A strange Sunday so far. Very quiet for a summer weekend. I woke early to do two loads of laundry and then returned to bed once the clothes were folded and put away. It is approaching 10:30 AM and the sun is shining but the neighborhood still slumbers. Maybe, like me, people had difficulty sleeping last night.
Friday on the train home after work Seahawks fans were on their way to the preseason home opener. Spirits were high and I was able to engage in some decent football talk with educated students of the game. There is a great deal of expectation of a Super Bowl repeat.
The letter below, what I recall of it, is that I actually spent some time putting it together. Usually I would knock out a letter in one sitting with the help of three quarts of beer, two of which were malt liquor. Now and then a letter would take two sittings, if I was working on relating a big event, like a bar brawl.
This one, addressed to my friend Mark, was a "Goodbye to all that," a declaration that it was time to put schoolboy ways behind us and get down to business. The text in caps was taken from letters Mark had written to me. I wanted to incorporate his words as a way to communicate that these letters were collaborative. We both wanted to write. But we were both struggling to figure out how that could be done outside the confines of academia.
The letter relates an experience of being stoned on mushrooms in a men's room of a bar on the Upper Westside of Manhattan and trying to remember to remember. What I remember now 25 years later is that the bouncer did not appreciate that my friend Antony and I were smoking cigars. When he walked by our table he truculently, with a plastic pub menu, scrapped the ash off our tabletop onto the floor. He was hoping, I think, that one of us, in our drunken and tripping state, would say something to him, which would then allow him to escort us outside, possibly with a beating included. I did not take the bait. That night I displayed a lot of self-control. Maybe it was the mushrooms.
If you have sampled any of these letters you know that there are certain repetitions, obligatory passages that each new letter must revisit. Foremost, is a golden-hued recollection of the Berkeley high life, followed close behind by a hosanna to Jack Kerouac.
Friday on the train home after work Seahawks fans were on their way to the preseason home opener. Spirits were high and I was able to engage in some decent football talk with educated students of the game. There is a great deal of expectation of a Super Bowl repeat.
The letter below, what I recall of it, is that I actually spent some time putting it together. Usually I would knock out a letter in one sitting with the help of three quarts of beer, two of which were malt liquor. Now and then a letter would take two sittings, if I was working on relating a big event, like a bar brawl.
This one, addressed to my friend Mark, was a "Goodbye to all that," a declaration that it was time to put schoolboy ways behind us and get down to business. The text in caps was taken from letters Mark had written to me. I wanted to incorporate his words as a way to communicate that these letters were collaborative. We both wanted to write. But we were both struggling to figure out how that could be done outside the confines of academia.
The letter relates an experience of being stoned on mushrooms in a men's room of a bar on the Upper Westside of Manhattan and trying to remember to remember. What I remember now 25 years later is that the bouncer did not appreciate that my friend Antony and I were smoking cigars. When he walked by our table he truculently, with a plastic pub menu, scrapped the ash off our tabletop onto the floor. He was hoping, I think, that one of us, in our drunken and tripping state, would say something to him, which would then allow him to escort us outside, possibly with a beating included. I did not take the bait. That night I displayed a lot of self-control. Maybe it was the mushrooms.
If you have sampled any of these letters you know that there are certain repetitions, obligatory passages that each new letter must revisit. Foremost, is a golden-hued recollection of the Berkeley high life, followed close behind by a hosanna to Jack Kerouac.
Winter 1989
Here it is, the Mendoza oeuvre.
Six-months old (the space between a cricket's legs, which still feels pretty damn wide and pretty damn deep from where I sit -- oceanic, I guess). Oh, well. Half a year of waxin' and pissin' waiting for something wonderful to happen -- to us -- to transform us. The grand transformation: that's what the letters, our letters, are all about: waiting for it, all the time, palms under thighs on bus bench, head cocked to the left looking down Oak Street, or Haight Street, or 14th Street, or 42nd Street for bus or subway train to come and take us out over the Bay or East River (not over to Oakland or Queens, mind you; just over, over, over a body of water, like the Genesis image of God moving upon the face of the deep before the earth's creation). But the problem here is that heroic Cassady is not behind the wheel/controls of bus/subway. No, nobody's there. In fact, plastered on bus/subway's broad front is huge contoured plastic replica of a leering simpering Henry Duke face . . . WOULDN'T IT BE LOVELY THOUGH IF THE MAN MOST WONDERFUL WERE TO FLY SPREAD-EAGLE ACROSS THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE NATION, BRAVING CERTAIN DEATH FOR THE PRIZE THAT IS YOUR WARM CAVERNOUS MOUTH.
