Oh, to have the liver I had when I wrote the letter below, a chronicle of a drunken non-wedding reception at the leafy suburban Long Island family home of one of my wife's medical school classmates. Everyone was wasted drunk because of the strange circumstances. The wedding had been called off at the last minute but a decision was made to go ahead with the reception anyway. Guests who attended fortified themselves with alcohol.
I remember there was a Fleshtonesesque band that played in the non-bride's family sitting room. It was a nice old big house with high ceilings and fireplace mantel mirrors. Things started to get a little crazy. People were dancing and screaming. I was shouting "Go! Go!" as the baritone sax player climbed atop the fireplace mantel, playing all the while. The non-bride's mother freaked out and the music was halted. That was the end of the fun.
Summer 1989
Money is very scarce nowadays. We blew a lot on a wedding that was called off two days before it was supposed to take place -- one of Ashley's fellow first-years. She was scheduled to marry a full-blooded Mick fresh from Ireland. But he got cold feet and then she got cold feet and then the wedding was called off. Meanwhile, we were spending full days scouring Manhattan for appropriate gifts and garbs. Gary and Eleni went along one afternoon. We started down at Fifth Avenue & 13th Street and ended up on Eighth & 41st seven hours later. We were shopping for summer suits for me and Gary, and all we ended up with were three ties apiece. All-linen suits at the hip downtown clothing store were too expensive for me and too risky for Gary. There was this one pumpkin orange sweetheart that tickled my fancy but it would have run around $160; plus, they didn't have it in my size. Uptown in the garment district prices were more palatable but the styles were too conservative -- painfully boring you know; also, the linen was a cotton blend. So we headed home on the 'A' with nothing to show for our suffering.
That was a Monday. Later on in the week I went down and bought a shirt and a sports coat and a pair of pants. All told, including the ties, I spent around $70. Not bad, huh? But that $70, along with the money we spent on a gift we didn't even give 'em, plus the money it took to get to Islip, L.I., took us pretty deep into the red. Yeah, now get this: we had to make the stinking 2 hour train journey to Long Island anyway because, and this is the tricky part, even though they weren't getting married, they were going ahead with the reception portion of the ceremony. I think they did this because all the relatives had already been flown in from Ireland by the time they decided not to exchange vows. I also openly hypothesized that since they had called off the wedding on such short notice (36 hours before it was to take place) they were probably stuck with an irate caterer and a bunch of cases of champagne. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, I still think it's pretty fucking weird to get everybody out there to suburban Long Island, to get everybody dressed to kill, to have a band playing dance tunes and people getting shitfaced, with children running around, and family elders red cheeked on sunny lawns while they drooped into thin-stemmed wine glasses, to do all this -- this whole ambitious celebration -- to do all this with absolutely no heart, no love. Now that's fucking shitty, unholy, weird -- whatever you want to name it -- and it leaves you with a bad taste. And it did.
Indeed, the best part of the whole experience was the train ride out on the LIRR (Long Island Railroad). We took the 4:25 from Penn Station, departing on Track 17. Gary and I had decided earlier on that we'd get toasty before we arrived arrived at Islip. I had suggested something hard, possibly whiskey, to really do the trick, but Gary abjured. Gary doesn't like the hard stuff . So when we got to the station, pleasantly pretty in our festive clothes, we went to a convenience store and bought some beer. I had told Gary that we should. buy our beers in Washington Heights because they'd be substantially cheaper there as opposed to any place we could purchase them at Penn Station; but, once again, he abjured, citing the increase in beer temperature resulting from a subway ride of 168th to 34th as reason enough to pay the extra price. (I guess I had never taken that into consideration.) And sure enough, the extra price was grandiose. You see, they only sell singles in Penn Station. We went to a couple of stores until we found a promising nasty-looking one. We went in and were surprised to see that they sold one brand of beer for as little as 40 cents a bottle. Now this means that a six would only run you $2.40, which in New York City is tantamount to winning the lottery or finding water in the desert. The brand was TIGER, from Singapore. An import no less! I was overjoyed. An imported beer in a bottle not a can and for only 40 cents. But I smelled a fish. The next cheapest beer was some shit like BUD or SCHAEFFER or BUCKHORN, and that was a dollar. This TIGER was too good to be true. So I asked a big guy with a black handle-bar mustache who was just then pulling open the clear glass cooler door and grabbing two cans of SCHAEFFER himself if he had ever had TIGER.
