On this St. Patrick's Day, why not letter number 12? This one like the others from a string-tie folder of epistles typed, using WordPerfect on a desktop IBM clone, the first year-and-a-half I lived in Gotham. It's a story about drinking Protestant Irish whiskey during lunch break working on Wall Street. Another yarn of "drinking to win" (and in this case a tale of drinking at work to circumvent my wife's prohibition at home). The Jeffrey in this story is a guy I worked with (a good guy in spite of the few pejorative comments below) at Davis Polk & Wardwell and not the college buddy addressed in letter number ten. This missive, like the majority so far, is to my best friend from Berkeley, Mark, who at the time was teaching English in Spain and writing me "drinking to win" letters of his own.
The one thing I will say about the guys who I worked with at Davis Polk & Wardwell -- a Jamaican who lived in Queens; young men from the Bronx and Manhattan (black, Puerto Rican, Greek); a nerd from UVA who was trying to make it in the Big Apple like I was -- is that I considered them my brothers, brother factotums. And another thing I'll say: lunch has never been as fun as it was on Wall Street in those days at the end of the 1980's.
The letter's coda is one of only two things that I remember about these NYC letters, the other being the letter(s) describing the fight at the Old Town Bar. It's clear that my fantasy of the future was shaped by growing up in the 1970's watching a lot of situation comedy on television.
Summer 1989
Mark, I'm writing right now, but it's just a little thank you epistle; the big one is coming a touch later. I wanted to write and thank you for both of your letters: for the mom's Honda on cruise control at 70 mph from SF excesses and the Madrid gin Russian John Travolta skinning nose and rushing the last call. Thank you, man. Who knows what my brain and soul would be like without you? I mean, I want to tell you that my eyes can't see fast enough to read the stories you write -- they're that satisfying.
I was thinking as I read your 18-page masterwork that if what you were going through with Marilou's letter and Michele's body had to be assigned a Bukowski equivalent it would most definitely be WOMEN, whereas my own state of affairs, if it had to be Bukowski-ized, would probably turn out to be POST OFFICE (I'll take yours any day). Every morning I wake up at 7:15; every morning I brew coffee and iron a pair of pants and a clean shirt; every morning I shower, shit, shave, and shine my teeth; -- every goddamn morning, the same miserable routine: the Eternal Return. The subway follows. I read and start to feel halfway decent, but then it's the Wall Street station and I have to get out and walk up to the street, my face shoved in some fat secretary's ass. I arrive at the office in a small gold-colored elevator; I sign in at the front desk. It's then that they take my soul from me and put it in a clear glass jar (size: half gallon) and place it on a long shelf next to all the other jarred souls of people who are already at work.
The monotony is terrific, stupendous. I sit with a red ball-point pen and delete unwanted letters and numerals. On my left is a handwritten draft; on my right, is a computer printout. The task is to correct any mistakes that the word processors make when they input the handwritten draft. All there is to do is to glance from the handwritten draft to the printout -- glance from left to right, make the occasional deletion of a typo, and flip the pages. This goes on for hours. Occasionally I'll get up and go to the pisser.
Fortunately I work with about half-a-dozen other proofreaders, most of whom are male, black and hispanic; there are two women, but they're both white and pretty and they're both cunts (I tell all the boys they're what's called "pretty va-cunt"). Between deleting digits and listening for the supervisor's footsteps we toss around the shit quite a bit: a lot of fag-bashing and skylarking and speechifying about the feminine structure. One of the guys is a big drinker. He's a black guy from the Bronx who used to deal blow but then got caught and tossed in jail; now he's got a wife and two kids and just got off parole two months ago and he's dealing a little again (though I haven't sampled any, and, for some reason, have no desire to, but, it should be said, he's never offered me any; he's okay, but a power hitter he's not; in fact, he's sort of a chiseler). Jeffrey is his name.
Jeff is my age, 25, and he likes Jack Daniels; he likes to drink it at lunch. The first few times I went out with him he used to get Jack and Coke,which is a healthy shot's worth of bourbon and about 5 ounces of Coke. That didn't look too good to me, so I'd drink pints of Budweiser. At one point or another he asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him at this place called McAnn's. I said sure. We got cheeseburgers and draft beers. By the time we finished the meal we had had about three steins each. I hadn't been drinking that murch because it was just a week after that bar fight I'd been in and I was still hobbling around on a bad leg and Ashley was fresh into her zealousness over banning me from booze and beer; so anyway, those three steins gave me such a high that I was about ready to levitate off the sawdust floor and fuck every woman in the room all at once. We went up to the cash register to pay the bill, but the funny thing was that even though I was flying high I couldn't help feeling that something wasn't right. We paid the bill and Jeff went back to the table to leave a tip and I still felt like something was wrong.
Jeff came walking back towards me and I said to him, "I think I'm gonna have a shot." -- It came out of my brain and onto my tongue and out of my mouth from nowhere. I hadn't even thought of taking a shot before the second that I had said it. He said, "Go for it." So I stepped up to the bar, nudged my way into the barkeep's eyeshot, and barked, "Shot of Bushmills!"
