The Colt 45 Chronicle #67

The goal for the holiday weekend is to post a letter a day from "The Colt 45 Chronicle," a project initiated January of last year (the 2012 season) during the Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta. For some reason at halftime, sizzling with mental trauma brought on by the prospect that Seattle's magical young NFL team would soon have their Super Bowl run aborted, I went hunting for a spontaneous prose document I had typed while living as a bachelor in Washington Heights over twenty years ago. I found it in a storage space; next to it was also a collection of letters composed during my first two years in New York City. 

The time was 1988 to 1990. I was married. My wife and I lived in a married-student housing high rise on the campus of Columbia University Medical School. Our marriage was collapsing. The letters chronicle this collapse obliquely; it has to be interpreted through the tea leaves of my constant pining for Berkeley, the college town from whence we came.

There are some persistent themes to these old letters besides waxing for the West Coast: the San Francisco 49ers, Cynicism (I was enamored with the idea that a philosophical school diametrically opposed to Platonism traced back to Socrates, and that school argued that a short cut to virtue existed by observing the behavior of animals) and of course the mundane horror of worklife.

The larger goal is to finish this letter collection off and then move on to the spontaneous prose Shit Stinks, a time of high drama.

Autumn 1988

Roger Craig rushed for almost 200 yards, and they don't telecast a single 49ers game here. So all I can do is read up on a few highlights in the Monday UPI release. I hope I didn't sound too bombastic and yahoo during my recapitulation of the aforementioned brawl. I worry about this, about my frat-boy pride that kicks like a cowboy to get out. But I see it in there and I know what's going on. My new pre-work fantasy is to drive across the country in December, after I quit my job. Take the ol' squeaky stallion on the road at least one more time; see the country during winter; take a different route from this summer's; have a car to tool around California/Oregon when we visit out West. Sooner still, Ashley and I have a trip to Boston in mind -- Thanksgiving -- to pay a visit to her cousin Sarah: smoke some dope, feel sanded down, drink a pot of Turkish coffee, do a set or two of push-ups in the bathroom, and lay on her painted-red wood floor. I've been nibbling at quite a few titles recently. Diogenes Laertius' LIVES OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS was this morning's subway selection. I read about Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope, the two great Cynic fathers. A lot of Plato bashing, like the time Antisthenes went to Plato's house to call on him but finds him sick and puking; so he says, "Plato, I see the bile, but not the pride." (I like that one.) I also liked the one where Diogenes comes upon a youth sunbathing in an exposed position, and says, "You best be careful boy or someone will spear you in the backside with a dart."

I wake up every morning just before seven. I look over at Ashley and she is wide-mouthed and dead to the world. Snuz is holding down the fort. at the bottom corner of the bed. The radio goes on two-minutes later; if I'm lucky, it's sports talk or the weather or the news; but a lot of times it's rancid fifties "nostalgia rock." I hit that shit off immediately. I keep my eyes open for thirty seconds and I'm awake. I don't have to take a shower because I've done it the night before. Coffee is the first stop. So I do that; put on my clothes; take a shit; wash my face and brush my teeth; go out the door and push the elevator button; drop down with some future Bush voters off to early-morning rounds at Columbia Presbyterian -- I've already got my book out at this point. I walk past all the sullen security guards listening to the radio, and pass through the two glass doors right out into the cold weather. It's a sprint to the subway; someone is gaining on you so try to crank it up a notch and keep pace. And then, Bam! You smell the dirt/grease/electricity and know you're home free. Skipping down the stairs, building momentum, you gird up your loins and pop the turnstiles hard. Then it's an attempt to be Tarzan in the Congo, testing all your faculties, "Is the train coming? Should I make a break for it?" You cock your head, point your ear, watch what others are doing . . . .

I never thought what was after Berkeley, what was after the West; so all this is still pretty shocking. I just did it, we just did it, and now we're here. For a good long while. And needless to say it's too different to like right off the bat. But I really feel that the only thing that is good in me is the West, So every time I feel positive about being out here I automatically begin to feel the demon in me. The West is still the frontier, is still space and freedom compared to this place. I lived in that shithole apartment like it was my life, for five years, with all the toil, like women, and Cain, and Job. I worked hard. Since I was eighteen. And I was just about to figure things out, which was only because I was just about to leave. I wish I could apologize, effusively, like a Pope. To all the people . . . .