The Colt 45 Chronicle #27

At the beginning of the month, Google Blogger started requiring a header for each post. I took the opportunity to name these letters -- which I have been posting, usually late afternoon Sunday, every week -- "The Colt 45 Chronicle." An advantage to this is that it will allow me to dispense with the formality of recapitulation -- how I pulled these letters out of storage during halftime of the Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta last January. I was in excruciating psychic pain at the time. For some reason I made the effort to find these letters. Actually, I was in search of the spontaneous prose document that I had completed at the end of summer 1991 and titled Shit Stinks. The letters were in a heavy-duty cardboard string-tied folder identical to the one that held Shit Stinks. So I pulled both out.

The National Football League season starts in two months. And I'm still working through these letters.

Colt 45 malt liquor was my favored lubricant for epistolizing during the period chronicled here -- the summer of 1988 to the spring of 1990. I appreciate your patience. The idea is that The Colt 45 Chronicle paves the way for the spontaneous prose document yet to come. And that's what I want to get to. Because even though I have not looked at Shit Stinks since I read some of its pages while living in San Antonio 20 years ago, I know it was written during a time when I was a newly-minted bachelor -- drinking heavily, fighting regularly, loving ladies of the street, pogoing at CBGBs, typing on a manual Brother -- and it should make for worthwhile entertainment.

My cousin Colin -- the main topic of the missive below, number 27 -- stayed with me and my wife in our married-student apartment on the 22nd floor. He slept on the futon we had in the living room until Ashley mandated that he had to go. She told me to give him a week's notice. And I did as I was told. The week came and went and Colin was still there. My wife requested that I deliver an absolute demand this time. He had to be gone in 48 hours. (It might have been 72 hours; my memory here is not exact.) Once again, I complied with her request.

I felt horrible. I sound nonchalant, almost brutal, in the letter, but it really bothered me. He was family. We grew up together as children, and he had lived with me for a spell during college. But it was this time as roommates at Berkeley -- during a summer when Ashley, who was still just my girlfriend, had moved out to pursue her trysts -- that had poisoned the wife's mind to my cousin. She thought he was mooch, always hanging around the periphery and never kicking into the kitty.

But everything turned out fine. Colin had work. So it wasn't like we shoved him out into the street. He got a room in a boarding house -- I vaguely recall that the Hell's Kitchen apartment mentioned in the first paragraph ended up not panning out -- and the worst thing that came of it for him was that he had to use a bathroom shared  by other lodgers. Soon he would migrate out to Brooklyn, which at that point was just becoming hipster holy land.

Other highlights of this letter -- which, like Chronicle #25, is addressed to my buddy Niall back in San Francisco -- include my friend and supervisor at the corporate law firm where I proofread breaking his back, something covered in Chronicle #4, and the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The picture below, taken by my wife while Colin was living with us, captures what she called "little dog, big dog" -- Colin on his Mac Classic and me on an AT&T IBM-clone word-processing our megalopolitan exploits. You'll notice, if you look closely, that I'm drinking a 32-ouncer of Coors -- not Colt. Usually, I'd start off with two quarts of malt liquor and close up shop with a quart of the light lager from Golden, CO.

Autumn 1989

I got the letter! Is #3 in the works? I hope so. I'll take anything, any old story -- anything, like a law-school party or a morning bus ride. Colin is staying with us and has been doing so for the last two weeks. He found an apartment on 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, what they call Hell's Kitchen. The unfortunate part of it is that he can't move in until October 15. According to Colin, the place is small but fundamentally okay and that the guy who he's gonna live with is nice enough (a grad student at NYU). Ashley and I have been putting up guests since August 1. And I'm not talking a guest now and then; I'm talking two solid months of nothing but people. There was a weekend when we were visitor-free, and then we went up to Ashley's aunt's house in Vermont. But minus that one weekend, and maybe three days in early September, there's been nothing but a packed calendar of family and friends, and dang-it-all I'm tired of it. Even though it's good karma and all that to open your home and be hospitable, two months is two months. I'm tired, plain and simple.

I was coming home from work the other day. I was on the subway and it was already dark outside. I had a seat, which is something. You see, there was only a handful of people in my car, and that's the only time that I allow myself to sit down. When there's absolutely no doubt that nobody else needs a seat -- whether child or high-heeled woman or hard-working man in construction boots. If I do sit down and then see a woman who is standing, I immediately feel sullen and dirty. I feel guilty of a horrible softness. But at the same time I don't want to make a show; I don't want to rise with a grand air and tip my hat and extend my arm, pointing to my vacated seat and grinning like a small man with spotted teeth and greasy hair and bowed back. -- It's all too self-congratulatory and public and diseased for me. So what I usually do is get up, and get up quickly as if I were planning to get off at the next stop, and walk to the other side of the car (so that the woman can't see that I'm abandoning my seat for her). But anyway, this night I had a seat.

Aw shit, it was ages ago that I wrote the above. I think it was the night I called you about Evan. Colin was still staying with us then. Now he's living at a rooming house down around 110th and Columbus. Ashley couldn't get any studying done with him always hanging around playing music and gabbing on the phone with his girl. So I gave him the boot. It's better for him anyway; he's closer to where he works, and he's wiping his own ass.

Evan got back the other day. He told me that he ended up staying with you for a whole week. I hope he wasn't a sore-thumb inconvenience for you. I had no idea that he was going to milk your hospitality to the point of chaffing the udder. It was awfully nice of you to do what you did. I appreciate it.

Well, Niall, it's been another two weeks or so since I wrote those two preceding paragraphs. I've been trying to cut back on my drinking and subsequently I'm not writing as much. But fuck all that. -- You guys had yourself a real honest-to-goodness natural catastrophe! How the fuck can the Bay Bridge buckle like that? As for that section of 880, I always had a feeling of imminent danger when I drove it; it was very old. How did Oak Street hold up? Where were you? What did you do? I left a message on your machine today, and I've been calling back but the circuits are overloaded.

Evan fell down a flight of stairs last Friday and spent the night in the hospital. He was skunk drunk and an ambulance was called and a paramedic got out and administered CPR to him. I haven't talked to him yet because he's been away from work all week and I figured that if I called him up it'd probably be painful for him to have to recapitulate for the thirty-fifth time the story of his unlucky excess. Sometimes it's best just to leave someone be. Solitude's gotta be the best cure.

Anyway, I hope you and Eve are okay and hanging tough. I'd tell you about a fight I got into recently, a fight where I really fucked up my ankle and was on crutches for a few days, but I don't have the guts to do it right now. It really wasn't a big deal. Get in touch with me as soon as you're able.

I was thinking about the trip I made last year to California. I'd cruise into these Stop 'n' Shop gas stations, fill up the tank, and buy some ash-flavored coffee and 50-cent-a-pack cherry-sweetened cigars. The whole time I wasn't really eating, except for a sandwich around noon. I had the sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, and I'd eat one sandwich per day. I'd get the sandwiches out of a cooler. The cooler was sitting between me and the passenger's seat. But the deal was that I didn't even have to put the sandwich in the cooler because the whole car, my VW bus, was so fucking cold that anything in the car, unless it had a pulse and was wrapped in wool was well below freezing.