The Colt 45 Chronicle #57

Maura and Phil were friends. Maura had worked with my wife in the library at U.C. Berkeley. I believe that is how they met. When my wife moved out (she was still just my girlfriend then, the summer of 1987 -- this is recounted in Chronicle #54), she eventually moved in with Maura. They lived together in an apartment nearby. It was at this time, the fall of 1987, that Maura and I had an affair that lasted a couple of months. We were quite passionate. Sex is what young people like to do, heedless of consequence. The reproductive organs, tumescent at a moment's notice, rule.

It was only after Maura and I discontinued our furtive romance that I met Phil. He had been attending school back East, if my memory serves me, and he arrived back in Berkeley to take some time off and apply for a graduate program. That's what prompted Maura to call it off. Plus, Ashley, my girlfriend soon to be my wife (and Maura's good friend -- ah, youth!), had decided to move back in with me since Phil had taken up residence in the ladies' apartment. Three is a crowd.

In any event, when the wife and I were in New York City at the end of the 1980s, Maura and Phil lived in D.C. Phil was in the political science masters program at American University. At the writing of this letter, the dirty secret Maura and I shared had yet to be revealed; that would happen in a little less than a year. It was something that greased the birth of the separation from my wife. Too bad it hadn't happened sooner.

The final paragraph is another panegyric to the apartment in Berkeley.

Spring 1989

I want to thank you guys for two really great letters, each one wondrously definitive of its author. -- I started to write Phil right after I got his package -- on a Friday night after a work week of counting countless rows of stick numbers (numbers which stood for socks and pantyhose and underwear all somewhere cardboard silent in backroom storehouses) -- but it didn't work out and I had to give up the ghost after three quarts of beer, half a cigar, and an unexpected early Ashley return from the library. So anyway, the letter was too close to what I was doing at the time -- which was working on 42nd Street near Times Square, opposite New York Public Library -- so close that it felt lifeless and heartless -- the worst kind of letter -- full of moil and toil and brow-knitted distress, like describing in faithfully exacting scientific detail the ironing of wrinkled pre-work pants on a grey ironing board in the haze of 7 o'clock windows while waiting for a small pot of coffee to brew. All that shit. The brain needs a bit of distance to work effectively; you've got to let things cook a while, sometimes a long time, before they turn out right; a lot of unimportant shit gets sifted out of the narrative thanks to the unconscious, or whatever you want to call it (the thing that makes memory possible) -- and all the unconscious is is old father time making his big healthy demands and spitting back his little joys and whitewater frolics . . . But then Maura's letter came, and I was reintroduced to the necessity of getting something off to you guys because it was such a fine and succinct and sweet communication. That was the weekend of Good Friday. Now it's Thursday night, my last night before my last day at the clearing house microfilming stock in the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange. Amen. I'm quitting on behalf of Mark's arrival, which is tomorrow. He'll be in town a week and I don't think he deserves to ramble the streets alone.

I have stories accumulated for you of my recent life, of our recent life, but I am too drunk to tell them. In these circumstances all I have is my distant and jaundiced memory. But before I go into some sugary Berkeley retrospective let me say that I think of you guys often, and most of the time it is on my way out the subway station after a full day's work. And I have things I want to say to you -- hammy things, goofy and corny things like: ACCEPT SUFFERING IN ALL ITS HAPPINESS AND LET'S BE FREE TOGETHER . . . . . FORGET ABOUT SUCCESS AND THE EYES OF OTHERS AND LET'S HAVE CHILDREN, WHO ARE TIME MACHINES. A lot of evenings (oh, by the way, Ashley wishes she was Jody Foster) the four of us would drink six packs (we would do a case) and smoke dope over at 2210 Durant. Those wood floors would shine back at us while we were blasting Bob Dylan, and I remember we were all separated by yards, the four of us, like we were posing for an album cover (a rock band), huge chunks of space stretching out before us while those luminescent yellow floors competed with the music for attention. The four of us spaced out in that big living room, Maura here Phil there Mike out there Ashley over there, vinyl records everywhere. But crowning the whole scene, more beautifully and poetically than anything the mind could have dreamed up, was that tall high circular bone white ceiling beaming down on us a Grecian paternal protectiveness and authoritative acceptance that unleashed the whole thing in the first place.