For several weeks after I returned from California and my extended Christmas/New Year's holiday sojourn the winter of 1988/1989, I remained unemployed. I read a lot of novels and perfunctorily looked for work. I remember one time going down to somewhere west of the Village to apply for a job at UPS. When I got off the 'A' train and found the address, there was a line stretching for blocks. I spent all afternoon standing in line until I got into a room where a guy sitting at a desk took my application and said two words, "Thank you." That was it. I was back on the train up to Washington Heights. The Bush I recession must have already been picking up steam as early as the winter of 1989.
I didn't mind. I enjoyed the time off. The wife didn't approve; she would hector me. But during the day she was in class, and at night she had to hit the books. So my time was basically my own.
At some point, by the week of President's Day, based on the letter below, I must have found work. I think this is when I was working as a temporary inventory clerk for Lane Bryant, plus-size clothier.
The letter, written to my good friends Mark and Niall, details my opinions of some Hitchcock classics; it also contains, in the final paragraph, an accurate prediction that I would never return to the university. All of which is conveyed in the "Hey, dude!" vernacular of a young man in his twenties from California.
Winter 1989
"It's Tuesday, the Tuesday after President's Day, and it seems like all I did this past weekend was spend tine with couples. On Saturday and Monday, it was Antony (Colin's old roommate) and his girlfriend on Sunday, it was a married couple who Ashley knows from her first-year class but Ashley wasn't there; it was just me trying my damnedest to keep everybody happy and entertained, like a little bald and arthritic monkey doing a sidewalk jig, you know, very grey and somber but very happy. I realize now that if somebody feeds me a six pack I'll do anything to please."
So anyway, later on that evening, the Tuesday evening after I wrote the preceding paragraph, I watched Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (which is the one with Doris Day -- Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day). Damn good movie: crafty writing and Jimmy is something else. The next night, Wednesday, I saw VERTIGO, which was even better. It takes place in S.F. and Jimmy is a police detective who gets the willies when he's up high (great chase scene in the beginning where Jimmy is hanging five-stories up on a wispy piece of rain gutter; a uniformed officer who is also involved in the chase breaks off from the pursuit to turn back and assist Jimmy but slips on the ceramic shingles as he stretches out a helping hand; the scene ends with Jimmy just looking at the stupid beat cop helicoptering down to alley floor). The movie reopens with Jimmy in some cool artsy pad, cane in hand, bullshitting with a fine slice of cheesecake, a radiant pixie blond seven-years-outta-college type. And what's so kick-ass about the whole scene is that he's there and everything is so colloquial -- real laid back, but real witty and meaty. There's this definite baseline of sexual tension excitement and enchantment; they're talking about getting a drink, about maybe seeing a movie in the evening -- fuck! -- about how to deal with life. But then after a few more scenes Kim Novak enters and the whole movie jumps up a few notches. Man, what a bombshell. She is great and Jimmy is great in displaying his awestruck realization and corresponding consumption of her greatness. The concluding scene is a distinct letdown -- self-abnegating, puritanical, too tight, too neat, too anti-feminine, unhappy, diseased, unfair.
Tuesday, THE BIRDS was on. I have seen it a million times before, dating back to when I was a little boy of about six. So I hadn't planned on watching it. But at Eight I turned on the TV out of habit and realized that I really wasn't that familiar with it, especially the beginning. I watched Tippi Hedren mince a-sexually across the screen with her child/bitch's body, and I watched Rod Taylor attempt masculinity with his snugly-fitted suit and his Green Bay jaw pumping out dandified quips like dirty well water (masculinity, which for Stewart is an unaffected burden taken on good-naturedly, is for Taylor some fucking Fashion Ave. joyride). Finally, after an hour, and after I had pieced together parts of the plot that I had been ignorant of, I turned Hitch off and went to bed early.
That was it for the the mini-Hitchcock festival on Channel 11 for the week beginning with President's Day of 1989. MASK, starring Cher, was on Friday. I got home from work at Six cradling four quarts of beer, looking forward to a night of liberal consumption, but Ashley had just finished her last midterm and had friends over all day; she wanted to turn in early. Subsequently, we ended up watching a lot of MASK, and was not that bad. It urns out that Cher isn't in it that much (which for me is good), and the guy who plays the fucked-up kid, Eric Stolz, is pretty damn perfect. But I demanded to turn it off before we got to the pathos wringer, before we have to see him die and Cher cry.
Saturday, Ashley and I had the aforementioned first-year couple over. They bring a bottle of cheap wine. I have the four quarts cooling from Friday. We get blasting, or I get blasting -- I can't remember -- right away. The chick, the guy's wife (they're both twenty-five), is from Greece; she speaks English well for a foreigner, but she's still pretty rough. He's from Minnesota, went to school there; he's okay, but a little too affected -- too pompadour -- for my tastes; fed some brews and wine, he loosened up quickly; but he's just a little bit too much like a successful, worldly Colin for me to really get into.
What makes Colin great is his suffering. Next time you see him, look at his forehead; it's furrowed with pain -- with lines of all that failure and loneliness and inconsequential pleasure which speak louder than any book.
So anyway, he's like Colin without all that good suffering. But no one stacks up to you guys; you guys are my real peers, my honest-to-goodness brothers.
Sunday, I had to get up and iron some pants for a shindig a friend of Ashley's (a sweet first-year) was having out at her folk's house on Long Island. I rode down to Penn Station with the same aforementioned couple and another guy I had never met before. Ashley, once again, could not go; she had play rehearsal. Once I got there I started drinking; I was still drunk from the night before (I don't like to eat in the morning or the afternoon; the brain doesn't work as well if you do). I drank a lot -- even Scotch, two of 'em -- but I ate a lot too, and talked a lot between the beers and wine, and even threw the football and danced, and felt like an extra in a young adult drama. So I wasn't even hungover when I went to work on Monday.
I remember this time when I was cutting a line of speed -- speed which Mark had given me -- on a brand new blue-jacketed edition of Aristotle's complete works, an edition that Ashley had given me for Christmas. The jacket was very smooth and shiny and blue. And I sniffed one off there, off that deep pond of Aristotelian blue. I walked away from the coffee table where the book was to the folding metal chair in front of the computer. I sat down, all my books spread out beneath me and before me, and I looked at the computer that I'm looking at now. But the one thing I remember, or the thing I remember the most clearly and succinctly about that time now, was this healthy spring afternoon sun beaming through the living room windows; I felt like a Victorian, like I was doing something dirty but beautiful. I knew right then, better than I have ever known, so picturesque and still and tragic and dumbfounded, like a deer drinking at a stream caught in a gunsight, that I would never have anything to do with academia.
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