I remember two things from the collection of letters that chronicle my life in New York City after my wife and I first arrived there at the end of the 1980's. One is contained in the letter below, number nine from the aforementioned collection, a description of a fight I had at Old Town Bar (if you Google it you can see the glass doors through which my adversary and I crashed).
Old Town Bar was part of the video montage that opened the old Late Night with David Letterman show on NBC after Carson. This was a pre-Internet America where most people watched the same television shows, at least at 11:30 PM, and that was The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Letterman, airing after midnight, attracted a younger, more male audience. I remember being out and about midweek late at night drunk in my university days and wherever I stopped off, whatever buddy's apartment, Late Night with David Letterman would be on the TV; it was part of the collective collegiate consciousness.
If truth be told, I think the bartender took a disliking to me, as described below, because he could read my mind. I was bouncing around in my head the idea of walking out on my bill, something which I don't recall ever having done before or since. I must have been feeling surly. I had stayed on too long. It turned out that I didn't have to pay for any of my drinks anyway. Because of the fight.
In college I became a street fighter and barroom brawler, and it was not entirely owing to alcohol. The first real street fight I was in I was attacked by some guy coming out of Larry Blake's on Telegraph. He was drunk and grabbed me by the hair and tried to force me to my knees. I was a freshman; I didn't even drink then; I wasn't doing anything but walking down the street with some friends minding my own business. I saw red and knocked him to the ground and was contemplating my next move -- slamming his head on the pavement or throwing punches to his face -- when a passerby intervened.
A proclivity for brawling followed me to New York City. I kept track of my won-loss record like a young Sugar Ray on his way up the rankings. At this point I had nothing but what I considered wins under my belt. But eventually one loses one's edge. The explosiveness and rage wane. I started to lose. (Later, I developed a taste for losing.) Beggars Banquet was on my turntable a lot at this time:
Autumn 1989
Shit, we're neglecting each other. It's been almost two months since September 11th (the date of the mistakenly conceived party, black Monday). What's up? I figure you're busy generating class plans and grading papers. For my part I'm pretty much doing the sane old thing. I have cut back on my drinking though. Ashley served me with an ultimatum: either I stop drinking or I leave. She wasn't foolin'. So I cut a deal. I agreed to eliminate all my social drinking and in return I will be able drink at home twice a week, with an option every third week to add an extra day of libation. The reason she came down so hard on me was because of this fight I got in at a bar. I really fucked up my ankle, to the point that I was hobbling around on crutches for five days. It wasn't busted, just ligament damage. As for the fight, it was a real joke. I was watching game 2 of the American League Championship Series and I had had three or four irish whiskies and four or five beers when the bartender refused to serve me. He ordered me out of his bar. I told him to fuck off. I told him to fuck off because he was a malevolent sonofabitch and I wasn't doing anything disorderly; shit, my speech wasn't even slurred. Once I told him to fuck off this young tough came swirling from behind the counter at the other end of the bar (I don't know if he was a bouncer or another bartender). He was yelling at me about how he was going to kick my ass. I told him to step forth and get on with it. So we blasted through a glass door. Little diamonds giggled on the sidewalk cement. Now at some point during the fracas I slipped completely off my feet. When I got back up I couldn't plant off my left leg; it felt like I had a water bed in there. It didn't take me long to figure out what had happened: my goddamn shoes had let me down. You see game 2 was a day game so I had taken a late lunch from work and gone to a bar. I was in work clothes, in a tweed coat, tie, and wingtips; -- those same goddamn wingtips that we had had a discussion about the last time you were here. I remember the discussion quite well. We were in the bedroom sitting on the bed and I asked you why my shoes had a small metal triangle on the bottom of the heel. You said it was a heel guard; that most shoes had rubber or plastic heel guards but that older shoes (or some such explanation like that) came with a steel heel guard. I asked you what a heel guard was for. "Protects the leather, " you said. "Otherwise the leather will wear down and you'll have to get it replaced." You expressed admiration for them because the heel appeared to be solid leather. I told you that I had got them at a Goodwill in Ashland for $2. I also said that the steel heel guard made it very slippery whenever I walked on a smooth surface. Anyway, imagine that; imagine the prescience of that moment -- it was that heel guard, it was that goddamn metal tap that yanked my feet up to the clouds and left me lying flat on my ass, my legs splayed like a centerfold cutie. The young tough plopped right down on top of me, and he had me. I asked him to give me the best that he had, to give it to me in the face. But the crowd elbowed through the broken glass doorway and gave me time to get to my feet. But like I said, when I got to my feet I realized that I was operating with only one leg. I gave it another go, but nothing was there. All of which was a real shame because I knew I was better than him. You see, I knew that I had him. It was when we had first swung out onto the street during the rain of glass. -- I got a good look at his eyes and he was scared, and I wasn't. -- I'd been around before, or somewhere close by, and I knew what I was doing. And right then I knew that I had him, and I told him as much. I told him that I was better than he was, and then his eyes dilated and filled up with so much fear that all I could see was black.
