The Colt 45 Chronicle #88

As this old letter project draws to a close, I promised some sort of assessment of who I was and what I thought I was doing back then as a young man in his twenties recently eructed from the university.

Today's letter below provides a decent snapshot. I was an alcoholic, working or avoiding employment at low-wage jobs in New York City and finding a little solace in drinking malt liquor and typing an epistle, usually little word pictures like the one below, to friends, usually young men like myself, back on the West Coast.

I just wanted to read and write. And my time in New York City -- first, pursuing "career-track" employment, which was quickly abandoned, and then as a temporary worker dispatched by various agencies located near 42nd Street and 5th Avenue -- made me understand how difficult this was going to be. I concluded that if scratching out a living while trying to find time to do one's "own thing" was as hard as it was in the nation's commercial mecca, I was going to have to try something different. Meaning, I was going to have to get the hell out of Dodge.

Summer 1989

An electric fan shoved between the legs of a fat woman with corn-rowed hair who was operating a packed elevator as it pulled all of us upward eight stories to a place that was a place that would let us off just one-floor shy of the last gasps of Broadway-&-168th air and late summer daylight. Oh, man, that's a slice of pie that would bow the back of the best donkey. That fan was pushing smells at me that you could catch like a football. Smells tactile and hairy. Smells exactly like a yeasty pussy. Smells I could taste with the tongue. Smells that dripped down the back of my throat.

The elevator doors parted and all us passengers shot out like water through a broken glass jar. I popped up the last flight of cement steps and was greeted by the pummel and rustle of Broadway at 168th Street.

I cruised west towards Haven Avenue and home, passing the flower peddler who works in front of the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Right when I passed Fort Washington Avenue and was crossing onto Haven, I noticed a jogger who was busy stretching. It was pretty obvious that he had just finished a run. He was stretching against a three-foot brick wall. He had his left leg thrust up on top of the wall, and he was resting the side of his head against his knee. And what made the whole thing so special for me was that he was stroking the underneath of his thigh very slowly with  measured strokes which were obviously causing him pleasure just as if he were petting the waist-down green-scaled luminescent portion of a mermaid.

He made me sick. Did he think his legs were as beautiful a mermaid's tail?

Niall, why don't you ever write me? Have I done something wrong?