I start off the letter with a paean to Coors beer, the beverage of choice during my university days and whenever I would get together with the boys. (Niall didn't cotton to the sweet syrupy kick of malt liquor.) It speaks to the power of corporate branding that three progressive young men, educated at the citadel of American liberalism and multiculturalism, U.C. Berkeley, could bond so completely with a product manufactured by a leading light of movement conservatism.
Coors scion Joseph ran the company during the period when I guzzled the brew. Joe Coors was a member of Reagan's kitchen cabinet, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, and an early sponsor of the John Birch Society and later the terrorist war on Nicaragua. Coors had broken the union at the Golden brewery, making it at the time the only brewer of the big three -- Budweiser, Miller and Coors -- that was non-union. The AFL-CIO boycotted Coors for most of the 1980s. I remember my wife, who was my live-in girlfriend at the time, brought home a flyer she had been handed. It had an illustration of a Coors Banquet Beer can draped in a Ku Klux Klan sheet burning a cross on the lawn in front of the Golden brewery, which is reported to have happened in the 1920s when the KKK was riding high. I attached it to the refrigerator with a magnet.
The reason we loved the beer had nothing to do with politics of course. It was the only widely available beer that was not pasteurized. To me pasteurized beer like Budweiser or Stroh's had a formaldehyde flavor. Plus, if you drank a lot of it, and I drank a lot of beer at this time of my life, it left you with a nasty hangover. Coors never did. It was a clean beer that did not have that formaldehyde aftertaste. I could drink six to eight beers a night and wake up the next morning without a hangover. -- This was the basis of my love affair with Coors.
After getting married in Reno my wife and I, newlyweds that we were, made a special pilgrimage to Golden, Colorado to visit the holy city that produced the elixir at the largest brewery in the nation. It is not a convenient jump off the Interstate either; it took us a considerable distance out of our way in blistering summer heat. When we pulled into town on a Saturday evening we parked the VW bus at a bowling alley and went inside and bellied up to the bar and requested a Coors draft. We were served in plastic cups the freshest, most delicious beer I have ever had the privilege to consume.
That evening in Golden was the highlight of my honeymoon trip across the North American continent: drinking a Coors draft in a plastic cup at a bowling alley; listening to a mix tape, on which there was a mournful version of "Motel Blues" sung by Alex Chilton, that my friend Oliver made for our transcontinental drive to New York City; watching a story on the local evening news about a washed-up Tony Dorsett trying to make it through training camp with the Broncos; and then ending the day reading in the motel bathroom a copy of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that my father had given us as a wedding present.
The rest of the letter is a description of a still-drunk-from-the-night-before morning when Mark and I gang up on Niall and give a brother shit about being pussy-whipped by his new girlfriend, Eve. What I remember about Eve is that she was mousy like my wife, but much more dour and controlling; therefore, as Mark and I saw it, she was a fair target for ribbing. Niall had a track record of getting hooked up with controlling women. His girlfriend before Eve, Leslie, led him about as if she had a string tied to his genitalia.
Winter 1989
Cantilever days out in San Francisco filming the best unfilmed beer commercial in the world: Coors can coronation; better yet, the day after coronation of King Coors (cooronation . . . coors-o-nation . . . Coors Nation). You would wake up in the morning and slap your feet on the dusty wooden floor. Going down the hall and into the living room, you would find all the dead little golden angel cylinders from the night before.
I was chanting on the living-room sofa: "Oh, Eve! Oh, Beav! Oh, Bee-eee-eeav! Oh, Beaver! Oh, Bee-Va! Oh, Bee-Vaah! Oh, Bee-Vaa-a-aah! . . . Oh, Viva! Oh, Vee-Va! Oh, Vee-Vaah! Oh, Vee-Vaa-a-aah! . . ."
Mark was lying on the floor looking up at his ceiling which hung white and cracked 11 feet from his face as he let out a big booming belly laugh. In the adjoining hallway Niall bit his bottom lip, squinted his eyes and furrowed his brow, or I should say that I figured -- divined -- that he was doing all this. I couldn't see him. All I could do was hear him rustling in the hall. But he was definitely sending out waves of anger and hostility as he he stood there in the shadows listening to his two powerful and self-loving pals poke fun of his girlfriend of five months, Eve.
Niall wished -- he wished he had the courage to stride into the living room and smite us with such a blow as to leave the flies buzzing around two wobbly, spinning cross-eyed faces. But he did not. He took the ribbing, radiating prickly silence.
Niall kept a picture of himself, a small picture attached to a rectangular piece of paper, as a bookmark which he tucked in his copy of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. The picture was of him running a 10K road race. He laid in bed reading this book (which seems to be so popular today) covered by the baby-pink comforter that Ashley and I had lent him.
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Kerouac's aching heart dripping these burning holes in the nighttime tar highway; holes the size of large lemons or cat hearts.
Like every word you are too lazy to look up in the dictionary; like the difference between Kerouac and Bukowski
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