The Colt 45 Chronicle #90

Here is a letter, written obviously after the end of an evening of too much to drink, to my friend Niall. You can almost see the yellow lamplight in the darkened apartment and taste the sour mash and the malt liquor.

I had a dream last night. My father and I were dressed in matching adidas track suits, making pick-ups and drop-offs driving a black Mercedes 4-door coupe. We could have have been Albanian traffickers. It all had a disreputable, surreptitious vibe. At one point we exited through a vestigial kitchen door that opened onto the hallway of an old apartment building to avoid men as they entered through the front door of the apartment.

I have an unused kitchen door like that (it bolts to the floor) in my apartment -- the building I live in is 105 years old -- and I had a kitchen door like that in the apartment I lived in for the five out of six years I attended U.C. Berkeley; that apartment building, or so the story went as told by the landlord, survived the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

My father and I in the dream went from exiting through the vestigial kitchen door to driving the Mercedes through an apple orchard at night under a bright moon. The ground was moist with fallen leaves. The dream seemed to last all night long. At one point we were in Manhattan.

Some truth was being revealed about the chaotic, rambling, underground destiny of the men of my family.

The drunken epistle below recapitulates my favorite fantasy of the time, a frequent coda to these sauced buddy letters, the one of the big house and the loving family who reside there in angelic perfection. A dream of youth that never came true.

Autumn 1989 

I don't get drunk enough to get as full in touch with the past as I used to. The beer is getting weaker and weaker and so is the malt liquor. So I've been moving on to the Jack, the Jack Daniels. That bourbon whiskey, well, shit, it's something that's far bigger and more incredible than I am. But who knows? Maybe I'm just chasing a skunk up a tree. Maybe it's all wrong. Maybe I'm just bored.

Hell, everybody is bored. 

That's the point, to find a way around it. The point is to find a way to always be satisfied with yourself. Of course this calls for a little self-torture. Kant tagged it "autonomy."

I hope you and Eve are treating each other well. It's a long hard lesson, but nothing satisfies like a spouse who is a best friend. There's nothing better -- no way, no doubt. 

Maybe someday we'll all have big houses and picnics with rosy-cheeked children tumbling down grassy hills. God. We're so young. But at the same time we have so completely passed up any chance at real openness and selflessness that whatever we do now will automatically be riven by forlornness and insincerity.

Aw, shit. Cat paws in the wind and a red dog spitting into a brown bag. -- The shit I want to say to you isn't even as good as a dusty glass jar of pennies hidden and lost in the hall closet of some dead Jesuit priest. But you're my buddy, and all the back slapping tearful giggling hokum that that entails . . . .