The Colt 45 Chronicle #44

This is an example of a letter written to myself, probably with the intention of reworking it into a letter to a friend. I remember I took a copy of it with me when I drove back to the West Coast from New York City in December of 1988. I quit my first career-track job at the Foundation Center after three months. I couldn't stand it. Nothing at the university had prepared me for the horror -- the horrible pettiness and ignobility -- of the 9-to-5 life.

The ostensible reason for the drive back to California was to return a VW bus to my father. Keeping it in New York City was not an option. My wife was in class all day and I was downtown at work. We had no parking space included as part of our married student housing. So we had to park the bus on the street which required frequent moves due the city's alternate side of street parking schedule. We accumulated tickets and the bus was broken into on more than one occasion.

I refer to myself below in the third person. The tone is semi-bombastic, par for the course for most of these youthful letters, which probably had something to do with the fact that I was normally drunk when I sat down at the word processor. I recount a morning after I stayed up all night writing a paper on Plato's Gorgias and then zonked from lack of sleep and too much speed getting lost in the Berkeley hills trying to find the house of my professor, kind old man Gregory Vlastos. My wife, who was still at that point my girlfriend, had recently moved out of our apartment so as to be better able to pursue her trists.

After I finally located Vlastos' house and slipped my paper under his door, I headed home via a route that took me through campus; that's where I ran into my professor Art Quinn and the departmental administrative assistant Andy who was working his throwing arm with one those big rubber bands. I think he belonged to a fast-pitch softball league.

Autumn 1988 

Cocksure and lesson-proof. Pay attention more to my brain and less to direction. A time when I listened to ON THE BEACH, when Ashley had moved out, when I had been left utterly alone and semi-adult with my graduate-class-on-Plato-with-the-foremost-scholar; friends poured in, wanting to see the new man, and all his new old furniture. Coming down off speed, off crystal, which he had been with so much during that period, the world was new for him. People came to him. The walk at dawn had gone on earlier, like Christ without a cross. The pilgrimage that meant nothing but burnt paper. You can't hold a candle to it. Talking to Quinn and Andy on the way back: Quinn was pitching Thomas Mann; I was pitching Homer; Andy was pitching pitching. -- Off to Chateau and Mark naked and the shitty out-of-place reggae music which was the choice over Irangate on the radio on the way to a Mastercard breakfast. Nothing can touch that time for what it was: William Henry Harrison, a Snuz fight, a rosewood legged chair that smelled like a dead dog; "Adorno as the Devil" by Lyotard; Shale with a girlfriend at last, crazy and gone.