The Colt 45 Chronicle #98

A young couple moved out on Friday from the building across the street.

I used to be able to keep track of the different tenants, usually young women, as they moved in, lived for a year or two -- sometimes less, sometimes more -- and then moved out. But now I am not familiar with any of them.

This young couple looked healthy, attractive as they skillfully secured a load of furniture by means of fancy rigging to the roof of their Subaru Forester. I couldn't help but feel a little envious of their vitality and handsomeness.

Later on, I'm not sure if it was at the end of the day Friday or Saturday morning, I noticed that next to the sidewalk in front of the building a queen-sized mattress and box springs were left behind with an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper attached. I couldn't read the note from the window of my third-floor apartment, but I'm sure it said, "It is yours, if you want it."

The mattress and box springs look relatively new and clean except for the top plush cover which was soiled top to bottom with waxy amber urine and menstrual stains, pecker tracks from innumerable ejaculations and whatever other excretions the human body can produce.

And there the mattress has sat all holiday weekend, a poignant "Ecce Homo" reminder to 4th-of-July revelers. Beneath our clean sheets and spotless comforters there is something more earthy to behold.

And that's what the final letter from "The Colt 45 Chronicle" brings to my mind: a filthy mattress.

Drunken, self-pitying, megalomaniacal, these old letters from a quarter-century ago of a young man passing through life in the Big Apple as his marriage disintegrated have been painful to post. But now it is done, and I can move on to something else. With the 4th-of-July holiday over, it is a long march to Labor Day.

There was a time when I was alone, and it seemed that I was stronger. But, oh, well, it's all so different now; everything is different except the alcohol. I used to stand straight and tall, as Neil Young sings. I used to be a star. Goddamn, no kidding. I was an honest-to-goodness hero for youth. I did my part, and anyone who has ever known me knows that, that I did my lick straight up for youth. I was there like a supermarket, like a tennis court -- everything there for the taking. Yes, too much.