20 spots one by one in her direction. We buy the tickets, thank her profusely, and all stare at each other again making the "no friggin way!" look, thinking how cool of a score this was. She said there'd be twenty of us in there so it might get a bit crowded, but we didn't care. SUITE TICKETS!
Justin finally shows up from the parking ramp, and we walk in. Sure enough, the tix are legit and they let us in to the posh and tony suite level. NOICE! To the bar we go! We load up our drinks and walk into the suite. We introduce ourselves to the people there already, and start eating the munchies they have in the suite. There's an iced 24 pack of Miller Lite cans, so some of us helped ourselves as you would do in Rome. We didn't loot the place or anything, maybe two total beers were grabbed, and a handful of chips and salsa type stuff.
The lady was right; it was pretty cramped in there. At least the suites in the X have enough room for everyone to actually sit in a game-viewing seat. Not here. But oh well, we just stand around, watching the game. The Wolves ended up scoring 42 points in the first quarter! Cool!
Knapper's engaged in a friendly conversation with the nice lady that sold us the tickets, and I'm sitting to his right. I overhear that she was supposed to go see the Rockin' Hollywoods at the Medina and would have danced the night away if she was there, but she kind of got roped into this instead. I also overheard that the tickets were acquired in a charity auction. About halfway into my Summit EPA, Neil whispers to me "I think we're getting evicted." Quite honestly, I blew Neil off. I didn't look at him, or acknowledge what he said. I just straight up dismissed that idea in my head, again with the "no friggin way" thing, only in a different way (if that makes sense).
A minute or so later, I thought about what he said again, and looked around for him. He's talking to this middle aged yuppie guy, wearing a fucking solid pastel green sweater. I'm telling you...that color is right off a box of Paas easter egg dye. Just a hideous color for a sweater any way you slice it. The MAYGIAHPS ("middle aged yuppie guy in a hahhhrible pastel sweater," pronounced "may-gee-ahhps") is clearly taking to Neil, but never looking him in the eye, just kind of talking down to him...and Neil looks worried. Crap, we really are getting evicted. What the fuck for?! None of us so much as even uttered a "damn" while there. Other than helping ourselves to the snack mix and about about two beers total, we did nothing but watch the game with smiles.
So four of us all kind of gravitate towards the back of the suite while Knapper is allowed to finish his beer, and just kind of whisper to each other. "Is this really happening?" and "What did he say?" and "Now what?!" being the most repeated questions. Knapper joins us in the back of the suite, and the lady that sold us the tickets goes to the other end of the suite out of earshot and talks with the MAYGIAHP, presumably about the sentence handed down. The guy is talking in the same physically condescending way to her - no eye contact, very little spoken to her, arms folded. In hindsight, this was his "let's just stand here and wait for these street punks to leave" conversation, not a airing of grievances as we'd hoped.
We were still standing there, starting to look pretty crestfallen, and he finally comes over and acknowledges us as a group. We're told we need to leave. He then tries to reason with us simpletons. His pitch is that we at least got in - that's the key of this whole deal. We're in the building, as if that's quite an accomplishment or something. Just go walk down to the lower bowl, sit down, and it'll be fine. We got in, right?
The guy pissed me off right then and there. It's the same kind of flawed logic crap I hear from debtors all damn day, like when they tell me that since they didn't receive (or notice) a monthly statement, they figured they didn't have to pay that month. That kind of shit. Anyway, he gives us that pitch and I told him that's not cool, because we bought a ticket for this suite. For this suite. Having a ticket in the arena does not entitle you to any seat in the arena. He then pulls out two $20 bills and says that here, we can go and try and buy back seats in the arena. We gave him some funny looks and furrowed brows to the $40 offer - no hostility whatsoever, just stunned disbelief - so he rips off a $20 for each of us. I call it even at that point and turn around to leave, and the rest of us follow suit to hang out in the suite concourse lounge to watch the rest of the 2nd quarter from the TV and finish our drinks, since we couldn't take them into the general concourses. To me, it really wasn't worth making a scene and getting booted from the arena or arrested. We got our money back, so be it. We got paid $100 to leave, essentially. Roadie Ron taught us that money talks, so we had no choice but to use his sage business wisdom in this incident.
My guess is that he told the wife or whoever that lady was, that he's got some extras, go get rid of them in the box office lobby. He's prolly thinking she'll find a mom & dad, their two boys and daughter or something. Then she comes back with these hooligans. Since all of these guys are my friends, I don't really think about what we look like. But when I took a step back, it was obvious why. We scared him, he prolly figured we were gonna start turning the suite into Animal House and get into some fights. Justin's got the hungover and tired thing going, with the greasy hair, wife beater and flannel, and Rolling Stones stocking cap look; Neil looks fairly conservative as he normally does, but he was wearing a BLACK LEATHER jacket (the horror!); I was wearing jeans, my Wolves warmup pullover, and a black Harley Davidson beanie with skulls on them; Knapper looked like our token asian friend; and Mike has his voluminous Viking beard with shaved sides on his head, but shoulder length hair on the top, and of course, that black leather jacket that was so threatening...fifty years ago. The funniest thing though, is that Mike is every bit as laid back as Justin is, and he doesn't even drink. Burly dude, but really friggin nice. I was prolly being the loudest one there, but really, I wasn't doing anything other than offering hilarious (and clean) commentary on the game between two awful squads. (Yes, that was a pat on the comedic back, thank you.) It's what I do at every game I go to, no matter the sport.
We ended up waiting a few minutes into the 3rd quarter, and scouting out five empty seats in a row. Neil found us a good spot in the last row of the lower deck and we watched some really bad Knick basketball and cracked jokes the rest of the night. Certainly not bad for free, I guess.
So yeah. It's been awhile since us suburban white boys have been discriminated against. Heck, if you break it down...it was white on white crime! Neil made a good point when we were walking to our cars afterward - Knapper should have played the angle that the guy was just booting us cuz Knapper's asian and made a stink about it. We had a lot of good thoughts in hindsight though. The best we could come up with at the actual time of it happening was getting our money back, which is fine.
What a weird night. From being flabbergasted that we lucked into such bomb ass seats, to pure defeatism, to standing up for our rights as suburban white American men, to heckling Isiah Thomas. Good times! We'll have to see a game together again.