REGRETTING IN THE FROST OF TOMORROW . . . our fate.
Right before Ashley and I left California for New York I gave you my copy of Conrad's The Shadow-Line, jotting down on a blank page something about how I thought the mystery of manhood was in learning to give up dreams. I knew when I wrote it that I was right. You were there. You had stopped by with a six of Coors and a pint of tequila. The place was full of boxes. I was patching holes in the walls left by bookcases we had taken down. I've wondered a lot since then about the truth of that statement. Most of the time -- after I got to New York and during my worklife here -- I thought that it was full of shit; I thought everything came down to dreams, that the only way to change a stinking life was to dream out of it. But in too many ways dreams really boil down to this: . . . HE SMILES TO HIMSELF IN THE MIRROR. Fortunately, now I know, again, what I meant about giving up dreams. Giving up dreams doesn't necessarily mean stoicism, a broken and self-abnegating capitulation to dolorous moils and toils . . . IT'S UGLY BEING SINGLE, YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH SHIT LIKE THIS; it isn't the same as coming home after a work day, yanking the TV on, and then settling for bed-- in one big sumptuous and ill-defined motion . . . WHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES, THE SUN IS NEVER MISSED. Giving up dreams is going forward, the power of a line of flight: Al Davis' "Just win, baby"; manliness, without all the parochial mindedness of macho squalor. Energy, being up, taking it all on, "Out of idolatry and into action," -- Captain A . . . READY TO ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES AND BITE THE DAY'S DUST IN RINGSIDE AMERICA. -- Power, a constant, ever-present revolution: "The question of the revolution's future is a bad one, because, as long as it is posed there are going to be those who will not become revolutionaries. This is precisely why it is done: to prevent the becoming-revolutionary of people everywhere and at every level."
A month ago, Terri, Antony and I went out into the inky blue New York night, very cold, and ate mushrooms which taste peculiarly like store-bought produce. We drank a lot of beer during the course of the evening. At one point, standing mushroom bedazzled in the bathroom of a 100th Street bar, everything aglow in grapefruit pink, I found myself caught in the effort of memory: of trying to mentally inscribe the event as I was experiencing it just then so I could recall it in the future. But when I did this, when I tried to force myself to remember what it was I was doing exactly at that moment, I forgot what I was trying to remember because in engaging myself in the act of purposeful remembrance I was no longer doing what it was that I wanted to remember. -- All of which distracted me from what I was thinking about before I headed into the pisser -- which was: How can we write after Kerouac? A guy who thought about everything in terms of writing, in terms of being written down, to be writ: anything, everything, like the glop glop of mundane memories silent inside heads, my head, like the memory of Saturday afternoon suns in Berkeley kitchens baking lasagna . . . A SLOW-PACED AFTERNOON OF EXTENDED STAYS ON THE SHITTER, STINKY , WELL-CRAFTED FARTS AND TRIPS TO THE MIRROR TO CHECK OUT MY SHINER; that is as good and as beautiful and as ennobling as any story that life has to offer. Kerouac upped the ante so fucking high he cleared the table, of Lawrence and Hardy, and anyone else esteemed in my mind's eye. So anyway, that's what got me involved in he befuddled memorizing careening latrine confusion: the importance of memory, the godliness of the rememberer.
What the fuck gives then? What are we waiting for? Let's give up our dreams! Let's remember! -- About the gray Berkeley Friday when we drank coffee at Sufficient Grounds (like all our Friday mornings began: 11 o'clock AM, downing mugs and ready for the luminescent impending debauchery stardom of a promise-ridden Friday night in collegetown (which to us at the time was not collegetown, but the world (like Homer's world: open, bold, exciting, new, enchanting -- to be conquered, to be fought for and won, like Helen or the grace of Athena). Coffee buzzing in our heads, the first thing we'd think of was beer, a few drinks to put us in touch with the place that we wanted to be. But we were learned -- a little, a very little -- in the art of self-control; so we'd keep each other in check while we studied (read, which now is a luxury) for approximately forty minutes . . . . . . . .
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