It was exactly at that moment that I slipped, exactly at the moment that I knew in my heart of hearts that I had fought a good fight and was just a beer commercial away from chalking up another victory in the war against banality and insensitivity and the idea that somebody can beat up on somebody else whenever they want. But I slipped. I slipped like it had all been planned by a Greek god or a Greek playwright or a Hollywood screenwriter, like I wasn't really there duking it out but Andrew McCarthy -- Andrew McCarthy up on the screen in an afternoon cineplex, Phoenix, AZ: a seventeen year-old Jewish girl grinding her ass into a foam-cushioned seat and scrunching up her neck, biting bottom lip and clutching fat chest, which just goes to show you that passion is felt everywhere, and that a barroom brawl is just as meaningful and as meaningless as little girls and money spent.
Like I said, after that fall my left leg was no good.. And even though I had the heart to keep it going and I wanted to keep it going, I was beat. The guy definitely could have dusted me at that point. And that's what I think I wanted. Right then I knew I could've taken good punches and laughed 'em off. And that's what would've given me the victory: I could've shown then what lightweights they all were -- all of them -- all those middle-aged debilitating bar cronies, all those bullshit pretty girls in red lipstick; I could've taken their best shots -- all 'em put together -- and not been fazed one bit. As it turned out, I had to walk away from the hubbub, but not without informing everybody on the sidewalk that it was my goddamn wingtips that were to blame.I kept pointing down at them. I felt like a big shaven lion, gray and bristly. Before leaving I reiterated that my face was better than any blow that could be delivered. There were no takers. So I hobbled off the wrong way to the subway.
My first loss ever. And in such a fashion. Oh man, it hurt. When I woke up the next day my ankle was the size of a football. I hopped my way up to the emergency room on Broadway. I went to radiology and got an X-ray. Good news -- no break.
One month later, it's not quite back to new. I can't run on it, but it's good enough. Anyway, getting back to the original story, that's why Ashley demanded that I stop drinking: because she was scared (deeply I guess) by the whole brawl incident, even though, really, the whole thing, like I said, was nothing -- Cracker Jacks and M&M's.
Before I sign off here I want to say a few things. First, there's nothing that smells better than the smell of drinking a beer. Second, there's nothing that'll break your heart faster than meeting a guy who's your age and who's a nerd, but at the same time a good guy -- a guy who is completely out of step and missing the point but at the same time a guy who is completely honest with his energy and goddamn energetic to boot. Am I making sense? It's probably what the Philistines thought about Jesus -- too much energy and too goofy and he doesn't know how to keep his voice down on the subway so all the people going home from work don't have to be disturbed. I can't help but think that there's something essential and right about a person like that. Third, this morning on the subway platform a homeless junkie black man tried to stand up from his slumbers on the subway bench. He teetered, pitched forward, and then landed on all fours, skinning his hands on the smelly pavement.
No comments:
Post a Comment