"Yeah."
"Is it any good?"
"Yeah, it's okay."
Well that wasn't very encouraging coming from a guy who would pay 60 cents more per 12 ounces for a beer that tastes like seltzer water spiced with upchuck. But Ashley was supportive and Eleni was intrigued, so I grabbed myself a six and made my way up to the cashier. Gary on the other hand couldn't take the risk, too many variables; he wanted something from the fatherland. He got Eleni and four or five BECKS for $1.15 a pop. When we got up to the register the catch to the TIGER all of a sudden dawned on me. It wasn't a twist off. You needed a bottle opener. Shit! Right then and there I wished I had one of those handy Swiss Army knives. I asked the cashier if they sold cheap bottle openers. He said, "Yeah. Sixty cents."
"Excellent! Toss one in."
But this cashier was a little indian-colored demon of some sort. As he rang up our total, he grinned, "I hope you can drink all that. Not too many people like the stuff."
I said, "What are you saying? Is this stuff really shitty?"
He didn't proffer a reply. Running through my head was this fear that the shit had gone bad; that it had been left to rot on some drifting oceanic steamer and then purchased in bulk for cheap at a Cost Guard auction; that it would have that sour stomach acid smell of dead eels and soggy beer hall sawdust floors. So just to confront the motherfucker, I demanded the opener from Ashley and cracked open a bottle right then and there in front of the counter and took a long pull. God damn, it was good! Tasty, fruity and smooth -- really good. I told him as much; told him I thought that it was "Very fine!" What I should have told him though was that, "Dreams are for free motherfucker!"
But I was too demure, overcome by the surprise of the TIGER actually being tasty. As I walked out the door he called me back and handed me a small paper bag, saying, "Here€. You better put your beer in this. You don't want a $150 ticket."
We walked down to Track 17 and found some seats on the train. I passed the bottle to Ashley. She liked the TIGER too. The train left the station. Gary and Eleni cracked open their BECKS. We ate pretzels and potato chips. The scenery changed to green after we moved past Jamaica, Queens. The beer started to work its magic and the conversation sparked up. We talked about Gary and Eleni's travels in Pakistan. From Pakistan we moved to Eleni's family in Greece and her father's relationship with his brothers; and from there we moved on to Eleni's womanizing older brother and how this womanizing led to the brother's wife's attempted suicide. We chatted peacefully as we cracked open more beer and the train sped along in the Long Island summertime green. The sun filtered through the window, and we conversed about man and woman in Greece and the beer folded us to a motherly breast.
When we got off at Islip station the magic was still there. I was buzzing but not drunk. I would have needed more than a six for that. I would have needed. the bourbon I suggested. No one was there to pick us up. Gary had brought along some hooter and wanted to smoke it. I told him I wasn't good socially on the shit --that I was better with beer and booze -- that that I would certainly accompany him to the rear of the parking lot where the bushes breezed to watch him perform his ritual. So off we went, and Gary smoked a big bowl in his pipe and got plenty glazed. Ashley made us all necklaces and. headbands out of clover and weeds.
After a call was placed, we got picked up by the non-bride's gay brother's lover in a latrine-shaded station wagon and anything that was good immediately died.
There will always be bills to pay. As long as you are alive there will be gas bills and telephone bills and bank statements. I'm truly sad when I think what that means, what that entails. Right now the beer tastes like MY MOTHER'S VOICE, THE VOICE FROM THE BREAST THAT FED ME LOVE AND SUPPLENESS, and I gulp it happily at 1 o'clock AM when I think of the work day tomorrow. The shittiness of tomorrow is only improved by a hangover, and I mean this. We are all fated to SLEEP SWEETLY UNDER THE FEATHERS OF SLAUGHTERED BIRDS, and maybe even a PUDDLE OF SWEAT.
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