The Colt 45 Chronicle #36

I'm getting off schedule with this letter archive project. "The Colt 45 Chronicle" is a collection of letters that were written my first two years in New York City. I had left the University of California and had moved with my wife to the Big Apple where she attended medical school. We lived in a housing high-rise on the urban campus of the health sciences complex on the western edge of Washington Heights.

I pulled the string-tied folder of letters out of storage during halftime of the Seahawks-Falcons playoff game last January. Bit by bit every Sunday afternoon I've been posting a letter here. It's an archive project that allows me to see who I was 25 years ago, which often times has proven to be an unpleasant experience.

I've been taking the letters off the top with no ordering or editing other than some punctuation changes and the occasional elision of a name. Two missives I've skipped entirely because they were all business -- "I'll be out of town on this date . . . You can meet me here at . . ." -- That type of thing.

The letter below is addressed to a guy I knew at Berkeley. He was an "art for art sake" bohemian who was a hanger-on with my group of friends. He was a participant in the events mentioned in Chronicle #15. Henry was his name. He liked to keep his cock in a tube sock; he boasted about how much he masturbated. Henry's good friend was a guy named Dallas. Dallas was in his 30s (we were all in our early 20s) and had a thick head of prematurely gray hair; he was a dishwasher, a smart guy, who I believe had been a graduate student at another university but who had migrated to Berkeley because Berkeley was Berkeley. He and Henry liked to go to parties -- any party. And this was the primary bond that I shared with them. They would supply information to me and my friends as to where the parties were -- mostly on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights -- and we would crash them.

Henry and Dallas were after free beer and women and the sound of their own voices. We would go to these parties and argue about books. We would drink; there would be a fist fight now and then; sometimes there would be single women with whom to flirt. One much-discussed evening Henry and Dallas were alleged to have met a woman whom they escorted to a pornographic theater (they still had them in those days) where they had sex during the movie while the audience of forlorn single men hungrily looked on.

The letter below I'm sure was never sent. I would often begin a letter after I had completed one. I liked to create the kernel of an epistle when I was done with my third quart of beer and finished with whatever communique I had been working on and I was sitting contentedly beneath the palm at the end of my mind. Then later on, on another night, I would go back and expand the kernel into a full-blown letter. This one, probably because it was irredeemably negative, was never salvaged.

Autumn 1989 

Give up the ghost and try something like swimming off the maverick shore. 

Life never gets ironed out if you sit in the same seat all your life; -- that's got to be a foundational truth, huh?

Here, let me tell you something: people who've got big heads, as in strong minds (eggheads) -- like you Henry -- always have a problem with comfort; by problem I mean "need." You have an addiction to comfort in other words. Smart people have this problem because they're the first ones to figure out the pleasure-pain calculus; and, often times, the first ones there are the last ones to leave.

You're a sweet guy and you probably have a heart of gold, and I wish things were all comic books and Berkeley, but the truth is that is the farthest thing from the truth.