The Colt 45 Chronicle #11

I find it hard to believe that I mailed this letter, number 11 from a collection of New York City epistles that are arranged in no order (I'm taking them straight off the top). Addressed to my college friend Shale, who I doubt appreciated it, I was obviously very drunk. The first story referred to was a going-away night-on-the-town thrown for me by my supervisor at Deloitte Touche, which was then located on one of the top floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center (this was before the basement 1993 truck bombing). What I remember about that going-away night (I was leaving for the Emerald City) is that we stayed until the strip club shut down, and at that point all the men who were in there, besides a large bouncer, started wrestling with each other (hence, the "stupid homoerotic men").

Story number two refers to a Saturday morning that fIREHOUSE oddly played on the grass at the center of Columbia University's campus. Ed fROMOHIO, Watt and Hurley sounded great. I talked to both Watt and Hurley; I gave Hurley a sheet of paper for the set list. I ended up drinking three quarts of beer quickly. This impeded me in story three, going to see a Peter Greenaway film with my buddy Gary's wife, Eleni. The movie was so intense and I was so drunk I excused myself and hung out in the Men's Room for about 15 minutes.

Story four is an ancient complaint that a son has against his father. We watched Super Bowl XXIII together (Joe Montana to John Taylor with 34 seconds to go!) and had a great time. No drinking, no hostility. I was very relaxed, nursing wounds from a Saturday night fight on Haight Street. I don't know why I'm beefing about my father here in the context of Super Bowl XXIII. Maybe I'm figuring out that there's a familial connection to drunkenness and insanity.

Spring 1990

Shale, as they say in the sports page, here's the skinny.

I'm flying out of here the 1st. Ashley's got an apartment down at 116th and Morningside right next door to Columbia University (we're subletting our apartment through September).

Friday April 20th was my last day at the accounting firm. I celebrated by heading to a strip joint with my boss and this gay word processor from the Report Department where I work.

We dropped down 21 stories to the 78th floor, what's called the SKYLOBBY. Here's an explanation of drinking and writing: ecstasy is too easy; you've got to make a profession of it; and the key is to do it over and over again until you get used to it so you can capture the pith of it, the fiber of it; drinking and writing is done out of complete respect for the ecstatic -- the excrement of joy.

Four stories: 1) strip joint on the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place (ink wet black hyperbolic young stupid men old streets drizzling like a plague; the great visitation like an atom bomb nuclear nightmare; Hobbes' man as errant wolf bubonic leviathan, when push comes to shove, the soiled and skinned-ness and hate of stupid homoerotic men); 2) fIREHOUSE and the magic of time and the beauty of greatness, of heroism, and the simplicity and wholesomeness of the world, and the perfection of rain green grass and mud wrapped in clear thick plastic in the paradise of academy's pasture (and me, with a quart of Miller, the only one drinking), but more than anything, the greatness goodness the strength the magnanimity and wealth of decency that makes Mike Watt and George Hurley who they were and still abide to be to me and you (heroism can't be beat; it can beat time; that's the key ----- after all that's been said and done, that I should shake hands (me with bloodied cat-scratched palm) and talk with tongue to men that to me are my hope for life, brings philosophy to a standstill); 3) movie: THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER -- total and complete indulgence in violence and gratuity and excessiveness of life, that light is bound to shit and the black (they make the archangel gynecologist eat his transcendence and lightness (the feminine principle is in between, having to reconcile both forces, light and dark)) -- anyway, the perfectness of man and wife seeing this film together, not my wife, but another man's, and this my philosophy, my point of view, thoroughly represented, Bataille's world on screen without the obligatory optimism that always accompanies philosophical writing/representation, but the full-bellied nausea that is synonymous with overeating and the too much of life, the dark dream, the dark forces that you will always have to encounter no matter what; 4) my Dad is crazy and disrespectful (but that's what happens when you're a drunk and don't have anything else going on -- you look to enliven people at all costs -- interaction no holds barred), but  what does it mean to have a crazy father, a crazy castrator? It means you have total freedom to do whatever you want to do (and at the same time a complete burden), and that's rare. So I should really make the best of it, and do everything that's in my power to follow hardship's course, which means buying truck and working, writing and working labor, and when you're staid and sober -- read and read and read and write down your thoughts about the reading.

I started this story before I ever thought of it. Superbowl Sunday and I went into my father's bedroom in my grandmother's house and grabbed down out of the bookshelf one of my old books, Lucretius, and I kept it by me the whole game on a stand with a lamp (high five with my Dad's crippled hand) and it was a bad game until the 4th quarter (oh my god, the synchronicity, during the Christmas game Gary and I coming back uptown to this place and smoking our homegrown dope and watching the last game of the regular season, the Cincinnati Begals and Minnesota Vikings, Rick Fenney) and the 49ers came back and won thanks to the all-ness of Joe Montana (and once again I'm right) -- anyway, it's all wrapped up in ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, -- and what happened from there?