The Colt 45 Chronicle #73

There is something to be said for consistency. And of late I have not been consistent with these "The Colt 45 Chronicle" posts. The story that goes along with them is that during the Seahawks 2012 playoff elimination game in Atlanta I went searching for a spontaneous prose novel I composed the summer of 1991. I found it in a roll-out bed nook that I use as a storage space in my studio apartment. Next to it was a collection of letters that I wrote to friends and family the first two years my wife and I lived in New York City.

We had moved to Washington Heights (the north Manhattan neighborhood that feeds into the George Washington Bridge) from Berkeley, California so that my wife could attend University of Columbia Medical School. Our marriage, which was in trouble prior to the move to the East Coast, dissolved with the last of these letters.

I decided to post these letters as an exploration of who I was when I got my start, eructed from the Academy, in the rat race. I worked my way through the university. But working and going to school is not the same as working a full-time job. I remember in typing these letters (using WordPerfect on an AT&T IBM-clone PC) that I was making a conscious effort to understand the six-years of elite education I had just received in light of the work I was doing to earn a living.

It is the first Sunday of the 2014 National Football League season. Since these letters (often written while drunk) were retrieved because of my attachment to a professional football team, let me make the pledge that I will finish this project before the end of the regular season. So by the end of December all these letters will have been posted; I will have separated from my wife; and on to the Emerald City in 1990 we will go. (I've decided to explore the writing I did -- I don't think there is much of it -- when I first lived in Seattle before moving back to NYC to try to salvage my marriage.)

The letter below is another one written to my wife's grandmother who lived in Joplin, Missouri. I had no idea I wrote to her as much as I did. These missives to Grandmother Esther are embarrassing in that they affect an "Aw, shucks" naif-in-the-city persona. But they are helpful in that they provide a pretty straight forward description of what is going on, i.e., what jobs I'm working, etc. 

Winter 1989

Dear Esther,

It sure is cold here in New York, the kind of cold that makes your ears burn. When I walk to the subway in the morning to go to work downtown I get to thinking about California and how warm it must be there (I don't think Berkeley ever got down below forty-five degrees). As I'm thinking this, bowing my head down to the sidewalk to keep my face from being hit by the wind, these little shiny slivers of ice catch my eye. They really sparkle, and when I look up again I realize they're not just on the sidewalk, they're everywhere -- in the street, on walls of buildings, on hoods of cars -- making our neighborhood look like some gigantic dirty ice palace. And it's all peace and quiet except for the Hudson winds and the footfalls of fellow workers moving off to work. Everything gets back to normal once you get down into the subway station. You warm up pretty quick.

I've been back in New York for about a month now. I  was working in California for most of January, and I was trying to sell our VW bus at the same time. I was working construction, working in this big Baptist church that was being built and making pretty good money -- $l0/hr. -- which was a fortunate thing since I ended up being unable to sell the car and had to pay for my plane ticket back to N.Y. with the money I had saved from the job. I was staying with friends, best friends, who have an apartment in San Francisco. I would get up at around 6:00 in the morning to drive over the bridge into Oakland where I would park the bus and catch a ride to the job site with the guy who runs the construction company. It was a forty-minute trip to the job from where I'd park the bus; we'd stop and get a nice big cup of coffee before getting on the freeway. That coffee really made a difference; after a few gulps, you felt like you could deal with another day in a cold church on top of a three-story scaffold. I'd get back over to San Francisco around 7:00 at night, and then my friends Mark and Niall and I would grab a bite to eat and have a few beers. I would have enjoyed myself a lot more -- visiting friends, working construction again, being out West -- if I hadn't missed Ashley so much. I was plenty glad to get home.

Right now I'm working a job around the corner from Times Square for a company called Lane Bryant (I don't know if you've heard of them; they're a clothing store for big women). I'm working there on assignment. So once the project is over, which will be in a week, I'll move on to another place. But in the meantime, I'm spending eight hours a day tallying orders for hosiery from Lane Bryant's 687 subsidiaries. The work is tedious, but it's money. I work with a Jamaican woman talks and burps and sleeps all day but is really very nice.

I really want to thank you for all the wonderful gifts you sent us over the last couple of months. We use the food proeessor just about every night. We chop up a lot of garlic and ginger and onions (green and yellow) for the various pasta, Mexican and Chinese meals we make. It saves me 15 to 20 minutes in the kitchen). The Christmas you sent along to Ashland was very generous; it has come in handy recently; and your preserves and vinaigrettes were greeted with tasty delight by two hungry palates.