I skimmed this letter several times and was unable to identify to whom it is addressed. Then I started re-typing it, and in the fourth paragraph I notice that I name the addressee.
Jesse was my wife's cousin, a gentle, intelligent young man a few years my senior. He was an electrical engineer, I believe; either that, or an architect (I can't remember). He grew up in Boston and went to university on the East Coast. He then secured employment in the Bay Area. So by the time his cousin and I were relocating to New York City, he was trading places with us on the West Coast.
Jesse was what you would call a nerd, but a nerd who enjoyed loud Punk music, hot food, and European sports cars. And Jesse was a nerd who liked to drink. We shared several male-bonding experiences, one of which was getting his turbocharged Audi stuck on a snowdrift driving in the mountains of Southern Oregon. As the December light began to fade and we were apprehensively mulling over a nighttime hike of many miles and many hours, a Ford Bronco barreled around the bend and saved the day.
I assume a tone here of masculine truculence, something I affected regularly, fancying myself as I did a street fighter and Lothario. It is a bore. Let me apologize up front.
But these old letters, snatched as they were out of storage during a time of great emotional need -- halftime of the Seahawks 2012 season playoff elimination in Atlanta -- are a testament to a young man's youth, and part of their bounty is the realization that I have never really transcended that level of maturation. For all his bravado and victim complex, that youth is who I remain at the age of 50.
A couple housekeeping items: At the writing of this letter, my first fall out of class since I was old enough to walk, I still had not read any Jack Kerouac. Soon I would ingest On the Road, followed over the next several years by the rest of Kerouac's writings, leaving me something of a Kerouac aficionado. And the last line of this epistle -- "[New York City is] not a place for young people." -- I get all wrong. New York City is the perfect place for a young person. It provides a newly-minted adult the chance to experience the Divine Comedy while his liver is still fresh, his limbs strong and his heart pure.
Autumn 1988
What the fuck are you doing in the South Bay? Shit, man, you might as well be in L.A., sucking up McDonald's and Wendy's, staring at big lawns and stultified faces. "Go for the Gold" -- get some of that triple-hot chili pepper sauce, swig down a few shots of it, and then march north, either 101 or 880, it don't make any difference. Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Your primary motivation has got to be hooking up with Ms. Right. Finding that Aphrodite freshly from Olympus dropped, ambrosia on her lips, the one who is going to wash away all worry. She could be right around the next suburban corner, but I doubt it. Collegetown honey is what you're looking for. The 'Furds on the Palo Alto farm are after Average Joe (blank stare and bare horizons) and that you ain't, man. You need something better, something up north, something bright like the star. You gotta remember cigar smoking Sigmund's message about how important Mom and Sis are in mapping your feminine course. And you got some high-class, anti-average geography there, my friend. So shoot for the fucking stars. In the meantime, of course, you could eat a little junk food, take Suzie for a few Coronas and lime slices at the local Carlos Murphy's. The problem here is that you're not like that. You're a noble beast of the old world. Monogamy is the name of your game; so you just might get strapped to some donkey. Up north you'll find that bike-riding, salsa-pounding, shirt-sewing lady you're looking for. Berkeley is an incredible place, like no other; but you know that.
Anyway, sorry for the homesick onslaught. New York is everything you said it'd be -- basically pretty fucking miserable. Subways are great but stink to high heaven and are plenty crowded. I'm working as an assistant editor at a place called the Foundation Center, a foundation set up by other foundations to record and make available all relevant data to the general public. This is strictly a no-growth, no-exit nightmare. Women old enough to be my mother, women who dream about the salads at McDonald's -- they stink up the place. The upper echelon men are genderless boobs -- near-faggot fops -- who also stink up the place. And among all this stench I don't even have the consolation of a healthy income. I'm taking home a pauper's 1.1K a month, which, needless to say, makes toiling 9-to-5 just about a stupidity. New York does have energy though. I like 42nd Street, with all the porno theaters and crack smokers. You walk five blocks checking that out, and boom! You're at New York Public Library (on Fifth Avenue), with the lions and a thousand people eating lunch on its steps. The East Village is something, like Rome two centuries late(r); a lot of drug-taking and crest-fallen youth trying so hard to discover that pasture in the sun it's like going in and partying with a bunch of corpses at a morgue. You get a real drunken edge. Our immediate neighborhood is more like Mexico City than any place in the United States. Great fried food but you get the distinct feeling that you're not on Manhattan (which I like).
I dream about the West, about getting back home. I hate to say it, but people are generally nicer out there. Koch is a fucking homo and everybody knows it. After city and state sales tax, not to mention the general inflatedness of all consumer products here, you're talking about a dollar worth 89 cents. Buying a six pack of talls is like getting the cash together to make a down payment on a house. Shit, California is Eden, and I'm Adam, after the apple and the suit of clothes, sent off somewhere to the east. You made the right call, Jesse, the future is where the sun sets. I'm just hoping that this retrograde motion will be worth something in the future. I just want to be like Janet Evans and say, "There's no substitute for hard work." And then win the gold. But it seems like there's always an excuse. At Berkeley, it was all my friends; here, it's my bullshit job. But in the next place it'll be a new thing. When does the myth of total freedom ever get realized? Kerouac has always, secretly, been my hero without ever having read a single word he's written. Hitting the road, getting gone, doing what you've always felt you should do. Everybody wants to be famous, to have their breath or image recorded for posterity, to be seen on screen, like Mickey Rourke or Madonna, but I don't ever admit it. Coming here, seeing all the secretaries dying on the subway -- women who were once young and beautiful and expectant of life, but who now, beige and blue, are filled with hate and fatigue -- made me cash in the big NYC chip. This is not the place to be. There's something about the West, I don't know what, that excuses it from the kind of fatigue and misery and hopelessness that is trademark here. Here, you have to pay the piper. It's not a place for young people.
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