Drinking to win is a large concern of young men, as revealed in the letter below, the fifth taken from a collection of missives written in New York City between the summer of 1988 and spring of 1990.
Barbet Schroeder's Barfly was a big deal to me and a lot of other young guys making their way in the world in the late 1980's/early 1990's. The story of a young down-and-out drunken poet and brawler taps into the Romantic-hero archetype that I fancied myself emulating -- to the point of megalomania and delusion, as you will witness below.
Evan is the friend I visited in the Brooklyn hospital in the last letter posted. The job I quit was as a temporary proofreader for the corporate law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. All I can recall of the eve before Christmas eve night out on the town described below is that it was so cold that everything looked different -- blue-black, sharp, shiny and amber lit; that, and the pavement of Broadway crunched underfoot like the frozen plank road of a frontier town.
Winter 1990
I went to lunch with a friend the other day. He broke his back three months ago falling down a flight of stairs; he'd been drinking beer and gin for nine-hours straight; he ended up spending three weeks in the hospital and another two months recuperating at home. He hasn't touched a drop since. Anyway, we were sitting at the table with two other guys (this was in the cafeteria at work) and Evan says (Evan's his name), because the topic of alcohol has been broached and I've just said, "Yep, there's definitely something to the point though that going completely without alcohol and actively avoiding it leaves you a little dull and monological," and Evan says, "Aw, Bukowski is so egotistical and full of shit. He doesn't know anything." and I respond, "Yep, yep, you're right, it's true." (Evan's read Bukowski (he'd only read the BARFLY screenplay, because of his love of the movie, and then I lent him HOT WATER MUSIC, and after that he started buying the poetry, like THE DAYS RUN AWAY LIKE WILD HORSES OVER THE HILLS)); Evan can't out drink me (though Evan, it must be said, did drink a bit more frequently than I did (though, mostly, because he's single and I'm married)); and Evan did break his back just a week and a half after I fucked up my ankle in that bar squabble (which brings up an interesting point, the point being that up until that time, the time of our mutual accidents, the two of us were on a drinking self-mutilation binge; we used to go out together and spend whatever was in our collective wallets on beer pints and Johnny Walker's; -- we were on the same wavelength, the same path, which was go and go and don't worry about tomorrow because it'll always be there, and if it isn't, so what?) Anyway, tomorrow came a lot closer to disappearing for Evan than it ever did for me -- he broke his back and I just roughed up my leg, so I can understand why he's wholeheartedly convinced that nothing but evil can come from the booze bottle and why now he radiates fear and suspicion when the conversation drifts anywhere close to the topic of drinking. But still, it broke my back to have to acquiesce like that in shitting on Bukowski, even though Evan was half right. Heroes are hard to come by and you hate to have to turn the other cheek when one of yours is being profaned, especially in public, but I figured that if anyone had the right to do it it was Evan, breaking his back and all while trying honestly to act out his own interpretation of the big Bukowski screenplay. Oh well.
Good news! I quit my job! I was accused of using "language" unsuitable for the workplace. I was given the option to "improve" it or to go someplace else. I sat for a moment, flabbergasted, my brain blank, but then the blond beast in me stood up and I fired back to the bitch, the one who called herself my boss -- why is it that they are always women? wilted, tormented, insincere, middle-aged women -- I fired back, "Well then, I quit." That was it. I walked out of her office, packed up my stuff, had her sign my time slip, and the next thing I knew I was out the door and on the street, Wall Street -- free after six months of pointless, shit-picking toil (the kind of toil you think of when you see a chicken pecking at lint). It felt good to be out of there: 4:30 in the afternoon and riding on an empty uptown subway back home. My cheeks burned a little from the humiliation of being accused of excessive profanity, but I comforted myself with the thought that "Yep, it happened to D.H. Lawrence too!"
I've been out of work a week, and I've been looking now, lackadaisically, for about three days. I promised myself that I'll never work in an office again. That leaves factory work, construction, and other assorted sordid low-level positions, all of which, in my mind, have to be superior to the fluorescently-lit, pseudo-white-collar drudgery I've been suffering through since July. As I always tell Ashley, the worse thing about office work is that nothing is above board, nobody ever tells anybody what they really think; it's all obsequiousness and delays and subterfuge. A person suffers incalculably in such an environment; there's no nourishment -- no happiness, no valor, nothing but the people who you never knew in junior high, the small people, the truly inconsequential. So I swear I can't go back.
My Christmas, with Ashley gone to Oregon, was full of drink and cigar smoke. The windows froze up at night and I'd sit down and plug away at the Colt and the Cuban, writing stupid little holiday greetings to Ashley's glrandmother and one or two long-forgotten friends. Saturday, the day before Christmas Eve, I hit the town with Antony. We ended up at that place where we'd ditched you (that was a night I know you'll never forget, the night I bolted out the door pressing hand to mouth in an attempt to restrain the upchuck from bursting through my lips).... We met a couple of Antony's friends there, friends who I'd never met before; I felt very different: they were very clean and seemed quite young (it turned out that they were my age, 25); I drove myself to the Jack, ordering glass after glass after glass, "with just a little ice." The youngsters looked on mortified, speechless, bedazzled. Antony smiled. I guess he didn't like his friends either because as soon as he got drunk (he had started in on the whiskey too) he began insulting them, telling them what a bunch of fools they really were. But through it all I felt like a pop star, a magnet: pure steel as brilliant as a blow torch. God how good I looked, seeing myself as Antony's friends saw me: big, brash, but without saying hardly a word, a true star....
The next morning the star woke up with a hangover so bad that the first thing he thought of was how stupid he had been for not puking before he went to bed.
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