Twenty-five years is a long time. Today I am a "Nothing Man," someone who goes to work and assumes a office-professional persona but who is not really known by his coworkers. Back in 1988, I had a large group of good friends, a wife and aspirations of a big life.
The letter below, number 24 from a collection written upon arriving to New York City, gives vent, at the end, to my displeasure with life lived in the company of others. It is addressed to my wife's cousin, who was the same age, and with whom we spent a long, snow-bound, stoned Christmas holiday the year prior. She and I carried on a heavy-duty but unconsummated flirtation. For a brief spell, at the end of my Berkeley days, I was a Lothario.
At one point during the aforementioned Christmas holiday, cousin and I were going to travel back to Boston alone together. Luckily, it didn't turn out that way; another infidelity was averted.
Autumn 1988
I work in a honeycomb full of shitheads and assholes, Newcomb. We got married under the big skies of Nevada, except it was under a roof and around midnight, one of those commercial chapels -- piped-in wedding bells and a mumbling minister. We were plenty afraid (too much like a funeral parlor). Ashley kept giggling and fuckin' up her lines. His sermon -- the minister's sermon (what came before the uttering of vows) -- caught me off guard. He said something about love and how it didn't know deceit and selfishness, smallness and cruelty; that love was plain and simple and pure and beautiful. And all this was said outright without dressing or word play, and I fell for it.
I keep celebrating the mystery of life with my old buddy Adolph Coors. Crack it open, pour it in, and what you know? It's a holiday. Whether it's a weakness, a pathology, an addiction, it's just beer, and so the fuck what? After we got back from Boston/Vermont that Christmas, and all the spanking of ourselves we did over consumption, I took refuge in Bukowski. I remember sometime around February saying to someone that the worst I could do would be to end up like Bukowski. But shit, you read the guy's poetry, which from that time on I proceeded to do, and he's no self-aggrandizing boho wimp; he tells it like it is. Anyway, I could identify with the poems about the pilgrimage to the liquor store, and the poems about hiding from the phone and the door bell, and the poems about making a meal at 11:30 at night, and the poems about being inside, in your apartment, lying on your back in the afternoon sun, which you're trying to shut out like a guilty motherfucker, while the world, which for you is what you can see of the avenue through a cut in your blind, stays as normal and as hostile and as ever-moving as you've always imagined it. But fuck, what I want to say, and one of the things that this letter was meant to do, was that I had a great Christmas with you, and with Ashley, and the whole deal. Those red floors and the windows and the rocking chair -- and the windows -- and the back bedroom and the refrigerator (beers and tequila shots, though we never drank the vodka) I will never ever forget. As Prince would say, "You got the look." I don't know why I never wrote you while I was in Berkeley, God knows I had the fuckin' time. But there was something tricky about living in Berkeley that I could never quite get a handle on. Too much accessibility to other people and the feeling that you never had a moment of your own (which is I guess what happens when you live in one place too long).
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