The Colt 45 Chronicle #61

I woke up last night after midnight muttering the name "Laurie Kittiver." Who is -- who was -- Laurie Kittiver? It took me a while, but I gradually pieced it together. 

Last night I finally got around to viewing David O. Russell's American Hustle (2013). It is good, but I was expecting that it would be better. One aspect of the film that is unquestionably superb is the music put together by Danny Elfman. Elfman leans heavily on cuts by Electric Light Orchestra and Jeff Lynne -- very evocative of the post-Hippie, pre-Reagan cultural Zeitgeist (if one excludes the Punks) of the middle-to-late 1970s. 

Elfman made a name for himself as the leader of Oingo Boingo, an I.R.S. Records, Los Angeles band synonymous with 1980s New Wave. Oingo Boingo's second album, Only a Lad (1981), was ubiquitous while I was at the university. 

A young woman who I worked with at the library loved Oingo Boingo. Her name was Laurie Kittiver.

Laurie, though maybe four years my elder, seemed much older. She could be as stern as a spinster high school Spanish teacher. 

When I woke up in the middle of the night muttering Laurie Kittiver's name, and after I finally remembered who she was, I thought of the night of her goodbye party. 

She was graduating and leaving the university and before she left she was having a shindig at her apartment, a nondescript unit in a cheaply constructed building from the late 1960s not too far off University Avenue in West Berkeley. Laurie Kittiver drank beer -- there was a keg that night on a small balcony, I believe -- from a red plastic 16-ounce cup. She seemed different, less the schoolmarm and more sexual. I'm sure we listened to a lot of Oingo Boingo that night.

Years later drunk and stoned at a party in West Berkeley standing on a dark balcony in the early morning, I had the sudden deja vu realization that I had been there before -- at Laurie Kittiver's goodbye party. Anyhow, the gauzy stoned deja vu topsy-turvy confusion came back to me last night with Laurie's name.

My first job when I got to New York City at the end of summer 1988 was as a researcher for Scholastic Press. My poor opinion of that experience is found below. Then the letter meanders off into the usual drunken nostalgia about the joys of university life. The epistle is addressed to my two drinking buddies, Mark and Niall, who were roommates living across from the Panhandle in Haight-Ashbury.

Autumn 1988 

Well, assholes, where's the letter? Lost in the mail? Oh, I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to imply that the two of you would somehow be . . . .  My God, work is so fucking terrible. I wrote a little anonymous and unsent hate epistle today to all the cuntless cunts who order about this demeaned freelancer (I'm bottom of the barrel):

You babies. You, who somehow managed to stay stunted Louisa-May-Alcott style. It's all dollhouses and Little Women here, can't you see? Sexuality? NILL! To you a pussy is a gratuity, an unexplained sprouting which is obediently endured and ignored. You had a big brain early on (when the world was paper dolls and piss and Hardy Boys and daddy's roof), and you figured out that you were pretty fucking smart and pretty fucking special. ("Oh, little muffin, all she does is read in her room all day. Now there's a smart girl!") But you forgot one important thing, didn't you? You forgot that bird watching and Nancy Drew and chemistry don't teach you shit about living right, living like you should. That's why when I come by and ask a simple question and you are busy, you have a fit and bark, "We're really going to have to talk about this some other time!" Needless to say, I am smarter than you, and I am better than you. History exists for me; you are nothing, absolutely nothing -- a shuffler of paper, a grease spot, an eyelash in the margin of the shit you write. I despise you.

So it goes, the torment, the resentment, the enormous stupidity. I want out. Give me a good job. I could take total boredom. But this job is at a publisher that deals with deadlines, and of course all the cuntless cunts get bent out of shape every fucking chance they get. What happened to those halcyon days grazing in the pasture of the Sun? Jesus, Berkeley gets more golden to my mind's eye every day I'm away. Like some big orchard where we could barely muster up enough energy and guts to move from one tree to another because we had so it so good where we were. Whenever I want, when I'm forlorn, I can flip open the book to one of Niall's drunken swaggers or one of Mark's bombastic cat calls, and, shit, I'm satisfied. The sight of puke running out of Niall's cockeyed mouth, or one of Mendoza's signature calypso jigs as a dozen scared and hate-filled dance-hall eyes bounce off his back, brings me right back to home base and right out of this. The thing that I realize now for the first time even though people have been telling it to me for years is that there is no place like Berkeley (Colum once called me up after he had moved to NYC and told me this in a way I don't know if I could ever come close to describing) . . . . . . . . . How many people get to swill beers and read books and work at what they want to work at and be young and have friends and have a place to congregate and listen to good music and be able to drive and be able to walk to where they want to go, and, most importantly, through all this, to be considered okay, to be considered an adult? I think it's only Berkeley. We take it for granted because we did it. But that's just it -- hardly anyone does it. Joe McHenry is living out here (a friend of Eric Mason) and he called up the other day and we rapped about the Berkeley scene (versus the New York scene) and he put forward something pretty incredible. Simply put, Berkeley had kick-ass parlor action. -- Dudes sitting around surrounded by a bunch of books, drinking, bullshitting. (Shit, I'm drunk.) To put on a good drunk with some good friends, to shoot the shot, to tap on the window and feel the line being cut up -- that's it. Mark, how about that day after Quinn's class? We cruised over in the eleven o'clock spring sun to Sufficient Grounds (just like two Peter Parkers going to the "Coffee Bean"). All that concrete on the way, and then through the corridor. You got a cappuccino and a fancy pastry; I got a house coffee. People brushed through the door, and we -- the two us, without speaking -- knew that they were full of shit. So we sat there like Castor and Pollux, laughing inside to each other, drinking our coffee and considering what we should do with our noon.