This is a letter written when newly arrived to the megalopolis. The voice is that of a young man long gone. Brash, profane, combative (I am now brash on only the rarest of occasions, just mildly profane and thoroughly pacific) I didn't have a high opinion -- as you can see in the second paragraph -- of the native New Yorker. The missive ends with a flying of the Berkeley flag. This university boy missed his college town.
Autumn 1988
Got a view of the famous Chelsea today on my latest crusade for full employment. There I was, fully clad in a very pretty subtly striped black and white suit cruising down 23rd Street, and bam! here it is -- the Chelsea Hotel. The same as in SID AND NANCY; the home of Bob Dylan, who got his name from another guy who had lived there, Dylan Thomas; the same place that put up Arthur Miller, who wrote the big father play (the one with Biff). The red brick looked just as off, just as Amityville Horror-esque, as the movie; I looked up at it and thought about that scene in the movie where Sid gets up out of bed, just after the Sex Pistols had split apart at Winterland in San Francisco, and looks out over good old gray New York City; and there I was, just below Sid, and off to Springer-Verlag, publisher of science manuals. It was hot and I was definitely breaking a sweat. I kept looking at my watch, which kept telling me that I had a half-hour until my interview. I had to pee pretty bad, but before I went pee I wanted to find 175 5th Avenue, the place where I had to be at three o'clock. Anyway, fuck this story for a second. How the hell are you? -- So after I got out of the interview I went for the nearest bar, took that pee, got myself a tanker of Coors from the tap and gulped it down fast, and then I headed back onto the street and into the five o'clock sun. After popping into a yuppie bar to place a few calls to my various employment agencies (oh, wow!) I headed to 8th Avenue and another bar. This time I struck a Mick joint; got myself some Bass, a pint in fact; pounded it, as I contemplated talking to a fellow monkey-suited asshole (fuck him). The next thing I knew I was out the door and on my way to a livelier watering hole. I asked the barkeep there what-the-fuck a buck-fifty would buy me; he told me a pint of Budweiser. -- Yes! Heaven does exist. So while I sat on the stool, drinking€ Bud, looking at all the bottles of juice behind the bar, the blankets came wrapping around me one after another; one word., one phrase, one sentence, floating in. Guys, freshly out of work (5:15 PM) ordering shots of Absolute, of Johnny Walker Red Label, with beer chasers, telling stories about wives who bitched over spilled milk ( . . . giving the boys big belly laughs). Surrounded by this I found myself sitting sheepish and rosily demur, a glazed simper smeared on my lips, inhaling this old black guy's cigar smoke while I tried to look haggard and uninterested. I did think, more than once, about trying to swap my watch (a Swiss-built model from an uncle) for ten bucks. But I realized that fantasies don't grow limbs in one sitting. So I slid of my stool, put my hands back into my pockets, and settled for sobriety and 34th Street, Penn Station.
When I got home, I flared up my own cigar, cracked open a quart of Coors that had been judiciously omitted from the previous evening's repertoire, and sat down to write you this. But now it's almost a week later. New York is great. There's no denying it. But one thing's for sure: it's also really fucking overrated -- way inflated with its own pomposity and self-aggrandizement, coldness and sham heritage; too much nose-in-the-air crap. These assholes, when you get down to it, are the biggest whining, pampered, paranoid pussies in the U.S. of A. Where else could they live? Could they live in Madison? In Tulsa? In Fort Worth? In Ashland-fucking-Oregon? No way. These fuckers can't stray far; they're pampered, and they're damn stupid. Damn stupid. They can live right here, and they can drink their Heineken wrapped in a paper bag. But as for going someplace else and seeing something different, there's no way. I'm working now. Scholastic Magazines, Inc. Pretty much a shit hole, but I think most of the publishing world is. After my first day and all of its unbearable stupidity and circumlocution, I was ready to get back into school. But it's livable now, which is the frightening part. The one thing New York has going for it, which is a really incredible thing, is that you can walk down a street, like 42nd Street, and cop a total buzz. That's a rare thing in S.F. I got off more in Oakland, San Pablo between 27th and 22nd . . . Oakland is way more real/happening/etc. in a lot of ways. I say I'm from Oakland/Berkeley, and people say, "Oh, I know where that is." Berkeley, after having been treated to this, becomes more and more amazing. It's incredible, the pasture where the Sun grazes his cattle. And these aren't backward looking wet dreams on my part because it's not necessarily loss or longing that I feel for the place, just, like I say, astonishment that such a -- in many ways -- perfect place should exist.
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