"Shot of Bushmills?"
"Shot of Bushmills!"
He grabbed a bottle from behind the bar and slammed a thick glass down on hardwood. He took a long look at me, a big red-nosed curly-headed Irishman he was; he took a long look and poured and smiled and kept on pouring; he poured and poured until the glass was almost full. He liked my looks, I guess. Goddamnit, there I was -- giddy after only three beers and faced with at least three shots of Irish whiskey and Jeffrey standing eager-eyed grinning in anticipation of calamity. I grabbed the glass and cleared my mind of any foul thoughts and started drinking; but instead of shooting the whiskey down without tasting it, I drank it nice and steady and slow and all at once; -- I wanted to show Jeffrey what was what and who was who: so I gulped it gently and thoroughly, to the very last drop, like chilled water in a paper cone. Jeffrey was impressed to the point of being jealous. But being no slouch, the first thing he did was to say, "That looked good; I think I'm gonna get me one. -- Shot of Jack!"
The barkeep arrived and poured him up. It was a good shot, not quite as large as mine, but close (and, in all fairness, Jack Daniels is a thicker whiskey than Bushmills); and goddamnitall, Jeff hooched and gurgled that glass of bourbon just as if he were a brown-faced bear and it was honey from the hive; -- he'd followed the leader and made it even more spectacular. We looked at each, eyes sparkling success and beaming pride, and we turned in tandem and marched out into the rain and back to the office.
That was just the beginning of what turned out to be a beer and bourbon shot ritual. I stuck to Bushmills just one more time before capitulating to the superiority of Jack Daniels. We kept going to McAnn's because the beers are just $1 a stein and the shots are only $2.25, but we shifted locations to a different McAnn's, one that's west of Broadway instead of the one on John Street which is to the east of Broadway. I enjoyed these afternoon celebrations. They were a spitting in the face of Ashley's sobriety standards. They were an escape from the suffocation of razor-burn mornings and subway cars and log sheets and gold-colored elevators and red ball-point pens; they were an unruffling of wax wings while my work buddies and I danced a button hook jig on the sheet metal roof of the sun.
One day we got a little out of hand though. It was a Wednesday, a payday, and four of us went to McAnn's for lunch. I had told everyone before we left that I wasn't going to drink.
"Yeah, right."
"No, I mean it."
"Okay. Okay. No problem. Don't worry about it."
I knew they knew, at least Jeff knew, that I was full of shit, and that as soon as the beer was passed out and I'd got a good whiff of it I'd be flagging the waitress for a stein. Once we got there and were seated the first thing they did was order up a couple of pitchers of McSorley's cream ale, a local brew with plenty of flavor. They were definitely fucking with me: I was the one who turned them on to McSorley's in the first place. The mugs were filled and the food was ordered. They drank and I sat and watched . . . and smelled. Oh, man. The smell was unbelievable, fantastic. They gulped and giggled and helped each other to fresh steins, flame filling their cheeks. And I had to watch the whole fucking thing; I had to smell those two pitchers disappear.
Our food came. I'd ordered a bacon and swiss cheeseburger with a combo of onion rings and french fries; it looked damn good. The boys waved for the waitress to get some more beer; and while they were fretting over that I dove right in. The burger was perfect: well done, but juicy, with a perfect amount of bacon lettuce tomato swiss cheese and pickle. I squirted some ketchup on my french fries and onion rings -- mmmm! nice and salty and tangy. Everything was perfect; everything except that I didn't have anything to drink. And it was right at that moment that the waitress appeared on the scene with two fresh pitchers of McSorley's.
I took that as a providential sign and broke down and begged the waitress for a mug of my own. There was some jeering from the boys, of course, but fuck them. -- There's nothing like a good burger and a glass of beer. The waitress quickly returned with a mug. I poured a tall one. -- I finished that stein and went for another; I finished that one and went to the next; I finished that one and my burger at the same time; but then someone promptly filled up my mug, so I did that and helped myself to another; did that, and poured another.
After all was said and done, I pretty much hogged the two pitchers for myself, which was fine and dandy as far as the boys were concerned because they'd stopped drinking after the the fresh pitchers came: they were afraid of going back to work too drunk. Shit, fine by me.
Jeff was the only one who kept going. And while he had slackened his pace when the food arrived, he kept an eagle eye on the number of steins I downed and when I got ahead in the tally he'd gulp down his glass and refill it.
****
The sun closes and the doors are open. Back somewhere in my mind is the future and it's bright and happy and full of strength and all taking place in a big house and you're there on a visit and kids are all around like crickets in tall grass. I'm 35 years old but not yet dead so my brain is still alive and buzzing like a horse fly. Oh shit, the coffee is brewing and the flapjacks are puffing and sizzling and showers are clouding up medicine cabinet mirrors and everybody is thinking private thoughts of a type suitable for 8:30 AM; and out of some nameless, soundless corner of a bedroom closet a mouse trickles . . . .
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